Once upon a time. How many life preludes commence with this obnoxious phrase – my own included. Happy ever afters, on the other hand, are precious as a rare gem in my world. The tragic endings I write might reflect my own life's tragedies, being ripped away from what I cared and loved the most. At first I wanted to stop writing, leaving William to carry on our family name on his own. My brother, knowing me better than I know myself, convinced me otherwise.
William and I live together in the sparsely populated German village of Steinbach, alongside the bank of the Kinzig river, near the Black Forest. We left our crowded family home in Hanau five years ago to pursue our writing career. Today, five years later, we are close to publishing our first fairy tale collection entitled Grimm's Fairy Tales.
"What if we change this part of Rapunzel? One has to scale her long, yellow hair to climb inside the tower, but rather than having no door, the entrance is closed off by rocks," William suggests.
I finish off the last sentence in our handwritten manuscript, dipping the feather quill in the ink bottle one last time. Inside this book we only include stories which we've completed and proofread.
"I've just finished copying it into the manuscript," I say, putting down the quill beside the book.
One sacred rule we both agreed to when we started the manuscript is we would never rip pages out of it. I'm always the one who writes in it because, according to William, my handwriting is more legible than his. When I write, I copy the text from our drafts and taking care not to make mistakes, always ascertaining a page is dry before turning it, to avoid smears and smudges.
"If you dislike how we described the tower, why didn't you speak up sooner?"
William opens his mouth to answer my question but he doesn't get the chance to speak. The floor shakes. The ink in the bottle swirls. China and glassware rattles and clinks in the cupboards. Paintings swivel on their hooks and drop crash to the ground. Ornamental vases slide off surfaces and shatter. I forgot whether I ever experienced an earthquake of such magnitude.
The ground tremors ebb and our surroundings fall quite. Alas the silence is short-lived. Tree roots punch through the dado and crawl all over the floor. I raise my feet and prop them backwards on the seat to stand on the chair. William climbs onto the sofa. Thick branches break our front windows with snaps, rip our curtains and knock down some furniture in the process, filling our living room with greenery. The room now resembles a cluttered greenhouse.
"That was one mean earthquake," William exclaims, inspecting a branch by his head. The leaf at the end brushes his ear.
"Where did the trees come from?"
"Whatever the tremor was, it sure wasn't an earthquake," I reply, getting off the chair and looking at our surroundings. What earthquake would cause trees to sprout into our home when we live on a street across the river from the wood?
William gets off the sofa, dusting off some leaves which flew on him when the branches broke in. I grab the manuscript book, secure it in my leather satchel and make my way to the front door. The thick branches make it impossible for us to see the outside through the windows. The door might be blocked from the outside for all I know.
With a little force, the door swings open all the way to the wall. The familiar rubble street and the clopping, horse-drawn carriages have disappeared, replaced by soil, grass, flowers and moss. Tall trees reaching out to the sky replace the neighbouring wooden houses and shop windows. Our house is now wedged between two cypresses in a grove.
"Where are we?" William asks as we step into the forest. "Call me crazy, brother, but our surroundings seem oddly familiar. Are we in the Black Forest?"
The door to the house closes with a bang. Howls come from deep within the forest. Unless we find a way to return to our quiet village, we'll be spending the night in a dark, cold forest chased by a pack of hungry wolves. I extend my arm to grab hold of the doorknob leading back to the warmth and safety of our home. An invisible force blows me away, forcibly hitting my back against the trunk of a tree and crashing on the ground near its roots.
"I think I know where we are," I tell my brother, answering his question while picking myself off the ground. Before saying anything, I wanted to make sure of our location, which is nowhere close to Germany. I have no plausible explanation of how we came to be here.
"Everything around us seems familiar is because we're in our world. The world we've spent a lifetime writing about. I don't know in which realm we ended up in."
"Did you hear that?" William asks as we fall silent. At first all I hear is the soft rustling of leaves from a light breeze weaving through the nearby trees. I wait a little longer before a high pitched howl echoes around us. Then as if in reply, the forest fills with howls – some closer than others but all much closer than before.
"Wolves. Run!" I urge my brother as I run to the left. My sense of orientation fails me. Every tree looks identical and I can't tell North from South. My legs seem to have a mind of their own, pushing forward. William is a few paces behind me, and I constantly turn my head to make sure he's still with me.
A glimmer of silver fur is all it takes to stop me on my tracks. I break my run with my feet and unravel some dead leaves and soil onto the wolf. William hurdles into me, sending me face down onto the ground, my head underneath the wolf's snout. The wolf growls, its bare teeth greeting me as I dare raise my head to look up.
Slowly retreating backwards, I sit up and look around. We're encircled by an entire pack. The wolves step forward together, closing in on us and we have to stand, back to back to distance ourselves from them. William trembles beside me as he's afraid of everything canine. The constant growls keep him on edge. I pick up a thick branch lying nearby but it won't be enough to protect two people and fend off all the wolves and their masters, the huntsmen. Wolves never stray too far from their masters.
