You've heard of cinderella, but have you heard of cindersink?
Read this chilling retelling of cinderella, where instead of Cinderella, we have Ella, and she discovers the truth of her world.
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"You do not belong to the light, girl. You were made for soot and sinew."
The house stood crooked at the edge of the bog, slumped like a dying animal with its ribs jutting through moldy thatch and its spine sagging with rot. Ash smeared every surface inside like the aftermath of a slow-burning grief. And beneath the floorboards — always a creak, always a whisper, always the soft, sticky scuffle of them.
Ella slept in the hearth, though sleep was too generous a word. She hid there. Curled up inside the soot and cinder like a half-formed thought, bone-thin and grey-eyed, her skin mottled with chimney rot. Her stepmother called her Cinder-Ella not as a name, but as an affliction. The sisters never used her name at all. Just kicked her when she was too slow.
Ella had no real memories of before. Only flashes. A pale room. A warm voice. A mother, maybe. Gone. Taken by illness, they said. Or madness. Or both. The first time she coughed up soot, she knew it wasn't illness. It was inheritance.
She swept ashes by day. She coughed black by night. And beneath the boards, something waited.
The whispers began when she turned sixteen.
Not words at first — just the gentle scrape of nails on wood. A soft giggle like a boiling kettle. One night, she peeled the hearthstones back. Found a hollow where the ash sank deeper. Buried in the filth, wrapped in black thread and bits of teeth, was a shoe. Not a dainty glass slipper. No. This was a slipper made of bone, stitched with hair, still wet inside. The label inside read:
Property of: E. K. / L.C. 𝒏𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕
That night, she dreamt of a spindle with no wheel, a thread that pulled itself, threading through a bleeding eye. The name whispered in the dark was not her own.
The palace was no palace. Not anymore.
To Cinder's eyes—cleared now of soot but made darker by all she had seen—it had bloomed like rot in the sun. Its once-marble bones seemed to pulse, as though breathing slowly. Walls no longer stood clean and noble; they wept with condensation, and when she pressed her hand against the stone, it came away red. The chandeliers above were not made of crystal, but glass-blown ribs and suspended vertebrae, hung with tendons so fine they twitched when the wind passed.
The ballroom stretched vast before her, glistening like a hollow stomach. The guests wore masks not to hide their faces, but because they had none beneath—only smooth, waxy skin, stretched tight where features should be. Their laughter came in coughs and burbles, like soup boiling over. They smelled of perfume and turned soil.
The prince stood at the end of the hall, stiff as a marionette with tangled strings. His face was still and strange, too symmetrical, too clean, as though sculpted yesterday and never truly finished. But his eyes—oh, his eyes—they flickered when no one watched. They darted from guest to guest, pupil dilating wide enough to swallow the whites, then snapping shut again. When she looked away and back again, she could swear they had moved positions. Higher. Further apart.
"You look…" he said in a voice like thin paper tearing. "You look like someone we lost."
He took her hand. It felt like gripping a bundle of wet wires.
They danced.
The music came from the walls.
Literally—from within them. Fleshly panels parted slightly as violins and cellos were pulled by twitching strings of tendon. There were no musicians. Just arms. Bare, freckled, twitching arms, nailed into the walls at the shoulder, dragging bows across gut-stringed instruments over and over. The tempo was wrong. Off. It sped and stuttered, as though reacting to someone else's panic.
Her glass slippers clicked on the floor, which was no longer wood or tile, but something smoother, stickier. Something that groaned beneath the weight of feet.
The prince grinned.
"I hope you'll stay longer tonight."
She could not answer. Her throat was tight with rot.
Somewhere in the hall, behind the veil of festering glamour, someone was speaking. A whisper in a language that writhed through her bones. She didn't understand it, not really. But the word sink appeared again and again. And something about stitching.
"Sink into her."
"Sew the new skin."
"She was promised. She was given. She will be worn."
Cinder looked around. The guests had stopped dancing.
They faced her now. Unmoving. Heads tilting one by one.
Their masks had split open.
Inside, not flesh. Not even bone.
But fabric. Threaded and neatly lined. As though their faces were simply sleeves pulled over something else.
One guest leaned too close. Their mouth was a zipper, half-undone. Something moist blinked from within.
She fled.
—
In the servant halls, the illusion cracked like cheap porcelain.
The walls revealed exposed bones, iron spikes and rusted nails. Portraits bled from the eyes. The palace smelled of lye and piss. Behind one torn curtain, she saw three girls stitched into the wall—alive, eyes moving, mouths frozen open around wicks. Someone had used them as candleholders.
Her hands shook as she found a side passage that spiraled down.
