three years ago...
"I dunno how much longer we can do this," groaned a twenty-one-year-old Claude Verelia, popping the cap off a colorful blown-glass bottle of cognac he'd snatched from an unsuspecting old drunkard who had happened to leave his satchel flap open while walking through the magic-infested markets of East Fairy Kingdom. It was a rookie mistake when Claude, a longtime pickpocket out of mainly necessity, could easily be considered one of the least dangerous scoundrels prowling the streets these days.
His sister, several years his junior and still harboring some baby fat in her rosy cheeks, looked over at him curiously. The young man had been pacing for so long there was a dent in the horrendously ugly pink carpeted floor of their shared motel room.
"I have to support you," he continued feverishly, "and I can't do it here anymore. You're—you're not going to get anywhere here, Sicilienne. I want a meaningful life for you—"
"I'm fourteen! I don't know what I'm gonna do with my life!" she protested with an incredulous laugh, dumping the contents of his wallet onto the counter to flip through it. How she could still laugh so freely was something he could never understand. A headache was blooming behind the bridge of his nose. "You said your job was secure. It seems like we're doin' okay for now—"
"We're barely scraping by," Claude sighed, finally giving up on pacing and flopping onto the rock-hard block of moldy cheese the lady at the front desk had claimed when she gave them the room was a couch. Godmothers, hotel-hopping was the worst. He tipped back the bottle. Piles of them littered the place by now, but Sicilienne was polite enough to eye them warily and refrain from mentioning the increased frequency of his drinking habit. "Wages are less and less... They're laying people off at the shoe factory, and I don't think I have a good chance of staying, if I'm being honest."
He wasn't being honest, of course. He never was. He had no shoe factory job, not anymore. Holding down anything for much longer than a few months wasn't one of his strong suits. Some might have called him a pathological liar but, really, he just could never bring himself to tell his younger sister about the theft. She would be devastated, that sweet, innocent girl of morals that she was. And after one too many lies, it became easy, too easy...
Sicilienne's lips twisted, and she reached up to anxiously tug on the caramel-colored bangs that tickled at her eyelashes.
"Scraping by." She said it as if she didn't quite understand the meaning of the words.
He took another swig of his liquor and a deep breath before replying.
"Yeah."
If she had stopped for a moment to consider that Fairy Kingdom was known far and wide for its footwear demand and that the labor shortage had leveled out since Queen Ella's rise to power, she might have had the good sense to question what he'd said. But she trusted her brother wholly and fully, so she just sighed, slumping into a stool at the counter and tracing little circles on its surface with lacy-gloved fingers. Where could they go with almost no property to their name and no family anywhere to extend a helping hand?
"You know, I bet you could easily make a living with that music o' yours," he said finally, leaning back. She met his eyes again. They always sparkled when he complimented her, like she was the sun to his earth, like she was the center of everything for him. Maybe she was.
She cast her good eye downward, flushing with warmth. "Oh, I don't know."
"'Course you do, love—you're a natural. People make incredible careers out of art and music and whatnot, 'specially in the Northwest Tower Kingdom. We could go there if we got ahold of enough cash to make the trip. Just picture it. You, the official flutist to... Queen Rapunzel or something."
Her brilliant, girlish smile lit up the dingy, hopeless room. "I thought you hate the royals."
Claude nodded, lifting the bottle once more to his lips. "But I wouldn't if you were one."
"I couldn't see it."
He rose from the couch, his hand sliding into his pocket and closing around a gold locket. Nice necklace like this could get him a good number of yellowbacks—maybe not a lot, but at least something substantial in a place like East Fairy Kingdom. The local royals were poor at managing finances and inflation was on the slow-moving rise for the peasants, but if he could get to some well-off broker, managing to avoid getting swindled out of his steal wouldn't be too hard.
Abruptly he set the bottle on the counter again, sweeping past his sister to leave the room. She spun around at his sudden movement.
"Where you goin'?" Disappointment flooded her voice. She was grateful for his taking care of her in the absence of their parents for as long as she could remember, but he left her so often.
Claude fiddled with the locket's chain. "No questions, no lies, love." He snatched up the boots resting by the door and slid back the several locks he'd attached out of that paranoia he pretended he didn't have. "I'll be back in an hour, maybe two. Just work on your studies, and don't go anywhere without me!"
With the brief flash of an elusive grin, he was gone.
