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

  5) The Necklace of Harmonia is a Greek Myth. It will appear later on again, more detailed.

  6) Managarm, the wolf chasing the moon, is based on Norse mythology.

  The Grimm Diaries Prequels #

  9

  Rumpelstein

  by Cameron Jace

  Edited by Gema Guevara & Danielle Littig

  Rumpelstein

  as told by Rumpelstiltskin

  Dear Diary,

  Call me Rumpelstein. It’s the new name I was given by my maker; the man who created me for reasons beyond my knowledge. Then again, who knows the real reasons for their creation?

  I always thought makers, or creators, were immortal. I never thought they would die like us. Mine did. I just came from visiting his grave, and I left puzzled, feeling undone with no one to tell me who I was meant to be. Unanswered questions swam in my head: Who was I, what was I, and why was I? My question turned to be only dust in the wind. It seemed as though I was never going to know, and I wondered if that was what my maker had intended for me all along, or if he’d had plans for me at all.

  My maker tried to play God by creating me, only to die ashamed of failing to reach immortality. Irony can’t even begin to describe it.

  I remember kneeling down in the pouring rain and reading my maker’s name on his tombstone. Knowing his real name left me even more confused. That’s when I knew I had to write this entry in the diary, to tell you about my maker’s name. I wonder if it will be as shocking to you as it was to me.

  But before I do, I have to tell you about the circumstances under which I came to be known as Rumpelstein, which, all in all, isn’t my real name, and which I’ll have to keep secret from you the way my maker had kept his from me. We have our reasons.

  I won’t be able to narrate my story down to every last detail, and I know that you will hardly believe most of it. My advice would be to think of it as a fairy tale. After all, fairy tales are a good way to believe the unbelievable.

  And now, you’d better brace yourself because here’s how it all began…

  When I was a kid, while still living in a God-forsaken village at the end of the world, and before migrating to the Kingdom of Sorrow, children in my school called me Rumpelstiltskin. It was their way to ridicule me. I was a scrawny kid, shorter than average, and endowed with a big nose. Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t my real name, however.

  Rumpelstiltskin is a Germanic word that translates to “the goblin that makes noises by rattling posts and rapping on planks.” It was some sort of an annoying creature, whose name mothers mentioned to scare their children when they refused to go to bed early. It was a stupider version of the Boogeyman. Children used to make fun of their elders and tell each other stories about how they’d caught a Rumpelstiltskin under the bed the night before and trapped him in a closet, or how they crumpled him up like a paper bag and played with him in the snow, as if a Rumpelstiltskin was some miserable hamster. I was the most disrespected creature I had ever heard of. I was also tiny, a little bigger than a creature called an imp. Come to think of it, my name was really funny. Rumpelstiltskin.

  And so I spent my early life being bullied and labeled as Rumpelstitskin. Although it turned my childhood to hell, I didn’t completely mind. I was raised to be a good child, obey the elders, and thank the lord for the curve balls life threw me. There was another reason why I had accepted this. I wasn’t supposed to let anyone know my real name, which wasn’t Rumpelstiltskin or Rumpelstein, but I don’t want to write about that or my family right now.

  Wherever I went, people made fun of me, calling me: Rum pel.stilt.skin, stressing on the syllables and then sticking out their tongues, making creepy faces, or just plain mocking and kicking me around. Even when we migrated to the Kingdom of Sorrow, nothing really changed. The name was a laugh-out-loud curse. Even when I grew up to be a man, my dwarf-like figure was still motive to taunts, and Rumpelstiltskin lived on.

  Some people perceived me as a monster, even though I hadn’t done anything bad. They considered me evil because of my looks and my name.

  Many times in my life, I was tempted to roar back at the world. I wished for a genie in a bottle to turn me into an evil giant so I could take my revenge on those who bullied me.

  But I didn’t. I was raised to tolerate things because I was told I was to grow up a good man and raise a good family. Good men had to stand the test of time.

