Guest Post by Mindi Meltz: The Ever After Ever Trilogy

Here’s an invocation by the Wicked Witch in Mindi Meltz's After Ever After trilogy, a fairy tale of real relationship beyond the "happily ever after" union where most love stories end. Cinderella must overcome childhood self-denial to become queen and stand equal with her husband. Sleeping Beauty wakes to find her primeval land and matriarchal people destroyed—but her forgotten, hundred-year dream of love’s surrender holds the key to renewal. Belle yearns secretly for the Beast who inspired her passion before he turned back into a man, reflecting her own animal yearnings in a ghostly land. Snow White, raised in mythic wilderness by demigods of old, must recognize her own human self in that magic mirror, to finally take in and transform by the love of the huntsman. Discovering each other across mountain and dream, through ritual and longing, by war and friendship, these four familiar princesses evolve into real women across three epic tales. And that “wicked” Dark Faerie keeps luring them deeper into the forbidden, shadowy, feminine magic threading each of their clashing cultures—the lost rage, tenderness, sensuality, compassion, community and natural aliveness of the divine feminine—until they claim, not by battle but by intimacy, the true sovereign power to heal their broken worlds.

Book 2 was just released in July, Book 3 to be released early next year. Read more at www.mindimeltz.com.

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Snow White hid in a mirror reflected. 

Cinderella danced at the ball undetected.

No one knows Sleeping Beauty’s dream.

Beauty loved Beast, but was she what she seemed?

They woke by kisses; they changed rags to riches; 

They defeated the curse of those dark faerie-witches.

But was it a curse? Did you ever ask her?

Did they really live happily all the while after?

Who were those princes, and how did it feel

to wake a hundred years later, your old life not real?

One fairy tale ended, but another began:

You married a beast, but must live with the man.

Who sent you blind, into love, to be “princess”? 

Who wrote love stories that ended in conquest?

You already know the tales told by men. 

I tell the tale that comes after the end.

I, witch of old, tell the story of she

whose lands are not symbols: they birth us, they breathe.Snow White, Beauty, Cinderella—

My curses were gifts, and at last I will tell you.

I call on the wolf, the sea, the winds.

I call on your memory, I call on the Grimms.

I call in the maidens, the mothers, the crones, 

the forest, the fields where you played all alone.

I call in jealousy, changes, new tears, 

the sacrifice and the long marriage years.

I call in wild-men, huntsmen, dwarves

slain by the heart and not by the sword.

I call in the waking, the crown and the blessing. 

I call in all of the things you were wishing

when you pricked your finger, or stole the rose, 

when you prayed at the grave your mother knows.

How will you be strong, and what does it mean 

to rule a world, to be princess—or queen?

Now you’re a wife, but you’re looking thin. 

So bite the apple. Let me back in.

— the Dark Faerie Queen

Mythical Novels and Animal Wisdom

www.mindimeltz.com