The Grimm Diaries Prequels 7 - 10

4 teaser novellas for the upcoming release of

The Grimm Diaries Series

by Cameron Jace

Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the author.

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 This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the
writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All facts concerning fairy tales publication dates, scripts, and historical events mentioned
in this book are true. The interpretations and fantasy elements aren’t. They are the author’s
imagination.

Table of Contents

Prologue
Once Beauty Twice Beast
Author’s Notes:
Moon & Madly
Author’s Notes:
Rumpelstein
Author’s Notes:
Jawigi
Afterward

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Foreword

First of all, thanks to the mind blowing support of my readers. By

reading the second set of bundles, I assume you’ve read the first set and
liked it – or at least giving it a chance to like it –, so I can talk freely,
explain little things, and even point at some shortcomings of mine. Reading
this set of prequels demands that you have read the first set. Stories are
getting more connected in the Grimm Diaries Prequels, and you can’t enjoy
them without having read the first set. Also, bear in mind that the timeline
varies from one story to another. Things are not told in order, but it’s not
hard to follow. In this bundle, you’ll be introduced to new characters like
Rumpelstiltskin, but you’ll also learn about others like Jack and the Queen
of Sorrow. It might help to know that I didn’t plan to write the prequels. It
just happened that when I posted the synopsis for Snow White Sorrow on a
social network, I was bombarded with comments about the similarities of
the blurb to other books. So I decided to write the prequels to show
otherwise. It was a stroke of luck that the prequels took a life of their own,
thanks to you readers, bloggers, and reviewers.
So what are the prequels exactly? Here’s the best way I could put it:
They are simply my background notes on characters designed to appear in
the main series; where they came from, what their motives were, and what
they want in the course of the series. I wrote them as diaries to make them
more appealing to you. And I am glad I did, because a lot of your feedback
allowed me to learn more about them and develop them even more.
So why continue the prequels? Because many of the characters will not
appear before the third main book in the series. The first two books will
mostly be about Snow White, Queen of Sorrow, Loki Blackstar, Cinderella,
and other characters I don’t want to spoil. Ladle Rat, Peter, and Jack do not
appear until the third, for instance. So the prequels will help keep their
memory fresh until then — I am almost thinking of giving them their own
series until they meet with the rest later, but I am not sure I have the writing
skills to do that at the moment.
Which brings me to my writing. I am in no way up to par with the
fabulous writers I read and love. I am just a storyteller and I believe I have a
good story to tell. But I am also getting better, because I am learning.
Thanks to you and others who’d been teaching me a thing or two each day.
One last note is that I wanted to add a prequel that would appeal more to
fans of Ashes to Ashes & Cinder to Cinder and Beauty Never Dies, but
there wasn’t enough time. However, prequel #11 and #12 will be out soon
and will appeal to fans of prequel 2 and 3.
OK. I talked too much, and I know you’d rather spend time with Queen
of Sorrow, so I wish you a great read.

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 “This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, except
only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence.
Or lack thereof.”
Neil Gaiman

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 Prologue

Two hundred years ago, the Brothers Grimm altered the true fairy
tales, hiding the fact that its characters were immortals, secretly living
among us.
They placed a curse upon the immortals, burying them in their own
dreams, so they won’t ever wake up again. The immortals’ bodies
would appear as if in a coma in the real world while their minds
created a world of their own imagination in a realm called the
Dreamworld. The Brothers Grimm once mentioned this curse in the
Snow White story when she was sleeping in her glass coffin. In the
original scripts, they called it the Sleeping Death.
However, the immortals broke the curse by intertwining their
dreams, and were able to wake up for a brief time every one hundred
years. The good ones wished to tell the truth about fairy tales. The bad
ones planned to bring wrath upon our world.
Since immortals did not die, descendants of the Brothers Grimm
summoned the Dreamhunters, a breed of angels that killed immortals
in their dreams. The confrontations didn’t end very well.
Everything that happened in that period was documented in a Book
of Sand, or what mortals call the Grimm Diaries. Different fairy tale
characters wrote each diary, telling part of the story.
My name is Sandman Grimm, and my job is to seal the final edition
of the Grimm Diaries every one hundred years, using a magic wand
that writes on pages made of sand. After I seal the diaries, they will
dissolve into sand that I pour into children’s eyes every night to create
their dreams.
What follows are mini diaries I call the Grimm Prequels, scattered
and buried pages that didn't make it to the main volumes of the Grimm
Diaries. There are seven of them, each told by a famous character. You
might want to read them before the first full-length diary called Snow
White Sorrow. It will give you an idea of what this world is like.
The prequels don’t necessary hold the truth. Some characters might
want to manipulate the truth in their favor. And since the prequels
don’t give away much of the story, some matters could seem confusing
at times.
It’s better to think of the prequels like snap shots of a magical land
you're about to visit soon. I like to think of them as poisoned apples.
Once you taste them, you will never see fairy tales in the same light
again.

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 Once Beauty Twice Beast

The Grimm Diaries Prequels #7

by Cameron Jace
Edited by Danielle Littig

Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the author.

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 Once Beauty Twice Beast
As told by Beauty (sometimes known as Beast)

Dear Diary,

Once upon a time, time wasn’t on my side…

With a racing heart, I was expecting my visitor to come knocking on
my castle’s door. The large raven-shaped clock hadn’t struck midnight yet,
but I knew time was the greatest murderer in history. It always arrived
wherever you were, not a tick too soon, and not a tock too late.
I expected my visitor the way you’d anticipate an inevitable kiss… of
death.
Beads of sweat had exposed the fears I was hoping to conceal. Damn
those sweet fears. How dare I think of them as sweet? But they were sweet,
and they sent chills to my spine, conspiring to stop my hands from writing
this entry in the diary.
However, my hands were bound to tell the truth of a tale we all thought
we knew well. Sometimes, hands are like tongues, acting against our better
judgment, screaming out the secrets once kept in the deepest closets of your
mind.
“Things must be loved before they are lovely,” I mumbled to myself,
my voice intense and echoing in the room. I repeated the phrase religiously
like a priest reciting a hymn that could save a sinner. “Things must be loved
before they’re lovely,” I was breathing heavily, watching my breath
shimmering in the candlelight. “Stars must be cherished before they glitter.
The moon must be loved before it’s full. And the sun must be remembered,
even when it’s dark,” I said, staring at the clock on the wall, ticking; tick
tock, tick tock, the footsteps of time hunting me down. Each passing
moment, every breath I took, I was worried I’d hear a tick, but not live long
enough to hear its tock.
Looking away from the clock, there was a canvas hanging on the walls
in my chamber of solitude. It was Persian, and I tried my best not to look at
it. It had the same phrase sewn with golden threads to its fabric, “Things
must be loved before they’re lovely.”
“Stop it!” I yelled out, as if talking to ghosts.
The phrase on the canvas was killing me. I had to write down my story
before my visitor arrived. There wasn’t enough time left to tell the truth
about who was really the beauty and who was the beast.
‘What makes one evil and what makes one good?’ I wrote, tightening
my grip on the pencil as if it opposed my will to write. The question on the
paper lulled in my head. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, so
little time for getting the right answers. Sometimes, I wondered if I was the
only one who questioned the origin of tales. Why was it that people didn’t
care about origins, or where things came from?
‘Who are we to say who is good and who is evil? Who, and what, is
beauty and who is beast?’ I wrote, carving the alphabets on paper as I
closed my eyes, hoping the words would disappear when I opened them
again. But no; the words were still there, daring me to answer the question I
had just asked.
I wondered why these words on paper wouldn’t disappear? Weren’t the
diaries made of sand? Weren’t they supposed to dissolve once read?
It was true, but the Books of Sands – known to humans as diaries – had
to be read by one other human before they dissolved. It was the universe’s
way to keep a story alive, so that someone else always lived to tell it.
In my experience, tales that old like the Beauty and the Beast, tended to
change a great deal. Someone had told someone who had told someone who
told someone… you get the idea.
How did we expect stories to stay true with each individual adding
their own lie to it? The world was full of stories, but rarely the truth or the
origins of things. I do know the origin of my story, though.
You might wonder why you should believe my version among others,
but that’s the easy part to answer: because I was the Beast – or the beauty. It
all depends on how you perceive me by the end of this diary.
I took a deep breath, imagined the clock didn’t tick, and wished I could
finish my story before my visitor came. I started writing…
It all started the day I was born. My parents said it was the happiest day
in their lives. I was their seventh child, the only boy following the birth of
six girls – I know you expected beauty to be a girl, but that wasn’t the case.
 In my time, girls were sent off to get married at the age of seventeen,
while boys had to grow up into becoming courageous men. My father, the
king of the land, always wanted a boy who would soon become a prince and
join him in his endless voyages in the sea.
Unlike our neighbors in the Kingdom of Sorrow, we lived in peace and
our royal family’s main interest was exploring the world. My father was a
descendant of Christopher Columbus, who had discovered many regions of
the world, including the Kingdom of Sorrow.
For personal reasons, I shall not name my kingdom, my family’s, or
mine. I don’t know who might read this diary, and I can’t risk it ending up
in the hands of those who have learned the dark arts and knew about the
power of real names.
Unfortunately for my father, I wasn’t interested in traveling like he had
hoped. I had no interest in the sea or my father’s voyages because I had an
infatuation with books. My father didn’t like that because his voyages
weren’t only explorations. Our kingdom benefited immensely from the
trades and the goods his ships brought to it. He was worried that if I didn’t
develop a liking for the sea, he couldn’t pass his sailing skills onto me. I
didn’t understand by then that I would be my kingdom’s only hope if my
father died.
“Don’t you want to join your father in his voyages? Don’t you want to
be like the great Christopher Columbus?” My lovely mother asked me
while I was yawning next to a pile of vellums I had bought at expensive
prices. I collected books that were only written once, and were never
copied, thinking that I could gain exclusive knowledge like no one else did.
I wanted to learn how to turn copper into gold, and about magic, which was
forbidden in our kingdom.
“I hate the sea,” I said. “Why should it be of any interest to me? Is it
because I am his only boy?”
“Well, your interests are rather strange, my son,” My mother said.
“Boys don’t usually become bookworms. If it was one of your sisters, I
would have accepted it.”
Ironically, none of my sisters read a single book. They had one thing on
their minds; to get married before they reached the age of twenty-one,
probably to another prince, and it would’ve been a bonus if he were
charming.
 “The things I can learn from these books are much better than my
father’s voyages across the ocean, risking his life to make money,” I
explained to her. “I could make gold, mother. Gold! And we’d never have
to sail ships across the oceans to make a fortune again.”
“Gold? How?” She wondered. “People dig and find gold, my son. No
one makes it.”
I knew that she wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want her to know that
I was into alchemy, which was prohibited, the same way dice was. It was
thought of as works of the devil.
“As you wish, my son,” She shook her head and limped away, out of
the room. My mother had been ill for years with a leg slightly shorter than
the other. No one ever told me how it happened, and I wasn’t allowed to
ask. My grandmother told me that my mother was darkly enchanted by
someone who hated her. I was eleven, and I wanted to heal my mother with
alchemy since then.
One of the reasons my father loved to sail was that he wished he’d find
a cure for her somewhere far away. Funny how we always look for the
cures of our sorrows in the distant places while the pain is right here where
we stand.
I could heal you, mother. I could heal you. Forget about my father’s old
fashion ways, crossing the oceans with his ships to find what isn’t there.
With alchemy, I could heal you within seconds, if I only find the Forbidden
Rose, a red flower that heals everything. It’s written here in my books.
“And shouldn’t you go out and mingle with others your age?” My
mother wondered with caring eyes. “You’re sixteen now. Shouldn’t you
look for a girl, and make her your wife many years from now? You’re a
beautiful young man.”
I had always heard this phrase, and it was true. I was a beautiful boy;
so beautiful that other families begged my father that I should marry their
daughters. One of their girls cut her fingers accidentally one day when she
was peeling an apple while looking at me. I was more beautiful than my
sisters were. I didn’t know what that meant, other than having a number of
male enemies, and endless female admirers. Thanks to my mother, I
inherited her fabulous genes. She was the most beautiful of all, if only her
leg wasn’t causing her pain and embarrassment. The one who had
enchanted my mother must have envied her beauty.
 Days passed and my interest in girls never peaked. It was books, books,
and more books, trying to find the cure for my mother. Alchemy was the
key, and I wasn’t into those frauds like Nicolas Flammel and their kind. I
was collecting books from the source, from where alchemy started: from
Persia. That was I only asked my father to shower with books when he
visited Persia, but he rarely did.
I didn’t care about Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians. I only wanted the
secrets found in the Persian books, the secrets that could make me rich
without having to travel or work hard like my father, and the secrets that
could end my mother’s pain and truly make her the most beautiful in the
land. Beauty had to be perfect. A beautiful face wasn’t enough. I had to heal
her leg.
“Your father’s late,” My mother told me several months later. “He’s
been to Transylvania, and he usually gets back within two months. It’s been
three now.”
I didn’t know what to do or say, hating how she looked when she was
worried. How strange was it that a beautiful face turned into an ugly one by
only moving a few muscles? How thin was the line between beautiful and
ugly, between a beauty and a beast?
A week later, the sad news came knocking on our door. My father’s
ship, the Demeter, sank in the sea. Although my mother and sisters cried
and whined, I listened to the details and facts about the incident. It was
rumored that there was a coffin on the ship, one that held the corpse of a
Count Dracula. For some reason, this coffin was of great importance and
would’ve made us richer if it hadn’t sunk with the ship’s crew. It was said
that the corpse of Count Dracula came alive and killed everyone on the ship
before it sank. It was a myth the sailors kept reciting for years after the
incident.
The aftermath of my father’s death was that we were about to become a
poorer kingdom. There was no one who could do my father’s job properly,
and his crew, whom he had trained, died with him in the sea.
I had to step up, bury my alchemy dreams, and grow up into a man and
sail away to save the day.
I was told that there was one last sail I had to make on my father’s
behalf – a first sail for me, though. My father had planned the voyage
before his death, and wrote in his own diary which he kept in the safely of
my mother’s hands. I followed the instructions and let them build the ship
he had designed in the diary, and sought for the best sailors left to decipher
the map I had found with the diary, explaining our destination. The map
pointed to a place called was considered a myth. Sailors loved to call it
Neverland because no one ever found it. It was a region only my father
knew about, or at least believed in. In his diary, he said that I could save my
family, and the kingdom, if I brought the finest food and merchandise from
Neverland, and traded it with neighboring kingdoms. I was supposed to
look for a boy called Peter Pan once I got there.
I packed all my books, brought them aboard, and sailed with a newly
trained crew. The sea wasn’t an easy place to be. I got sick every other day,
and I couldn’t read my books. It wasn’t too bad, though. I just had to be
strong until I reached our destination.
We never reached Neverland.
A pirate ship named Jolly Roger attacked us, led by a man with a hook
instead of a hand. They hijacked us and threatened to kill us if we
disobeyed him and refused to be enslaved.
Abandoning my books, I escaped, swimming away, six days and seven
nights on a log in the sea until I reached a shore.
Lost and hungry, I walked through endless forests with no one in sight,
until I saw a sign, carved in wood. It said:

Welcome to the castle East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

Things must be loved before they are lovely.

There was a castle right in front of me, in the middle of nowhere, and I
didn’t know whether I had missed seeing it while approaching or if it just
appeared out of nowhere.
The castle almost called to me, as if it had a soul or knew me from long
ago, before I was even born, and even before the world was born. On my
knees, I pounded on its enormous gate and shouted through its bars, asking
if there was anyone there to help me before I starved to death – I had only
saved one book from the ship, and the stories about the Forbidden Rose in it
kept me company when I was hungry. I admit that I was about to literary
chew on some pages on my way, cannibalizing on words that had only been
written once. But I had steered away from the thought because I believed
that the origins of things had to be kept intact.
I looked at the gates of the castle as they squeaked open on their own.
Did the castle decide I was worthy of saving? Or torturing? I didn’t
know. Hunger blinded my judgment as I stepped into the echoing halls of
the unknown.
This was when my real story – a fairy tale to you – began.
Although the castle looked old and abandoned from the outside, it
shone like a golden treasure from the inside. Everything I saw, glittered;
everything I heard, echoed; and everything I touched, I smeared with dirt,
for my hands were not clean enough, having had a long journey.
“Hello?” I called out, craning my neck up at the chandeliers that waved
slightly over my head, back and forth, as if the castle was a cradle rocked
slightly by the hands of evil.
I was a beautiful boy, but never a fool to miss the menacing heart of
evil drumming underneath the marble floors, hiding in the echoing walls,
and crouching underneath glittering artifacts. My father had told me enough
scary stories to recognize darkness when I confronted it, even in the
brightest of lights. I remembered trying to sleep with my eyes open after
those bedtime stories.
I had to wait and listen to my voice echoing seven times before I could
call out for the castle’s inhabitants again, but then I realized that there was
no need. The echo had done that on my behalf.
I noticed that there were no mirrors in the castle, and when I
approached a glittering plate and lifted it to my face, it did not show my
reflection. Such items had to be bewitched by evil spells that didn’t show
one’s reflection. I read about them in the alchemy books, that these were
only found in places inhabited by demons or evil spirits, which feared its
own image.
Clutching the book in my hand, I decided I should leave, feeling
frustrated, and blaming myself for being a useless young man who had lost
his way in life. Neither could I find the Forbidden Rose to heal my mother
in the tens of books I read, nor did I listen to my father and learn how to sail
a ship before I almost died in the sea.
Was I being punished for my adolescent stubbornness? But I had
always thought of myself as good. How couldn’t I when I was such a
beautiful and desired boy? Didn’t beauty equal good? Was it not a cosmic
rule that ugliness equaled evil?
Strangely enough that day, I didn’t leave the castle, although I should
have. Something made me stay.
It wasn’t the walls that echoed, the furniture that glittered, or the faint
music that hummed underneath my feet. It was the smell of food. I was
starving, and the castle seduced me with the a most primitive human need.
I turned around, looking for the smell’s source. I walked on toes like a
sleepwalking princess, raising my nose up, closing my eyes, and imagining
the smell of fresh food dancing like an Arabian snake in front of my eyes,
guiding me to Sesame, Ali Baba’s cave. I told you I read a lot, and I
couldn’t help but compare stories I read to real life incidents.
I stopped at a great hall with a long table full of food, of all kinds, all
colors, curving up and down like beautiful mountains in a dream. There was
enough food that would last me a year. It was fresh and warm.
But I didn’t care. I dipped into the soup, sank my teeth into the meat,
and drank the delicious wine.
Strangely, everything tasted of flowers somehow. Still, I didn’t care.
After I ate the delicious food – which was even better than my mom’s
–, I felt heavy and sat on one of the huge gold-plated chairs, sighing and
imagining myself returning home with something precious to save my
fathers kingdom, something that proved I wasn’t a loser. The thought
reminded me of tales I read about princesses lost in the woods after being
banished by their evil stepmothers. The princesses usually ended finding a
castle of some sorts where they met a prince charming who kissed them,
and then the story ended – I always wanted to know what happened after
that, but historians and fairy tale collectors never cared for my opinion.
But I wasn’t a princess. I was a boy. This story felt wrong to me, and I
didn’t know why. There was no princess in this castle, too. It was just me
with the endless food and probably some ancient ghosts waiting for me to
sell my soul to them.
Something outside the castle’s windows grabbed my attention all of a
sudden. It was something red, and although it was small, single, and was
left alone against the windy weather outside, it stood against all odds. I
jumped off my chair and ran toward it. Standing at the threshold of the
castle’s main door, I saw a little creature of nature standing there. I was
right. It was a Forbidden Rose. The only Forbidden Rose I had ever seen.
I checked the alchemy book in my hand and compared the picture to
that of what I saw before my eyes. They matched. I shrugged in an attempt
to calm myself down. I wasn’t a loser after all. I did find the rose that was
going to cure my mother. All I had to do was step outside and grab it…
Unfortunately, the castle’s heavy door slammed shut before me,
followed by the windows and every other opening. I wasn’t scared yet, but
there was no way for me out of here. A whirling wind behind me forced me
to turn around to see what caused this. It was a beast, and it was a she.
She was the most hideous creature. Looking at her deformed face,
hunched shoulders, and large hairy feet, I was disgusted more than appalled.
She wore an expensive dress though, but it was ripped in places to give way
to the protruding parts of her irregular body. I sensed that she was younger
than me, although it puzzled me how I got that impression.
She stood with her dirty-blonde hair dangling before her face. Then she
parted her hair with her hands and made way for her eyes. I noticed she
wore a diamond ring on one hand. Her eyes were pitch-black like demons.
I turned back, pounding on the door, knowing that there was no one
outside who could hear me. I tried to break the glass but failed. Was it under
a spell? As I looked outside through the glass, I saw other plants next to the
Forbidden rose acting in a strange way. They were bending awkwardly and
dying on their own as if hit with an abrupt plague, but that wasn’t the case.
They were dying because of the beast. Whenever she approached a living
thing, it died or aged instantly. I was lucky to be still alive. Why wasn’t I
affected like the plants?
Turning back, I saw that everything that glittered dimmed when she
walked by, candles flickered away, and the floor underneath her turned to
ashes as she set foot. I didn’t know what do. I was a beautiful boy about to
be killed by a beastly girl in the middle of nowhere.
I could’ve talked to her, or begged her to spare my life, but my tongue
was tied. The thought of grabbing a spell out of my book of alchemycrossed
my mind, but my hands gave up on me and the book fell, thudding against
the ashen floor.
 Her black eyes kept staring at me, blazing with anger. Since it had
taken her sometime to hurt me, I expected her to speak. How did a beast
like her sound? Was her voice as scary as her look?
She approached me. I closed my eyes, unable to imagine being so close
to saving my mother and yet failing.
Goodbye world. I’m a failure. I was stubborn, not listening to my
father, only believing in those damn alchemy books. What use were they
when they couldn’t save me from the beast that looked like it guarded the
Forbidden Rose?
Suddenly, I heard distant voices approaching; men shouting and
cursing outside the castle. I opened my eyes and looked outside. There were
tens of them, with stakes, guns, and torches in their hands. I think they were
the locals of a neighboring town. Anger shone on their faces as they
approached shouting, “Come out, ugly beast!”
They were here for the beast that stood behind me. I pounded on the
unbreakable window, hoping they’d hear me before she kills me.
“Come out, beast! Today is your judgment day.”
One of the older men in the gathering saw me and pointed at me. They
came running, attempting to break the window, but failed, too.
Everything that the beast had sealed in the castle was unbreakable, and
when she approached to show herself through the window, they swallowed
hard then gritted their teeth, trying their best to stand tall, not showing fear.
Turning around again, I saw her behind me, much closer now, still
staring with black eyes shining from between thick blonde hair. I noticed
trickles of dried blood on the hair, and I wondered about what kind of scary
face she hid underneath.
She pulled me with one hand and threw me away against a wall, then
gestured with open palms for the doors to open wide and let her chasers
inside through fluttering curtains. They caught the bait and came running
into the castle with their torches and stakes.
A big mistake.
I didn’t know that she could levitate, not enough to fly but enough to
kill and slice her enemies. She had strong hands, and she could kill with
them, twisting necks and slicing through a man’s body like a knife. She was
unapologetic in her killing and she was more angry than scary. It was as if
she blamed them for something – as if she thought of them as beasts, too.
 When she was finished with her little massacre, she threw the bodies
outside onto the earth that planted the Forbidden Rose. The earth drank the
men’s blood and fed the plants.
Thinking of it now, I could’ve run while the doors were open, but I still
don’t know why I didn’t. Was I too paralyzed and scared, or was it that
something about her made me curious?
After the doors slammed shut again, she walked toward me, her big
feet heavy like trolls, clutching on the floor. She pulled me by my hair and I
slid helplessly with my back against the floor. I tried to free myself but she
was too strong.
Finally, she threw me into another room and started eyeing me again. It
would’ve been better if she had killed me instead of bestowing her evil eyes
upon me.
I watched her pulling out some animal skin and writing on its back
with some darkened ink that I wished wasn’t the blood of her victims. She
handed me the skin, and wanted me to read what she had written on it.
Puzzled, I took the skin and wondered if the beast was mute.
‘You were about to kill my rose,’ she wrote. ‘Why would you do that?’
I stared back at her with widened eyes, wondering why this was her
biggest concern, but who was I to argue with the beast who had spared me
so far?
“It’s the Forbidden Rose,” I said to her. “I need it to cure my mother.”
‘It’s precious to me, and everything thing comes with a price in this
world. What would you pay for it?” She wrote on another animal skin, and I
was beginning to feel safer since this had turned into a conversation instead
of a bloodbath. Again, I was pleased that we were bargaining. I thought I
would bargain for my life, but she spared it already without me knowing
why. Did it matter why I was still alive? Of course, it didn’t. We take
advantage of such things like being alive, rarely bothering if there is reason
to it at all. Only if we die, or are threatened with death, do we question and
whine about how all this time we wasted the gift of living.
“I’d pay anything,” I said. “It’s for my mother. If I heal her, I will not
only make her happy and proud of me – and probably my father, too, in his
grave – but I will make peace with myself, knowing that I wasn’t such a
failure as her son.”
 ‘Is your mother as beautiful as you?’ The beast wrote, not mentioning
the price anymore.
“Much much—“ I was enthusiastic to say more, but it occurred to me
that I was talking to a beast. I didn’t want to talk to her about beauty she did
not posses – far from it. “Not so much,” I lied. “She is an average woman,
really,” I said, not wanting to either hurt the beast’s feeling or tickle her
anger.
‘For a beautiful boy like you,’ She wrote. ‘I’d give you the rose to heal
your mother if you marry me.’
I was stunned. That was straightforward – her words almost cut
through me.
It was one of those times when I felt that my beauty was a curse. If I
had been the kind of boy who accepted the many advances girls made in the
past, it might have made sense to submit to the beast and save my mother.
But I was only a beautiful boy who preferred books over girls.
‘The Forbidden Rose will not only heal your mother. It will also gift
her with immortality,’ The beast wrote. At least her handwriting was
beautiful.
“If that’s so, why didn’t you use it to heal yourself,” I asked, lowering
my head a little so she didn’t get furious.
There was a long moment of silence, the calm before the storm, and I
knew I must have insulted her.
‘The rose can’t cure me,’ The beast said. It amazed me that she
confessed her bestiality being part of an illness or something. ‘My cure is
almost priceless.’
I didn’t want to elaborate, asking what she was, and what it was that
could cure her. The image of my mother smiling, running in green fields
with two equally-long legs shaded my judgment. I decided I would do it for
my mother. I would waste my beauty and youth for her, and it amazed me
how it felt good. How so, when I was giving in to this horrendous beast? I
experienced the enchanting feeling of sacrifice for the first time. It had that
bittersweet taste. How did sacrificing yourself for someone you love bring
so much joy? That wasn’t a feeling I read about in books.
I agreed to the Beast’s offer, enslaving me with her in the castle,
wasting my youth, shattering my dreams of becoming what I wanted, all in
the name of the vague word called ‘marriage’. I knew why the beast wanted
to marry me. She wanted my beauty, even if she ended up torturing me for
it. What was the most important thing a beast lacked but beauty? That’s
why they always walked side by side, a beauty and a beast; one had
succeeded in enslaving or taming the other.
In the coming days, I figured out how to postpone my agreement to
marry her. She had warned me from entering any of the rooms on the first
floor. Each night, I breached into one of the several rooms so she got mad at
me and punished me. Thus, the marriage was postponed. Her punishment
was cruel and gruesome, but sweet on my body in exchange for not
marrying her. The more she punished me, the lesser I sympathized with her.
Such an ugly, vicious beast I didn’t care for.
Still, she astonished me that there was a rule to her torture. She
wouldn’t harm my beautiful face. The scars filled my body, though. I was
her boy toy, the one her goblin father and monster mother never bought her
– that’s if she had a father and mother.
At night, she chained me to a luxurious bed in a room next to her room.
Although I was in no way capable of escaping the wicked castle, she’d
thought that chaining me would make me marry her eventually. I tried to
escape several times but I never succeeded. No door or window opened
against her will, and my book of alchemy proved useless against her darkly
enchanted castle. Negotiating with her was tiring as well. I wasn’t sure if
she was mute, but she still never talked to me, only using animal skin to
write on.
The beast had some taste for music, though; a certain kind of music
that reminded me of Ballroom dancing. It was good music, aristocratic, and
it filled the castle all night, humming gently out of the walls. The music
helped me sleep against the pain every night.
It helped me dream…
In my dreams, a beautiful girl showed up repeatedly. She had blonde,
curly locks and walked through a garden full of Forbidden Roses under a
rainbow. Her curly hair fluttered to a summer breeze as she approached me
with the most beautiful smile. Her beauty was so imminent it lessened the
perception of my own beauty. She kept advancing toward me, and by the
end of the dream, the girl whispered in my ears, “Things must be loved
before they are lovely.”
 Then I woke up, sweating, staring at the beast that captured me. She
reminded me that there were no beautiful girls for me in this real life. It was
just my mind, playing tricks on me.
The beast started lavishing me with expensive wear as if I was a bride
and she was my promised husband. Then, when I refused whatever she
offered me, she tortured me. She also enjoyed having dinner with me,
watching me eat.
She never ate in front of me. When I asked why, she wrote that she was
afraid that if I saw her eating, I’d be disgusted with her and wouldn’t marry
her. Later, I caught her eating a tarantula. Some marriage proposal, that was.
‘Do you think you could love me?’ She once wrote over dinner.
“Not in a million years,” I said. She had tortured me enough that I
wasn’t afraid to speak the truth. Torture was so hard to tolerate in the
beginning, but later it tasted like a bitter memory that stuck with me forever.
It was always painful to remember, but no longer surprising or shocking.
‘That’s alright,’ She wrote. ‘It will take some time, although I don’t
know what love is, so I can’t claim I’d be missing it if you didn’t. I just
want to look at you every night, and wish you to keep me company.’
“How’d you expect me to marry you if I don’t know much about you?”
I thought it was a good time to learn anything about her. If I had learned
anything from the books I read, it was that people’s weaknesses could be
spotted through their speeches. You just had to listen carefully and read
between the lines. In all of the fairy tales my father told me, the villain
always had to make a speech.
“There isn’t much to know about me,” She wrote. “I’m a beast. I do
horrible things, and I enjoy it. No amount of things you know about me will
make you sympathize with me. You have to like me for who I am.” She
said, picking up a beetle from a small box and munching on it.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up, but I knew one thing; she
was a smart beast. She talked with reason, but how was I supposed to like
her for what she was?
“Were you born a beast?” I asked.
She stopped in the middle of a bite, and threw whatever was left of the
insect away – the legs probably. Her eyes blackened again but she sat still,
not picking up a skin to write on. Apparently, she wasn’t going to answer
this.
 “I am sorry,” I said. “It seems you don’t want to talk about it. How
about if I ask you about my mother? You said you would show me evidence
that she has received the rose and was cured, or what would be the point in
marrying you?”
‘Really?’ She wrote. ‘Are you going to marry me?’
“Let’s talk about my mother first.”
‘That’s fine. I’ll keep my promise,’ She wrote. ‘But you have to
promise me that you will do as I say. You have to promise me that you will
not do something foolish.’
“Why would I do something foolish?”
‘You just promise me!’ Her handwriting wasn’t as beautiful as it was
before. It was scribbled and looked nasty.
I agreed and followed her through the castle; to the rooms she had
warned me of entering on the first floor. I walked slowly, two or three
strides away from her. Everywhere she walked things dimmed or died. All,
but me. I was still safe from her curse.
She stopped in front of one of the rooms and showed me in while
standing at the threshold.
‘This is a forbidden room,’ She wrote. ‘No one’s supposed to enter it.’
“No one? Even you?” I asked.
‘Even me. I don’t enter it. It’s enchanted in ways I can’t explain.’
“So why are you showing me in?”
‘Because you want proof that your mother is healed, and only mirrors
have the power of showing you what’s happening in far away lands without
having to travel. You must have noticed that there are no mirrors in the
castle. I hate them.’
“So?”
‘There’s a mirror in this room though,’ She wrote. ‘Ask it about your
mother, and she will show you she’s safe. You don’t ask the mirror anything
else. Understood? Not one other thing. You must promise me.’
I nodded and entered alone as she closed the door behind me.
The mirror inside the room was blackened and had no reflection. What
kind of mirror was that?
There was nothing special about the room itself.
“Mirror?” I asked it, lowering my head, and thinking I was insane.
No answer.
 “Mirror?” I repeated.
This time it shone slowly from dark into light with a rippling surface,
showing my beautiful face in its reflection. With all the madness I had been
through, I wasn’t surprised, and I remembered reading about such mirrors
in books.
“Could you show me my mother? Could you show me if she was
cured?”
The mirror’s surface rippled and showed me my family’s castle in our
kingdom, and then it showed me my mother. She looked beautiful and
healthy, walking in the green gardens outside while ruling the kingdom.
Seeing her brought a long smile on my face. She was cured.
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” I asked the mirror.
“No one in this castle knows what your mother looks like,” A girl in
the mirror said. I could only hear her voice but not see her face. “If I wanted
to trick you, how’d I be able to conjure the image of someone I’ve never
seen?”
It wasn’t the most convincing explanation, but it proved the mirror
could speak to me, so I knelt down and whispered to the mirror, keeping my
eyes on the closed door separating me from the beast.
“Do you know how I could escape this place?”
“You can’t escape this place…” The girl in the mirror said, then
stopped without saying more.
Was that it? Was I destined to stay trapped with the beast forever?
“…unless your heart changes,” The girl in the mirror continued.
“What does that even mean?”
“How could you expect to leave if you haven’t changed?” She
continued. “How do you expect to advance in life if you don’t learn from
your crises?”
“I don’t understand. Change how?” I decided to go on with the insanity
and actually ask.
“Ask the girl in your dreams,” The mirror said. I felt my heart racing.
How did the mirror know about the girl in my dreams? “She is trying to
help you.”
The beast knocked on the door.
“Just a minute. I’m on my way out,” I said to the beast, and leaned
closer to the mirror. “Why can’t the beast enter this room?” I whispered, but
I was too late. It had gone black again, hearing the beast’s voice, I assumed.
The rest of the day, I did everything the beast asked of me. I just
wanted the sun to set so I could go to sleep and dream about the beautiful
girl that could help me out of here.
While I was chained, dreaming about the girl, she seemed too real to
me. Too beautiful, wearing a white dress with pink flowers. Her blonde hair
was braided on both sides, glittering in the sun. Tiny white birds flew
around her, celebrating her youth and beauty.
I had to follow her wherever she went, walking into cornfields and then
ending up before a simple house. Unlike what I had imagined, she wasn’t a
princess. She was a merchant’s daughter living in a secluded house in a
farm. The kind of people who lived the real happily ever afters. They didn’t
need crowns, enchantments, fairy tales, or too much beauty. They had each
other, a family of five; her father, her mother, herself, and her two sisters. I
wondered if this was the true beauty I should have aspired for.
The girl signaled for me to follow her in the house. I discovered that no
one could see me in the dream but her, and I watched her kiss her parents
and play with her two sisters before dinner.
Everything happened fast in the dream, as if she only wanted to show
me precise things, enough to know about her. I was patient and I didn’t
interfere with what I saw. I was here to learn how to change, whatever that
meant.
A messenger came knocking on their door in the dream, inviting the
girl to the Queen of Sorrow’s castle. So this girl lived in the Kingdom of
Sorrow?
The messenger said that the Queen offered young girls the opportunity
to make money by working for her in the castle. The Queen also promised
to teach the girls the etiquettes of princesses and shower them with gifts
when their work ended.
The girl didn’t really have to go. Her family was neither rich nor poor.
But all young girls seemed infatuated with the Queen of Sorrow, the young
queen of the land. Even her mother and her two little sisters were fond of
the Queen. The father was reluctant but couldn’t deny his daughter’s
aspiration to go work for the Queen, who she described as the beauty of all
beauties.
 I saw her welcome the messenger and debate with her mother about
which dress to wear when visiting the palace. They couldn’t stop talking
about the Queen’s beauty and elegance. They had heard about the Queen
inviting young beautiful girls to visit her castle before, but they never
thought she’d choose their daughter.
“What’s your name?” I whispered to the girl, still wondering how her
mother didn’t see me.
She blinked at me then shushed me away behind her mother’s back. I
understood that I was here only to watch, not to ask questions in this
Dream, so I obeyed. All I wanted was to know how to change like the
mirror said so I could free myself of the beast.
I followed the girl riding the coach to the Queen’s castle, which they
called the Schloss, an old Germanic name for ‘castle’. The coach was black
and it looked like it was made from bones, but the girl didn’t see that. She
even claimed it was gold. I guess I saw in different colors in this world.
Then she talked to the coachman who was actually a wolf, but she saw him
as a man and called him Managarm. I was sure that I saw things differently
from her now, but I concentrated on what I should learn from this dream.
Who said we all would see the same dream the same way?
So back to the castle…
It would take me about two long diaries to describe the magical ride
and the castle itself, and I’m sure others will do a better part at it than me in
their diaries. What mattered was what happened in the castle…
Tens of girls lined up on both sides welcoming the Queen of Sorrow
passing through to her throne. The Queen walked on a red carpet made of
the finest fabric I had ever seen, and the throne that awaited her was made
of glass that looked like a precious pearls from afar. The castle’s ceiling was
so high it was absurd, filled with golden paintings on a sky-blue
background as if the delicate threads were sewn to the real sky. I heard the
girls talking about the Queen’s throne being placed at a certain point in the
castle on purpose. It wasn’t haphazardly chosen. There were tiny holes in
the ceiling that made the sun shine directly every day on the Queen’s face
while sitting on her throne, right at noon. The Queen used that single ray of
sunlight to enhance the skin on her arms and face. If the Queen desired the
sun to settle on that spot on any other hour of the day, the servant closed
certain openings and left others to match the angle of the sun’s changing
positions.
The Queen herself didn’t need so much sun on her face in my opinion.
She was as beautiful as Queens were supposed to be, and she might have
surpassed those expectations too. Her beauty was indescribable. She was as
beautiful as dreams that never came true because they were too fabulous to
be real. Her attractiveness wasn’t all beauty, though. There was something
dangerously enchanting about her. I couldn’t put my hands on it. She
reminded me of the bright and beautiful light that burned the moths and
butterflies.
I had to force my eyes away from the Queen’s attractive looks to
concentrate on the nameless girl I was following. The girl knelt, among
others, on one knee and bowed for the Queen who knelt for no one; she
didn’t even lower herself one bit, but the girls worshipped her nonetheless.
They wondered if they would ever be like her, talk like her, walk gracefully
like her, and if one day they could ever have other girls bend on their knees
for them like her.
Again, I’m sure the Queen is going to be mentioned in countless
diaries, so I’ll skip to the important – and shocking – ending of this once-
beautiful dream.
At some moment, the Queen consulted a large mirror held by two
strong male servants next to her throne. The mirror seemed heavy, and the
men holding it looked worried of what they held in their hands. I couldn’t
see who was talking to the Queen from the mirror, but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was when the Queen stood up.
The lovely Queen, the Godmother of most girls in Sorrow, turned into a
beast on her own terms, still looking as beautiful as ever, though.
The Queen walked down the carpet, and the girls on both sides stared
at her. Her chin was still up as she lifted her hands in a majestic way and
chanted strange words as she walked. It was a song, a lullaby, so sweet, yet
so deadly, like I had never heard before. I felt dizzy hearing it, but what
happened to the girls was much worse.
The girls fainted and piled down one by one next to her like dying
plants, bending down the floor. Some of them gave in silently, and others
throbbed like a fish out of the water before they gave in eventually. The
beautiful Queen was like a plague, killing everything she passed.
 She reminded me of the beast that captured me outside of this dream,
except that one of them was a beauty and the other was a beast.
Servants began collecting the girls in glass coffins and sending them to
a secret chamber, which turned out to be a large bathhouse. What was a
better place to have a bloodbath but a bathhouse?
But the dream prevented me from accessing the bathhouse. The dream
had powers over me; I couldn’t wander wherever I wanted, and the girl who
had ushered me here was in a glass coffin half-filled with water and floating
roses, just like all the other girls, pushed to the bathhouse where I started
hearing screams.
“You know all you need now,” the beautiful girl said from behind me,
taking a ghost form. We weren’t in the castle anymore. We were in some
neverwhere, those places in dreams when you know you were about to
wake up soon.

