Prologue

The asteroid,too small for the NASA watchers to even bother with, mostly burned up as it came through the Earth's atmosphere. The heat turned the little rock a bright green, noticed only by Agatha Dunrobin as she sat on her back porch enjoying the evening air.

The old lady watched as the glowing speck in the sky plummeted, landing in her precious flowers. Alarmed for her prize-winning roses, Agatha clutched the handle of her cane with a gnarled, arthritic hand and thumped down the steps. As she hobbled toward her garden, she couldn't see the object at first, the foliage lush this time of year. She had to weave past thorny branches before she spotted a pulsing green glow. How odd. She'd always thought meteors glowed red like burning coals.

Agatha crouched, her joints protesting, but she ignored them to peer at the rock partially embedded in soil. A very round rock, smooth and glassy in appearance. The light from it emitted no heat when she waved her hand over it.

"How strange," she murmured aloud. It definitely didn't behave like a rock, even one from space.

Rather than grab it with her bare hand, she hobbled back to her basket of gardening supplies on the porch and snared her thick gloves before returning to pluck the object from the ground.

The stone, which felt heavier than expected and emitted no actual heat, continued to glow. Intrigued, she carried it inside for a better look. The bright glare of her kitchen lights didn't reveal any special details but rather emphasized its smooth, polished surface. It reminded her of jade, the green paler than an emerald but, unlike jade, more translucent. Putting on her bifocals, which she used for doing the daily crossword, she peered closer and spotted a tiny bright speck in the center.

How fascinating. Albert would have been over the moon if he'd found it.

Her late husband used to love hunting for geodes, and it brought a pang to think of how excited he would have been to discover this mystery in their garden. Thinking of him reminded her of his books. She'd not had the heart to get rid of them after his death, and they remained in the study, big dusty tomes about rocks that he used to read while they sat together in the evening.

The study—the place he used to grade papers from his students—had slowly become a hobby room, as knitting supplies now filled the desk he used to work at. The big club chair by the window, where Agatha sat and sometimes read, had a small side table holding her current book. A reproduction of Children's and Household Tales, written by the Brothers Grimm and first published in 1812. A dark tome of fairytales that hadn't been sanitized by modern times. It sat atop a modern version of adaptations. Agatha had been reading them both, studying their differences.

Agatha set the rock atop the book of fairytales while she perused the titles on the spines in the bookcase. Surely one of them would be able to name what she'd found.

A hum from behind lifted the hair on her nape, and she almost fell as she whirled quickly to see what caused it.

A blink of her eyes didn't change the fact that the rock she'd set down had flattened as if suddenly liquid, spreading across the cover of the book.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed. Without thinking, she reached to brush it away. An electrical shock stung her flesh. She snatched her hand away to hug it to her chest.

The green goo evaporated without staining the cover but left behind a tiny bright pebble, which sank into the book.

Then there was nothing. No glow. No rock. Not even a hole through the cover. Had she imagined it?

Agatha hesitated before grabbing the fairytale tome. A shiver went through her as she cracked it open to see if there'd been any damage. She found the grape-sized rock nestled in the heart of the book, sparkling faintly. As she watched, it literally sucked the words from the page, the texting sliding into the stone leaving the paper blank, which in turn increased the twinkling.

What kind of sorcery was this?

With a gasp, Agatha dropped the book back on the table, atop the brighter cover of the newer version. The jolt didn't stop the growth of light. It became big enough that the cover began to lift, revealing a fist-sized sphere of brilliance.

As fear replaced wonder, Agatha backed away, but it was already too late.

When the glowing ball exploded, the shockwave knocked her down. It took a moment to recover her wits and rise, only to realize something about her had changed.

She later discovered it wasn't just her. The entire world had been affected.

Fairytales began coming to life, cursing people to live out many of those terrible tales, made especially bad because these stories, written for a different time, clashed with the modern world. Eventually, it became known as the Grimm Effect and with it, a new era began, one of good and evil, magic and mayhem, happily ever afters, and tragedy.