The Curse of Happily Ever After

People don’t talk about the real side of every fairy tale. They don’t talk about how there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. How there is no Prince Charming. How the shoe fits more than one. That there is no happy ever after or that there never was one.  

They don’t want to talk about the way that the story really ended. They don’t tell the stories of the people who didn’t have such a happy ending. The stories of the people who never even got close. 

But why should they? Mortals eat up lies. The air they breathe might be filled with lies if it wasn’t filled with the smog, smoke, and pollution they brought to the world. Leaving the rest of Earth’s habitants to suffer in the unbearable circumstances. 

Tragic, really. That’s why there’s no fairy tales about the real world. About mortal earthlings. You can sprinkle some glitter and make something seem prettier than it was, but you can’t un-rot a spoiled egg. Trust me, I’ve tried. 

Humans are interesting creatures. They want happy things to escape from their unhappy life or a sad thing that makes them feel warm. They can’t accept an ending that is too true because it isn’t their escape from reality.  

They can’t accept that Hansel and Gretel is about child killing and cannibalism. That Goldilocks was eaten and never seen again. That Sleeping Beauty didn’t end with such a nice prince. That The Little Mermaid never had a happy ever after. That the Evil Queen in Snow White doesn’t die from just a fall. 

They don’t like that there isn’t a happy ever after, even in a fictional world where they haven’t caused the world so many troubles. It’s an annoying cycle. If you think that 80 years is a long time to live, try living for eternity and listening to how humans complain over their coffee having one pump of milk instead of two. 

It’s amusing, at first, until they became little flies and it’s impossible to kill them all. Not that we really had the power to kill humans. I’ll break down the immortals.  

At the bottom are the demon malefactors. To sum them up, they’re mostly idiots and shitbags. Then above them are regular spirits. They’re like regular humans, but they’re dead. They’re the type of immortals that mess with humans by haunting them. It’s funny, really. 

And then you move up from spirits to demons and angels. Both are pretty much dimwits. Demons are mischievous troublemakers. They’re less annoying than human flies. More like spiders. You need them even though you want to squish them.  

The angels are nice, but that’s just their problem. They’re happiness pumps. They’ll do whatever they can to make somebody happy and then pretend that they stay happy through all of it. Like a lady bug. You only really keep them around until they get boring. 

Lastly, there’s the Tellers. That’s what I am. And exactly 54 others. And if you didn’t get it from the name, we’re story tellers. That’s our job. Seems easy, right? It’s not as easy as you think. 

I’ll give humans some credit, they’ve come up with tons of good stories. But Tellers specialize in fairy tales. Cinderella? We wrote it. Almost every fairy tale. We wrote it. You might be wondering if the Brothers Grimm are one us and the answer is no. None of the humans that wrote fairy tales are Tellers... because they’re humans. 

In short, they all lived in the human world and lived human lives. They weren’t Tellers. You see, immortals live in different dimensions. We can travel between them, but we can’t go to the human dimension and interact with humans. Besides spirts and occasionally demons, but demons have to be summoned to enter. 

Tellers can’t interact with humans. But we can inflict them. We write a story, bring it to the Council Tellers. The extra five. They’re the ones who read the stories, edit it, and if they like it, then they’ll get it to a human. They plant the idea in their mind, the human writes it, and we never get the credit. Annoying. Very annoying. 

But you know what’s more annoying? Not being able to tell the dark side of stories. Everything has to have a happy ending. So, to make this simple, we write the stories, bring it to the council, the council makes the changes if it works, and then they send it to a human to write. 

By changing the stories, I mean that they change the endings on some of them. Tellers like me write stories with sad endings. I wrote Sleeping Beauty. Not the story you know. I wrote the version where she wakes up to her baby taking the poison from her hand. Dark, right? 

That was the origin story. Then it was spread to the humans. They made a few different versions, most of which were censored. For a while, the good versions stay around. Where there’s a happy ending even though there never could have been. Where nothing bad happened. 

But it didn’t stay like that forever. The Council of Tellers are more powerful than regular Tellers, but Tellers have a bit of infliction in the human world too. Let’s just say that I did put the real ending idea.  

The point is that the altered version where nothing bad happened is the story that is supposed to be told. It’s the story that everybody knows and it annoys me that nobody really knows the real version. 

The Council aren’t idiots though. They realized that we were spreading the real stories and they came up with the punishment for it. If we wrote a story, they changed the ending, and we spread the real ending, we would be reprimanded. 

Reprimanded meant that we had to suffer through years around demons. The years depended on how bad they claimed it. I was reprimanded once for 20 years. That was when I spread the real ending to Sleeping Beauty. Worth it. 

When they found out we could get used to living around demons, reprimanding became just the first warning. The second warning was that we had to live many deaths as a human. None of us had gotten that far. The third warning was that we would be banished from writing and stripped of our abilities. 