“You’re dead?” I wondered.

“Not exactly,” she said. “I can’t explain, and you don’t need to know
more. I want you to free me so you change, and then you can free yourself.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “What do you want me to do, and what does
this have to do with me escaping the beast?”
“To escape the castle, you need to free me from the dream I’m trapped
in,” She said. “This isn’t just any castle. It’s like a world of itself. It has
been there since the beginning of time, and it’s everywhere. It has no
address, and changes place from century to century. Did you see any signs
on your way to it?”
 It took me a moment to remember. “Yes. It said, ‘East of the Moon and
West of the Sun’.”
“No. It should say, ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’.” The girl
explains.
“Does it even matter?” I laughed. “It’s not like it is a real address.”
“You said it yourself. It’s not a real address. Don’t you understand?
This castle is evil. I bet it is what caused you to get lost somewhere,
whether land or sea. It has planned everything to bring you here. It does it
all the time. It washes people’s minds and lets them think it has been here
since the day they were born, until it takes away what it wants.”
“What does it want?”
“I can’t say, and even you know, you can’t say either.”
“What kind of puzzle is this?” I started losing my patience. “This is
still so confusing, and I don’t care about all of this. All I want to know is
how I could free you so I can leave it.” I said.
“To do so, you have to tame the Beast that holds you prisoner. You
tame her, you free me and yourself.”
“Is that it? Is that the only way out of here? To tame the beast?”
“Yes.”
I wondered why she didn’t just say so from the beginning, but I was in
no position to argue. “How can I tame her?” I asked. “She chains me to the
bed every night, and she tortures me. How do you tame a beast?”
“Find beauty in her, and you tame her,” The girl said. “It might sound
unreasonable but I’m giving you ‘the key to set yourself free’.”
“How am I supposed to find beauty in her when she is an ugly beast?” I
asked.
“’Things have to be loved before they’re lovely’” the girl said that
damned phrase, and gave me no chance for further discussion.
I woke up.
The next day, I sat at the long dining table in front of the Beast, trying
to enjoy my delicious food as she ate a beetle, a spider, and then started to
have a frog as dessert, I presumed – she poured cinnamon and sugar on it as
it wiggled its feet before being eaten alive. The beast croaked momentarily
after swallowing it, instead of burping. I had never eaten a live frog before,
so maybe this was what naturally happened after eating them.
 How was I supposed to see beauty in her? How was I supposed to get
close to the beast?
I knuckled my fingers and cleared my throat, reminding myself that I
had little experience with girls, wasting my life reading alchemy books
about magic that couldn’t save the day when I needed it.
“Hmm…” I coughed, wiping my mouth with the finest fabric, but it
seemed to take her attention away from the frog’s dead legs for now. “I
meant to ask you something,” I said.
She nodded at me, not bothering to write on the animal skin as sticky
green stuff drooled from her lips.
“What’s you name?” I asked. It was the best I could come up with. It
occurred to me that to know people, to bond with them, their names were a
good start.
The beast threw whatever she was munching on away, raising her eyes
to me. Although disfigured, something shone in them. I wasn’t sure what it
meant when black eyes shone, though. Did I say something wrong?
“I’m sorry—“ I shrugged. “I didn’t mean to—“
She grabbed her animal skin instantly, wrote on it, and jumped off her
chair and walked to me, showing me her name.
It was Villeneuve.
Villeneuve? How peculiar, I thought. It sounded like, ‘villain’ but the
‘neuve’ part made it sound fine and sweet.
When I spelled her name on my lips, her eyes shone brighter, evading
the black and turning into a paler shade of blue. She tilted her head when
hearing her name and kept gazing at me as if she wanted to kiss me –-
something I didn’t want to do.
“It’s a lovely name,” I nodded, and I wasn’t lying.
She amazed me by holding one of my hands between hers. How could
this be the torturous beast I knew? The girl in my dreams was right. This
looked like my way out. But what now? Should I just ask her to let me go? I
didn’t think she would yet. The best thing was to continue playing the
game.
“I noticed you like music,” I offered. “Some ballroom music, I
presume. It really helps me to sleep at night.”
She nodded, kneeling down next to me. Suddenly, I was talking to a
pet, which also had the power to chop off my head.
 “You like to dance?” I asked, not expecting her to say yes, but she
shook her head with approval. She clapped her hands and the music started
to play in the castle. I noticed that things didn’t die or turn into ashes around
her when she was close to me. Well, a couple of plants still died nearby, but
the effect had lessened.
She pulled me up and held me closer and we started to dance…
I didn’t say a word, but she was a good dancer – a little too powerful in
her moves, though. I had to make an effort so I didn’t end up under her feet,
squashed like the frog she had just devoured.
The more we danced in the vast castle, the more her face eased, still
disfigured and ugly, but with some kind of a happy soul shining through.
We kept dancing and dancing until I got exhausted. I couldn’t fake
being a happy prisoner any longer, and had to ask her to stop dancing.
I ended up punished and chained to my bed again. The Beast’s rage
was overwhelming, and I started to think that it wasn’t a good idea anymore
to try to tame the Beast.
To make things worse, the girl in my dreams disappeared. She didn’t
show up when I slept. Was that it? She just showed me how to do it, and I
couldn’t discuss it with her again?
The next day, I made sure to say, ‘Good morning’ to Villeneuve, and
call her by her name, which she still liked. I had practiced my broad smile
all night so she couldn’t interpret it as fake. I was a beautiful boy; a girl had
cut her finger accidentally once when looking at me, so it wasn’t that hard
to seduce the beast.
I was amazed by her girly attitude, sitting upright in the chair. She had
combed her stiffened hair that looked once like a broom’s. Well, she
combed it in her own fashion, and she wore a pink dress. She had even
brought a fork and a knife to chop off something in her plate. We both knew
she wasn’t eating pancakes. It was a rat. I imagined that she thought it
would be less disgusting for me. She had cooked it in a good manner,
though, made to look like meat.
Then something stranger happened…
“Good morning to you too,” she said in an awful, beastly voice, but I
knew her intentions were good so I imagined birds humming to me in my
ears.
“You can talk?” I wondered.
 “I was afraid that when you heard my voice, you’d not like me,” She
said.
“Oh,” I almost choked on my food. I didn’t know why I imagined her
insisting on letting me taste part of her rat at that moment, but that never
happened.
“I know that I have a terrible voice, but it’s my voice.”
It wasn’t terrible. It was horrible, as if made of the sum of all children’s
nightmares; as if it was an ensemble of creaking doors, donkey voices, and
croaking frogs. I couldn’t tell her that. Nor could I tell that her voice was so
sweet I wondered why she never sang to me. She would know I was lying.
Sometimes silence was the best way out of situations like these.
“You really should’ve let me hear your voice a long time ago,” I said.
“We’re closer now. We should know everything about each other.”
She blushed… in her own beastly way.
We spent the following days between dancing, talking, and getting to
know each other. One thing she refused to talk about was who she was or
where she came from, and she definitely hated anything that had to do with
mirrors, even if it was a fairy tale.
Occasionally, she let me watch my mother through the mirror, but
while leaving the door open so I couldn’t talk to the to it privately. What
mattered was that my mother was doing great, healed, becoming healthier
and better every day. Little did my mother know that she’d become
immortal, and it tore my heart whenever I watched her pray the lord to
bring me back. She still believed that I was alive. I was looking forward for
the day I got back to her and told about my beastly, yet magical, journey.
The beast began to let me sleep unchained. She even offered to sleep
next to me, but I persuaded her that wouldn’t have been appropriate before
marriage. It made her even happier.
Then one day, she showed me to a secret library in the castle. It was
huge, but strange indeed. Wherever I stood, I saw shelves stacked with an
infinite amount of books, but if I changed my place and stood elsewhere, I
saw different shelves with different books. It was as if the library was a
huge maze. To get what you want, you needed to know where to stand. A
puzzle of placements and orientation. The situation reminded me of what
the girl in my dreams had said. The castle was an evil place unbound with
time or place. It was East of the Sun and West of the Moon, wasn’t it?
 “I thought I’d show you the library since I’ve seen you like books,” she
said. “I am sure you will read all the fairy tales you like here. Consider it
my wedding present for you.”
“But this is crazy, how can I find what I’m looking for? I could waste
my life in here without knowing it, discovering those invisible shelves.”
“I know,” Villeneuve nodded. “I love books. I spent my life reading in
here.”
Even the Beast was a bookworm like me. At this point, I was still
resisting the idea that I grew to like her a lot. The dances, her shyness, and
being an avid reader; it made her bestiality irrelevant at times. I didn’t know
how to explain that feeling, connecting with someone on a basis beyond our
looks, or where we come from. But then again, I was raised on books, and
they shaped my adolescence before I was thrown into the sea. Books that
allowed me to live in faraway places, pretending to be a hero in a fairy land,
all this while I was still in my place, staring into the pages.
But no, she’s still a beast, and I am too beautiful to end up with her.
Too damn beautiful.
Suddenly, I remembered what the girl in my dreams had said, ‘Things
must be loved before they are lovely.’. I still didn’t know what this meant,
although I began to have an idea, and I didn’t like it.
“I like books, too,” I said. “I might spend some time in the library, if
you don’t mind.”
“I’m glad you like it, but I have to warn you,” She said.
“Of what?”
“There is this girl,” Villeneuve sounded hesitant. “She looks beautiful,
but she is not to be trusted.”
“What girl?”
“She lives here in the castle. She might be a ghost, but I’m not sure.
She loves this library. If you see her, you better leave immediately.” She
said, and I couldn’t help but think about the girl in my dreams.
“She is a bad girl,” Villeneuve insisted. “Don’t be fooled by her beauty,
and never do what she says.”
When I wanted Villeneuve to elaborate, she refused and looked angered
again. I didn’t push it. I couldn’t risk her not trusting me. I thought I was so
close to ask her to let me go. Although she had warned me of that girl, I
believed the girl in my dream had helped me a lot. I did change, didn’t I? I
did see through Villeneuve’s skin of bestiality and let her show me the
beauty in the beast whose skin she lived in. My imprisonment in the castle
wasn’t horrifying anymore. I wasn’t scared of the beast. We made peace. If
I still wanted to leave, then it was only for one reason; I felt out of place. I
wanted to see the world outside, see my mother and tell her that I was still
alive, and sail back in the sea. I wanted to have chances, to try and to fail,
and chose what I want to be or do on my own will in the end.
As much as I understood the Beast, I was still determined to leave, and
that was when I asked her to let me go…
The rage that possessed her was darker and fiercer than anything I had
seen before. She lost the shining in her eye to a miserable dark, like a
spoiled child with evil powers, about to torment me to death. Every plant
around us died as the library shook like in earthquakes, books flying in the
air everywhere.
I ran away, lost in the maze of the library, then hid in the darkest corner
I found as she called angrily for me. It didn’t look like she was going to hurt
me and chain me to the bed. Her anger was blinding so I thought she was
going to kill me.
A couple of books fell next to me, and I couldn’t help but notice they
were all books about beauties and beasts from every corner in history, fairy
tales, and fables. I couldn’t read all the titles, as the light was feeble in my
hideout, but I read the title of The Phantom of the Opera, where a girl loved
a ghost; Cupid and Psyche; the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the East of
the Sun West of the Moon where the beast was a prince disguised as a bear. I
remembered this story now. I had read it when I was a kid but just forgot
about it. That’s why the castle’s evil address was East of the Sun West of
the Moon. All these stories were about the love between a beauty and a
beast. Were all other books the same? Did she spend her time reading just
about forbidden romances between beauties and beasts? Was that why she
had the idea of trapping me inside, and never thought of trapping any of the
locals who had threatened to burn her? She trapped me because I was
beautiful, and expected me to fall in love with her?
I lost my temper and started pulling books from the shelves, and
reading their titles as my thoughts wandered; most of the beasts where men
in these stories I had mentioned. My situation was quite different. I
wondered if this meant anything.
 Then I came about a book called the Beauty and the Beast. Upon
opening it, I found out that its pages were empty, and they dissolved and
poured like sand through my hands. I opened every book with the same
title, ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ and the same thing happened. The books
where empty.
What did that mean?
But I had no time to understand. Villeneuve, the beast, was about to
find me in the maze of the library. I ran and ran in the dark and endless
corridors of the library until I glimpsed a golden, thin ray of light, peeking
from under a small door. I open it, entered, and locked it behind me.
Looking around, I discovered I was back in the room with the mirror
again, having only entered from a different door. I ran to the mirror and
asked it, hoping it would reply and advise me what to do. The beast was
pounding on the door outside.
“Mirror!” I said. “What should I do? She is going to kill me.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Villeneuve screamed behind the door, crying and
sounding regretful. I didn’t know if she was trying to trick me, but she had
never tricked me before. She’d been mad and angry but had never been
manipulative. “Don’t listen to the mirror, or the girl. Please!” Villeneuve
pleaded.
“I can help you,” the girl in the mirror said. “You can kill her easily. All
you have to is to make her see her reflection in the mirror. Why do you
think there are no mirrors in the castle?”
I didn’t have time to read between the lines or ask why a mirror would
kill her. Villeneuve was already breaking through the walls, and I had no
choice but to try my luck with the mirror. I pulled the tall mirror and turned
it to face Villeneuve so it was the first thing she bumped into once she
entered.
It worked.
Villeneuve screamed when she saw her reflection in the mirror.
“Why?” She said. “The girl and the mirror fooled you. I didn’t want
this to happen.”
Villeneuve didn’t die, or get hurt, looking in the mirror. She just got
down on her knees and kept crying. I had to turn and see what her reflection
in the mirror looked like. What I saw was beyond belief.
 Villeneuve had turned into the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She
turned into the lovely, fabulous looking girl in the pink dress I saw in my
dreams.
Puzzled, I turned around, looking at the real Villeneuve. She had
transformed from a beast to the girl in my dreams.
“Are you happy now?” Villeneuve said to me.
“What do you mean?” I asked. What was going on? “Why didn’t you
tell me you were the girl in my dreams? Why did you warn me of her if she
was you?”
“It wasn’t me. She only looked like me, planted in your dream by this
evil mirror.”
“What?” When I looked back at the mirror, it had turned black again.
“It’s a curse by this castle I live in,” Villeneuve explained. “It’s an
enchanted evil castle, controlled by the Queen of Sorrow. She sent me here
after she wasn’t able to take what she wanted from me in her castle. She
sent me here to punish me in this cursed castle,” It seemed like there was no
time for me to learn what had happened in the Queen’s bathtub chamber.
“The castle has a soul of its own, and many of the famous stories you read
in books happened here,” Villeneuve was crying hysterically. “Every beauty
and the beast story happened in this castle.”
“You mean all the books in the library are only describing things that
happened here? Cupid and Psyche, the Phantom of the Opera, and the
Hunchback of Notre Dame? This is absurd.”
“The castle takes all shapes and forms. It lives in different countries in
different times. Sometimes, it lives in people’s dreams. It has to be fed to
stay alive. It’s cursed. Can’t you understand? The castle is the true beast!”
“And what does this have to do with you? With me?”
“In order for the Castle to survive, it needs to capture a soul. A beauty
and turn it into a beast. It’s what it feeds on. It seduces a traveler and turns it
into a beast, and it’s fueled with its victim’s pain. It’s done this before for
thousands of years with those you read about in the books. The Queen knew
this and punished me in here, knowing that the castle will never give up on
me unless…” Villeneuve gazed at me with more tears in her eyes.
“Unless what?”
“Unlessl I am loved by someone,” She said, sobbing. “That’s what I
was hoping you would do. Love me for who I am, and then we both would
be free. ‘Things must be loved before they are lovely.’ It’s the phrase that
breaks the curse.”
“But I—“ I was tongue tied.
“But you didn’t love me, I know,” Villeneuve said. “Even when I tried
my best to let you love me. It could have happened, if you only didn’t ask to
leave me. I couldn’t control my anger in the beast form.”
“So why did the castle trick me into taming you and then asking you to
let me go?” I asked, still holding the mirror in my hands.
“Because the mirror is part of the castle. It’s evil, possessed by a girl
called Mary,” Villeneuve explained. “She tricked you because she knew if
you gave me hope and then asked me, my anger will be fierce and then the
beast inside me would hurt you more and you’d never ever love me. This
way, I’d never ever leave the castle.”
“And why did you regain your real looks now?”
“I don’t think the castle planned this, but it’s because you made me
look in the mirror. Part of the curse was that the person who insisted I
looked in the mirror…” Villeneuve shrugged. She was talking about me
now.
“What? What happens to the person who insisted in making you look
in the mirror?”
“He’d take my place,” Villeneuve said with moisten eyes. “Especially
when they’re beautiful.”
“What?”
“Look in the mirror, go see for yourself,” She said.
I looked, and then I let the mirror fall and splinter into pieces. It was
better that way, than to look at my horrible, beastly new look. I was cursed
instead of Villeneuve.
“If you only were able to love me,” Villeneuve said, standing up.
“None of this would have happened.”
“Where are you going?” I said with tears in my eyes.
“I have to leave as long as the castle’s doors are open for me. They will
only let me out. The castle has a new beast. You! I am so sorry,” Villeneuve
ran to open the door but I yelled at her.
“Will you come visit me, then? I know I am cursed and don’t know
what to do about it, but will you at least come visit the beast? We danced
together, remember? I was so close to loving you.” I screamed.
 “But you didn’t,” Villeneuve said. “I was going to wait for you forever
until you did, but you didn’t. Besides, I can’t visit you any more.”
“Why?”
“I know that I won’t remember any of this once I go back home to my
family. I will forget all of this after the first night I sleep and have ordinary
dreams.”
Villeneuve left me, and I became the new beast for the castle.
It would be silly of me if I told you of my time in the castle after that,
learning its timeless secrets, and spending my loneliness among more and
more books. All I can tell you is that I have left a lot untold in this story,
including names and dates for reasons you should not hear from me.
Within time, I had accepted my fate with all the weirdness of the tale
and what happened to me, but one thing always bothered me when I entered
the library. It was that the books titled The Beauty and the Beast were still
only sand. They were the only empty books in the library. I had always
thought that they were empty because my story with Villeneuve hadn’t
reached a conclusion by then. But if that was the case, why weren’t they
written yet?
Like many other things in our life, I forgot about the matter as time
tick-tocked away.
What mattered the most was that after a while I understood how the
lovely girl called Villeneuve not only looked like a beast, but acted like a
beast when she was cursed, because the same thing happened to me.
In the beginning, I was only wearing the carcass of a beast as a my
skin, and I thought if I waited long enough, fate should bring a girl my way,
and I would invite her in the castle and make her love me like Villeneuve
tried with me. This time, I was going to be patient, caring, treat her well,
and show her that, ‘Things must be loved before they are lovely’. I’d would
resist my beastly nature. Then we would both be free, and I’d be the first to
survive the castle’s curse.
But the beast wasn’t just a carcass. It took over my soul, heartbeat by
heartbeat, until I didn’t recognize my old heart anymore.
The beast in me led me to find a book of dark arts and enchantments in
the library. There were ways to control another’s heart and fate in the book.
I used it with a crystal ball to bring a girl to me in my castle. I created a bad
luck charm for her father, who was a merchant, so that he went poor and
lost all his money. Then I cursed him with a spell that sent him to the sea
like me, and let him survive the shipwreck and arrive on an island that sent
him to a road where he could read a sign called, ‘East of the Sun West of
the Moon’. At this point, my castle appeared in front of him. He entered it,
ate, and found a red flower outside, but didn’t know of its real purpose. He
had only picked it up because his daughter had dreamed of it.
I showed myself to him and threatened to kill him, pretending that the
flower meant a lot to me and that he had to give me something really
precious in return. I pushed him to offer me one of his three daughters who
lived in a small house and experienced the real happily ever afters, living in
the Kingdom of Sorrow.
The man agreed, and went back to send me his daughter…
As I write this diary right now, the doorbell of the castle just rang. I am
glad I completed my tale before my visitor came, or you might have never
known about it. My visitor is a special guest, and my visitor means both life
and death to me.
I am going to stand up now and leave this diary be. I will go open the
castle’s gate for my visitor, the daughter of the man I cursed under the
influence of the beast inside me. I will try my best to make her love me. I
will try to be patient, chivalrous, and understanding if she doesn’t love me
right away. I will be understanding if she thinks she is only here to save her
father from getting killed, choosing to sacrifice herself while her two sisters
gave up on him. And after that, I will let her go home, so it will be her
choice to return with her love for me or escape my cursed bestiality forever.
If she does return, then I’ll break free from the curse, and we will live
happily ever after. If she doesn’t, I will understand that she owes me
nothing. I did hurt her before while all she wanted from me was to love her.
I take one last look at the Persian canvas on the wall and read the
words aloud, ‘Things must be loved before they are lovely.’
I will go now and open the door for Villeneuve who doesn’t remember
that she was once the Beast.
As I leave you, it occurs to me that I know now why the pages of the
book titled the Beauty and the Beast were empty. It’s because they weren’t
written yet. It’s my job to fill its pages while Villeneuve is with me in the
castle. It’s my duty to make the story right.
 I hope that one day when the pages in the book are written, and you
read it, you’ll find that I succeeded in making her love me. Only then, it
won’t matter who is beauty and who is beast, because we all had our share
of both sides one way or another.

