It was one of those few days when Camille felt as if she could fly. She imagined her wings catching the frothy breeze, letting it carry her over the oceans, across vast deserts, through early morning mists, to the edges of stars. If she stretched out her arms, she could feel what it must feel like to be a bird. She leapt down the hills at cheetah speed, whirling, prancing with the limber grace of a mountain goat.  Happiness bubbled uncontrollably from her chest, nearly finding its way to her throat, threatening to burst free from her mouth in a jet of song. But she stuffed it into a bottle, only allowing it to pinch up the sides of her mouth into a smile, and occasionally letting it gurgle out into laughter when it became too much for her to contain.
     Camille was a princess. The sparrows followed her in droves, landed on her shoulders, brought her the whitest magnolia flowers. The butterflies circled her golden hair, creating the most magnificent of crowns, and the squirrels made her soft beds of pine needles for when she got tired and had to sit down. Sometimes, Camille became so light that her feet hardly touched the ground, and she rose high enough for the tips of the dandelions to tickle her bare feet. No one in the whole wide world could pull Camille down; not her father, not the strongest king, nor the meanest wolf.
     So she floated until the sun turned the maple trees into silhouettes and the owls emerged from their slumbers, only then realizing that the path had become laced with knotted roots and narrowed by thick brambles. The trees were unfamiliar giants and seemed to grab at her in the quickly approaching darkness. Fear began to nestle itself behind her stomach. Her heart beat quickly now, and it surrounded her in a terrifying ruckus. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Drowning out the cicadas. Her feet hit the ground hard and forced her to stumble. Scraped palms and gritty dirt. The roots tore at her ankles. She became immersed in a panicky blindness, imagining the blood-thirsty vampires and starved mountain lions lurking in the shadows beyond the next bend. Cowering behind her own body, Camille still charged forward, unable to stop her feet from pounding the ground in the rhythm of her heart. Above, the sliver of a moon laughed at her, but Camille kept on running.
     She soon reached a ragged clearing that was no larger than the wingspan of a vulture, but, in her desperation, it seemed as endless as a grassland and as soft as a cloud. Too tired to continue, she fell onto the rough grasses and instantly was drowned in a fitful sleep. Camille dreamed awful dreams. She dreamt of the death of her family, of the falling of the sky, of the eternity of winter. She dreamt that birds no longer existed and that her wings had been severed from her body. She dreamt that she was lost in the woods.
     Camille awoke in a blanket of dew. A friendly sun had painted the sky a glorious pink, but hadn’t yet escaped the confines of the horizon, so Camille lay there, listening to the clunking of the woodpeckers and watching the robins scuttle through the tall grass in search of worms. It wasn’t until the light drenched the forest in molten gold that Camille sat up and massaged the knots from her neck. A brook chuckled in the distance, and Camille, wiping the dried tears and nightmares from her eyes, stumbled towards the noise. She found the stream and plunged her arms into the elbow-deep water, searching for the jolt that would carry her from this bad dream. Instead, the water was cloudy and tepid, floating lifelessly over the lightning-charred branches and pungent fish carcasses that clogged its flow. Camille instantly recoiled, choking back the bile that had arisen in the back of her throat. Where was she?
     Camille felt her feet, which had before been so solidly bound to the earth, leaving the ground, and felt her mind, her consciousness, lifting high above the forest floor, the tips of the trees, the planet. Up there, the world, in its immensity, was a pinprick in space, a mite on a log, a trifling insignificance. She saw the oceans and the forests and the deserts, as if suspended in a still life painting, and she saw her home, with the clear ponds and benevolent birds. But she also saw the dark woods and death and ravenous coyotes. She first saw them as separate; there was her home, bright happiness, and there, on the other side was the darkness in which she had been trapped, but as she drifted, she noticed that they were really not separate at all. There was nothing to stop the darkness from floating over the walls of the kingdom, no matter how tall they were, nothing to stop the wolves from killing the beautiful songbird, and nothing to keep the night out of her stepmother’s kind heart.