Crisanta Knight: The Lost King

PROLOGUE

Prologue

Oh, what a difference a day makes.

You’ve probably heard that saying before, though you may not be able to pinpoint where it came from. I get that. As the daughter of Cinderella, and a girl who lives in a world full of fairytale characters who are constantly being adapted in new stories, I’m used to being surrounded by things that feel familiar but have foggy origins. The latest turn in my adventure, for example, has been a hodgepodge of recognizable characters and concepts, but also one mindboggling surprise after another.

It all started last semester when my friends and I discovered that the antagonists of our realm were plotting to break out of their magically sealed-off kingdom of Alderon, overthrow our world, and eliminate its protagonists.

To give a little background, the citizens in my world of Book are divided into two main groups—protagonists and common characters. Common characters are the ensemble cast of our reality.

What do I mean by that?

Well, have you ever been in a coffee shop surrounded by people and thought to yourself: Is everyone here meant to make a difference in the world, or are some people just fillers—everyday folks who don’t cause ripples, but form the masses that cause the unique to stand out? That’s the mentality in Book. Common characters (commons) are the horses that allow the unicorns to stand out, and protagonists are the unicorns.

Protagonists are destined to be the main characters of their own stories and attend special academies in their youth to prepare for those roles. My roommates, SJ and Blue, and I are protagonist students at Lady Agnue’s School for Princesses & Other Female Protagonists. Meanwhile our close friends Jason and Daniel are protagonists enrolled at our brother school, Lord Channing’s School for Princes & Other Young Heroes.

Our realm’s Author selects Book’s main characters and her choices are manifested in the form of physical texts called “protagonist books.” These volumes are inevitably filled with her visions for our futures, but all start with a prophecy that summarizes the gist of the plot that will define each of our lives. Once your protagonist book appears, you are sent to the appropriate school to learn how to be the type of main character the Author intends for you to be. If you don’t receive a book, then you go on living an ordinary life as a common where nothing spectacular is expected of you.

This was our land’s system—rigid, but orderly—for generations. Too bad the whole thing was riddled with deceit. Last December, my friends and I discovered that the Author wasn’t some all-controlling, all-knowing prophet. She was actually a former Fairy Godmother with Pure Magic Disease, which gave her the ability to see glimpses of the future. Our realm’s Godmother Supreme and the rest of our higher-ups had been using her visions and propagating her legend for a long time to control our land and its people.

My friends and I had planned to expose this sham, but we had more immediate problems to address first. Starting with retrieving Paige Tomkins’ memories.

Paige was a Fairy Godmother who’d disappeared from Book a decade ago. Because of her former position in the Fairy Godmother Agency, she was the only person who knew where Book’s mega-powerful genies had been imprisoned. Fearing that people would eventually capture her and force her to share that mighty secret, she’d fled the realm and gone into hiding. Book was only one of fourteen magical worlds in our dimension, known as the Wonderlands, so the odds of her being found were slim.

Regrettably, Book’s antagonists (commons gone bad, if you will) were undaunted by these odds and set on tracking Paige down so they could find out where the genies were being kept. They wanted to use the magical beings to further their plans of conquest over Book. Thus, SJ, Blue, Jason, Daniel, and I had embarked on a quest to foil them. We were a few of the only good guys out there who knew about the antagonists’ wicked intentions, so we had a responsibility to stop them by locating Paige first.

Lo and behold, we’d actually succeeded (yay!) but the win was not so simple.

In order to really protect her memories, Paige had gone to Oz and gotten herself turned into a brainless scarecrow. Brainless scarecrows were victims of Glinda (the formerly good, but recently turned wicked witch of Oz). When victims were transformed into scarecrows, their memories were stored in Glinda’s all-but-impenetrable memory stone, which she kept in her lair in the North Mountains of Oz. The only weapon that could pierce this memory stone and thereby retrieve Paige’s memories was the legendary Camelot sword Excalibur. So, off we’d gone in search of the famous blade so we could achieve our goal.

This was a demanding challenge on three fronts.

For one, traversing Camelot and its many formidable monsters, dangerous lands, and treacherous traps in pursuit of Excalibur was a lot to ask of anyone, let alone five (admittedly feisty) teens.

Second, the main antagonists we were competing against were even more formidable, dangerous, and treacherous. It was hard to say which of them I hated more: Arian, Mauvrey, or Alex.

Arian, under direction of the antagonist queen Nadia, was one of the main villains leading the charge against Book. Our paths had been intertwined since my protagonist book prophecy declared I was going to be the key force responsible for either stopping the antagonists’ plot or helping them accomplish it.

