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Leningrad, winter of 1942.
Snow fell thick over the broken rooftops, muffling the distant echoes of cannons.
The sky was gray, colorless — as if the world itself had forgotten what light was.
Through the frozen streets, the wind whistled between the ruined buildings.
In a cracked brick house, a young blonde girl leafed through her favorite book.
The pages were blank — they had always been.
Even so, she smiled every time she opened it. It was very special; it had been a gift from her older brother.
"One day, the words will appear and write a beautiful story for you," he had told her.
She remembered his expression when he said it. He couldn't smile, but with all his heart he wished that his little sister would one day live a beautiful fairy tale — far away from all that misery.
Her mother only watched her, eyes sunken from hunger and cold.
Her father, like her brother who was no longer there, didn't smile anymore.
The book was called Сказка — Fairy Tale.
But sadly, the only tale here was one of destruction and death.
That night, the bombs began to fall again.
The ground shook, windows shattered into shards.
When silence returned, the girl was alone.
Her parents' bodies lay beneath the rubble.
She let out a heavy sigh and picked up her book, refusing to accept the reality before her.
Among the ashes and the smell of gunpowder, she walked through the streets barefoot, clutching the book to her chest.
The wind tore at her skin, but she kept walking, stumbling over frozen corpses.
She didn't quite understand what was happening.
But she knew one thing — life wasn't a fairy tale, nor a book of fantasy.
No one cared about her life, just as no one cared for the other heaps of bodies lying in the snow.
'In the end, power really is all that matters,' she thought.
Then, before her, she saw a soldier aiming a gun at her. Without a hint of hesitation, his body didn't tremble — not from cold, nor from regret.
At the end of the line, the girl smiled — a sweet, almost serene smile.
Her blue eyes shimmered with life for a fleeting moment.
In her final thoughts, one thing crossed her mind.
'It's sad, but no hero will save me. What a shame.'
A gunshot echoed.
The small body fell into the snow, staining the white with red.
The book slipped from her hands and fell open, its pages fluttering in the wind until they stopped — and there, where the blood touched the paper, something appeared.
Like a magic trick.
Just a one-line miracle.
The blood flowed in an impossible way, and then…
"Once upon a time."
The wind blew again, and the page closed.
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