10th Anniversary Snow White

Snow White’s 10th anniversary one-shot goes back to Sela’s book and what happened to all those stories when she destroyed it. The characters didn’t just disappear. They’ve been loose in the world, living lives they believe are real, and now somebody is hunting them down to put them back. The Huntsman is working in Oregon. Hansel and Gretel are at a diner in North Dakota, with Gretel working there and Hansel eating his way through the pies. They’ve ended up in these ordinary places, and then the Binder arrives with seven murderous dwarves. The dwarves are killing people while he collects the characters. The Huntsman gets dragged back into a book, and Hansel and Gretel go the same way. These are people who can be attacked and frightened, even though Druanna describes them as stories that don’t know they aren’t real. That explanation adds a lot to what Sela has been carrying around. Binders are supposed to preserve the important stories that shape people’s lives. Earth has one each generation, while the other realms have had far more because they’re older. Shakespeare was one. The brothers who made Sela’s original book were the unusual case where there were two at once. Destroying their book released what they had bound, so there’s a whole consequence of that decision walking around out there. Druanna already knows about the new Binder. Sela has to go to her to find out, and she’s getting tired of how much Druanna keeps to herself. There’s the trouble with the book, the prophecy, everything around Arcane Acre. Sela is expected to deal with these problems while somebody who could explain them keeps deciding when she gets to know what’s going on. Meanwhile, the Binder has gone well beyond preserving anything. Each story he takes makes him stronger, and he wants enough power to reach the older stories in the other realms. He tries to capture Sela too. She barely gets out of their first fight, and the dwarves are left to burn the diner after he’s taken the people he came for. Belinda goes with Sela the next time, and Skye follows them through the portal without permission. They land at a puppet convention in Cleveland, which turns into another disaster. There are frightened people running everywhere, the building is burning, and the dwarves grab Skye while Sela and Belinda are occupied. By the time they realize she’s missing, the Binder has her. He’s still struggling to open the portal he wants. Once he finds out Skye is Sela’s daughter, he decides she can do it for him and threatens to kill her if she can’t. Skye says she doesn’t know how. Then the book responds to her anyway. And she sends him straight to Arcane Acre. He thinks he’s finally getting access to Myst, walks through, and finds Sela, Belinda, Shang and the students waiting on the other side. He calls monsters out of the book, so the whole school gets pulled into the fight. Sela kills him and takes the book back. When she opens a portal to find Skye, her daughter is already there with a bloody axe and a dwarf’s severed head. Skye has gone from sneaking after her mother because she wants to help to turning the Binder’s own plan against him. She still can’t explain why the book listened to her. She knew where she wanted to send him, though, and that decision gives everyone else the chance to stop him. Sela gets her daughter back and immediately has another thing about her daughter that she doesn’t understand. There’s also something uncomfortable about Sela being so frustrated with Druanna’s secrecy while Skye is trying to find out what her own mother is doing. Sela is trying to keep her safe, but Skye follows anyway, without really knowing what she’s walking into. By the end she’s involved whether Sela wanted that or not. Shang wants the book locked away until they can consult the council. Sela points out that another Binder will take this one’s place, and they don’t even know how many stories are still out there. Then the ending cuts to a prisoner called Faulkner in Colorado. Three blind mice turn up in his cell. He reaches toward them, the same sort of magic appears, and they’re pulled into the notebook on his table. The replacement is already there. They’ve barely had time to put the book away.