Blood Apples

“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 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.

Blood Apples

as told by Prince Charming

Dear Diary,

Today, I sat by the fire in my castle, reading a letter made of pages of sand, delivered to me by a white dove guarded by two owls.

Those damn letters you get to read only once before they start pouring through your fingers like sand in a bottomless hourglass, forever gone, and forever lost like the two seconds that just passed since I started this diary.

I was staring at the letter with a smile on the corner of my mouth. It wasn’t the magical letter that amused me though. It was the names of its senders: Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug, the two women who were buried behind the Brothers Grimm’s eyes.

Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug were the source the Brothers Grimm got most of their fairy tales. They lived in Kassel in Germany, and one of their sisters married the Grimm’s third brother later in life. They told fairy tales in exchange for a loaf of bread or a place to stay at night. Sometimes they did it in exchange for a jar of golden fireflies to light up the night, trying to escape the vicious evil that hunted them for the rest of their lives.

The letter Jeannette and Amalie sent me was short and precise. They only had one question, and they demanded an answer.

I had known them for many years, but hadn’t been able to answer their
previous
silly questions. However, this newer question was much easier to answer.

Feeding wood to the fire, I winced at the flicker of ember, remembering when Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug used to ask me about why I loved Snow White.

That damned question!
Even when asked by your lover, you hardly knew the answer.

‘Why do you love me?’
What kind of question was that?

I love you because… wait… I take a drag from my pipe… I really don’t know. I think that’s the beauty of love, wanting to be with someone, taste their sweetness and their fears, live their lives and be there in their death, share their ups and their downs, and most importantly, love them and grow old with them, even if they were some kind of monsters.

Have you ever been unable to shake your soul free, wrapped with your lover’s velvet rope around your heart? Have you ever been enchanted with a nameless spell that made pain and pleasure synonymous?

I never had a logical explanation for my love for Snow White, and yet Jeannette and Amalie kept insisting on one.

But I knew why
they
thought I did.

I learned one thing among the years. It was that stories are beautiful lies told from a person to another, across generations, where each storyteller added his own filler – aka lie – to the pile of previous ones. After many  years, you get a totally different story from what really happened, filled with people’s expectations and desires.

Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug wanted to know the truth about fairy tales from me so they made sure the lies they told weren’t far fetched from the ones they made up in exchange for bread, fireflies, or a place to stay.

But it didn’t matter. The Brothers Grimm forged it all in the end anyway, and the world loved it.

So my ‘I don’t know’ answer never quenched Jeannette and Amalie’s thirst. They had to ask me a different question in today’s letter, one that sailed me back to a bittersweet memory of Snow White, the beautiful monster I fell in love with.

The question was, ‘
Can you tell us why apples are red?
’

A smile conjured itself on my face when I read the letter. It made me think of the endless people in this world who didn’t know why apples were red. To them, it was only a fact, and it probably had a scientific explanation. Hardly did anyone know (‘anyone knows’) that apples were once gold – especially in the Kingdom of Sorrow.

Have you ever seen a golden apple?
Unlucky you. Although the ancient Greeks and Romans had always mentioned them, the world still thought it was a myth.
How many times did the ancients have to send us clues until we deciphered the messages they wanted us to understand? Or is it we’ll just believe what we want to believe?

I found myself remembering the old days, walking through the Black Forest in the Kingdom of Sorrow in the darkest, moonless nights, guided by the light of flickering fireflies here and there.

But it wasn’t only fireflies that were golden and illuminated the night. It was also apples, glowing on trees like candle balls shimmering in the night. Along with the golden fireflies, apples lit the path for the good-hearted when they walked through the forest, and dimmed it for the black-hearted, leaving them lost in the dark.

It was a time when people still wondered why this was called the Kingdom of
Sorrow
when it was a peaceful and magical place with singing birds and gleaming fireflies. I guess the name preceded the truth that was about to be revealed.

I was a lost and spoiled young prince, searching for the beautiful princess who bit me when I was younger, wandering in the Black Forest of Sorrow. That was when I was first introduced to the golden and glittering apples by a boy and his sister.

They called themselves Hansel and Gretel, telling me that before the golden apples, they used breadcrumbs to find their way back home when they got lost in the forest. The apples glittered the most on Christmas night, and on Hallow’s Eve, which was the Day of Apple Harvest when everybody in the kingdom celebrated.

“It’s not just apples that are golden,” Gretel told me with her doe eyes. “It’s everything that was the color of…” She pulled me by my ear like a kiddo, and then whispered, “Red.”

“Red?” I wondered.

“Many centuries ago, all fruits and vegetables that were once red were turned into the color of gold,” Gretel said. “Berries, apples, tomatoes, you name it.”

“Why is that?” I asked. I was a prince of a neighboring kingdom so I

knew little of the Black Forest.

“Red is a forbidden color in the Kingdom of Sorrow,” Gretel explained. “Because it’s the color of Death.”

“Death has a color?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Death’s color is that of blood, and it’s a
she
,” Gretel whispered again.

“Death is a person?” I asked, wondering if it was Death we should be afraid of now.

“We call her Little Red Riding Hood,” Gretel said. “The weird, yet cheerful, girl living by the Tree of Life, outside of the forest.”