A/N: Sorry about the short first chapter length, I promise the following chapters will be longer. Hope you enjoy the story, and feel free to leave a review! As always, I do not own Once Upon a Time.
-Prologue-
The forests around the town of Storybrooke, Maine had always had somewhat of a mysterious air to them. It was never a painfully obvious one, however; but a subtle and fleeting one that made itself known in the minds of its visitors at the most unexpected times. It had been that way for as long anybody could remember.
People driving through its long, winding roads were not a particularly uncommon event, although to them, this was just another Maine forest that one was forced to go through in order to get to somewhere else. Those people would drive in and drive out, too wrapped up in their own noise and hurry to notice anything unusual at all.
But once in a great while, the rare, imaginative soul would pass through the forest in the dead of night, pause for a moment, and allow their mind to wander. To wonder if maybe, just maybe, there was more to this forest than meets the eye. But the instinct that something was off here was always dismissed. It was just an ordinary forest, they convinced themselves. Nothing to see here.
Their set ideas of what was real and what was fantasy were so strong that, should those expectations be tested, they tended to ignore what was right in front of them and refuse to do anything about it for fear of being called insane. Such was the mystery of Storybrooke, Maine. Because of the lack of belief in this land without magic, the evil queen's curse easily rendered the town undetectable to outsiders.
So, for over almost eighteen years, nobody came in, nobody left, nobody aged, and nothing changed. The residents of the other world known as the Enchanted Forest remained in their prison of time, robbed of their happy endings and forced to live as a mere shadow of their true selves. They were all puppets, blindly following the Evil Queen's orders without so much as a complaint as they relived the same day over and over. They were walking through a haze and didn't even know it. And nobody noticed anything wrong.
But that was all about to change very soon. A twist of fate had caused their only hope to return to Storybrooke, several years before she was prophesied to. The savior had found them earlier than even the powerful Dark One had predicted. The Final Battle between good and evil had begun at last.
But she didn't even know it.