by Cameron Jace
When I woke up, I was astonished by the existence of the lake in our kingdom, which I knew nothing about before. I didn’t even know how I got there. It was just somewhere in the Black Forest, abandoned, and darker than anywhere else, except for the thin moonbeam reflecting on the surface of the still water.
Swan Lake was divided by a troop of white swans on the left, and black swans on the right. The lake’s water was still as if it were dead. The swans floated inactively on both sides.
A single red swan, bigger than the rest appeared in the distance. It had large wings stretched to its sides, and it swam toward me with the other swans bowing their head for it on both sides.
Closer, I saw the swan had long feathers fluttering to the faint breeze kissing the water’s surface, barely stirring it into narrow ripples. Even closer, I saw the swan walked on water. It had legs. Why not, when it turned out to be a woman with a swan’s body. She was a swan maiden.
“Welcome,” she said.
I couldn’t see her face because the moonbeam never crossed it. It was as if my moon girl avoided shining upon the swan maiden.
“I have been expecting you,” she followed, and I assumed that I better not enter the water, as I stood by the edge of the muddy shore.
“You have?” I wondered.
“’One day the Queen of Sorrow will desire a baby, and it’s going to be either the end of the world, or the end of all evil in the world’,” she said. “It’s prophesized.”
“How can a world only weaved years ago by the talented hands of Lady Shallot have a prophecy?” I dared to ask.
“There’s always a prophecy, even before the creation of worlds,” she said. “But who believes in prophecies, anyways?”
“What do you mean,” I frowned. “You just said…”
“The existence of the prophecy does not mean we don’t have the will to oppose it. It was probably written by some drunk, or a hallucinating man like Nostradamus. I wonder why prophecies have to be vague, don’t you?” Her tone implied mockery and bitterness. She wasn’t as pure as Lady Shallot, or as evil as Night von Sorrow. Her voice was somewhere in the middle; like me, like most of us where good and evil were just points of view.
I nodded, “You know I was sent here by Lady Shallot, right?”
“That’s debatable,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“If you consider Lady Shallot sending you to me, then you were indeed sent by her,” she said, and I was confused. “But there is another way to look at it.”
“Which is?”
“That you desired a baby with all your might and went to Lady Shallot for assistance, and then, upon your wish, she sent you to me. In that case, it wouldn’t be sufficient to say she sent you because she was only a vehicle, a reason, on your road to me. You sent yourself, my dear. You want this.”
“I agree,” I said, although I didn’t admire her being philosophical. “So are you going to help me have a child of my own?”
“Twins of your own,” she said, and I really wanted to see her face that moment.
“Do you mind telling me who you are?”
“They call me Brighid, the Swan Queen,” she answered. “All those swans are mine,” she signaled at them with her enormous wings. The swans bowed their heads again, their beaks meeting with the water’s surface.
“What do all these swans have to do with me having a child?” I heard her let out a small whistle when I said that. It was an exquisite melody, and I suspected it was part of Lady’s Shallot’s melody. I couldn’t say for sure, since I couldn’t remember both. It was as if they were tabooed songs that I wasn’t allowed to memorize for some reason.
“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” Brighid said.
I nodded and said nothing. I wondered which ones she meant, the black swans or the white. The truth was the Black Swans creeped me out, although they were silent and as obedient as the White Swans. There was something eerie about them. They reminded me of the silent crows by my window.
“Can I ask you a question?” I uttered. “Why are you in this lake, surrounded by all these swans? I mean, what significance does it have with your ability and willingness to grant me a child?”
Brighid, hiding her face behind the shades, sighed, “They aren’t just swans, they are babies,” she said, as some of them approached her and let out those moaning noises. It was true, they sounded like babies. “Unborn babies,” she said, as she started to feed them from her hands.
“Unborn babies? I don’t quite understand.”
“Have you ever wondered what we have all been before we were born, Queen of Sorrow?” she mused.
“Actually, no,” I said bluntly. What kind of thought was that? Why would I care what, or who, I was before I was born? Why concern myself with such thoughts at all? “Are you saying we were swans?”
“Not all of us,” she said. “But when Lady Shallot weaved your world, she made it this way. All these swans around me are unborn babies, waiting for shapeshifting and transforming into human form; the form we ignorantly call ‘babies.’”
I wasn’t going to argue that my twins were swans before I’d give birth to them. All that mattered was that I’d get what I wanted.
“Each newborn in Sorrow was a swan in my lake once,” she said. “There are so many more swans deeper in the lake that you might not be able to see unless you swim in it. But I don’t want you to do that because your two twins are in this group around me.”
It was a puzzling moment, yet weirdly dazzling. Two of the many swans in front of me were my babies, and I was looking at them before they were even born. Suddenly, all swans seemed lovelier in my eyes. With their curvy figures and the songs they sang—which I couldn’t remember—, they had taken my breath away.
“Which ones are they?” I said, unconsciously stepping into the muddy waters.
“Stay where you are,” Brighid demanded. “I’ll show you who your twins are, but it won’t be a pretty scene. Are you up to it?”
