Protagonist Bound

by Geanna Culbertson

  But then, as I stood on the threshold of this crossroads and felt the weight of both paths begging for fidelity, something happened.

  An idea suddenly formed within me that was a by-product of both. It was something logical and instinctive, something thought-out and impetuous, and something that my head knew was possible just as surely as my heart knew it was right. Call it a burst of genius or a stroke of utter insanity—it was by far the strongest, most ridiculous, most inspiring thought I’d ever had. And the second it was born I knew there would be no going back or reasoning with it.

  “No,” I abruptly blurted out.

  SJ blinked. “What do you mean, no?” she asked.

  I sat up straight again, my blood practically boiling from the resolve beginning to burn inside of me. “I mean NO. I don’t care what Lady Agnue, or that stupid prophecy, or the Author says. The girl described in that book isn’t who I am. I won’t . . . I can’t let it be. There has to be another way, another option. And I don’t know how, but I’m gonna find it and I am going to change my fate. I have to.”

  “Crisa,” Blue sighed. “Believe me, I get how you feel; you know that I do. And you know I’m very pro rule-breaking. But defying one of the Author’s books isn’t about breaking a rule. It’s trying to go against life and, like, nature itself. That’s never been done.”

  “Then it’s long overdue,” I responded without pause.

  SJ and Blue looked at me like I was crazy. But, honestly, I would’ve thought they were crazy if they hadn’t. What I was suggesting was unheard of—it was completely insane. Of course, that didn’t mean it was impossible . . . Right?

  I could see the gears turning in their heads as they tried to wrap their minds around the ludicrous prospect I’d just presented them with.

  My friends were loyal, dependable, and usually game for whatever mischief or adventure came our way. However, I wasn’t exactly asking them to crash a tournament or play a prank on Madame Lisbon. I was asking them to believe that we could rebel against everything we’d been taught to accept our entire lives, and believe that it could work.

  Moreover, I was asking them to put their faith in that idea as it came out of me—the girl who’d just thought of the totally bananas plan within moments after receiving life-altering news, and who might’ve also been suffering the side effects of a partial concussion from a 500-foot drop.

  Eventually though, it was Blue who first began to humor the notion.

  “Let’s say it could be done . . .” she pondered aloud, “changing your fate, changing all our fates I mean. How would we even go about it?”

  “The Author,” I answered firmly. “Everyone knows that the only person with the power to control fates is the Author. And I figure if she wrote these in the first place, then there’s no reason she can’t just write us new ones—but this time ones of our own design.”

  “Okay, so we’d have to get to the Author,” Blue continued.

  SJ shook her head. “It is impossible.”

  “Or something very close to it,” Blue corrected.

  The two of them had a kind of silent conversation with their eyes for a beat as they thought on the notion. After a few moments had passed I let out a deep breath and readdressed them before common sense could cause their conviction to slip away from me any further.

  “Look,” I asserted. “Blue, you were right before. Wishes don’t change anything. But actions can. We can change that prophecy the Author gave you and rewrite your destiny to be something that you actually want it to be. And, SJ, we can insure that the one you eventually get is based on your will, not someone else’s, and that the only role assigned to you in the future is one that you picked out for yourself.

  “The bottom line is this, guys: I know it sounds nuts, but I also know that neither of you are happy with the Author’s ability to just up and take our lives from us. So, I am simply saying that we shouldn’t just sit here and throw in the towel. We owe it to ourselves to at least try and take them back. You know that we do.”

  I paused and watched as contemplation cut across my friends’ faces.

  The idea sunk in.

  The idea took hold.

  The idea was . . . considered.

  “All right,” SJ said after the beat of reflection had passed. “Suppose it were possible. To begin with we would need to find a way to escape Lady Agnue’s in order to even attempt a journey to the Indexlands at all.”

  “And more importantly, we’d have to figure out how to break the most permanent, and supposedly unbreakable spell in Book: the In and Out Spell around the Indexlands, “ Blue added.

