"Most of the stories that people know — or, at least, the ones they think they know — are a far cry from the real truth," Snow admits, and while she's not really prepared to launch into a full telling of her past and why that brief time she'd spent with the dwarves hadn't been all it was cracked up to be, for more than one reason, she still feels like Ruby will understand her brief skimming over the subject.

"We all used to live in a place called the Homelands — Bigby, and me, and everyone else from our world — before this terrible threat forced us all to leave. An Adversary, who wanted to take over our world and enslave everyone in it. It was safer for us to live among regular people after that, but we had to keep everything about ourselves a secret — partly so it would be harder for the evil to find us in a world that wasn't originally our own."

She raises a bare shoulder in a slight shrug, her mouth quirking in a half-smile.

"When you're trying not to be discovered, you do everything you can to try to blend in."