  As I’m writing this now, I can’t stop laughing at the old naïve me. I’m no longer part of the good of the world. In fact, good people, like I used to be, bore me to death now. They make me yawn, especially heroes. Who likes those? Goodness is an excuse, the easy way out.

  I grew to become a simple miller in the Kingdom of Sorrow. My family and I lived day in and day out under a pigeon-holed roof of a small shack. My wife worked on a spinning wheel and we barely made ends meet. We slept in a single, large bed that occupied most of the shack’s space, and we planned to have our future children sleep with us on the same bed. We were hoping for the ‘Happily Ever After’ as long as we were together.

  When my wife got pregnant, she started craving a plant. She was oblivious to its name, yet she could smell its foreign scent, and she said it smelled like ‘beautiful hair’. You can’t argue with your wife when she is pregnant. In fact, you usually can’t argue with your wife.

  Being the family man I was, I asked around in the village until I was told it was called rapunzel, a rare plant. Some peasants claimed it never existed. Whereas others claimed that it was poisonous and evil. They said that if there were such a plant, there’d be only one woman who could lead me to it. A fortune-teller called Madame Gothel.

  “Why would you be searching for such a rare plant?” She asked me.

  “My wife is pregnant and she craves it,” I answered.

  “Your wife?” Dame Gothel tapped her long nails on the wooden table with a crystal ball on it. “How did your wife begin crave a plant she apparently has never seen or eaten before?”

  “She said she dreamed of it,” I replied, which was true.

  “Does your wife dream a lot? Can she predict the future in her dreams?”

  “Not at all,” I lied to her. My wife had predicted she’d be pregnant a week before we found out. I didn’t think much of it, since it could’ve been a coincidence, but I didn’t trust Dame Gothel with the information.

  “Hmm…” She smirked and handed me some plants. “Here you are. These are the rapunzel plants. Do you wish for anything else?”

  “How much do they cost? I don’t think I can afford them. I could only buy one.”

  “You could have them all for free. We don’t find women craving rapunzels every day.”

  “We?” I asked, suspicious of her intentions.

  “I like to address myself as her Majesty does sometimes,” she said, laughing aloud, placing a hand on her chest. By ‘Majesty’ she meant the Queen of Sorrow. “An old lady can dream, can’t she?”

  “But of course,” I bowed my head respectfully. “Thank you,” I said and walked away, still not trusting her, but I was happy I’d fulfilled my wife’s wishes – and probably my daughter’s, who must’ve be craving the plant, as well.

  “Wait!” Dame Gothel called after me.

  “Yes?” I turned to look at her.

  “Is your wife pregnant with her first-born?” She inquired.

  “Yes. It’s our first child. We’re hoping she’s a girl,” I smiled. I had always wanted a girl so that she becomes the most beautiful spinner in the land. There was this prophecy saying that one day a beautiful girl would be able to spin straw into gold. Not that I believed it, but a father couldn’t help but dream of the best things for his daughter.

  “Oh, she will be a girl,” Dame Gothel said, placing a hand on heart once again, and then, without any sudden notice, she head back to the tree she lived in. That was when I saw a carved piece of wood, framed on the wall that read:

  Everything comes with a price.

  Looking at the
rapunzel plant, I wondered why she’d given it to me for free, but I pushed the thought to the back of my mind and walked home.

  My wife ate the plants every day, and she loved them. I tried to taste them once and ew, they were awful but I couldn’t tell her. Although I had gotten plenty of plants, my wife consumed them rather quickly. It was as though she was addicted to them. However, I didn’t trust Dame Gothel to dare go back to her. There was something evil about this woman.

  One day, while my wife worked on the spinning wheel, a leaf of rapunzels was caught into it, and it was spun accidentally with the straw. Then something strange happened: other plants grew from it by spinning them, and my wife had an infinite supply of rapunzels that were not planted or seeded in the earth, but spun on a spinning wheel.

  I tried to warn her that such enchanted leaves must’ve been a work of dark arts, but she wouldn’t listen, and I gave up when I learned how useful the plants could be.