  I raised my eyebrows hopefully. “Does that mean you’re in?”

  Blue and SJ looked at each other. I figured they were each racking their brains trying to see if any of the reasons not to do this outweighed how much they knew they actually wanted to.

  As suspected, none did. The idea to change our lives, take our fates into our own hands, and decide who we were for ourselves—it was an insane, beautiful, tempting idea that could not be extinguished now that we’d given life to it.

  SJ placed her fingers to her temple to ward off a headache for the second time today. “Crisa, if we are going to do this, first and foremost we will need information.”

  Blue tilted her head curiously. “What kind of information?” she asked.

  I smiled mischievously, leaned forward, and lowered my voice to a whisper to avoid being heard by a passing nurse.

  “Fairy Godmother information,” I replied.

  I Hitch A Ride On A Magic Mushroom

  rying comes easy for teenage girls. Frankly, I think we’re genetically engineered for the vulnerable undertaking.

  In my opinion, this sucked. For, no matter how tough or logical we were, if we lowered our defenses at the proper moment all it took was the right emotional rise to get the waterworks going.

  I’d lived at an all-girl boarding school long enough to validate this claim, and confirm that the innate shortcoming was as inconvenient as it was annoying.

  Like thanks, nature. It’s super helpful to get all misty-eyed just from reading a sad book or because the banquet hall ran out of chocolate chip cookies.

  Sigh.

  Emotions are the worst, aren’t they?

  Anyways, it was because of this inherent ability to turn on the waterworks that the Fairy Godmothers no longer responded to every princess or female protagonist at the drop of a tear like they used to. Now there was a whole routine we had to go through in order to get their attention.

  My friends and I were presently in the back garden of Adelaide Castle just past the orchard where we’d been conspiring earlier. The hour was late, the stars were out, and the odds were not great. But, there we were.

  SJ was fixing my makeup (for extra showmanship when the performance commenced) while Blue was standing beneath a weeping willow nearby, talking with Daniel and Jason. She was holding a large purple textbook with “Damsels in Distress 601” written on the cover in silver. She was laughing, smiling, and seemed to be having a good time.

  “Look up,” SJ ordered as she applied my mascara.

  I held back my urge to object and obeyed her request, but tried to keep Blue and the boys in my line of sight in the process.

  More than ever I wanted to ask Blue why she still remained so amicable with Jason. The behavior she’d been exhibiting was mind-boggling. I mean, not only was he the guy she was unwillingly chained to for the rest of her existence. But the main reason she was game for this little fate-challenging adventure was to fix that very problem.

  Despite my longing to probe into the matter further, I forced myself to continue to leave it alone just as I had been doing for the past month. SJ and I had made a promise to each other that as long as Blue didn’t bring it up, we wouldn’t bug her about it. An agreement I was seriously trying to respect since I could truly empathize with our friend’s situation. Now that I had a prologue prophecy of my own, it was totally the last thing I wanted an
yone to bother me about.

  Hmm. Maybe in hindsight of those feelings . . . I could understand Blue’s silence on the subject. At least from a practical standpoint.

  I’d been devastated to receive my prologue prophecy. But I’d immediately realized in the ever aftermath that allowing myself to writhe in that distress was pointless. The only thing it would accomplish would be me feeling more miserable.

  Conversely, if I ignored these feelings of dismay and refused to give them the satisfaction of crushing me and taking away my sense of fight, then I could turn around and try to convert my energy into something useful. And that (like Blue, I garnered) was the course of action I’d elected to take.

  It was simply more productive to keep my mind focused on the long, arguably impossible goal ahead rather than get caught up in the despair of the present. Turning melancholy into fire for fueling resolve was a far better use of one’s time than sulking in it, after all.

  This had always been as much Blue’s style as it had been mine. And now, more than ever, I was truly grateful for my tendency to bottle up weaker feelings in this manner. For if I could keep doing that—keep my eyes on the prize and avoid the heartache that common sense or cowering to the odds would bring—it might just give me the inferno-sized fire I’d need to fight what was coming.

