A Whole New World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,32

and not much else. What kind of win was that?

The kind she would have to make do with, for now, Jasmine realized.

“A whole race of djinn? Just like in the legends?” she asked, weary but curious. Rajah clambered up onto the bed next to her. She stroked his head and lay against his firm, warm back, as if preparing for a bedtime story.

“Yep. People just like you,” the genie said wistfully. “I mean, not just like you. We all were what you call magical, but what we called normal. And we didn’t all look the same the way you humans do. My wife was purple, and—”

“Your wife?” Jasmine gasped, sitting up.

“Yeah. She’s gone, too,” the genie said sadly. He snapped his fingers and a silver mirror appeared and floated in the air between them. Instead of reflecting the room it showed a grinning purple girl. She had what looked like tiny horns behind her ears and claws on her feet.

As Jasmine looked closer she tried to remind herself that this wasn’t just a creature of legend; this was a woman who was once alive and married to the genie and had whatever a normal life was for a djinn. If she focused, Jasmine could begin to see the person behind the purple: tiny laugh lines around her eyes, a smattering of deeper purple freckles across her nose, frowny marks between her brows. The sort of round belly and arms that people often got when they had been married for a while and were content with their lives.

“She looks happy,” Jasmine said, carefully not choosing the platitude beautiful. Plus, the horns…

“Yes, well, that’s because she wasn’t screaming at me right then. Or throwing things,” the genie said fondly. “I kid. We fought, but we loved each other. Very much.” He blew the picture a kiss and it faded away into blue smoke.

“What…happened?”

“Oh, you know.” The genie waved his hand dismissively. “Same old story. Dark prophecies about the end of the world. The end of our world, I mean. Time running out for the djinn. The Age of Man beginning. A young, greedy djinn who already had a bit more power than those around him and used that as an excuse to seek even greater power. Saving our world. ‘I’m doin’ it for the wife and kids,’ you know?”

“You had children, too?”

“No, it’s just a saying. I’m telling a story here, sweetcheeks. You mind? Anyway, long story short, the quickest path to infinite power is…infinite wishes. Right? A wish is the most powerful thing in the universe. If you know how to work around the limitations. So I went down the path of becoming what you folk call a genie, the most powerful being in this world.

“Only there was one tiny problem. I hadn’t quite understood the catch: you can’t make the wishes yourself. The universe has a way of keeping things in balance. Which, yes, I should have understood better as a student of the great magics. I thought I was above all that. So wham, bam, thank you, Kazaam, here I am. Still paying for my hubris ten thousand years later. And the djinn still died out. The, as they say, end.”

Jasmine was silent. There was too much to think about. An entire race gone, one man attempting to stop it—and losing. The genie’s story was sad and horrible.

And yet, if one ignored the fact that he was sort of thinking about saving his people when he went seeking unlimited power, one could almost see similarities between his and Jafar’s paths.

The genie still wound up losing everyone and, by trapping himself in the lamp, set things in motion for a greedy Jafar to attain almost limitless power himself. It was like a never-ending cycle of greed, power, and insanity.

And unhappy endings.

The universe sure had a terrible way of keeping balance if this was how it chose to do so, Jasmine reflected.

She shivered, wondering if Agrabah would wind up like the empire of the djinn: forgotten and legendary.

“So…again with the long story short…I would help you in a heartbeat, if I could,” the genie said gently. “But this is all I can do right now.”

He waved his finger sadly up and down. White smoke trailed out of the tip and became a silken thread. The thread rose up and down and then began to circle around itself. Faster and faster it ran, its point becoming sharp and golden like a needle. The whisper of cloth against cloth grew louder as a