She followed it.
Down.
Always down.
At its bottom—deep beneath the floorboards, behind bolted iron and a mirror made of stitched fingernails—she found a door that wasn't.
It was a hole, framed like a doorway but pulsing gently at its edges, like the mouth of a sleeping animal. There was a symbol carved above it. A circle, with a needle crossing through, the eye sharp and red.
And below it, the same phrase carved again and again:
"For more inquiries, Message +65 81339859 today!"
(Except this time, the numbers had teeth. The 8s were screaming. The 5 pulsed like a wound.)
Her slipper cracked.
She turned.
A whisper slithered behind her.
A hand reached from the wall.
It wasn't the prince.
It was one of the sisters. Her stepsister. But she was wrong. Hollowed out. Her arms were longer than they used to be. Her mouth stitched open, revealing a second face inside—a small one. A child's.
"You took it from us," she rasped, her voice like coal smoke. "You took our chance. So now we're taking yours."
From the shadows, more figures stepped forth. Not guests. Not nobles. But versions. Skinned-thin girls with faces too similar to her own. With dresses made of hair and mouths stitched closed in silken lace.
They reached for her.
Behind them, the prince watched.
But his chest had opened.
Inside, rows and rows of needles clicked, hungry and spinning.
The Elves were here.
And they had come not for shoes, but skin.
The fire in the hearth had not gone out.
Even as ashes smothered the room and smoke veiled the rafters like mourning shrouds, it still burned. Dimly. Patiently. As though stoked not by wood or coal, but by something deeper. Something older.
Cinder stood there, shoulders hunched like kindling snapped in two, her arms wrapped tight around herself as if they were all that kept her from coming apart. Her skin was veined in soot and blood, both dry and fresh, and beneath the layers of grime, one could see her shaking—though whether it was fear or rage, it was impossible to say.
The shadows watched her.
They had names now.
Or maybe they always had, and she simply hadn't been ready to hear them.
One whispered in a low voice like rusted hinges: "Threadbare."
Another giggled with breathy wetness: "Hearthkiss."
And the third... the third did not speak. It stared, unseen but present, the way mold is present in rotted walls. That one—The Needle—only pulsed.
She blinked. The room was darker. The bones in the ash pit had rearranged themselves again, forming a symbol: a spiral with seven jagged spines, all curling inward like a closing eye. She recognized it now. She had seen it before, scratched into the floorboards of her father's room when she was just a child, before Mother vanished and the attic was padlocked shut.
Before the rats began to whisper.
A scrape. A scuttle. A shuffle of fabric. She turned—
The steps to the basement had opened again.
Not visibly. Not with hinges or a groan. But as though they had always been there, and she had simply forgotten. Forgotten on purpose.
The scent was unbearable.
Boiled hair, milk gone rancid, and something else—something raw and metallic. The scent of meat that hadn't died the way it was meant to.
A shoe rested at the top of the stairs. Her stepmother's. The heel cracked. The toe still wet.
She descended.
Each step seemed to give, to pulse slightly beneath her weight, as if the house were holding its breath. As if it didn't want her going down, but had no choice in the matter anymore.
The walls narrowed, then widened unnaturally, like lungs expanding and contracting. They were wallpapered with cloth scraps—flesh-thin, stitched with trembling thread that squirmed under her gaze. One bore the monogram: E. K.
Erich.
From the other story.
But she didn't know that yet. Couldn't. The name meant nothing to her. And yet her fingers traced it with a reverence she didn't understand.
Below, something clicked. Metal on bone.
She reached the bottom.
The room beyond was wrong.
It didn't belong to the house. It didn't belong to any house.
It was a cathedral made of shoes.
High arching ceilings composed entirely of laced boots and children's slippers, stitched together with gut and grief. The pews were filled with eyeless dolls, their arms too long, fingers split at the knuckles to form needles. They turned to her as one, their button eyes twitching.
And at the altar—looming high above a pit of whispering smoke—stood a figure cloaked in veils made of burned lace.
Her stepmother.
Or what had worn her.
Her face was a melted thing, seared into a permanent grin, the teeth beneath etched with tiny words in a language that pulsed when you looked too long. One eye had been replaced with a glass heel. The other was a keyhole.
"I told you to be good," it said, voice breaking into three echoes.
Cinder stepped forward, trembling. The floor was not floor. It was breathing.
"Why did you kill her?" she asked.
"Who?" the figure giggled. "I've killed so many."
And then it stepped aside.
Revealing a mirror.
Cinder saw herself.
No rags. No soot.
She was beautiful.
