You open your eyes, and you are floating in water with lily pads surrounding you and a shock of glass erupting from your chest. Blood seeps into the water around you.

You’ve still got the damn glass in your chest. You twist the shard again. You cannot possibly remove it, but you hear a voice say,

“Careful, careful, careful! Don't touch, don't touch!”

Ring! And you see, approaching you, with beautiful, golden wings and a corona of light around her body, is a beautiful fairy. She has gleaming, golden skin and bright turquoise hair wrapped up beautifully with shells and jewels around it, and she flits over to you and says,

”Oh, my poor and dear darling prince! You are so badly hurt!”

“Yes!” Your reply is not polite.

“Are you all right?”

“No! No, I'm not all right! And I wasn't all right before I had the glass shoved in me! I'm a frog! I'm a prince! I should be a prince, but I'm a frog! And now I've been thrown into the water after being stabbed. Some furniture kicked my ass. What are you?’


“I know, I know, I know. I am so dreadfully sorry. Your Highness. None of this was supposed to happen. We need to get you back with the Princess Elody.”

“Correct. Yes.”

“We need to find what has corrupted her mind that she constantly thinks of war, and we need to change her back.’

“Right.” Wait. “No, no, no. We need to change me back.”

“Yes, of course, yes yes yes, but of course-“ “She's off, no, she-“ “She is the one to blame, because obviously-“

“Okay, well-“

“You wouldn't have become a frog if she had-”

“It’s not entirely her fault! It's... She's... The things... The problem is the outer things ruining our life, okay? If there's not giants coming knocking places down, destroying our castle, Elody never would've got it in her head to go off fighting. The bad stuff is all out there. We had a very nice life in the castle.”

“You are so correct. A wonderful, wonderful life.”

“So just undo this.”

“Yes.”

“The glass first.”

“Yes.”

“Then the frog thing.”

“Yes.”

“And then just tell me where Elody is, and we'll figure it out.”

“So, here's the issue.

All of this, the times of shadow, the Neverafter, me and all of the other fairies are working as hard as we can to fix this and get everything back on track. There are so many happily ever afters that need to continue to ever after. It's just that it's all kind of become a little scrambled, you know? So we're fixing problems, but we sort of have to fix them in the order. You know, sort of like, well, before you have to bail out the boat, but you also have to fix the leak at the bottom of the boat, and you have to get enough water out to fix the leak, but also the water will keep... These are complicated issues.”

Obviously you know all this already. She’s wasting your time.

“It sounds uncomplicated to me. I am in front of you, and perhaps there are other things that you need to deal with, but it seems like the easiest thing for you to do right now would be to pull this glass out of me and then wave your wand and turn me back into a handsome prince.”


“Well, I would love that. Interesting point, though. You're not in immediate danger of dying, because you are dead.”

“Fantastic, so put me... Okay, so then what? Put me in the fucking book. The book seemed cool. Everything was just... When King Cole went in there, just back-“

“Sorry, book? What book?”

You pause. Maybe you shouldn’t mention the book.

“The theoretical book of how things should be. You know, you are cursed. You become a frog. You find true love. You're not a frog anymore. Everything's great, and then oop, you start turning into a frog again, then you kill the fairy who did that to you. If anything, that's a sequel. We're done. Unless this is a trilogy, in which case, get the glass out of me.”

“I understand. In the world in which you died, a fairy cursed you. But ask yourself this, Prince Gerard. Would you have become wed to the Princess Elody had you not been turned into a frog?”

“Okay, yes. I don't begrudge the first frogging. But after that, I did it.”

“I’m so glad that you can see reason. The first frogging is, of course, a part of one of the Neverafter's most beautiful love stories, but the second one is a mistake.”

“You keep referring to these things as... There's just the one thing, and it's ruined.’

“Yes, yes, of course you are right. There is just one time, one once upon a time from which you hail. I am so sorry to say, but in that world, you are dead. You cannot return to that world. But, but, there are worlds that are so close! I mean, we're talking so, so close. Hardly any, you know, variation. Cards on the table, here's what we would love. We would love for you to come back to life.”

“Perfect.”

“Now, when you come back to life, you might be in a version of your body that is a little bit more in the wrong direction than this one is now, but- I am so very sorry, Your Highness. What about this? We are going to bring you back. You are going to enter a world where all of this gets to go back to the way it was before, but not right at the start. At the start, it will seem substantively worse. However, there is an opportunity within that world for you to rejoin the companions that you met, which seems interesting. You mentioned something. Was there any sort of object of significance or anything of that kind?”

“ I think it was just the companionship.”

“Companionship?

“Yes, Elody and I, before all of this got turned upside-down, we had many, many friends who began becoming distracted by more serious matters, and I was kind of left to my own devices, and it's been nice to be around... It's just been nice to be around the old friends again.”


“Gerard, we are working as quickly and diligently as we can to make everything right again, and I promise you that if you discover by what means you and your companions were able to come to places like this where you may speak with a shard of glass within your chest, and more importantly than that, if you are able to keep an eye on the Princess Rosamund and specifically tell me if anybody speaks to her or if she has found a contact with any of the forces, giants and ogres and wizards and all manner of terrible things. We believe that there might be people, quite wicked people, that are courting her.”

“And if they're going after princesses, have they gone after Elody?”

Only a wishy-washy answer and then.


Nestled within your chest is the glass shard, and though it stings you every time you move, it does not seem to deal a death blow to you. You are much more monstrous than you were before, and have some sort of horrifying toughness that allows you to continue to live even impaled upon this shard of glass as you are. You also are a little confused. You have sets of memories of the wonderful life you lived with the Princess Elody, but this world, the attack from Snowhold was so much more violent, the losses so much greater. You remember seeing Elody astride a blood-soaked horse, her eyes wide with battle rage, huge, golden mace overhead. This is a darker version of your story, and you are most confused about the manner in which you changed, because you thought you remembered receiving a kiss from a princess in the form of a frog as the act of faith and love that transformed you, but you have this strange, surreal memory now of being picked up and thrown into the wall.

“That's not how it's supposed to be at all.”

But at least you’re alive again.