Beauty Never Dies Read online

  This is a special edition that includes the Grimm Diaries Prequels 1,2, and 3, edited and revised versions, until the 28th of June 2012. If you have read the first two prequels, please skip for the third diary, Beauty Never Dies, book 3.

  The Grimm Diaries Prequels are short diary teasers for the upcoming Young Adult series called The Grimm Diaries, which will be out October 30. The series tells an imaginary story about a world where fairy tales were twisted and rewritten. You can read the Prequels as an introduction to the series or as stand-alone short twisted fairy tales. It’s not necessary by any means to have read the prequels before the series.

  – 06/14/2012 Cameron

  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 rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

  manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

  http://Cameronjace.blogspot.com

  All rights reserved.

  “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

  Prologue

  Two hundred years ago, in 1812, the Brothers Grimm altered the true fairytales by toning them down and rewriting them, claiming that it was in the best interest of the children who got scared, listening to the dark stories. The truth was that they needed to change the stories to bury a deep secret about an ageless and magical war in the fairytale world. They didn’t want us to know that the fairytale characters were immortals, living among us.

  Since immortals would not die, the Brothers Grimm needed to place a curse on them, and lock them away from the real world to stop their war from affecting the world we live in. For centuries, the immortals gained their power by feeding on children’s dreams, creating a powerful Dreamworld of their own where places such as Neverland existed. The only way to curse the immortals without hurting the children was to kill them in their own dreams. This way, their real bodies in the real world landed in an eternal coma but still allowed the children to dream. The Grimm Brothers once mentioned this in one of their stories when Snow White was sleeping in her glass coffin. They called it the Sleeping Death.

  The Brothers Grimm used the help of a rare breed of young angels who had the power of entering the dreams of immortals. They were called Dreamhunters.

  But the Sleeping Death method was flawed. It allowed the immortals to resurface for a brief time every one hundred years to lift up the curse. Since being trapped in the Dreamworld for years caused most of them to forget who they really were, those who remembered had to find the others and remind them of who they really were. Only then, the two opposite forces of fairytales could rise again.

  In 1912, no one won the war, and the truth remained untold. More than a hundred years later, they succeeded in finding each other. The world as we know it is about to end. They are only one step away.

  Everything that has happened was documented in a book with pages of sand. The book is called the Grimm diaries, written from different points of view of different fairy tale characters and Dreamhunters. Only an immortal can write in the Grimm Diaries using a magic wand on pages made of sand every hundred years, and it’s my job to document and seal the book and turn it into the sand that I throw into children’s eyes every night to create their dreams.

  Before you read the first full-length diary called Snow White Sorrow, a series of mini diaries called The Grimm Diaries Prequels were found, scattered or buried in the dunes of the book. The prequels don’t necessary hold the truth, but they hold opinions and confessions of certain characters, which may hint to you what kind of war this is going to be.

  Sandman Grimm

  The Grimm Diaries Prequels #1

  Snow White Blood Red

  as told by the Snow White Queen

  Dear Wilhelm Carl Grimm,

  She’s not who the world thinks she is. Believe me; she is not even what the world thinks she is. She does sing to the birds in the forest though, and her beauty does bring joyful tears to the eyes, but that is only how she deceives her victims, making them believe she is a giddy, naïve, and helpless princess. That’s how she fooled the Huntsman, Prince Charming and me, her birth mother.

  I am not going to ask why you lied to the world and told them that I am not her mother. Even though you credited with the role in the original script you wrote in 1812. Fifty years later, you decided to twist me into an evil, narcissistic, and heartless stepmother, blinded by jealousy and envy toward the little princess. Your brother, Jacob, once told me that you wanted to tone the story down after learning that children started having nightmares when they heard about me, the Queen who sought to eat her daughter’s heart and liver.

  Shame on you, Wilhelm. How could you play around with characters as if we didn’t exist. You, of all authors, know why I had to do it. You know that my actions were justified, that I was saving my kingdom from her wrath. The same way that you had to rewrite the true fairytales, making parents feed their children false bedtime stories night after night, generation after generation, lie after lie, until your lies turned into memories sewn into their velvet membranes. Your happy ever after lies, Wilhelm, shaped the world we live in now.

  Sometimes, I wonder why you didn’t burn the Books of Sand that hold the original scripts instead of rewriting them. I guess you figured that sooner or later someone would dig up the truth and expose you, so altering it was the smarter solution. You manipulated children into believing that the bites were resurrecting kisses, and that torturing glass coffins were made for sleeping beauties waiting for prince charming to come and kiss them awake.

  They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, but the truth is that the greatest trick was convincing the world he was someone else. This is what you have done to us, Wilhelm. You have turned us into pastiches of the immortals that we really are.

  Still, I know that you had no choice, and that you did it to save us from her and her seven friends whose names we don’t exactly know.

