The white of Jacob’s eyes looked reddened with vein-like spirals of red blood, curving underneath cinder-blackened eyebrows. A perfect white, red, and black scene. It made me wonder about how long I was destined to stay cursed and hunted by those three colors. Sometimes, I thought I could only see in blooded black and white.
I looked at the cinder on the floor next to the fireplace, wondering why Jacob’s forehead was smeared with it. For all I knew, Jacob could hardly walk at this stage of his illness. The cinder let me suspect that he had found Cinderella. There was no point in asking him. If he did find her, he wouldn’t tell me where she was.
“So since you’re dying, Jacob, I have a confession to make. But first, I have to ask you something, for no one will able to answer me after you die.”
I shook my head and breathed onto my manicured, long fingernails to puff the suspicious thoughts away. It was only minutes before he was gone anyway. “Do you think I am evil, Jacob?” I finally asked.
Jacob looked the other way.
“Look at me. It shouldn’t be that hard to answer. You know what happened. You know what I have done … and what she has done … and what she is capable of.”
“In my book, you’re the evil of all evil,” he whispered. “But when it comes to logic, I get confused sometimes. Many nights, I sat wondering about this but I never got a straight answer,” he turned his head back to me. “All I know is that evil is a point of view, to both: the reader and the protagonist, the predator and the prey, the dreamer and the Dreamhunter. People love me when I retell the stories they have collected. If I retell the story as it really happened, they blame and accuse me of telling a bad story, because readers expect stories to be logical, to have a linear plot, and to have plain good and bad characters, to have a hero and have a villain. That’s the difference between fact and fiction. A great writer is an excellent liar. And I am an excellent writer.”
“Are you saying that this is why you altered the tales?” I laughed mockingly.
“You know damn well why I altered the tales,” If Jacob had fangs, he would be snarling at me now.
I nodded at his words of wisdom and tapped his hands gently as an apology. Although we’ve been enemies all along, I admired the man and his brother who brought tales and bedtimes stories to the children of the world. Tales that they shouldn’t have told, at least not to children. But they did a great job in forging them and making them believable.
I lowered my head and looked him closer in the eyes again. My eyes have sunk huntsmen to their knees and girls to their glass coffins, so he should have feared me.
“You know what she is, right?” I whispered to him, my breath waving like fog upon his face. This time I meant Snow White. “You have heard the stories. They have told you and you know what she is.”
“That’s debatable,” he said, glaring at me. He was not afraid of me. “She still has a choice to choose who she is.”
“Jacob. Jacob. Jacob,” I sighed, pulling back and patting him on one hand again. “You and your riddles. You know that I like your brother Wilhelm more than you?”
“Are you capable of liking and loving?” He slapped back with the last few breathes.
“In many ways, I think of myself as an angel.” I smirked, blinked innocently, and then my eyes glittered.
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Imagine the world with no Snow White, or better, without a Cinderella.” I laughed. The coin mirrors clicked together in my hand as I did. ”If you’re so wise, why did you even bother to write the story? You could have just buried it with you to the grave,”
“It’s better to fracture a myth and let it spread and let it cling to the gelatin minds of children over the years than to burry it. Things buried are sooner or later dug up and surfaced, and then the truth shall be set free. Things altered are harder to bring back to its normal source, because in the mind of generations who have inherited the idea and passed it from one to another, they will refuse to believe otherwise.”
I smirked, not uttering a word. Took a glance at the mirror coins and then back at him. “You don’t know where you are, Jacob. Right?” I said as I kept clicking the mirror coins. The sound drove him mad.
“Oh—“ Jacob shrugged, getting the message. He lifted one hand and stared at it as if to make sure it was real then looked at the cottage and then back to me. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “You know we wouldn’t just call it a dream since the Dreamworld is not that easy to describe. But yes this is a dream.”
“Whose dream?” he asked reluctantly.
“Yours, Jacob. This is your dream.”
“You knew that I am immortal too?”
“All the time. And you know what that means.”
“It means that if I die in the dream, I will never wake up again.” He said absently, but with a thin smile curving on the corner of his lips. “It means you’ve been fooling around with me since you came in here. You actually came here to kill me.”
“Don’t you love?” I wiggled my nose. “When the character in the book killed the author?”
”But how did you enter my dream?”