The Dark Queens, Tome 6: The Fairy Queen

Chapter 1: Forward

Danika

In this life, none has been wronged more than Galeta the Blue. I’m sure you never expected to hear that coming from me. But there you have it.

If you’ve read my own tales, then you know the trial I myself suffered under her iron fist. And not just I was affected by what she’d done. The lives and stories she altered simply by being there were many.

The Man in the Moon, Miriam the Gray, Violet Wolf, Gerard, and more recently Fable of Seren, characters in some of the Tales’ most legendary stories, but did you know many of their stories (their real ones) should have turned out far different?

A truth we have only just discovered. I won’t go in depth with those for now, because for some of you it could shatter your concept of happily ever afters, and Kingdom is a world built upon them—a world that survives and thrives due to the most powerful magic of all...love.

Fate is an interesting character herself, for nothing is written that cannot be unwritten, nothing is set that cannot be undone. She helped turn what was bad into good. And she can help fix again what’s been lost. If any fairy can do it, it would be her.

Though Galeta twisted much of what should have happened in this world, the happily ever afters prevailed. Some wound up as they should have; others never got the chance to meet. For a time, Kingdom was exactly as it should be. It was good. Not without its share of hurt, but happy and wonderful all the same.

Not everything turns out quite as we’d hoped, though. But we learn to move on, and eventually the sorrow merely turns into a “what if” on a cold, lonely winter’s night when thoughts turn inward and maudlin.

I could hate The Blue, quite easily, but had she not cast the die as she had, my Alice and Hatter, Hook and Trishelle—why, even Rumple and his Shayera would never have been, not to mention so many more. A fact I only recently discovered to be true.

The path The Blue chose allowed those happily ever afters to manifest. So can you really hate someone when such joy was derived from the sorrow? Who knows—I’ll leave that to you, dear readers, to decide.

Miriam the Gray, my oldest and truest friend, used to tell me a fantastical tale. A story of creation, of rebirth, and transformation. The story of how Kingdom came to be.

Of course I believed her—Miriam had the second sight. All Grays do. But it scared me too. I didn’t want to believe it could be true, didn’t want to think that a creature I’d pinned all my frustrations, rage, and fears on could be anything other than the conniving, twisted, and demented creature she’d become.

There is an old Earthen saying I’m quite fond of: “When a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can eventually cause a hurricane in another...”

Basically, it’s sometimes the smallest and most inconsequential actions that can cause unbelievable pain and catastrophe down the road.

I had no idea at the beginning of my tenure as godmother to the villains that life was anything other than what I’d always known deep in my heart to be true. That people weren’t exactly who they appeared to be. I never really understood the degrees of layers or the fact that for some people, the truth of who they were was a lot like a tiny pebble rolling down a snowy hill.