Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

“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 that fact
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 kills
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 throw 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 how 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.

Snow White Blood Red

A Grimm Diaries Prequel

A teaser story 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.

Snow White Blood Red

as told by the Snow White Queen,

wrongfully known as the Evil Queen.

Dear Wilhelm Carl Grimm,

She is not that giddy, naïve, and helpless
princess she pretends to be. Please don’t let her fool you with her innocence
if you see her sing to the birds in the forest. Resist her charm from bringing
joyful tears to your eyes, and shield yourself from her devious beauty before
she deceives you into wanting to kiss her awake. It'll  be a kiss of death.
Your death. That’s how she fooled the Huntsman, Prince Charming, and me, her
birth mother.

I still remember the original script of
the fairy tale, the one you wrote in 1812. It clearly stated that she was my
own flesh and blood daughter. I don’t have the slightest idea why you altered
it fifty years later.

What was the point of turning me into an
evil, narcissistic, and heartless stepmother, blinded by jealousy and envy of
the young princess?

For years, I have been looking for you to
tell you the truth about her, but you were impossible to reach.

But I found your brother, Jacob. He told
me that you wanted to tone the story down so children could sleep better at
night, instead of having nightmares about the Queen who sought to eat her
daughter’s heart and liver.

Shame on you, Wilhelm.

You, of all authors, knew why I sought to
kill her. My actions were justified. I was trying to save my kingdom from her
wrath, before everything we loved was destined to an end. The same way you had
to rewrite the true fairytales after cursing us, so the War of Sorrows would
not continue ever after.

Night after night, and year after year,
parents fed their children false bedtime stories, until your lies grew into
inescapable memories. Your
happy ever after
lies, Wilhelm, shaped the
world.

I wondered why you didn’t burn the
original scripts, instead of rewriting them. You must have figured out that
sooner or later someone would dig up the truth and expose you. Altering it was
the smarter solution. You let children believe that the bites were resurrecting
kisses, and that torturing glass coffins were made for sleeping beauties,
waiting for a prince to come and kiss them awake.

A wise man once said that the greatest
trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was someone else. You
did the same with us, Wilhelm. You turned us into pastiches of the immortals
that we really are, and made it harder for us if wanted to persuade the world
otherwise.

I know that you did it to save us from
her
.
And I appreciate
how you concealed our real
names, or we would have ended up
like
Rumpelstiltskin,
tortured by those who knew of his real name.

But
sometimes, I can’t help
but wonder why no one ever questioned 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 was I treated as if I were the monster of the
week?

You know what I think? I think that the
world
never got the time to hate me. It just
wanted
to hate me long before it met me.

If I tell those who detest me about the
true nature of their little princess, would they ever care about me half as
much as they care about her?

I know that deep inside, they adore me. They
like the way I talk, walk, dress, and even the way I kill.

They are just afraid to admit how much they
love me. I am the Snow White Queen, strong enough that I don’t need anyone’s
pity or love, because
I
am loved by the greatest and most majestic heart
in the world:

Mine.

It’s 2012 now, Wilhelm, and it’s time we
all wake up from the curse, and correct the wrongs. I know that most of us
don’t remember who we really are, but we will find each other. 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 knowing what they
are talking about. Bur I have to do it before she wakes up again from her
Sleeping Death. God only knows what would become of us then.

Do you have any idea how many times I
tried to kill her?
Do you have any idea?

I tried witchcraft, charms, demons,
bloodsuckers, plagues, poison, Black Death, and practiced every sinful dark art
ever known to immortals. I sank to my knees, begging the oceans to drown her,
pleading the volcanoes to burn 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.

But she did, and only the devils know how.

She is empowered by the love of the
children who adore her. Every time children dream about her, she feeds on their
dreams. Such powers are
greater
than life and death.

Still, you refuse to tell me about the Lost
Seven. Remember them, Wilhelm? The ones you rewrote into dwarves?

Like Silverfish, they are hiding somewhere
in the dusty pages of every fairy tale that has ever been written, eating the
parts that belong to me. I need to know who they are, Wilhelm, or it will be
the end of all of us.

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

But you know what? I am not even half the
beautiful evil that she is made of.

Since you kept the Lost Seven’s identities
from me, 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 used to live. It’s as if he was addicted
to the scent of her death on the bed sheets. When he refused to tell me about
the Lost Seven, I poisoned him and ended his life, the way a Grim Reaper does.

If you to keep their identities from me, I
will kill each and everyone of the Grimms. I will be your
Grimm Reaper
.

As I sat on his bed, watching him die, I
told him a bedtime story. A
deadtime
story, to be precise. I told him
about her.

That’s is why I am writing you this
letter, to tell you what I already told your brother.

So dear Wilhelm, let me bleed on these
pages with my quill pen, made of feathers as black as crows, writing on paper
as white as doves, and ink that is as red as your brother’s blood …

It was the last decade of the eighteenth
century when I realized what she really was, fifteen years prior to killing
her.

I was looking outside my royal chamber’s
window in my castle. The winter had already come, and the snow covered the land
with aprons of shining ice. It was one of those twilit winters, known by the
locals for bad omens and superstitions. I didn’t believe in such things, but
when the snow buried the purple poppy fields underneath a shroud of a thick layer
of white, I had my doubts.

The peasants believed the curves of the
land resembled the body of a gigantic girl, buried underneath. They claimed she
was a demon princess who fed on the light of day and left us in the dark, that
she drank the rain falling from the skies before it reached the starving earth.

I couldn’t stand their ignorance when
rumoring that the princess buried in the snow was an incarnation of my
daughter. I detested those low-life  peasants, spreading their superstition in
the Kingdom of Sorrow. As the Queen, I was left to rule alone while the king
was away, leading his timeless war against real demons, lurking at kingdom’s
borders. It wasn’t the right time to correct and educate the ignorant peasants.
Part of me was rather satisfied when I watched them starve to death, unable to
seed the earth. They deserved it.