End of Grimm Diary Prequel #7

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 Author’s Notes:
1) As much as I like this prequel, I know it’s the vaguest of them all.
You don’t get to even know who the narrator is. But you get to know the
Castle. I am a big fan of how powerful places are, and how they might
choose us while we think that it was us who chose it. But what’s most
important in this prequel is the theme of beauties and beasts, which is a
major theme in Snow White Sorrow. What makes us monsters, what makes
us human, and what does it mean?

2) It always puzzled me who the Beast really was in the original

Brothers Grimm version. I never bought this part that he was just an
enchanted prince. It didn’t make his motives strong enough for me. But
when we know that she, the beauty, was once the beast, and that she doesn’t
remember, I guess the real story gets much more interesting.

3) The original texts that inspired this are The Beauty and the Beast,
East of the Sun West of the Moon, the Phantom of the Opera, and Cupid
and Psyche, although the last two aren’t by the brothers Grimm or fairy
tales.

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The Grimm Diaries Prequels # 8

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 Moon & Madly

by Cameron Jace

Edited by Danielle Littig & Gema Guevara

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 Moon & Madly
as told by the Moongirl

Dear Diary,

I was the moon. I was your light in your darkest night. I showed you
the way, and I kept you company if you were riding on your own. I was the
moon. My presence, when full, shot a Cupid’s arrow to your heart, enticing
you into falling in love. I was bright in the middle of the night. I was round
and tender against your sharp fear of the dark. I was far away, but always
watching over you as you slept. You observed me, wrote about me, painted
me, and chanted incantations to summon me. You knew me well, and you
wished you owned a magical bicycle which you could steer high in the sky,
reaching for me. I was here since long ago, for millions and millions of
years. The one thing you don’t know about me is that I am a girl.
In the Kingdom of Sorrow, children were told stories about me. I heard
mothers tell their children that the moon was a balloon floating on the night
sky above them. If the children tiptoed and squinted, they could see its eyes,
nose, and a crescent smile. Other children were told that a beautiful girl was
controlling the moon with a rope, like a kite in the sky, and that she only
pointed it near the good-hearted children to keep them safe from the dark,
especially the children who went to bed early and obeyed their parents.
Parents told their children stories they thought were only lies. Although
lying wasn’t a virtue—something all parents taught their kids—no one had
a problem with this sort of lie.
They were considered beautiful lies, and beautiful was always forgiven,
even when it came with a little ugliness on the side.
But the children knew better. They knew that some of these stories
were real. They knew that I was real, and that there was no girl controlling
the moon, because the moon was always the beautiful girl in the sky whom
the creatures of the night feared. The Boogeymen feared me, remaining
hidden in their closets, unable to get out when I shone my light through the
children’s windows. Even when evil goblins, who only dwelled in the dark,
managed to sneak past my light blocked by tree canopies in hopes of
hurting children, I was left with no choice but to descend down to earth and
kick their scary butts away.
Children loved me, waved at me and blew me kisses from behind
foggy windows, wishing I’d always be there until they grew up and could
defend themselves against the night. They saw me in my human form; a
blonde girl hiding under a black cloak that only showed my eyes, trying my
best to keep my bright light hidden under the cloak, although my bare feet
always created haloes of light on the ground.
The children and I had a secret, and it remained this way because
parents were awful, unable to understand these things.
As for me, I was created long ago by the creators of all creators, the
makers of all makers, and the gods of all gods, whose name I am forbidden
to reveal for reasons beyond your understanding. I had been here since
some time after the earth sprang into existence, and before the first human
heart ever ticked in the clockwork of life.
I wasn’t old, though. I was forever young. I was about sixteen in
human years. I was immortal. Not just in the sense that I was to live until
the end of the world, but I knew, deep down, that I was going to live beyond
that.

In the beginning, when the world was still ripe and man had no magical
powers against monsters, I was there to protect the good-hearted when they
walked the dark of night. I lit their way so they arrived safely to their
destinations. I smiled down on the righteous when they slept and dreamt of
better days.
Later, I was ordered that I should also protect the bad men, and those
who lived in shades of grey, leaning toward the dark side. I was taught that
no one was perpetually evil, and it was my responsibility to point them in
the right direction, as long as they weren’t hurting good people.
I was the moon, and I was proud of myself, keeping the monsters away.
I was people’s savior from the dark, against the creatures of the night:
Trolls, witches, warlocks, bogs, spirits, vampires, faeries, gargoyles, giants,
golems, and wolves who gained dark powers from my full moon.
I only awoke at night. By day, I sunk into the Ocean of Dreams and
slept at its bottom, deep enough to bury my light. The Ocean of Dreams, a
place unbeknownst to man, allowed me to breathe underwater when the sun
was up. I wasn’t able to breathe underwater anywhere else.
Even though I was immortal, only one thing could kill me: if I descend
down to earth and didn’t return to the sky before sunrise, and that was what
almost happened to me one night…
I want to tell you about the night the moon died. It all started with the
goblins that arrived to the Kingdom of Sorrow, wearing darkness as a cloak
over their ugly bodies.
There was a time when apples were still gold and lit the dark forest for
the good men the way I did. The apples were created by Pomona, the
goddess of fruits and vegetables, and she had her own reasons for turning
apples gold, but she made them glow to help me.
You see, the Black Forest, where Pomona lived, was the hardest place
for me to light up at night. The darkness that stemmed from the Black
Forest was too strong, and the trees were cursed. An ancient dark force had
given them power to growing exceptionally high, and to curve on their own
to prevent my light from splaying through – I heard the trees were only
giants in disguise keeping their eyes out for a boy who stole from them
repeatedly, but it might have been only a myth.
Like many other places in the Kingdom of Sorrow, I needed to work
harder to spread my light into the forest to protect people from things that
go bump in the dark.
One day, when most of my endeavors proved unsuccessful, I changed
into my human form and descended down to the kingdom, donning my
black cloak. I pulled my cloak tighter so my bright light didn’t shine from
underneath. As for my eyes, I couldn’t do anything about that. They shone
like two full moons in the darkest night. Pun intended.
I tucked back my golden hair underneath the cloak but it kept dangling
out over my face. I told myself that I wasn’t going to stay on earth for long.
Down in the Black Forest, I saw a squirrel digging for something near a
tree. It seemed that it had buried something and forgotten where, but then I
noticed it was too dark for it to see. I pulled up my cloak to my neck, and
the light from my feet glowed around the squirrel. It finally found what it
was digging for: its partner who’d been playing games and hiding in the
dark. I loosened my clutch on the cloak and let it fall to my feet, smiling at
the embracing squirrels.
 Then I saw an old man who had taken his shoe off near a lake, wanting
to fill it up with water and drink from it. Discreetly, I shone some of my
light for him so he wouldn’t fall into the lake. He ended up raising his head
and thanking the stars in the sky, instead of me. The starlight had always
been soft and not as strong as mine, but I wasn’t here to be thanked. I was
doing my job.
My little journey was a failure. I couldn’t find a way to separate the
trees or cast a spell upon them, and the red eyes staring at me from the dark
worried me. Walking on earth was risky. What if I was caught by creatures
of the night? I would die, and then who would light up dark nights?
I looked up at the void I left in the darkened skies above, and reminded
myself that I couldn’t be in two places at once.
Don’t stay for too long. You should be going back up there soon. Too
many people in the Kingdom need you.
Suddenly, I heard rattling sounds and yelling nearby. Ready to protect
another passer-by, I scanned the dark with my eyes and parted my cloak a
little to see ahead. There was a boy running away from someone chasing
after him in the dark. He didn’t look so much afraid as amused. I saw him
eating a fruit while he ran, occasionally looking over his shoulder and
smiling at his chasers. He also seemed concerned with the green hat he
wore on his head; as if it really mattered that it stayed on without being
damaged in any way. Running, he took another bite from the fruit yelling,
“De.li.cious!”
I lit up the way for him, distracting him, and he ended up heading my
way.
“What are you doing?” He screamed at me. “What’s all that light? Run,
girl, run!”
I raised my eyebrows. I thought he needed the light to escape from his
unseen chasers – I could hear their voices, though. They were goblins.
“Poor girl,” the boy held out his hand for me to grab. “Come with me.
I’ll protect you.”
“Protect me?” I laughed from under my cloak. I was the one supposed
to protect him.
“Come on,” he pulled my hand. “These are the goblins, meaning
they’re not good for you. No one fights them. You just run,” He took
another bite from the wonderful, juicy fruit in his hand. He also made
disgusting sounds when he chewed, as though he had no manners.
“Lovely,” he closed his eyes momentarily, indulging in the taste of the fruit.
It looked so tempting, I wanted to snatch it away from him and eat it
myself, but I was the moon, I wasn’t supposed to do things like that.
“Why are they following you?” I found the boy interesting in a quirky
way so I ran along with him.
“This!” he held the fruit in his hand, now just a core. “The Goblin
Fruit. It’s their most precious fruit. I stole it. Hell, yeah,” he panted, tapping
his hat again before it flew off of his head, and throwing the fruit core at the
goblins chasing us.
“And you dare risk your life for a fruit?” I rebuked him, sounding
ridiculously like someone’s mother.
“My life? What life?” he said, his eyes scanning for a place to hide.
Before I could ask him any more questions, I stumbled over a fallen
tree and fell face forward. I shouldn’t have socialized with him while
working, but I felt lonely and I was always excited to get to know new
people. As soon as my face hit the ground, I tightened my grip on the cloak,
and tucked my hair in. I thought the boy would keep running, and leave me
here for the goblins. Ironically, the protector suddenly became the prey.
But he didn’t. He came back for me.
“If I had a golden egg for every time I do this, I’d be a rich chicken,”
he sighed, standing over me with his hands at his waist.
“Do what?” I furrowed my brows, even though I was happy he didn’t
abandon me.
“Save a girl’s ass,” he sighed, pulling me up.
I found myself pushing him away, afraid he’d see my face or the
ridiculous amount of light I hid underneath. I didn’t want to scare him
away, and I was prohibited by my makers to reveal myself to anyone but the
children. It was a sin to show myself, let alone admire a mortal boy.
“Although I can’t confirm you have an ass with this carcass of a cloak
you’re hiding in,” he mumbled, entranced by my eyes. “Wow. Why are you
eyes so strange?” he blinked.
The goblins were closing in on us, and he was forced to tear his gaze
away from me, which I had really liked.
“Get in here,” he pulled me to a nearby tree, knocked on it once, and a
door shimmered into existence. He simply pushed me inside. How did he
manage to do that? I didn’t know, but it seemed so ridiculously effortless.
“You stay here until I get rid of them,” he told me, then went on to move his
hand in front of me as, if I were a mere reflection, “Is my hat looking
good?” he asked playfully, and then closed the tree door on me.
Thankfully, there were holes in the door. I made sure I watched what
the boy was going to do with the goblins. It amazed me that he decided to
confront them in the middle of the forest.
“Stop!” the boy said to the approaching goblins, heaving a sack on his
back. His command was so sudden that the goblins actually stopped, glaring
at him with suspicious red eyes. The last goblin in the line bumped into
another, splashing mud at a third. The boy held back his laugh so they
wouldn’t get madder. The goblins were short; they looked like they were
stuffed with clay, and looking at them was torture. They circled the boy,
keeping their distance, wondering why he stopped and what he was up to.
The boy stood in the middle, legs parted, one hand still holding the
sack, and the other hanging limply at his side. He returned their suspicious
look, not trusting them as well. It was as if each of them thought of the
other as a tiger who needed to be tamed. The only difference was that the
goblins had the boy outnumbered
“Give back the goblin fruit, Jack Madly,” the goblin leader growled at
the boy.
“I warned you to never call me Madly,” Jack said. “I’m Jack of the
Beanstalk. I’m awesome, and some will write a book about me.”
“We like to call you Madly,” another goblin teased. “Isn’t that what
they called your grandmother, because she was mad? If you hadn’t been an
orphan and had a mother and a father, maybe we’d have called you by their
names.”
“I bet they were low-life like you, Jack Madly,” a third goblin laughed.
Actually, I wasn’t sure it was a laugh since it sounded sinister.
“As if any of you gobs knows your own mother?” Jack fired back, but
calmly. “You guys are so ugly I don’t know how you even mate. Are there
even baby goblins? How short are they?”
The Goblins growled in unison, ready to pounce. The goblin leader
signaled them to stop, and prompted Jack to go on.
“Easy…” Jack said amusingly, noticing their impatience. “I’m just
going to drop my Sack of Wonders on the ground,” he said, letting it slide
slowly off his shoulder. “Now, there is no need to panic, as soon as the sack
thuds against the ground it will go boom. It’s just physics. It’s called the
consequences of gravity. Things make that sound when they fall, alright?”
Jack not only viewed them as monsters, but also as angry fools who would
burst out their evil for no such reason.
Still, the goblins growled at him, eyes on the sack. Their most
dangerous attribute wasn’t their vicious killings. It was their stupidity. I
couldn’t help but think of them as nasty dwarfs with fangs. They were such
peculiar creatures.
“He is tricking us into something,” one of the goblins said, but his
leader shushed him again. There was no hurry. They were many and Jack
wasn’t going anywhere. They were capable of catching him and eating him
alive at any moment. I wondered how Jack was going to get out of this
ambush. The goblins weren’t forgiving when their fruit was stolen. I’ve
heard rumors about the Goblin Market, but never explored it. It was said
that goblins used the fruit to lure young innocent girls into their trap and eat
them. They liked feasting on young maidens.
“I’m going to count to three,” Jack said, the sack still a few inches off
the ground. “One,” he said, and the goblins growled. “Two,” a crow cawed
somewhere in the distance, and Jack mumbled something about annoying
crows. “Three,” He let the sack fall on the ground. That sack seemed heavy,
and I wondered what about its contents.
I almost exposed myself laughing when a couple of goblins winced at
the thud. Jack clapped his hands together, as if he had accomplished an
incredibly hard task. He adjusted his hat with both his hands, heaving a sigh
of relief. That hat meant a lot to him.
“Does the hat still look good on me?” he asked them casually, but this
time they took a voluntary step forward.
“Wow,” Jack held up his hands defensively in the air, “Back off, gobs, I
need little personal space here. If we’re going to talk, let’s be civilized
about it,” he pretended to be upset; a plant was sticking out of the corner of
his mouth. “You know what civilized means, right?” he craned his neck a
little forward.
“Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t let my people eat you alive,
right now?” the goblin leader said through gritted teeth.
 “Just don’t say, ‘people,’ alright?” Jack shook his head. “You’re
goblins: Awful-looking, short, ill-tempered, and unnecessary creations. Like
flies, there’s no use for you whatsoever, except for buzzing people to
madness. Don’t you compare yourselves to people.”
“I will eat you alive!”one goblin snarled, and another calmed him
down, “Easy, Uggogog. We will skin him alive and cook him with beetle
sauce and two ripe canaries, and then savor him piece by piece.”
“Listen to your friend, Ugghh—whatever your name is. Sounds
appetizing,” Jack said and then turned to their leader. “I know you’re upset;
I stole your fruit, but it’s so damn delicious. God only knows why goblins
like you know how to grow such an amazing fruit.”
“That’s no excuse, Jack,” The leader seemed more relaxed – I
wondered what his name was. “You’ve stolen from us many times before,
and don’t forget that we’ve come to an agreement that if you don’t steal
from us, we won’t eat you.”
“That’s what I call justice, sir,” Jack laced his hands behind his back.
“’We don’t eat you if you don’t steal from us’ I couldn’t have said it any
better.”
“But it’s in your blood, Jack,” The leader burped. It seemed as though
he’d had a raven, two cockroaches, and a mouse tail stew for dinner. “You
can’t keep promises because you’re a thief. A damned, low-life thief.”
“Since when are thieves worse than goblins?” Jack joked, prompting
the goblins to take another step closer. Three more strides and they would
be stepping over his dead body. “Ok, Sorry. Didn’t mean to disrespect the
Order of the Goblins,” Jack held up a hand in the air again. “But seriously,
you know what you do with your fruit. You lull pretty, young girls into the
goblin market with the scent of your unbelievably tasty fruit, and then eat
them alive. I know that you’re sexually-frustrated goblins who are short,
ugly, unloved, and therefore you feel like you need to eat all the girls who
reject you, but that’s no excuse. When I steal your fruits, I’m actually
saving a maiden’s life.”
“I advise you not to say one more word, or we will really eat you now.
Unless you tell us why you stopped and dared to look in our eyes, instead of
running away like you usually do.” The leader grumbled.
“I’ve run away from you before?” Jack scratched his hat.
 The goblins growled and took another step closer. Two more steps and
you’re dead, Jack!
“Alright,” Jack gave up, “I stopped because I can compensate you for
the fruit I stole. I can give you something you’d really like and in exchange,
you’d let me walk away from here, unharmed. What do you think of that?”
“What could you possibly have that we want?”
“A silly question to ask a thief, really,” Jack scratched his temple
lightly. “It’s all in my Sack of Wonders,” Jack closed his eyes and spread
out his arms like a magician. “I’ll give you something that I’ve stolen from
the Devil.” Jack open his eye then winked, and started chewing a plant
stem.
The goblins took a step back, all staring at the Sack of Wonders that
held something that belonged to the Devil. I had heard about him, but never
cared to find out more, except that he was the root of all evil.
“You stole from the Devil?” The goblin leader asked suspiciously.
“But of course,” Jack said proudly. “I can steal from anyone. I’m
awesome. Someone should write a book about—well, I told you that
already.”
“Don’t trust him,” a goblin advised his brothers.
“I heard a story about Jack selling someone the Devil’s hair once. He is
a deceiver.”
“Why do you say such things about me?” Jack mocked them. “What
you heard was true. I stole one lock of the Devil’s hair once. It’s true. Hi
mom helped me by the way, but that’s another story.”
“You’re a liar. The hair you gave the man was golden. The Devil isn’t
blonde!” the goblins said with a smirk on his face.
“A Devil with blonde hair,” Uggogog and the other golblins laughed at
Jack.
“At least his name isn’t Uggogggh—whatever,” Jack commented. And
what are you laughing at, you beetle-eaters? Have any of you ever see the
Devil to know if he were blonde?”
Most of the goblin shrugged and looked down, embarrassed.
“That doesn’t matter,” another broke the awkward silence. “No one
steals from the Devil. It’s impossible. No one knows where he even lives.””
“That’s because he lives everywhere, you morons—I mean goblins –
eh – I mean—“
 “Yeah, yeah, we get it,” the goblin leader said. He looked at his tribe,
then looked back at Jack, and walked closer to him. He leaned in and
started whispering in Jack’s ear. “What is it that you stole from the Devil?”
His attempts at whispering failed since everyone, including me, heard him.
Jack squeezed his nose between his fingers – the goblins must’ve
smelled awful – and whispered something in the goblin’s big, shapeless,
and waxy ear, something we couldn’t hear.
“What?” the goblin’s eyes widened. “You’re not fooling me, are you?”
“Would I ever do that?” the most innocent smile appeared on Jack’s
face.
“How many of those do you have?” the goblin asked eagerly.
“The sack is full, grab as much as you can,” Jack suggested. “Just leave
me be. Want me to show you one?”
The Goblin nodded excitedly; something green and sticky drooled
down the side of his mouth. I guess it was drool of excitement.
Jack bent to open his Sack of Wonders, and the goblins growled at him.
“What did I teach you?” Jack reprimanded them like a teacher annoyed
with his students. “Didn’t I tell you about the physics thing? If I am to give
your leader what he desires, I’ll have to unknot the sack. I don’t have a
magic spell to uknot it, so I have to use my hands. Just stay calm. There is
no Rabbit in here. Although if there were, I’m sure you’d be happy to eat
it.”
Jack opened the sack and pulled out a thin, gold necklace. When
dangled, the necklace produced a unusual light. I was jealous of its beauty.
My light was white, and I wondered why it wasn’t gold like it is often
portrayed in books. But why was this necklace so important? Was it
because it belonged to the Devil?
“Beautiful,” murmured the goblin’s leader, mesmerized by the rare
pulchritude it possessed.
“That’s the most horrendous ‘beautiful’ someone’s ever said,” Jack
couldn’t stop himself from commenting. It was true. The way the goblins’
leader said it sounded as if he was disgusted by the necklace, although I was
sure he liked it. The goblins couldn’t feel human emotions. I was fond of
the way Jack dealt with them. They were scaring me, and I didn’t know if I
could protect someone from them, especially when they lived in packs.
 Jack began unpacking as many necklaces as he could. The way the
goblins gathered happily around Jack, made him look like Santa Claus.
Then something strange happened. Jack winked at me behind their
backs.
“I’ll meet you beyond those trees,” he mouthed and signaled me where
to go, “The door isn’t locked. Push it open.”
I didn’t know who I should be mad at, him or myself. I could have
easily checked that the door wasn’t locked. I sneaked out silently and tip-
toed to the rendezvous.
“Who are you talking to?” The goblin leader turned around.
“Talking? I’m not talking.”
“So what does this necklace do?” the leader asked Jack.
“I don’t know, but it’s the Devil’s. You’d find out yourself. Are you
going to let me go now? It’s about time,”
“I don’t know, Jack. It’s hard to trust you. I think we’ll hold you
captive in the Goblin Market for a while,” The goblin touched his shiny
necklace. “I’ll let you go in seven days, until you promise me to never steal
from us again.”
“As if I do care to please you,” Jack blurted out impatiently. “You little
awful, disgusting thing,” Jack smacked the goblin leader across the face and
ran toward me.
He grabbed my hand and I tightened the cloak around my body, in
hopes of keeping my face hidden from him. Only my blond hair showed
through. I found myself helplessly running alongside him again.
“Just do as I say!” Jack said as the goblins dashed after us.
I listened to him and hoped he had an escape plan.
In the middle of being chased, Jack picked up a black cat that got in our
way off the ground and tucked it in his sack.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Is this cat important?” I panted.
“Didn’t you see it? It’s hurt in the leg, and won’t be able to run when
the goblins come. Gobs like cats, especially black cats with garlic on top.
They’d eat it alive.”
I didn’t ask him any more about it. I was mesmerized by his love for
animals.
After running for quite a while, I noticed that the goblins weren’t after
us anymore. Did I underestimate them? I didn’t think I did. I was aware of
their superhuman strength and speed, and they should’ve been able to catch
up with us. What happened?
“Why aren’t they chasing us?” I asked from behind my cloak.
“It’s the necklace,” Jack sprinted down a hill, “The fools think it
belongs to the Devil’s. They believe his charm will make them more
powerful.”
“If the necklace isn’t the Devil’s, whose is it then?” I asked, enjoying
the feeling of his hands in mine. I thought this was a strange conversation.
“It’s the Necklace of Harmonia, a bad luck charm that makes you trip
or fall wherever you go. It will attract pigeons and they will dispose of their
waste on you; make you to stumble over things; become bogged down in
swamps, among other things. It’s a real bad luck charm. You can’t chase
anyone while wearing it,” Jack laughed heartily. He had won against the
goblins. I couldn’t help but notice excitement mingled in his words, it
almost sounded as if he enjoyed risking his life. It was a mission, a noble
one, to ridicule evil creatures, and it was ironic coming from a thief.
“And why did you happen to have so many necklaces in your sack?” I
wondered aloud.
“It’s not a sack. It’s a Sack of Wonders. I have tons of different
enchanted necklaces for every occasion,” he scanned the forest for a place
to hide. “You didn’t think I’d steal a fruit from them because I wanted to? It
was my trick to get them out of the goblin market. They are less powerful
when they’re outside,” Jack said and stopped in his tracks. “This brings us
back to you. What’s a girl like you doing out here all alone?” He stared at
my hair and then shifted his gaze to my eyes. I expected him asking me to
unveil my cloak and show him my face. “And are you going to keep hiding
your face behind that cloak from me forever?”
“It’s a family tradition,” my voice was muffled. “I’m not supposed to
let strangers see my face.”
“I’m not a stranger, princess,” he smiled invitingly, taking off his hat.
“I’m Jack. Everyone knows me, and they—”
“—should write a book about you. I noticed,” I said, reminding myself
that I liked it when he called me princess, “I just can’t, Jack Madly,” I
teased him. “I just can’t...”
 “What? Crap. We’re in the 18th century for God’s sake,” Jack sighed,
then as he was putting his hat back, we heard a wolf howling somewhere
nearby. “Anyhow, we really need to put as much distance between us and
the goblins before they find out they are wearing the bad luck charm, but
don’t worry I have a plan.”
“What plan?”
“These,” he said, showing me a fistful of beans.
Before I could ask, he dug up the ground and put the seeds into the
hole, then patted soil down over it. The ground rumbled and shook as a
gigantic beanstalk grew and stretched up and up as far as the eye could see,
into the sky. I wondered if Jack had thought out his plan carefully since this
was going to attract attention to us.
I winced at the movement of the earth, but before I lost balance, Jack
wrapped his arms around my waist.
“Hang on tight,” he whispered. “You’re going to be alright. I will take
care of you.”
Never had anyone said something like that to me. It was my job to take
care of the nomads of the night and fulfill my duties. There was no reward
for me other than being loved by children. I didn’t like that I was unable to
live among humans since I didn’t know of any other moons I could mingle
with.
Jack’s grip was firm, yet gentle. Why in the name of shining suns and
glittering stars did he care about me? Being treated this way made me feel
as if I was invisible before, and having this thief’s eyes lay upon me cured
my curse.
“Don’t you think the growing beanstalk will attract the goblins?” I
asked, succumbing to his embrace. I had seen the beanstalk many times
before, when I was up there in the sky.
So this is one of the annoying trees that blocked the view? I know it’s
not cursed, but it is the pathway to the giants’ realm. I had seen it many
times, in different places. Was that because Jack had the power to conjure it
up whenever he wanted?
“Let’s hope the gobs haven’t linked the necklace to their bad luck.
Even if they did, those creatures are by far the stupidest I’ve encountered,”
Jack laughed as he held onto a vine that dangled from the beanstalk. “They
think a tortoise carries the world on its back and makes it shake when it
yawns or wakes from a dream.”
“Yawns?” I laughed, and the hood almost slipped off my head, nearly
exposing my face. I appreciated Jack’s respect to m my privacy, and I was
glad he stopped asking about the light forming a halo around my feet. He
had his way of making me comfortable. He only asked once, but when I
didn’t answer, he dropped the subject, “So, now, they probably think the
tortoise is yawning and causing a mini earthquake on earth?”
“Of course; I wouldn’t be surprised if they start praying for forgiveness
until the shaking stops,” He said, pulling on the dangling vine, making sure
it was tight and strong enough to support our weight. “Now hang on tight
cloak-wearing weirdo,” he joked, “I’m taking you up into the clouds. Ever
seen the clouds so close before?”
“No,” I shook my head, lying to him. Of course, I saw the clouds each
night, but I didn’t want to spoil his endeavors at trying to impress a girl.
What girl wouldn’t find that romantic?
“It’s your lucky day,” he smiled. It wasn’t a smirk, and he wasn’t being
arrogant. It was a loving smile. In fact, Jack wasn’t behaving like his usual
arrogant-self. It seemed as if he wasn’t afraid to drop the façade around me.
It still didn’t make sense. I had just met him, and yet I was unable to resist
his charms. “You’re about to see where I live. I’ve never taken anyone with
me before.”
Jack nudged the vine and branches shifted into a staircase, leading us
up into the clouds. We could see the forest on our way up as we were
nearing our destination.
“Wow,” Jack said. “You haven’t even made any sounds. Most girls
panic at this height.”
“You said no one’s been here before,” I pursed my lips.
Jack blushed. “Weird… and smart,” he mumbled. “Who are you
glowing-girl-under-the cloak?”
I pretended I didn’t hear him. Luckily, he didn’t push the matter, and a
second later, we found ourselves walking on clouds.
At the top of the beanstalk laid a new dimension—a world different
from ours. You’d think you’d fall from an opening or a gap between the
clouds, but that wasn’t the case. It was a higher place, away from the crowd,
and it was magical. I found it to be a lot more enchanting than the sky itself.
Here, in Jack’s private world, everything except the clouds was green and
sometimes yellow or brown. The beanstalk was a maze of its own like small
town. Jack treated the ladybugs buzzing around with special care. Birds,
doves, and ravens were the common companions. When I stood on my
tiptoes and stretched my hand upward it disappeared into a cloud.
“Wow,” Jack said. “That’s a lot of light again.”
Instantly, I pulled back my arm and hid my light under the cloak again.
“Why would a bright girl like you hide under that black cloak all the
time?” Jack asked, letting the cat he rescued out of the sack. He then went
on to light up pumpkins that hung from the trees. They were hung by snakes
that looked exhausted from the job. There was a sign on one tree that said:

