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1.

You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte.

“If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with steel—“you’d have pretended your clumsiness was really punishment: a reminder to focus on you, not that floozy in scarlet silk across the room.”

But you aren’t clever. You admired the scarlet silk too; you couldn’t blame him. Back in your father’s barn after the ball, the godmother shakes her head and tells you there will be no more dances, no more gowns or glass slippers. You won’t see her again. “I can’t do everything. I thought you had enough wit to work with, but you don’t.”

For years now, you’ve dreamed of becoming beautiful and beloved. The godmother was summoned by your longing for the happy ending you hardly dared to believe that you deserved.

What do you believe now?

You cry yourself to sleep and ponder that question as you milk the cows the next morning. You believe that people deserve to feel better, not worse. You want to believe in happiness that doesn’t depend on the condescension of magic, which only reminds those without it how lacking they are.

And so you decide that your new dream is to be the anti-godmother.

2.

Running away is easy. You steal one stepsister’s satchel and two of the other’s dresses and set out on the road. As much as you love fresh air, you seek something else, the smell of shame that has festered in your nostrils for years: the reek of rotting meat, of piss and vomit, of dirty sheets. Following it, you find a housekeeper heavy with child from the employer who seduced and then rejected her; a gambler whose winning streak ended in losing his family’s fortune; a playwright whose productions keep flopping.

It’s easy to help them. The pregnant housekeeper genuinely loves children. She pretends to be a widow, and the two of you find rooms where she can care for her own child and other children, the children of women who have to work at a variety of trades, not all of them legal. They pay in money when they can, in food and cleaning and mending when they cannot. It is a living, and the children are a joy.

You help the gambler realize that he loves good soil and what grows there even more than dice. He takes over his father’s farm and makes a success of it; weather and harvests are enough speculation for him now.

The playwright has gifts within the theater, but writing is not one of them. You guide him toward his passion for directing other people’s works, many of which become resoundingly successful.

There are other triumphs. With each one you become stronger, more exultant, more beautiful in the eyes of those you serve. Your need for sleep and food diminishes. You discover that you can levitate and walk through walls, as the godmother did, and you age very slowly, if at all.

Not all outcomes are happy. When the prince you had hoped to marry is dying, you find yourself in the palace, where a weeping woman kneels at his bedside. The room boasts all the things you once craved: fine fabrics, ornate furniture, luxurious bedclothes. The kneeling woman must have been beautiful, before age ravaged her. She squints up at you. “You’re not the one I called. I called the fairy godmother.”

“I’m the one who comes when she doesn’t.”

“I summoned the best doctors,” she says, choking, “bought the finest medicines, prayed the most fervent prayers.”

“He must know how much you love him,” you say.

The queen looks up at you again. “Love hasn’t saved him. What can you do for him?”

“Nothing. I’m here for you.”

She draws a long, shuddering breath. “If you can’t cure him, you’re useless. I didn’t call you. Leave now.”

You obey her, as you must. No one could cure him. You hope someday she will find joy in being something other than his wife.

3.

No mortal can defy death, but you notice one day that it has been at least a century since you were born, although you look scarcely older than when the godmother dismissed you. Are you immortal? Is she?

Through the decades, you have seen glimpses of her. She appears as a game show host, a faith healer, a talent scout. She is the scam artist selling the fool’s gold of Happily Ever After. The most powerful kings die as their queens grieve, and in time the queens die too.

And yet you and the godmother do not die.

The human world has grown denser, dirtier, more desperate. You find yourself attending agonized parents who have lost children to shootings and suicide. You witness overdoses and death by plague and abuse, and while these things have always occurred—and while you still, sometimes, can find just the right comfort—you feel yourself growing sadder, weaker, and more tired.

Global despair spreads. Wars and pandemics and recessions worsen. Species loss accelerates. Crops fail, and starvation follows. There is not enough food or water or clean air, not enough hope or joy. For too many people, there is not enough to live for.

And one day, you follow the stench of shame to a payday loan shop in a decaying city. There, on a cot in a back room, you find a woman lying pale and still except for the cough that racks her slight frame. You know her.

“Godmother,” you say.

Her eyes are closed. “Go away. Whatever you want, I cannot give it to you.”

“I’ve come for your need, not mine. You released me centuries ago.”

Her eyes open. She peers at you. “Who are you?”

“The girl who stepped on the prince’s foot at my third ball.”

Tugging musty sheets over herself, she shrugs. “You and too many others.” But then she frowns. “Princes and balls are long past. Centuries, you said.” She examines you more closely. “There is power to you. Power and great age.”

You cannot think of any way to explain that she will respect. “Not as great as yours,” you say at last, and she laughs.

“What have you done all those years?”

“I have comforted and guided,” you say quietly, waiting for her to jeer at you.

Sure enough, she snorts. “People don’t want comfort. They want triumph and riches.”

“They want comfort when they have lost triumph and riches.”

A sneer, now. “No one wants you. They want me.”

“They want you, but they need me.”

She stiffens. “I don’t need you, girl.”

You haven’t been a girl for hundreds of years. “Yet here I am, drawn by need, as desire once drew you.” You shake your head. “How can you be dying?”

“How do you think? The mortals now want what no one could give them! A reversal of the decay all around them, a return of healthy seas and forests, the restoration of extinct creatures. They want back the balance they have destroyed.”

She helped destroy that balance by encouraging greed. You will not say so, but she glares at you as if you have. “Don’t look at me like that! How dare you judge me!”

“All you have done, godmother, is judge those who craved your magic.”

Outside, a moaning wind has arisen. Her fingers claw at the frayed sheets. “Is that my crime? That I insisted on excellence?”

“You overlooked what was already excellent. Everyone is excellent at something.”

“Hardly,” she says.

Like the mortals, she summoned you because she needs comfort, however much she denies it. But you can’t imagine what to offer. Will you die because you can find nothing to give her? Is your calling, like hers, at an end?

And yet you do not feel like you are dying, do not feel the despair with which she so clearly struggles. “Because of you,” you tell her, “I can help those you didn’t: the disappointed and dismayed, the ones buried under crushed dreams, so focused on one impossible goal that they ignored those within their grasp. I know them because I was one of them. And so I thank you, godmother.”

Her face is a mask of contempt. “Everyone’s dreams are crushed, now. No one can reverse the coming catastrophe.”

“No.”

Eyes narrowed, she stares at you. “Some excellence! You’ll help all of them, will you? The whole world, as it goes howling to its destruction?”

“I will try.”

“You will fail.” She turns away one last time, and draws one last breath, and is gone. Even in your sorrow, you feel her power flowing into you, feel yourself grown vast and infinitely wise. When the end comes for all the people who have not been wise or careful enough, who are terrified and lost, your arms will be long enough to embrace them.