Even if my gut was screaming wrong at every turn, the aura of this place setting off warnings with each unsteady breath and touch of the world.
Flying forward, I thrust my body into a sitting position, back hunched and posture comfortable over proper, and I watched as the maid flinched, but the edge of her lips twitched, threatening a smile, and a small giggle sounded quiet and soft in her throat.
I grinned at her, and then I tried to rack my brain for any possible way to ask of information without asking, and it struck me that paper and pen would work excellent.
She watched precisely as I motioned with my hands, using the left to symbolize a piece of paper and the right to symbolize a writing motion, and I repeatedly moved the two together, trying to get across that I could write.
Her brows knit, but she did as I asked and walked over to a sort of vanity beside the door, her face visible in the reflection of the mirror and she searched the drawers, finding most empty, to find what I’d asked for.
A small index finger held out into the air after her search was fruitless, and she hurried out of the door, shutting it behind her and scurrying through the hall, her pattering steps echoing. I listened until she was gone and sighed.
“I’m about to give in here,” I groaned. With the sudden devoid of any other person, I took it upon myself to walk around the room, feeling the edge of the small, dark wooden tea table and its shiny surface without a single speck of dust before wandering over to the vanity.
The vanity was made of wood just as dark as the tea table, a deep brown just as dark as a tree’s bark, and the surface was polished, but it didn’t shine and wasn’t smooth, and the touch of it was a little more rough, but there were certainly no splinters. It almost felt as if someone had painted over it.
Seating myself in the small chair equipped with a red cushion laced with pearls at the edge, I sat level with the mirror and stared into it.
My eyes were the same. As blue as the deep sea. But they weren’t my eyes, and they couldn’t be. My hair, too, was longer, still sopping wet. I wondered how long it even took for hair this long to dry, and then I recalled the horrors of brushing hair that went to mid breast, and now that it was more than double that? Nightmare.
I shuddered and brushed the thought aside, leaning over the vanity to get a better look into the mirror. When the tips of my fingers brushed over the mirror, it felt like any other mirror, nothing magical that would transport me home, and with a closer look at my face, it didn’t feel foreign.
Eleanor Raider stared back at me, but I was no longer Eleanor Raider because she had a scar over her left wrist from a violent cat when she was younger and one at her hip from an accident while hiking. Eleanor Raider, too, didn’t look this full around her rounded sharp cheeks- she didn’t have eyes that weren’t darkened from stress.
Weight aside, height and chest and everything else felt the exact same, like I was wearing a doppelganger's skin. The feeling wouldn’t shake. Something was off- and I felt like an invader. My soul didn’t belong here. It never did, but it was here, and something whispered for me to leave. How? I asked it, receiving, as expected, a response of nothing.
The door’s clicking startled me, and I jumped at the sound of it, almost letting a soft scream escape with a terrified flinch, but seeing the servant returning, her blonde hair held tight behind her head, I breathed in relief, somehow half expecting to see Jonathon walk through the door to slash open my neck and laugh at me.
There’s no escape, he would laugh, wicked and malicious, a deep sound in his throat riddled with evil delight. Eleanor, you’re mine.
I shivered, but the maid didn’t seem to notice as she was too busy placing a cream colored piece of paper before me followed by an ink cartridge and a black feathered quill. I snorted through my nose.
Damn. I don’t suppose she’d hurry back with a cell phone if I tried to ask, then?
The softness of her green eyes peering at me carefully as I reached for the inkwell felt like fire burning holes into my skin, but I tried to keep myself calm, and I stifled an irate glare. Carefully, I opened the ink and dipped in the quill, praying that I was even using it correctly, and then I reached for the paper.
It was a fact I’d known for a while. A person couldn’t read words inside a dream. If I wrote words and couldn’t read them, then I could confirm this was a dream. Surely, I’d entered a coma and was sleeping in a hospital while Jonathon began his rotting in jail. Eventually, they’d pull the plug, and I’d finally be done with.
The thought wasn’t as comforting as it once had been.
My hand was trembling, black seeping through the paper where I held it, and the maid almost looked ready to snatch the quill from my hands, like I was a child misusing it, but she refrained, tightening her clasped hands, her knuckles starting to pale.
I was afraid of something, and I couldn’t discern whether I was afraid that this would be real or if I was afraid that it wouldn’t.
