Beauty Never Dies

“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.