"Terror From the Briar: The Reign of Melona Pearsly. Volume 1?" Melona hefted the book in her hands. It felt dense, even for is size, as though there were somehow more pages in the tome than should have been possible. She flipped to the back cover, then looked inside both covers, trying to find the author's name or some information about the book or something that could have given her some information about what was going on. Nothing. She paged through the first few pages; there was what appeared to be a table of contents, but it was written in a script that she'd never seen before. A cursory glance at the main text of the book revealed more of the same. Save for the occasional diagram, she couldn't begin to understand what the book was about. She was about to dismiss the whole thing as one of the more bizarre student's attempt at a prank, when she flipped back to the beginning of the book and stopped. The author's foreword, unlike everything else she'd seen thus far, was in plain English. She skimmed through the initial couple of opening paragraphs, which mostly were stock-standard self-congratulatory nonsense about the value of history, then slowed down as she got to the more substantive material.
"To say that the birth of Melona Pearsly was the beginning of a curse that doomed the world would be only the slightest of overstatements. To say that her enrollment at the Briar Academy was the death knell for an era would be entirely accurate. To say that her pursuit of power and pleasure alike turned her into one of history's greatest monsters would be a conservative judgment indeed. To study Melona Pearsly is to look into the heart of evil at its most hedonistic, its most powerful, and its most terrifying."
Melona almost laughed. There wasn't a single word in that paragraph that made sense. The closest thing to accurate material that the author had wrote was that her birth did feel like a curse sometimes, but one that only affected her. She kept reading.
"But to confront the evil that lurks in the human heart is not the sole challenge of a scholar seeking to discuss the life of this plague in human form. From her beginnings as an unremarkable student, wallowing in self-pity--" Melona paused for a moment to process the sentence and to try and not get offended "--to her heights of power as the creature that laid waste to nation after nation, to her fall following the sacrifice of the Great Heroes, the tale of Melona Pearsly's life is shrouded in mystery as much as it is in terror. Following the scouring of the Pearsly estate and the destruction of the Briar Academy in the year--"
Melona rolled her eyes and skipped ahead. This was obviously nonsense. The only question was, who would waste so much time and paper to make up a prank that wasn't even effective or funny? Maybe there'd be an author's name at the end of the forward that she could try and trace.
"--and so, given the dire nature that Melona Pearsly poses to the fabric of reality itself, I have deemed it necessary to write these tomes in the Deific Cipher. No evidence exists to suggest that Melona, or her followers, had ever broken this code, and, should the gods be kind and just, I believe that this script will be taugh in a world that has at last recovered from her reign."
There was a strange squiggle at the end of the paragraph, which Melona took to represent the author's name. She flipped the page over to the dedication on the next page and, against her better judgment, gasped.
The dedication had been completely blotted out. In its place, in what appeared to be blood-red lipstick, was scrawled a message.
"ALL FOR YOU, MEL. DON'T SCREW UP THIS TIME. YOU KNOW WHERE TO START. LOVE YA, BABE."
Instead of a signature, there was a kiss mark in the same color of lipstick left on the page.
Melona's heart fluttered. This was incredible, but--but it had to be fake, right? Aside from the fact that Melona knew she would never be evil enough to merit a multi-volume work about her "reign of terror," there was also the fact that even if she was so cruel, she was about as threatening as a wet kitten.
Then again...
"It's just a puzzle," she told herself. "It doesn't mean anything. Not yet anyway. Just a fun way to pass the time."
She decided to--
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