But she was... wrong. Her skin was a stitched tapestry of others. Her eyes were shoe buttons. Her lips had been sewn shut, but blood had forced the thread loose. Her feet—oh god—her feet were gone.
In their place: perfect glass.
The reflection whispered: "This is who you were always meant to be."
She screamed.
The figure rushed her. Not walked. Rushed. Like a flood of cloth and teeth and flame. It tackled her into the altar, bones clattering from inside its dress like shaken dice. Her head cracked against the corner. Everything turned red.
Then black.
Then—
She was standing in a ballroom.
She knew this was not real.
And yet... she felt the music. She saw the twirling, half-faced nobles dancing across floors tiled with polished bone. Candles burned blue in chandeliers of vertebrae. A voice whispered in her ear, too close.
"You made it. You ascended."
She turned.
It was the Prince.
But not as she remembered. His skin was too tight, translucent, showing worms of muscle beneath. His teeth were filed flat. A crown of spines jutted from his skull, not placed there, but grown. He held out his hand.
"Dance with me, my Queen of Cinders."
And she did.
And as they spun, she realized the floor was breaking beneath them, spinning faster and faster, bones cracking, laughter turning to screams—and from the cracks, came voices.
Voices from another story.
Another tale.
A cellar. A shoemaker. A name whispered in a dead tongue:
Erich.
And then, behind her own heartbeat, a whisper she couldn't place.
A phrase. Familiar. Chanted.
"For more inquiries, Message +65 81339859 today."
Her eyes snapped open.
Back in the basement. Blood in her mouth. The mirror broken.
Something scuttled behind her. A dozen somethings. Tiny. Gleeful. Sewing.
The floor was covered in new shoes.
They all had names stitched into the soles.
Her name was on all of them.
"To find the thread, you must be willing to bleed."
The ash never stopped falling.
It sifted through the cracked rafters of the old kitchen like gray snow, clinging to Ella's raw scalp and the weeping sores along her spine. Her dress—if it could still be called that—was a patchwork of soot-stained cloth and scavenged mouse pelts. The sleeves had long since fused to her flesh with rot and heat. Where once her stepmother had commanded her to sweep the hearth, she now scraped blackened nails against the stone, tearing her fingers bloody in search of something—anything—beneath the soot.
She was no longer certain what she was looking for.
Sometimes she found teeth. Her own, perhaps. Sometimes fingernails. Once, she unearthed a half-melted cameo brooch that sobbed when she touched it.
Other times she found them.
The bones.
Small. Childlike. Wrapped in ribbon.
There was a scratching in the chimney again. She dared not look up.
Instead, Ella pressed her ear to the floorboards. It throbbed gently beneath her, a pulse that matched neither her heart nor the rats'. A sound like whispering wet thread. The voice was back—ragged, flayed—coaxing her like the curl of steam.
"Erich's gift grows restless. You mustn't let it sleep."
She blinked and the voice vanished, leaving only the memory of her father's name. Not her true father. Not the one who had been swallowed by the wall with a kiss of velvet fingers and an apologetic smile.
The house was growing.
That was certain now.
It had once been a modest stone manor at the edge of a clearing. Now, the windows had become slits, winking and leaking smoke. The banisters curled like horns. The floorboards creaked not from age, but hunger. Doorframes breathed. Mirrors blinked. There were new rooms, always new rooms. Some were wet. Others hummed. One was filled entirely with bird bones, arranged like a cathedral. Another contained a wardrobe that screamed when opened, revealing only an old red telephone, dusty and dead.
But the most unsettling room was the ballroom.
It hadn't been there the week before.
Now it stretched wide, deeper than any architecture should allow. The floor was polished flesh-vein and ceramic. Chandeliers made from femurs spun lazily overhead. And at the far end: a throne of shoeboxes. Empty. Each labeled in delicate, slanted calligraphy.
Names like: Willem. Adelaide. Erich.
And behind it, framed in withered roses and shards of glass, a great tapestry was being stitched by invisible hands. It grew every night. Its fibers gleamed with silver, red, and something that shimmered too fast to name. The image was unfinished, but Ella could make out pieces now:
A man in an apron, weeping thread from his eyes.
Children walking backward into fire.
A needle, the length of a tower, plunged into a world turned inside-out.
And above it all, a phrase stitched in meat-red cursive:
"For more inquiries, Message +65 81339859 today!"(Disclaimer: This is a joke. Please do not call any numbers that appear here. Doing so will definitely not lead to any revelations, nor will it give you an ARG spanning multiple messages.)
She reached for the tapestry once. Her finger bled where it touched. And she heard it again. The Voice.
"The Needleman wakes. The stitch must never unravel."
That night, the Prince arrived.
Not on a white horse.
