The Sleeping Beauty - Book 1 - Chapter 2
Magic: The Gathering and Charmed made stupid people believe that gorgons could change shape. That’s not how it worked, though. At least not for me.
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.
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Magic: The Gathering and Charmed made stupid people believe that gorgons could change shape. That’s not how it worked, though. At least not for me. I haven’t met every gorgon in the world, but none of those that I have met were shapeshifters. They were all just really good with makeup.
My mother taught me to be good with cosmetics. She hid my green complexion from the time I was a baby until her untimely death at the hands of the same type of monster hunters that stalked me endlessly. It was easier for me than it was for her, though. My father was dark skinned, so even if I didn’t use foundation my green tinge was barely noticeable.
The plus side of being good with makeup was that it also allowed me to easily conceal a beating. It was helpful during middle school after my mom died, and in high school before my father abandoned me, but it became even more helpful when I started to run into monster hunters every couple of months.
The welt under my eye from my last encounter grew by the minute, and I feared that without ice I wouldn’t be able to tamp it down in time for school the next day. I didn’t need a bunch of my classmates asking questions. Hopefully, I could sit in the back of the classroom and have the reasonable expectation they would all think I was just hung over. They were a nosey bunch, no matter how much I tried to stay away from them.
The headache coursing down my neck felt like I had just woken up after a week-long bender. I needed to stop by the drug store to buy more concealer and a bag of ice. I was running low at home and hadn’t been able to place an Amazon order yet. I had hoped to wait for some money to come in, but I guess I couldn’t wait any more.
“Try this card,” I heard from the register of the Walgreens when I walked toward the back of the store.
I turned to the counter to see Rose, my girlfriend, standing at the pharmacy checkout, her long, blonde hair pulled back in a greasy bun. She must have just gotten off work, because she still wore her black pantsuit and she hated that damn thing. She always pulled it off the moment she got home.
“Hey!” I ran up and hugged her from behind. “Funny meeting you here!”
“Baby!” She laughed and gave me a kiss. Her lips were soft, but she kissed with force enough to make sure I knew she was there. It wasn’t ever a polite, obligatory kiss with Rose. It was always like the first time we’d kissed.
She pushed back my hood and saw the welt under my eye. “What happened to you?”
I pulled my hood back over my head. “Nothing.”
“That’s no—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but this card is declined, too.” The pharmacist handed the card back to Rose.
“That’s impossible. I just got it…please, is there anything you can do?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. You can go to the hospital if it’s an emergency.”
“Emergency!” Rose said through gritted teeth. “You realize if I don’t get insulin I’ll die, right? You get that, right? Is that an emergency to you?”
Rose was a diabetic, and it wasn’t easy being diabetic and poor. Her parents cut her off from their insurance when we started dating, figuring it was better to have a dead daughter than a gay one, and every month it cost over seven hundred dollars to refill her medication.
“Babe!” I put my arm around her. “Calm down. It’s not his fault.”
She turned to me and buried her head in my shoulder. I could tell there was something else on her mind besides the insulin, but the fear of falling into a diabetic coma and dying was enough to put her in a bad state.
“Come on. Let’s get some food in you. When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t need to eat. If anything, my levels are high. My heart is racing. I can hear it in my ears like the beating of that infernal Tell-Tale Heart.”
“Well, I need to eat and not think about gothic horror for a minute. So, let’s sit in a restaurant like two normal humans, calm down, figure this out, and you can check where your levels are.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Joe’s pizza was as awful as it was cheap, but it was cheap, and I didn’t have money for anything else. I just needed calories, and Joe’s was a greasy lard bomb. Two slices could keep me going for a whole day.
Rose pricked her finger as I wolfed down a piece of pepperoni pizza. She filled me in on her day at work after I finished telling her about my encounter with the monster hunters.
“Do you think they’ll ever stop?” she said. “They seem to be coming more and more frequently with every passing month.”
Rose was the first person outside of my family who I told the truth about who I was, and the only person I trusted, including my family, not to tell anybody about me. My father only learned the truth after my mother gave birth, and he tried to kill me a half dozen times in my first decade of life. When he ran out on me, I effectively became an orphan. The state tried to take me into their custody, but I ran away instead, and survived on the street until graduation.
“No. There will always be somebody that wants a quick buck.”
Rose gave a snort. “That’s funny. If you had any money, I wouldn’t have to scrounge for insulin every month.”
“And I wouldn’t be living in your van. We would be living in a house, or at least a condo.”
The insulin register beeped. Rose looked down at it. “It’s really high. Like, fatally high. That’s what I thought.”
“How long since you’ve had a dose?”
“Two days. Some company approved me for another credit card, but it won’t get here until tomorrow. I was hoping this paycheck would…I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Hey,” I said, sliding my hand on top of hers. “We’ll figure it out.”
She looked up with me, her soft eyes tearing up. “I hope so. I don’t know how long I have left until my body shuts down. I used up the GoFundMe money two months ago. I can’t go back and beg for more. I can’t even pay for your stupid pizza. You’ve given me everything you have. My parents—well, they aren’t going to help.”
The world was falling apart. We seemed to always be on the verge of nuclear war. Our leaders drove wedges between us, and it became a bigger chasm every day. We were caging children on our own borders, and cops were shooting black people just for existing. We couldn’t even agree that black lives mattered, let alone that they should be allowed to live without being shot like animals. Still, of all the things wrong with the world, and even with it getting worse every day, nothing showed me this world was an unceasing cesspool of suck more than watching Rose dying and not having anywhere to turn for help.
“How is your Medicaid paperwork coming?”
“You know how it goes. They keep denying me for some reason or another. It’s like the universe wants me to die.”
I squeezed her hand. “I don’t want you to die.”
She chuckled and her face softened, looking into my eyes. Then she saw the fat welt swelling underneath them. “It’s hard to believe with how terrible this night has been that it’s only the second worst night between the two of us.”
“It’ll get better,” I said, taking another bite.
“How do you know?” she said.
“Because I have to believe, Rose, or I might as well just kill myself right here.”