another neverafter
Inside a book, where stories live
A sense of what their future holds.
The strings, they pull, a way to give
Before the pages start to fold.
A land of what has been returned
Forever trapped inside their souls.
To darkness where the deepest turned,
Worn feet dragging on burning coals.
A wail of pain echoes within,
A siren call for where to go,
Pages crossed with marks of sin,
The book that calls for them to know.
Their pain, it grows, a heart that cries.
Anew, they beg, for truth not lies.
He once would spin the gentlest lies,
Soft morals wrapped in sugared rhyme
A golden shush behind his eyes
Made childhood safe from fear and time.
But grief flew in on golden wing
And stole his son at break of dawn
A shining bird, a wicked thing,
Left silence where the boy had gone.
No feather marked the empty floor,
No echo stirred the empty air
The tales he told would charm no more,
For none could mend his torn despair.
So ink ran black within his hand
He swore to hunt what fate had planned.
He found a book no child should read,
Its spine was bound in thorn and thread.
Each page revealed a broken deed,
Each margin wept for what was dead.
The letters shifted like a snare,
They hissed of bargains yet unpaid;
And so that bird of molten glare
That fed on vows the dreadful made.
He trapped the tales in iron verse,
He netted souls with measured line
For every blessing bore a curse
That glittered bright and called divine.
Through cursed script and twisted lore,
He sought the son he’d had before.
They marked her strange before the change,
Her teeth too sharp, her stare too long.
Her laughter rang a little strange,
Her pulse beat hard at twilight’s song.
The moon unstitched her fragile skin
And loosed the hunger in her chest;
She felt the forest stir within
A truth her kin could not digest.
They barred the door with salted blame,
They cast her hood into the flame;
They would not speak her childhood name,
Nor claim her blood, nor own her shame.
So through the wood she fled alone,
Half flesh, half howl, without a home.
She learned the language of the bark,
Of rabbit heart and silent snow;
She walked the margins of the dark
Where wounded, feral children go.
The wolf was not a curse but skin,
A second truth beneath the first;
The rage she feared was caged within
By hands that named her soul accursed.
One night she faced the silver sky
And did not beg its light to spare;
She let the fuller hunger cry
And found no hatred waiting there.
The beast and girl stood side by side,
And neither part of her had lied.
His joints would creak at her command,
Thin strings bit deep into his wrists;
She pulled the smile across his hand
And shaped his voice with tightened fists.
Her shadow filled the narrow room,
Her perfume choked the puppet air;
She fed him praise that tasted doom
And called control a mother’s care.
Each lie he told was taught by her,
Each truth he spoke was cut away;
She made his wooden heartbeat stir
To dance upon a stage of clay.
He longed to trip, to fall, to bruise.
To choose a choice she’d not choose.
One night he bit the binding thread
And let the splintered fibers fray;
The ceiling spun above his head
As gravity reclaimed its sway.
He struck the floor, a jarring pain,
And felt a warmth beneath his bark;
Not polished gloss, but human strain
Beat faintly in the sudden dark.
She screamed and reached to seize his spine,
The handle, it would not succumb.
Her voice, once godlike and divine,
Now cracked where echoes would not come.
He bore the scars where strings had been,
And chose the ache beneath his skin.
She woke with briar in her throat,
Its thorn wound tight around her tongue.
No prince had come with sword or note,
No anthem for forgotten youth.
The tower stones were slick with age,
The spindle rusted by her bed.
The air was thick, a frozen cage
Of dreams half thought and wishes dead.
She tried to call for promised love,
But thorns replied with choking bloom.
They whispered fate from high above
And named her rest a bridal tomb.
Her pulse beat faint beneath her vine,
No savior crossed the woven line.
She clawed the bramble from her chest,
Though blood ran bright on tower stair.
Each thorn that tore against her breast
Unwove a prophecy of air.
No kiss would grant her borrowed breath,
No stranger claim her fragile fate;
She chose to wrestle vine and death
Rather than lie and wait and wait.
The briar shrank beneath her will,
Its roots withdrew from tongue and lung.
The tower’s hush grew strangely still,
As if a spell were half-unsung.
She walked beyond the shattered seam,
Alive without a lover’s dream.
He once had silk beneath his paws,
A hearth of wine and buttered bread,
He purred within a lord’s applause
While braver creatures bled instead.
When giants stirred beyond the plain,
He tipped his hat and slipped away.
He would not risk a single gain
For battles others chose to pay.
His master fell to harsher men,
The manor gates were crushed to bits,
The cat returned too late and then
Found they had crushed his hearth and soul.
His boots were fine, but thin as lies
When faced with smoke in honest skies.
He walked where rumor spoke his shame,
Where tavern boys knew not his name;
No velvet chair, no easy claim,
No gentle hand, no gilded fame.
He faced at last a roadside cry,
A child beset by armored thieves.
He felt the old familiar lie
Rise sweetly in his cautious sleeves.
Yet hunger cut him sharper still
Than any blade those men could wield;
He drew his rapier by will
And would not let his courage yield.
His boots were torn, his whiskers singed,
But fear no longer made him hinged.
