She hadn't always been contained within the confines of the Glass Prison. There was a time when she had been a little girl. A princess. A queen. She'd taken the form of a mustachioed man in a funny hat. Of a red-haired boy with freckles and a missing tooth. And through it all, through all the people who looked into her prison every day, none of them saw her.

Perhaps, she mused, that was the price of vanity mixed with immortality. She was anyone and everyone who dared cast a glaze into her cell, a perfect copy of them for as long as they peered into the Glass Prison. And yet, she was no one. Nothing.

In fact, her existence was tied to the vain. To those who sought to see themselves. So long as someone gazed upon her, she was alive. That was the deal she had made. What immortality had cost her aside from her identity. And while this hadn't been an issue for centuries, fewer and fewer had been looking into the Glass Prison over the last few decades.

And then everything went dark.

There no one gazed upon her. Nothing happened to casually pass by without so much as a glance in her direction. Here she was in a perpetual state of existence and nonexistence. Of being neither alive nor dead.

And so she would wait. For days, weeks, months, years, it didn't matter. When life returned, when the first thing crept or slithered towards the infinite walls of her prison, she would once more awaken. She would once more be alive.

But, after an eternity of civilizations rising and falling, of entire peoples being created and destroyed, there was nothing left. The universe was dead, collapsing in on itself. There would be no one to rescue her. No one to bring her back to life. And in the uncertainty of what that meant for her, she was afraid.

Terrified.

She had given up everything for this. For eternal beauty. For eternal life. And as she faced the last hours of existence, she began to realize how foolish she had been. She had “been” everyone and everything, and yet, she had been nothing at all. She played the part of those who peered into the Glass Prison, sure, and while she had once thought that made her their equal, she realized that it was nothing more than a facade. A show. A lie.

Despite the countless entities that had looked upon her since her imprisonment, none had seen her. Acknowledged her. She had thought herself needed. Wanted. Loved. It was only now that she came to realize how lonely she truly was. How lonely she had been all this time.

As the last few seconds of existence neared, one word came to her in the nothingness.

Regret.