My entire body tensed as soon as I stepped past the room’s doorway and saw the scenery of it all. It was familiar, and suddenly, I knew why.
The ceiling was a pristine white, not a single speck of dirt or dust somehow tarnishing its cleanliness, and the corners weren’t covered with webs, but I knew that if I had allegedly slept for nineteen years in this room, certainly someone had to take care of me- and what was with all of that; there’s no way I could survive nineteen years asleep without food, water, etc.
The whiteness of the ceiling wasn’t what struck me as too familiar, however. It was the matching red silk overhanging the ceiling, loosely draping down a two feet from it at its furthest, several strands of it crossing the vast, luxurious bedroom. The silks marked a red X over the ceiling, and the deep red of it matched the design of the room.
Below the redwood covering the corners, framing the entire room’s borders, the walls were a warm sandy color, and at the top of them, framing the room below the redwood, were consistent patterns of geometric shapes: light brown and blood orange triangles with edges of similarly colored rectangles.
Along the bareness of the sandy walls were few decorations, none seeming as if they’d been there long, as if they changed around often, and nobody could decide the best fitting. Currently, there was a large painting over the wall to the left, and it depicted a scenery that melted the unease pecking at my flesh, even if it was only for a second. It was a painting of a forest, and the trees were full of colored, fresh leaves and thick, brown trunks, but the leaves were a tinted blue, and the sky above it was partly cloudy, with a strangely large bird flying overhead.
Don’t tell me this place has giant birds. Angels? Is this truly heaven? Is heaven this strange?
In the middle of the room, an empty space with the tiled floor covered by a rounded, fur rug of some sort of animal with brown skins, stood the servant who escorted me, and she stared at me curiously, but when our eyes met, her green darted away, averting my gaze for too long.
I scrunched my nose, brows furrowed, and shrugged it off, shutting the door behind me. At this, she seemed to flinch, and her stare returned, widening again, as if the simple act of shutting a door were something as great as singing a flawless opera- something which I couldn’t ever dare as not a single note left my lips without sounding like I was crying.
My lips parted to speak, the words climbing their way to my throat, but I snapped them shut and pinched them, cocking my head at the woman, meeting her gaze as she gradually let it soften, returning to a serene look of relaxed muscles and lips a thin line.
She was quite cute and looked young, maybe younger than I. Her body was a thin frame, delicate, and there was a softness to her features, rounded cheeks and soft green almond eyes that contrasted with her smooth brown skin and honey blonde hair.
From her appearance and mannerisms alone, she seemed nice enough, but as I reminded myself, there was nobody to trust until I knew what was going on. I’d been tricked already by kindness and love in the old world, and look where it got me. Here. Was this some sort of test? To see if I would be stupid again?
Her head tilted with mine, keeping our stare at an even level as she was about the same height as I, but the way she cocked her head was birdlike, elegant, and she moved with such poise that despite being insinuated as “princess,” I felt like the average one in the room. Of course, I was, but everyone else seemed convinced that I wasn’t.
“Why did you do that?” she questioned. Her voice was honeyed and pleasant, a soothing sound that felt like a sweet lullaby, something that might ease my sleep, and it felt oddly familiar, just like everything else in this room. The bed against the window, directly across from the door. The dresser beneath the painting. The chairs to the right, organized around a small table as if meant for tea. I hated tea.
The question felt like a challenge, however. There was that singsong accent to her voice, lined with the thinnest touch of gold, but the way she spoke didn’t feel like an ordinary question. Maybe it was my paranoia, but it felt just as much a test as this entire world did.
This room, too, must have been some sort of test. Maybe I’d already seen my death incoming when I had my two dreams inside this very room, but if I were the one sleeping here for nineteen years, why did I wake up in this place? Was that an illusion, or just… what the hell? I couldn’t even fathom any of this, but I tried to push forward, letting myself adapt to the strangeness of it all. I already felt an inkling of getting the hang of it, but there was no telling what would be thrown at me next.
I said nothing and stared at her, nodding my head to the door, asking a silent question back. My voice would not be heard by this woman- not today- but she could certainly try to understand my horrible charades.
“Yes,” she said, taking a step forward, the brown skirt of her dress shifting with her movement. She approached me cautiously, as if I would explode on her, but she was curious, almost like perhaps a doctor, trying to get a look at a whining child, fragile to the touch.
I stared blankly at her for a moment, the only sound breaking our silence being the periodic drop of water from my now drying, waist length red hair, and suddenly, I glanced down at the robe and my hair and then at the room, and a thought of it all being to match my damned hair crossed my mind, but I reminded myself that the rest of this place had a similar theme of warm colors, and it could have been pure coincidence. Hopefully, at least. If not, that was certainly cheesy.
I’d been staring so long, and disappointment fluttered in her eyes. She breathed in and was mid sigh when I shrugged. It ceased entirely, and she lit back up, like a bursting flame of a candle. Her posture remained neck high and back straight, hands clasped in front of her, and she was sure to blink during our awkward stare, not to let her eyes go dry.
I seemed to have been staring too long because she tested a subtle movement, watching the flow of my eyes, and like the idiot I was, I followed her hand instead of kept staring at her eyes, and that pleased her even more.
“Can you speak?” she asked. “Do you- understand my words?”
Two questions in one? Go slowly, please? I thought with an inner sigh before proceeding to shake my head once and then nod. Hopefully she understood the order of my answers and didn’t demand words of me because I wasn't willing to give anything up. It was exactly what she seemed to want of me.
