Crisanta Knight: To Death & Back

PrologueYou know how princesses are supposed to wear pretty dresses, be saved by heroes, and live happily ever after? Well, if that’s what you’re into, you picked the wrong book. As the daughter of Cinderella, I’m all for pretty dresses, but I prefer to pair them with combat boots. While a few of my hero friends have saved me on occasion, I’ve rescued them just as many times. And as far as living happily ever after goes, at this rate I’ll be lucky just to be alive a few days from now. My name is Crisanta Knight. I’m a protagonist and I hail from a world called Book—a magical realm that separates its citizens into main characters and common ensemble characters. One of the things our realm is known for is the Author—a mysterious prophet who writes the stories, known as “protagonist books,” that detail protagonists’ fates. Each protagonist book starts with a prologue prophecy, a vague rhyme that predicts the general gist of a main character’s story. Unfortunately, mine was a doozy. I was prophesied to decide the fate of the wicked antagonists plotting to overthrow our realm and eliminate all its main characters. At the end of this story, I would either be responsible for stopping them or helping them see their evil plan through. Since learning of my prophecy, the antagonists had tried to strike me down at every possible turn. Protagonists in Book attend special private schools where they train for their fairytale destinies. As a princess and a protagonist, I’d always been trained to do good and be good, so the antagonists assumed that if I made it to the end of my storyline, I would enact the interpretation of my prophecy that implied I would stop them. As a result, they wanted to stop me first, and the only way to keep a prophecy from coming true is by killing its subject. Regrettably for them, I was pretty hard to kill. And I had a team of fierce friends that made sure of that. SJ (the daughter of Snow White), Blue (the younger sister of Little Red Riding Hood), Jason (the younger brother of the famous Jack who climbed the beanstalk), and Daniel (a hero with no previous ties to fairytales past) were always there for me when things got seedy. I also had a Fairy Godmother–issue wand which could morph into any weapon I willed it into. I possessed the combat ability to utilize this tool dynamically, especially in the form of a spear. And above all else, I had magic. My mother’s Fairy Godmother had given me a spark of her magic when I was a little girl so I could operate the wand. This spark had developed into a singular, magnificent ability: life. As in, I had the ability to bring things to life and control them. It was pretty awesome as far as powers went. Since realizing I possessed this ability a few months ago, I had spent a lot of time training to control and master it under the tutelage of the very Author who I once resented for supposedly controlling our fates. Last semester my friends and I had discovered that the Author was actually a former Fairy Godmother named Liza Lenore who lived under the thumb of our realm’s higher-ups. She didn’t control our fates; she merely had visions of the future that reflected our choices. The higher-ups used her visions to keep order in our realm, convince the citizens of Book that their fates weren’t their own, and separate people into protagonists and commons. Accordingly, Liza was imprisoned and isolated from the rest of the realm and was under an enchantment that made her live forever so she could be used in this way indefinitely. Although Liza was a tool of propaganda for the higher-ups, she had become a valuable ally and teacher to me. The reason? She and I shared a similar problem known as Pure Magic Disease. Magic normally works like a jacket. It’s supposed to be easy to put on and use when needed, and simple to remove and ignore when not needed. However, every once in a while, magic irrevocably bonds to its host, resulting in Pure Magic Disease—an affliction that bestows great power with one ability, allows its host to see the future, and eventually corrupts them. Liza was the only person I knew who had overcome the corrupting effects of Pure Magic, which made her the only person capable of teaching me the control to do the same. This involved tremendous focus and blocking out emotions—particularly negative ones—when I summoned my abilities. For while emotion made magic stronger, it also made it more unstable. I had ardently tried to keep my emotions in check as my magic usage increased and developed, but that had become a lot more difficult lately thanks to Alex. Alex is my older brother, and until a few days ago he was the beloved prince of our kingdom, Midveil. That all changed when he aligned himself with the antagonists and helped the common characters who had been rebelling in Book launch an attack on our home. His betrayal had devastated me. He was no longer the hero, friend, and brother I once held dear. He was a monster working with Arian (the antagonist who’d been leading the charge against me since my prophecy appeared) and Mauvrey (the daughter of Sleeping Beauty, a former classmate at Lady Agnue’s School for Princesses & Other Female Protagonists, and my long-time nemesis). I wished I never had to see Alex again, but our stories were entangled. Alex and company, like me and mine, were now after Excalibur—King Arthur’s legendary blade, which had been lost since his supposed death. According to legend, Excalibur resided on Camelot’s infamous Isle of Avalon under the care of the Lady of the Lake, waiting for someone worthy to claim it. The next person who would be able to do this was foretold by Merlin, Camelot’s legendary wizard, in the Great Lights Prophecy. Enter my brother and me. The Great Lights Prophecy indicated that a “Knight” of royal blood who was heir to the lion’s throne was meant to claim Excalibur. Alex fit that description, as did I. We were royal, Knight was our last name, and Midveil’s symbol was a lion. However, there was a deciding factor that could narrow down which of us had the chops to fulfill the prophecy: the Boar’s Mouth, a mystical statue in Camelot. According to the prophecy, the Knight meant to claim Excalibur needed to get blessed by the Boar’s Mouth in order to have any hope of completing the quest. The thing was, the statue only responded to people who had pledged a vow of loyalty known as The Pentecostal Oath to the king of Camelot. Which brings us to the present. Finding Excalibur was the key to accessing the memories of a lost Fairy Godmother named Paige Tomkins, who knew the location of Book’s missing genies. Our search for Paige Tomkins had brought my friends and I to Neverland. There, we discovered that the rightful king of Camelot, King Arthur, was not dead like everyone long believed. After being mortally wounded by his half brother Mordred, he had accidentally ended up in Neverland where biological time stood still, thus keeping him alive and also keeping him from aging. We’d allied with Arthur and his Neverland friends—Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and Girls—and I had sworn The Pentecostal Oath to the king so I could receive the blessing from the Boar’s Mouth in Camelot. Alex, meanwhile, had sworn The Oath to the person who had taken Camelot’s throne in Arthur’s place—only to learn he couldn’t receive the blessing because the Boar’s Mouth sensed Arthur, the true king of Camelot, still lived. Now my brother, Mauvrey, Arian, and a buttload of their antagonist henchman intended to track down Arthur and force him to complete the pledge of The Pentecostal Oath with my brother. If the antagonists succeeded with this endeavor, Alex and I would both be eligible to get blessed by the Boar’s Mouth. This made my status to Arian and the antagonists more complicated. While Alex and I had become opposites in a lot of ways, we were equals in terms of our chances at being the Knight of the prophecy. And since there was no guarantee that pledging The Oath would make the Boar’s Mouth bless us, Arian and company weren’t presently interested in killing me. They wanted to save me until Alex fulfilled all the requirements of the prophecy (the pledge and the blessing). In the meantime, I was their spare Knight in case he didn’t cut it. Which meant Arthur was not the only one who needed to evade their capture. One wrong move and he and I would both become pawns in the antagonists’ vicious game. It was a dangerous, precarious situation to say the least. However, while I was wary about the immediate future, I was honestly not as intimidated as I once might’ve been. The antagonists were a fearsome group—cruel, cunning, and ruthless. That worked to their advantage. Nevertheless, they had a bad habit of underestimating me and that was their greatest disadvantage. We’d spent a lot of time together, my enemies and I, and if there was one truth that I carried away from our experiences, it was this: The only thing better than being feared is being underestimated; because then nobody will see you coming. I was coming for Excalibur. If my enemies were smart, they would get out of my way.