Snow White Blood Red

“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-diaries 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

Snow White Blood Red

A Grimm Diaries Prequel

as told by

the Snow White Queen

Have you ever wondered why I was called the Evil Queen and never had a real name? Do you know that truth only comes with names, and that you only hold power over those you know of their true names?

I have always wondered why you never asked about my name. Was I so superficial to you? So stereotypical and mundane? Why did you treat me as if I were just the monster of the week?

You know what I think? You never had the time to really hate me. You
wanted
to hate me long before you even met me. You wanted to scrape my existence and avenge your childhood princess by laying all blame on me.

What if they didn’t call me the Evil Queen, what if the story was told from my point of view instead of hers, would you ever think of me as an angel? Could I ever make you care about me? Would you ever think that you could have been me?

I know that deep inside of you, in the very core of your heart – and I know a lot about hearts –, you adore me. You’re just scared like the others, afraid to admit how much you love the Snow White Queen.

But I don’t need your love, because I am loved by the greatest and most majestic heart in the world.

Mine.

The last time I had a little chat with
me
in the mirror, I decided I should uncover the snow burying the truth of the tale. If she managed to fool the world for two hundred years, it was time for me to splay some sunshine onto the fairylands and melt the snow white lies to uncover the truth. Not everything that is white is pure and not every girl that is young and beautiful is not a monster.