Her lips held parted, a soft brownish pink, and a few blinks later, she stifled a grin and breathed, “Amazing.”
Amazing? My ability to process words was amazing? I get that I was supposedly sleeping for nineteen years but for God’s sake why is everything so damned dramatic? Then again, I was quite dramatic when I whispered words of goodbye and tumbled over a cliff, but that had reason. This, however, does not.
“But how?” she pressed, taking a few steps forward. I kept still and watched her careful, keeping my eyes keen on her hands, sure to keep up with reflexes in case she tried to hurt me- to take a knife to my throat or anything. Unconsciously, my hands flew to my throat, and I softly held them there for a moment, causing her to flinch, but I snapped them away and turned my gaze to the smooth tiles of the floor.
“A throat injury? Is that why you cannot speak?” she inquired. I felt like an animal. Hello, Jane Goodall. Would you like to study me further?
I turned back to her and effused a sigh, followed by a frown. Her head jolted back a bit, almost offended from my annoyance, and with knit brows, I continued forward and walked to the bed, stopping before it, ignoring her presence behind me. She was giving little answers, and I felt patronized like this.
And the bed was more interesting. The sheets shined, the comforter even looked warm, and when I reached forward and ran the softness of cool, pruned fingers over it, my skin brushed against a silky smooth surface, soft beyond belief, displaying the true wealth of the castle’s owners. Pushing down on the bed, my eyes shot wide.
It felt so comfortable. My bed back in the apartment was one that Jonathon had brought from his home, having slept in a double bed since he was ten, and it was old because of that since it was the exact same double bed that he slept in for nearly twelve years.
Of course he was a psychopath. Who would keep a mattress for twelve years, even after it had long since turned to a rock? It wasn’t even a new mattress when he got it, apparently, so who knew how old it truly was.
This mattress was divine, as soft as clouds, and with the touch of it, I felt the urge to crawl into it and sleep. Sleep forever. Sleep my worries away.
The worries were still there, of course, and even when I awoke, I knew they would be, but this time, it was different. As soon as I hurled myself over a cliffside and awoke in a tub not even half an hour ago, it was a shift so sudden and strange that I hadn’t thought to process it.
The guilt. The pain. The gnawing feeling of emptiness at the very pit of my being. All of it still lingered, a remnant from an old world, but it felt distant- disconnected. My hold on it felt like I was trying to keep a tight grip on something fading, and the grip was strong enough to keep it in my senses, keep it in my mind, but my very soul wasn’t affected by a plague of everlasting worthlessness anymore.
I didn’t feel cured. No, I didn’t feel alive and thriving, full with the burst of life, but the emptiness I felt wasn’t like that of a vacuum in space. No, it was like a blank canvas. Like something that still had yet to be painted, the colors not yet lathered and splattered on- my life not yet begun.
Like a sedentary person, I felt my legs tire so easily from standing as I was, and it was true to me more than ever that this was not my body. I’d hiked so much with my grandmother and after her death, myself, and I had never tired easily from standing, even during the months of a disinterested lifestyle. This body was weaker, and I was not myself.
Scowling, rolling the blue of my eyes with more irritability than was necessary, I lifted a leg to climb atop the bed, finding it an adequate seat- much better than the strange tea area to the side.
“Don’t!” the maid cried out, hurrying over with a scurry of clicking heels. She moved so fast that by the time I spun to face her, she was right before me, brows creased and eyes twitching at the edge. Her dainty hands were reaching for me, as if she were prepared to pry me from the bed, and all I did was stare for a moment, scrunching my nose at the strangeness of it all.
“I-I mean… you don’t need to sleep again, Your Highness,” she said, stepping back with a frantic bow. “You are smart enough to understand me, right? Then surely you know my hesitance with you sleeping. You just woke up, so there’s… there’s no telling if you’ll wake up again.”
I laughed, and her face relaxed at this, the planes and curves of it smoothing over, but now, she just looked subtly perplexed, almost dazed by this entire thing. I could only imagine the thousands of questions running through her brain, many of them unsaid due to their lack of a yes or no nature. I felt a small twinge of pity for pretending I couldn’t speak, but my voice felt dangerous.
This world always felt wrong. The air of it buzzed and hummed with a silent energy of disturbance, and it picked at me, giving me waves of unease with each acknowledgement of it. Breathing it in, it felt normal, but feeling it, moving my limbs and my body through it, I felt like I was breaking in and entering at a place I shouldn’t have been. And at the same time, it felt as familiar and cozy as one’s home if their home were unfamiliarly, entirely rearranged while they had left.
Smiling, I stepped back until I tripped onto the bed, flopping back with a soft bounce, feeling the relaxation of taut muscles, wet hair pressing into the silk of the sheets and the warmth of my bare neck. I still wore only a robe, but I had no clothes of my own in this unfamiliar place. This heaven. This hell. This dream. This whatever.
I started to wonder if it truly mattered where I was. Wherever it was, it wasn’t the world I was born in, and that thought was a small comfort, but the unknown of where I laid was still troubling enough to motivate my curiosity further. There had to be some way to understand this.
You could ask, a voice said. My own voice. To it, I replied, and trust strangers again? No. Not yet. Knowing myself, I’d become too comfortable with speaking openly, and the next thing I knew, I’d spill the secrets of my life, and for some reason or another, these people would find a reason to turn on me. I knew nothing of their prejudices or anything, and from what little I knew of sci-fi and fantasy in my own world, I couldn’t guess on what those sort of characters would do in this situation, so I would do as my gut told me.
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