Don’t mess up with my Jack O’lantern

Yes, I’m talking to you, nasty troll!

I didn’t comment, hoping the giant – or troll – would stay away from
us, “I told you I don’t want to talk about it. If that’s not fine with you, I’d
like to leave.”
“If you have wings, and can fly, be my guest,” he signaled at the edge
of the beanstalk. He squeezed a disobeying snake so it would let him light
up the pumpkin.
“Ok,” I said and threatened to walk to the edge.
“Wait!” he said. “I’m sorry. I was just joking. I’d really like you to
stay.”
“Really?” I found myself smiling wider and couldn’t help it.
“Really,” He smiled. “All the other girls I met in this kingdom are…
well… monsters. You’re the first one that isn’t. Well, a bit weird, but not a
monster. Weird is good. So please stay.”
“Really?” I was speechless I couldn’t think of any other word to say.
“If you’re going to repeat that word, then you better need this,” Jack
pulled out a dictionary from his Sack of Wonders and threw it next to me.
“However, I mean it. I want you stay,” he smiled again. “But just ease up
with the light. That’s really too much. We don’t want to attract… well, I
have a nasty giant living somewhere in my kingdom. He doesn’t always
appear but I don’t want to fight him now.”
 “Oh, sorry,” I put a hand on my mouth hidden behind the cloak, and let
out short laugh. “I just got excited.” If I had parents, maybe they would
have taught me how to control my light when I met a boy I liked.
“Yeah,” He mused. “I do get excited, too. Sadly, I don’t shine like you.
How do you even do that? Are you hiding a gas lamp under that cloak?”
“No,” I furrowed my brows. This was my light, not a gas lamp!
“Are you an enchanted frog that lights up and doesn’t croak?”
“Why a frog?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, waving his hand. “Frogs are helpless.
Everyone in the kingdom has been bewitching them, turning them into
princes and princesses. The poor creature is being played with and
humiliated when all he wanted in life was to croak us out of our sleep every
night.”
I omitted a laugh again. “No, I am not an enchanted frog underneath.
Didn’t we agree you won’t ask anymore about me?”
“Alright,” he said and then slapped the snake playfully on its mouth.
“Didn’t you hear the weird-bright-princess say no more asking about her?
Hah!”
The poor snake made a grumpy face. It was feeling exhausted just by
holding the pumpkin, and Jack’s squeezing didn’t make it any better.
“Now, sit down, princess,” he signaled me to sit on the shell of a turtle.
“This is my best chair. It does move every now and then though, so be
careful.”
“You’re awful,” I said. “You’re using the poor thing as a chair?”
“Will it be too woody?” Jack wondered, climbing up a hammock next
to the turtle. “I could cover it with sheep skin if you like.”
“Unbelievable,” I shook my head and sat on the ground next to the
chair—I mean turtle.
“What did I say? I was just trying to show some hospitality,” He took
off his hat and put it on his chest as he lay back in the hammock. “Nothing
like a little rocking back and forth at the end of the day,” he sighed, “I’ve
been working very hard. You sure you’re comfortable down there on the
ground?”
“I am,” I said, staring at the dark sky above. As much as I enjoyed
myself with Jack here, I should have been up there. This was irresponsible
of me. The kingdom needed my light, and I was not allowed tardiness. If
the sun rose before I got up there, I would die, and the world would live in
perpetual darkness.
“Moonless night, huh?” Jack mused, looking up and breaking the
silence.
“Yeah,” I nodded, feeling ashamed I wasn’t up there now.
“I really miss the moonlight,” Jack said casually.
“Really?” This time I controlled my bright light and kept it hidden
under the cloak, but I coulnd’t control my really, though.
“Don’t you like it?” he looked back at me.
“I do,” I shrugged. “What do you like about it?”
“Everything,” he said. “It’s so cool, just chilling up there on its own,
oblivious of the crazy life we have down here in the kingdom. It’s like a
god or something. It is also like clockwork, comes and leaves in time and
does its job, it seems invincible to me. Would you dare fly up there and get
to it?”
“But don’t you think it’s lonely?” I asked.
“Why lonely? I bet it watches all the mischief in our lives and laughs,
thinking, ‘You poor humans living down there, suffering and having to work
hard in an unjust world.’ We must be amusing to it.”
“No, it doesn’t do that,” I petted the turtle on its back.
“It does.”
“Does not.”
“And how do you know?”
“I just do. The moon…well, she’s kind and caring.”
“She?”
“Hmm… I always knew it had to be a she.” I swallowed hard and
tightened the cloak around me again.
“I always thought it was a he. Never heard about the man in the moon?
Unless by ‘she’ you mean the cow. I heard there is a cow on the moon.”
Jack was suddenly getting on my nerves. How could he think that of
me? “The moon is no cow!”
“I didn’t say the moon was a cow,” Jack said. “And why are you so
upset about that? Ah. I know. Girls love the moon, the full moon.”
“They do?” I raised an eyebrow. “Who else loves me—the moon, I
mean?”
 “Everyone does, even werewolves. It’s a pretty amazing little ball up
there, shining its light onto us at night, although it’s gone tonight. Did you
ever wonder where it goes when it disappears? I mean, I was taught in
school that it’s never gone. Only gray clouds conceal it sometimes.”
“It will be back. In an hour,” I said, planning on leaving Jack sooner
than that.
“You sound sure of yourself,” Jack said suspiciously.
I shrugged, “Well, she – it must return. Don’t you think?”
“I sure hope so. Sometimes, when it disappears too long, I worry that
Managarm ate her,” Jack said, staring up again, trying to find me—the
moon—beyond the dark clouds.
“Managarm?”
“The wolf, you know, the one who was howling when we were down
there,” Jack looked back at me. “You don’t know the story of Managarm,
the evil wolf who chases the moon?”
“What?” I felt the blood drain from my face. Who was that wolf who
seemingly likes to chases me? I hated wolves.
“Although people claim that Managarm is the wolf howling in the
Black Forest in the middle of the night, I’m not so sure. But I used to hear
this story from my grandmother, Madly, when I was a kid—“
“A kid? Were you a thief back then?” I couldn’t help but ask. I was
curious about him.
Jack laughed and straightened up. “I stole my first coconut from a
goblin when I was six. I was poor and hungry, and the goblin market has
always been my favorite place for eating. Unfortunately, I gave to the first
poor girl I saw. So, yes, I was a thief back then.”
“And is you grandmother called Madly?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask why she was called that? Or was it her name?”
“To be honest, I loved her a lot, but she was also mad. She used to
gather up children and tell them dark stories, mad stories, before she died.
That’s where she got the name. Goblins hate her because all her stories
warned children of goblins and they couldn’t lure young girls into the
goblin market anymore. Can I tell you the Managarm story now? Curious,
little hooded-girl.”
 “Yes, but be quick,” I knew I had to go, but I couldn’t resist his charm.
How was I supposed to meet him again? If I kept thinking of him tomorrow
night, I wasn’t going to do my job properly.
“It’s a quick story. ‘Once upon a time, a bad wolf named Managarm, or
the creature that chases the moon, was cursed with a wicked soul. He was
sent by the Queen of Sorrow to devour the moon,” his expression was grim,
and I knew he wanted to give me a fright. I guess he was imitating his
grandmother. “Night after night, the wolf chased the moon wherever it
went, trying to jump as high as it could to snag it, but he always failed. Not
because the moon was too high, but because the purity of the moon was too
much for him to handle. Managarm, the wolf, decided to draw a jagged-
wheeled carriage built from the bones of children kidnapped by the
Boogeyman. The Queen had given the carriage to Managarm and instructed
him to trap the moon inside and bring it to her. Night after night, people saw
him flying high up in the sky drawing his carriage, looking like a black spot
in the heavens, but no matter how close he got, he could never catch the
moon.’”
“Why did the Queen of Sorrow want to catch the moon?” I found
myself asking, mesmerized by the story. I wish I had someone telling me
bedtime stories before the sun rose every day.
“Generally, the Queen of Sorrow wants to have everything and
anything. But in this case, it was because the moon was rumored to be one
of the Lost Seven the Queen was looking for,” Jack still made that creepy
face.
“Stop doing that thing with your face. I’m not a child. Who are the Lost
Seven?” I wondered if that story was true.
“No one knew exactly,” Jack’s face returned to normal, a little
disappointed that I wasn’t scared. “Some the lost Seven will save the world.
Some say that they are actually the ones that have to killed to save the
world. It’s unknown so far who they are and why they are important.”
“So you don’t think the story is true?”
“I don’t know,” Jack shook his head and swung a foot protruding from
edge of the hammock. “My grandmother told me a lot of crazy things. She
told me I was going to fall in love with a girl who is as tasty as marmalade,
for instance. She even said her name will be Marmalade. You know what
marmalade is, right?”
 “Of course, I do,” I lied. I had only heard night passengers say that it
was something really sweet and rare, only found on the dining tables of
kings and queens, and sent over from Europe.
“Even with your cloak hiding your face, you’re still a bad liar,” he said.
“You have no idea what marmalade is. I have a jar in my sack if you want.
Stolen from the Queen of Sorrow herself. She’s pretty fond of it.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to try something you stole.
Please tell me more about your grandmother. Did you ever meet this
Marmalade?”
“I don’t think I’d know if I did,” he laughed. “What does a girl as sweet
as marmalade look like, exactly? And if I go around asking girls if their
name is Marmalade, they’d laugh at me.”
At this point, I remembered Jack lying about me being the first girl he
wanted to impress by taking her up to the clouds. It made me assume that
he’s had a lot of adventures with girls. I could understand how he could be
attractive to many girls with his quirky personality. Was it possible that all
of his sweet escapades were a secret quest for finding the foretold
Marmalade? I wondered.
“Grandmother just loved to tell me weird stories. She even gave me
this,” Jack pulled out a necklace from his sack. It was made of small
seashells, arranged together in a unique way.
“Another necklace of wonder, I assume.”
“Except that I didn’t steal this one. Grandmother really gave it to me,”
he assured me.
”It looks lovely,” I said. “Why don’t you wear it?”
“And look like a fish? No, thank you. Besides, it’s too feminine for me.
Grandmother suggested wearing it, though. You won’t believe what she
said this necklace was for.”
“What is it for? I’m curious.”
“It’s supposed to,” Jack hesitated, “grant me a second life if I was
killed,” Jack laughed, looking at the necklace. “A second life? Nonsense!”
“Does that mean that if you were killed and you were wearing it, you
would come back to life?”
“Well, according to my grandmother, it was supposed to give me a new
life if I were killed, but there is a catch. It should give me a new life in
another form,” Jack leaned forward and whispered to me, “My grandmother
claimed she used it when she was young. She told me she was a fish before
she became human. Can you see why they called her Madly now?”
“A fish?” I considered. “I actually like this story. How did she become
human?”
“Well, she said she died when she was fished out of the water. She was
a fish, remember? The necklace supposedly saved her life by turning her
into a human being. You get how this works? A new life equals a new
body.”
“That’s amazing,” I stared at the necklace.
“What’s amazing?” Jack leaned back. “You don’t think my
grandmother was a fish, do you?”
“Why not? Don’t you believe in magic?”
“I believed in open windows, trees I can climb, and things that help me
unlock doors. That’s magic to me.”
“I think you’re wrong. I believe in what your grandmother told you.
You should wear the necklace. You could have certainly used it today if the
goblins had killed you.”
“And then have a second life as a what? A frog?”
“What’s your problem with frogs? And who said you’d be a frog?” I
laughed. “If you had no choice but to die now, wouldn’t a second life be
better than none at all?”
“No,” Jack explained. “I love me. If I’m ever given a second life after I
die, I want to be me, Jack, all over again. Or how are they going to write a
book about me? Besides, grandmother said that part of the enchantment is
that you can’t tell anyone about your new identity.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. That’s what she said. You know what that means? It
means that you can’t tell your loved ones who you are. What’s the point in
giving me a second life if the ones you love aren’t allowed to recognize
you?”
“What did your grandmother say happens if the person who’s been
given a second life tells about it?”
“That person dies, along with the person who was told,” Jack said.
“See? It’s a curse more than a gift in my opinion.”
“Oh,” I considered. “But it’s still a second life, a second chance. Maybe
you could have a second life where you aren’t a thief anymore. Maybe you
could be a prince charming?” I teased Jack.
“No!” Jack said. “I hate charming princes. They’re boring, and no one
wants to write about them. I’m Jack Madly. I’m a legend.”
“Whatever you say,” I couldn’t argue with him.
Jack spent the rest of the night talking. As a moon I was used to
listening without really interacting that much, and Jack was a charmer. It
wasn’t just that he kept telling me stories about his childhood with a boy
named Peter Pan – they seemed to be close friends—, but it was how I was
sure he was someone entirely different from the person he pretends to be. I
saw his confidence and cockiness when he was facing the goblins, but he
was someone a lot friendlier here. It was as if he felt comfortable pouring
his heart out to me. I liked to think that my moonly charm was affecting
him. He was having a genuine conversation with a girl hiding behind a
black cloak, and what’s best of all is that he stopped asking me to show my
face, and seemed to be enjoying our time together. Up here, in his personal
heaven, it was hard to think of him as a thief. He was a normal boy who
wore a mask of ambiguity and carelessness when he descended down to the
kingdom of Sorrow. I wondered if the same thing would happen to me if I
had mingled with the people of Sorrow. Would I have to wear my own
mask when facing the world?
Falling in love with a boy who lived in the clouds seemed suitable. I
was the moon, and this was closest I’ve come to having a boyfriend. I
wouldn’t have to descend all the way down to earth to meet him. Yeah, but
could I bring myself to confess my true nature?
“Jack,” I said. “I have to go.”
“What?” he blinked as if I had just woken him from a beautiful dream.
“I’d really like to stay but I have to go,” I stood up.
“Why?” He came down from the hammock. “Did I say something
wrong?”
“Not at all,” I smiled behind the cloak, and wished I could show him
my face, but I couldn’t. If I did, I’d have to explain what I am, and risk
breaking the divine laws.
“Then what is it? Is it because I slapped the snake and wanted you to
sit on a turtle? I stole them from the Queen of Sorrow. They are evil
creatures, not like the rest of their kind. They have been created by dark
wizards and I learned how to control them—“
 “Jack,” I sighed. “You don’t have to explain. You didn’t say anything to
upset me, but I have to be home before sunrise.”
“Usually girls need to be home before midnight,” he mumbled.
“I’m not just any girl,” I said. “And I can’t explain much. I have to go.”
I said, and turned my back to him, preparing to use the vine to get down to
the land. I could have ascended to my place in the sky from here, but I
didn’t want him to see that. It was easier to let him think I was a normal girl
who needed to walk home on foot, and then ascend from there without him
seeing me.
“Wait!” he said behind my back. “Don’t you need someone to walk you
home? It’s too late and the gobs might be out there.”
“I’ll be fine, Jack,” I said, although I was worried I’d run into the
goblins again.
“Really? How will I be able to know you arrived home safely?”
I turned around to face him, “When you see the moon hanging back in
the sky,” I said.
“What?”
“Trust me,” I interrupted him. “Once the moon is back, then I’m safe.”
Jack looked puzzled, but his eagerness to see me again prevented him
from connecting the dots.
“Will I see you again?” he asked.
“I think so,” that was all I could promise. I needed to think it over
alone. Was I allowed to spend time with Jack every night?
“Will you at least tell me your name?”
“Next time,” I said. “I really have to go now,” Then I finally turned
around again, and took hold of the dangling vine.
“Wait!” he insisted again, and this time, he turned me around to face
him. He wasn’t aware that his touch, although above the cloak, sent shivers
through my bright body. “Take this,” he offered me the seashell necklace. “I
will not take no for an answer. This is the only way I know for sure you will
be safe alone down there.”
“Why?” I smiled. “Because I will have a second life if a Goblin kills
me?”
“Yes,” he nodded.
“But I will turn into something else then, and you will not like me
anymore. Would you like me as a frog?”
 “I think so,” he said. “Bear in mind I haven’t seen really much of
whom you are, and I do like you.”
“Why did you change your mind about the frog?” I asked.
“Because I will miss this laugh, even if it’s veiled behind this crazy
cloak you’re wearing,” he said, looking at me as if he was never going to
see me again, as if he stared harder he’d find something to recognize me
later, my eyes probably.
I couldn’t help but laugh, “You don’t like frogs,” I hit him lightly on
the chest, and he closed his eyes as if I just kissed him alive. His hands
fidgeted. I thought he wanted to touch me back, and his manners kept him
from doing so.
“Alright,” I nodded and took a step back, now really worried that it was
almost sunrise. I took the necklace in my hand so I’d put it on when I got
down to the land. “I will go now and you can’t say ‘Wait!’ anymore.
Agreed?”
Jack pursed his lips like a spoiled child, and nodded, not taking his
eyes off me while I slid with the vine all the way down.
“I’ll be at the lake next to the Goblin Market tomorrow, right before
sunset,” he yelled.
“After sunset would be better,” I said as I descended, unable to hear
anything else he had said. I didn’t think that meeting near the Goblin
Market was a great idea, but I knew he just wanted to see me again, so he
picked the place we first met.
After I landed, I had to walk for a while, in case he watched me from
up there, until I could ascend back to the sky and take my moon form.
Although I was late, something attracted me by the lake before I could
get back up. It was a tiny sound of pain or something. The night had been
unusually silent since I came down from the beanstalk. Listening carefully,
it sounded like a faint screaming of a moth, and it got me curious in a
strange way. Using some of my light in the dark, I spotted the source of the
sound. It was a caterpillar, a little bigger than usual, stuck on a snag in the
middle of a lake – it was more of a dirty swamp, tangent to the road leading
to the Goblin Market. But that didn’t matter. It was the screaming caterpillar
that mattered. I caught it in a rare moment, giving turning into a butterfly. I
had never seen this before, and I couldn’t resist approaching it.
 You shouldn’t be doing this. You have little time before the sun shines
back.
But I couldn’t. There was something about the butterfly screaming its
way into life that I couldn’t resist. It reminded me of Jack’s necklace on my
neck. Was this butterfly a having a second life too, turning from a
caterpillar into a new and different creature, emerging from a pupa to
become a sweet creature? What was the wisdom in its pain? The screams
raised too many questions in my head. I wondered if death wasn’t really
death, and if we people didn’t die, just reborn into something new,
sometime much more beautiful.
I was never going to know the answers because I was immortal.
What’s wrong with you? Even if this necklace on your neck turned you
into another new creature when you die, it wouldn’t be natural. Every
unnatural thing has a price to it. And you could die and forget about
immortality if you don’t get back home before sunrise.
What if I could turn into a regular girl and be with Jack? I knew it was
an irrational thought, but it was the first night in my life when I wanted to
be human, just a regular girl with no responsibilities. I wanted to chase
butterflies in a large poppy field, filled with purple, pink, and yellow roses.
I wanted to feel the sun on my skin. I wanted to give up my brightness, and
be paler as long as Jack was chasing me playfully in the field.
You shouldn’t be in love. No one said the moon should be in love or
have a relationship. You were made to do certain things, and that’s all. Even
if you were allowed to fall in love, it shouldn’t be happening so fast. You just
met Jack today and he is a thief, someone you should catch, not fall in love
with.
That night was a special night in my life, because for the first time I
didn’t listen to the voice in my head. Instead, I listened to that inner thing
that had no name, because it was magical, and I didn’t think magic needed a
name, or a reasons. It was magic for Heaven’s sake. We all know what it
feels like; no one needs to know what it looks like.
I stood at the edge of the marches, my heart beating faster. I wanted to
cross over and see the butterfly emerging from her pupa on the snag, like
that magical feeling spreading out of my soul. But the dismal bog with
black, and greasy-green, pools of water separated me from the snag. I
noticed there were many other snags rising out of the dirty waters amid the
dank growth of weeds and grasses. Why was everything so silent around
me? Where did the sounds of the creatures of the night disappear?
The feeble glimmer of the stars reflected in the gloomy pool. I had to
part my cloak even more to let the bright ring of moonlight shine out of my
body to see where I was going. I was acting against everything I had
learned before, especially showing big amounts of my light into the night.
The yellowish white light stemmed from my head to my feet as I
started to advance into the bog. A sudden breeze from the night stirred one
tussock after the other as I stepped between the slimly ponds and deadly
quagmires.
You shouldn’t be doing this…
The butterfly’s screams became louder as I approached, and I saw it
was the color of a sunflower, on its way to welcome the world with its first
flutter of wings.
It was beautiful. I was so close to touch it with my hands.
Go back now before the sun shines!
Suddenly, my foot tripped, and I was about to fall into the dirty swamp.
I snatched at an overhanging branch of a nearby snag as I fell backwards. I
gripped the branch and clung to it, trying to save myself from the fall.
When I thought I had saved myself from falling into the swamp, I
discovered that something was terribly wrong.
You shouldn’t have come here.
The tendrils in the bough whipped round my wrists like deceiving
snakes around their prey. I resisted with all my might, but the tendrils acted
as if they were alive, tightening hard on my wrists, and starting to cut
through my flesh.
Still struggling, my cloak fell back from my golden hair, and my light
flooded the swamp. This wasn’t supposed to ever happen. My light was so
bright I suspected it killed the newly born butterfly at such a close distance.
As I lay there, shivering in the arms of the tendrils, neither fully
submerged in the swamp nor capable of freeing myself, I saw the goblins
approaching on the land. They hopped happily and clapped their hands,
hailing the Queen of Sorrow.
“I told you the butterfly trick would work,” one said to another.
“The Queen will be so pleased with us. She hasn’t been able to catch
one of the Lost Seven, let alone knowing who they were in the first place.
All she was sure about was that the Moongirl was predicted to be one of
them.”
“Look at her,” a third one said as many of them approached. “She is
beautiful. So bright.”
“Don’t get too close to her light,” a fourth said. “It’s only slightly less
dangerous than sunshine.”
“And what now? How are we going to catch her?”
“Soon enough she will drown or the sun will shine. Either way, she
dies. That’s what matters. The queen wanted her dead or alive. I think it’s
her body that matters,” another said as the first flickers of sunshine splayed
on my face. I was going to die. The sun could kill me and turn me into
moondust, and the nights in the Kingdom of Sorrow will stay black forever.
What have I done?
The more I resisted the tendrils the more they cut at my flesh and
pulled me down to the swamp.
“And then what, when she dies?” another goblin asked.
“Our part ends here. The rest is Managarm’s, the Moonhood. He will
collect her and bring her to the Queen of Sorrow in his blackened, flying
coach.”
“I guess we should be going then,” another goblin suggested. “I’m
always so scared of Managarm. Such a vicious beast.” he followed, as if
they weren’t horrible beasts themselves.
Finally, when the sun shone brighter, I had to give in to the tendrils
pulling me deep into the swamp. I was going to drown down there, but it
was my only choice to buy some time before the sun dusted me away.
I took a deep breath and sank backwards in the greasy, green water,
held tight by the tendrils, still resisting, arching my back upward as if
giving a painful birth to a child.
You shouldn’t have been here. Foolish girl.
I was struggling franticly now with more tendrils wrapping themselves
around my body underwater, watching the bubbles coming out of my mouth
while the sun shone beyond the water. The wavy water made the sun look
like a hazy ball of fire. I didn’t think my light shone through the water
anymore. When you’re dying, all light gives up on you, and all that remains
is the light of the fire that will burn you.
Is this how I’m going to end, the same night I thought I fell in love?
 Still caught by the cords in the muddy waters, I saw the hem of my
white dress floating in front of my eyes.
The air in my chest abandoned me, and opening my mouth wasn’t
going to help. My chest felt like it was going to explode and I suddenly
noticed I hadn’t been breathing for a while. My moonface must have been
turning blue as my eyelids throbbing for one last time.
There was no point in resisting anymore. Down here, I was going to die
drowning, and up there, I was going to die burning. How ironic it was of the
moon to die so far from home. Goodbye, my life.
As I faded away, Jack’s necklace with its seashells floated in front of
me. This time it glittered in blue…
What was the use of this mystical necklace if I was still dying? Where
was my other life? I didn’t mind turning into a frog right now, but nothing
happened. Jack was right. His grandmother only told him lies.
Jack Madly, I’m never going to see you again. You were right. Someone
should write a book about us and call it Moon and Madly.
I gave it one last shot and tried to kick the tendrils with my legs, but
they were numb already. I wondered if the tendrils had eaten them away.
A great intolerable pain hit the sides of my face, right above the
cheeks. Was this how death felt? Did it have to be so painful? Why couldn’t
I just go? Or was I paying for my sin of being a reckless moon?
But that wasn’t the case. My cheeks were being cut in small lines. My
backbone was hurting too, but it felt as if it was stretching. What was going
on?
The only thing I knew was that I should’ve been dead, but I wasn’t.
I must be alive because I’m feeling so much pain.
I found myself screaming underwater. Although muffled, it sounded
like the butterfly’s aching minutes ago.
My back hurt again, and I could feel my spinal cord changing
underneath my flesh. The pain was sharp enough I had to bend my back
upward and sink back with my head, deeper into the swamp.
Finally, the cuts in my cheeks stopped, so did my screaming, and so did
the pain in my back. The silence underwater was alarming as if I had been
plugged out from the world.
Was I dead? Was that it?
 “Ease up, girlie,” I heard a voice tell me although I didn’t know where
it came from. I thought I had seen a girl in a red hood talking to me, but I
wasn’t sure. “You’re not going to die. Your name didn’t show up in my
cookie today, although I don’t know if I was supposed to kill the moon,
too,” the girl’s voice said. “I’m starting to hate my job,” she uttered her
final words and disappeared, promising that I wasn’t going to die?
But how? And for what price?
She was right. I wasn’t dead. I found myself inhaling deeply, filling my
heart with oxygen underwater. If I had a mirror, I swear I was sure that I
would have seen myself alive, as I had never been before.
I was breathing underwater!
But I wasn’t only breathing in from my mouth and nose. In fact, these
two organs couldn’t have provided me with that kind and amount of
oxygen. My heart felt as if it had grown bigger, and I felt taller but didn’t
know how. All of this was because I was breathing from the three cuts in
my cheeks. I had developed gills.
The necklace kept glimmering in blue as I felt my spine being too
flexible than normal. I hadn’t lived in human form a lot, but I surely knew
its limitations. I was exceeding all of it.
The thought hit me with a smile on my face. I was reborn underwater,
given a second life because of the necklace. This time the necklace chose
something beyond my imagination for me, something I didn’t believe
existed.
There was one last thing left to be sure. I tried to move my legs, and
when I did, a broad smile filled my heart. I didn’t have legs. I couldn’t
imagine anyone else in the world being so happy they didn’t have legs.
I had a fish’s tail, and I splashed it out and then into the water again. I
couldn’t describe the excitement I was experiencing, so I kept on splashing,
still tied by my wrists. The tendrils had stopped cutting through my flesh, as
if they were taken by the purity of what I had become.
I was reborn like the new butterfly, except I was turned into a mermaid.
I didn’t know at the time if all mermaids were created that way, or
maybe if I was the first, becoming the mother of mermaids. I only knew
that I was saved, and that it was the closest I could be to become almost
human, and not a moon anymore.
 Later, I freed myself from the tendrils and swam all day. Although it
was a nasty swamp, I managed to find an opening that led to a cave, which
led to the ocean. But I wasn’t ready for the big world of the ocean yet. I
needed to swim back to meet Jack, who wanted to meet me by the lake.
Of course, I couldn’t tell him that I was the girl from yesterday, and I
couldn’t tell him I was the moon, and I couldn’t tell him I was a mermaid.
Since his grandmother was right about the necklace, I believed her when
she told Jack that you can’t say who you were in the previous life or you,
and the one you tell, will die. The necklace itself proved to be of use only
once. It dissolved into some underwater animal and I didn’t have it
anymore.
When the sun set the next day, I sat by the shore of the swamp, picking
the cleanest spot I could, and started combing my hair. I had the ability to
transform my tail into legs once I got on shore.
When Jack came waiting for me, he found me by the rock, dressed in
my white dress, the one he hadn’t seen yesterday – the black cloak had been
shredded to pieces by the tendrils, and there were no goblins waiting for me
when I surfaced. They must have thought that I was an dark enchantress,
being able to disappear in the water. I wondered what punishment the
Queen had bestowed upon them, and what Managarm had felt when he
couldn’t catch me. He wouldn’t have even recognized me in my new life as
a mermaid.
“Excuse me,” Jack asked, looking sad. “Did you see a girl in a black
cloak?”
“In a black cloak?” I said. “What did she look like?” I was curious to
know what he saw of me.
“I… don’t really know,” Jack lowered his head. “She is very bright,”
he said reluctantly, afraid that I didn’t understand.
“Bright like a full moon?”
“Wow,” Jack’s eyes widened, staring up at the moonless sky. “That
must be it. I was so stupid,” he tapped the back of his head with his hand.
“She was trying to tell me that she had something to do with the moon.
That’s why she said she’d be safe if the moon shone back,” then he stopped,
looking into nowhere. “But the moon is absent. I wonder if something bad
happened to her.”
 I was tearing apart from inside when I saw him so concerned about me.
My tongue almost slipped but I couldn’t risk both of us dying. There must
be a way I could tell him what happened. I just had to stay alive to find it,
and I had to keep him close to me and befriend him until then.
But Jack seemed uninterested in the girl combing her hair by the rock.
He hadn’t even tried to warn me of the Goblins like he did with me when I
was the moon.
“Well,” he said. “Sorry to bother you,” he started walking away. My
heart raced as he did.
This can’t be it. I have to find a way to be near him.
“Wait!” I said this time, instead of him. “What’s your name?”
“Jack,” he said without turning around, and without telling that he was
awesome and that someone should write a book about him. He looked lost,
regretting he had let me gor yesterday.
“Are you used to talking to people without knowing their names,
Jack?” I said playfully.
“Oh,” he looked embarrassed, still thinking about how he lost the
Moongirl. “Sorry,” he tried his best to put a smile on his face. “I should
have asked you. What’s your name?”
I drew the biggest smile on my face because I knew exactly what to tell
him. I knew what name would keep him close to me, at least out of
curiosity, so someday I could find a way for us to be together as Moon and
Madly.
I took a deep breath, blinked, and then told him the name that would
keep him interested in me with a big sigh of relief, “You can call me
Marmalade.”