  SJ finished with my makeup and called the others over so that we could go through our plan once more.

  “Okay, Blue,” I said when we’d all gathered round. “Read the checklist again.”

  Our friend opened her textbook to the designated page. “Alrighty,” she said. “‘A princess or other female protagonist will surely receive help from a Fairy Godmother if she experiences: One: An Unpleasant Confrontation. Two: Insulting/Hurtful Words. And Three: Tears that cause her to run away to a private location, fall to the ground, and bury her face in her hands.’”

  “That’s so specific,” Jason laughed.

  “Yup, apparently damsels do it by the book,” I responded. “Now then, let’s get this show on the road. Come on, Jason. You’re on.”

  “Oh, Crisa, didn’t I tell you?” Blue interjected. “Jason’s not your co-star this evening. Daniel is . . .”

  I was pretty sure my blood pressure went up at the mere suggestion. I held up a finger to the boys. “One second, please,” I said brusquely. They gave me a strange look, but nodded as I grabbed SJ and Blue by the wrists and pulled them away.

  I lowered my voice so that the boys wouldn’t hear. “Blue, what are you talking about? First off, I can’t believe you even let Jason tell Daniel about this. He’s here now, and I’m dealing with it, but there is no way I’m actually going to team up with him for this next part. No way, you hear me? None. Zip. Zero. Just absolutely not—you got it?”

  “Crisa,” Blue whispered. “Jason is good at a lot of things—axe-throwing, high-fiving, rope swinging. But confronting people just isn’t his scene, recreationally or otherwise. I mean, come on, the guy’s practically got honest-to-goodness selflessness carved into his DNA. He won’t be able to do this even if he is acting. SJ and I both agree that you’ll have much better luck with Daniel. He’s naturally good at insulting you.”

  “Besides,” SJ said, patting me on the shoulder. “Jason told us that Daniel is apparently just as adamant about changing his fate as we are, so we can count on him. You really should give the boy a chance, Crisa. He is not that bad, you know.”

  “No, actually. I don’t know.”

  “Well, Jason mentioned that Daniel tried to save you during the tournament. He tried to keep you from falling when your prologue pang hit.”

  “Emphasis on ‘tried,’” I asserted. “More emphasis on the fact that I definitely didn’t ask him to.”

  It irritated me like no other that Daniel had felt compelled to try and save me today. And it irritated me even more that I had put myself in a situation where I needed saving in the first place.

  No girl should do that; it’s far too clichéd and way too demoralizing.

  But it happened. My attempts at trying to prove I could be a hero had (quite literally) fallen to the ground. What’s more? My heroic boy nemesis had been given a front seat to the whole spectacle and was no doubt itching to hold it over me.

  Still . . . as much as I wanted to avoid spending time with him because of this, I knew SJ was right. Daniel would be way better for the role of confronting and hurting me than Jason. And that’s exactly what we needed in order for our mission to get its heels off the ground. So, while I loathed the idea with a passion bordering on detrimental, I reluctantly agreed to the casting change and my friends and I rejoined the others.

  Blue cleared her throat as she proceeded to cover the rest of the plan.

  She had stolen several Pegasi from the Adelaide Castle stable, which she’d tied to an apple tree in the orchard. She, SJ, and Jason would be hiding with them while Daniel and I did our thing. Then, once I’d “burst into tears,” I would run to the nearby riverbank and Daniel would join them until the Fairy Godmother arrived and I yelled the signal. This would subsequently cause the Godmother to realize she had been called there as a trick and make her take off—creating a trail for us to follow right to our desired destination: Fairy Godmother Headquarters.

  Fairy Godmothers travelled in the form of shooting stars, you see. So any one of them would’ve been easy enough to pursue via Pegasi as she flew across the sky leaving a glistening trajectory of light in her wake.

