Chatterbox: Inkwell

TNÖ's NaNoWriMo 2010

Going for 50,000 this year, which may cause an increase in quality. Let's hope. Regardless, my prologue's done and I am going to share it with you because I don't know what happens next (and what else is new?)

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Prologue

Once upon a time, there lived a princess.

She was not, on the whole, an overly typical storybook princess. For one thing, she was quite ugly. She was rather short and perhaps a bit on the dumpy side, and she hunched. Her hair was an unfortunate shade of ditch-water blonde and hung in strands around her face no matter what she or her various maids did with it. Her nose dripped constantly.

Then there was the matter of clothes. The princess hated pink, blue, purple, and yellow on the principle that no colours had the right to be so darn cheerful while she had several times contemplated whether the use of a nail file would help her skin to clear up. Likewise, black made her look overly flushed and white made her pasty, and brown, she thought, was just an ugly colour in general. She didn’t even want to think about green. In fact the only colour that the princess considered she could wear without intensifying her hideous appearance was a dull grey. So she wore only grey dresses, which invariably clung to all the wrong places and hung limply off everywhere else, no matter how many hours the princess spent standing for fittings.

Of course, the princess tried to act like princesses ought to, or at least how she thought they should. This led to a lot of languishing on cushioned benches and moaning whenever anyone of the male persuasion happened to pass by, usually at a run for some reason. When she felt particularly daring the princess attempted daintiness. Most often this led to broken furniture, though on one extremely regrettable occasion it ended in the near-fatal wounding of a pageboy who had been in the wrong place at the entirely wrong time.

The name didn’t even bear thinking about. Oftentimes the princess wondered if her parents had been trying for cruelty or if they had merely been... unwise... when they named her.

Her name was Morass. She supposed it was a nice enough sounding name. When she was a child she’d quite liked it, in fact. But then she had grown up a bit and looked it up in a dictionary and had been mortified to discover that it meant “an area of muddy or boggy ground”. Now she shuddered every time she thought about it.

Once upon more or less the same time, there lived a witch.

Not a wicked witch, mind you. No one could say she was a wicked witch. Not twice at any rate.

By unlucky circumstances the witch had inherited the genes meant for Morass. She was a bit on the short side, true, but no matter what she tried she couldn’t seem to get a hump started. Her fingers, despite all manner of interesting techniques, remained un-gnarled. Warts and pimples flatly refused to grow even under the most disgusting of remedies. Most infuriatingly of all, the witch’s hair remained thick and shiny and healthy long after she had given up trying to ask nicely and started washing it in mud once a week. The best she could come up with was that she had a slightly hooked nose, though it was shamefully devoid of greasy nose hair or hideous birthmarks.

Still, the witch made the best of things. Long ago she decided that if she couldn’t look like a wizened, mangy old crone, then she’d darn well be the best crone in the world, even if she did look more of the maidenly type. So far it had worked, mostly because she had an intimidating glare and a nasty habit of coming up with spells that worked. She dressed the part, too, of course, and that helped a great deal.

The witch dressed in black. On holidays she might get really wild and add in a bit of dark green or gray, but for the most part her wardrobe consisted entirely of black. People expected a witch to wear black, and so the witch wore cloaks the colour of a deep cellar at midnight and skirts as dark as ink. Her hat especially was a masterpiece, an ancient family heirloom the witch had found in the attic one day, much to her delight. Family history stated it was made of cloth stolen from Death himself, though the witch personally thought it more likely to be a regular hat that had been enchanted to absorb the shadows until it became so black it seemed to radiate a field of darkness around itself. Either way, it was a good hat for witching.

So the stories spread. Alcina Hecate became a household name, someone to blame when the apples were sour or the milk went bad. If the cow up and died, it was Alcina Hecate’s fault. And she could give people the pox just by squinting at them. The stories didn’t need proof, not when the witch had a name like that.

Generally speaking, Alcina didn’t make a habit of baking small children into pies or slipping poisoned apples to innocent young women. That sort of behaviour was bad for business, and small children were too chewy anyway. To make up for the lack of abject evil in her life the witch made a habit of being viciously caustic to the world at large. Thus far it seemed to work out all right.

And finally, once upon an entirely different time, there lived a girl. 

It was unwise to call her "girl" to her face, however. She preferred the term young adult, which was very nearly true. 

In fact she was sixteen, widely acknowledged as an age that seems lovely at the time but in retrospect was somewhat ruined by the onslaught of hormones. 

This girl had very little to do with fairy tales. She was the sort of person who dismisses stories as suitable only for smallish children with runny noses and sticky fingers. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more reliable, level-headed sixteen year old one could hope to find, at least as far as stories went. She even had a good, sensible, everyday name, Mary, which was something of a relief for her because she had a little brother whose name was, mystifyingly, Xavier. 

Naturally, Mary's no-nonsense and strictly realistic view of the world made her an ideal target for the stories themselves. By first grade she had accidentally discovered no less than three magical worlds. During her middle school years, Mary was dragged quite literally kicking and screaming into a rather standard urban fantasy involving a magical boarding school. Fortunately her high school years had been almost entirely untouched by the supernatural, and her previous adventures could be dismissed as he errant daydreams of a developing mind or severe, long-lasting delusions brought on by poor diet and raging hormones.

Once upon these times, life happened.

That’s what life generally does, of course. But the important part-- the really important part that needs to be understood here-- is that once upon these times, life happened in an interesting way. And while it is true that, generally, people like things to stay more or less the same, it is also true that the best stories are the reflections of lives that happen in an interesting way. The ones in which the avalanche of time rattles the cutlery of emotions and shifts the vegetable gardens of relationships several feet to the left. Such stories need to be told, and they invariably find a way.

These two times, separated by centuries or even millennia if one wants to err on the side of caution, are extremely close to each other geographically speaking. Within a block of each other, in fact. 

Not that the average man on the street would know, of course. People tend to walk around with their minds all wrapped in on themselves, with little concern for the little eddies and puddles of time they pass. It takes a very straight and simple sort of mind to notice such things. Very likely this is a good thing, because trying to get through the day while dodging around alternate universes or flashes of, say, ancient battles would drive the average man on the street quite mad.

Still, location is important. The people might not know what times are tangled up in the loose threads of their own reality, but the stories know.

The stories always know.

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