The Sleeping Beauty - Book 1 - Prologue
I knew it was going to be a bad day when I stepped out of the house with two different shoes on my feet. I did not think it would be so bad as to end with me strung upside down on a meat hook in the b
Fairy tales are real.
Rose Briar is a diabetic college student without insurance. She’s been scraping by through a combination of maxing out credit cards and relying upon the kindness of strangers.
Unfortunately, she’s spent every dollar at her disposal. There’s no money left to buy her life-saving insulin.
Without her medication, Rose falls into a diabetic coma. She tumbles into a deep slumber and wakes up in a fantastical place called the Dream Realm, where fairy tales and legends of old are still very much alive.
She has one chance to wake up.
She must trek across the world, visit the most powerful object in the land, the Obsidian Spindle, and entreat with the fates; the only beings powerful enough to send her soul back to Earth.
But evil forces don’t want her to leave. They will stop at nothing to capture her and make sure she never goes home again.
Now, with the help of her half-gorgon girlfriend and a mysterious red rider, Rose must race across the land fighting dragons, monsters, and the forces of the Wicked Witch, Nimue, in order to reach the Obsidian Spindle before her body dies on Earth and she’s trapped in the Dream Realm forever.
Will she be able to wake up? Can she survive? Find out by reading The Sleeping Beauty today. If you love mythology, fairy tales, and dark fantasy, then you’ll love the first book in The Obsidian Spindle Saga.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.
I knew it was going to be a bad day when I stepped out of the house with two different shoes on my feet. I did not think it would be so bad as to end with me strung upside down on a meat hook in the back of an abandoned warehouse.
“Tell me where the gold is!” a gap-toothed, bald man hissed.
I was surprised they didn’t put a cloth bag over my head. Most monster hunters were superstitious, and they believed the old wives’ tale that gorgons could turn people into stone with just a look. We can’t.
“Does it look like I have any gold?” I asked. “Both of my shoes have holes in them.”
Blood dripped from the corner of my mouth onto the floor. Idiots were always surprised that my blood ran red, but I was only half-gorgon after all. The human part of me didn’t give me the strength necessary to break through steel and take my captors out. If I was full gorgon, I would have already ripped them in half.
A squirrelly, lanky man with bad teeth and a pasty complexion knelt next to me, his knee barely missing the pool of blood gathering on the floor. The harem of snakes growing from my head snapped at him, but my abductor remained just out of their reach.
“Look here, little one. We been doing this long enough that we can smell a gorgon anywhere, and we know one thing. Where there’s gorgon, there’s gold. It’s that simple.”
I turned my eyes to the feckless twerp and spat blood all over him. The man scurried away, apparently worried my blood might burn him like hydrochloric acid. Unfortunately, that wasn’t one of the gifts bestowed upon me by my mother’s DNA.
“There is no gold!” I shouted. “Trust me, if there were, I wouldn’t be living out of my car.”
The fat, bald man walked forward and grabbed me around the waist. The tendril of snakes growing from my head hissed at him, and he growled back at them. Unfortunately, my snakes were not poisonous, just a nuisance, so I couldn’t use them to kill our captors.
He smiled at me. In the battle to capture me, I had kicked out his front teeth, and I took great satisfaction in seeing the gap where his teeth should have been.
“We have all night, little one.”
He turned me around and around until the chain kinked and wouldn’t go another rotation. Then he let me go. I swung violently around a dozen or more times before I came to a stop in the other direction, and then spun back again, repeating that process again and again until the chain finally settled down and the Twinkie that was my lunch hurled out and splattered on the ground, mixing with the blood beneath me.
“Soon enough all the blood that’s left in your body is gonna pool to your brain and your eyes will pop outta your head from the pressure.”
“Actually,” I said, trying to hold in what remained of the lunch in my stomach, “that wouldn’t really happen. It’s a myth.”
The lanky man stepped forward. “Well, then how come we seen it with our own eyes?”
I cocked my head toward him. “Because you’re liars. All of you are liars. Every monster hunter I’ve ever met has been nothing more than a lying, sniveling coward, who couldn’t find a self-respecting job, so they decided to fill the hole in their souls by picking on my kind.”
“Well,” the bald one said, “at least you admit you’re a monster. That’s progress.”
“I’m not ashamed of what I am. I’m just trying to get by. I’m ashamed for you, though. Because you’re a pussy.”
Without saying another word, the bald man raised his boot and connected it with my face. My head snapped back, and I passed out.
When I woke up, I was alone. I don’t know why people always left unconscious people unguarded. Maybe they saw it in the movies, or maybe they were just stupid enough to believe I was helpless.