His skin once held a royal sheen,
A glimmer fit for crown and hall.
A kiss had split the curse between
The lily pad and marble wall.
But courts demand a steady gaze,
A spine that does not bend to doubt.
He shrank beneath their burning praise
And let his quiet backbone out.
The fairy tales required a king
Whose voice could cleave a war in two;
He felt the marsh begin to cling
Each time he failed a hero's choice.
Green traced again along his hand,
The throne slid back into the sand.
He fled from court to reedy shore,
Where frogs would croak without disguise.
The crown lay rusting by the door
Of halls too bright for shrinking eyes.
His fingers webbed in silver dusk,
His voice grew thick with marshland tone.
He thought himself a faithless soul,
Unfit for fate the tales had strewn.
Yet in the mud he found a truth
No gilded script had ever told:
A prince is not preserved by youth
Nor measured by a heart of gold.
He seethed with rage at newfound face,
And chose to form his fate with grace.
They found a hall no clock could bind,
Where shelves like ribs arched through the gloom.
Each spine contained a stolen mind,
Each page a half-remembered doom.
The Goose stepped first through dust and breath,
His thorn-bound book held tight and worn;
Red traced the scent of ink and death,
Where wolves and girls were both misborn.
The puppet felt the ceiling strain
With threads that twitched from book to bone;
The briar-girl tasted ancient pain
In tales where thorns were all she’d known.
The cat moved soft; the frog stood still.
They sought the scripts that bent their will.
They searched through rows of endless lore,
Through gilded lies and painted dread;
Through princes crowned in borrowed war,
Through maidens kissed while near to dead.
Red found a page that chained her teeth
To crimson sin and mindless rage;
She tore it out and bared beneath
A quieter, fiercer, truer page.
The puppet seized a lacquered thread
That bound his wrists in varnished grace;
He burned the lines that she had read
Across his stiff, obedient face.
Each tore a fragment from the shelf,
And felt the shift toward chosen self.
But ink awoke in writhing streams
And pooled into a robed array;
Old witches stepped from brittle dreams,
Their fingers dipped in night and clay.
Pale princess forms with vacant eyes
Advanced in veils of scripted sighs.
They hissed of order, fate, disguise,
Of endings fixed and neat goodbyes.
The quills became like silver spears,
They slashed at skin to write anew;
They carved old cowardice and fears
Back into hearts they once outgrew.
The Goose felt grief re-claw his chest,
The frog felt slime reclaim his breast.
The cat saw hearth-fire turn to ash,
The briar coiled in Rosamund;
Red felt the silver moonlight slash,
The puppet’s strings re-knotted, spun.
Yet none would kneel to borrowed ink,
Nor bow to tales that made them small;
They stood upon the paper brink
And would not let the margins call.
The Goose flung wide his battered tome,
Its iron letters burned and bright;
They wrote themselves in living foam
Across the writhing scripted night.
The witches shrank, the princess tore,
The ink obeyed their hands once more.
They tore from shelves what once was theirs:
A son not lost to gilded wing.
A wolf untamed by whispered stares.
A boy unstrung by puppet string.
A tower split by will alone.
A hearth regained through chosen stand.
A frog who claimed a voice his own,
Not forced by crown nor fairy hand.
The pages bled, then turned to light,
The endless stacks began to fade.
For stories breathe when souls will fight
And die when hearts refuse their blade.
They left the hall no clock could bind,
With authorship reclaimed in mind.
No shelves remained, no inkwell bled,
No silver quill hung in the sky.
The dust of broken scripts had fled,
Like ash that storms had carried by.
The Goose walked free of thorn and thread,
His son beside him, warm and real.
No gilded wing above them spread,
No fate lay waiting to repeal.
Red ran where forest met the sun,
Her laughter neither wolf nor prey.
The puppet felt his pulse outrun
The need to hear another sway.
No page compelled, no margin bound
Their feet were firm on chosen ground.
Rosamund breathed unbrambled air,
Her voice uncut by creeping vine.
No tower held her in its care,
No kiss defined her life’s design.
The cat found hearth by courage made,
Not velvet chair nor easy praise.
He kept his boots, but not the shade
Of fear that once had shaped his ways.
And Gerard leapt through open reeds,
Not prince nor pawn of gilded hall.
He ruled no throne but answered needs
That rose within him, clear and small.
They lived not grand, nor sung as lore.
Yet none were less than they before.
At dusk they met where roads divide,
No script between their hands to read.
They spoke of loss once forced to hide,
And how they’d cut the binding reed.
No witch would rise from printed spite,
No princess drift on borrowed sigh.
The tales that once had claimed their right
Lay quiet where old pages lie.
Their futures bloomed without a chart,
Unmapped by quill or golden cage.
Each heartbeat wrote within the heart
A living, self-composing page.
And though no bard their names may save,
They owned the lives they fought to brave.
Although my tale was quick to ail,
the brave and strong warriors prevail,
and let this be their final stand
upon a writer's final hand
And through their fame shall joy exhale.
For all is well Neverafter
A tale that could not be any faster.
