by Cameron Jace
The Grimm Diaries
Prequels
15-18
The Grimm Diaries Series
by Cameron Jace
www.CameronJace.com
Edited by Jami Hampson
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.
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.
Contents
Forward
Prologue for the Prequels
Snow White Black Swan
The Pumpkin Piper
Prince of Puppets
The Sleeping Beast
Afterward
Other Titles in the Grimm Diaries
Forward
There is no stopping the prequels. And complying with readers’ suggestions, the prequels will be an ongoing series within the main series. They will serve as an appetizer between main books. They have a life of their own; they expand the world, and give me a chance to write about characters who might have been missed for a while. It’s unorthodox to write this way, and I don’t know of any other writers who do this (two parallel series at once, and with Piper Diaries on the way, three). But then again, this is an unordinary series with unordinary, unique, and fabulous readers.
The prequels in this set are the following:
Snow White Black Swan is told by the Queen of Sorrow, and it’s written in the same tone and imagination you will read in Blood, Milk, and Chocolate (The Grimm Diaries book 3), so you know what to expect.
The Pumpkin Piper, told by Jack Madly, is a peek into the Piper Diaries world, which seems to have the most favorable characters in the series.
Prince of Puppets, told by Pinocchio, is … well, I can’t even hint at anything here, or I will spoil it.
The Sleeping Beast is short, but I believe you will find it the wrapper of many prequels, an eye opener to one of the most controversial characters in the series, and a bit emotional.
Also, there was a bonus prequel called #15 in the last set, The Grimm Diaries Prequels 11-14. We’re not going to call it 15 anymore, as it was a bonus and short. This new set includes the new 15th prequel, the 16th, 17th, and 18th.
Now, I should shut up and let you read.
“This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, except only certain fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”
Neil Gaiman
Prologue for the Prequels
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 now 18 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 as snapshots 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.
The Grimm Diaries Prequel #15
Snow White Black Swan
as told by the Queen of Sorrow
By Cameron Jace
Edited by Peyton Schriftsteller and Jami Hampson
The Grimm Diaries Prequel #15
Snow White Black Swan
as told by the Queen of Sorrow
Dear Diary,
There is a humming bird outside my window. It never utters words, nor does it sing pretty twittering songs. It only hums, everyday, endlessly, those low-toned creepy ‘hmms’. I feel like it’s sending me a coded message that could only be deciphered with the power of hearts, not minds.
Everyday it still hums by the window. No one ever listens or asks it what the voices mean. No one really cares about the bird.
The best they’d do is offer it something to peck on. You’d think these people are chivalrous and kind, wanting to feed a homeless flyer. But I’d beg to differ; they want it to shut up, because people don’t want to know what it has to say. In a world where our childhood was immersed in fairy tales, no grown up ever wants to know the truth.
I feel like that bird in many ways. Sometimes I wish I was one; capable of humming, pretending I don’t know the words. It would be the only rational excuse to keep concealing the secrets I’ve buried in my chest for years. And oh my, if you only knew what I know and can’t speak of?
If anything strikes you as unusual in this diary, then it will be my voice and my sincerity. In many instances, you’ll wonder if it is really me telling the story. Because this time, I am opening up a little.
Of course, being the Queen of Sorrow, no one believes me anymore, but I am not going to waste my immortality worried about your prejudice. Like I said before, I don’t owe you, or anyone for that matter, any explanations. Before you point fingers at me, you’d better remove your own mask, the one you wear every day to face the world around you.
If my handwriting curls and runs off the rails like a mad train, if it turns thinner and unreadable at times, it is due to my trembling as I recall memories of certain events. The secret—one of many—I’m about to reveal at the end of this diary is heart-shattering. I doubt you’ll be able to take it lightly.
I shall start with the day my dear husband, Angel von Sorrow, and I escaped his vicious father, Night Sorrow, by means of a ship …
I had decided to run away with him; away from our families and the wrath of Angel’s father. More importantly, from Angel’s past that
threatened our future like an incurable plague.
