From the tower window, the world looked perfect.
Green rolled endlessly toward the horizon, the air trembled with silence, and the light settled gently over the hills.
From her height, Rapunzel thought she was gazing at freedom.
Until one day, she saw a line of people climbing the narrow path. Many of them. Aligned. Armed.
But not with spears or axes, as she would have thought:
with magnifying glasses and mirrors.
Hundreds of mirrors. Large, small, oval, framed in glossy rims, carried on their shoulders like sacred shields.
They approached in silence, surrounded the tower, and raised their mirrors toward her.
Her image began to move across the walls. On their palms. On their faces. On the sky.
Suddenly, the world was invaded by her own face.
Thousands of Rapunzels stared back, multiplied to infinity.
Every gesture bounced back at her, like a boomerang.
Every flicker was caught, returned, amplified.
She was blinded by her own reflection, trapped in a symphony of mirrors.
A smile captured in a thousand angles. A gaze that no longer felt like her own.
Countless faces that mimicked her better than she ever could.
She lifted her hand to brush away the reflection, but the image cut through her gesture.
She blinked and the entire army of mirrors blinked back.
She reached toward the window. A thousand fingers pointed back at her.
They had come to imprison her inside her own beauty.
A portrait under the microscope.
A perfect image, captured and dissected.
A woman always looked at, but never seen.
For a moment, she no longer knew the difference between her images and herself.
Then she grabbed the scissors.
She began to cut.
Short, precise snips, as if slicing through invisible threads.
She cut through light, through reflections, through everything that held her captive.
When the scissors reached her hair, she kept cutting. Piece by piece.
Her hair fell over the windowsill, and with every strand that dropped from the tower, another mirror shattered.
At first, just a crack. Then, a rain of shards.
When the last one broke, a strange silence filled the air.
Then, a sound. Not of glass, but of laughter.
A chorus of laughter. Liberated, triumphant laughter.
The laughter of women who, perhaps, had never truly laughed before.
From the mirrors, faces began to emerge:
Cinderella, without her lost slipper; Snow White, stepping out of her glass coffin; the Sleeping Beauty awake; Belle, without her Beast.
Each woman once trapped and forgotten in the fairy tales of the world rose from her reflection, reclaimed her face, and spoke her story aloud.
A chorus of power and release.
Rapunzel ran her palm over her bare scalp. Her skin breathed, warm, exposed.
For the first time, she felt whole.
Not a perfect image, but a whole being.
Not an untouchable icon, but a clear voice.
She leaned over the window and saw the path stretching far into the unknown.
Below, the shards of mirrors scattered the light into raw colors, each one a window into a woman freeing herself somewhere, in another time.
She smiled.
For the first time, she left the tower by the inner stairs, without having to fill the walls with her golden hair.
It was no longer necessary for someone to climb up, holding on to her treasure, to save her.
Now she could climb down herself.