Prologue Trapped in the Narrative #2
After their parents divorced, Alice and Rae took their mother’s maiden name. Alice missed her old name, her old life, and her old father, the one she believed in.
Alice nodded, and automatically checked if Rae was nodding too.
When Alice was twelve and Rae sixteen, Rae had seemed a tall fierce warrior.
Now Alice was sixteen and Rae was twenty, Rae lay silent and shrunken down to almost nothing in the narrow hospital bed.
So narrow Rae would have more room in a grave, but for now the body, just barely breathing and so just barely still her sister, was trapped here.
Against the thin hospital blankets, her sister’s hands were claws.
Against the white hospital pillow, her sister’s face was grey.
The cheeks were sunken, and the closed eyelids and eyes beneath seemed to be sinking in as well.
What used to be a beloved face was becoming bottomless pits and bones. Imagination failed as death approached.
Rae tried to protect Alice from everything. But she couldn’t protect Alice from the worst thing that ever happened to Alice. The worst thing was far worse for Rae.
Sometimes Alice feared she was wicked, pitying herself when she should feel bad for Rae.
Sometimes she didn’t feel bad for Rae at all.
Her sister had cancer, so Alice shouldn’t resent missing book club or not seeing her baby brother enough.
At night, when Alice admitted to herself she loved Rae less now her sister was impatient, exhausted and unable to help her, Alice knew she was wicked.
Enough reality. She wanted her book.
Alice turned the page on Time of Iron with finality. She was moving on to Time of Lies, the second book in the series, searching for comfort. For her favourite character.
Across the red ice of the battlefield came the Emperor, black-haired, sullen-eyed, cursed sword in hand, a god, a monster, a laughing tragedy, a born conqueror claiming his first great victory. Soon, as the prophecy foretold, all the worlds would be his empire.
Alice rolled her eyes. Not him!
The book series was practically perfect, except the writer had picked the wrong main character.
Technically the brutal Emperor was the hero, but Lord Marius deserved to be the hero.
Rae preferred the Emperor, but she also enjoyed bad internet jokes and that cheesy Time of Iron musical which didn’t reflect the true depths of the books.
Of course she picked the wrong guy. The Emperor was vicious as heartbreak.
Lord Marius was the handsomest man, the truest knight, the best big brother in the world.
Lord Marius would always keep his word and defend his family.
If you believed in nobody else, you could believe in him.
While the Emperor was pure evil. Some readers argued he was morally grey.
If you asked Alice, some readers defined “morally grey” as “a remorseless murderer who is good-looking”.
It was unbelievable that people like Alice’s deluded sister dismissed noble Lord Marius, and found the killer sitting jauntily in his jewelled throne irresistible.
Had they failed to read the famous Burning Hearts Ball scene? The Emperor ripped out the hearts of those who betrayed him. With his hands. When Alice reminded her sister of this, Rae cackled, “Extremely sexy behaviour.”
Alice disagreed.
Alice flipped back to the opening scene, and frowned down at the sequel’s first page. She feared what would happen next. If Alice was any judge of fiction, Lady Rahela was about to betray the Emperor again. Rahela’s heart might get ripped out in the first chapter.
Her mother coughed to get Alice’s attention. “It’s nice in a way, how books change. If the magic and illumination isn’t in the story any more, the magic and illumination was always in you. The story caught a reflection of you at the right time.”
That wasn’t nice, it was terrifying. If magic and illumination could leave a story, magic might desert Alice. She wanted to keep enchanted dreams between the covers, always ready for her to sink into.
Alice turned to the flashback about Tagar, the kingdom of ice which would be the Emperor’s first conquest as he built his empire.
In the heart of the Snowcastle, a heartless young king laboured over his macabre invention while oblivious to the poison coursing through his veins.
In the morning the king would be found on the floor, cold as his metal monster. Neither would ever wake.
Instead of being found dead, before Alice’s disbelieving eyes, the young king got interrupted by a call to war. Ever swift in thought and deed, King Ivor turned from his experiment upon the stone slab and reached for his war helm.
That wasn’t how the story was supposed to go!
Lost in dismay, Alice hardly noticed her mother slipping out.
These books were the only lifeline Alice was able to grasp for years, but her grip on them had suddenly turned shaky.
She tried to call back the beloved words, but memories slipped through her fingers like dark water.
Logic said Alice’s mind must be playing tricks.
Her mother was right. People felt the story had changed when rereading a favourite book all the time.
But if people felt this way all the time, maybe they had a reason. Maybe some books really did change.
She’d read the Once and Forever Emperor series over and over.
She knew every word by heart. Even if her brain insisted this was how the story went, Alice’s heart swore the story had gone wrong.
Reading about heartless King Ivor of the icelands, Alice felt as she did reading about villainous Lady Rahela, and even flawless Lord Marius.
She kept thinking the strangest thing, about every single one of them: You should be dead.
Most characters died, and the Emperor’s fate was worse still. Alice’s sister might hope for his happy ending, but Alice knew better. No character ever escaped a prophecy. Trying to escape your fate only made it come true. The story couldn’t change. They were all doomed.
You should be dead. She didn’t look up, afraid to see Rae under her white sheet and think the same thing. In books, death worked differently. Black and white as words on a page, fiction made sense. That made Alice want to be good.
Alice recalled a quote from wicked Lady Rahela, which she’d read as if for the first time yesterday. Near the beginning of Time of Iron, Rahela started making wild proclamations.
“Don’t listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently avoid suffering.
Don’t you dream of the forbidden?” Lady Rahela coaxed her maid and guard into joining the rogue band of villains which would be known as the Vipers.
“Choose wrong. Choose evil. Let’s do it together. ”
Rahela was terrifying, but she made Alice smile.
Alice knew Rahela must die, but she didn’t want it to happen.
Against her will, Alice’s hands shook, and the book with them. Everything had gone wrong for so many years. Things only ever went right in books. Now, even her favourite story had gone wrong, and Alice had no idea why.
Surely the sequel would fix everything. Lord Marius would do what was right.
Alice trusted him. She’d once written a long response to a fool on the internet claiming Lord Marius was as bad as the Emperor.
Alice explained Lord Marius had never done anything wrong in his life, while the Emperor would enjoy destroying this misguided reader and everyone they loved.
She cried at the cruel mockery when they wrote back, “The Emperor’s wrath will never be visited on me or my loved ones, due to his fictional nature.
It’s not real, so it’s not that serious. Hope you get your family out of Eyam!”
Alice flicked through Time of Lies with determination, only to discover Lord Marius… That couldn’t be right! As she frowned at the words gone wild and twisted, a golden ribbon of light fell across the page.
Alice looked up.
The door opened, softly and silently as a flower. It wasn’t a doctor with bad news, telling her to give up hope. No echoing hospital corridor lay past the threshold. What lay beyond was light.
Such light, and such colours. Dragon-scale silver, irresistible sirens’ sea blue, burningly wicked red. More vivid and true than anything in real life. Alice realized she’d seen these wild bright hues before, in dreams and glimpses of imagination as she read her favourite books.
From the space that was no longer a hospital door but a threshold to incandescent imagination, Alice Parilla heard a familiar voice.
“I swear I’ll come back. If I can.”
As Alice clutched her book and stared at impossibility, the wildest thought leaped to her mind: What if your family actually was in Eyam?
Into fading light, she whispered, “Rae?”