End of Grimm Diary Prequel #8

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Author’s Notes:

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1) This prequel is basically based on my most favorite fairy tale of all
time. It’s called the Buried Moon. I would love to write a whole series
about it in the future. The idea of the moon being a girl, and that she
was created to protect us from the creatures of the night is such so
amusing to me.

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2) The Goblin Market is a reference to Christina Rossetti’s amazing
poem by the same name. Although it’s insinuated with adult themes
and feminism, I loved the idea of a Goblin Fruit. It will be mentioned
more in the series, and of course, Pomona has something to do with it,
too.

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3) I came up with names of Moon and Madly from a phrase in an
E.E.Cummings poem. If you’ve read his poems, you’d know how
creative he is with inventing words. His original phrase was ‘Mad And
Moonly’.

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4) Jack stealing the devil’s hair is based on a fairy tale: The Devil's
Three Golden Hairs. And it’s true, the devil’s mom helped Jack, but
we’ll take a look at it later.

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5) The Necklace of Harmonia is a Greek Myth. It will appear later on
again, more detailed.

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6) Managarm, the wolf chasing the moon, is based on Norse mythology.

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The Grimm Diaries Prequels #
9

Rumpelstein

by Cameron Jace
Edited by Gema Guevara & Danielle Littig

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 Rumpelstein
as told by Rumpelstiltskin

Dear Diary,

Call me Rumpelstein. It’s the new name I was given by my maker; the
man who created me for reasons beyond my knowledge. Then again, who
knows the real reasons for their creation?
I always thought makers, or creators, were immortal. I never thought
they would die like us. Mine did. I just came from visiting his grave, and I
left puzzled, feeling undone with no one to tell me who I was meant to be.
Unanswered questions swam in my head: Who was I, what was I, and why
was I? My question turned to be only dust in the wind. It seemed as though
I was never going to know, and I wondered if that was what my maker had
intended for me all along, or if he’d had plans for me at all.
My maker tried to play God by creating me, only to die ashamed of
failing to reach immortality. Irony can’t even begin to describe it.
I remember kneeling down in the pouring rain and reading my maker’s
name on his tombstone. Knowing his real name left me even more
confused. That’s when I knew I had to write this entry in the diary, to tell
you about my maker’s name. I wonder if it will be as shocking to you as it
was to me.
But before I do, I have to tell you about the circumstances under which I
came to be known as Rumpelstein, which, all in all, isn’t my real name, and
which I’ll have to keep secret from you the way my maker had kept his
from me. We have our reasons.
I won’t be able to narrate my story down to every last detail, and I know
that you will hardly believe most of it. My advice would be to think of it as
a fairy tale. After all, fairy tales are a good way to believe the unbelievable.
And now, you’d better brace yourself because here’s how it all began…
When I was a kid, while still living in a God-forsaken village at the end
of the world, and before migrating to the Kingdom of Sorrow, children in
my school called me Rumpelstiltskin. It was their way to ridicule me. I was
a scrawny kid, shorter than average, and endowed with a big nose.
Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t my real name, however.
Rumpelstiltskin is a Germanic word that translates to “the goblin that
makes noises by rattling posts and rapping on planks.” It was some sort of
an annoying creature, whose name mothers mentioned to scare their
children when they refused to go to bed early. It was a stupider version of
the Boogeyman. Children used to make fun of their elders and tell each
other stories about how they’d caught a Rumpelstiltskin under the bed the
night before and trapped him in a closet, or how they crumpled him up like
a paper bag and played with him in the snow, as if a Rumpelstiltskin was
some miserable hamster. I was the most disrespected creature I had ever
heard of. I was also tiny, a little bigger than a creature called an imp. Come
to think of it, my name was really funny. Rumpelstiltskin.
And so I spent my early life being bullied and labeled as Rumpelstitskin.
Although it turned my childhood to hell, I didn’t completely mind. I was
raised to be a good child, obey the elders, and thank the lord for the curve
balls life threw me. There was another reason why I had accepted this. I
wasn’t supposed to let anyone know my real name, which wasn’t
Rumpelstiltskin or Rumpelstein, but I don’t want to write about that or my
family right now.
Wherever I went, people made fun of me, calling me: Rum pel.stilt.skin,
stressing on the syllables and then sticking out their tongues, making creepy
faces, or just plain mocking and kicking me around. Even when we
migrated to the Kingdom of Sorrow, nothing really changed. The name was
a laugh-out-loud curse. Even when I grew up to be a man, my dwarf-like
figure was still motive to taunts, and Rumpelstiltskin lived on.
Some people perceived me as a monster, even though I hadn’t done
anything bad. They considered me evil because of my looks and my name.
Many times in my life, I was tempted to roar back at the world. I wished
for a genie in a bottle to turn me into an evil giant so I could take my
revenge on those who bullied me.
But I didn’t. I was raised to tolerate things because I was told I was to
grow up a good man and raise a good family. Good men had to stand the
test of time.
 As I’m writing this now, I can’t stop laughing at the old naïve me. I’m no
longer part of the good of the world. In fact, good people, like I used to be,
bore me to death now. They make me yawn, especially heroes. Who likes
those? Goodness is an excuse, the easy way out.
I grew to become a simple miller in the Kingdom of Sorrow. My family
and I lived day in and day out under a pigeon-holed roof of a small shack.
My wife worked on a spinning wheel and we barely made ends meet. We
slept in a single, large bed that occupied most of the shack’s space, and we
planned to have our future children sleep with us on the same bed. We were
hoping for the ‘Happily Ever After’ as long as we were together.
When my wife got pregnant, she started craving a plant. She was
oblivious to its name, yet she could smell its foreign scent, and she said it
smelled like ‘beautiful hair’. You can’t argue with your wife when she is
pregnant. In fact, you usually can’t argue with your wife.
Being the family man I was, I asked around in the village until I was told
it was called rapunzel, a rare plant. Some peasants claimed it never existed.
Whereas others claimed that it was poisonous and evil. They said that if
there were such a plant, there’d be only one woman who could lead me to
it. A fortune-teller called Madame Gothel.
“Why would you be searching for such a rare plant?” She asked me.
“My wife is pregnant and she craves it,” I answered.
“Your wife?” Dame Gothel tapped her long nails on the wooden table
with a crystal ball on it. “How did your wife begin crave a plant she
apparently has never seen or eaten before?”
“She said she dreamed of it,” I replied, which was true.
“Does your wife dream a lot? Can she predict the future in her dreams?”
“Not at all,” I lied to her. My wife had predicted she’d be pregnant a
week before we found out. I didn’t think much of it, since it could’ve been a
coincidence, but I didn’t trust Dame Gothel with the information.
“Hmm…” She smirked and handed me some plants. “Here you are.
These are the rapunzel plants. Do you wish for anything else?”
“How much do they cost? I don’t think I can afford them. I could only
buy one.”
“You could have them all for free. We don’t find women craving
rapunzels every day.”
“We?” I asked, suspicious of her intentions.
 “I like to address myself as her Majesty does sometimes,” she said,
laughing aloud, placing a hand on her chest. By ‘Majesty’ she meant the
Queen of Sorrow. “An old lady can dream, can’t she?”
“But of course,” I bowed my head respectfully. “Thank you,” I said and
walked away, still not trusting her, but I was happy I’d fulfilled my wife’s
wishes – and probably my daughter’s, who must’ve be craving the plant, as
well.
“Wait!” Dame Gothel called after me.
“Yes?” I turned to look at her.
“Is your wife pregnant with her first-born?” She inquired.
“Yes. It’s our first child. We’re hoping she’s a girl,” I smiled. I had
always wanted a girl so that she becomes the most beautiful spinner in the
land. There was this prophecy saying that one day a beautiful girl would be
able to spin straw into gold. Not that I believed it, but a father couldn’t help
but dream of the best things for his daughter.
“Oh, she will be a girl,” Dame Gothel said, placing a hand on heart once
again, and then, without any sudden notice, she head back to the tree she
lived in. That was when I saw a carved piece of wood, framed on the wall
that read:

Everything comes with a price.

