The Sleeping Beauty - Book 1 - Chapter 42
Red and I walked through the night until we came upon an odd church.
Fairy tales are real.
Rose Briar is a diabetic college student without insurance. She’s been scraping by through a combination of maxing out credit cards and relying upon the kindness of strangers.
Unfortunately, she’s spent every dollar at her disposal. There’s no money left to buy her life-saving insulin.
Without her medication, Rose falls into a diabetic coma. She tumbles into a deep slumber and wakes up in a fantastical place called the Dream Realm, where fairy tales and legends of old are still very much alive.
She has one chance to wake up.
She must trek across the world, visit the most powerful object in the land, the Obsidian Spindle, and entreat with the fates; the only beings powerful enough to send her soul back to Earth.
But evil forces don’t want her to leave. They will stop at nothing to capture her and make sure she never goes home again.
Now, with the help of her half-gorgon girlfriend and a mysterious red rider, Rose must race across the land fighting dragons, monsters, and the forces of the Wicked Witch, Nimue, in order to reach the Obsidian Spindle before her body dies on Earth and she’s trapped in the Dream Realm forever.
Will she be able to wake up? Can she survive? Find out by reading The Sleeping Beauty today. If you love mythology, fairy tales, and dark fantasy, then you’ll love the first book in The Obsidian Spindle Saga.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.
Red and I walked through the night until we came upon an odd church. It slanted to the right at an acute angle and the tip of its steeple, curled like the tail of a pig, seemed to point to the top of the tallest peak of the mountain range in the distance. The building was painted six different colors: red, blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, and it continued in that order up the entire base and into the sky.
“That is a weird structure,” I said when it became clear we were walking toward it.
“It’s the Church of the Six,” Red said. “They worship the six deities of Urgu.”
“Hedging their bets.”
“In a way. However, unlike Earth, these gods actually presented themselves and visited their wrath upon the people quite often, so appeasing them is not the worst idea in the world.”
“Do you worship the six gods?” I asked as we neared the entrance. It was a wooden door with six faces carved on it.
“I do not worship any god.” Red sneered. “They are fickle and cruel.”
“Is this them?” I asked, pointing to the door.
Red nodded. She indicated a thin-faced man with smoke coming out of his head. “That is Hypnos, the abandoner.” Next to him was a woman, scowling. “Hera the cruel.” Below her was the picture of a lioness. “Sekmet the hunter.” Next to the lion was a wide faced man with spider legs growing out of his head. “Anansi the sly.” Below Anansi was an androgynous man with horns growing out of his head. “Loki the Trickster.” And finally a woman with blood on her face. “And Agrona the Merciless. The six gods of Urgu, each worse than the last. Come now. We are late.”
Red pushed open the door and walked inside. Wooden pews made up the majority of the inside decor, besides an altar at the far end with six bowls beneath it. Painted reliefs adorned every wall, depicting the gods engaged in battle. A nude Agrona stood covered in blood, holding the head of a deer. Anansi hung as a spider from a tree, whispering to a child. Loki sat on a throne of glass. Hera held the world in her hands. Sitting at the top of the church, watching the others like a guardian, was Hypnos.
Red walked to the altar with its six golden bowls on the ground. She pulled out six pink orbs from her pouch and held them up.
“What are those?” I asked.
“They are dreams, the currency of Urgu.”
“Dreams? Like…my dreams…like when I stand in front of the class without pants on and people laugh at me kind of dreams?”
Red chuckled. “Those are nightmares. That is Epiales’s domain. These are dreams. The kind that leave you untethered to the world and in a blissful state of peace. That is the true nature of Urgu, not this bastardization it has become.”
“I watched you hand some of those to the orc at the Happy Dragon Inn. Do you barter with them, too?”
Red threw a dream into each of the altars. “They are very powerful, Rose. Dreams hold every secret in the universe. They are truth and they are falsehood. There is nothing greater in all of Urgu aside from the Obsidian Spindle, so yes, we barter with them. Now that there are no more dreams coming to Urgu, their value increases by the day.”
Red bent down and placed her hand in each altar. I heard a cracking and saw a mist of pink ascend as she broke one dream off in each bowl.
“You destroy them?”
“They are power. If you want to summon something powerful, you must use power itself. We trade them until an opportunity comes to use them.”
“That is an odd currency.”
“Perhaps, but is it so different from your dollar? It is a piece of paper that you think represents value, but it is not but what you imagine it to be. These dreams, however, have real power.”
I sucked in my breath and held it for a moment, studying the church and all of its paintings and bowls and altars. “This place is so weird.”
Red let out a breathy laugh. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
The six wisps of dreams found each other in the middle of the temple. They molded together into a thin tendril which rose high into the air, disappearing into the bent steeple.
Red sat down in one of the pews, cupping her hands together like she was praying. She closed her eyes and muttered something that I couldn’t understand. Then, she placed her head in her hands and took a deep breath.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We wait.”
Fairy tales are real.
Find out by reading The Sleeping Beauty today. If you love mythology, fairy tales, and dark fantasy, then you’ll love the first book in The Obsidian Spindle Saga.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.