He came riding a creature shaped like a man, skinned from neck to navel, eyes buttoned shut, bones re-strung with ribbon. It wept oil. The Prince's face was beautiful, unnaturally so. His jawline too sharp, his eyes mirrored. Not reflections—mirrors. Flat and empty.
He did not knock. The doors split open like ribs.
Ella crawled from the hearth, not because she wished to see him, but because the house demanded it. Her back arched, cracked. Her teeth ground down to points. And still she walked, barefoot and blistered, toward the thing that wore a man's skin like a fine suit.
The Prince took her hand. It sizzled in his palm.
"You fit," he said, though no words escaped his lips. "Not in shoe. In story."
The walls keened.
And the ballroom filled with dancers.
They slithered in from the dark—women with no feet, men with too many hands, children stitched into pairs, sharing torsos. They danced upon stumps and nails. Their laughter had been looped, warped, slowed into something like a funeral dirge played backward.
The Prince lifted Ella into his arms. She did not resist.
The waltz began.
And the thread tightened.
"He threads through all things, and all things thread through him."
The Prince's arms were freezing. Not like winter frost, but like the void that comes after breath stops, a cold that lives beneath time. Ella's skin blistered against his touch, and still she clung to him, not because of affection, but because the house demanded she do so.
Around them, the ballroom spun like a music box wound too tight. The dancers blurred into streaks of red and bone. Their shadows twisted up the walls like vines, knitting themselves into gargoyle faces that wept fat tears of pitch.
And the music—it wasn't music. It was a pattern. A loop. A sequence of sounds that echoed somewhere below hearing. A thread being pulled through meat, slow and deliberate. If you listened too long, it began to sew into your thoughts.
Needleman.
She didn't remember learning the name. It had simply arrived, like a maggot in fruit, always there, always waiting to be noticed.
The Prince leaned in, and when he whispered, his voice didn't come from his mouth, but from every shoe in the house—each one speaking in unison, an orchestra of leather lips and tongue-laced syllables:
"He made us all. And now He returns."
The chandelier above them burst like a blister, raining down shards of ivory and old teeth. The dancers paused, mid-spin, arms in grotesque arcs. The music stopped. And then, one by one, they turned to face the throne.
The shoebox throne.
It pulsed now. The labels had faded.
Only one name remained.
"Ella."
From within the topmost box, something shifted.
Something climbed out.
It was shaped like a man but thinner than a sewing pin, taller than the room should have allowed. His limbs were endless threads wrapped in skin, waxed and glistening. His face was stitched shut in every direction, his features marked by puckers and lines, like a mask sewn too tight.
He walked as though suspended, not touching the floor.
And he brought with him The Needle.
It was not held. It was him. It extended from his spine, curled like a scorpion's stinger, impossibly long, constantly flexing in mid-air. The air folded around it. Reality hiccuped where it moved.
The dancers fell prostrate. The Prince vanished into black thread.
Ella stood alone.
The Needleman turned to her.
Her mind cracked open. She saw it all—
Erich, alone in his shop, begging for help in whispers to no god that listened. The first shoes. The red thread. The Elves who were not Elves, but pieces of something far older, shattered fragments of a Pattern beyond mortal shape. The children weren't taken. They were gifted. The flesh wasn't stolen. It was lent. And Erich had sewn his debt stitch by stitch into the world.
The Needleman had no mouth. And yet, he spoke.
"You carry the Thread now."
Ella looked down.
Her veins pulsed visibly beneath her skin. They glowed faintly red. Her fingers twitched with muscle memory not her own. Her spine arched, a spool turning. She screamed—but it came out in a perfect singer's hum, a single pitch, vibrating with divine resonance.
The ballroom walls split. Not cracked, unzipped.
Through the seams, the world beyond showed.
Not heaven.
Not hell.
A loom. Spanning endless night.
Each thread a soul. Each stitch a story. Tangled. Torn. Repaired. Rewritten.
The Needleman gestured.
Ella's body moved without her.
Her back tore open, and ribbons of her own spine unwound. Her flesh reshaped itself into an instrument of continuation. The house folded itself inwards. The dancers leapt from flesh to pattern. They were recycling now. Input becomes output becomes input.
At the center, on the tapestry, Ella's name shimmered once... and then unraveled.
And still, in the far, far corner of the tapestry, barely visible—
"For more inquiries, Message +65 81339859 today!"(Disclaimer: Please do not call. No revelations await. None at all. Trust me.)
Just beneath that, stitched in thread too faint to see unless one bled into it:
"The next story starts where the thread ends. Seek the one with the spindle eye."
Then, darkness. Final. Unbroken.