What Fate Holds in Store
Disclaimer: I do not own Lord of the Rings, that is the property of Tolkien Enterprises. But I do own the verse below.
Reader beware:
Dead men tell no tales, they say,
Yet fangirls tell only the same.
Ah, true, there are slight variances. But,
With Juliet we cry, "What's in a name?!"
--GreatBigCranberries
When one thinks of a beautiful heroine, Mary Roland was not the first to come to mind. For one thing, her parents never beat her or locked her in her room. In fact they were downright decent people. Her father was an accountant for a small firm and her mother worked part-time cleaning houses. The firm did well, and her mother knew how to economize, so they had never yet been desperately poor.
At school she was neither hated, nor spat at, nor stoned, nor trampled, nor anything else so viscous or violent. No one envied her bewildering beauty, though she once heard someone say they envied her mother's cooking. And though she had but a few friends, they liked her very well.
As to her person, Mary was neither so graceful that wherever she took a step people stopped to stare in awe. Nor yet was she so clumsy that she constituted a danger to herself and others. Her hair, it is true, held many shades, but they were all of the same colour. And her eyes were the same as her father's, and many other people's besides. As far as her astounding beauty went, she was pretty enough to have been asked out once.
The only trait she had on her side was that she did, in fact, love fairy stories and fantasy. Books and films filled with everything but practical information were her delight.
But all in all, she was––as you may have guessed––a girl of rather ordinary make. With so much stacked against her, it's a wonder and a marvel that fate yet had something in store.
It was late one night when it finally came about. Much later at night than perhaps it was altogether good to be awake. Certainly not good when she had, just the day before, stayed up all night finishing an English assignment that had been left to very much the last minute.
But she had returned home this day only to open her favourite fantasy volume and she had been reading it ever since. Though there were many other things that both needed and ought to have been done instead. At just the moment that Sam had been appointed to join his master on that most terrible and dangerous of quests, something strange began to happen.
Mary could have sworn to you (if you had been there, that is) that something on the pages had started moving. Or perhaps it was the pages themselves. All she knew for certain was that one minute she had been reading it, the next she had fallen into the book with a loud crash. And everything went dark.
Once her eyes finally opened, it was to an unfamiliar sight. She found herself resting in a bed that certainly wasn't her own and looking up to a white ceiling.
"What time is it? And where am I?" she said in some confusion.
A gruff voice answered, "It is ten o'clock in the morning," an old familiar line, "And you're in the hospital." Much to her surprise, it was the voice of her father. And if the scowl on his face was any judge he wasn't pleased. "I can't believe you stayed up all night reading. Your mother called the ambulance when she found you passed out on the floor! It's fortunate for you, you were already taking the cure for exhaustion. We were in such a panic, and now I'm late for work. If you think you're getting out of this scot free young lady, you've got another thing coming..." and he went on. Mr. Roland was very good at lecturing.
Mary sighed. She had been having a very pleasant dream. She dreamt that instead of falling on top of the book and onto the floor, she had fallen into the story and right into the Last Homely House. It was all very enjoyable. That is, until all the Elves transformed into Orcs and tried to slay her.
Ah well, at least the orderly coming to check on her was cute.
Well, what did you expect to happen? I have to say, that even though I wrote it, I'm not entirely satisfied with what this story seems to be implying. It almost sounds like I think fantasy novels are bad! Know that that isn't what I meant. I think good fantasy is capable of pointing out all the wonder that already exists, which we often fail to notice.
But I do believe there's a warning in there somewhere.