His family, The Sorrows, originated from Transylvania and resided in Lohr, Germany at the time. While my family, the Karnsteins, resided in Styria, Austria.
We were two lovers against all odds. He was a descendant of the most vicious clan in the world, and I was a descendant of the first natural born vampire hunters.
Sadly, the ship was hijacked by pirates led by a man with a hook instead of a hand. Angel and I had to escape again, jumping into the ocean and swimming for days.
I know you’d like me to tell you more about what happened to us in those seven days in the ocean, but I’ll be detailing it in my own full-length diary later. Now, I’d like to tell you what happened after Angel and I found a huge rock floating in the middle of the endless ocean.
At first, we thought it was a small island with roots growing deep into the abyss. When I was a child, my dad told me that islands were nothing more than tall trees rooted deep in the bottom of the ocean.
On the contrary, the island turned out to be an enormous rock miraculously floating upon the waves of the ocean. The island was covered with white sands that the ocean shied away from. The island remained dry and encircled with palm trees. Later, we found out that standing in the middle of the floating rock island, you could see all its shores with your bare eyes. It was that small.
The palms didn’t produce dates, but apples which we ate by the shore. To grab the apples, which were golden, Angel had to kill a snake protecting the fruit on the tree. The apples were juicy on the inside, and tasted like sweet magic. I had never tasted anything like it.
In the middle of the island there stood a tall dark tower. Inside, a woman was humming a distant song. Her voice was so serene that Angel and I were immediately tempted to meet her. The song she sang was beautiful; relaxing, as if composed in Heaven. A wordless tune, which I surprisingly couldn’t memorize no matter how hard I tried.
Inside, we climbed the tower's spiral staircase. Although it seemed like the climb would take only minutes, it took us …
Seven days!
Now I'm not bothered if you see me as a liar, or think I have lost my mind. I can’t even explain how or why we kept climbing the stairs for seven days, but we did. What it was that motivated us, I have no idea—maybe we were influenced by the apples.
All I know is that Angel had plenty of apples with him, and the song the woman hummed was hypnotic; hallucinatory, but beautiful and enticing at the same time. Angel and I acted like children, following the wavy smell of a freshly baked cookie that had been baked inside a house. At one point, we even noticed breadcrumbs and beans, scattered all over the stairs.
“Why all the breadcrumbs and the beans?” I remember asking Angel. “It’s not like we’d lose our way in this narrow spiral staircase.”
“People lose their way all the time,” Angel had told me. “Even when traveling paths located on one-way roads.”
I didn’t know what Angel meant. He’d been cryptic and dreamy since we started climbing. Later, when I thought about the breadcrumbs and the beans, I realized they must have been scattered to keep us from starving to death on our week-long journey.
Each day when the night draped its curtains upon us, we slept on the stairs, and continued our vertical quest when the morning sun kissed our eyelids awake.
According to Angel’s calculations, we reached the top of the tower on the night of the seventh day. But through the top of the tower, the sun shone through the windows—we learned later that darkness did not exist in the tower. Though we were still unsure why, it was always bright and sunny.
I followed Angel into the room where the melodies came from. There was a lady inside. She stood with her back to us, facing a huge mirror which doubled as a window to another world. The lady in front of the mirror was watching the other world from a high point, as if she were a God.
Looking through the mirror more closely, I realized I was watching not only unfamiliar worlds I had never visited, but also our own.
The mirror’s golden frame had a word engraved upon it: Aleph.
I stared back at Angel for an explanation. He had been an avid reader, and he’d obtained great knowledge from his travels.
“The Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points,” Angel said. “Anyone who looks through it, can see everything in the world from all angles simultaneously, without confusion.”
“What?” I frowned. “What does that even mean?”
“Believe me, I'm just as confused as you are. I read a lot of books, yet understand and comprehend very little,” Angel said. “But I think it means the Aleph is the ultimate truth when the world is seen from all angles at once, which sounds impossible to me.”
“Does that mean this mirror the lady is staring at is an Aleph?” I wondered, and Angel didn’t reply. He preferred to say nothing when he knew nothing, a trait so rare among men, and one that I liked about him.
