Ashes to Ashes and Cinder to Cinder Read online

  Ashes to Ashes &

  Cinder to Cinder

  A Grimm Diaries Prequel

  A teaser story for upcoming release of

  The Grimm Diaries Series

  by Cameron Jace

  Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

  http://Cameronjace.blogspot.com

  All rights reserved.

  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.

  If you haven’t download Snow White Blood Red ( A Grimm Diaries Prequel #1 )

  Click HERE to downloaded while it is still free

  “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

  for the Grimm Diaries series

  It’s unknown to the common human being that most of the characters in fairy tales are real immortals living among us. Some of them know who they are and some of them don’t. Living too long can make you forget who you really are and what you were meant to be.

  They lived before you were born, and will continue to live after you die. That is why they are carved in the inner skeletons of your soul like a birthmark. The fact that you have been introduced to them in books does not mean they didn’t exist in your dreams since long ago.

  The immortals dream when asleep like humans. When you keep dreaming for eternity, each dream manifests a world of its own.

  Every immortal’s dream intertwined with another’s for centuries, creating mountains, continents, real people, and wars in a world of their own imagination. All the dreams in the world gather in one realm. They called it the Dreamworld, where the dreamer could become someone else entirely.

  What better way to kill time in a boring eternity than dreaming new dreams every night.

  But the Dreamworld was not all fun and dreams. There was a catch: If immortals were killed in the Dreamworld, they never woke up again in the real world. They stayed trapped in an identity that was not theirs in a dream of their own while their real bodies in the real world suffered from an eternal coma.

  Coma and eternity? Nah. Not exactly what they’ve been looking for.

  After centuries of eternal sunshine and endless living, even a short-lived human could put an immortal to an eternal sleep. The Brothers Grimm called it the Sleeping Death, which they mentioned briefly in the original script of the Snow White so-called fairy tale.

  All the human had to do was to find a way to enter the dreams of the immortals and kill them before they wake up. Those humans who possessed the talent were called Dreamhunters.

  Long ago, the immortal fairy tale characters built themselves a realm of their own inside the Dreamworld and called it Jawigi – there was a reason for choosing this name but I won’t get into it right now.

  The Jawigi was used differently from the Dreamworld. The immortals buried the true fairy tales and stories in the Jawigi; the truth about fairy tales that the Brothers Grimm and other writers had forged intentionally in their books – I am not allowed to discuss with you why they did that.

  What better place to bury the truth of the immortal fairy tale characters than the dreams of immortals.

  Why did they do this? What didn’t they want us to know?

  There were certain elements in the tales that needed to be hidden or an imminent evil would rise from its darkened prison and end the world we live in. What we thought of as fairy tales was real, what was real was never told accurately, and that which was never told was buried in dreams.

  It was the only way for everyone to live happily ever after.

  But the Jawigi, like in the Dreamworld, wasn’t all secrets and dreams. There was also a catch: What happened in the Jawigi affected our real life.

  If one certain fairy tale was altered in the Jawigi by dreaming it all over again and manipulating its incidents, it had its consequences in the lives humans lived. If dreams were altered, darkness would find a way out from the Dreamworld right into your living room in the real world.

  There was a fairy tale war between the characters who protected the tales and those who wanted to alter the tales. Thus, affect our real world. Each of them had their own reasons, be it good or evil – but the line between good and evil was thin and blurry.

  Altering and retelling which once was untold in the Jawigi was only possible for a period of time, It occurred once every one hundred years, starting from the day the fairy tale characters were first buried in their dreams. The year was 1812, when the Brothers Grimm wrote their first fairy tale collection – I mean, forged their first fairy tale book.

  Every one hundred years, the Dreamworld was exposed to the possibility to be altered and rewritten all over again.

  At the end of the alteration period, and in spite of whoever won the war, the new tales in the Dreamworld had to be documented so the new truth can be remembered for the next hundred years. Think of the documentation of dreams like your foretold fate in real life, except you had the right to change fate every one hundred years if you ever lived that long.

  The new dreams were documented in diaries, written by many different fairytale characters. In fiction, they call this technique epistolary, where every character told the story from their point of view, and it was up to you to judge and gather the pieces.

  The diaries were called the Grimm Diaries.

  Each Grimm Diary was not your usual pen and paper diary. It was a Book of Sand, an exquisite kind of celestial book. Its pages were not made of paper but of sand. Only an immortal could write in it, using a magic wand that shaped letters on the page the way you stick-shape castles in the sand. Each entry could not be re-written in the span of another hundred years, because once the immortal wrote their thoughts and confessions the pages turned into unreadable sand for protection.

  Each diary exposed part of what the Brothers Grimm didn’t want you to know – for your own good actually.

  It’s been two hundred years now since 1812. The Dreamworld is open for change for another fifty years. It’s my hope that it won’t be a great and vicious war this time, for what happened in 1912 was unimaginable.

