Snow White Blood Red (The Grimm Diaries Prequels #1)
Cameron Jace
“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.