Although the Aleph scripture was interesting, I focused on the silent lady looking into the mirror of the world. I watched her slide the tips of her fingers over the mirror and roll the images with her hand.
She was rolling the world with her hands.
The mirror was simply a horizontal live, world map. But most amazing of all, everything looked so real. It was as if I were at these specific locations, as opposed to viewing them through a window.
The lady’s main concern wasn’t the magic mirror, though. It was the loom she was weaving artistically. It looked like a magic carpet. The lady and the mirror were encircled with what I later learned was called a Dream Temple, a sacred place to commune with dreams and other worlds.
“Who is she?” I whispered to Angel, curious about her.
“I have no idea,” Angel whispered back. “All I see is that she is weaving something with the red ball of thread that seems to never end.”
“Welcome,” the lady said. I assumed she had seen us in the mirror, and I was surprised at her lack of surprise to see us. “Forgive me for not turning around. I have to finish this last piece,” she said sewing the red thread tentatively, like a caring grandmother. She did it with accuracy and love, and I happened to finally understand that she wasn’t weaving a dress. Whatever she wove in her hand appeared like mountains, rivers, and towns in the mirror; sometimes stars, moon, and suns.
The lady in the mirror was weaving the world.
“Please have a seat,” she pointed behind her back. “I’m almost finished.” She wet the thread with her tongue, and continued working on her masterpiece.
There were no seats in the room, but there were two turtles with shells that looked like chairs. Angel sat on one immediately. I waited to see if the turtle would squeak or scream in pain. It didn’t. It only pulled its head inside to give way to Angel’s legs. Imitating my husband, I sat on the other chair—I mean turtle.
“That’s about it. All this world needs now is a sun and moon,” she basically talked to herself, proud of her creation in the mirror. How I wished I possessed such a power. I’d be sitting all day knitting the world as it manifested in the mirror. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how Gods felt about us. “I’ll have to wait for a sun and moon to be born soon, and see if they fit this world,” she mumbled, and turned around.
A sun and a moon born?
I was curious, but in no position to ask. There were way too many questions in my head. Also, seeing the lady’s face was interesting.
She looked serene—not beautiful, but glowing in a spiritual way. I had expected a lady who lived seven days high to be possessed by the kind of beauty that brought a tear to the eye.
Instead, she looked ordinary, like most of us in many ways. She looked as if she were fit to be anyone’s grandmother. Her eyes were doe-like and caring, and her smile made me want to sleep in her arms.
“Isn’t it a mystery how people look very different in reality from their reflection in the mirror?” she said, her eyes scanning our faces.
“What
do you mean?” Angel asked practically.
“Did you ever notice that your left is your right and your right is your left when you look in the mirror?” she said.
Angel said nothing. I didn’t know why exactly. Maybe because not many people owned mirrors in that time of history. The only mirrors we knew about then were made of brass and obsidian stones, which weren’t exactly reflecting much. Glass mirrors—or silvered, like some would like to call them—were not invented until years later. They were the most precious thing on earth then; more than gold, but I had the most horrifying experience with them. But that’s another story.
Also, Angel didn’t like mirrors. Being a half-vampire—due to being the descendant of one of the most feared vampires in the world—, he avoided mirrors. Against contrary belief, mirrors did show his reflection. But only the gruesome dark side of him, which he’d been running from all along.
“The fact that your left is your right in the mirror means that you can never really see yourself with your own eyes. It’s just impossible,” the lady elaborated.
“Only others can tell you how you really look,” I muttered, taken by the idea. “Only others can see you the way you really are.”
“There is great wisdom in that,” she began sewing again. “But one can’t help but wonder if my left in the mirror is my right, does it mean my up is my down, too?”
Angel was interested in her paradoxically provoking questioning. Angel had not been himself lately because of the hardships we'd been facing, and tended to get caught up in conversations of nonsense quite frequently. He had begun questioning God, the universe, and why we were born. I guess it was his own way to resist giving in to his family’s curse and becoming a fully-turned vampire.
