by Cameron Jace
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.
Until then I spent my lonely days and nights reading books from the mysterious library. Most of them were diaries written by what ordinary folks would call ‘fairy tale characters’. Each character seemed to have their own origin story to tell.
I slowly realized I was one of them, but didn’t grasp the significance until later. I also gathered I may be immortal, because most of them were. And that the diaries didn’t necessarily tell the complete truth. Some of the characters may have manipulated it to their own favor, which might cause confusion at times – I solved this by adding my notes at the end of most of the diaries; I called them ‘MY NOTES’.
The diaries, probably because all stories are prequels to what the Brother Grimm have made you believe about them.
But we warned. You will never be the same again after you read the stories. I like to think of prequels as poisoned apples, once you taste them, you’ll never see fairy tales in the same light again.
End of Diary
Grimm Prequel #19
FRIDAY THE 13TH
as told by Sleeping Beauty
Dear Diary,
My name is Wendy Darling. I’m far from being a darling. Some call me Sleeping Beauty. Again, I’m hardly asleep and far from a cutie, goodie beauty.
In fact, I’m as dark as black swans are. I’d kill you before you’d even know it. I’d drink your blood while you’re breathing your last; not so much because I’m thirsty, but just for the fun of it.
If you’re smart enough, you’d run for your life. You’d even stop reading this diary.
And if you’re a priest or a man who does good in this world, don’t preach please. Really, don’t. It’s not like I’m beyond absolution or redemption. The point is I like what I do.
I like the chaos, the pain, and the power of scaring people. It’s hard to come across a girl like me — unless it’s Bloody Mary. But she’s nothing but an angry girl trapped in a mirror at the end of the day
Me? I’m happy to bite your neck and I’m unapologetic about it. I may even ask you to smile on your death bed for me.
What is that I hear you say?
Ah, you think my nastiness is a cover for my pain. You say that because you think you know me. You think you know who I am and what I have been through. Let me tell you this: I’m like a phoenix — not like Cerené, but I’ve been burned once. Long ago. And I’ve risen without complaints. I did it so many times, I think of it as a hobby.
My memories are the phoenix’s ashes. My power is the fire I am breathing onto the world.
I don’t relate. I don’t sympathize. And I don’t feel guilt. The one thing I am loyal to — and I repeat, it’s the only thing — is my fellow black swans. They’re my tribe. We’ll forever wage a war against whatever is white in this world.
Be it roses. Be it pure hearts. If you relate to anything white, be afraid. I’m going to sound clichéd here and repeat myself:
Be very afraid.
And if you that think I’d only stain everything white with my darkness, you’re incredibly mistaken. Delusional. Darkness doesn’t leave a mark behind. Things get dark and disappear. Darkness is as clichéd as my earlier sentence.
What I’d do to everything that’s white is spatter it with red. The color of your insides. The color of Death itself. And the color of the one girl I hate the most in the world.
Snow White.
Think of it. Black, white, and red. The colors of my eternal enemy. Lips red as blood, skin pale as snow, and hair as dark as night. Snow White Sorrow. My sister.
I’m not going to retell the story of my mother killing me in favor of her precious princess. If you don’t know that yet, then you haven’t read all the diaries.
And I really don’t have time to tell you about what you’ve missed.
What this diary is about is much more interesting. It’s not just the diary of a pissed-off sixteen-year-old girl — a Sleeping Beauty vampire, some would argue. It’s a diary with a secret. One that the world has been wondering about for hundreds of years.
It’s about Friday the Thirteenth.
You’d think it’s a day like any other day. An urban legend, populated by teenage boys and girls and pop culture movies and books — I’m writing this while I’m in the Real World in 2015; I’ve been having some evil fun here for some time.
Friday the thirteenth, if you really knew what it was all about.
People never ask themselves these questions. The origins of our belief. People are lazy. They never do. They only love to spook themselves by giving in to the fact that we should be scared on that day. Never really asking why.
Older people still cling to their traditional beliefs. Keep silent. Never talk about what scares you the most. Keep the monster in the closet. The beast under your bed. Just don’t say a word.
Younger people celebrate fear so loud you’d think they’re brave and ready for the life ahead of them. Trust me, when you’re young, celebrating fear is only an art for covering your demons.
Youth is festive. It’s loud. Always linked to love and expectations. When in truth, youth is the time you’re afraid of every other thing in the world. Especially a beast called tomorrow.
But let’s get back to Friday the thirteenth. My favorite day in the year.
Did you ever know Friday the thirteenth only happens if the first day in the month is a Sunday? I could be wrong. Peter Pan used to tell me these things.