Arian was smart, ruthless, and an impressive fighter. I’d learned to respect that and be wary of it. He was also a constant threat to us because he could get past the defensive force field surrounding the antagonist kingdom of Alderon, called an In and Out Spell.

In and Out Spells are enchanted barriers that keep people from getting in or out of the locations they protect. There were several in Book, and the one around Alderon worked at half capacity so villains and monsters could get tossed in but wouldn’t be able to escape. Unfortunately, some antagonists like Arian were not limited by the spell because they were Shadow Guardians—people who allowed dark creatures called Shadows to live inside them. It was a symbiotic relationship because while the Shadow fed on the soul of the host, that very lack of a soul let the host pass through In and Out Spells undetected. Luckily, most people were not compatible with Shadows, so there were only so many antagonists from Alderon running freely around the Wonderlands. Which was fine by me because there were plenty of bad guys out here already. Like Mauvrey.

Daughter of the famous Sleeping Beauty, Mauvrey was a protagonist turned Shadow Guardian and villainess. She had gone to school with me, SJ, and Blue since the start; however, girl decided to go all evil and disregard her princess lineage for a life of wickedness. I still didn’t know why she’d changed; I’d met her a few times before attending Lady Agnue’s and thought she was perfectly nice. But she had turned malicious at school and fully leaned into the villainess role. Now, like Arian, she had no problem trying to kill us and was working with the antagonists on their nefarious endeavors.

I loathed the blonde for many reasons, but the greatest was that she had brought Alex into this. Alex was one of my two older brothers. He used to be heir to the throne of our kingdom of Midveil, but after getting romantically involved with Mauvrey, he had joined the antagonists and helped launch an attack on our kingdom and castle as part of the commons rebellion gaining traction in Book.

Ugh. I can feel myself grinding my teeth just thinking about it.

Before all this came to light last week, Alex and I had been really close. Now it felt like he was dead to me. He was a Shadow Guardian, an antagonist, and a traitor. All but a tiny ember of love that remained deep within me was sure that he could never be redeemed. As such, I would not hold back whenever or however he opposed me. The time for mercy had passed. I already had enough things going on without being distracted by affection for someone who was so lost.

Anyway, aside from our cruel foes, the third main threat working against my friends and me in our quest to retrieve Paige’s memories was time. This issue was arguably the most daunting.

At the start of our quest for Excalibur, we only had a few days to get it and get back to Oz. Now we had less than one day to return there and cross the In and Out Spell around Glinda’s lair during the Vicennalia Aurora.

I know, it feels like we’ve been building toward this climax forever, right?

For those of you who missed the last two story arcs, or would like a little reminder, the Vicennalia Aurora is this great magic fluctuation event that takes place simultaneously across all Wonderlands, despite time differences in each realm. For us in Book, it happens every twenty-five years. Other worlds, like Oz, Neverland, and Camelot, experience it every five-and-a-half. Either way, at exactly 7:30 p.m. tonight, for just one hour, all the skies in the Wonderlands were going to be streaked with beautiful colors as magic throughout the fourteen realms went bananas.

While the greater populace of the Wonderlands was excited about this because of the pretty lights and celebratory parties, my friends and I were gaming up for the magic instability caused by the Vicennalia Aurora. We had learned that this year’s Aurora was going to make ordinary magic weaker. Which meant In and Out Spells were going to become weaker too.

Oz’s rulers had blocked off Glinda’s domain in the North Mountains with an In and Out Spell to protect the realm from her. It was a bit of a weird hybrid spell because it combined different forms of magic, but it worked like the one around Alderon: beings could go in but they could not get out.

Though my friends and I had become immune to certain types of In and Out Spells through past ventures, we were not immune to Glinda’s. Therefore, the only night we could enter the North Mountains in pursuit of Glinda’s memory stone was tonight, during the brief hour of the Vicennalia Aurora when the spell would be weak enough to allow us to pass back out without a problem. If we didn’t exit in that window, we would be trapped there just like Glinda.

This brings us to the here and now.

Throughout our journey the antagonists had been one step ahead, but for once we finally had the advantage as we raced against the ticking clock of the Aurora. After a harrowing journey across Camelot, my friends and I had beaten our enemies to Excalibur and I now had it in my possession. It was literally in my hand and we had seven and a half hours to get to the North Mountains and use it before the Vicennalia Aurora struck and a whole bunch of climaxes collided.

What, did you think getting Paige’s memories was the only thing at stake here?

Don’t you know me better by now?