  It was kind of a hassle, but this whole routine was necessary because (as mentioned) Fairy Godmother Headquarters floated somewhere in the sky over Book. Not only that, it was always moving to protect its Godmothers from people who would take advantage of them—magic hunters or otherwise.

  As such, the only way the Godmothers left themselves vulnerable to outsiders was in the manner I’d just explained. At least theoretically anyways, given that no one had ever made a run at what we were attempting. Only princesses and other female protagonists had the power to call for magical help in this way. And thus far it seemed the majority considered ticking off Fairy Godmothers a risk they’d presumably rather avoid.

  I, on the other hand, had already gotten on the bad side of that one Godmother, Lena Lenore, so unlike my protagonist counterparts I figured a second didn’t really make a difference.

  In retrospect, I knew ours was not the most elaborate or foolproof plan for reaching the Godmothers’ elusive domain. But to be fair, since it had to be executed tonight, my crew and I had been forced to work pretty quickly to get it together.

  In the morning we were leaving Adelaide to return to our respective schools. Once we were back, the In and Out Spell around Lady Agnue’s would go up again—preventing us from leaving the campus and, ergo, from attempting to get to Fairy Godmother HQ to talk to Emma. Which was the whole reason we were doing this in first place.

  In order to reach the Author we needed to find a way past the impenetrable In and Out Spell surrounding the Indexlands.

  Since the Godmothers were the ones who’d cast the spell all those years ago, we figured that they’d be the only ones with knowledge on how to break it. Yes, we knew no random Godmother was just going to up and share this kind of powerful information with us; that was a given. However, our thinking—our hope as it were—was that my mother’s Fairy Godmother (my own regular godmother, Emma Carrington) might just be the exception to this rule.

  Like I said, she used to be a big part of my family when I was little. And despite her withdrawal from our lives a decade ago, the two things I still remembered about her very clearly were how much she loved me, and how she was one of the few people who’d never treated me like a misshapen piece in someone else’s puzzle. She’d believed in me. She’d believed I could be more. So if anybody would’ve been willing to give my friends and I the information we needed and support us with what we were trying to do—I felt certain it would’ve been her.

  A minute later when Blue finally finished with the full recap of our plan, she turned t
o address me specifically.

  “Crisa, I don’t know how this Godmother will react to, you know, being tricked down here. But good luck. Assuming she doesn’t turn you into a koi fish, we’ll have to move fast to have a shot at making this work.”

  My friend closed the book and pulled up the hood on her cloak in full mischief mode. We said our farewells and she, Jason, and SJ went to hide while Daniel and I were left alone together to execute the first phase of our mission.

  He and I proceeded to stroll across the grounds uncomfortably and wordlessly as we tried to find a nice open spot for our imminent performance.

  To be honest I preferred the silence, and was dreading when it would end. I didn’t want to talk to him; I didn’t even want to look at him. Just seeing his face filled me with anger. Partly at him naturally for, well, being him, but mainly at myself. One glance and everything came rushing back. I could see his face looking down on me as I dangled from his Pegasus—the epitome of a damsel, of weakness.

  Maybe Lady Agnue was right; maybe I was as poor an excuse for a hero as I was for a princess. Maybe I really didn’t have control over who I was no matter how hard I tried and this was all just a waste of time.

  No. Stop it. You’re going to prove her wrong. You’re going to prove the Author wrong. You’re going to prove them all wrong, my inner voice reminded me.

  It doesn’t matter what that prophecy says. Who I am isn’t written yet. And the only person who will have a say in it when it is, is me.

  I shook my head as Daniel and I continued to walk—attempting to rid myself of the doubts that wormed their way into my subconscious the more I thought about this afternoon’s turn of events.

  Eventually we stopped at the top of a small hill overlooking a ravine. The moon was casting a glow over the entire property and reflecting off the water below. My right arm still sore from the fall during the tournament, I took a moment to switch my satchel to the left shoulder. Meanwhile, Daniel gazed out into the distance all serious-like as if he were thinking about something deep and philosophical.