  We discovered the rapunzels could be our food for the rest of the year, so we didn’t have to work for food anymore. My wife cooked rapunzels with everything. I had to swallow the bad taste and fake a smile to my wife, though. Sometimes a man had to tolerate things his family loved. It was my job to keep them happy.

  As the days passed, it got colder in the Kingdom of Sorrow. I heard from villagers that Dame Gothel had foretold the arrival of a curse in the land: Seven years of unstoppable snow and icy grounds. Peasants claimed it was right after the Queen of Sorrow had given birth to her first-born whom she called Snow White, a few weeks before we had our daughter…

  My wife and I called her Rapunzel, honoring the plant that saved us from starving in the inclement weather – it was also a rare plant, and I had decided my daughter was meant to be special. Looking back at this moment, I believed my daughter to be my creation, like my maker had thought of me, but I’ll get to that later when I reveal the name of my maker.

  The seven-year-long curse turned our life in the village into dark days, masquerading behind the white of snow. We couldn’t grow crops, and there wasn’t much work available for me. The roads were blocked and people starved in isolation.

  The three of us, under one pigeonholed roof, and one creaky bed, lived by the power of one love that held us together.

  My wife spun the plants inside the cottage, and Rapunzel’s smile filled the small space with joy.

  Rapunzel’s hair grew increasingly fast, which we thought was a healthy sign in the beginning. Her mom had to cut it off repeatedly. It wasn’t efficient, though. But we found a great use for her hair. We filled the holes and the corners in the cottage with my daughter’s hair, and we lit it on fire to protect us against the penetrating cold. I told you my daughter was going to be special. Without her, we’d have most likely starved and died off like many others.

  Years later, the snow began to ease, and occasional sunshine spread over the land. The roads were useless and barren, having been abandoned for years. The geography of the land changed a great deal. In my village, we discovered we were surrounded by a lake that wasn’t there before. It made it harder for us to cross over to the bigger towns of Sorrow to sell our goods and make money.

  We needed to buy straw from Sorrow but couldn’t cross over, and when we built canoes and rowed to the other side we discovered that the Queen of Sorrow had decided to exile us from the kingdom. My village was one of the poorer regions, and the Sorrows decided they no longer had use for us in their kingdom after years of being cursed with ice. We became a burden the kingdom didn’t need, and the lake only made matters worse. Whoever insisted on crossing the lake was shot and hung by the Queen’s huntsmen.

  We were simply locked out to starve on our own again.

  We barely survived on the rapunzel plants, and they weren’t enough anymore. We were raising a child and one type of food wasn’t helping her grow strong enough– although her hair still grew on its own. The rapunzel plants span by machine weren’t as good as before, as they were aging like us.

  If we only found a way to buy straw, we could have had something to offer the Sorrows. Maybe they’d have taken us back, or at least bought from us.

  But the snow on our side didn’t fully subside, as if our village was still under the curse. I woke up in the morning and saw the sun shining on the Kingdom of Sorrow, but refusing to come over to our village still covered in grey clouds.

  I tried to reach Dame Gothel, but she had gone to the Kingdom of Sorrow where she’d become the Queen’s fortune-teller. Who knew how she’d managed to cross over.

  Later, we learned of the intruders who had sailed all the way from Europe, aiming at the Kingdom of Sorrow. It was rumored that they weren’t human, that they were an army of demons who had elongated teeth and drank the blood of the living. Sailors used to tell us about something called the Vampire Craze in Europe at the time, and we all suspected the intruders had to do something with it. It was said that they were going to attack the Sorrows to capture the Queen’s child.

  Why did they want to get the Queen’s child? I didn’t care. I was a hopeless man wanting to save my own family, and being stranded and weak killed me inside every time I looked at my beautiful daughter.

  I learned why the Queen had shut us off from the land. The European intruders were attacking the Sorrows from the borders where we lived. The Queen preferred to sacrifice us instead of the rest of the land. I had always been puzzled by the Queen’s actions. Should I have blamed her for letting a part of the kingdom die to save others, or should I have applauded her courage of taking such drastic measures to save the rest of the kingdom?