Looking at the rapunzel plant, I wondered why she’d given it to me for

free, but I pushed the thought to the back of my mind and walked home.
My wife ate the plants every day, and she loved them. I tried to taste
them once and ew, they were awful but I couldn’t tell her. Although I had
gotten plenty of plants, my wife consumed them rather quickly. It was as
though she was addicted to them. However, I didn’t trust Dame Gothel to
dare go back to her. There was something evil about this woman.
One day, while my wife worked on the spinning wheel, a leaf of
rapunzels was caught into it, and it was spun accidentally with the straw.
Then something strange happened: other plants grew from it by spinning
them, and my wife had an infinite supply of rapunzels that were not planted
or seeded in the earth, but spun on a spinning wheel.
I tried to warn her that such enchanted leaves must’ve been a work of
dark arts, but she wouldn’t listen, and I gave up when I learned how useful
the plants could be.
We discovered the rapunzels could be our food for the rest of the year, so
we didn’t have to work for food anymore. My wife cooked rapunzels with
everything. I had to swallow the bad taste and fake a smile to my wife,
though. Sometimes a man had to tolerate things his family loved. It was my
job to keep them happy.
As the days passed, it got colder in the Kingdom of Sorrow. I heard from
villagers that Dame Gothel had foretold the arrival of a curse in the land:
Seven years of unstoppable snow and icy grounds. Peasants claimed it was
right after the Queen of Sorrow had given birth to her first-born whom she
called Snow White, a few weeks before we had our daughter…
My wife and I called her Rapunzel, honoring the plant that saved us from
starving in the inclement weather – it was also a rare plant, and I had
decided my daughter was meant to be special. Looking back at this
moment, I believed my daughter to be my creation, like my maker had
thought of me, but I’ll get to that later when I reveal the name of my maker.
The seven-year-long curse turned our life in the village into dark days,
masquerading behind the white of snow. We couldn’t grow crops, and there
wasn’t much work available for me. The roads were blocked and people
starved in isolation.
The three of us, under one pigeonholed roof, and one creaky bed, lived
by the power of one love that held us together.
My wife spun the plants inside the cottage, and Rapunzel’s smile filled
the small space with joy.
Rapunzel’s hair grew increasingly fast, which we thought was a healthy
sign in the beginning. Her mom had to cut it off repeatedly. It wasn’t
efficient, though. But we found a great use for her hair. We filled the holes
and the corners in the cottage with my daughter’s hair, and we lit it on fire
to protect us against the penetrating cold. I told you my daughter was going
to be special. Without her, we’d have most likely starved and died off like
many others.
Years later, the snow began to ease, and occasional sunshine spread over
the land. The roads were useless and barren, having been abandoned for
years. The geography of the land changed a great deal. In my village, we
discovered we were surrounded by a lake that wasn’t there before. It made
it harder for us to cross over to the bigger towns of Sorrow to sell our goods
and make money.
We needed to buy straw from Sorrow but couldn’t cross over, and when
we built canoes and rowed to the other side we discovered that the Queen of
Sorrow had decided to exile us from the kingdom. My village was one of
the poorer regions, and the Sorrows decided they no longer had use for us in
their kingdom after years of being cursed with ice. We became a burden the
kingdom didn’t need, and the lake only made matters worse. Whoever
insisted on crossing the lake was shot and hung by the Queen’s huntsmen.
We were simply locked out to starve on our own again.
We barely survived on the rapunzel plants, and they weren’t enough
anymore. We were raising a child and one type of food wasn’t helping her
grow strong enough– although her hair still grew on its own. The rapunzel
plants span by machine weren’t as good as before, as they were aging like
us.
If we only found a way to buy straw, we could have had something to
offer the Sorrows. Maybe they’d have taken us back, or at least bought from
us.
But the snow on our side didn’t fully subside, as if our village was still
under the curse. I woke up in the morning and saw the sun shining on the
Kingdom of Sorrow, but refusing to come over to our village still covered
in grey clouds.
I tried to reach Dame Gothel, but she had gone to the Kingdom of
Sorrow where she’d become the Queen’s fortune-teller. Who knew how
she’d managed to cross over.
Later, we learned of the intruders who had sailed all the way from
Europe, aiming at the Kingdom of Sorrow. It was rumored that they weren’t
human, that they were an army of demons who had elongated teeth and
drank the blood of the living. Sailors used to tell us about something called
the Vampire Craze in Europe at the time, and we all suspected the intruders
had to do something with it. It was said that they were going to attack the
Sorrows to capture the Queen’s child.
Why did they want to get the Queen’s child? I didn’t care. I was a
hopeless man wanting to save my own family, and being stranded and weak
killed me inside every time I looked at my beautiful daughter.
 I learned why the Queen had shut us off from the land. The European
intruders were attacking the Sorrows from the borders where we lived. The
Queen preferred to sacrifice us instead of the rest of the land. I had always
been puzzled by the Queen’s actions. Should I have blamed her for letting a
part of the kingdom die to save others, or should I have applauded her
courage of taking such drastic measures to save the rest of the kingdom?
In the village, we locked our doors, hid in our shacks, and pretended we
were dead when the intruders came. It was said that if the intruders looked
you in the eyes, you weren’t going to live long enough to tell the story.
Only those who helped them were spared.
Many of our village people submitted to the intruders and assisted them,
showing them how to cross the lake or enter the Kingdom of Sorrow from
roads we’d never dared to venture. They told them about the history of
Sorrow and who played what role in its existence. They told them things the
intruders needed to know, all in exchange for sparing their lives.
At the time, I was keeping my family and myself safe, digging a hole
underground and rarely sneaking out. My wife, my lovely daughter, the
plants, the bed, the hair, the spinning wheel, and, of course, myself were
bundled into our secret haven.
My wife tried to persuade me to help the intruders and spare our lives,
but I wasn’t going to betray my own people. Who was the Queen of Sorrow
to say who belonged to the land and who didn’t? I still belonged to the
Kingdom of Sorrow, and although it wasn’t my birthplace, it was the place
where I raised my family and where I called home. A vicious ruler wasn’t
going to change that, and I often found myself dreaming of finding a way
home, someday.
Years later, the intruders left the village – or maybe they found a better
entry into the Kingdom. Again, I didn’t care. I was just a simple man who
couldn’t care less about politics. I only cared for my family.
When my daughter, Rapunzel, was eleven years old, the rapunzel plants
gave up on us, and we couldn’t spin more plants out of them. I guess
everything is destined to get old and die eventually.
We needed to find a way to get straw to start spinning again, but the only
way to get it was to cross over the lake from our exiled land. It was like
looking death in the eyes.
 Sitting ashamed of being helpless and unable to provide for my family,
Rapunzel walked into the cottage with the solution. It was her hair.
She suggested we use her fast-growing hair as straw, and it worked. We
had to keep it a secret, though. I didn’t want our neighbors to get jealous of
us, and I didn’t want anyone asking me where I got the straw.
Secretly, day by day, we watched Rapunzel’s hair grow so we could cut
it and use it. I can’t say I felt good about it as a father, but she didn’t have
any use for the excessive hair and we had no other choice.
Still, I was afraid to cross over the lake to the other side of the kingdom,
carrying the goods with me. The soldiers could have shot me before I
explained the reasons why I wanted to get there, so I stuffed the goods into
a canoe, along with a note clarifying who I was and how much I demanded
in exchange for my good, and pushed it off into the lake. I was thankful that
none of the soldiers dared to cross over to our village. They thought we
were a plague, and didn’t want to deal with us.
I was lost in thought when the canoe came to an abrupt stop a few
minutes after I had pushed it away from the shore.
What a helpless man you were, Rumpelstiltskin! You couldn’t do
anything right, even when your daughter tried to save you. When were you
going to stand up and protect your own people?
I stood by the shoreline, wondering if I had the guts to swim and push
the canoe farther onto the other side, but I didn’t. I was a good man, but I
was hand tied and a useless coward. What was good about a good man if he
was so passive?
Now, when I look back at those days, I can’t help but laugh, while
staring at my reflection in the mirror. Perhaps goodness and evil weren’t
attributes. They were jobs, and I sucked at being good. It’s easy claiming
you’re good. The hardest part is to have the heart to live up to it. The line
between good and evil is fuzzy, and you could easy drown in the oblivious
grey in between. Grey is only a shade lighter than black; it never leads to
pure white.
This was how I felt that day, and soon you’ll see where I ended up.
After moments of waiting in the freezing cold by the lake, help came to
me in the most inexplicable form. It was the kind of help that rendered me
useless, but it showed me that I was a good man too; it was a divine
intervention of some sort.
 Mermaids rose through the water and began pushing the canoe gently
toward the other side. They were beautiful and young; they were nothing
like the old stories described them: Evil and manipulative. One of them
turned back and blew me a kiss over her shoulder. A glittering necklace
hung on her neck; it was made of seashells and its glow reminded me of the
moon on dark nights – the moon hadn’t been appearing for many days, but
that was another story. I rubbed my neck, blushing, wondering what my
wife would’ve done to me if she’d seen that.
By sunset, the mermaid with seashell necklace came back with the
payment. It wasn’t gold, but two baskets filled with fruits and vegetables,
and a piece of oak with a note carved on it:
‘On behalf of the King of Sorrow, we encourage you to keep your magic
a secret, and welcome your next’s canoe’s arrival.’
It didn’t say who wrote the note, but whenever they mentioned the King
of Sorrow, I knew they meant the Queen. The King had been busy,
protecting the Kingdom, building his army of young men, and he didn’t
have time to write ‘thank-you’ notes. He was a good man; but unlike me, he
was a strong one, greatly feared by his enemies to the point that his courage
managed to make its way into many stories told to the children of the
kingdom every night.
Things seemed to work out fine back home with my beautiful family. I
was welcomed as a courageous father, and the loveliest two women in my
life adored me more than I actually deserved – I didn’t tell them about the
mermaids, even though Rapunzel had found a single fish in the basket. I
figured the mermaid had slipped in when I wasn’t looking.
When Rapunzel turned fifteen, she came to me one day to show me
something.
“Close your eyes, Rumpelstiltskin,” She loved to call me by that name
because she thought it was funny, and she loved it more than calling me
father – I never told her my real name, and hearing it from her sounded
sweeter than those who used it to tantalize me in the past.
I closed my eyes, unable to resist my daughter’s charming smile.
“Now wait,” she said, and I heard the clicking of scissors. She had cut a
wisp of my hair.
“Ouch!” I said. “What was that for?”
“I will spin your hair in the spinning wheel,” she said enthusiastically.
 “But it’s just a small lock, and my hair isn’t as fine as yours,” I said.
“I’m not going to spin it for the usual purposes,” she gingerly touched
my nose with her small fingers. I had a rather big nose – which was too big
because of my small figure. My nose was only cherished by Rapunzel, even
when it had kept many women from marrying me in my youth. I believed
they thought I’d be snoring all night long, and, of course, I was just
downright unattractive.
“Oh? Then why are you using my lock in the spinning wheel?” I asked
Rapunzel.
“It’s a secret,” she whispered in my ear.
“What does Rumpelstiltskin have to do to let his princess tell him about
her little secret?” I asked Rapunzel.
“You have to sleep,” She giggled.
“Sleep… hmm… now?”
“Whenever you want, but not before I use your hair to spin a dream for
you.” She said.
“A dream? You can spin dreams now?”
“Shhh, whisper, Rumpelstiltskin, whisper, no one can know about this.”
“I will, Rapunzel,” I said. “So you can spin dreams with the spinning
wheel?” I whispered.
“Yes,” she said. “I tried it on me, and later on my mother without her
knowing it. I cut her hair while she was sleeping. The day after, I asked her
about her dreams, and she told me exactly about what I had spun for her.”
“You control the dreams, too?” I played along, whispering and looking
overly suspicious.
“I’m not a kid, Rumpelstiltskin. You don’t have to act like you believe
me when you don’t. It works. While I spin, I close my eyes and think of a
beautiful dream for you. It usually turns out almost as I had imagined it.
Now sleep, Rumpelstiltskin,” She pushed me back on the bed.
That night, I dreamt of what she had woven on her spinning wheel for
me. It was a dream about a beautiful princess who was born to a beautiful
queen in a huge castle with four gates leading outdoors. The gates didn’t
lead to different places. Instead, each gate opened to a different season:
Autumn, winter, spring, and summer. The princess and the queen were able
to experience four seasons in one day, and eat all the seasonal fruits they
wanted all year long. It was a silly, yet nice dream.
 The next day, I spent all day staring at the spinning wheel while
Rapunzel and her mother went out to the nearby market.
What was this spinning wheel? And who spun the dreams? The wheel or
my daughter, and what did that mean? Could I spin dreams on it as well?
I remembered that Rapunzel’s mother had dreamt about having a child,
and then about the Rapunzel plant. I wondered if we were a family with a
great gift like telling the future through dreams. Like I told you, I had
always thought my daughter was special.
I remembered the prophecy of the girl who could spin straw into gold. It
was every father and mother’s wish, that their child would possess such
magical attribute. I always thought it was a silly thing to believe. But who
was I kidding? I had mermaids help me cross the canoe over to the other
side. There was definitely something different about the word
‘Rumpelstiltskin’ other than being just a silly name.
I touched the wheel slightly, speculating about what it meant to be able
to weave dreams. Rapunzel called the wheel ‘the Loom’, a place within a
‘Dreamworld’ where real magic happened, and she called herself a
‘Dreamweaver’, someone who weaved dreams. Just like knitting a beautiful
dress, the spinning wheel and spindle were like the needle and the ball of
fabric.
“What dream will I have tonight?” I asked my daughter when she came
back.
“Not every day, Rumpelstiltskin,” She laughed. “Don’t be greedy. It
doesn’t work that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a good thing to use the wheel every day. I don’t know why, but
it doesn’t like that.”
“The wheel talks to you?”
“No. But I can feel it. We are somehow connected.”
“Connected?”
Rapunzel lowered her head, and folded her hands together by
interlocking her fingers, “I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll spin you and
mom a fabulous dream soon, I promise.”
I wasn’t a man who’d use his daughter, even if she possessed the most
magical qualities. I pitied her enough for having to spin straw for us at her
age when she should have been spending her days playing or discovering
the beauty of life.
One day, coming back from the lake, I found a piece of gold on our bed,
a real piece of gold.
“Did you see that?” Her mother said to me, almost dancing.
“Where did you get that?” I wondered, furrowing my brows. I was
sensing something sinister behind that. Rapunzel’s mother was a good
mother, but she always wanted more. She’d asked me to betray my
kingdom once, and it worried me.
“This is payment for the service Rapunzel offered today,” She said.
“What service costs a piece of gold?” I didn’t want to tell her that I’d
never seen gold before in my life. I thought if I’d never get it, why bother to
find out what it looked like?
“Rapunzel spun a dream for a child,” her mother said. “Somehow, this
woman heard about our daughter’s ability and asked her to spin a beautiful
dream for her child. The next morning she was so happy with what her
child dreamed that she paid us with a piece of gold. Do you know how rich
we could become?”
Was the prophecy true? A girl who can spin straw into gold, only
through spinning dreams?
“Rich?” I waved my hand in the air. “What are you talking about,
woman? Who told that lady our daughter possessed such a gift?”
“None of us, I swear, but now that it’s out in the open, what’s the harm,
Rumpelstiltskin?”
I went to ask my daughter how she felt about this. I wasn’t interested in
the gold.
“I’m alright,” Rapunzel assured me. “Did you see the gold?” She
mustered an uneasy smile. Something was wrong but she wouldn’t tell me. I
couldn’t force her. She was a brave, but slightly stubborn child, and I knew
she’d sacrifice herself for the family. It was my fault. I let her feel
responsible for us from the first day I allowed her to spin her hair.
“What was the name of the woman who paid you?”
“Oh,” Rapunzel giggled. “She is a funny woman, very talkative and
friendly. Her name is Dame Gothel. She said she knew you, and told us to
remind you that everything had a price, and she had to pay us for my
service.”
 I knew it. Something was wrong with all of this. My wife and Rapunzel
hadn’t seen Dame Gothel in the past, nor had I told them where I’d gotten
the rapunzel plants. When I asked my daughter about Dame Gothel, she
depicted her as a lovely old woman. I knew by then that there was
something sinister about Dame Gothel. She looked far from lovely with her
stiff white hair and long fingernails. I stood looking at the grayish sunset
coming down on our village, wondering what the future had in store for me.
My daughter’s secret was out there, and we couldn’t stop fathers or
mothers from asking Rapunzel to spin dreams for their children. My wife
became greedier, and Rapunzel was only fourteen, happy with her new
powers that could potentially enrich us, filling our sack of gold inside the
shack. We had travelers crossing the lake from the Kingdom of Sorrow to
bring us a lock of their children’s hair along with a piece of gold.
Dame Gothel didn’t show up again.
I started to notice that spinning drained energy out of my daughter. She
began to get sick, coughing incessantly and looking gaunter every day. I
had to stop her from continuing to spin, and I refused to accept offers
anymore. I carried her to bed and tucked her in, allowing her to regain her
strength while I watched over her.
That same day, someone called my name from behind the shack’s door
in the middle of the night.
“Rumpelstiltskin!” He sounded young and full of life, and it seemed as
though he was amused by shouting out my name. “Rum-pel-stilt-skin!”
Angered, I opened the door in my nightgown. There was a boy standing
next to his horse. He was tall, thin, and wore a green hat with a white
feather on it.
“Didn’t your elders ever teach you to knock?” I snarled at him.
“Oh,” He raised his eyebrows. “I’m not very fond of doors. I don’t use
them. I like to sneak into houses; windows and tall trees always do the job
for me.”
“What?” I snapped. “Who are you and what do you want knocking on
my door so late?”
“First of all, you really need to leave this house,” The boy said. “A man
in possession of an ample supply of gold should get himself a better door,
and house…and name,” he pulled out a straw and positioned it in the corner
of his mouth, slightly chewing it. “My name is Jack.”
 “And why are you calling my name out in the middle of the night,
Jack?”
“Oh. I wasn’t calling. I was just trying to see if I can say it ten times in a
row without biting my tongue or gritting my teeth. Peculiar name you have,
my friend. ”
“I swear...” I was the one starting to grit my teeth.
“Hey. Take it easy, Rumpelstiltskin,” He waved his hands. “I want to
help you. Actually, I’m here to warn you.”
“Of what?” I narrowed my eyes.
“Dame Gothel and the Queen of Sorrow,” He uttered. “Long story short,
I eavesdropped on them talking about your daughter.”
“Rapunzel?” I asked nervously.
“That’s right. I didn’t get the whole story, but I understood there is a
prophecy that a girl – a first child – would be born to a mother that craved
rapunzel plants. The girl would have long golden hair that she can use to
spin dreams with or something like that. And somehow, the Queen of
Sorrow wants the girl, as she is of great importance to her.”
“Are you saying—“
“I’m saying that the Queen’s huntsmen will be visiting you soon, and it
won’t be friendly – and even if they were, they’d kill you, just by making
fun of your name alone. You know the huntsmen, they only drink and kill,
and do kidnapping on the side. So I’d say they’re coming for your
daughter.”
I stood silent for a moment. Whomever this Jack boy was, I had the
feeling I could trust him, and his words came as no surprise to me. I was
sure that Dame Gothel had meant to harm my family from the very
beginning. Was that the price for the free rapunzel plants? To take my first
born after she’d grown into a beautiful girl?
“But why now? They’ve always known about Rapunzel,” I muttered.
“Everybody knows that she is a skilled spinner,” I mumbled to myself,
gazing up at the sky. “Why now?”
“If you’re asking someone up there, I don’t think they know the answer,”
Jack said, still chewing his straw. “In fact, I could answer you. I heard them
say that Rapunzel will only be useful to the Queen when she reaches a
certain age. So, perhaps, they were waiting for your daughter to grow up, or
maybe they were just waiting to make sure she possessed the power of
spinning dreams,” Jack asserted, then whistled to his horse. “I’m sorry. I
have to go. Got some work to do. I thought I’d stop by and warn you.”
“Wait. How do you know all of this?” I wondered.
“Let’s say I was there in the right place at the right time, and in the right
closet with the right amount of jewelry.”
“You’re a thief, aren’t you? That’s why you didn’t knock. You’re used to
sneaking into other people’s houses. And that’s how you heard the Queen’s
conversation.”
“With all due respect, this is not a house,” he pointed at my shack. “But
I’m guilty as charged,” Jack raised both hands proudly. “I stole an apple and
a comb, today. Don’t know what use I got for them, though. And here,”
Jack pulled a sword out of a scabbard strapped to the horse saddle, and
offered it to me. “Take it. I don’t have a use for this, either.”
“I don’t need a sword. I don’t kill people. I am a good man.”
“Tsk tsk,” Jack shook his head and lowered it to whisper in my ear. “You
might be a good man, but without a sword to fight for your family, you’re
not good enough.”
“You expect me to take advice from a thief?” I grunted.
“No,” Jack mused. “I expect you to take the sword,” He put it in my
hand. “And Rumpelstiltskin,” he added, preparing to mount his horse. “A
wise man once said that the opposite of being alive is being boring, so for
God’s sake, don’t be boring!”
“Wait!” I ran after him as he rode away into the night. “But why did you
bother to tell me?”
“I’m a thief for God’s sake. I’m on the poor’s side all the way.
Someone’s going to write a book about me!”
Confused with Jack’s immoral conversation, I darted back into the house
and woke up my wife. We had to run away before the Queen of Sorrow
arrived. I found Rapunzel spinning on the wheel, still feeling sick.
“What are you doing, Rapunzel?” I asked. “You’re sick and I said no
more spinning.”
“I had to spin this for you, Rumpelstiltskin,” She said with a ghostly
smile, pointing at the wheel. I saw she was spinning my tresses. “I spun you
another beautiful dream.” She told me, her eyelids throbbing from
exhaustion. The spinning was eating her soul away, and it seemed as if she
felt obliged to keep on spinning, nonetheless.
 “What dream?” I asked.
“A dream about me,” She mumbled. “So you never forget me.”
I didn’t know why she thought I’d forget her, but she fainted before I
could ask her. I held her in my arms, summoned my wife, and we were on
our way out.
I was too late.
The sound of the huntsmen on their horses gave me goose bumps
already.
As I went out, there were four of them, hiding their faces behind their
helms, which were modeled after a hawk’s head. Only one of them was
headless, or maybe the shades of the night played tricks on me. They had
already caught my wife and thrown her with the sack of gold in a nearby
well – so they weren’t here for the gold. They were here for Rapunzel, just
like Jack had said.
I ran, carrying Rapunzel in my arms, but they had me surrounded, and I
felt my legs gave out from under me and I sank to my knees. I wish I had
taken Jack’s sword but I had left it in the shack.
I was positive we were going to be saved. Something or someone was
going to save me, another divine intervention, but I was wrong.
Dame Gothel strode confidently toward me, “Give us your daughter,
Rumpelstiltskin,” She stretched out her hands. “We’ll take her either way.”
“No!” I screamed, and held my daughter tighter, her long hair dangling
on the ground.
Suddenly, a cold wind filled the air around me. It sent shivers down my
spine, and the night clouds in the skies hued to dull violet colors. Crows
hovered over us, fluttering their wings and cawing maliciously. A dark mist
settled low in the village, and dispersed to give way to the approaching,
mysterious horse rider. The Queen of Sorrow.
The Queen of Sorrow rode out of the dark on a hornless unicorn. Even in
dark moments like this, the Queen’s beauty was mind-blowing, like Death
itself. How did a dark soul like hers inhabit such enchanting flesh? It
occurred to me that the only living thing competing with her beauty
would’ve been the white unicorn she rode. Was that the reason why she had
its horn cut off?
I looked closer at the unicorn and saw the scar where its horn had been.
The unicorn trotted gracefully in my direction. The Queen took her time
before she halted and bowed to me. She scrutinized Rapunzel with hungry
eyes. If she wasn’t surrounded by her huntsmen, I imagined she’d have
licked her lips and stretched out a snake’s tongue to touch my daughter.
“Is that her?” She asked Dame Gothel.
“That’s her, Your Majesty.” Dame Gothel held her arms to her sides and
bowed her head.
“Give her to me, Rumpelstiltskin,” The Queen of Sorrow ordered. “She
is mine.”
“What do you mean? She is my daughter, and you will not have her.”
“If you give her to me, I’ll invite you back to the Kingdom of Sorrow,
and I’ll grant you every wish you ever wanted,” She said.
“I will not give up my daughter,” I held her even tighter now, brushing
my cheek against hers.
The Queen leaned back on the unicorn, and sighed impatiently. “Why do
you have to make me kill you, Rumpelstiltskin?”
“You can kill me, but let my daughter live,” I said firmly.
“Your wish is my command,” she clicked her fingers, rolling her eyes,
not even considering her words twice. I never saw the headless huntsman
raise his sword and chop my head off with a single stroke.
It was swift and, surprisingly, painless. I didn’t even time to ask the
headless horseman who’d cut off his head? Or was he just envious people
had head and he didn’t?
I had never thought death would knock on my door so unexpectedly, and
without any notice. No ‘Make your last wish before death’ or ‘If you have
anything to regret, that would be the right time’?
I couldn’t even feel my body thudding against the ground and giving up
on my daughter. Everything faded into grey before my eyes, I felt as if my
life was worthless in this world. Being a good man didn’t help a bit.
With my last breath, I saw an image from another world. I saw a girl, but
it wasn’t my daughter. It was a girl in a red hood, running toward
something, holding a scythe in her hand.
At first, I thought she was the angel of Death, but then I realized she was
running toward a black shadow.
“Stop!” The girl in the red hood screamed at the shadow. “It’s not fair.
He’s a good man, and it’s not his time yet.”
 The shadow seemed stronger though, pushing her away, and closing in
on me.
Closer and closer until everything faded to black…
You might expect stories to end when the storyteller dies, but think
twice, for that is not the case in fairy tales. I don’t know what happened
after I died. All I remember is the first time my eyes fluttered open once
again…
I was lying on my back in a chamber, dim light illuminated my
surroundings. My eyes hurt and my vision was blurry. I couldn’t feel the
rest of my body, either.
Something ruffled next to me. I thought it was an animal moving, but it
wasn’t. What animal wore a black cloak, held a gas lamp, and chuckled like
a goblin?
It was a short, pudgy man. He was standing on a bench so I could see
him. He was a hunchman and he was ugly. A golden tooth twinkled in the
dark, his maw stunk and his teeth were rotten; whereas his left eye was
covered with a black patch, his beady right eye inspected my face. He was
so ugly, trying to fit into any other mold than what he really was.
“Stay put,” He told me, and chuckled once again. I seemed to amuse
him. Is this what afterlife is like? Because if it is, I didn’t want to be part of
it. “You’ll be functioning soon. You’re the first. You’re a miracle,” He
grunted, sounding envious. “Master!” He summoned.
My head ached, and I wanted to feel my legs, but I couldn’t, neither
could I feel my hands.
“Stop calling me, Master. You call everyone you work for that,” Another
man said to Hunchy, and then came to see me. He was young and looked a
lot like the European intruders, although he didn’t look as evil. He had
grown a beard, wore a white coat like a doctor’s, and held vellum in one
hand.
“How do you feel?” He asked me, showing concerned as if I were his
own child. He was genuine in a weird way. Was I in Hell?
“Where am I?” I noticed my voice sounded differently.
“You’re… alive,” The man said, and wrote something in his vellum,
before taking a long drag on his pipe.
“It’s a miracle, Master,” the hunchman said behind the flickering of his
gas lamp. “You did it. It worked,” the hunchmen began to cheer in his own
ugly way, walking around with his gas lamp, saying, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
“Shut up, Hunchy,” The Master said.
“I hate that name, Master. You know that. Pete was the one who invented
it,” said Hunchy. “I like to be called Igor. Eee-gor. I like the ‘gore’ in Igor.”
Hunchy cackled annoyingly.
“Rest for now,” the Master told me, ignoring the annoying Hunchy. “It
will take a while until you connect to your body parts,” He said, closing my
eyelids with his hands and I fainted again. “You’ve been connected to
electricity for nine months now, like a newborn. You’ll be fully alive soon,
recreated like a new character in a timeless book; you’re born out of the
writer’s imagination.” I heard him mumble as I drifted off again.
In the course of the following days, I started regaining sensation of my
body, but I still couldn’t move. It puzzled me that I hadn’t been feeling
hungry or thirsty. I was too tired to carry out a conversation, and my head
throbbed with pain.
Then one day the Master told me what really happened to me. I was
dead, and he performed a scientific procedure on me called Galvanism, an
experiment never practiced on a living being before, to revive me. He had
found my head—after the Queen’s huntsman had chopped it off– and gave
me somebody else’s body parts, and created a new me. He said he found me
a heart that wasn’t mine. It was a strong heart, although it hadn’t responded
to the rest of my body, yet.
None of this made sense, but all that mattered was that I was back from
the dead. This man played God on me, and although it left me oblivious to
who I was at the moment, I couldn’t refuse the gift of life – even if it was
cursed.
“Once your heart accepts the new body, you’ll be able to dream and
remember things, and you’ll be able to walk and see your reflection in a
mirror,” the Master said. “Until then, rest some more,” he smiled at me.
“You’re destined for great things, Rumpelstein. Great things. A character
like you will live on forever, and your name will be mentioned in famous
books.”
“Is that my name, Rumpelstein?” I moaned.
“Part of it, yes,” he nodded. “But I like this one better. Rumpelstein,” He
clenched his teeth and made a fist with his hand. “A powerful name for a
powerful creature—I mean, man. You’ll be strong, and your enemies will
fear you. No one will be able to stand in your way. Rest now. Once you
begin to dream again and retain memories, you’ll hopefully remember who
you are now, not who you were.”
I had memories? I thought I was just born? I didn’t know that this was
my second life. Have you ever remembered things that didn’t happen to
you? Then you might have been born where I lay helpless that day.
That night, my heart finally responded to my new body and I started
dreaming.
I dreamt of a little girl with long hair, spinning on a wheel. My
apparition brought a smile to her face, and her pink lips uttered a familiar
sound, “I told you, Rumpelstiltskin, I weaved amazing dreams for you.”
“Who are you?” I asked, still unable to fish memories out of my fuzzy
brain.
“I’m Rapunzel. I’m your daughter, and you’re alive again. You’ll avenge
me, father.”
I woke up in a rage, kicking and destroying everything in sight,
remembering my daughter, and thirsting for revenge. I knew who I was
then, and what had happened to me. Hunchy hid under a table, avoiding eye
contact with me. The Master stood in a far corner with a pipe in his mouth,
writing in his vellum, observing his new creation.
That’s when I accidentally caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror:
Ugly, scary, and deformed—a half living, half dead being. I was a
patchwork of body parts, an evil-looking creature.
“I will fix that,” The Master assured me. “I first needed to make sure it
would work. I will soon give you a comely, improved body. Rumplestein.”
“Don’t call me that!” I shouted. “I want to see my daughter.”
“So you remember?” He asked, revealing childish curiosity. “That’s
good. You’ll be free to do whatever you want to once you get better.”
Suddenly, the room echoed with shouts and thundering feet. Taken
aback, I neared the small window and gazed out into the garden: A
multitude had gathered outside the tower, carrying torches, and cursing my
new name and existence. These people constituted the local villagers of the
Kingdom of Sorrow, and they wanted me dead. The Queen, kidnapper of
my daughter and destroyer of lives, had sent its locals after me to put an end
to my being.
 What kind of life-after-death was that? I was a good man before, and I
died on my knees – but still a good man. I didn’t want to be resurrected into
a monster. I didn’t want to be hated. All I wanted was to save my daughter,
and I had, once again, failed.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” The Master said. “They’ll leave soon
enough. They can’t enter the windmill, and they don’t understand your
greatness,” He approached me and held me by the shoulder. “You’re
beautiful, Rumplestein. Do you understand that? They just can’t see it, yet.”
Night descended upon us, and the men began to tire, parting for their
humble abodes, but swearing they’d come back the next day, and the day
after, until my body lay dead on the ground.
Soon after, I succumbed to sleep, and the same vision of my daughter
manifested itself in my dreams, which made me long for her company even
more. She took my hand in hers and led me to a steep hill. On top of the
hill, I saw the Kingdom of Sorrow from a bird’s point of view, surrounded
by water on the South, West and East side. The North side was the icy
village I came from.
“Can you see how small the kingdom looks from up here?” Rapunzel
told me in the dream, the last dream she’d woven before she was
kidnapped, the dream that I thought I’d end up dreaming forever.
She was right about the kingdom. All the grandeur and power of the
kingdom seemed small compared to the world extending beyond the ocean,
visible from the summit.
“Don’t let evil change you, Rumpelstiltskin.” She said, patting my hand.
“Be strong. Don’t let them turn you into a Rumpelstein. Believe in your real
name, and it will grant you great powers. Be patient, for all that you’ve
suffered will be paid off,” My Rapunzel seemed to have grown wiser
beyond her years. “I sense war is imminent, Rumpelstiltskin, and only one
side will triumph.” She turned and walked away.
“Wait!” I yelled. Her small figure, now only a faint spot in the horizon of
her woven dream, was quickly dissipating. “I don’t care about wars. I don’t
care about the kingdom. I just want my daughter back. How can I find
you?” I asked desperately, not knowing if she were real or just a mere
pigment of my imagination.
“There’s a hard way to find me,” She said over her shoulder, her long
hair fluttering in the swirling wind, spinning like a spindle, weaving and
adorning the skies with stars and a silver moon. “Kidnap as many children
as you can. They have to be first-borns. Some of then carry the secret
location of my prison in their dreams. If you’re able to interpret the
children’s dreams, you’ll know where I am.”
“That seems unlikely,” I said. “There must be an easier way.” I wondered
why she couldn’t cut to the chase and tell me if there were easy way. Or
perhaps that was not her in my dream?
Her stare pierced into my soul.
“Is there an easy way, Rapunzel?”
“You might call it an easier way, while it’s the harder for most people.
But I will tell you about it,” She considered. “When you find yourself,
you’ll find me.” She said before fading into black.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, I wondered how she had seen
me in the dream. Did she see my repulsive, soulless figure?
I tried to walk and explore the tower that night, reflecting deeply on
Rapuzel’s words. Before I could decipher her message of how to find
myself, smoke invaded my nostrils. I ran toward the window and found
myself facing an ugly sight: the peasants of Sorrow were burning the tower
down.
They had caught the Master already, and there was no sign of Hunchy. I
was going to die in here – ironically, I was going to die for the second time
in my life.
Standing helpless in the middle of the fire, I met a man I’d never seen
before in my life. He was blonde and wore fancy clothes, and to my
surprise, fire didn’t seem to burn him.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I hate when someone asks me that question, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where do
you come from?’ ‘Do you come here often?’ You don’t want to sleep with
me, do you? It’s not so much who I am as to what I can do,” He answered
theatrically.
“Can you help me get out of here?”
“You just stole the words out of my mouth,” He chuckled and snapped
his fingers. “Everything comes with a price, hmm… except one thing, and
I’m not telling you what it is, considering I’d be letting go of a potential
sinner.”
“I don’t have any money.” I said.
 “Money is overrated, my friend. It’s easier to burn money than is it to
burn people,” His laugh was bittersweet; it almost sounded as though he
remembered an old memory. “People,” he uttered as if talking to himself for
a second. “Those awful creatures. Unlike me, they were created to kill and
do bad things, and yet get away with it,” He sighed.
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s nothing,” he waved a gloved hand in the air. I noticed he was richly
dressed too. “People pay with other things, more precious than money, and
I’m worth the payment. What I can do is usually beyond words.” He added.
“What does that mean? What are you doing here? And what is it that you
do?”
“Don’t worry about why I’m standing in the middle of a blazing fire. To
me, it feels kind of like bathing, and I’m very keen of getting showered all
day long. Let’s say I’m in the business of catching people… fallen people,
if that rings a bell?”
“I’m not falling.” I said, ignoring his comment about fire.
“Sure you are, Rumpelstein. I know all about you, your daughter, the
Queen of Sorrow, and those nasty people wanting to kill you because you’re
different. And if I were you – having been resurrected and such by a mad
Master – I’d take my revenge on the world. Revenge is good by the way. It
really feels good.”
“I’m a good man,” I insisted.
“Not a very good-looking one, though,” He raised an eyebrow and
sneered at me. “But we can always fix that. Looks are overrated, you too. In
fact, everything is overrated except one’s soul.”
“I’m not the kind who takes revenge, and if you can’t save me then leave
me alone,” I was about to be burned alive and there was no way out.
“Well,” The man leaned forward and winked at me. “We both know you
suck at being good. I mean, you really suck. You’re like a rat that refuses to
eat cheese, a squirrel swearing not to ever eat nuts, and a werewolf who
claims he turns into a cat under a full moon -- awful metaphors, I know. I’m
not a poetic person. So you couldn’t protect your family with all that hocus-
pocus goodness, could you?”
I lowered my head, ashamed. I was afraid it would fall off, as it felt a bit
loose.
 “No need to feel ashamed,” He waved his theatrical hands in the air like
a magician. “We’ve all tried to be good and failed. There’s nothing new to
that; it happens every day. Blame it on Mama and Papa, who insisted the
world was good when we were kids. But you’d be a fool if you don’t try to
be bad for a change. Who knows? You could be good at being bad, and it
could be your destiny,” He laughed.
“Who are you?”
“Asking the same question, again and again, are we? I’m the one who
could help you, and I can’t go on telling you all my names. Besides, what
matters is how I can help you. I can help you have a real body, infuse a soul
into the soulless thing you are. Take care of that arm. It looks like it’s
falling off, by the way. You haven’t been stitched well, my friend. Tortured?
Yes. Stitched? No. Stitching reminds me of your funny name. What was it?
Rumpelstitchkin?” He wiggled a forefinger in front of me. “Let me give you
a Faustian makeover, and don’t ask me what a makeover is.”
“I don’t want any of that. All I need is to find my daughter.” I said.
“You can’t find anything that the Queen of Sorrow has taken if you keep
playing good. Just look at you.”
“I know, I look awful,” I lowered my head, then raised it up again,
reminding myself that I didn’t want to risk it to fall.
The man started circling around himself and dancing with his loose
hands in the air. He was singing a song with a bad tune, “You’re so awful to
be true. I can’t take my eyes off of you,” then he suddenly stopped on his
own, as if he had forgotten I was watching him but then suddenly
remembered, feeling a bit embarrassed. He stopped and adjusted his tie,
“Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. You were not supposed to see that.”
“My daughter told me that I will find her if I find myself.” I said,
neglecting whatever this man was doing. We were in the middle of a fire,
and he was dancing. How should I have commented on that?
“Oh,” He pretended to rummage in his front pockets for a handkerchief.
“I’m sorry I don’t have you in here. You’re not here, not there. You’re
missing, my friend.”
The man had an uncanny way of making me feel bad. Suddenly, the idea
of revenge started to make sense. I was going to die in the fire, and I was
fed up with pretending – or insisting on being good and waiting for divine
interventions. I had to bargain for my life – well, my second one – before I
died.
“If I were you,” he said. “I’d feed them the same rubbish they fed me:
An eye for an eye, and all that crap. Didn’t your daughter tell you that if
you steal enough children you might find her whereabouts in their dreams?”
“What do you mean? And how do you know about the dream?”
“I mean they stole your daughter, and it’s not going to be easy to find
her. Until you do, how about you steal their firstborns? What if I gave you
the magic to be able to afford things for a certain price? What if I taught
you how to fool people into giving you their firstborns? All those people in
the Kingdom of Sorrow who humiliated you, and all those who stand
outside the tower now, waiting for your death? None of them has ever been
good to you. I don’t see the reason why you should be good to them.”
“I’m a good—“
“I know, I know. I heard it a million times. You’re a good and weak man.
Why am I even bothering? You think those people downstairs will let you
live unless you have a normal body, so they see you’re just like them? Be
smart and apply my wisdom in your life.”
“What’s your wisdom?” I asked, doubting that he had any.
“’If I can’t inspire love, I will cause fear’,” he said. “Well, it’s not mine.
I’m quoting a book, but you get the idea.”
“Alright,” I nodded, thinking that if I had a good body and soul, I could
at least find my daughter. “What do I have to do for you to help me?”
“It’s easy. You sign this,” He pulled out a book. “You have to sign it in
blood,” he followed, pinching me with his long fingernails. I didn’t bleed,
of course. I was just a thing. “Oh…no blood? We can solve that. Spit here.”
He pointed the spot where my signature should’ve been.
“Spit?”
“Spit! It works. Not everyone’s saliva is made up of the same
components. Didn’t you know that? Someone’s going to discover DNA
centuries from now. Besides, this is a damned contract so spitting might as
well be an appropriate thing to do.”
I signed his contract, and he gave me a ball of fire to swallow. He said it
belonged to an ancient god called Prometheus. It healed my body, and I
became a dead man walking, looking as if I was alive, with a new body that
no one could recognize. I escaped from one mad Master with another mad
someone…
What came after is complicated and too long to write in this diary. All I
can say is that each time I took a firstborn, I wished it would lead me to my
missing daughter. My anger and my powers clouded my judgment. Still, the
Queen of Sorrow kept my daughter away from me for reasons I still
couldn’t fathom. She never found out I was the man whose head she let her
huntsmen chop off. I was given a new and improved face and a body so
strong and big that put my old, scrawny-self to shame. And of course, it was
a goodbye to Rumpelstiltskin, and a welcome to Rumpelstein.
Years passed, memories of my daughter were pushed to the back of my
mind, and I gave in to my dark side. I even built a school in the Kingdom of
Sorrow, where students tended to mysteriously disappear. There was no
better place to kidnap firstborns. It didn’t matter that they were six or ten
years old, they had to be firstborns. Their disappearance tore their parents’
hearts out; but eased the fire in mine temporarily.
Having lost my true self, I accomplished nothing but becoming
Rumpelstein, the powerful and feared man. I often thought back to the most
important question I never got to ask the Master, my maker: Why did he
resurrect me? Why did he say I was destined for great things? In order to
seek an answer to my question, I had to reveal his name.
I searched day and night for him, and never found him. I even ended up
working for the Queen of Sorrow, betraying my daughter and the old
Rumpelstiltskin still living within me. I did it because I felt I had no other
choice. I suspected she could lead me to the Master, and my daughter as
well.
This was my life, crossing the shore of good men to the abyss of evil,
and nothing changed until today, when I saw the girl clad in a red cloak.
I was looking for a mad scientist in the forest of Sorrow when I saw her,
holding her scythe. When I tried to avoid her, she stopped me.
“Where the tick-tack-tock do you think you’re going?” She smiled
quirkily.
“Is it my time?” I asked. I had seen her in my dream when I died the first
time, so I knew she was Death.
She pulled out a small hourglass and placed it on the ground. “You’ve
got time until the sand flowing in between reaches its end,” she said. She
smiled and kept petting a scruffy cat on her shoulder. Her smile reminded
me of Rapunzel. Squirrels and other small animals were playing at her feet,
too. “You better make a wish or something, because time is tick-tick-
ticking.”
“Are you sure it’s me you’re looking for?” I asked, stalling Death,
She folded out a piece of paper and read it. “You’re Rum.. pel... stitl…
man your name is so hard to read, but I know it’s you. No one cheats
Death.”
“But my name is not Rumpelstiltskin,” I lied. “I’m Rumpelstein.”
“Yeah, and I’m the Wizard of Goose. Now get ready because I’m going
to chop your head off. Chop. Chop. Chop,” she waved her scythe in the air
as if it were a toy, and the squirrels squeaked happily around her. “Look, I
hate this job, so please let’s just get done with it. And here, I brought you
bread and cakes. You like cakes, right?”
“I do, but I don’t feel like it as I am going to die.”
“Hmm…” She sighed feeling genuinely sorry for me. “My name is
Ladle Rat by the way,” she stretched out a friendly hand.
“Please,” I sank to my knees. “I can’t die now. Not before I find my
daughter. I even sold my soul for her.”
“Yeah, I remember you,” She said, checking a coconut in her hand. She
tapped it twice and murmured, ‘awesome,’ to herself. “You’re the one who
was killed by the Queen’s huntsman.” She recapped.
I nodded, “I think I saw you right before I died. Or maybe I imagined
you.”
“No, it was me,” she picked something off from a tree and put it on her
tongue, only to spit it out a millisecond later. ‘Phew, tastes awful’ she
mumbled. “It was me. I was trying to save you from the Shadow. It wasn’t
right for you to die then. It was before your time. I tried to save you, but I
couldn’t.”
“Then, save me this time,” I begged. She was a young girl, a year or so
older than my daughter, but since I saw her when I died the first time, I
knew she could kill me in an instant, as long as my time was up.
“I saw your daughter that day,” she chose her words carefully. “She is
beautiful, and her hair, oh my God, is so stunning. That long silky hair. I
wish my hair were as good. I heard she could spin dreams for children. Is
that true?”
 I nodded, not really feeling I was in front of Death.
“It’s so sad that the Queen took her.” She made a sad face.
“Have you seen her since then?” If the answer was yes, I was willing to
die.
“No,” She wiped off her scythe with her red cloak as if sharpening a
knife. “Any girl that dares enter the Queen’s castle is never heard from
again. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be able to escape after I kill her when her
time comes. Tell you what? I’ll let you go.” She said casually, laughing to a
squirrel tickling her neck.
“Really, why?”
“To find your daughter, and then I’ll finish you off. Don’t try to play
games. The Tree of Life will tell me when you find your daughter.”
“But aren’t you defying the rules by letting me live?”
“Wasn’t the Queen defying the rules of life when she let you die?” She
winked. “I have to break rules from time to time. You can’t expect me to do
all the work accurately. Besides, you talk to much and you will waste my
time. I have to get back to my beloved. So I will do this for your daughter
because she deserves to be saved,” She stopped talking for a while, “and for
you, too.”
“Why for me?”
“I don’t know, but that day when your daughter was kidnapped, I
thought you were a good man, Rumpelstein. You still have time to turn over
a new leaf. And by the way, your Maker is dead. I know you were looking
for him.”
“What?”
“He’s buried up that hill. I saw you asking around so I thought I’d tell
you.”
My heart raced as my eyes traveled up the hill. I didn’t understand how a
maker could die. Who was supposed to tell me why I was made? At least I
had a shot at finding out his name.
“Hey,” Death told before I climbed up. “You know where the market is?
I need to get a Goblin Fruit for Wolf, or he will get so hungry, he’ll eat me.”
“Who’s Wolf?” I furrowed my brows. “And why is it that Death doesn’t
know the way to the market?”
“I’m Death, not Columbus—or Nostradamus!”
“I suppose Death isn’t afraid of the Goblins in the market.”
 “You supposed right,” He waved her scythe. “Now where is it?”
I took her to the market, and turned back in direction of the hill. With
every breath, my heart palpitated, and I kept wondering who my maker was.
Would his name mean anything to me?
I climbed and climbed, panting, until I was finally standing in front of
the only tombstone in the cemetery. It started to rain and I knelt down to
read the name of the man who had stitched me together back to life for
reasons beyond my knowledge.
Once I read his name, tears escaped my eyes. It was sad that tears mixed
with rain were indiscernible. They reminded me of my identity, just another
lost tear in the rain that no one paid attention to. The name I read on the
tombstone didn’t mean anything to me at that time. However, deep down, I
was hoping that if I dug up my maker’s name, he would magically appear
and we would sit around the same table discussing the reasons for my
creation.
Later, when I knew whose name it was, I was even more puzzled. I felt
as though I was a character in a book, created by the author’s imagination.
It was as though I wasn’t real, not a human being expecting people to
believe in him. But how can this be when I feel so alive?
The name on my Maker’s tomb read: Jacob Carl Grimm.

