Teaser Time: Stories

Just because I've been shamefully lax with keeping on top of blogging does not mean that I'm being totally slack. For one thing I think we're probably over 60km of walking survey, I've written over 15,000 words for NaNo (check the word count - pushing 30k tonight!), and finished 4 books. Yeah I'm not even kidding, I'm still surprised that I've gotten any sleep at all over the past week I've been in the field. But alas I have!

Just not as much as I probably should get hence all the coffee, sugarfree V and having the lovely Tinkerbell drive me around in the morning. Good guy!

But there's only a few days of fieldwork left (sadly, also for the year) and still about 20 or so km to go, and then another 20,000 words of NaNo. I can finish it by the 22nd, right?

Hell yeah I can. I'm hardcore!

Story Time

In which Rory tells Eleanor the truth she didn't want to know about fairytales. 

Their walking and arguments had finally led them to a small cottage amidst the trees where they could spend the night. Rory went ahead and made sure that the cost was clear again, and when he found no real signs of life within he ushered Eleanor inside.

                Striking up a fire in the hearth to warm them, Rory was still weary of Eleanor’s wrath as she paced around the small common room of the cottage and touched absolutely everything.

                But it was the oddest things that struck her fancy. For one thing, everything was laid out in threes; three armchairs, three spoons, three bowls. Eleanor had a feeling that if she looked upstairs she would find three beds of varying sizes just like everything else.

                A niggling suspicious came to her and she wondered if she already knew where there were. But surely that defied logic, didn’t it?

                Of course what about any of this so far actually conformed to little things like logic, physics and possibility?

                “Rory,” she said, picking up the littlest bowl from where it had been placed neatly on the dining table with its corresponding spoon. “Did you ever hear of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?”

                He blinked and angled his head, unsure how exactly to respond.

                So she continued. “It’s a story that practically everyone in my world knows; it pretty much just tells of three bears that lived in a cottage in the woods and would make porridge for breakfast every day. They had three of everything; beds, bowls, chairs, and all of them were just the right size for each of the bears. One day a little girl with blonde hair called Goldilocks came to the cottage while the three bears were out ate all of their porridge, claiming first that one was too hot, one too cold and the last just right. Then she went to their beds claiming that the first was too hard, the second too soft, and the last one just right before falling fast asleep. Before long the three bears came home and discovered Goldilocks asleep in their bed and frightened her so much that she ran out of the cottage and far away.” Eleanor placed the bowl back down onto the table and sighed. “I guess this place just reminded me of that story.

                Rory came over and touched the bowl himself, almost regretfully. “The story of the Bears is not the way that you described although some parts were true.” He cast her a look with a grimace.

                She looked up at him wide-eyed. “The three Bears were real?”

                “In a manner of speaking – you’re already aware by now surely that there are a race of beings known as Animals, different to the ones you know in your world, who are larger, wiser and communicate in our languages as all other beings in the Underlands do.” Eleanor nodded, thinking of Phineas Alabaster, the Rabbit in the waistcoat responsible for her run in with this White Prince. “Well the three bears that once lived here, probably within this very cottage, were Animals. And it was because of the horrible thing that happened to them that there are no more Bears in the Underlands anymore, they all escaped to your world, where they cannot speak to humans.”

                “But why? Why leave a world where you can communicate to one where you can’t?” Eleanor moved slowly over to the mantel above the heart, running her hands over the embroidered ‘Home Sweet Home’ crochet that sat there. “What awful thing happened to them to make them want to leave so badly?”

                “You see, Eleanor,” Rory explained, leaning against the table. “You already know; it was the Golden Lock child, her vicious murder that drove Bears away from the Underlands forever.”

                “What? When you say Golden Lock child, are you talking about Goldilocks? You can’t really be suggesting that some innocent little girl murdered three bears on her own.”

                “The first thing you need to understand about the Golden Lock people is that they’re never innocent. They are demons, killers, legends among the citizens of the Underlands and creatures that you hope to never meet. The little girl, although I find it difficult to think of her as such, was the spawn of a demonic race and came upon the Bears who lived in a cottage just like this one. They took her in, fed her – porridge I believe, and suppose that that’s where that facet of your story comes from – read her stories of the Underlands, and put her to bed. You see, the Golden Lock people are rare, so rare in fact that they became the kind of legend that the world doesn’t really believe in anymore – like your King Arthur or Atlantis. The Bears didn’t know, they couldn’t have, not when all they saw was a little girl with golden hair so hungry and sad.”

