Once Beauty Twice Beast, Moon & Madly, Rumpelstein, Jawigi Read online

  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.

  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:

  J a w i g i

  Afterward

  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.

  “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, 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.

  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.

  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, th
e 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.