Start the story from the beginning: Tales of Eversparkle: Preface

(Previous entry: Tales of Eversparkle: Chapter 1, Book 1, Volume 15)

Chapter 2: Defending Against Ninjas

“Where am I?” Mandy asked.

“Eversparkle, child. The land of dreams, love, and absolute fools,” she cackled back. “For only fools dare to dream and love in Eversparkle.”

Mandy noticed distractedly that the woman was missing a bottom tooth, but her otherwise straight-as-a-picket-fence smile gleamed off-white-yellow in the light of the fire.

The woman took another swig from her gourd and offered it to Mandy. “Drink. You must be parched! It sure was a scorcher today wasn’t it! It almost hit 50 Sperks!”

Mandy had no idea what that was supposed to mean and proceeded to scoot away from the proffered hand, eyeing the gourd suspiciously. “I don’t trust strangers,” she said with half-believed conviction. She felt six again.

The old woman just shined a smile Mandy’s way, not at all offended by her brusqueness. “Well, let me introduce myself then. I am Priscilla Appletree, lover of art and nature, and an old woman with a fancy for hallucinogenic substances. I’ve traveled to the end of Eversparkle and back, but consistently find myself drawn back to the woods of Westwind. I’m a master brewer of potions that can help young women to fall in love and turn princes into frogs. People of the kingdom know me as the Witch of Westwind Woods, but you may call me Priscilla. Or Ma’am. Ahaha!”

Continue reading «Tales of Eversparkle: Chapter 2, Book 1, Volume 15»

(Previous entry: Tales of Eversparkle: Preface)

Mandy washed ashore. The sun roused her awake gently like a mother’s kiss. Her graduation robes were covered in a strange sparkling sand. When she looked closer it appeared as though each grain was a tiny diamond that shimmered brilliantly in the warm light. She slowly got up on her knees and looked around pleasantly dazed. She let the sounds of the sea wash over her, the seagulls’ cry, the waves lullaby, and the sound of a gentle breeze as it passed through coastal trees. She closed her eyes and almost fell back asleep.

“Heavens! This isn’t the place for a princess to be slumbering. Unless you are under some witchery. Come now, we mustn’t tarry long, these are shores of the Poison Eaters.”

Mandy gazed up at a handsome stranger with blond hair. He was clad in golden armor from head to toe and rode a white horse. She knew instantly who it was from her days spent reading. It was Prince Chad Goldwind, of the rich and illustrious Goldwind Kingdom of Eversparkle. A sharp realization hit her like an arrow to the head. She was in the book. She was somehow sucked into the book.

“I’m in the book! Just like how Julia got magically transported there in volume one!” she shouted out at the horsed man.

Continue reading «Tales of Eversparkle: Chapter 1, Book 1, Volume 15»

The library is like a tomb for memories, thoughts, and ideas. In these books stories were embalmed in ink and sepulchred from cover to cover. Then, like any medieval crypt, they were stored away in shelves packed with bones, each with a brief effigy and number to date their inscrutable existence.

Mandy always hovered around a certain area of the library. She flocked there like a hungry pigeon, pecking away at the old pages like stale crumbs. It was the fiction section of the library, to be more specific, books of the fantasy genre. Mandy fell in love with the worlds and people contained in those dusty graves. They shimmered in her mind like some far off mirage, the twinkling of a city over the sea, warped by so many mists.

Until that day.

Mandy had rushed to her sacred haunt with tears in her eyes. It was graduation day and she was expected to be walking across that narrow podium to receive her degree that very moment. Only the idea of graduation didn’t sit well with Mandy. Her heart and mind were buried so deep in these fantastical realms that the idea of real life terrified her. Gradation was a painful ritual, she thought, something that forever marked you as different, as a person who now is left to the whim of the cruel fate of adulthood. She reached for her favorite book series, “Tales of Eversparkle”. The band was playing the perfunctory graduation song outside. She could vaguely hear its garish clamorings. When she opened the book she could almost hear her name being called from the podium.

“Mandy Beezul”

A single crystalline tear fell from her eye and onto the first paragraph. Where it should have simply sunk into the page it instead began to form a small pool. Mandy stared in disbelief. The teardrop grew and grew and began to swirl around the page like a small whirlpool. Soon the text itself was caught up in the eddies of this strange prismatic pool. She could read the words ‘Mandy fell into the book,’ begin to reorder themselves on the page. Then, like a geyser, the pool exploded into a growing rainbow-kissed ocean. The waters filled the aisles of the library, washing away the books as their pages disintegrated into the bubbly flood.

And young Mandy Beezul was carried far far away on these strange tides.

(Next entry: Tales of Eversparkle: Chapter 1, Book 1, Volume 15)