The Tales of Lena LaMarelle

Disclaimer: This section will follow the subplot of one character, Lena LaMarelle, through the entirety of my middle grade series, The Ever Afters. However, to be able to speak about this subplot through the course of the whole series, this post contains spoilers for all four books of the Ever Afters: Of Giants and Ice, Of Witches and Wind, Of Sorcery and Snow, and Of Enemies and Endings. As I mentioned in the introduction, I’m using examples from my own novels, because I own the copyrights to those books. I also know them really well, so it’s easier for me to use them to demonstrate the tools.

If you’re already familiar with the series, you’ll notice that I’ve omitted some parts—even some good parts. This is for length. If you aren’t familiar with the series, don’t worry. In this section, I’m including all the details that you need to know to understand the tools that follow.

Of course, if you are the type of person who hates spoilers, and you would like to pause this Season so that you can read all four books, go ahead. This material isn’t going anywhere.

1. 

Once upon a time, a clever girl named Lena LaMarelle attended an afterschool program called Ever After School, and this was much cooler than it might sound.

Ever After School trained young fairy tale Characters, and sooner or later, each kid who attended would find themselves in a Tale of their own.  Most kids were excited to find out what Tale they’ll get. None of them knew which Tale exactly that they would get, and it was a point of some concern, at least for the kids in Lena’s sixth-grade class. Everyone wanted to get a cool one like Jack & the Beanstalk, and everyone was secretly concerned that they would get a not-so-cool one like The Town Musicians of Bremen.

There was some danger too. With every good Tale, there were also villains. For example, the Snow Queen had waged war on Ever After School and the Canon, the group of adult fairy tale Characters who ran it. The Snow Queen had gathered terrifying villains to her cause, including her general, Genevieve Searcaster. The adults whispered that General Searcaster had plucked out her own eye, sacrificing it to gain magic and become the only known sorcerer-giantess. 

These stories always made Lena shudder, but as the Director, the woman who ran Ever After School and the Canon, often reminded the students: that had been years ago. The Snow Queen was in prison, her general in hiding, and the Director herself had instituted many rules to keep the young students safe on their Tales.  

So, the students trained, and they dreamed about the Tales they would someday get—all except for Lena.

Lena had a different dream: she wanted to be a magic inventor when she grew up, just like her famous ancestor Madame Benne. Centuries before Lena was born, Madame Benne had created classic magical items, such as the magic harp and the Table of Plenty. She wrote the instructions for all these inventions (and many more) in her spellbook. Sadly, that spellbook had been lost for centuries.

So, instead, Lena read other books, as many as possible, and shadowed the adults, asking as many questions as possible. She tried to learn as much as she can from as many sources as she can. With her photographic memory, she could recite anything she has read, even dragon-slaying tips.

And she followed the rules. After all, like the Director often said, rules keep people safe. (Also, Lena hated like to be in trouble.)

One day, the Ever After School held a fair, and Lena’s family entrusted her with a mission and enough money to fulfill it: to buy a Table of Plenty, a magical item which produces as many meals as you ask it to. Lena was young, yes, but she was also responsible and the most knowledgeable among them about magical items. 

While she was shopping, a book vendor let it slip that one of his wares may be Madame Benne’s spellbook, containing knowledge missing for centuries. Lena bought the book, using money that her family had set aside to buy the Table of Plenty. Her older sister found out and reminded Lena that the Table of Plenty was supposed to help the family with their grocery bill. Lena regretted her action, especially when she couldn’t find the vendor to return the book.

It’s hard to blame Lena. Her dream appeared, as close as it had ever been, and she took action to reach it. She’d thought: With the spellbook, I can make a Table of Plenty, just like my ancestor.  

But believing that she has been swindled and ashamed of herself for spending her family’s money, Lena accidentally burned the book, and the ashes were buried.

This sounds bad, but of course, this story takes place at Ever After School. This situation creates the perfect conditions for a fairy tale.