Sicilienne blew air out of her cheeks, running her thumb over the rose-patterned patch covering her right eye as she padded across the room in her tights. She picked up her textbook from where it sat beside her flute, on the tiny table adjacent to the limp mattress they had for a bed. Claude's own schooling was minimal and so he could help her little, but he had long encouraged her interest in history and literature. She was even practicing writing as of late. He had taught her to read via road signs, nutritional labels, and posters in building lobbies, and she had taken it upon herself to expand her vocabulary with the chronicles of King Arthur and the adventures of Hercules. But reading music—that had always come so much easier.
Claude seemed to think of music as her intrinsic calling, or at least he saw enough talent in her that he had paid for several lessons in singing, the pianoforte, and the flute. Her eyes trailed over to the little wooden instrument, and she set the book back down again.
She took the flute and approached the hanging wall mirror right by the bathroom, analyzing herself. She hesitated for a moment before striking a dramatic pose with it, and then another, and then another, trying to picture herself as some sort of royal instrumentalist. It was a fun idea, at least, but she just didn't particularly think that—
Sharp pain exploded to life in her chest and she cried out suddenly, the instrument slipping from her grasp and rolling ungracefully across the floor as she clutched her head. Energy was filling her, threatening to burst her veins, the pressure in her head making her feel like she had to get rid of it, now. The surge.
That was what she'd taken to calling it; a monthly wave of unbridled communication magic that Claude had never exhibited any signs of. Frankly she didn't have a clue where the enchantment gene had come from, and neither did he, for that matter. Desperate to get rid of it, she grabbed the nearest object her fingers could fumble upon, her eyes squeezed shut from the pain. That turned out to be the mirror.
With her eyes closed, she could picture in her mind an electric wave of whatever power it was that gave her the ability to do this. Reaching out in darkness, making dizzying turns until it reached, presumably, another mirror. She always connected one object to another, and it tended to be a parallel of whatever object she'd originally grabbed. Finally there was nothingness again. She exhaled in relief.
A voice suddenly surrounded her mind.
"Oh. Why, hello there."
It was a man's. Peculiarly, she couldn't place his age—he could have been anywhere between twenty-five and a hundred and five, which baffled her. Fluttering her eyes open again, she waved awkwardly at the mirror, knowing that despite her inability to see anything but her own reflection, whoever was on the other side of the connection would see a ghostlike vision of her.
"Oi. Sorry to bother you, sir. I've got this magic—"
"No need to explain yourself, my dear. Magic is a funny thing. Though, a magic that only acts up once a month is certainly interesting, I must say," the recipient on the other end replied. She could practically see the man stroking his beard in thought in her mind's eye, which was even stranger than the struggle to recognize how old he was.
"Yes, well—wait," Sicilienne realized a beat too late. "How'd you know the surge happens once a month?"
"Lucky guess," he replied easily, unbothered that she'd caught the unusuality of the comment.
"Doubtful." Her mind was spinning, searching for some plausible explanation. She may not have been the cleverest or the most educated, but even Sicilienne Verelia knew never to trust a mysterious voice in your head who knew things that it shouldn't. There were enough tales of rogue fae tricksters to know that. "Are you some kind of all-powerful warlock?"
"Perhaps something like that."
"You a, um... a telepathic wizard, then?"
"Again, sort of in the realm of the correct."
"A fairy? There's fairies who can read minds from long distances, I think—"
"I could be for all I know."
She was stumped. Fairy Kingdom was populated by enough magical species to inspire a hundred legendary stories, but it wasn't as if she knew about all of their abilities. Her curiosity was piqued now. "If not those, then what—who—are you?"
"My, what an interesting question," he chuckled, not the least perturbed by her insistent inquiry. "I wish I had a simple answer, but I'm afraid it's more of a complicated subject than you'd expect."
She really didn't see how that could be a complicated question at all, but it had been, truthfully, a silly one. "Well, fate isn't in favor of us meeting again, so it's not like it matters," she said with a shrug, dropping the subject. There was no use in debating with a stranger about what he was or wasn't. Not that she had anything better to do, of course.
There was a pause on the other end.
"Do you believe in that, really? Fate?"
"Well, sure," she answered tentatively. His tone of voice wasn't mocking, but she was so used to condescending responses that she still feared judgement that wasn't really there. "'Course I do. 'Fraid I don't really understand people who don't."
