"This isn't the story they told to you. The fairy dust turned cold and blue."*
Once upon a time, the sky was filled with silver light, and the Fairytale Kingdom thrived under the rule of stories spun in hope and harmony. Castles gleamed like crystal, rivers sang lullabies, and magic hummed through the meadows like laughter on the wind.
But every light casts a shadow.
And every story told… forgets something.
Beneath the marble towers and golden crowns, cracks had begun to form, subtle, silent, serpentine. The magic was waning. Wishes made in haste were splintering at their seams. Forgotten tales, neglected by time and memory, began to stir in the cold corners of the world. They were the broken, the discarded, the misremembered, and they were awakening.
It began, not with a scream, but with a mirror.
The Oracle's Mirror, once a sacred artifact held in the Tower of Lore, cracked one moonless night with a sound like thunder in a coffin. No hand had touched it. No breath had fogged its glass. And yet, from the center, a jagged black fracture spread like ink in water.
In the mirrored shards, seers saw twisted reflections of beloved figures: a weeping Cinderella walking barefoot over broken glass; a girl in red with eyes that glowed like embers; a prince crowned in ash and shadow. These were not the stories they knew. These were warnings.
The elders dismissed it as an omen, nothing more. They sealed the mirror in the deepest vault and buried the key beneath the roots of the Wishing Tree.
But the damage was done.
The cracks in the mirror spread across the kingdom, not just in stone and wood, but in time, in memory, in story.
The First Sign
In the heart of the Kingdom, the Great Clocktower struck midnight. Nothing unusual, except that the thirteenth chime followed.
The sky pulsed with a strange light. For one brief moment, stars blinked out, and the moon turned a shade of blue no one had ever seen. Children stopped laughing. Flowers ceased blooming. The birds, once ceaseless in song, went silent.
At the stroke of the thirteenth hour, the first dream unraveled.
Princess Briar Rose, beloved child of prophecy, slept peacefully in her ivy-covered tower. But when her attendants entered the room, they found the roses had grown wild, blackened, and thick with thorns. Her breathing had stopped, but her eyes were open, glazed like moonstone, staring into nothing.
"She's not dead," the healer whispered. "But she's not dreaming, either."
The Sleeping Curse had deepened. Irrevocably.
The Spiral Begins
Elsewhere, in the lowland meadows, a little girl known for sitting on her tuffet failed to answer her mother's call. When they found her room, it was empty, save for a shattered teacup, a silk ribbon, and golden threads that clung to the ceiling like cobwebs.
In the coastal villages, children whispered of a song they heard at night. A haunting flute melody that called from the mist, promising games and candy. Whole families vanished. The rivers ran still.
And in the royal court, the Queen of Glass held her kingdom together with trembling hands. Her slipper had cracked, her prince no longer visited her bed, and every mirror in the palace had begun to fog over with images of a ballroom long destroyed.
Each tale was unraveling, one by one.
The curators of lore, the so-called Loreweavers, assembled for the first time in a century. They dusted ancient scrolls and read forgotten margins. They compared rhymes from the old days, hunting for answers.
One scroll, written in a hand they did not recognize, bore no title, only a line in black wax:
"The Dream is broken. The Dark will rise."
It was signed with a single symbol: a cracked crown inside a mirror.
The Kingdom Fails
Seasons stopped changing. Summer bled into winter without warning, and spring never returned. The Wishing Tree stopped granting desires. Its roots writhed like worms in the soil. Children born after the thirteenth chime grew silent and wide-eyed, rarely speaking. They would draw spirals in chalk and whisper of someone they called "Mother Time."
And still, the rulers did nothing.
They clung to their thrones, hosting balls while the sky turned to smoke. They told bedtime stories to comfort themselves, false endings, golden lies.
But the common folk knew better.
They burned their storybooks. They buried their relics. They locked their doors not at nightfall, but at sunset, for that was when the stories began to bleed into the real world.
The Final Turning
The true end began in the city of Arcandell, once known as the City of Song.
Every clock stopped at once.
The sky rained petals of ash, not snow. The rivers ran backward. A voice, not loud, but infinite, spoke from nowhere and everywhere:
"There is no happily ever after. There is only ever after."
People screamed. Some clawed at their eyes. Others stood still as statues, mouths hanging open as if waiting for a final line that never came.
Then the lullabies began.
Broken music-box melodies echoed through the city streets. And walking down the cobbled roads, dressed in black and shadow, came a girl with spider-silk hair, her fingers trailing strands of gold.
Behind her walked others, figures the people thought they knew.
A glass queen with bleeding palms.
A girl in red, barefoot and bloodied.
A wolf with no voice but eyes that mourned.
A piper without a mouth.
A prince crowned in ash.
And more. So many more.
These were the Fallen, the cursed remnants of stories gone wrong. And they had come not for vengeance, not even for justice.
They had come to tell their side.
The side no one had wanted to hear.
The Forgotten Spell
Deep beneath the ruins of the Tower of Lore, a final spell lay dormant, locked behind a wall of runes. It had no name. It could not be read aloud without bleeding.
But one girl found it.
Crystal, a child born after the thirteenth hour, wandered through the forbidden vaults with eyes like shattered mirrors. She did not cry. She did not blink. But she hummed the songs the wind had forgotten.
She stood before the wall and whispered:
"I remember."
And the wall cracked.
Behind it was a single page. One sentence, inked in blood older than time.
"The story must be retold, or all shall be undone."
She took the page and walked into the world, barefoot like Red, silent like the Piper, burning like the Match Girl.
She would become the Chronicler, the one who bore witness to the end of stories and the beginning of truths.
The Kingdom Reborn in Ash
The Fairytale Kingdom is no more. What remains is something else. A land of broken rhymes and twisted paths. A place where glass cuts deeper than swords and wolves weep beneath crimson moons.
The Fallen walk these roads.
Some seek redemption.
Others want revenge.
But all of them remember what the world forgot:
There is no magic without cost.
There is no story without pain.
And there is no ending without a price.
Once upon a nightmare... the story began again.
End of Chapter 1
Next: Chapter 2: "Little Miss Mourning"