From the buried ashes grew a Beanstalk, and that day, the Director announced that Lena had gotten her Tale: “Jack & the Beanstalk.” This news cheered up Lena considerably. Though she was no closer to her dream of becoming a magic inventor, getting a really cool Tale wasn’t half bad. Per the school’s rules, Lena chose two classmates to accompany her, and with them, she climbed the beanstalk to finish her Tale.  

There, they encountered the giantess whose story made Lena shudder: General Searcaster, the right hand woman of the Snow Queen. Luckily, General Searcaster was not the giant in Lena’s Tale. Instead, the giant in Lena’s Tale was the general’s son, who was considerably less intelligent and way less dangerous. 

After a few other adventures, Lena and her friends outwitted the general’s son and escaped successfully down the beanstalk. They also brought back a talking magic harp named Melodie. Moreover, Melodie revealed that she wasn’t invented by Madame Benne—she was Madame Benne’s assistant. In other words, the harp held even more knowledge than Madame Benne’s spellbook.

Melodie explains that the book Lena had accidentally burned had belonged to Lena’s ancestor, much to everyone’s dismay, but the information inside the book wasn’t lost thanks to Lena’s photographic memory. Lena simply recreates a copy, with the harp’s help. 

Even better, Lena and the Director came to an agreement. The Director gave Lena permission to set up a station in the Ever After School workshop with as many resources as she needed for her inventing. In exchange these resources, the Director would ask Lena for a few favors from time to time, such as making certain magical items for the rest of the community. Lena quickly took the opportunity offered to her. After all, this way, Lena could become the magic inventor she always wanted to be.

Sure, she had to follow a few extra rules from the Director around her inventions, but as we mentioned, Lena and the Director both liked rules. Rules keep people safe.

With a little practice, Lena could soon make anything her ancestor could make—including the Table of Plenty that her family needed. Within a year, Lena turned her dreams into reality, making new magic inventions the world had never seen.

But that is only the beginning of Lena’s journey. Because after you make your dream real, you quickly reckon with what you have brought into the world.

2. 

2a.

In seventh grade, with Melodie’s help, Lena stood apart from her classmates yet again. Most of them were still waiting for and training for their Tale. She had begun to live her dream. “Living the dream” doesn’t mean some luxurious state. It means taking a dream that lived like a spark inside you and bringing it into your everyday life, giving the dream weight and texture, accepting its rewards and its problems together.

For Lena, this looked like spending most of her free time in her workshop. The Director gave Lena magical materials, and Lena created new magical items with them.

Several things were wonderful about this:

• With Madame Benne’s assistant, Lena was picking up where her ancestress left off, exactly as she always wanted to do.

• Lena’s inventions were helping her friends and her classmates during their adventures.

• She was making magical items people have never seen before.

• She had gained enough notoriety that people outside her community knew of her. Even famous fairy tale figures, like the West Wind, wanted to meet Lena.

Several things were not-so-wonderful about this:

• With that much notoriety, not-so-nice magical important people also learned about Lena, such as General Genevieve Searcaster, the sorceress-giant, the same villain Lena encountered up the beanstalk.

• Like all passions, inventing takes time—Lena was spending more time in her workshop than weapons training with her two closest friends. As a result, she couldn’t fight as well as the other kids in her grade.

• Even worse, she started to feel a little bit like the odd one out of her group of friends, because as the only one among the who couldn’t defend herself, she was more of a liability than a help.

For example, when she got poisoned by the Snow Queen, her friends had to go out in search of a cure, and they also had leave her behind. While they were gone, Lena did everything she can to support them remotely, keeping in touch with them on her mini magic mirror (one of her inventions). She ran around her workshop and the library in order to provide her friends with as much information as she possibly could.

She worked so hard to be useful that she hastened the effects of the poison, endangering her life. Just in time, her friends returned with the cure, but trying to keep up with them from afar, she again became a liability. Afterwards, Lena decided to find a way to make sure she would never be left behind again.

2b. 