“Why not a pretty scene?” I wondered.
“You’ll be the mother of two unusual girls,” she said.
“They’ll be girls?”
“That’s what the prophecy claims,” she said. “But who knows.”
“So what scene are you warning me about?”
“You will see,” she signaled for the swans to separate again. White swans swam to the left, and black swans to the right. “Take a deep breath, Queen of Sorrow.”
It was a bit hard for me to comprehend the atrocity I was about to witness, but I sensed it through the air. The swans on both sides were growing sharp wings that could cut like a knife. Their beautiful voices turned to an eerie darkened rumble, facing each other. Then some of them drew fangs.
A fight between the black swans and the white swans began in the lake.
The once-beautiful creatures from both sides clashed into each other, fluttering their edgy wings like steel upon the water, beak to beak and head to head. They cawed like crows and slashed at each other. Black swans ripped out the white’s feather and skin. The whites cried out in high pitches that were agonizing to the ears. I had to clamp my hands over my ears against the noise.
Blood spattered in the air and on my own face. The white swans were dropping like stones, splashing onto the water. The black ones were vicious, killing mercilessly. And the three colors that shaped my life painted the night in front of me: Black, White, and Red.
I wanted to scream and tell them to stop, to beg Brighid to make them stop, but it was apparent that they wouldn’t and that she had no control over their actions. They were pecking at each other, pulling out chunks of flesh and letting out victorious eerie sounds, as if they were the root of all evil.
Brighid hailed like a mad ringmaster in a circus, encouraging them in the massacre and to leave no one alive.
Suddenly, it dawned on me that two of those were my daughters. I couldn’t help but walk toward the dead swans floating on the water. This was insane.
/> Please God, don’t let this dead one be my unborn child. Not this, nor this.
Eventually, when I reached them only two were left alive.
A black one and white one.
They snarled at each other as the moon disappeared above, probably scared by their presence.
“You two killed my twins,” I cried, although I was afraid of both, cawing with red blood on their feathers.
“They didn’t,” Brighid said. “They are your twins.”
“What?” I let out a shriek, even when I feared them, I stretched out my arms to embrace them both. Unexpectedly, they complied and rested their heads in my arms, in their mother’s arms.
As crazy as this was, deep in my heart I knew they were my unborn daughters. I embraced them, sharing the spattered blood on our skins.
“The next time Angel makes love to you, these will transform into babies in your womb,” Brighid said, disappearing in the dark, leaving me undone. “You may have what you wished for.”
“But wait,” I said. “Who’s the evil one? Who is the good?” As a mother-to-be, it was a silly question. All my daughters will be alike. How in the world would I favor one over the other? It was impossible. Both of them were going to be born of my womb.
“Does it matter?” Brighid said. I could only hear her voice now, as she disappeared in the dark.
In that instance, the black swan bit my arm. I screamed in pain, and let go of them both. It was an almost poisonous bite. Dizzy, I fell back in the water and fainted.
I woke up back in Lady Shallot’s tower. My dress and face spattered with blood.
Lady Shallot advised me not to talk. It was obvious that she didn’t like the sight of blood. She only demanded one thing of me before I went beck to the Kingdom of Sorrow. It was a strange thing, but I had to obey her, or she said I wouldn’t be granted the twins.
Lady Shallot demanded that Angel shouldn’t under any circumstance know about me carrying twins.
“But he will know eventually when I give birth to them,” I said.
“No, he doesn’t have to know,” Lady Shallot explained. “Because one of them will kill the other in your womb.”
“What?” I protested. “Why?”
“Either the good will kill the evil, or the other way around,” she said. “It’s true they are twins, but there is only room for one of them in the world. Your womb will decide if evil should prevail or good.”
“And what about all that talk about the universe desiring balance?” I wondered.
“The balance will always be there, because whoever survives will have both black evil and white good inside her,” Lady Shallot said. “Evil has goodness suppressed inside, and goodness has evil suppressed inside. It’s up to us whether to choose black or white at the end of the day.”
A week later, I was pregnant. Nine months later, I gave birth to one beautiful daughter. Don’t ask me how I kept Angel from knowing there were twins. It was a hard task, but I managed through witchcraft. And like Lady Shallot had prevented him under oath not to tell me how, or who, the moon and the sun came to be, I kept from him the secret of how I suddenly became pregnant.
Frederich Van Helsing, the Dutch doctor, was the only one who figured it out—although it was concealed to the human eye by black magick. I think I had mentioned having twins in one of my older diaries, Jawigi. He even told Angel that one of my daughters killed the other in my womb. But Angel, overwhelmed by the moment, didn’t give it much thought. He was consumed by fighting all evil to bring his daughter into the world. Being told his daughter had a twin, and that she was dead, didn’t concern him much at the moment. Later, he’d woke each day reciting a prayer for his other unborn child, wishing that she had gone to a better place than the Kingdom of Sorrow.
I had to live with the idea that one daughter fed on the other in my womb.
Looking at it now, it’s hard to imagine what happened, how my eager desire for having a child—part of it was the insane jealously of the sun and moon babies—led me to sacrifice one.