                Eleanor inclined her head a little. She had a bad feeling about where this little episode of story time was going. “What happened?”

                “She killed them; all three of them. Tore them limb from limb, the flesh from their bones, and painted the walls red with their blood. The constables from the White Throne sent to investigate the area discovered the remains and refused to believe that this little girl could have committed such a horrendous crime. They escaped with their lives, although one of their number was not so lucky. To this day, very few people or beings have seen the Golden Lock people or the little girl again, but the trauma that the slaughter caused the Animals resulted in a large scale exodus to the World of Storytellers, which is another term that we have for your world. Many of the smaller Animals left, the more helpless ones, and every last Bear retreated vowing never to let something of this calibre happen to them again choosing to live speechless instead.”

                When Rory finished speaking he turned away from the bowl that he’d still held in his hand and looked over at the fire where Eleanor was warming her hands. She looked stricken, her expression ill.

                “I don’t even know where to begin,” she said, brushing the hair back from her face nervously. “You told me such a horrid story that I’m devastated for the poor Bears that were driven away from their homes, and the ones that were killed so brutally; but you’re turned a childhood story that used to always end happily in my mind into a nightmare. I can’t help but wonder how dark everything else actually is! What other stories stem from such negative and brutal beginnings? Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, the Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen?”

                Rory thought it was a rhetorical question, sort of hoped it was, and was disappointed when she gazed at him expectantly.

                He turned away. “I reckon I could probably find something for us to eat, you know, if you promise not to judge my basic cooking skills – didn’t cook much living in the palace as...” He’d almost forgotten that that was yet another touchy subject at the moment.

                “Rory.”

                “Er, but never mind, I’ll just find something else!”

                “Rory.”

                “There might not be too much here though.”

                “Rory! Shut up about the food for a moment and look at me.”

                Reluctantly, he did. She looked sort of wild. Her long dark hair was completely loose now and hung in waves over her shoulders, and her peach dress was streaked with dirt from her time in the Red Throne’s dungeon. If it wasn’t for the look of crushing disappointment and consternation on her face he would have found the whole thing rather adorable, a word he had heard in her world that he found rather fitting.

                “Please just answer my question; I feel like I really need to, and deserve to, know.”

                And he supposed she did. He had dragged her here after all and drilled into her that his world was where fairytales effectively came from; he couldn’t lie to her now when she asked for the truth about them.

                He sighed in resignation and momentarily abandoned his search for food in the kitchen’s cupboards. “Alright,” he began. “But maybe you should sit down.” She went over to the comfiest of the armchairs and patted the one beside it for him to sit on and he followed her lead.

                When he’d sat down beside her and she’d taken a nervous moment to rearrange the way her dress flowed over the seat of the chair, Rory cleared his throat. “Ok, well where do I begin? Once upon a time? I’ve already told you that all the fairytales and many of the folk stories of that you know in your world come from a form of truth that happened here in the Underlands. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, JM Barrie – all of these famous writers that you know so well all took influence from the experiences that they had on meeting inhabitants of the Underlands or the adventures that they had here themselves.”

                “Yes, I sort of gathered with the Alice in Wonderland thing – that was pretty much a given.”

                “Yeah, real lucky for us that we’re out of copyright, right?” He joked weakly in an attempt to lighten the mood again.

                Eleanor didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile, although she did wonder how he was so casual with modern lingo and law when he was the Prince of a distant land. Well, world. She resolved to ask him later after she’d dragged enough information about the reality of fairytales from him.

                “Ok, well I won’t just sit here and tell you the truth of every fairytale out there because that would take forever and I really was serious about procuring something for us to eat. So how about I start with this: the Underlands are much older than your world, in the sense that what you know as ‘civilisation’ has existed for centuries longer here than it has in the World of Storytellers.