  The first diary in the Grimm Diaries was called Snow White Sorrow, one of seven full-length diaries.

  The diaries were fun reads with an adolescence spirit since most of the writers were teens – did you ever notice that most of the fairy tale characters were young?

  You don’t have to fetch for every symbolic meaning in its pages though. It’s like the original Brothers Grimm scripts: it makes a lovely bedtime story, but for the trained and keen eye, the truth lies somewhere between the lines. So if you don’t get things in the beginning, stay cool and enjoy the ride.

  I remember those who knew about the diaries a hundred years ago, ended up rereading the original scripts of the fairy tales and other historical books to confirm the facts told centuries ago, because the diaries claim that the world, and literature, is connected in a unique and unimaginable way. Each book ever written, and which I assume you have read, was hinting to bits and pieces of the truth about the tales.

  Before you read the fully detailed diaries, I thought I’d show you a number of mini-diarie
s I found scattered and lost in the sandy pages of here and there, like a seashell left abandoned on the shore while keeping great secrets inside it but no one cared to pick it up and listen. The mini diaries won’t give away the main story but it will give you a hint of what the Grimm Diaries are about.

  I called them the Grimm Diaries Prequels.

  Finally, remember that what you read in the Grimm Diaries Prequels is not necessarily the truth since some characters will still want to alter it and protect themselves. It will be up to you to read between the lines. The road is long and fun.

  If you’re wondering about me. They call me Sandman Grimm, the keeper and collector of fairy tale dreams from the Dreamworld – which are buried in your dreams too. My job is to collect and seal the dreams every one hundred years.

  By leaking the Grimm Diaries Prequels, I will be punished, but I had to let you read them for there are bigger dangers at stake.

  Eventually, I have to say my last goodbye since you will never meet again.

  Sandman Grimm

  Ashes to Ashes &

  Cinder to Cinder

  as told by Alice Grimm

  Present day, whenever you think that is.

  The remains of the dead witch’s skeleton were found in a small town near Venice in Italy. To inspect it, I had to fool my teachers in California and tell them that my German grandma died and that I had to fly overseas to attend her funeral. No one even asked me to have my parents call the school to confirm my claim. When you are a descendant of the Brothers Grimm, every body treats you like a modern day Cinderella.

  Ironically, I was flying over to Venice to find the real Cinderella. The one everybody accidentally killed when they believed that she was a fairy tale character and didn’t exist.

  It didn’t take me much time to travel from Germany to Venice, and I was so curious to see the corpse: an 800-year-old Italian witch found by archeologists with seven nails driven to her jaw. Gruesome stuff. My perfect taste.

  “Why seven nails?” I asked Bella, the Italian archeologist’s assistance while standing over the grave in broad daylight. Bella was about twenty-four years old, seven years older than I was. I am sure her name wasn’t Bella. Some of the investigators around the world preferred not to make their names known to others.

  “No one really knows,” She said. “It was what they used to do to European witches in general, nailing them in the jaw.”

  “You mean women who were accused of witchcraft,” I corrected her. Women had been burned, crucified, and killed for practicing things like playing a game of dice, which was considered witchcraft at that time. I hate when they are were called witches because they were not. “We all know these women were innocent.”

  “Whatever,” Bella said absently as I noticed her wearing those white gloves. It was ironic that I was the one defending witches, since my ancestors had taught me to search for the likes of them all of my life. Not only witches, but also fairy tale characters that secretly lived among us without us knowing. Sometimes, they didn’t even know who they were.

  “What’s really interesting is that the skeleton was wrapped up in a shroud that is nailed to the ground.”

  “Any reason for that?” I wondered.

  “Of course. It was the common believe to cover the body of a witch or a vampire in a shroud and nail it to the earth so its spirit stays trapped and can’t wake up again and hunt them.”

  “Oh—“ I still couldn’t understand why they sent for me. They knew that I wasn’t here for this. My secret investigations were about discovering the truth about fairy tales. The stories my ancestors actually managed to forge.

  “I’ll get to what you want in a minute,” Bella said, pointing at the corpse covered in white sheets in its grave. Then she gazed toward the other workers leaving the site. “I need to make sure everyone leaves the scene and only us, who know why you’re here, stay.”

  Finally, Bella uncovered the corpse. That is when I got a glimpse of why I was here …

  There were seventeen glass slippers surrounding the corpse.

  “That’s odd.” I mumbled, kneeling down.

  “See? Italian witches from the 12th and 13th century are usually surrounded by 17 dices because dice was the game that women were forbidden to practice at the time since it was thought of as a form of witchcraft.”

  “Why seventeen?”

  “17 was considered bad luck. Don’t ask me why.”

  “And we have … glass shoes … Hmm.” I thought I knew why there were seventeen glass shoes surrounding the corpse but I needed to know more to confirm my suspicions.