"What are we going to do?" William asks.
"I'm thinking. I'm thinking," I snap. I hate being pressured and William knows this fear must be clouding his better judgement.
Galloping hooves and metal clinks alert us to the arrival of huntsmen. The soldiers, bearing weapons be it swords or spears, always use horses to keep up with their wolf companions. The horses halt at a short distance from us and the wolves stop advancing. Even if somehow we manage to fend off the wolves, we won't be able to return home the same way we came. Something stopped us from going back into the house.
Huntsmen alight their horses, spears pointed at us. The commander whistles and the wolves retreat, each next to its master. William's shakes ebb considerably once the wolves stop growling and back off and he raises his hands in surrender. I drop the branch I picked up earlier and raise my hands. Although I'm perseverant and hard-headed, we are greatly outnumbered.
"Dame Gothel owns this forest and the surrounding lands. You are trespassing and by her decree, all trespassers shall be taken as her prisoners and tried."
A trial for being unjustly placed at the wrong place at the wrong time? I think not. Whilst I'm proud of how our characters turned out to be, as malicious as we described them, there's no fat chance these guys will cuff me and take me prisoner and let a snob judge me.
"Tell your mistress she can come and arrest us herself if she wants to take us prisoners."
It was a bold move to speak up to the huntsmen given our predicament. We risk being pierced, run through with swords and devoured by wolves. The odds are against us but I'd rather die a brave man than rot in a cell in cowardice for the rest of my life.
"Step aside," a feminine voice commands from the back of the group. All the huntsmen drop to their knees, excluding the two pointing their spears at us. Even the wolves seem to bow, lowering their heads. A cloaked hooded figure is in plain sight, standing alone behind the huntsmen.
"Who dares speak with such insolence in my regard?" she asks, staring at me, her stare so intense it could pierce my skin. She approaches with firm and decisive paces. Gothel comes to a stop, standing between the two huntsmen.
With filed and polished nails at the end of bony fingers, she grabs the hem of the hood and uncovers her head. On her thick brown locks rests a golden tiara with a red ruby droplet at the centre.
"We are Jacob and William Grimm, authors and creators of this world. I demand your release us immediately."
"Or what? You'll throw a quill at me? A bottle of ink perhaps?" Gothel's face is contorted as though she's indeed afraid of us but her icy eyes and the childish tone she uses give her away – she's taunting us.
"I swear to you when I'm free, I'm going to write you off or rip out your story pages."
"If I were you - Jacob, is it? I wouldn't make promises I cannot keep. You'll never be free. My men will arrest you as soon as I leave the woods. You will be then taken to my prison and await your execution tomorrow morning."
"Execution?" I scoff. "A verdict of guilt without a trial? I thought you were a woman of your word."
"This is your trial," Gothel sneers, opening her hands. "Don't be fooled. You may not be wearing shackles but make no mistake - you are my prisoners. Trials are held only for us to determine how perpetrators trespass and what motivates them to do so. No one has ever been acquitted. In your case, since you speak so rudely, I'm willing to skip the usual pleasantries. Our conversation is merely buying me more time to decide how best to deliver your sentence. Of course there is something which might spare your lives."
"What could you possibly want from us?"
"If you have a spell book which can give me the power to control my story and what happens to everyone else in this world, I want it. What did he call it? Ah, yes – the manuscript. You see, gentlemen, I'm a woman who has a thirst for power but it has been harder to quench lately."
A blood-thirsty villain is exactly what we need. Could things possibly get any worse? The possibility of getting out of this mess and back home alive is deteriorating by the minute. How can we end all this? For a moment, I consider giving away this pile of bound papers but this is not simply it. Countless lives are at stake – innocent characters who might suffer because of our actions.
"Maybe we should consider giving her to it," William says, whispering in my ear. "We would be free to start looking for a way to return home. Who knows maybe she can even help us find our way back."
"How naïve can you be? Do you think she'll set us free if we hand it over?"
The idea of giving away our manuscript to Gothel disgusts me. Even more so because she revealed her evil intentions for wanting it in the first place. I look down at the leather-bound book in my grasp. The thick yellowing pages have started to curl up at the edges. We've had this in our possession since we first started writing. William had the idea to collect all our drafts into it so that when we publish, it would be easier for us to go to a printer. I don't intend to part from a lifetime's worth of work anytime soon.
An idea strikes me like a flash of lighting. If we created this world and we can shape it however we want, then I should be able to change it without writing anything down. It's a long shot but it's worth the try. Diving down, I grab a fistful of soil in my free hand. I close my eyes and picture exactly what I need it to do before forcibly throwing it back to the ground. A cloud of blue smoke engulfs us and we're transported into a darker, gloomier part of the forest, away from Gothel, her huntsmen and their wolves and away from our home.