In eighth grade, Lena’s planning and hard work began to pay off. Lena and her friends teamed up for a rescue mission. Unfortunately, the Director had expressly forbidden this particular mission, all the way to the Arctic Circle, where the Snow Queen, freshly escaped from prison, and General Searcaster, freshly reunited with her queen, had imprisoned thousands of kidnapped children. Though Lena hesitates, her friends persuaded her to break the rules. Besides, she didn’t want to be left behind again.

This time, Lena had invented something new, something that made up for the fact that she wasn’t the best fighter: a legion of baseball bats. The Bats were designed to listen to her voice commands and fly on their own, and they could defend her and others when enemies attack. In the middle of their adventures, when a pack of big, bad wolves attacked her and her friends, this invention—nicknamed “The Bats of Destruction”—performed marvelously. When the bats drove off the wolves, Lena was extremely pleased: not only had her dream come true—her inventions were truly helping her and her friends, even during a fight.

They traveled on, reached the enemies’ stronghold, and snuck inside. As soon as they found the kids they’ve come to rescue, they were discovered by none other than the sorceress-giantess herself: General Searcaster. When Lena tried to use the Bats of Destruction to defend them again, her invention backfired on her for the first time. General Searcaster, a powerful sorceress herself, overpowered the spell inside the invention, and the Bats of Destruction followed Searcaster’s instructions instead of Lena’s. Then Searcaster used Lena’s weapons to capture Lena and her friends.

All was not lost. Lena and her friends had other magical items and plenty of courage, and they use these to break free. Searcaster tried to use Lena’s Bats of Destruction to recapture them, but then, getting tangled in another spell, the Bats accidentally exploded, creating heavy casualties on Searcaster’s side.

This was just the distraction they needed. Lena and her friends managed to return to safety at Ever After School, but Lena was shaken. In the past, she had only concerned herself with a few invention-related questions: does the invention work or not? If not, why not? And how can it be fixed? With the Bats of Destruction, her invention always worked, every single time. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that: sometimes it worked for Lena, and sometimes it worked in the hands of her enemies. Worse than that, those bats had turned out to be much more destructive than Lena ever intended. 

For the first time, Lena’s main question for her inventions wasn’t: How can I turn the idea into reality?

It had become: Is this an idea I want to bring into reality?

Then war broke out between Ever After School (and its allies) and the Snow Queen, General Searcaster, and all their allies.

All of a sudden, Lena didn’t have to answer those uncomfortable questions.  

Instead, she relied on the Director, the person who has been making rules for decades—since the last war with the Snow Queen.

After all, the Director reminded them, rules keep people safe.

And Lena agreed.

2c. 

At the beginning of the war, Lena did what she is told. She followed the rules.

Specifically, she let the Director tell her what to invent. At one level, she was just a fourteen-year-old in the middle of a scary war, feeling reassured by the authority of her community’s most important grown-up. At another level, she was afraid to trust herself again. She knew she’d made a dangerous mistake with the Bats—when Lena broke the Director’s rules, going on a forbidden adventure, her inventions began to go wrong.

First, the Director’s demands just kept Lena busy in the workshop. Lena mass-produced items everyone will need to survive the battles ahead. These were small items, invented long ago, and due to the quantity, they were physically taxing but didn’t challenge Lena at all. She could easily make regular magical equipment. 

Then the Director asked for more. Specifically, the Director asked Lena for improved Bats of Destruction—the same as the previous model, but instead of just hitting their opponents, they would explode.  

Lena didn’t say no outright, but Lena didn’t want to make them. She hesitated instead of answering, and she delayed making them as long as she could.

Then, in the middle of a Canon meeting, the Director chastened Lena for not making the new Bats faster, especially while there was a war on and people were in danger. Cratering, Lena tried hard not to cry, torn between her reluctance to make more Bats and her desire to follow her rules that keep people safe.

After the meeting, Lena’s friend checked on her. Lena finally admitted why she has been purposely stalling: after seeing how much destruction was caused by the bats that exploded accidentally, she doesn’t want to bring such an invention into the world. Since her friend had much less fondness for rules, she told Lena, “You just have to give her [as in, the Director] something, not necessarily what she wants.”