Nobody had gotten to that point. I had to admit, the Council had done a good job with the levels. The point was to scare us and it did that. Although, I have to admit, I do wonder what it would be like to die as a human. A few Tellers believe that they would burn us to death. That was supposed to be the most painful thing in the world. That was possible, at least. 

But the one thing that they can’t do is remove the real story from humans’ minds. Once it’s out, it can’t be taken back by our abilities. It would have to be forgotten completely and that is near impossible. 

As you might suspect, not being able to have the regular creative flow impacted the stories. Fairy tales and folktales fell out a bit, so we brainstorm stories that are a little more modern nowadays, but none of them are as good as they could be because we have to come up with a happy ending. But sometimes there just isn’t a happy ending. No matter how hard you try. 

“Veda, Pollux, we’ve been over this.” Council Teller, Xev says, shaking their head. “You can’t write a story where a human murders another.” 

I cross my arms. They says murder as though it didn’t happen in the real world all the time. “But you’ve barely read it.” Pollux argues next to me. “Please, just consider it.” 

“The decision is no.” Endy says. “We’ve repeated to you two specifically that these stories need to be written sensitive. You two haven’t had a good story in years.” 

A good story? I’ve written plenty of good stories. It was their bullshit rules that made good writing seem bad. Pollux looked over at me. Their eyes were begging me to help them, but I couldn’t. I had tried. I was over trying to solve it.  

I uncrossed my arms and started to turn away. Pollux sighed and followed behind me. “Thank you.” Xev calls. “Make sure to remember that your stories need to be sensitive!” 

I stop walking. Pollux nearly bumps into me at the sudden movement. I turned around to look back at them. “Why?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Why should we have to be the ones that write sensitive?” 

“Humans are fragile.” 

“Humans have to deal with it every day.” I say. “Every day. They live in the real world. Crime happens. Death happens. Why should we have to limit our abilities and make it so that it doesn’t exist?” 

Xev sighs, shaking their head and looking towards Sepety for help. They shake their head too. “Veda, it’s just the way that it works.” They say. “Our writing is a way for humans to have a world to escape to.” 

I look over at Pollux. I know that I can’t be the only one who thinks that they system we follow by is flawed. They get the hint and decide to speak up too. “The world they escape to shouldn’t have to be so different.” They say. “Similar things should happen anywhere because no place is perfect. Even here isn’t perfect.” 

“It’s still a no.” Endy repeats. “Please go and come back with a new story.” 

I stop Pollux when he turns to go. “No.” I say. “I am so tired of this. Have you any idea how it is to write thousands of stories? Or how it feels to have them all rejected because of one little thing?” 

“Veda, this is not the time.” 

“Then when is the time?” I grumble. “How should we be expected to follow rules that don’t make sense?” 

“That’s how it’s been.” Hellion says. 

I cross my arms again. “Then perhaps I’ll send the idea to the mind of a human without your permission.” I say. “I think that it should be time for things to change. If you really want humans to have a world to escape to, then we should be able to write all the stories we can so that they have options.” 

“You’ve already been at a strike.” 

“And I’ll use the rest of them if it means that I can spread my stories.” I say. 

Xev puts up a hand to silence anybody in the Council that may have wanted to talk. I stop for a moment, starting to realize all that I had said. What was I doing? I was asking for trouble... but maybe I was right. 

If they wanted our stories to be an escape from reality for humans, then it should resemble a world that actually made sense. To write a good story, it needed to play with emotions. It needed to make readers feel things. We couldn’t do that it we couldn’t bend a few rules. 

“I believe that Veda and Pollux have made a good point.” They said. 

I don’t think that Pollux has said that much, but I don’t correct them. I think that I’m already lucky they haven’t punished me for lashing out, so I stay shut. “It should only be fair that the stories resemble a sense of reality and the rules prevent that from happening.” 

“But we shouldn’t allow gruesome stories.” Endy argues. 

“We may not permit some things, but perhaps the rules should be changed a little.” Xev says. They look to me and Pollux. “I would like for the both of you to pick two of your stories that we have rejected. Any two that you like. Edit them, make sure you’re happy with them, and we will send them into the human world as a test. If it goes well, then we’ll talk more about changing the writing rules.” 

I grin. I have been waiting to do that for centuries. Perhaps an outburst here and there isn’t so terrible. I like being more in control of my stories and it should be my decision to add in a sad ending here or there. The rules have always prevented me from doing so. 

“Thank you, Council.” I say, dipping my head. Pollux does the same before we turn away.  

Pollux grabs my arm as we’re walking away, a grin consumes their face. “You’re amazing.” They say.  

I smile back. I am glad that I decided to lash out. Part of it had been a reaction, the other half had been the decision to let it out. “Of course I am.” I say, giving them a wink. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got some stories to review.”