Wicked, right? The months that start with going to church are the same months we witness the darkness of the scariest day in the year.
The day numbered thirteen.
I remember I had been first introduced to the number thirteen through my fellow black swans. Back then when I spend my early childhood in Swan Lake in Sorrow, a man used to come to tell us stories. Fairy tales, he called him. A tall man who never showed himself to us, hiding behind the veils of night.
We were told to call him the Father of Swans — later I learned he was the Piper of Hamelin, raising us vampire swans for a great war in Sorrow many years later.
Point is, the Piper told us real fairy tales. The dark ones. Plain and dull, without make up and wishful thinking. We swans loved those tales.
I loved them a lot. You have no idea. Because I’d known and lived one of the tales myself. The day my mother had left me for the darkness to consume my soul. But like I said, I’m not delving into that now.
The Piper told us about more and more fairy tales. He even told us of their real
origins and secret. He told us about the Brothers Grimm and how they forged the tales for reasons he didn’t want to explain then.
But he also told us about a strange fact. That none of the tales ever started with the number thirteen. There were the Twelve Princesses, the Six Swans, the Four Feathers, and so many other numbers in fairy tale titles — including a never told tale called The Lost Seven.
But never the Thirteen Geese or The Thirteen whatever.
“Why is that the case?” I had asked, eager to learn.
“I’m amazed you should ask,” the Piper told me, leaving me perplexed and confused. “I’m amazed you ask this question, Wendy.”
I trembled. It should have felt like a compliment that the Father of Swans — and all evil — knew my name. But it scared the black feathers out of me, too. “Me? Why?”
“One day you’ll know why,” he said. “One day, probably in the future, you’ll understand why people are really afraid of Friday the thirteenth.”
“Friday? Not just the number?”
“Let’s start with the number now,” he said. “People fear this number. It’s an exquisite number, mathematically, that is. But I am not interested in that. I’d like to tell you about the people who fear this number, so much they can’t stand the thirteenth day in month.”
All of us swans wondered why.
“People in Sorrow, and even outside of the Realms of the Seven Seas, fear if it’s the thirteenth day in the month. They worry if they’re the thirteenth in any gathering. And so on. Even the Father of Time stopped the month’s count, and galaxies in the skies, at the number twelve. He feared if there were a thirteenth month it would be the deadliest of all.”
“Maybe that’s a power we need to study and use,” my bloody mind of a child swan suggested.
The Piper made a sound. I believe he was impressed with me. “We will, Wendy. One day, we will.”
“What about Friday?” I asked.
“If Friday and the thirteenth coincide, the powers of evil arise like never before.”
Us swans fluttered our tiny wings. We loved evil. We weren’t like other villains who behaved in evil ways but pretended they were good. We didn’t have excuses for our inner ugliness. Our darkness was beautiful. We cherished and prided ourselves of it.
“As you grow up and become women, you will understand the significance of this number,” the Piper said. “Especially you, Wendy.”
“Why me?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to know.
“Leave it until the time is right. Time is the best storyteller of all. Just remember that there’s never been a fairy tale with the number thirteen.”
That’s when I asked him the awaited question. “Will there ever be?”
The Piper stood up, his silhouette merging with the night. “That’s up to you, Wendy. Only you can write such a tale.”
And then he disappeared in the dark.
I spent most of my youth looking for answers about the number thirteen. But hardly found any. Most people in Sorrow were fixated on other numbers. Like the number seven.
The Lost Seven, you know.
It was until the day came that I needed to leave Swan Lake and wanted to explore the world outside that everything changed.
“You’re not allowed to leave,” Mother Swan, our caretaker, told me. “Black swans are an army. We raise vicious and powerful swans, and will only allow you to leave when you’re powerful enough to help the Piper in his quest.”
“I’m sure he’d want me to leave,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“Who do you think you are, Wendy?” she said. “You’re just an orphan child with little power and so much you haven’t learned yet.”
I didn’t know my father and mother were Carmilla Karnstein and Angel Von Sorrow then. But I had never believed I was just a random orphan. They’d tried to send me to live with foster black swans many times. But I couldn’t stand any of them, and ended back in Swan Lake again.
So I gave up, just for while, until my thirteenth birthday.
All year long I thought about the number thirteen. If it’s all that evil, why couldn’t I feel its power? Why couldn’t I use it to leave Swan Lake and explore the world?
Then it came to me. One day I realized what I needed to do to leave Swan Lake. I realized how Mother Swan would be forced to exile me. My only way out was in pain and shame.
It was a devious plan, especially for a thirteen-year-old.
You wonder what I did?