"Hmm." It sounded like he was mulling something over. "Is it right, though, for our paths in life to be controlled by a thing so vague as destiny?"
She was hit with a sudden feeling of déjà vu. This man, whoever and whatever he was, sounded astonishingly like the old wanker who did nothing but mope and grumble in the motel lobby in the afternoons over chess, lamenting his ill fate. Like the perpetually drunk woman down the hall, exponentially worse than Claude was. She cursed the Writer's name into the wee hours of the night only to be found unconscious on the floor outside of her room come morning. Like the teenagers who lived in the garbage heap outside the building, who found comfort in the opium they injected into their forearms as they applied for job after job after job just trying to pay for more of it. This man sounded like her brother, who seemed to have already lost hope in the future.
Something inside her snapped, and all of a sudden Sicilienne couldn't keep her emotions leashed anymore. Random stranger or not, she couldn't stand his attitude. She couldn't stand this stupid, trashy motel room with all of its stupid, flawed quirks; she couldn't stand the bitter hopelessness of those around her; she couldn't stand not being able to do anything about it.
"Is that really a question?" Sicilienne set her jaw, and felt her voice harden like the steel in her eyes, rising with every word. "Don't anyone believe in happily ever after anymore? What's so wrong with dreamin' that things will work out in the end? It don't matter what your path is—you're one of those Writer haters, aren't you? The free will fearmongers?"
"I didn't say anything like that," the voice said calmly. "There's no reason to—"
"I—I mean—look at Queen Ella! Or—or—or Snow White! Everything that happened to her was to get her to find her prince, find her happiness—and now she's got security in knowin' that everything she ever wanted has come true! Don't you wanna believe in that? Don't you wanna have faith that it's real?" She was on a tangent now, shouting, having forgotten all about whoever was on the other end of the mirror connection. "All I want is for my brother and I to get a happily ever after of our own. Fate will get us there! It will, I'm sure of it! The Writer is out there somewhere—and—and he's going to—"
Sicilienne didn't realize she'd slammed her fist into the mirror until glass was raining down upon her. She scrambled back, dropping to her knees and gasping. She tried to focus for a moment on controlling her rampant emotions, which clearly wasn't her strong suit. Deep breaths. In... and out. In... and out.
There was a beat of silence, and then:
"You've gotten yourself very worked up about this, my dear," came the mysterious man's voice. Her eyes went wide. The mirror was shattered, and their connection with it.
She whipped around.
He was there, in her motel room. The stranger was tall and slender much like her brother, with a top hat covering a mop of salt-and-pepper hair and the shortly-cropped stubble crawling its way across his chin and neck. He appeared to be on the earlier side of middle-aged, adorned with a long, sweeping coat of royal blue.
How is he here? Some kinda teleportation? How did he find me?
"You, my friend, are quite the character," he observed, his mouth twitching upward in an amused smile.
"H—how did you—"
He raised an eyebrow, as if the answer were obvious. "Magic is how I got here. Surely you of all people understand?"
Sicilienne could do nothing but remain there frozen in place, her expression suspended in an unmoving state of terror and bewilderment. She had no way of knowing what to expect. If he was here to hurt her, Claude was gone, and thus there was no one around willing to provide protection. However... he didn't seem too keen on causing her any harm. Instead, the stranger tapped his cane on the hideous carpeting.
"Lovely choice of flooring," he said, wrinkling his nose. "Internal-organ-pink is in style these days?"
Sicilienne blinked over and over, and even pinched herself just in case, but she wasn't imagining this situation.
"Who're you?" she finally managed to ask.
"You may call me the Writer," he answered kindly, his smile crinkling the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, "and I would like to offer you a job."
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈
The prologue is finally here! I would NEVER have gotten this out without my amazing editor, so give her some love in the comments! I'm really glad I managed to crank this out and it's not too short, and I hope it can hold y'all over until I perfect the first chapter. Plotting is a bit of a mess right now, and my writing has been a little all over the place since I'm currently sick, but I had some really good inspiration today while brainstorming and I can't wait to show all you lovely readers what I have in store!
If you've given my story a chance, I really appreciate it and my heart goes out to you <3 This is your official welcome to Fairytaletopia, and I hope you enjoy your stay. I love you all and hope you had a wonderful day, and if not, hold out for one!
Edit: This chapter has been revised for a clearer reading experience.
⸻Ginger