  I appreciate how you have kept our real names hidden, or we would have ended up like Rumpelstiltskin, who when his real name was found out, power was held over him. But sometimes, I can’t help but wonder why no one ever wondered why I was called the Evil Queen, and why I was never given a real name in the books.

  Was I so superficial to the world, so stereotypical and mundane? Why did they treat me as if I were just the monster of the week? You know what I think? I think that they never got the time to really hate me, but they wanted to hate me long before they’d even met me. They wanted to avenge their childhood princess by laying all the blame on me.

  If I tell them what she really is, would they ever care about me half as much as they care about her?

  I know that deep inside, in the very heart of their dreams, they adore me. They like the way I talk, walk, dress, and even kill. They are just scared like the others, afraid to admit how much they love the Snow White Queen who doesn’t need anyone’s pity or love, because I am loved by the greatest and most majestic heart in the world:

  Mine.

  But that’s all in the past. It’s 2012 now, Wilhelm. Two hundred years after you first cursed us and trapped us in the Dreamworld. But like Sleeping Beauty’s curse, it was flawed. We’re granted to wake up for
a brief time once every one hundred years, and we’re back again.

  It’s true that most of us are lost, not remembering who we really are, whether in dreams or in real life, but we will find each other, and this time, I will win this war for good. I will bring down the superficial world that praises fairy tales as happy ever afters without even knowing what they are talking about. I have to do it fast because if I don’t, she might rise again from her glass coffin and torture us with that innocent deadly smile on her blood-red lips.

  Do you have any idea how many times I have tried to kill her in the last two hundred years, Wilhelm? Do you have any idea?

  I tried witchcraft, charms, demons, bloodsuckers, plagues, poison, Black Death, and every form of killing known to the world. I begged the seas, oceans, and volcanoes to kill her, but it was all in vain. I went as far as to bury her in the Dreamworld, six dreams under, where no immortal has ever survived before, all but her, and only the devils know how.

  She is empowered by the love of the children who adore her. Every time a child dreams – or daydreams about her –, she feeds on those dreams, and such a power is greater than life or death.

  All that, and you still refuse to tell me about the Lost Seven. Remember them, Wilhelm? The ones you portrayed as dwarves? Her alliances, hiding somewhere in the dusty pages of every fairy tale that has ever been written. I need to know who they are, Wilhelm, or it will be the end of us.

  I admit that I am no angel. It would be foolish to pretend that I am. To be honest – and honesty is not my fairest charm – I have danced with mischievous faeries too close to the dark side of Neverland. I ushered young butterflies to the deceiving light of fire. I have slaughtered and slithered, tortured and burned, laced and suffocated, combed and killed, poisoned and ripped out hearts, and then sat on my throne watching my young beautiful victims lying dead on the floor of my castle, biting on blood-apples topped with chocolate syrup and fresh milk.

  But you know what? I am not even half the darkness that she is made of, or the wickedly lovely and beautiful evil that she is.

  Since you keep refusing to tell me of the Lost Seven, you left me no choice but to show you what my majesty can do:

  I found your brother Jacob today, hiding in the cottage in the forest where she once lived. It’s as if he was addicted to the scent of death she had left on the bed sheets. When he refused to tell me who the Lost Seven are, I poisoned him as if I were the Grimm Reaper.

  As I sat on his bed, watching him die, I decided to tell him a bedtime story – a deadtime story to be precise. I told him the true story about her. This is why I am writing you this diary, Wilhelm, to tell you what I already told your brother.

  I will tell you the things about her that no one has ever known. So dear Wilhelm, let me bleed on these pages with my quill pen, made of feathers as black as crows, as I am writing on paper as white as a dove, with ink that is as red as blood that belongs to your brother …

  I want to tell you about the time I stopped breast-feeding her, the day when I realized what she really was in the winter of 1797.

  I was sitting in my bed in my royal chamber, in the castle we call the Schloss, at the top of a hill overlooking the Kingdom of Sorrow, the kingdom of which I was its queen, and she was to become the most beautiful princess.

  It was one of the coldest winters. The snow fell intensively, burying the lovely purple poppy fields and covering it with a shroud of a thick layer of dark white snow. Somehow, the white of the snow that year did not reflect sunlight or shadows. It lay grisly over the contour-lined land like a dead girl’s white coat made of the fur of dead polar bears, like a white wavy carpet that was in no way magical. The curves of the land made the snow look like there was a beautiful gigantic dead girl buried underneath it. Little did I know that the time would come that this buried girl could only be Snow White or me, that the world wouldn’t be spacious enough for both of us.

  Peasants went broke because they couldn’t seed the earth, and animals were no longer to be found, all except the crows of course. Those damn crows pecked at each other out of hunger, fluttering high in the bruise-colored sky as their blood spattered all over the snow like red rain next to the black corpses of their own kind. It was a black, white and red winter, the wicked colors that doomed my life.