Not much really, compared to the horrors I committed later in life. But it was my first horror. The most beautiful one.
And it started by accident.
One of the black swans, a girl about my age, wouldn’t let me swim in her territory. She’d always been like that. She’d always been the strongest and most feared of my age.
But I was losing it, wanting to leave. So all I did was I slashed my wings at her when she stopped me. Blood sprouted out of her face in ways I’d never seen before. And I didn’t even want to hurt her.
I was too late.
Other swans gathered around me, wanting to punish me. The laws of black swans dictated I should be killed immediately.
I was going to die.
But I wouldn’t let it happen. The Piper’s words about me being special may have been a reason. But the real reason was the memory of my twin sister, Snow White Von Sorrow. I wasn’t going to die before I had found her, tortured her, and killed her first.
Not before I made my mother see her white, precious, and pale daughter drown in her own blood, in her own bloodbath in paradise, the color she loved the most.
So I slashed left and right at the other swans.
This was when I learned the secret behind winning wars. Even though I was one against many, I dominated them and killed each and every one of my swan sisters.
Why?
Because I had more to prove than any of them. A simple fact of life. She who needed to prove herself the most rose and fluttered high in the seven skies. Because when everyone was asleep, she was staying up to learn, sharpening her nails. When everyone was dreaming of cute boys in their sleep, she was soaked in the nightmares of her fears. When everyone thought they were backed up by the courtship of friends, she was embracing the power of her loneliness.
That was me.
When the other black swans fought me, they were secretly sure they’d kill me. How could they not when all their powers were gathered against one?
As for me, I had no one to back me up but me. Every slash had to be accurate and as powerful as I could make it. Even better than I could. And with every drop of blood of the swans I was raised among, I clung tighter to my loneliness. I realized the power of self. The power of me.
I didn’t hesitate killing my own tribe, the only thing I told you I loved the most earlier.
In the end, I stood tall, my neck up in Swan Lake, singing everybody else’s swan song. Everybody had to die in order for Wendy to live, just like I had to be left behind for Snow White to become princess.
Mother Swan couldn’t believe the massacre at Swan Lake. She easily let me go. If she’d only listened to me earlier.
On my way out of Swan Lake, as if out of a dark paradise, the rest of the black swans whistled a goodbye song for me. A tune I thought was Mozart’s Magic Flute for many years.
But it wasn’t.
It was a tune the Piper had taught the swans to sing the day I left Swan Lake. The Pied Piper of Hamlin knew about me more than I’d ever imagined. He’d taught the swans to sing a farewell song he’d composed himself. Part of a prophecy I only learned about years later.
This tune stayed with me so long that in 1893 I felt the need to popularize it. I wanted the world to hear the last song ever whistled in Swan Lake. I terrorized a reverent composer in Russia, feeding his cold and snowy night with the fire of my nightmares until he couldn’t get it out of his mind and had to turn the melodies into a most mesmerizing symphony.
That Russian composer was Pyotr Ily
ich Tchaikovsky. And that music is now known to the real world as Swan Lake — never mind how they changed it into a romanticized fluffy story.
But the song wasn’t what really mattered. Something much more beautiful and revealing happened that day. Something I could have never imagined. A realization. An epiphany I learned about while mending my wounds of the fights at the Swamp of Sorrow near the Goblin market.
Are you asking what the epiphany was?
I realized that not only was my age thirteen the day I left, but that it also was a Friday.
Which Friday you ask?
Yes, you got it. It was Friday the thirteenth.
It’s important to note that this day, even though it’d been an epic page in the book of morbidity, wasn’t the reason why people nowadays fear Friday the thirteenth.
I will come to that later.
But it was the first time I realized the power of that specific day. A first step in a long road of recurring darkness happening on the same date years later.
It would take an infinite amount of pages of sand to tell the rest of my story, so let’s skip to many years later in the future. Specifically, the time when I had met Peter Pan and fallen for him — that one is a story like not other, but I don’t feel it’s the time to talk about it. Now.
Let me forward you to a moment in my history you may have heard about. A rainy day in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. The castle Peter Pan lived in for a while.
On that day I’d been dead for years in a loop of time traveling you’re better off not knowing about. And Peter was determined to wake me up, resurrect me back into life. Except that it wasn’t easy. He needed to dig up Count Dracula up from his grave with Hunchy’s help — you know the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Yes, him.
Peter woke up the famous vampire, whom most people mistake for being the first vampire - a callous lie — and brought him to the castle where he planned to wake me up from an eternal sleep I had been cursed into.
Yes, me, Sleeping Beauty, at this point.
