The Sleeping Beauty - Book 1 - Chapter 17
By the time I entered Critterton the whole town was on fire. Usually I would have fought for them, but I was there on a mission for Ozma. I didn’t have time.
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.
By the time I entered Critterton the whole town was on fire. Usually I would have fought for them, but I was there on a mission for Ozma. I didn’t have time. Even if I did have the time, I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to help.
Find the dreamer and bring her to safety before the Wicked Witch finds and binds her. That was my mission. There hadn’t been a new dreamer in the Dream Realm in over a hundred years. Not since Hypnos vanished, taking the secrets of the Realm with him.
The dreams that once powered this place had all but faded. I had heard talk that the Nightmare Realm was at its greatest power in untold millennia; there were hardships on Earth and the whole of civilization was collapsing before us. If we couldn’t find a way to bring dreamers back to Urgu, it could be the end of all our worlds.
And this girl, whoever she was, could be the key to saving us all. I couldn’t let the Wicked Witch capture her first. Not this time.
A pack of the Wicked Witch’s guards passed by me. They were human, but barely. Long ago they had been promised their freedom from Urgu if they helped the Wicked Witch. Every day their souls became more and more corrupt, and they were entirely susceptible to the false queen’s will.
That’s why I had no trouble slaughtering them. I gripped my dual daggers tightly and sliced one across the neck and stabbed another in the stomach. They disappeared in my arms, nothing but ash and dust. Before they could raise their swords, I stabbed the other two soldiers straight through their chests and watched them turn to dust under my blade. What remained of them, the ash that made up their souls, blew away in the wind.
Two rabbits hopped past me as I ducked behind a flaming house. One of the Witch’s guards grabbed at them, but I pulled a dagger from my thigh and stuck her with it. She collapsed to dust and the rabbits escaped down the garden path. They wouldn’t be safe for long, but I had to do something to protect them.
In the town square, the usurper’s army had collected the critters and bound them. A blue dragon sat perched on a stone fountain, gazing at them with a hungry look. The fountain was a gift from Ozma, from the days when critters were friends with humans, centuries ago.
A scar-faced guard screamed at a porcupine. “Tell us where she is!”
“We don’t know!” The porcupine cowered.
The guard glared at the critters. “Araxis! Burn them!”
I turned away from the carnage. There was nothing I could do without giving away my position. Dragons were the one beast I dared not face, at least not alone. Screams echoed across the city until the poor little critters vaporized into dust.
“Find her!” the callous, scar-faced guard screamed.
The guards disbanded and spread out into the streets again. Two of them made their way toward me. I spun around the back of the house and stuck them both through the neck when they passed me. They disintegrated at my feet.
Now was my chance. The guards were busy searching the streets and the square was unguarded. The only thing keeping me from crossing the square was the dragon, and it was facing the other way.
I took a step toward the town’s center and that’s when I saw two figures running up the hillside toward the woods. One was a human. The other a gorgon. One of them had to be the dreamer. They were damned fools if they thought they could survive alone in the Enchanted Forest.
“Hey!” I heard from the side of the square. “It’s th—”
I crossed the square in an instant and slit the guard’s throat, who disintegrated in my hands. Two more guards were rushing toward me.
“It’s you!” one of them snarled.
The other one aimed his spear. “The Red Rider!”
“That’s right,” I said with a smirk.
They stabbed at me with their spears, and I leapt over them. I threw a dagger into the first guard’s eye and as the other charged, I swerved to dodge his spear then stuck him with another dagger right where his cold, dead heart would be, if he were still alive.
When they both had disintegrated, Araxis turned toward me and let out a bellow of fire. I fell to the ground to avoid it and rolled away from him. I couldn’t take on a full-grown dragon. Maybe a youngling, but not one who had been in the service of the dark queen since before I came to Urgu.
The forest was my only way out without fighting my way through a battalion of the Wicked Witch’s troops. I flung two throwing daggers from my shin toward the dragon, hoping to distract it for a moment, and then gunned up the hill and disappeared into the forest. I wondered how many guards had seen me enter. If they came for me, I would fight them in the brush. They would never burn the forest, though, and risk their already-uneasy alliance with the pixies, so I was safe from the dragon fire for the time being.
If I didn’t find the dreamer soon, though, I feared she would be lost forever.
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.