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A short while before Sawwse had gone exploring, a royal carriage stopped atop the same hill. Dappling sunlight filtered through a row of beech trees. The hill looked out on an unparalleled perspective. Between two gently rustling trees, the path opened up to a wide vista showing plains, valleys, settlements, towns, and far away, large blue mountains. Distance was subordinate to the gaze of those who held this view.
‘All this will be yours.’
King Poht shifted in his seat and drew back the carriage window’s thin red curtain. He had spent a considerable amount of time choosing the vantage point for this conversation. His nickname, ‘the reflective king’, was not without reason.
‘It’s so vast.’
Eugenie knew that Dorienne, their kingdom, was large, but the scale felt almost overwhelming.
‘We owe it to the land to be responsible. Our kingdom has become more and more powerful, but our strength lies in carefully considered motivations and alliances.’
The king had wanted to impart his wisdom earlier, but state matters had a habit of getting in the way. There was no sense in overloading Eugenie with information. After all, this was the start of a process, preparing her, over time, for a very particular life. But recently, his thoughts had turned again and again to time’s endless march, and he realised how much he had to tell his daughter about governance. He’d decided that this would be the day to begin sharing his experience.
‘It’s all about balance,’ he started. King Poht had seen his own father fixate on one or two issues to the detriment of other, equally important tasks. It seemed his daughter shared these tendencies. While it may have been why she had accomplished so much for someone still so young, it would not do when ruling.
‘People will look to you for guidance on all manner of things.’
Eugenie continued to look past her father at the view. Her eyes drew towards their home and the seat of power, Doriana. The white stone of the city glistened with scattered beams of sunlight.
‘I’m ready father.’
‘No, Eugenie. You will never be ready.’
He paused, gently rubbing his temple with an index finger.
‘One is never truly ready, and that is why we must continue to learn.’
King Poht met Eugenie’s gaze. He found it difficult to fully appreciate that the intelligent and strong, keen-eyed young woman who sat alongside him was no longer his baby daughter. It was impossible for him to see anything but the child he had helped to raise. He often shared a joke amongst his council when news was brought of Eugenie’s intellectual and military achievements: ‘How can this be? My daughter is only ten years old.’
A cool breeze gently whistled past the carriage. It whispered in the ears of the eight knights standing sentry.
The look shared between father and daughter communicated more than either of them could put into words. The king didn’t need to explain that he had already advised his council to start transferring his powers to Eugenie. He didn’t need to say how much he knew the people of their realm would love and respect her. This would all be expressed in the public speeches, and more importantly, private conversations nearer the time. They continued to sit in a pleasant silence, looking from one another to the view and back again.
It was two of the more astute knights who first felt the drop in temperature. It chilled them as the wind found its way into the gaps in their armour. The knights shifted uncomfortably, glancing sideways at each other as they did so.
A million thoughts flitted about Eugenie’s head. She had known that this moment would come to pass, though she hadn’t realised it would happen so soon. But looking at her father, she didn’t see the venerable king who’d brokered an alliance with the temperamental Ishgarian Elves and the fiery Magnarrians. She saw an old man, creased and already fading away.
‘Do you remember the Golden Fayre?’ King Poht asked his daughter, eyes sparkling as he smiled.
‘That poor knight in the joust,’ she remembered. ‘He ended up getting his head stuck-’
‘-in the hedge.’
Father and daughter laughed together.
‘I wish we had more time,’ he sighed.
A loud crack rang about the glade.
‘What the-’
The carriage rocked back and forth as it was suddenly buffeted by a powerful gust of wind. The king sensed danger and ordered the driver to take them away from the forest at once. The carriage remained stationary. Looking back at his daughter, King Poht took hold of her hand and mouthed, ‘It will all be fine.’
The struggle outside the carriage ended as abruptly as the wind had started. Eugenie’s heart beat faster and faster as she heard the muffled cries. ‘Our knights will take care of the bandits,’ she thought.
Her father arrived at the more worrying conclusion first. No bandits had taken their chances in Dorienne for many years. More distressingly, there had been no sounds of metal clashing, just movement and anguish. This wasn’t a raid. It was a massacre.
There was silence once again. The king turned to his daughter, hoping to reassure her with a paternal smile, when a vicious blade cut through the back of the carriage and tore straight through the Dorienne king’s chest. Eugenie gasped and leapt back in her seat. The sword mercilessly withdrew, and King Poht slumped, bowing his head as though deep in thought.
Time expanded for Eugenie. Seconds slowed and slurred, treacling into one another as she sat frozen staring at her father. And then, all of a sudden, time spooled out of its reel and minutes fired past her. Eugenie’s breath seemed to be just out of her reach.
Finally, she began to move. Keeping her eyes fixed on her poor father, she stepped backwards outside of the carriage, tripping on the bodies of the Dorienne knights lying face down on the earth. Eugenie walked around the back of the coach, gathering her courage to face whatever repulsive bandits might be waiting for her.
In the shaded cover of the beech trees stood a tiny, shadowy figure with gleaming green eyes, gingerly holding a long, thin, bloody rapier. At the sight of the princess, the creature turned and ran, but not before its face had burnt itself onto Eugenie’s retinas. Her mind had already begun to twist in grief. Noble leadership replaced by savage vengeance.
Chapter 3: Terra Incognita
I walk, I walk, I walk.
Through fire and steel, water and air, hope and emptiness.
I walk through a decaying world desperate to swallow me in ruin.
I walk through desolation, through fertility, over plains, under tumuli, within icy caverns and across melting beaches.