  Looking through the huge rectangular window overlooking the dark Black Forest, I accidentally pricked my thumb while Snow White lay nestled in my arms. I don’t know how I hurt myself that day but I sure know that I was distracted by her beauty and innocent smile. Those lovely doe eyes of hers were gleaming above her chubby cheeks that curved like ocean waves whenever she smiled at me, like a rhythmic sonata so enchanting that the singer’s voice caused the instruments to bend, reform and curve with mirth and ecstasy, bringing dead wood instruments to life.

  I don’t know how she possessed such beautiful doe eyes. Neither the king nor I had them. Only one other man in my husband’s family did, my husband’s vicious father who hunted us for years after we’d escaped from him, crossing wide oceans. But his father’s doe eyes were far from beautiful – for they were blackened with sorrow –I’d rather not talk about that now.

  Snow White wrapped her small, almost boneless hands around my pricked thumb, finger by finger, so gently that her touch took my breath away. I almost cried hot tears of joy. As hard as she tried to press on my thumb, her skin still felt like silk around my flesh, and I wished that she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother, and she needed me never to let go of her, but little did she know that I didn’t want her to let go of me either.

  I laughed as her face knotted childishly, staring at that stubborn thumb of mine that she could not pull closer to her. In her childish frustration, she reminded me of cats chasing balls of thread. I knew my daughter would grow up to be a kick-ass girl one day, but right then, she was still a baby – and yes, the Queen of Sorrow says kick ass and stuff like that. Because guess what? I am an immortal, and I have seen everything from Brothers Grimm to Lady Gaga. You feelin’ me?

  Since I would have granted her any wish in exchange for one look from her ocean-blue eyes staring back at me, I didn’t mind lending her my thumb, which suddenly seemed to attract her more than the milk in my breasts.

  I noticed a drop of blood on top of my thumb where I had pricked it. My intention was to pull it away, clean it, and give it back to her, but when I tried pulling it away, her hands seemed stronger all of a sudden, not strong enough to pull my thumb though, but I noticed an unusual increase in her strength. I thought I’d seen a vein popping out momentarily from her gelatin-like and almost-boneless neck.

  However, it wasn’t alarming enough then. Mothers are blinded by their love for their daughters in a way that if they died while nurturing them, they would barely notice their own death. Only after their responsibility toward their child is over, would they allow death to take hold of them – and if you really have to know, I wasn’t immortal yet then. I am the Evil Queen, remember? Always the last one to be considered.

  So I loosened my thumb for Snow White to pull closer to her.

  At first, she pulled it to her chest, not taking her eyes off it. Her eyes had a sudden golden tint to them which I thought I was imagining.

  “Are you alright Shew?” I asked, as I preferred to call her. Her father had another nickname for her, a much sillier one.

  Snow White didn’t answer me. She pulled my thumb up with both of her tiny hands and sucked on it, which I found mesmerizing and cute, like when she was sucking on her own thumb while asleep.

  My husband, the king, had warned me many times that she should not start sucking on things, that it was a bad habit, inappropriate for princesses.

  Her sucking was ticklish. After all, her teeth hadn’t grown yet so it was a funny feeling that I felt. As she continued with my thumb in her mouth, the golden tint loomed back into her eyes.

  Suddenly, I remembered the drop of blood and tried to pull away. Again, it wasn’t that I couldn’
t pull away. By any means, she wasn’t stronger than me. In fact, her weakness was her greatest power. It was that I found it strange that she insisted to put a pricked thumb with blood in her mouth.

  Before I could let my mind wander suspiciously, the most beautiful smile landed on her face the way fluttering stars land onto a cloudy midnight sky.

  Shew’s symphonic smile was accompanied by curling cheeks, dancing eyebrows, and a wiggly cute nose.

  I patted her as she let go of my thumb and hugged her and told her a bedtime story. It was about a beautiful girl who had been cursed by a witch to stay asleep forever until a most charming prince came and kissed her awake, and they lived happily ever after. Snow White loved to fall asleep to this story. I was wondering if she dreamed about the prince, when sudden lightning struck outside.

  As she went to sleep, I wiped a drop of blood off her red lips.

  This incident never happened again. That was because I never pricked my thumb again in front of her. I did prick my thumb a lot in my years, but not for her – and that’s another story. I was alert enough to keep her at a distance from the sight of blood.

  Sometimes, she still stared dreamingly at my thumb, like a girl standing next to her mother in the kitchen, tiptoeing to see if her mother finished baking her favorite apple pie, so she could start eating it.

  Seven years later though, my concerns were confirmed, and I knew that there was no way back.

  It was a festive day when my husband and I welcomed the king and queen of Red, a neighboring kingdom. Times were harsh as we fought the demons trying to breach our borders and threaten the safety of the kingdom that my husband and I had paid trails of blood to protect.

  If only I had the time to tell you about the sacrifices I made for this kingdom, for my husband, and for bringing Snow White into the world.