The Sleeping Beauty - Book 1 - Chapter 1
Working nights sucked. I was so tired every day I was barely able to keep my eyes open during classes, let alone finish my assignments on time…but then again, it was best not to complain, especially a
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.
Working nights sucked. I was so tired every day I was barely able to keep my eyes open during classes, let alone finish my assignments on time…but then again, it was best not to complain, especially about things I could do very little about. I drew the short straw in life, what with being birthed by unsupportive, poor, and uneducated parents that didn’t trust higher education. If I wanted a degree, I had to suffer for it, and I really wanted a degree.
“No,” I said, rubbing my temples as I tried not to sigh deeply into my headset. “You can’t just put just any credit card number into the system and expect it to work.”
The angry woman on the other end of the line had been badgering me for five minutes. “Why not?”
“Because that’s fraud, ma’am.”
“That’s stupid. I want to speak to your supervisor!”
I sighed. “Gladly. Please hold.”
I pressed the hold button on my receiver and typed in my supervisor’s number. “Melody. I have a hot one for you.”
I needed a break. I had been working since four pm and it was going on midnight. I still found it ridiculous that people cared about ordering vitamins at midnight, but in my time here at Tivarinex the one thing I had learned is that they cared about it deeply, so deeply they had a whole staff of late-night call center workers making sure their customers were happy. Their customers were the worst humans on the planet. Swamp monsters would have treated me better.
I shouldn’t complain, though. They could have hired a call center in India to do the same job, but they kept it in America, and it wasn’t their fault customers were the worst.
“Rose!” a curt voice snapped behind me.
I turned around to find my boss’s boss, Christina, eyeing me. She did not look happy. Then again, she never looked happy. Probably because the way she painted on her eyebrows made her look perpetually pissed off at the world. Still, even for her, she looked particularly upset. “Yeah, boss?”
“I need to see you in my office. Now.”
It wasn’t much of an office, but Christina’s cube was tucked away from the rest of the mayhem of the floor. It was quiet, or at least quieter than my cubicle, where I could hear every key typed and every word grumbled from the ten people around me.
“Do you remember Marvin Helfer?” Christina asked, sliding into her chair.
I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t ring a bell, but then I talk to like a hundred people a day.”
Christina harrumphed. “Well, you took his call five days ago, and let him put a card on file which turns out was stolen.”
“Oh no,” I said, bringing my hands to my mouth. “That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Yes,” Christina said, flipping open a manila folder. “You have quite the history with fraudulent charges, don’t you? We talked about it before, not two months ago.”
“I know, but I’ve been better. I’ve been trying really hard. I just—”
“Not hard enough.”
“I know but, like, at the end of the day isn’t that up to our fraud department to figure this sort of thing out?”
“No, my dear,” Christina said, slamming the folder on the desk. “It is your responsibility. It became your responsibility after the fifth time a fraudulent charge went through at your terminal in a single month.”
“So what?” I braced for a scolding. My mother had the same look of disgust on her face right before she beat me with her belt. “Am I fired?”
“Hardly,” Christina said. “If we fired you, then we would have to pay you severance, and then you would be stealing from this company for a second time.”
“I’m not stealing. If anything, I’m negligent.”
“You are definitely that.”
“It’s hard. With work, and school, and—”
“I don’t care about your excuses. What I expect is professionalism from my employees, and in lieu of that, I expect them to keep their personal lives to themselves. Now, you will go back to your terminal and take a fraud seminar for the next three hours—unpaid—and I will be deducting this from your paycheck.”
“What? You can’t do that!”
She snickered. “I’m very sure that I can. Life will be very difficult for you from here on until you summarily quit or flame out, and I very much don’t care which one it is.”
I pushed myself up from my seat. I wanted so badly to quit, but I needed the job. There were very few night jobs that didn’t involve scrubbing toilets.
“How much was the charge for? Twenty dollars?”
“Hardly. Seven hundred and thirty-four dollars, exactly.”
“That’s more than two weeks wages!” I shouted, digging my fingers into the back of my chair. “I have medicine I need to buy. It’s literally life or death.”
Christina twisted her mouth into a smile. “Then make sure not to make the same mistake again.”
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.