End of Grimm Diary Prequel #9

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 Author’s Notes:

1) I always found the name Rumpelstiltskin funny, never

understood whether he was evil or good, and never knew why he
traded for first-borns in the original Brothers Grimm texts. This back
story doesn’t tell everything about him. Besides, we know that
sometimes characters don’t tell the truth in the diaries.

2) The meaning behind the Rumpelstiltskin’s name that was

mentioned here is true.

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 Jawigi

The Grimm Diaries Prequels #10

by Cameron Jace
Edited by Bethany M. Rosser & Danielle Littig

Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the author.

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 Jawigi
As told by Sandman Grimm
Ink Keeper of Dreams & Sealer of the Books of Sand

Dear Diary,

A wise man once said the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to
convince the world he was someone else…
I’ve always wondered why people believed the things they are told, or
read. If you start your tale with a phrase like: ‘Once upon a time…’ they
expected a ‘Happily Ever After’ ending. If you start with: ‘It was dark and
stormy night…’ they begin looking for a monster under the bed.
It’s as if we are all expected to be predictable, molded after the way
other people want to see us; as if their prejudicial eyes are the definite truth
that shapes each tale while our side of the story is only lies.
Come to think of it, every tale we’ve ever been told was some form of
a lie, even the true ones. It’s part of our human nature. We love lies, we
cherish them, and even worse, we retell them. Only under one condition:
the lies have to be beautiful, enchanting, and entertaining. Our heroes in the
tales are sent deep down to the pits of hell, only to resurface again – and
probably kiss the one who holds the key to true love.
And by that, the stories have to be predictable. You know who the
villain is, who the hero is, then two-hundred-and-some pages later, the hero
always wins.
Skip. Next book, same story, only a little different!
The story I am about to tell you is far from being predictable, and by
the end of this diary, you’ll know what I mean. I’ll shock the wicked apples
out of your sore throat, because even before I start my tale, I know who you
are. Yes, you, the reader of the Books of Sand. You’d be surprised how
predictable you are, and I dare you to know the ending of this one.
Take the Queen of Sorrow’s tale for example. Whenever I mention her
in a diary, readers boo at every syllable of her name, prejudicing her
without even knowing her real name or where she came from.
 But who was I to say? I was just an Ink Keeper of Dreams, a Sealer of
Books made of Sand, a simple librarian of sorts with the job of collecting
and authenticating the diaries of the immortal fairy tale characters every one
hundred years. I was like a book you ripped apart, only because when you
read it the story didn’t flow the way you wanted. Instant anger had always
been humans’ most uncontrollable sin. You hated the book without even
thinking it was only a messenger, and it did not interfere in the destinies of
the characters between its folds. It only recited things after they had
happened.
So, should I start with, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’? I think I
should. Now you know where this story is heading…
It was a dark and stormy night at a secluded Inn at the end of the
world. I had hardly made my way through the storm covering the Black
Forest. I reached the Inn two days after risking my own death. It was one of
the scariest places in the Kingdom of Sorrow.
A black silken cloak under a brown fur coat shielded my skin from the
dread of the sinister cold. My long white beard had caught snowflakes, and
it was almost hard to move my frozen eyelids when I arrived.
At the door of the Inn, my personal raven found me and rested on my
shoulder. I stretched my back and entered the cave, pretending the journey
was as easy as pouring sand into children’s eyes while they’re sleeping – a
side job I still did next to being the Ink Keeper.
The Inn was dark and silent. A couple of glasses clicked in an unseen
dark corner, and a lonely man sat at the bar with his back to me. I smirked.
He was the man I came to see.
“Jacob,” I patted him on the back as I climbed the high chair next to
him.
Slowly, he turned back to me with heavy eyelids, trying his best to
pretend he was sober.
“Sandman Grimm,” Jacob smiled wearily. “Didn’t know you for a man
who drinks.”
“I didn’t know you for a drunk,” I patted him again. “I couldn’t believe
when they told me you’re here at the edge of the world, drinking yourself to
sleep.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Jacob said. “You’re the Sandman. Your
life is a big fairy tale, pouring sand in the eyes of children and lulling them
to sleep. I bet you have no problem sleeping,” he leaned a bit forward.
“Because I bet you don’t have nightmares like me.”
I didn’t want to comment; little did he know about me. Believe me,
little did he know about me. I wondered why no one ever wondered about
who poured sand into the Sandman’s eyes when he slept, but that is another
story.
“I have nightmares, Sandman.” Jacob pounded his drink against the
wooden bar, alarming the Innkeeper, a hairy boy with thick sideburns who
was just cleaning the glasses. “Night. Mares. Dark, horrible, and creepy
nightmares.” Jacob explained.
“I can see that,” I said flatly. Jacob looked weary and tired like I had
never seen him before. He laughed as if he were mocking himself. Like a
sinner playing Russian roulette, leaving his fate in the hands of a gun
because he didn’t really know if he was good or evil.
“Aren’t you the Sandman?” He said, as if the previous conversation
didn’t happen, and he just saw me entering the Inn.
“I am.” I nodded at his silly question.
“Then can you lay me down to sleep?” He patted me heavily on the
shoulder. “Pray the lord my soul to keep?” Now he was just a drunk man
singing. “And if I die before I wake?” his eyes moistened and he even
repeated it, “If I die before I wake, Sandman. Pray the lord my soul to take.”
“Take it easy, Jacob. I’m not surprised you have nightmares. Most
writers do.”
“Are you calling me a writer?” He smirked at his own question.
“You’re the Jacob Carl Grimm,” I said. “You’ll be remembered and
cherished in the world – well, not our world, but the human world.”
“I shouldn’t be remembered or cherished, and I’m not a writer. I’m a
forger of tales, killer of characters, and manipulator of histories.” He
lowered his voice again, staring toward the unseen people clicking their
glasses in the corner. “People think I collected the tales for the children,
Sandman. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Look at what we have just
done today.”
“Well, that had to be done.” I said, “We all know why. Don’t be so hard
on yourself.”
“Do we?” He eyed me.
“Do we what?”
 “Do we all know why I forged the tales?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I felt irritated, not only by his rather
quirky question, but because there was that silver candlestick behind the Inn
Keeper. It had a reflective surface that bothered me. I hated mirrors, not
always, but today I hated them, and I didn’t want to see my reflection in this
one so I adjusted my place a little.
“Look at me,” Jacob demanded. “I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know, Jacob.” I shook my shoulders. “I’m just a Sandman
who’s got a new responsibility is to seal those diaries. You were the one
who forged the tales. You must’ve had your own reasons.” I didn’t want to
tell him that I questioned a lot of the tales; things that didn’t make sense,
but I wasn’t here for that, so I passed. I was here for something more
important.
“True,” Jacob lowered his head. I didn’t know if he were passing out or
feeling ashamed. I have always heard he was a pleasant man, a trustable
mentor to many other writers, but he didn’t look so at the moment. He was
changing. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” he raised his head but I wasn’t
sure he was looking at me. “The truth is I don’t really know what the truth
is.”
“That’s a rather confusing sentence you just said.”
“It is, and it has to be, because I forged the tales I was told. Can you
believe that? I forged tales that I collected from others. Could it be those
who told me the tales lied, too?” He sounded sincere.
“But you must have collected some evidence or why did you do it?”
“Of course I did,” He said. “I’ve looked darkness in the eyes, and I
don’t think it has taken its eye off me since.”
“You mean…” I shrugged. “The Queen of Sorrow? Snow White?
Who?”
“I mean whatever I mean,” He patted me as if protecting me from the
evil surroundings in the air. “I don’t want you to know much about this.
You better stay the Sandman you are, a gentle and caring man who pours
sand in children’s eyes.”
“But I will know the truth eventually when I start collecting the
diaries.” I smiled, proud of myself for being handed such a job by
Morpheus, the King of the Dreamworld.
 “That’s going to happen a hundred years from now,” Jacob said. “For
now, I’d like you to be just as caring and loving as you are, because once
you read the diaries, your life will truly change.”
“For the better or worse?”
“That’s something that you’ll have to decide. The stories are made for
the reader to decide. Not even the most skilled forger can fool you as a
reader,” He chuckled at himself wearily, stressing on the forger word. He
even picked up the candlestick, checking a tooth in its reflection for a
second. I leaned back so its surface didn’t reflect my face, then I tightened
the cloak around my head. Those damn mirrors.
“So why are you here, Sandman,” Jacob said, putting the candlestick
back. “Checking up on old Jacob Grimm?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“That’s sad. I thought you cared about me,” He leaned forward with a
funnier drunk face. “Can you tell me what dream you poured in my eyes
when I was a kid?” It astonished me that it was a sincere question. “Was it
the one where I rode a coach with a beautiful woman who turned into a frog
when I kissed her?”
I was about to burst into laughter because it was definitely a sincere
question.
“I’m here to ask you about what you did with Morpheus,” I said firmly
and shrugged. “Did everything go well with cursing the fairy tale
characters?”
Jacob’s eyebrows furrowed, “What kind of question is that?” He leaned
back. “Don’t you know we did? Didn’t you meet Morpheus?”
“I didn’t have a chance to meet him yet. I came from a long travel,” I
said. “I just heard that he has assigned me to seal the Book of Sand after a
hundred years. I read a few of the shorter diaries, which Morpheus
suspected were lies, and will not be taken into account of the main books a
hundred years from now. I could go ask him if that bothers you.”
“It’s alright,” Jacob patted me again and smiled. “You’re such a sweet
man, naïve, but a good man at heart. I’ll tell you what you want to know.
Morpheus did bury all the nasty characters from my books in the
Dreamworld.” He laughed again with pain oozing from his chest.
“And?”
 “It wasn’t an easy process. All that magic stuff, spells, and rules of the
Dreamworld, but the curse has been cast.”
“How?” I wondered. “I heard many of them are still awake.”
“The curse takes seven days to work,” Jacob said. “We just cast it
yesterday. A number of Dream Hunters will bury each character in their
dreams with their own ways. I was told it’s going to be a vicious hunt.”
“You have any idea how the Dream Hunters do that?”
“No,” Jacob shook his head. “We’re not entitled to know. It’s a secret
art,” Jacob lowered his head to whisper again. “The Dreamhunters work for
Heaven,” he explained. “They’re half human, half angels, and Morpheus
said we weren’t supposed to know more about them.”
“Interesting,” I rubbed my chin. “So it’s all set as you desired to get rid
of them.”
“Not all that easy, though,” Jacob considered, acting as if sober again.
“The curse itself isn’t like I thought it would be.”
“How so?”
“Morpheus said a curse that large comes with consequences. He said
the universe demands balance in situations like these.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He said although the curse will bury them in their dreams, they will be
able to wake up every hundred years for a certain amount of time.”
“Is that necessary?”
“It’s all about the balance Morpheus was talking about. It has to be this
way. He explained something about alchemy, but I didn’t get it.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “In alchemy, you can’t use a
spell to create something unless you give something back. It’s a universal
rule in magic and curses. Equilibrium of the lost and found.”
“If you say so,” Jacob drank up. “The problem is what happens if they
come back? Can they manipulate history? Can they change roles? Can they
break the curse? Or worse, can they tell the world about what really
happened? It’s such an irrational rule. I didn’t like it.”
“What about Wilhelm? Did he like it?” I asked, knowing that Wilhelm
had a soft spot toward the characters. He had always loved them and
believed that many of them were good, only misunderstood.
“Wilhelm liked it, of course. I’m afraid that my brother and I are more
of enemies when it comes to the way we look at the curse. You know how
he keeps insisting on adding small lines in the forged tales; lines that hint to
the truth.”
“He does?” I wondered.
“Always. Each fairy tale we collected or forged contains riddles to the
truth. He even started spreading lullabies all over the Kingdom of Sorrow
that also hinted at the truth.”
“Lullabies?”
“They call them Nursery Rhymes now, little song that hint to the truth
of historical incidents, only disguised as children’s happy rhymes. It’s a
smart trick of Wilhelm if you ask me. Children love these rhymes, and sing
them all the time. This way Wilhelm guaranteed the rhymes will live on
forever, century after century.”
“Wilhelm has always been smart, but why did you approve of such a
thing?”
“I couldn’t stop him. Morpheus was at his side all the time. Like I said,
he demanded balance. If we were allowed to forge the tales, then there had
to be clues as well. It’s the Dreamworld rules.”
“I understand,” I nodded. “So was that all? I mean I still don’t
understand what the conflict is exactly, but I take it that I will when I read
the diaries. I read something about the Jar of Hearts in one of the single
entry diaries. Do you know about that?”
Jacob seemed sober all of a sudden, and pulled me from my cloak.
“Don’t ever talk about what you don’t know about. Unless you read the full
diaries, don’t ever mention the Jar of Hearts,” Jacob’s eyes shifted to the
dark corner again. “Did you hear me?” He whispered, looking back at me.
“Alright,” I couldn’t shake myself from his strong grip. “You make it
sound like the Holy Grail.”
“You don’t get it. It’s far more important than the Holy Grail. You are
asking me too many questions that you shouldn’t. It’s easier for you to meet
Morpheus and learn from him, and leave me with the guilt that’s eating me
up.”
“I still have one question though,” I said, reluctantly while Jacob still
gripped my cloak. I was a stubborn old man.
“You don’t give up. Do you, Mr. Sandman?”
“I want to know the name of the Dreamworld Morpheus created for
you?”
 “Why would you want to know that?” Jacob eyed me suspiciously.
“Can you just answer me, please?” I said, avoiding that candlestick’s
reflective surface again. “I’m trying to learn everything about this world.
It’s my responsibility to seal the diaries later. Hearing the point of views of
different sources will always help me get the picture, and make up my mind
about what is true and what is false. So please help me. I don’t know when I
will be seeing you again.”
“If you weren’t the Sandman I always loved, I wouldn’t tell you. But I
understand your eagerness to know as much as you can,” Jacob drank
again. I didn’t think he’d have told me more if he weren’t drunk. “It’s called
Jawigi.”
“Jawigi?”
“Yes,” Jacob said. “And you’re not going to ask me what it means and
how the name was constructed. I told you enough already.”
“Of course not,” I fidgeted a little, although I needed to know badly. “I
know all about the power of names, and I know the power of the
Dreamworld’s names lies in knowing what the names really mean. Some
names could be read backwards, some names are anagrams, some names
are referencing to ancient languages like Latin, and some names are
abbreviations of some sort. If solved, you know the meaning behind the
name. Thus, control its power and have access to the dreams of those who
were cursed.”
“That’s right, Uncle Sandy. You don’t mind me calling you that,” He
leaned forward again and whispered to me through his fingers, “It’s an
abbreviation of some sort. Ja. We. Gi. Each two letters are an abbreviation
of a word. Happy now?” He winked then leaned back. “But don’t expect me
to tell you what it is.”
“I understand,” I nodded. I looked around, especially at the dark corner.
“Knowing the real name of a Dreamworld is a dangerous thing, and we
wouldn’t want the curse to be broken, not after all you went through to do
that.”
“That’s right,” Jacob asked the Innkeeper for another drink.
“We wouldn’t want Snow Whi—“
“Stop!” Jacob turned to me, with furious eyes this time. “I don’t want
to hear anything about these stories anymore.”
“I understand,” I nodded again, still wanting to ask more questions.
 I watched Jacob drink for a while, not uttering a word. How was I
going to get him to listen to me?
“You know I’ve been reading the single entries in the diaries, right?
The ones I heard are called Prequels.” I said.
“Cut to the chase, Sandman,” Jacob said. “You just told me that
already. If you go on reading and believing every written word, you’ll get
confused even more.”
“Yes, I know. Just bear with me. I know you don’t want to talk about
them, but I just wondered if you read a certain entry.”
“Which one is that?” Jacob said impatiently.
“The one about the Queen of Sorrow.”
“She wrote a dozen of those, and most of them were lies.” Jacob said.
“The one where she describes the day Snow—I mean her daughter—
was born.”
“What?” Jacob squinted. “There is a diary entry of that incident?”
“Not just that,” I explained. “It’s a diary that puzzled me more and
more about the whole thing. I could read it to you if you like. It’s not that
long.”
Jacob gave me a puzzling look. Curiosity showed on his face, although
he had just been finished with the curse and didn’t want to hear about it.
“Look, Sandman,” Jacob pointed at his drinking bottle. “My bottle is
half full. You read it to me while I drink. If I finish my drink before you do,
I’ll leave and you’ll not see me again for sometime. And I will make you
pay for my drinks, too. So make it quick and read the damned diary.”
“I will,” I said and put my crescent glasses on. “Once upon a time…”
“Don’t feed me that nonsense,” Jacob interrupted. “I invented that
‘Once upon a time’ phrase. Just get into the matter.”
“But this is how the diary begins.” I pleaded.
“There is only one true ‘Once upon a time’ sentence, Sandman. You
know what that is? It goes like this, ‘Once upon a time, fairy tales were
goddamn dark and twisted, and that was when they were so awesome!’”
Jacob laughed hysterically, pounding the bar again, then clicking his bottle
with the Innkeeper’s glass. I even heard a soft laugh coming from the dark
corner in the Inn.
Jacob was drinking faster, so I decided I was going to read him the
Queen’s diary, neglecting whatever he would do to interrupt me again.
 Here is what I read on behalf of the Queen of Sorrow…

