Breaking a tale

Luna - Well this is unexpected

The man noticed my confusion straight away. He really was quite perceptive. He led me to the entrance of the house before he spoke. "We are at Nullo-loco, the house of tales, we left Artagon but you are not ready to enter your tale. You are free to do as you wish, as long as you don't go upstairs, if you do your freedom will be quickly removed." With that he pushed open the door and waited expectantly for me to enter. I was tempted to ignore him but I realised there was nowhere else to go, so I picked up my suitcase and walked inside.

I stared around the house in awe. The place kind of reminded me of a hotel, all fancy and important. There were staff in black and white uniforms running everywhere with baskets or bags in their arms and they all had the strange crest somewhere on their outfits. The whole area was loud and busy, with a large fire crackling in a fireplace off to the side of the entrance hall. The house was a lot bigger on the inside than it had looked from the outside. The walls were painted with a bright cream and there were black and white tiles on the floor. There were doors on either side of the room and a grand staircase in the middle, carpeted in a plush red rug. There was a large mahogany desk in one corner and behind it was a cabinet filled with books and keys. The man strode to the desk where a woman was standing. As the man began to talk to her I had time to collect my thoughts.

They never tell you about this part of the journey, this place must have been like a hotel for people before they enter the tales, why hadn't anybody told me about this place? I wondered how long I would have to stay here for and what I would have to do here. I turned my attention back to the woman in front of me. She was wearing a flowy white dress with long wavy sleeves and black gloves, come to think of it, everyone in the house was wearing black gloves. She had a white cardigan on and on the pocket was the same crest that was on the man's tailcoat. I decided that it must be the crest of the tale master as everyone here obviously worked for him, whoever he was. She smiled at me and said something to the man that I didn't quite catch. She then came around the desk and shook my hand.

"You must be Luna, I'm Mary," she said, a beaming smile fixed on her face "We have been waiting on you for some time."

I liked Mary instantly, she seemed like the kind of person I could trust, at least she was talking to me. I opened my mouth to reply, but I was so overwhelmed by the situation that I didn't know what to say, I just continued to stare around the room with a bemused expression on my face. The man had disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived and was nowhere to be seen. He had somehow managed to vanish into thin air. I frowned and tried to spot him in between all the other staff. I hadn't even managed to get his name. I was about to ask Mary about him when she took control. She called over a porter who did such an over exaggerated bow as he took my suitcase that I had to stop myself from laughing. Mary then led me through the left doorway and into a maze of corridors. We took so many twists and turns that I lost all sense of direction, the house was massive, every corridor we went through had at least a hundred doors on each side and every corridor was themed after a different tale. I knew there were lots of different tales, but I didn't realise how many there actually were, there must have been hundreds I had never even heard of.

We went through several corridors of tales I knew such as the "glass slipper" and the "green fairy" but there were many others that I had never heard of before such as the "birch tree" and "the dog and the sparrow." When I asked Mary about these tales she just told me not to worry about them and to just focus on my own tale. I also noticed that the corridors seemed to be different ages, some of them seemed new and shiny, with newly painted walls and modern art, whilst others were much older, with stone walls and thin, slit-like windows. Corridors are also lighted by a variety of different light sources. Some of them had normal lights but others are lit by candles and one was even lit by burning torches. Mary noticed my confusion just as we entered the fifth corridor.