I may not have gotten all my mother’s powers, but she taught me a thing or two about using magic. The chains that bound me were carved with runes and enchanted to make sure I couldn’t cast a spell to unfurl them, but they had made the critical error of not wiping up the blood that dripped from my nose.
I closed my eyes. “Sanguinem glacies adstricta. Mihi reserare”
Latin was the best language for spells. They were never as powerful in any other language, so I forced myself to learn the minimum amount of Latin required to make them work. None of the Latin I took in high school stuck, which meant I resorted to using Google Translate once I worked everything else out about the spell. My grammar was horrible, but the spells were effective none the less. Somebody once told me that spell casting was half confidence, and at least in that aspect of being a mage, I got an A plus.
The blood on the ground coalesced into little needles and shot up toward the lock that bound my feet. The chains were exceptionally strong, but the weak point with all chains was the lock. A hundred blood needles shot into the metal lock, and in my mind’s eye I saw them push inside the lock and liquify again.
“Pruinae,” I whispered, and the blood turned to ice. I looked up and saw the lock turn to a bright blue. “Praemium.”
The lock exploded into a million pieces and scattered throughout the dark warehouse. I struggled to loosen my chains, and eventually I wiggled free enough to emerge from my metal chrysalis and slam onto the ground.
“Not very much like a butterfly,” I mumbled to myself, pulling off my black leather coat that was now stained with vomit and blood. “That’s going to the cleaners.”
“What’s going on in here?” The bald man shouted as he shuffled across the warehouse. I could have run into the darkness and avoided a confrontation, but if I did, then they wouldn’t learn anything. If I let them go, they would hunt me again. Or worse, they would hurt some other monster who couldn’t defend themselves.
I wrapped the metal chain around my wrist and pulled it from the meat hook. When the bald man saw me, he went for his gun. I whipped the chain at him. The lanky man came up next to him, and I flung the chain at his face, smacking him across the cheek with it.
I rushed the men, roundhouse-kicking the fat one in the stomach and tying the chain around him. I squeezed it tight and pulled him to the floor. The skinny man swung at me, and I blocked it with my arm before wrapping him up with the other side of the chain and kicking the back of his knees, so he dropped to the ground. They both screamed when I yanked the chain tight.
“Don’t eat us, please!” the fat one said.
“We won’t say nothing,” the other one squeaked. “We promise. Just let us go.”
I smiled. “Wow. You really think the worst of me, don’t you? That really is the lowest opinion of me I’ve ever heard. I’m not going to eat you, but I can’t have you following me, either.”
My eyes glowed yellow and I grabbed the faces of both men and turned them toward me. “Listen to me, closely.”
“I don’t wanna become stone!” the fat man said.
“I’m too young to die!” the skinny man added.
I dug my fingers into their cheeks. “OPEN YOUR EYES!”
They couldn’t fight me any longer without passing out. Their eyes popped opened and started to glow in time with mine. “You will forget you ever found me. You will tell anybody who asked that the last you heard I was headed to Zimbabwe to find my ancestral home. When you regain your faculties, you will lose your taste for hunting monsters, and get menial jobs pushing papers in some government agency far away from here. Am I understood?”
“Yes, mistress,” they both said in unison.
“Good.” I pulled the chains from off them. I blinked, and my eyes turned back from yellow to their deep green. “Now, off you go.”
The men turned to each other, confused. They didn’t say a word. They just looked at each other, then to me, then to each other.
“I think you have some jobs to apply for, don’t you?” I asked.
The fat man nodded. “Yeah, I think this monster hunting business has run its course, don’t you?”
The skinny man looked dazed. “I think I’m ready to become a company man, get fat, and have a gaggle of kids.”
“That sounds like a good plan, gentlemen. One final thing. If I ever see you again…I’ll rip your throats out and eat them in front of you as you die gasping for air. Got it?”
“Got it,” they replied in unison.
“Good. Now, have a great day.”
I walked toward the door. Before I got there, I found the wig my abductors had taken from me. I had long ago learned to tame the snakes growing from my head with spells and draughts of sleeping potions, but I couldn’t conceal them completely. Hence the wigs. If anybody else saw the snakes on my head and learned that monsters really existed, well, it wouldn’t be good for anybody.
I ran my fingers through the tendrils of snakes flowing across my head, and they cooed at my touch. I grabbed the wig from the table and put it on before pulling the hood up from my sweatshirt. It would have to do until I could get to a bathroom and clean myself up.
Fairy tales are real.
Find out by reading The Sleeping Beauty today. If you love mythology, fairy tales, and dark fantasy, then you’ll love the first book in The Obsidian Spindle Saga.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.