How had she never thought of it?

Pickwick, clinging to a nearby tree branch, watched Shew roll the pendant. The front and back engravings, powered by the speed of rolling on the axis, merged and formed one coherent sentence.

The front:

And the back:

It was clear as night and day.  Right there in front of her. They were like a jigsaw puzzle. All she needed was to connect them together.

Even Pickwick raised an eyebrow, reading the message Loki had been trying to send Shew all along.

Shew read the words and started crying hysterically. She was shivering hard with the pendant still in the palm of her hand. How could that be, she thought. She didn’t’ need to feel this right now after she’d killed Loki.

But before she could deal with the conflicting emotion of what she’d read on the pendant, Fable shouted from inside…

“Oh. My. God.” Fable shrieked. “I freakin’ know Charmwill’s true name!” she sounded strangely confused, though.

Axel dashed back through the door, and Shew followed, tears sticking to her eyes.

Pickwick followed them both, wondering how they’d feel about the discovery. He knew that knowing Charmwill’s True Name was going to be a shock. It was true that it was going to help them resurrect him, but it will raise more questions about the Dreamworld and what really happened to fairy tales.

“How could that be?” Fable said, pointing at the rearranged letters of Charmwill Glimmer.

Bitsy jumped on the refrigerator again, wanting to rearrange Charmwill’s name. He thought the name he was reading was so wrong. It just couldn’t be.

Pickwick  picked up Bitsy with his beak and threw him away, plastering on the foggy window, giving time to Shew and Axel to read Charmwill’s name.

“Is this an anagram for his name?” Axel’s face knotted, unable to comprehend.

“But that makes no sense?” Shew said, still hanging onto Loki’s necklace. “Charmwill Glimmer, Loki’s Guardian, is actually…” she couldn’t pronounce the discovery.

“Fable?” Axel pulled her by the shoulder. “Are you sure? Did you maybe add a or subtract an alphabet?”

“No, I didn’t,” Fable pulled his hands away. “The same way Carmilla was an anagram for Mircalla, Charmwill Glimmer is an anagram for Wilhelm Carl Grimm.”

End of Cinderella Dressed in Ashes

Book #2 in the Grimm Diaries

Next book will be

Blood, Milk, and Chocolate

Book #2 in the Grimm Diaries

From the Queen of Sorrow’s point of view.

Afterword

Since the beginning of this series, the awesome readers and fans helped me break tons of rules, starting from the idea of prequels and ending with a series that could be read through many parrarel books and on my many different levels of perception.

To celebrate this unusual style, Cinderella Dressed in Ashes doesn’t only end with a twist, but one that you will have to solve. Loki’s message should be easy to figure out. If you figure it out, send the answer to the following email:

jawigi@live.com

 All ‘right’ answers will be chosen to enter endless giveaways from necklaces and artwork made by other fans for the series, free paperback editions, and free advance copies for the coming books in the series.

Psst. If you know the answer, don’t tell anyoneJ

List of the Grimm Diaries Prequels available so far:

The Grimm Diaries Prequels 1- 6

Including the following Prequels:

1 Snow White Blood Red

narrated by Snow White Queen

2 Cinder to Cinder & Ashes to Ashes

narrated by Alice Grimm

3 Beauty Never Dies

narrated by Peter Pan

4 Ladle Rotten Rat Hut

narrated by Little Red Riding Hood

5 Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

as told by the Devil

6 Blood Apples

narrated by Prince Charming

The Grimm Diaries Prequels 7- 10

7 Once Beauty Twice Beast

as told by Beauty

8 Moon & Madly

as told by Moongirl

9 Rumpelstein

as told by Rumpelstiltskin

10 Jawigi

as told by Sandman Grimm

The Grimm Diaries Prequels 11- 14

11) Children of Hamlin

narrated by the Devil

12) Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale

by Jack Madly

13) Ember in the Wind

by the Little Match Girl

14) Jar of Hearts

by the Queen of Sorrow

The following quotes might be too many, but if you come back to them after you finish reading the book, I believe you will appreciate them even more.

‘Evil is a point of view.’

~Anne Rice

‘Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.’

~Hans Christian Andersen

“Love is like death, it must come to us all…but never can it be cheated, and never will it be forgotten.”

~Jacob Grimm

“…for obvious reasons, I have changed the names of the people and places concerned…”

~Bram Stoker

in his  preface to the 1901 Icelandic edition of Dracula.