  In the village, we locked our doors, hid in our shacks, and pretended we were dead when the intruders came. It was said that if the intruders looked you in the eyes, you weren’t going to live long enough to tell the story. Only those who helped them were spared.

  Many of our village people submitted to the intruders and assisted them, showing them how to cross the lake or enter the Kingdom of Sorrow from roads we’d never dared to venture. They told them about the history of Sorrow and who played what role in its existence. They told them things the intruders needed to know, all in exchange for sparing their lives.

  At the time, I was keeping my family and myself safe, digging a hole underground and rarely sneaking out. My wife, my lovely daughter, the plants, the bed, the hair, the spinning wheel, and, of course, myself were bundled into our secret haven.

  My wife tried to persuade me to help the intruders and spare our lives, but I wasn’t going to betray my own people. Who was the Queen of Sorrow to say who belonged to the land and who didn’t? I still belonged to the Kingdom of Sorrow, and although it wasn’t my birthplace, it was the place where I raised my family and where I called home. A vicious ruler wasn’t going to change that, and I often found myself dreaming of finding a way home, someday.

  Years later, the intruders left the village – or maybe they found a better entry into the Kingdom. Again, I didn’t care. I was just a simple man who couldn’t care less about politics. I only cared for my family.

  When my daughter, Rapunzel, was eleven years old, the rapunzel plants gave up on us, and we couldn’t spin more plants out of them. I guess everything is destined to get old and die eventually.

  We needed to find a way to get straw to start spinning again, but the only way to get it was to cross over the lake from our exiled land. It was like looking death in the eyes.

  Sitting ashamed of being helpless and unable to provide for my family, Rapunzel walked into the cottage with the solution. It was her hair.

  She suggested we use her fast-growing hair as straw, and it worked. We had to keep it a secret, though. I didn’t want our neighbors to get jealous of us, and I didn’t want anyone asking me where I got the straw.

  Secretly, day by day, we watched Rapunzel’s hair grow so we could cut it and use it. I can’t say I felt good about it as a father, but she didn’t have any use for the excessive hair and we had no other choice.

  Still, I w
as afraid to cross over the lake to the other side of the kingdom, carrying the goods with me. The soldiers could have shot me before I explained the reasons why I wanted to get there, so I stuffed the goods into a canoe, along with a note clarifying who I was and how much I demanded in exchange for my good, and pushed it off into the lake. I was thankful that none of the soldiers dared to cross over to our village. They thought we were a plague, and didn’t want to deal with us.

  I was lost in thought when the canoe came to an abrupt stop a few minutes after I had pushed it away from the shore.

  What a helpless man you were, Rumpelstiltskin! You couldn’t do anything right, even when your daughter tried to save you. When were you going to stand up and protect your own people?

  I stood by the shoreline, wondering if I had the guts to swim and push the canoe farther onto the other side, but I didn’t. I was a good man, but I was hand tied and a useless coward. What was good about a good man if he was so passive?

  Now, when I look back at those days, I can’t help but laugh, while staring at my reflection in the mirror. Perhaps goodness and evil weren’t attributes. They were jobs, and I sucked at being good. It’s easy claiming you’re good. The hardest part is to have the heart to live up to it. The line between good and evil is fuzzy, and you could easy drown in the oblivious grey in between. Grey is only a shade lighter than black; it never leads to pure white.

  This was how I felt that day, and soon you’ll see where I ended up.

  After moments of waiting in the freezing cold by the lake, help came to me in the most inexplicable form. It was the kind of help that rendered me useless, but it showed me that I was a good man too; it was a divine intervention of some sort.

  Mermaids rose through the water and began pushing the canoe gently toward the other side. They were beautiful and young; they were nothing like the old stories described them: Evil and manipulative. One of them turned back and blew me a kiss over her shoulder. A glittering necklace hung on her neck; it was made of seashells and its glow reminded me of the moon on dark nights – the moon hadn’t been appearing for many days, but that was another story. I rubbed my neck, blushing, wondering what my wife would’ve done to me if she’d seen that.