                “You know that I am the Prince now, my great-grandmother was the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s story and many of the characters you know are real but not as you know them. There are national archives in the White Throne that chronicle most of our histories and how they have become stories in your world. I’ll take you there – you can peruse through the archives all you want.”

                “I do want to. This has changed a lot of things for me – I can hardly even understand it.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “When I was little I always wished that fairytales were real – wished I was a princess and everything. But now I don’t know anymore, I almost wish I could go back to the way I was before you found me and shattered the Disney illusions that I had of stories like this. It’s a terrifying thought, you know, when everything you thought you knew isn’t the truth.”

                Little does she know, Rory thought.

                “And I know you said you wouldn’t just tell me everything now, but tell me one more. What really happened to Cinderella? She is the face of Disney, you know, the ultimate princess. She grew up poor and abused, never gave up on her dreams and one day she met the man she’d been waiting her whole life for. It’s romantic, a fairy story, and when I think about it I worry that it must be one of the most dark of all written stories, particularly when you look at how awful the original Brothers Grimm story actually was.”

                Rory gave a nod and waited a moment, collecting his thoughts. “You’re right in thinking that the true story of Cinderella was dark; it was. It was traumatic for all who lived through it, not unlike the incident of the three Bears and the Golden Lock child. Cinda Notte was a young woman of the noble classes of the Red Throne and was forced to work her fingers to the bone much like in the story, she was a good woman and eventually she married another noble from the City of Hearts, close to the Queen. And he loved her; he stopped her from working and provided her with everything she desired including the grandest selection of shoes that the Throne had ever seen. But the Queen grew jealous, losing her most favoured courtier infuriated her and so she took her revenge: her noble courtier was accused of treason and found guilty, the punishment beheading. Cinda Notte was heartbroken and inconsolable, her husband murdered by the jealous heart of her Queen, and she would not leave her house for days. Then one night the manor that Cinda Notte lived in caught fire; the villages were too late to save it and within a few hours all that belonged to Cinda had burnt to the ground as ashes and cinders. Cinda Notte was burnt along with it, her body becoming like her name.”

                Eleanor grimaced. “That’s really awful.”

                “I know, but I’m not finished. After her death, Cinda Notte became known as the Lady of the Cinders, her soul returned as a spirit of fire that legend tells will come to you through fire if you call her. She protects lovers and helps those to connect when parted, but no one really knows how true it is.”

                “Who started the fire?” Eleanor asked after a moment.

                “No one really knows to this day; some say that it was the jealous Queen, others her selfish step sisters that were the inspiration for the Brothers Grimm story. It all happened so long ago that facts have been lost to time and no one really knows the whole truth anymore, it has become a source of superstition among young couples to always be able to reach one another though I’ve never heard of her being truly contacted before.”

                “What a beautiful, sad story,” Eleanor whispered, and Rory was touched to note that she had tears in her eyes when she said so.

                It was the betrayal of so good a person, the destruction of love, and the tragedy of her death at so young an age that really got to her. It might not have been the fairy tale that she’d grown up believing in about glass slippers, pumpkins and fairy god mothers, but it was still a haunting tale of love and loss that cut right to Eleanor’s heart.

                They sat in silent contemplation for a little while by the fire, each lost in thought; Eleanor rehashing all the fairytales she knew and wondering what other devastating truth of the story she was going to come across in this strange place, and Rory about Eleanor.

                In the few minutes that he thought about her he didn’t come to any real conclusions that didn’t make me uncomfortable, and before long he excused himself to search for some form of sustenance for the both of them.

                Left to her own devices momentarily, Eleanor pivoted her armchair a little closer to the fire and peered into the flames there. She thought about the phenomenon of scrying, using the fire to see things or people, asking questions that could be answered by the flame.

                I wonder if the Lady of the Cinders is who they call, she thought, when they stare into the flames. In this world and mine, I wonder if she answers.

                She gazed into the fire for some time after that, almost sure that she could see the features of a young, beautiful woman within them.

                She couldn’t really tell that it was happening until it did, and Eleanor soon found herself well within a trance. The crackling of the fire died away and she could no longer hear Rory rustling about on the other side of the cottage, all she could hear was a soft whisper of her name.

                “Eleanor...”

Sam xox