So, this was exactly what Lena does. She followed the rules, but she bent them—just slightly. She modified the Bats of Destruction: they didn’t explode, but instead of using bats, she enchatd sharper weapons—axes, swords, etc. As a safety precaution, she added some human technology: voice-recognition software—this way, only pre-selected people can use these weapons. By taking such care, Lena did her best to satisfy the Director and to make sure that her inventions protect her loved ones instead of hurt them.

But then the Snow Queen, General Searcaster, and their allies invaded Ever After School, one of the few safe places left for Lena and her friend. In that battle, Lena puts her Axes and Swords of Destruction to the test. She assumed that the voice recognition software would be enough to keep the weapons from being taken out of her control.  

But Lena miscalculated. General Searcaster laughed at her, and then touching her throat with a spell, the giantess spoke with Lena’s voice and ordered the Axes and Swords of Destruction to do her own bidding instead. Lena got caught in the crossfire of her own weapons, which were indeed very sharp, and she was gravely injured during the battle: she lost both hands. Though the invading force was forced to retreat, Lena’s life was at risk from blood loss.  

This sounds bad, of course, but this story took place at Ever After School. This situation creates the perfect conditions for a fairytale. Specifically, the Tale of “The Handless Maiden.” In that Tale, the handless maiden regrows her hands, and so it was for Lena. To save Lena, a member of the Canon passed on her membership to Lena. The magic and immortality attached to that membership instantly healed Lena, including regrowing new hands.

New hands or not, you don’t come back from such an experience the same as you were before. You have only two choices: let the memory feed your fear, or let it give you more clarity on where your courage is needed.

3.

While Lena was recovering, her best friend came to visit, and together they mourned what had happened to her. Though she’d gained new hands, they were different from the ones she lost. For one, they were golden. For another, they gave Lena the power of a sorceress—an incredibly powerful sorceress-inventor, much like General Searcaster was an incredibly powerful sorceress giant.

But more importantly, Lena’s golden hands were a powerful reminder of what can happen when Lena allowed other people sway her from doing what she felt was right.

The next time she was called to a Canon meeting, she wasn’t a guest; she was now a member. Again, the Director ordered Lena to make more Axes and Swords of Destruction. Again, she tried her old tricks of intimidating Lena. Uncomfortable, Lena still held her ground; she replied that she won’t make any more weapons—she would make only magic shields.

The Director continued to press, reminding Lena how unnumbered they are, reminding them all of the rules that keep people safe. Then the Director threatened her: “You’ll do this, even if we have to forcibly remove you to your workshop and keep you there until you finish.”

So, Lena raised her golden hands, filling the air with sparks and magic. Then she said, “I have a new rule. I won’t make anything I would hate my enemies to use against us. I’ll make the shields. If you don’t like it, lock me in my workshop. Let’s see how long I stay there.”

And that was how Lena went from following the rules to making the rules. After all, rules keep people safe, and Lena knew her inventions better than anyone else, the damage they can do and the lives they can save.

Lena understood by then that her power did not come from her inventions. Her power didn’t even come from her hands. Her power came from her ability to make her dreams real—in exactly the way she dreamed them.

On the last battlefield, deep in the Arctic Circle, she again faced off with General Searcaster, and the show down went very differently. The giant sorceress taunted her, by asking her, “What have you brought for me to play with today?”

Lena stepped up, her golden hands empty, and her concerned best friend stopped her, reminding Lena that she doesn’t even have a weapon.

“I am the weapon,” Lena replied. Then she proceeded to combine her new sorceress powers with the spells from the flying bats and swords, and she launched enormous slabs of ice at General Searcaster.

Because the magic came from Lena, not in an external invention, General Searcaster couldn’t influence the spells. So, Lena defeated her. Then Lena moved on to her next task, which was saving her best friend.

This is Lena in her true power. She is not her inventions. She is not her magic hands. She is the person who decides how to use them, in exactly the way that feels right to her.

Note: for everyone who is still concerned about Lena and her hands after the series ends, check out this post.