A stroke appeared before I even knew what I wanted to write, but being an entirely different person in an entirely different world, I had to have an entirely different identity, right? Eleanor Raider didn’t belong in this world. I was no longer Eleanor Raider.
I wrote, and she watched as I scrawled out the words, my handwriting clean and crisp, a little rough at the edges, but it didn’t look like something someone who had never learned to read or write would scratch over paper. It looked like I was educated, and when I glanced at her, I saw those eyes as big as the moon once more, and I couldn’t even laugh anymore, just shaking my head. Ridiculous.
My stomach sank and twirled all in one, and from the sensation, I couldn’t tell if it was nervous fluttering or nervous dread that filled my entire being, encompassing me in a perplexing feeling that I didn’t understand.
I could read the words.
I wasn’t in a dream- which meant that I certainly had died.
But if I died? Where was I now? This world… surely it wasn’t the after life, so if it wasn’t, how was I here? And why? What purpose did Eleanor Raider have being here, wearing the skin suit of someone who looked like her but wasn’t her all the same?
“You can write, too,” the maid gasped. “Sleeping for nineteen years, but you’re so… educated.” She reached for the paper, but I smacked her hand away, pointing to my words with the quill, insisting that she answer me.
What is my name?
She stared at it for a moment before turning my gaze to me. She tilted her head once more. “You don’t have a name, Your Highness.” I frowned, forcing the lines of my face to scream out why. “They did not know if you would survive, so the King and Queen did not name you. You are an unnamed Princess of Etaeris.”
Etaeris? It sounded every bit foreign as this place felt, but the speaking of English perplexed me even now. Surely, I would find out about it along with everything else I sought, but for now, I would take things slow. From what it seemed, I had plenty of time to get catched up, being nineteen years behind in whatever world this was.
I continued to write. If this stolen life didn’t have a name to it, and if it was to become mine by whatever impossible means, then I would claim it as my own, keeping some piece of my old self.
Eleanor.
“Is that your name?” she asked.
Yes, I wrote.
“How do you know?”
I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t trust the maid, even if she seemed desperate to help me, to understand me, but this world was unknown and felt off with every breath, so I thought not to trust her with the truth but instead offer vagueness.
With sleep does not always come unconscious darkness, I wrote.
“Like a dream?” she inquired.
Yes and no, I answered back. Tired. Let me rest.
“But!” she exclaimed reaching out for my shoulder, I turned to her with an icy glare, and she stepped back. I was not fond of sudden touching, especially from strangers. It was kind of her to hand me the robe, but I didn’t want her to touch my shoulders- or pull me into a hug as that “Queen” intended to do.
“Fine,” she managed. Reluctance heavily lined her voice, but she did not protest further. “I hope for your sake that you wake up again.”
So do I, I thought. My body went cold with the thought. I wanted to wake up? Since when did I ever want to wake up? There was the possibility that the whole reading in a dream thing was a lie- even if it wasn’t- and I would wake up back in the real world, I supposed. I didn’t want that. I made peace with my goodbyes.
Hesitantly, her thin arms reached forward to grab the paper, and when the cotton of her coco colored sleeve accidentally brushed against my face, she recoiled with a gasp, muttering apologies before snatching up the paper and hurrying out.
I listened to her leave, and once I heard nobody around, I went to the window and stared outside, pressing my face close to the glass, the rounded edge of my nose touching. It felt cold, real, and the entirety of each sensation pulled me back to reality.
This is all too real.
And looking outside the window, my mouth fell agape as I stared at a vast landscape out in the distance. It was what looked to be a forest, but the trees were nothing but brown and twisted, like they’d been eternally dead, and it stretched far beyond the horizon, and before it, at the foot of the castle, almost like toy pieces from the furthest point to the closest, was a city.
The buildings were by no means modern, and the city streets were hard to see, but people were indeed walking along, almost hurriedly, as the sun started to make its descent. It’d been morning when I jumped, but in this world, it was nightfall.
Having my soul held in a body that wasn’t my own was surprisingly tiresome, despite the nineteen year sleep, so I allowed myself to close my eyes and attempt sleep. It took two hours for it to finally take me, but it did, and I, as expected, did not have a single dream.
And when I woke up, I stared up at a ceiling of white, adorned with ribbons of red silk.
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