The Curse of Once Upon a Time

Prologue: Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time. That's how these stories are supposed to start, right? With every fairy tale comes the side of the story that nobody ever talks about. Because people don't talk about the real side of every fairy tale.

They don't talk about how there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. How there is no Prince Charming. How the shoe fits more than one. That there is no happy ever after or that there never was one to begin with.

They don't want to talk about the way that the story really ended. They don't tell the stories of the people who didn't have such a happy ending. The stories of the people who never even got close.

But why should they? Mortals eat up lies. The air they breathe might be filled with lies if it wasn't filled with the smog, smoke, and pollution they brought to the world. To Earth. Leaving the rest of Earth's habitants to suffer in unbearable circumstances.

Tragic, really. That's why there's no fairy tales about the real world. About mortal earthlings. You can sprinkle some glitter and make something seem prettier than it was, but you can't un-rot a spoiled egg. Trust me, I've tried.

Humans are interesting creatures. They want happy things to escape from their unhappy life or a sad thing that makes them feel warm. They can't accept an ending that is too true because it isn't their escape from reality.

They can't accept that Hansel and Gretel is about child killing and cannibalism. That Goldilocks was eaten and never seen again. That Sleeping Beauty didn't end with such a nice prince. That The Little Mermaid never had a happy ever after and never even got close. That the Evil Queen in Snow White doesn't die from just a fall.

They don't like that there isn't a happy ever after, even in a fictional world where they haven't caused the world so many troubles. It's an annoying cycle. If you think that 80 years is a long time to live, try living for eternity and listening to how humans complain over their coffee having one pump of milk instead of two.

It's amusing, at first, until they became little flies just swarming everywhere and it's impossible to kill them all. Not that we really had the power to kill humans. I'll break down the immortals.

At the bottom are the demon and angel malefactors. To sum them up, they're mostly idiots and shitbags. Then above them are regular spirits. They're like humans, but they're dead. They're the type of immortals that mess with humans by haunting them. It's funny, really. Of all of the other immortals, I think that they're the least annoying and that's saying something.

And then you move up from spirits to demons and angels. Both are pretty much dimwits. Demons are mischievous troublemakers. They're less annoying than human flies. More like spiders. You need them even though you want to squish them.

The angels are nice, but that's just their problem. They're happiness pumps. They'll do whatever they can to make somebody happy and then pretend that they stay happy through all of it. Like a lady bug. You only really keep them around until they get boring. And once they're boring, they're annoying.

Lastly, there's the Tellers. That's what I am. And exactly 54 others. And if you didn't get it from the name, we're story tellers. That's our job. Seems easy, right? It's not as easy as you think.

I'll give humans some credit, they've come up with tons of good stories. But Tellers specialize in fairy tales. Or they used to. Hundreds of years ago. Fairytales aren't as common anymore. Folktales, fairy tales. Cinderella? We wrote it. Almost every fairy tale. We wrote it. You might be wondering if the Brothers Grimm are one us and the answer is no. None of the humans that wrote fairy tales are Tellers... because they're humans.

In short, they all lived in the human world and lived human lives. They weren't Tellers. You see, immortals live in different dimensions. We can travel between them, but we can't go to the human dimension and interact with humans without permission. Besides spirts and occasionally demons, but demons have to be summoned to enter. That's when they're really fun.