To this day, guilt eats me alive. Angel and I never talk about it. Maybe it’s because Snow White’s birth led to unexpected and horrific consequences, maybe because life won the best of us and we couldn’t look back anymore, and maybe, just maybe, I convinced myself that Snow White was the white swan, and that she killed her evil twin.
I know my story must not make sense to you, because, after all, Snow White isn’t a purely good daughter, and I am not a good mother all the time.
I wish I could explain further. I wish I could clear that conflict you sense in my personality right now, but I can’t. That would be revealing what I am prohibited to tell—I have my reasons. All I’d beg of you is that you don’t believe everything you’re told about me, even things I sometimes say aren’t true, but there is a good reason for everything.
We are nearing the end of this particular diary, and to feel that I have opened up with honestly, I should tell you about that night I woke up sweating from the bad dreams I had in the castle. Snow White was only three months old, sleeping in her cradle next to me. Angel was away, fighting demons at the borders as usual.
I had dreamed of my other daughter swearing she’d take revenge on me for giving up on her. She was scary in that dream. I feared her even more that I feared Snow White some years later.
Sweating in my bed, I grabbed for a glass of water as I glimpsed the moon shining bright in the midnight sky. Our lovely baby moon.
Then I dropped the glass, splintering it to pieces on the floor.
There was something outside staring at me behind the semi-open window with the curtains fluttering in front of it.
It was a swan. A black one. It spread the blood-spattered wings against the light of the shiny moon behind it, and its eyes gleamed red.
I was sure it was my other daughter, and it was also staring at baby Snow White sleeping. I had no idea how this was possible. Maybe it was just an incarnation of my unnamed, unborn daughter. Maybe I was only hallucinating, and maybe I was still dreaming.
Puzzled, I didn’t know what to do. I pinched myself, trying to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, and it hurt. I thought of reaching out for the black swan. Maybe my motherly love would ease her pain. But I was frozen with fear.
Then my evil baby girl, the black swan, started singing. It wasn’t the same tune that Lady Shallot sang, or the one the swans were singing at the lake. It was a different tune. A sadder one, but it was also a tune I could only hear but never memorize.
Only this time, I saw the black swan falling into sleep while singing it. It—or she—was hypnotizing herself to sleep with that song. This was when I gathered my courage and walked toward her. By the time I reached her, I saw she wasn’t sleeping. She was dying—for the second time.
The song she was singing was a Swan Song, sung before saying goodbye to this world. I held her in my arms, crying myself to death, for I didn’t understand what was going on.
Was my daughter attending her own funeral, one that we hadn’t even attended or cherished? Was she reminding me in some cosmic way that I killed her, that I favored her sister? That however I tried, it was hard to know which one of them was actually the good swan and which one was evil?
Her body turned into ashes in my hand, and the wind blew her remains away toward the moon.
My pain was too hard to bear - I could hardly breathe. Not knowing was a greater punishment than knowing that you have done wrong. I had to live with my pain until many years later, when I understood what was really going on.
All I knew by then was that one daughter had survived on the pain and death of the other. One was called Snow White. The other had no name. I called her Black Swan, and she was someone you knew very well.
End of Prequel #15
The Grimm Diaries Prequel #16
The Pumpkin Piper
as told by Jack Madly
By Cameron Jace
The Grimm Diaries Prequel #16
The Pumpkin Piper
as told by Jack Madly
Dear Diary,
Even though I can’t get the mysterious moon girl out of my mind, I’m having a good time with Marmalade. Something about her is comforting when she’s nearby. I feel like I could lay back with her in my hammock in the beanstalk and stop thinking about my demons—I’m not going to talk about my demons in this diary. I want to tell you about something else. It has to do with who the Pumpkin Piper is. Everyone I know is curious about him.
But first let me tell you about my last adventure with the ever-interesting Marmalade.
Last week, she decided to show me how badass she was, and helped me steal a Goblin Fruit. It’s not like I needed help—I’m Jack Madly; I can steal anything, even hearts.
Still, stealing had always been a lonely quest for me. Sharing it with her felt different. You could live in hell, but if it’s with someone you like and share a lot of things with, it’s going to feel a lot like paradise. Who wants to live in paradise alone?
Marmalade had this crazy idea of not only stealing from the Goblins, but pissing them off. As lovely and baby-face as she looked, God didn’t create her without some little quirks—did I tell you that there is nothing I like about a girl like those mad quirks?
As usual, I stole the Goblin Fruit and ran out of the Goblin Market into the Black Forest, the fat little goblins panting after me and swearing to kill me. Instead of running farther, I stopped near the lake where I had first met Marmalade. I pretended I had lost my hat. The goblins stopped suspiciously, knowing that I always had tricks in store for them—they hadn’t forgotten the fake devil’s necklace I had fooled them into wearing yet.
I knelt down and picked up my awesome hat—one day, I will tell you about the story behind that hat. I put it on and made sure it was positioned the way I liked it, plastering a welcoming smile on my face.