In the deep darkness, when the edge of the woods was as distant as hope, she found a cottage. Already the girl had run so far and knew that if she did not find safety before night, wolves would do worse to her than any step-mother could.
Before she'd even knocked, the front door creaked slowly open, inviting her in. She stepped through. She could not account for what was there. Inside the cottage was perfect emptiness. There were no walls, no windows, not even a door behind her anymore. Only the endless abyss. A marble floor appeared beneath her feet. Joining it came miles of banquet tables so long they disappeared into distance, covered in the most luxurious lavish foods. There was also the finest bed she had ever seen.
“Who is this, brothers?” hissed a goblin voice from the surrounding shadows.
The girl was afraid. She looked about for the voice. There was another.
“Come to us, this child has, or succumb, perhaps.” The many scratchy voices laughed wickedly, cruelly.
“What is its name, we wonder” sang another of the entities.
“I’m lost” the child answered, terrified.
Out of the void, seven shades appeared like stepping out of smoke. They were edgeless and black, they were darkness walking.
“Hello, Lost.”
“Who are you?” she asked, fear rising in her heart. She was sensible. The shades only looked at her. They did not move nor speak. The girl carried on. “Please, my step-mother is jealous and wishes to murder me.”
The girl was beautiful, her eyes golden and glittering, her hair purest dark, her lips as red as life and skin ethereal pale. Her obese wicked step-mother had learned the girl would one day grow to fattest of them all and sent her monsters and huntsmen to kill the poor child. The shades answered her.
“The Sins Seven. Deadly are we. Pride.”
“Envy”
“Wrath”
“Gluttony”
“Lust”
“Greed”
“… Sloth”
“Our names they are. Our home this is.”
The shades were Sins, specters of atrocity, bore of evil, God’s most loathed children.
“I did not mean to trouble you” she called out. She was terribly afraid. “Leave me be, I promise I will not intrude again.”
“So simple it is not!” laughed Pride.
“Yes, serve us you must…” added Sloth.
“…with your flesh!” finished Lust, the most excited of all.
They moved in on her but she was quick of wit.
“I am innocent. No sinful thought enters my mind or humors my soul. The Christian Fathers of my village say I am as pure as white snow and no demon can enter the heart of a virgin.”
The dark Sins stopped and spoke amongst their minds. The Sins knew she was correct but would not lose to wit. They had lived much longer than Wit.
Pride said, “Correct you are, but hold you we still can. You must marry one of us and be that Sin’s goodly-wife, until they die or grow tired with you.”
She thought. Whichever mortal Sin she chose she would have to live with her entire life.
She did not want to be lustful, for she was a saintly child and thought Lust the worst of all cardinal crimes. Pride she did not chose because it was her step-mother’s pride that had inspired her wickedness, as well as Envy. Wrath was quite out of her nature, she felt she would not be very good at it. Sloth was undesirable also, as she had terrible nightmares of being put in to a cursed sleep, she did not want to miss her life going past. Greed she thought was childish. She picked Gluttony then.
“I suppose I must eat anyway” she thought to herself.
So the girl married Gastrimargia, the Sin Gluttony, and though she had expected to be a servant the rest of her days (as was the age) he instead brought her food. He insisted she eat more and more like a great pig, and the girl found herself indulging, feasting endlessly. While the other Sins watched, she allowed her husband to stuff her with the finest meats and honeys and creams. She came to love the food, accepting everything her stomach was presented for she knew it was infinite and all for her. She did not know it, but now Greed had taken her for his wife also.
Not much time passed before she outgrew her clothes, her vast body only getting vaster. She admired it stretching around her, understanding her step-mother’s narcissism. She much preferred her quivering gelatinous mass to her erstwhile smaller self and the Sins constantly told her it was a thing of beauty. That is how Pride too became her master.
As she expanded and grew softer she found herself excited by the folds of her body and soon needed to be pleasured in every way. That is when she welcomed in Lust.
Occasionally, her husbands and the other Sins fed on the flesh of forest fare which made her hunger and yearn for their food to be her own. Thus once more she was married, this time to Envy.
She became so entitled to her new life of hedonism that anything which should puncture her joy was of great offense to her. Any slow slave or unsatisfying sex resulted in vicious abuse towards her husbands and workers. The cruelest words spilled from her lips until she was returned to her spoiling. Now she was the wife of Wrath.
Though she had come to the house starved skinny from slaving for her imperious step-mother, she was now as large as a barn. She could not move, her bed was forever. So she spent her days there, immobile, until movement was a strange forgotten thing. Finally, Sloth had also taken her.
That is how Snow White became the Queen of Sin.