I screamed in pain as the doctor’s calash stopped outside the gates of

my castle. I was in my royal bed, and my beloved husband, the King of
Sorrow, cringed as he looked out the window. He loved me dearly. My pain
was his pain, and I knew he couldn’t stand looking at me while I was
suffering.
It was best for him to look out the window, watching the doctor
arriving amidst the snow. Moments later, my husband turned back to me
with a smile. The doctor had come.
I hardly nodded while I pressed tightly on my servant’s hands, trying my
best to fight the pain in my back. My bones were almost breaking from the
pain as they watched me with worried and sympathizing faces. Every
muscle in my body trembled as I arched my back again against the pain.
The servants advised me to bite on a pillow. I did, but it was useless, and I
ended up screaming, which only increased the pain and left me breathless.
Previous doctors had advised me to inhale slowly in four counts and let
the air out again. I tried, but it was impossible. Those damn doctors were
useless, too. There was no way I could breathe steadily with this pain
tearing me apart. Instead, I found myself breathing faster, irregularly, like
panting dogs and dying fishes.
I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror on the wall, unable to believe it
was me in there. I used to be the most beautiful in the kingdom, but no
more. I looked insane, bewitched, and older all of a sudden, swimming in
my sweat as my nightgown stuck to my body.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the mirror, because I saw a dark future
waiting for me. It showed on my face. I was afraid of the unknown, which
had manifested itself into the daughter I was about to give birth to.
Eerie images flooded my thoughts. I was imagining her being born in the
most gruesome ways, bursting out of my guts and splitting me apart.
Although I knew what kind of monster I was pregnant with, I wanted her
more than anything in the world. I had sacrificed everything precious to me
to have her, and I was determined to have her.
“Hold on, dear,” said my husband. “The doctor has finally arrived. He
should have a solution.”
 “Which one?” I screamed. “You’ve sent for many, and none of them
were helpful.”
“His name is Frederich Van Helsing,” said the king. “He is Dutch, but he
was born in Lohr in Germany.”
“Lohr?” I managed to ask, still breathing like a maniac. My husband was
born in Lohr, although his ancestors were Hungarian.
The king stopped for a moment, gazing at the servants, afraid they’d
know more than they should about us.
“Don’t worry,” I ached, and gripped my two servant’s hands tighter.
“They are trusted.”
My husband had been absent for months, leading an epic war against the
intruders trying to breach into the kingdom.
“In that case, you should know that Van Helsing knows about us, too. He
knows what she is,” He meant my yet-to-be-born daughter. “He has been
studying others like her all over Europe, and he is also literate. He knows
about the prophecies.”
At the time, Europe was threatened by what the locals called the
‘Vampire Craze’, an unexplained phenomenon about people returning from
the graves as blood sucking creatures.
Minutes later, Doctor Van Helsing entered the chamber. He was short
with broad shoulders and a heavy German accent.
“Mein Gott,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet you, your
highness.” He addressed my husband, for he was a legend all over Europe;
a scary version of a legend, but unforgettable as well.
“We have no time for that,” My husband said. “Call me Angel, please.”
He shook Van Helsing’s hand, then patted it gently with the other, as if
discreetly begging Van Helsing to save me.
“I could never allow myself, addressing your highness with your first
name,” Van Helsing bowed his head, still not taking off his hat.
“Stop the formalities,” Angel said firmly, sending a flicker of fear into
Van Helsing’s short soul. “I am glad you made it. How many days and
nights did it take you to arrive?” It was Angel’s most imminent attribute,
frightening someone one minute then being tender the next.
“Twenty one days and nights, My King,” Van Helsing couldn’t bring
himself to say his name. “We sailed in Demeter, the bravest ship in the sea.
I consulted with other doctors in Europe first then boarded on a ship from
Spain and crossed over the ocean. I spent a week on the land until I arrived
at the Kingdom of Sorrow.”
“Did you meet my father?” the king wondered with worried eyes.
“No harm, My King. He doesn’t know I am here. If he did, I would have
been dead by now.” Van Helsing turned to me and took off his hat.
Even in dark moments like these, mentioning Angel’s father sent shivers
to my servants’ spines.
Van Helsing broke the tension in the room by turning back to me, “I am
honored, My Queen.” He said, taking off his hat.
“Please help ease my pain!” I screamed at him.
“But of course.” He said.
Frederich Van Helsing started examining me after partially sedating me
with a golden apple’s syrup, which he claimed was his own invention. I
almost fainted for some minutes before he made me drink what he called
Mermaidala, a blue drink he had brought along from Europe. He said it was
mermaid’s blood – it was supposedly blue, the color of the ocean. I didn’t
question him for I had seen crazier things in my short life of twenty years,
and I pleaded for anything that could ease my pain.
“So?” Angel asked Van Helsing. “Can you ease my wife’s pain?”
“I am sorry,” said Frederich absently, thinking about something. “This
might be beyond my expertise.”
“What do you mean?” Angel roared. Frederich took a step back. Even in
my pain, I feared my husband’s rage. “I sent for you from all over the world
because you are the expert.”
“Bear with me, My King,” said Frederich. “The only way for your wife
to live is to give up on that baby, and even that is almost impossible since
she is about to deliver at any minute.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Angel looked confused.
Van Helsing took a slow step back toward Angel, and asked him to talk
in private. I saw them walk to a corner of the chamber. Angel got furious
upon Van Helsing’s suggestion, which I couldn’t hear.
The only thing I heard was the words, ‘Queen Bathory’. I wasn’t sure but
it seemed like Van Helsing was connecting my daughter’s birth to the rise
of this Queen Bathory.
“Who is Queen Bathory?” I screamed at Angel. “And what is this doctor
telling you?”
 “What are you talking about?” Angel approached me, and knelt by the
bed, holding my hand. I knew he was lying about Queen Bathory, but I was
willing to listen to what he had to say. “Van Helsing says he can save you,”
Angel shrugged. “Only if you let go on our daughter.”
“What?” I shrieked in a mix of pain and astonishment. “How could you
say so, Angel?”
“I know,” He kissed my hand. “I want her more than you do, but I could
end up losing both of you.”
“I am not going to give up on our daughter,” I said. “I don’t care if I
die.”
“The problem is that you both could die,” Angel explained. “Remember
when we thought you were pregnant with twins?” It was true. When I first
got pregnant, the king’s doctors had thought they were twins. “Van Helsing
says it was true. The doctors weren’t mistaken. Our daughter…” Angel
shrugged again. For a fierce warrior like him, these were too many shrugs.
“Our daughter, what? Continue.” I pleaded.
“She ate up her twin,” Angel couldn’t meet my eyes.
“I don’t believe that!” I shrieked again. “Did Van Helsing tell you that
now? And who is Bathory?”
“There is no Bathory,” Angel said, pressing on my hand. “You misheard.
What matters now is you. I can’t live without you, and you know what our
daughter is.”
“So she could be one of those Vampires, I don’t care,” I said. “I will
bring my daughter to the world. She is my daughter. I don’t care about
prophecies. My daughter deserves a chance to…”
“She is not exactly a vampire, my Queen,” Van Helsing felt the need to
interfere. “She is,” Van Helsing reconsidered, as if he remembered to stop
himself from uttering the word.
“She is what?” I demanded.
“She will kill you all,” Van Helsing said slowly, then added, “My
Queen,” he lowered his head, refusing to tell me what the prophecy said
about my daughter. “I can save you, My Queen, but you have to give up on
her.”
“I am not going to give up on her!” I turned back to Angel with pleading
eyes.
 A sudden knock came on the door, interrupting us. It was one of the
huntsmen.
“They are here, My King,” The huntsman said with worried eyes.
“Who is here?” I asked.
“They must have followed me,” Van Helsing said.
“Who is here?” I screamed again. “The intruders?”
“Not exactly, My Queen,” said the huntsman. “They sent their panthers.”
“Oh, my!” The two servants gave up on me, shrieking.
“The black panthers, My Queen,” Van Helsing said. “They are here to
kill you and the King. My assumption is that when the intruders failed in
breaching the enchanted boarders, they sent their panthers that are capable
of going anywhere.”
Angel looked me in the eyes. “Are you sure you want to keep her?” He
said, tightening his grip on my hands.
“I will not give up on my daughter!” I screamed one more time. How
many times did I have to shout it out? I was the Queen! Why didn’t anyone
obey me in this room? “I don’t care about black panthers, and I will fight
until my last breath.”
“As you say, My Queen,” Angel said to me, honoring my wish. “And I
will fight with you for our daughter. There is only one way to give birth to
her.”
“But, My King. She is a monster…” Van Helsing tried to say.
“I don’t care if she is the devil himself,” Angel roared. “She is my
daughter. We will take her to the Black Forest. I know a safe place by the
Avalon Tree. Pomona will protect us there,” Angel stood up and ordered the
servants to help me walk to the carriage, a special one with bars on the
windows, which was used in the wars.
As they pulled me out of bed, the pain was starting to become
unbearable. I gripped Van Helsing’s sleeve on my way out. “If you want to
be useful, then tell me what I should do to bring this baby into the world.”
“What do you mean?” he looked puzzled.
“What is the most important thing I should keep doing no matter what
happens to me? If I get stabbed or decapitated, is there still something I
could do to help her birth while I am dying? I don’t want to waste one
second as long as I live that I hadn’t tried enough to make that happen.”
 “I don’t know what you’re talking about, My Queen,” said Van Helsing.
“If you get killed, do you still expect your body to deliver the baby?”
“If that’s possible, yes. And if it’s not possible, and it’s considered a
miracle, I’d like to try it.” I ached in pain as the servants tried to pull me out
of the chamber.
“I don’t think I have an answer for that. I am sorry,” Van Helsing said.
“She is a monster, My Queen. She doesn’t deserve this love from you,” Van
Helsing burst out.
“No one is destined to become a monster, you awful and useless
physician,” I said, loosening my grip, and allowing the servants to take me
to the carriage.
On my way out, Van Helsing felt the need to say something, “Breathe!”
he said.
“What?” I screamed back.
“Breathe, My Queen. Breathe. As long as you do your very best to
breathe, you will be able to give birth to her.”
Later, Angel tucked me back in the carriage.
“You will be safe here,” he said. “I will be riding the carriage. I had
designed with a barred door for an occasion like this. These are two of my
best horses,” he pointed at the front of the carriage. “They are unicorns
actually, and they will get us there.”
“Unicorns?” Although I was in great pain, I had never seen a unicorn in
my life before. I never knew they existed in the first place. With all the
magic that surrounded us, and with all I knew about my husband’s past,
unicorns were always the one myth that was actually a myth. Seeing them
for the first time, pulling my husband’s carriage, which he had apparently
designed exclusively for such an occasion, made me want to go out in the
snow and watch them with my own eyes.
But the pain, as sharp a spear, hit me in the back again and then my
daughter kicked me from inside out. I let out a horrible scream.
“She really wants to come out to the world,” Angel looked dazed,
watching my stomach. “There are two other carriages behind us. They will
be of great help,” he said to me, waking up from his daydreaming about our
daughter. Angel was an alert leader, and distraction didn’t linger long onto
his consciousness. “When the panthers show up, don’t show any fear.
Understood?” He told me, “They feed on our fear. You just keep breathing,
my love. Just keep breathing. I’ll take care of the rest.”
His words had already set my lungs on fire, breathing in and out, and
remembering that this was what Van Helsing had said. I reached for Angel’s
hand before he closed the barred door. “Take care of yourself, my love.”
“I will,” he kissed me on the forehead. “I will kill every single panther
they send after me. Our daughter will be born today.”
The carriage took off, and I fell from the bunk to the floor, unable to
keep balance. The fall increased my suffering, and I started breathing
hysterically once I heard the sound of the panthers padding on the snow
outside.
On my knees, I looked out and back. It was a mistake to look. The
panthers were swift with reddened eyes, and they had already killed
everyone in the first carriage following us. Blood splattered on the snow,
red trails of liquid spreading on the white of the ground, and followed by
the black panthers. The three colors hurt my eyes for some reason. Part of it
was reminding me of Angel’s past. We had seen these three colors hunting
us before, giving us nightmares for the rest of my life. I hated them. Red,
White, and Black: Blood, Snow, and Panthers.
I screamed, holding the bars with my hands. Another mistake. The
panthers diverted their gaze toward me.
As they ran after our carriage, birds fluttered away from the trees. The
most imminent sound was the panther’s heavy breathing.
Breathe, Queen of Sorrow. You have to breathe. Your daughter’s life
depends on it.
I kept breathing, more like panting, as the panthers followed us.
Angel was a master in controlling the unicorns, and they were fast, and
did not lose breath. Looking through the bars, I glimpsed part of their
fabulous bodies, and wondered if they could kill these panthers with their
horns, or maybe they could fly this carriage high to the full moon above.
The panthers started jumping, hitting against the carriage with their
bodies. I didn’t know if they did this to scare me or if they thought they
could actually breach through to me.
I didn’t even understand what they wanted exactly. Were they sent by the
intruders to kill us because we were at war with them: if so, why tonight?
 In the distance, I heard the howling of wolves. I wondered if they were
warning us, or if they feared the panthers.
“Keep on breathing, love!” Angel screamed from outside, whipping the
snow away as the unicorns took off even faster. I heard a panther moaning
and thudding to the ground. That had to be Angel. He killed it with his
sword, I assumed.
Curiously, I neared the bars again to get a glimpse of my husband’s
courageous endeavor. A panther jumped right in front of me, its paws
holding to the bars as if it were human, staring at me with reddened eyes.
Again, I fell on my back.
The first thing I did was check up on my daughter by touching my belly.
“You’re going to be alright, Snow White,” I whispered to her in my belly.
Angel and I had agreed on her name earlier. Her name was more of an
epitaph of a memory we cherished in our past. “I will not let them hurt
you.”
With my hand on my belly, I suddenly remembered what Angel had said
about me having had twins; that one of them fed on the other. Could that be
true? How did one of my daughters kill the other in my belly?
You will have to investigate that later, Queen of Sorrow. Right now,
breathe! Just breathe.
Still lying on my back, I saw there was a rifle in the carriage. I reached
to pick it up and shoot the panthers, helping Angel.
But I was too late.
I heard a heavy thud to the ground, followed by Angel’s screaming.
Standing up and holding onto the bars again, I peeked outside and saw
Angel sprawled on his back above the snow.
The unicorns continued their escape, though, pulling me in the carriage
along.
“Angel!” I screamed, holding the bars with my hands like a prisoner
pleading for her innocence. “Beware!”
Some of the panthers were approaching Angel while he lay unconscious
on the ground. They were going to cut him into pieces.
I kept breathing hysterically, unable to think, only knowing that I was in
the hands of the unicorns whom I supposed knew the way into the Black
Forest and the Avalon Tree.
 It was only minutes until we entered the Black Forest, so I assumed the
Unicorns were trained. I didn’t know if they were capable of surviving the
panther attacks, though.
Breathe, Queen of Sorrow. Breathe. Let fate take care of your
destination. Your job is to breathe until the time comes to deliver Snow
White, which is only minutes from now. Hold on.
Breathing wasn’t enough, though; the unicorns went down. They
thudded to the ground and let out moans that shook the whole forest. I had
heard about how a unicorn’s shriek lets you so sympathize with it that it
could tear your heart out.
That wasn’t the case with the panthers, though. They started ripping the
unicorns flesh out, and then, when they were finished, they brought the
carriage down on its side.
I lay on my back in the shaking carriage, looking at the full moon in the
sky through bars. But not for too long: two of them were standing up, trying
to find their way in.
Staring them in the eyes, I kept breathing. It was time. I could feel Snow
White coming out.
I had never thought I’d give birth to her on my own, let alone with all
those monsters around me. I assumed my servants were dead by now,
attacked in the other carriage that was following us.
“You’re not going to kill me before I bring her to the world!” I screamed
at the panthers, and they understood me, growling fiercer as their saliva
dropped down on me.
“Push, Queen, Push,” I told myself, feeling my guts tearing apart. I knew
I couldn’t stand and that I would faint, if not die. But I had to give it all I
got.
The panthers kicked hysterically against the carriage. The red in their
eyes glowed brighter. I still didn’t understand why they were here. Did they
want to stop me from giving birth? It was an unlikely thought. It looked
more like that they wanted to take her away from me. They were here for
her. Angel had told me the intruders were here for Snow White. But why?
And how much did I not know about my husband’s past?
Another panther’s drool slapped my face as my bones almost broke from
the pain.
 “I wish she is born a monster like everyone’s been warning me!” I yelled
at the tigers. “So she comes out now and rips your red hearts out, smash
them on the white snow, and skin your beautiful black coats and use them
as a cloak of her own.”
The panthers growled more and more, staring at me. They hated me in a
strange way I couldn’t understand.
Breathe Queen. Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Faster. Stay alive.
My eyelids were throbbing from the pain, and it hurt me that my
daughter was going to come out with no tender hand to hold her into the
world. She was simply going to lay down on the bottom of the tipped over
carriage, and one of those evil panthers might drool on her. Poor Snow
White.
And it seemed like this was my last thought as I felt the world fade to
black…
Black. What a color. Why is it we fade to black, not to any other color?
Do we have to fade to darkness?
I didn’t know where I was exactly, and I didn’t know if I was dead. The
world around me went silent and the blackness consumed my vision.
Somehow, I was sure my eyes were still open, but I couldn’t see. Was this
the passage to the afterlife? Did I give up on my daughter, so easily?
I tried my best to move a hand or a muscle in my body, but I was gone.
My body wasn’t mine anymore. It was just a vehicle I used in this world,
and it was time to leave it.
But no! I wasn’t ready to go. I was the Queen of Sorrow. Dame Gothel,
the fortuneteller, told me I was destined to do great, yet horrible, things.
Who stole my chance in life?
Please God, if I am going to die, don’t make me die a bad mother. Give
me strength to come back, just for a little while. Let me give Snow White a
chance to live, to grow up, to see her first sunrise, to walk for the first time,
to say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’, to go to school, to learn and show her talents,
to grow even more, to love, to have her first kiss, to get heartbroken, to cry,
to be miserable only to rise from the ashes to be alive again. Please God,
give me the strength to give her a chance. I don’t care if she’s a monster. I
don’t care if she is going to kill her father and me. I only care that she tries
not to be a monster, and if she fails then it’s ok. Most of us fail, but it’s the
journey that matters, not the ending.
 In my darkness, knocking on heaven’s door, I finally saw someone. It
was a woman. She wore a yellow hood, and held a scythe.
“Do you really want to bring her to the world?” the woman asked.
“Yes, please. Can you help me?” I didn’t care who the woman was. I
only hoped she could save me.
“Are you prepared to give birth to her, even if she kills you?” the woman
asked.
“Yes,” I nodded, or so I thought. There was nothing to be sure of in this
medium. “Please, give her a chance.”
Then suddenly I noticed the woman was pregnant underneath the cloak.
Who was this woman?
“I am pregnant too,” she said, touching her belly and smiling at it. “Just
like you.”
“So you know how I feel,” I confirmed. “Will you help me live, just until
I bring her into the world?”
“My girl is sort of a monster too,” the woman said, smiling the most
amazing smile I had seen. “She’ll be like me. Death.”
“You’re Death?” I said reluctantly, knowing it meant all my chances
were dust in the wind. Who was I fooling? I was asking Death to save me
from death.
“I know you should kill me now, but all I’m asking is to give Snow
White the gift of living. Kill me and let her live,” I gave it my last shot.
“I can’t save you,” Death said, and turned around, walking away.
“Wait!” I screamed. “Where are you going? You’re not going to leave
me here, wherever this is.”
“I can’t save you, Queen of Sorrow,” Death said over her shoulder. “You
have saved yourself already. You’re one of the strongest women I have ever
seen.” then she disappeared.
It only took me a minute to understand what was going on, and it was
then when I heard the sound of my breathing.
Slowly, I was feeling again. I could move my hand and my legs, and I
could even hear the panthers growling. Death was right. I did save myself,
and it surprised me.
The truth was that although I was unconscious, and on the verge of
dying, I didn’t stop breathing. My body, and my inner soul, didn’t stop
breathing, not for a minute.
 And even more than that: I had given birth to Snow White.
With all the pain I was suffering, her first cry into the world was as sweet
as the sunshine on one’s face on a victorious day, that moment when you
have defeated your enemies and overcome the struggles of life. I had
succeeded in bringing my baby to the world.
“Always remember,” I heard Death in my ears, unable to know how that
was possible. “You and your daughter either live together or die together.”
I hugged Snow White closer to me as if the place around me wasn’t a
mess, as if there wasn’t liquid and blood everywhere, as if I wasn’t tired to
death, and as if there weren’t panthers breaking into the carriage.
One of the panthers bit on the tip of my cloak and pulled me out to the
snow. Shivering, I still held onto my daughter in my arms. I couldn’t
believe as they circled around me, and I didn’t know what to do. I was
barely breathing from exhaustion now. Death’s words clung to my ears. My
daughter and I, we either lived or died together.
Then something unexpected happened. The panthers started to moan and
bow their heads closer to the snow, as if reciting a hymn or a prayer. Their
eyes were fixed on Snow White, and they were suddenly paying their
respect to her.
Dizzy, and about to faint from the pain, I almost let out a painful laugh.
They were afraid of my daughter. I couldn’t believe my eyes, staring at
them. Was she so important? Was she so feared? Or was she loved? I didn’t
know.
All I knew was that I was about to pass out.
Only one of the panthers approached me suddenly. Unlike the others, its
eyes were still reddened. I took it for an outcast that didn’t want to abide by
whatever rules or prophecy the black panthers believed in.
In a moment of recklessness, it cut my umbilical cord with its teeth and
snatched my baby from my weary arms. I was too tired, unable to fight
back with my numb arms, watching it holding my daughter in its teeth the
way cats grab their infants, and running away.
What have I done? How didn’t I fight the panther back? The thought of
losing my child to a black panther pumped the blood back to my brains, and
I opened my eyes again. My daughter was out of sight.
But it was only seconds before I heard a shot behind the trees, and then
there was the sound of footsteps approaching me.
 Slowly, I witnessed the happy arrival of Angel, caressing Snow White in
his hands. He had survived the panthers back there, and shot the last one
and saved our daughter.
Angel knelt down next to me, and kissed my forehead before putting my
daughter in my arms again.
“I told you our daughter was going to be born today,” He whispered.
A week later, back in our castle, I asked Angel about what was going to
happen now. We knew who our daughter was – and I will not mention it in
this diary – and I wondered what the consequences were going to be.
“You almost died for her,” Angel told me, embracing me, as we looked
out into the night sky from our chamber’s window. It was a lovely night,
and I could feel its breeze on my nightgown. “This is what matters. You’re
a brave woman. I’m thinking I could stay in the castle and cook while you
go fight the intruders,” Angels joked as I gave him a tender look, tilting my
head. “But then again, I am a bad cook.” He laughed.
“Angel Von Sorrow,” I recited his name. “How could it be that a man
like you is a descendant of the Sorrow family?”
He patted me and didn’t reply. It was a tough question, and I wanted to
know more about him.
“Doesn’t it bother you that we’ve given birth to a monster?” I asked. It
didn’t bother me. I wanted to make sure he felt the same way.
“Monster or no monster, she is our daughter,” Angel said. “We’ll stand
by her, every bloody step of the way. She’ll be a legend. Snow White Von
Sorrow.”

…. Jacob Carl Grimm had tears in his eyes when I raised my head from
my Book of Sands. We watched the pages turn to sand in front of us, and
knew that by now this little diary was buried deep in our minds. It was the
hardest part after someone read you a story from a book of sand, because it
was up to you what to with it next. You could decide to kill it and never tell
it to anyone, or you could decide to pass it along to other generations in
another Book of Sand. Or, you could do like he did later on: forge the tale
and make it a happily ever after one – the Queen’s story was a happily ever
after of sorts, anyway.
“Are you crying?” I asked him.
“Crying? Huh! I just finished my last drink and feel sleepy.”
 “So you weren’t moved by the tale?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve cursed them and I want to put it all
behind me.” He stood up, ready to go.
“Wait,” I said. “I told you a precious story. Don’t you think you should
give something back in return?”
“What do you want, naïve Sandman?”
“Jawigi,” I said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to tell me what it stands for.”
“Your’s some stubborn, Sandman,” Jacob said and opened an empty
page in my Book of Sand. He used his forefinger to write in it so he
wouldn’t have to spell in front of the Innkeeper and those unseen visitors in
the dark corner.
What he wrote in the book drew a smile on my face.
Jawigi turned out to be an abbreviation of three famous names.
Morpheus had used the first letter from every name, followed by the first
vowel, and put them together in one word.
Jawigi simply stood for Jacob Wilhelm Grimm. The j and a from Jacob,
w and i from Wilhelm, and the g and i from Grimm. What better way to
name the Dreamworld but this? It was Jacob and Wilhelm’s world anyway.
“Happy now, Sandy?” Jacob grunted.
I smiled and nodded, avoiding the mirror behind the Innkeeper again.
Those damn mirrors.
“I hope you pour good dreams in my eyes tonight, Sandy,” Jacob said
over his shoulder as he walked out.
“Hey Jacob,” I said. “Did you ever hear the phrase, ‘the greatest trick the
devil ever pulled was to convince the world he was someone else’?”
Jacob stopped in his track then turned around. “Where did you hear
that?” he looked worried.
“I read it in a diary entry. It just didn’t make sense so I thought I’d ask
you,” I said.
“Stay away from those single entries, Sandy,” Jacob advised. “They are
full of lies and they will confuse you, and you’re a naïve man. Stick to the
real diaries a hundred years from now,” Jacob was at his highest peak in
being drunk. He turned around and walked out.
I waited a minute, gazed at the dark corner with the clicking glasses
again, and walked out, too.
Out in the snow, I pulled a small mirror from my bag, and looked at it.
 “Mary Mary on the wall?” I said to it. “Who is the devious of them all?”
“You are, my Queen,” The mirror replied to me.
As I looked in the mirror, I saw that my real face had returned.
“Did you know the real name of the Dreamworld?”
“But of course, Mary,” I said. “Now I have control over a big part of it.”
“And what Wilhelm? Is he still taking the Lost Seven’s Side?”
“It looks like it,” I said. “He even invented some kind of a lullaby made
for children to recite. It supposedly will hint and carry one the truth about
some of us for years to come.”
“I’m afraid my story passes on, My Queen,” Mary said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “I have a long way to find and
identify the Lost Seven.”
“As you wish, My Queen. I am amazed Jacob didn’t suspect you’d be
the Queen?”
“No, he didn’t. He was drunk,” I said. “Which reminds me that I am not
going to use that shape-shifting spell again. I had to avoid all mirrors in the
Inn at all times. I could have exposed myself if it caught my reflection.”
“Whatever you desire, majesty,” Mary laughed.
As for you, whoever reads this diary, how hard was it for me to write
that I was Sandman Grimm in the beginning to fool you?
Always remember the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to
convince you he was someone else.

End of Grimm Diary #10

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 Afterward

I hope you did enjoy reading the Grimm Prequels 7-10 as much as I
enjoyed researching and writing it. If you have been following my
Facebook page, you’d know that we had a poll about the most favorite
characters. So far, Lade Rat, Peter, and the Queen of Sorrow were on top.
I’m sure opinions might vary after each set of prequels. But since most of
the favorite characters will not appear in Snow White Sorrow – except the
Queen of Sorrow –, there’ll be more prequels about them in the coming
weeks until Snow White Sorrow is published. There will be a new one
about Ladle Rat, Peter Pan, the Pied Piper, and an ensemble prequel where
most of them where young and in school together, trying to figure out who
the Tooth Fairy really is. This one is going to be the next prequel and it’s
called:
The Grimm Diaries Prequels #11
Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale

If you have the time and could kindly review the prequels, that’d be
awesome. You have no idea how much this means to me. An honest review
helps me learn and improve as an Indie storyteller. I also answer all emails
sent to me if there is something you want to ask about.
And if you’re already interested in Snow White Sorrow and want to be
the first to know about its release date, please join my Facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/camjace.
Thanks again and wish you all a new and awesome year.
And remember: Evil is a point of View
Cameron

To know more about Snow White Sorrow, HERE

List of the Grimm Diaries Prequels available so far:

The Grimm Diaries Prequels 1- 6

 1 Snow White Blood Red
narrated by Snow White Queen
2 Cinder to Cinder & Ashes to Ashes
narrated by Alice Grimm
3 Beauty Never Dies
narrated by Peter Pan
4 Ladle Rotten Rat Hut
narrated by Little Red Riding Hood
5 Mary Mary Quite Contrary
as told by the devil
6 Blood Apples
narrated by Prince Charming

The Grimm Diaries Prequels 7- 10

7 Once Beauty Twice Beast
narrated by Beauty
8 Moon & Madly
narrated by Moongirl
9 Rumpelstein
narrated by Rumpelstiltskin
10 Jawigi
narrated by Sandman Grimm

Upcoming single diaries:

11 Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale
12 The Pumpkin Piper

Other books by Cameron Jace:

The I Am Alive series:

I Am Alive volume 1-3: Nice Day to Die, Wheel of Fortune, Through

Your Eyes (Ya Dystopian series)

You can contact me at

 Goodreads
or
Facebook
or
my blog
or
Twitter
@cameronjace
or send me an email
[email protected]
( I answer all emails personally )

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