  “That’s why you are here,” Bella announced. “These are 800 year old glass slippers, astonishingly still looking as new. I think it is her.”

  “This is almost impossible. She should be buried Six Dreams Under,” I touched my lips with my reluctant finger. “If that’s her, then it’s starting, which is not good at all. Someone wanted us to find this. Someone is sending a message.”

  “I don’t know why you’re surprised. It’s 2012, Alice,” Bella said. “And I don’t mean that bullshit about the Mayan discoveries about how the world ends. You know what I am talking about. We both now how the world might really end.” She shrugged.

  “2012. Exactly two hundred years after the Brothers Grimm wrote The Children’s and the Household Tales,” I mumbled, staring at the glass shoes. “So it’s true? I didn’t spend my childhood chasing shadows?”

  “I would have preferred if spent your childhood watching Snow White and Cinderella movies and chasing Prince Charming instead.”

  “I tried to, believe me. Every time I watched the lies, I couldn’t bring myself to it. I prefer Edward and Bella. At least they are absolutely ridiculous lies we can love.”

  “Philosopher much? Anyway. You did a great job so far.”

  “You really think it’s her?” I raised an eyebrow, part of me was frightened and the other part almost enchanted.

  “Might be.”

  “And how are we going to know?”

  Suddenly, a smile curved itself on Bella’s full lips. She cocked her head at someone in the scene: A slender and fair boy with platinum-blonde hair.

  “Who is he?” I wondered.

  “Whoever he is, he is hot.” Bella winked, which confused me. Even though there was something so devilishly attractive about the boy, he looked much younger than she did. About my age.

  “So he doesn’t have a name?” I mused. “Or is his last name hot?” I loved gorgeous, slender boys with that unseen aura surrounding them saying that they were as much trouble as good, but I had a job to finish. The world was about to fall apart if I didn’t do my job right.

  “His name is actually interesting,” She said, not taking her eyes off him. “Blackstar. Loki Blackstar.”

  “I don’t which part I hate more. The Loki, or the Blackstar.”

  Bella laughed. “You too could be a match made in hell—I mean heaven. We should introduce ourselves.”

  “Shouldn’t a Loki have black her?” I squinted, pretending the sun annoyed me while checking him out one more time.

  “That’s like saying shouldn’t every hulk be green,” Bella commented. “We live in a world where we discovered that fairy tales were altered. Why wouldn’t a Loki be blonde. Too blonde actually.”

  Loki was standing in front of an old and dirty red Cadillac. I rubbed my eyes because I thought he just talked to it and it wheeled back a little on its own. Then the radio was turned on at a sudden without any one touching it. It played an oldie song that said something like Red Cadillac and Black Moustache.

  “Stop it.” Loki hissed at his car … and it stopped.

  As he approached us, he was guiding other men to construct something around the corpse. They dragged two huge mirrors along.

  Looking over the corpse, Loki blocked his nose with one hand while gobbling on a greasy slice of Pizza with the other. It was interesting how did he that while still looking elegant.

  “It d
oesn’t smell,” I commented. “It’s 800 years old.”

  He didn’t acknowledge me whatsoever, his other hand in his front pocket.

  “You’ve been pulp-fictioned my friend.” Loki barely whispered to himself, looking at the corpse and then he took another bite.

  “She is a witch,” Bella kind of introduced herself. What a start. “You know back in the day they were scared of the witch’s powers and abilities in Italy.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” he muttered, still not looking at us. Yeah, I remember? “This one had rather a particular power,” He said. “She could make better Pizza than the other Italian witches, and she bathed in Olive oil.”

  Bella laughed. I didn’t find him funny, smelling arrogance reeking out of his green eyes. Bad metaphor, I know. Sue me. I am not a poet.

  “A pretty bad way to kill and bury a competitor.” Bella commented.

  “Better than the Danish people,” He said, finishing the sandwich and throwing the wrapped foil recklessly into the grave. “You know they used to drink, dance, and eat around the corpse of the dead in the 17th century?”W

  “No shit.” I found myself blurting, not knowing why I said that. He kind of got on my nerves. What did this guy even do?

  Loki finally looked my way, neglecting Bella casually. He stared at me from top to bottom then licked his lips and some ketchup off his thumb. His stare was straight and sharp and unapologetic, but not in a weird and creepy way. Still, I scanned the membranes of my head for comebacks since I had the feeling he might say something insulting and silly.

  “What do you think are three things about you that would make me want to know you better?” He said as he took a step closer toward me, grabbed my hand, and put a small plastic bag in my palm. He did it swiftly and gently like a magician. Somehow, any come back I was about to back spit on him escaped me as he looked into my eyes shortly before he turned around to guide the men placing the mirrors.

  They placed the two mirrors opposite to each other and perpendicular to the corpse.