WAIT A SENTENCE! THIS HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH. Mom. Dad. I need to know. What is that lava? Why is the world in pieces? What is Shadow High?
AAAH!
Can you please—
AAAH!
…stop flipping out long enough—
AAAAH!
…to explain it to me?
Whew. Ugh. Bleh. Okay. You’re right, Brooke. Sorry. It’s time. This history is so dangerous, Narrators usually learn about it only after they’ve graduated from Narrator High.
But you should know now, Brooke, even though it might already be too late to stop what’s happening. Once upon a time, long, long ago, in the land of Readers, the First Author made up the very first story. She used a chisel to inscribe the story in stone. It was such a good story that people kept reading it and retelling it. And that awakened a kind of magic.
The best kind of magic! The characters in that story came to life! Not in the Readers’ World, but across the Fourth Wall in the World of Stories. And as the centuries marched on, whenever the Readers told and retold stories, their characters came to life. Soon the World of Stories was full of characters—and their children, and their children’s children.
Each character lived in the land devoted to his or her kind of story. There was a land of adventure stories—pirates and ninjas and explorers traveling through new places. There was a land of science-fiction stories—rocket ships and outer space and adventures with aliens!
There was a land of mythological stories—gods and goddesses meddling with human matters, ancient creatures crawling out of deep pits. There were lands of holiday stories, romance stories, superhero stories, epic fantasy stories, mystery stories, Wonderland stories—
And… I guess there were lands of monster stories and fairytale stories?
That’s right. They were all together in one big, beautiful World of Stories. And it was the Narrators’ job to keep telling the stories of the characters in this world. Some Narrators believed the characters should keep living out the same stories the Readers first wrote down, and some Narrators believed characters should be free to live their lives however they chose. I’m one of the former; your father is one of the latter.
But there was a third kind of Narrator. She called herself Ms. Direction. She believed that the Narrators should have more power, that they should decide what happened in the stories. So she founded a school to teach other Narrators her way. They learned how to not just narrate what characters were doing but to also force the characters to do what the Narrators wanted them to do.
That’s right, Brooke. To control the stories, these Narrators created a magic that unmade the stories, breaking them down to bits, believing that they could then take the pieces and build new stories. Ms. Direction was powerful, but even she couldn’t control what she had begun. The Unmaking magic erupted like lava from a volcano. First it unmade her school, and then it began to flow all over the World of Stories, unmaking everything it touched.
In order to stop the flow of the Unmaking lava, the rest of the Narrators had to break all the rules. First they sought out and retrieved the chisel that the First Author had used to write the First Story. It was an object of great power. Then one brave Narrator volunteered to leave the Land of Narrators and journey into the World of Stories to Shadow High. He used all the power of the Narrators and the characters to enchant the chisel with a great magic. When he hammered the chisel into Shadow High, the spell broke the world. The different lands cracked and moved away from one another, becoming continents and islands. Now the Unmaking that was flowing from the volcano at Shadow High could fall harmlessly into the trenches of the Margins, the spaces between the lands.
The World of Stories would be safe as long as it stayed broken and the lands separate from one another. That Narrator sacrificed his own life to hammer that chisel into Shadow High’s island, keeping it still and away from the other lands at the center of the World of Stories.
Narrators tried to erase all references to Shadow High from books. As the years passed, most characters didn’t know that the World of Stories had ever been unified. They assumed the stories about other lands were just made-up tales. But when the characters from Ever After High and Monster High began to reach out to one another, the lands started to shift, to feel that pull to reconnect.
That caused the tremors.
Exactly. And when the Evil Queen found the Lost Library and got very near Shadow High, a fail-safe in the ancient spell caused the World of Stories to break again, this time into even smaller pieces. And so the Margins reached right up to the edge of Ever After High.
The Evil Queen found an ancient book that the Narrators couldn’t erase. It mentioned a powerful “key” holding Shadow High away from other lands, and she used her magic to pull it loose. Now that Shadow High is free from the spell of the chisel, it is indeed like a magnet, pulling all the lands together again.
The Margins are narrowing. The Unmaking is rising in the trenches between the lands. Soon it will flow over all the lands as it did over the Lost Library. If we can’t stop it, the entire World of Stories will be unmade.
Wait, Dad, do you mean that nowhere is safe? But what about over the Fourth Wall?
In the Readers’ World? Characters cannot live there. No one from the World of Stories could make that journey.
There’s still hope! I may not have graduated yet from Narrator High, but I know a lot of stories, and I can see how this one goes. It’s an adventure story, with both mystery and magic. The group of characters—two monsters, two daughters of fairytales, one child of Wonderland, plus an evil villain—must travel to the mysterious and dangerous Shadow High and replace the chisel. Once the chisel is back, the lands will stop coming together and the Unmaking lava will stay safe down in the trenches between lands. I’d better tell the others.
Well, we already have. At least, I’m pretty certain Madeline Hatter has been eavesdropping on this entire conversation.
Yessiree, Bob’s your uncle! Whew! There was a lot of information in this chapter.
Hi, Maddie! Yeah, it was pretty information-heavy. Narrators call it exposition.
Well, I call it a head-scratcher. World of Stories? First chisel? Ms. Direction? There’s just too much going on! But I think I got the basics: Find Shadow High. Put back the chisel. Save the world. Right?
You got it, Maddie.
Okay, I’ll tell Raven and Apple and everyone what you said. Though I may add a few jokes. Jokes make everything better. Even news about how the entire world is going to end unless we hurry over foggy, mysterious bridges to an evil island and find some kind of a hole? To put a chisel in? And somehow that will fix everything?
I like knock-knock jokes best.
Hey, Brooke? Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting Narrator.
Interrupting Narrator wh—
AAAH EVERYBODY IS PANICKING HURRY WITH CHISELS BLAAAAAAAGHHH!!!
Good one, Maddie.
Thanks, Brooke!