Where the heroine falls
When I wrote my heroine, the sun was steadily rising. After a day of storm, summer finally asserted itself firmly to my skin. My heroine, too, was deep in summer.
Bright and brave, she was also beautiful enough to stop time. Her name was a monosyllabic sound that rang to pierce through one’s heart. She was as pure as a drop of water, and as innocent.
She breathed in a place where giants, fairies and other beings lived harmoniously in the valleys, surrounded by a mountain and river fork with its abundant wildlife. She grew up with words of magic, ones that she would sing for her village’s future. Her mission was to sustain the balance between magic and craft, between all species sharing her world and their often incongruous needs.
Something broke outside my room. It sounded like glass. In that moment of surprise, a drop of ink fell from my jerked hand to form a large blob, and from that I wrote her a monster. No, monster is a silly word for what it was, and I had no idea what I have written except belatedly. I worked furiously to thin the blot already spreading, and of those mistakes I wrote its name. A sound that vibrates your cells, deeper than an ear could listen to.
Soon, I had to watch as it ate my heroine’s family of five, the baker at the corner of the street, his wife, the carpenter and her dog, the weather man, the shaman that needed to teach the heroine the rest twenty-five magic words to sustain life. Each time, it grew stronger and more powerful that it overtook the energy that I had reserved in me to write her future. Breathlessly, I gave my heroine only the slightest warning through the still dank air. Being her, she approached this catastrophe curiously instead of running immediately.
Despite my urging, the girl spent too much time beside her family’s bodies, grieving. Their bodies now dried and burnt from the inside. I had to force her to get up and start running before it could find her when it returns down the street. There were still the two farmers, the steelworker, and the three widows for it to devour before it would find her. I hoped this was enough. She took off running towards the river crossing as she screamed the giants names, calling them to her bidding as if size would be a match for evil.
But it was high noon, and the giants were fast asleep. All giants sleep in summer noons. There was no magic to be harnessed at noons, so she had to survive till dusk arrives. She ran up the hills that were the sleeping giants, up a giant’s golden arm. The hair strands on his arms, taller than her, swayed by the winds like pampas bushes and blocked her view as she ran. She swept them aside as she scrambled through and dug her fingers through the giant’s neck as she climbed to its face.
— Wake up, wake up!
Her screaming voice was a whisper to the giant’s ear and it snorted in its sleep. Snot streamed from its nose and whipped the heroine back from her run, her path now a slippery one. She slid and fell to the ground. She limped to the riverside begging the water sprites to help her. They came, but in their fear and under the heat all they could manage was to carry her across the river to the edge of the fairy forest. Then, they ran and disappeared into the cool water, hiding from the inked abomination.
The fairy forest was silent, and at high noon none were dancing. Fairies are fickle by nature, and only on the right conditions would they come out. The heroine chanted her magic repeatedly, and yet none appeared. The wise knew to stay away. She was all too young and too green to take over the heavy duty of magic and life. After all, her first challenge wasn’t supposed to arrive until three winters later.
She remembered her teacher telling her about Time up on the tower deep in the forest, and towards it she ran. She’d never been there, but it was her only hope to beg it to bring dusk sooner. Meanwhile the ink blot has spread itself, leaving some villagers untouched for the chase of my heroine. Its form changed constantly to what it had devoured. Stubbornly, it chased the heroine, sniffing her possibilities.
I held my breath as she ran up the tower to Time. Perhaps there is hope after all for this land to survive the evil. Up and up she went, always slower, as her body tries to keep up to her desperation.
At last she reached the top where Time resided and controlled the turnings of the world. The room was filled with crystals, each rotating in its own speed suspended in air, each representing a time in past, present or future. Time stood impatiently. My heroine stepped and looked at Time squarely.
Time gazed back at her and stopped.
I trembled as I reread my curse, and I cursed. Her beauty had the power to stop time. Ignorant, she tried to shake Time out of its stoic state, but there was no movement. The crystals froze and fell to the floor, shattered. There was no more time.
The ink bane of my creation appeared in the room; now capable to move wherever it pleased. It reached a single tendril towards her left eye and pierced it faster than writing a line. I cried out as I watched it sap the brown of her pupils and turned it to its colour. My tear dropped on my heroine. She curled, now beaten, dark and drowning. Diluted. I did not prepare her for this, I had written her for a fairytale where her enemies see her light and would come to love her. A story where she would be enough.
Now this monster had her, too. Her beauty, her brightness and her boldness. As it took her appearance, I realised the other beings of the world — the giants, fairies, sprites, humans, animals, all of them — would not be able to tell. That they wouldn’t know what lies beneath that skin, and they, too, will eventually be devoured. That in their stories, ‘she’ will be the greatest villain. Her sweet innocent smile crawled upon my back. I bent from the weight. I felt its hunger, not just for the world where it was born but for every universe imaginable.
I wiped this filthy ending away with my hands to no success. It was too late to turn back and control the plot. I was twisted in many ways, and some people, like me, cannot be unknotted.
As I wept, I discovered the stains on my fingertips. So it has begun.
Soap, detergent, bleach, sandpaper. I rubbed my fingers raw, red and bloody painful, yet still the stain remained. I could not hold a pen firmly in this pain without tears blocking my view. Still, I must write for the hope that someone would find a way to rewrite my heroine’s story, and by necessity, me. There were too many mistakes, too many bad decisions. I should not have written. I should not have been written. Everything must be reversed.
