Prologue
I opened a small box, the last one of my birthday gifts. Inside was a small platinum bracelet with tiny gemstones. I took it out to examine it in the light. The sun made the ruby and sapphire stones sparkle brightly, red and blue being the colors of the royal crest. I slipped it onto my left wrist and held it out to admire its dainty elegance. Suddenly, the bracelet shrinked to the exact size of my wrist and I heard a “clack” as if it were locked in place. I felt a tiny wave of energy pass through my body.
“Ahahaha! You’re cursed! Cursed!” cackled a man. He walked forward from the crowd of guests. He was very, very old and his brown robes were very, very tattered.
“You can’t do that,” I replied imperiously, trying to pull the bracelet off to no avail.
“Don’t bother with that. It’s a cursed bracelet. You can’t take it off,” the crazy-looking old man explained gleefully.
“So I’m cursed with a bracelet I can’t remove?”
“Oh, no, that’s not the curse itself. It’s just that the bracelet IS cursed itself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ok, then what IS the curse?”
“I’m not really sure. It’s different every time,” he shrugged. “I’ll have to consult my grimoire.” He pulled out a black leather book and riffled through some pages.
“Well?”
“Hang on. I’m actually kind of new at this evil wizard thing. It says here… yes, that’s it. A most foul and evil curse indeed! It will take away two things that you hold most dear. The first one is your shoes,” he nodded towards my bare feet.
“No!” I cried. “Not my shoes! A girl’s got to have a nice pair of shoes.”
“Not just those shoes, but you are cursed to not be able to wear any shoes,” he laughed evilly.
I started crying. No shoes! What was I going to do? And my poor cobbler would be out of work, too.
“Now then, let’s have it. What’s the other thing?” I sniffled.
“It’s… well, I’m a little embarassed to say,” he looked down sheepishly.
I sighed impatiently.
“I may have messed up a little teensy part of the curse. I’m still learning, you know,” he stammered.
“I don’t CARE!” I yelled. “What did you do to me?”
“You lost your… that is… you lost your prmmmhmph,” he mumbled.
“I lost my what?”
“Your pronouns,” he said in a small voice.
“No!” I cried. “You can’t do that.”
“And if you don’t break the curse in three days – I mean months, why do I always get that line wrong. If you don’t break the curse in three months, it will last forever,” he proclaimed. And then he grabbed a pouch from around his waist and emptied dust onto the ground. The dust swirled in a cloud around him and he snapped his fingers. A few seconds later the cloud blew away and he had vanished.
I ran over to my best friend Lila. “He couldn’t have taken my pronouns away. Try to talk about me in the third person.”
“The princess was cursed on he-” Lila started coughing. “On he-ACK.”
So that was the strange energy current I had felt. I had lost my gender. And my shoes (all shoes, really). And I had three months to break the curse.