I walk through faith.
I walk through culture.
I walk through history.
I walk through planets, through systems, through galaxies.
I walk and I walk and I walk, and I become betwixt and between, caught within this world and the next.
I walk and my body phases in and out.
How I long to feel familiarity again. All terrain is now alien, every person a stranger. I observe, but I do not understand. There is nothing scarier than losing oneself, and yet I fear it is too late to stop it. The ego is composed of time and place, but whenever my body phases, I arrive in another alien world. As my sense of place slips, so too does my mind.
Another phasing. My mind splits. It is excruciating. An icy wind smothers me, shatters my body into particles and reassembles it somewhere else. I fall to my knees and squeeze my temples. The firmness of the ground momentarily distracts me from the pain. Had I not just been walking through sand? I am not used to the stubbornness of the ground, unyielding to my boots. My previous graceful movements are mistranslated into a vulgar gait.
An image flashes into my mind: a hand reaching to grab my sister as she falls backwards over a cliff edge. It’s a memory from years ago. I should have saved her, but I reacted too late. It upsets me. Why am I thinking of this now? This has lodged in my head to remind me of something. Another image. Thi
s time it is the figure shrouded in shadow. ‘You did this to me,’ I try to scream, but the hatred suffocates my throat.
I spend some moments on the hard ground breathing deeply. Looking down at my hands, I catch sight of the gash below my ribs. A coward’s trophy from a failed attempt to end all this before it got worse. Too deep for a simple spell of mending to work, but any magic I try to wield has gone. I am now almost completely in the thrall of my body. It dictates where I go and what I do.
I look up into my new, unfamiliar surroundings. Trees. A carriage. Distant mountains. I make connections with none of these things, and my frustration begins to grow. There is no storm that causes me to anger. It is the lack. The missing steps to a dance. The languages I once knew. The simple bloody line between A and B. My mind was a colosseum of knowledge. It has become a chasm of decay.
Perhaps it is the unfairness that makes me fly into a fitful rage.
Pity the poor souls who are around when I fit. I watch them from the shadows, see them shifting as my phasing wind cuts through their armour. Do I recognise the armour? My mind splits again. There’s nothing. Not nothing, no. A bodily response to the pain and confusion. It terrifies me. The ease with which my hand reaches for my rapier suggests that I have done this many times before. I lose control. A whirlwind of slashes cuts short their lives.
I try to wrest control from my body, but not quickly enough. My blade cuts through the carriage, into one final body. The rage is satiated. I drop my blade and clasp a hand to my head, stumbling away. Should I feel more guilt? Probably. But as feelings slip through my fingers like dust, is guilt what I should cling onto? No. There is not enough time to reflect on the callousness of coincidence. Whether I always lacked empathy, I no longer know.
The image of my sister flashes back into my mind. Yes, I know. But what does it mean? Am I searching for her? That is surely impossible.
The rage dissipates and my mind dulls again. My body guides me through the landscape, and I let it. A waking sleepwalker.
I walk, I walk, and I walk.
Chapter 4: Upsetting an Ogre
Sawwse made her way back to the clearing with Marius, tiptoeing as she approached the sleeping ogre. The wraith had not followed her, but she still wanted to warn Marius about the nearby danger.
She quietly retrieved the lute from her bag, climbed one of the nearby trees and hung upside down from the lower hanging branches. Her long wispy hair fell down, gently dancing as the breeze caught it. Ever so gently she fingered her lute, creating a soft and steady rhythm.
The sleeping ogre did not stir, and Sawwse preferred it this way. Studying the wind as it gently nudged at Marius’ cloak, she whistled a tune. As she did so, she pictured the scene that she had just encountered among the beeches. The whistle was, in the same breath, a whistle and a whisper, carrying her thoughts on the wind to Marius...
Ogres usually dreamed in abstract blocks of colour. If it had been a particularly tough day the shades might clash or vibrate erratically, but otherwise the colours worked to soothe an ogre’s mind. It was strange then that since he had taken on his little gnome companion, Marius’ dreams had taken on shapes and figures, for the first time in a long while. In his latest dreamscape, he stood in a beech grove looking out at valleys, and cities, and mountains. A bloody dagger appeared in his hand: it felt utterly wrong in his grasp. As long as he had his yew staff, he had no need for sharp blades of any kind. A piercing scream made him recoil. In front of him stood a sorrow-wraith, clutching at her heart. Seconds later, the shocking form had vanished, and a familiar soothing green occupied his mind.
The friendly ogre awoke some moments later. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he turned to find his gnome companion where he had last seen her: sitting against a tree, humming a pleasant tune. Arcing his body back, with enormous cracking sounds which were somehow painless despite their ear-splitting volume, he looked into the sky and found the daytime star’s position relatively unmoved. Elra’s radiant glow embellished the rich greens of the grasses and foliage-covered forest floor.
Marius signalled to Sawwse that their journey should continue. He gestured to the gate of beech trees, but then suddenly remembered his violent dream. The ogre paused and gave Sawwse a quizzical look.
The gnome smiled innocently and shrugged. It was typically Gnomish to find such a roundabout way of warning someone of danger.
Marius knew these woodlands to be peaceful, but decided to give Sawwse the benefit of the doubt. He decided that they would divert to a brambly path alongside a beck, much to Sawwse’s relief.
The musical gnome smiled and waited, while Marius gathered up his picnic blanket, fashioning it into a kind of cushion for his new friend.
‘You’re too kind.’
Sawwse once again climbed into the bag.
The ogre stooped very low so that he was eye level with Sawwse. His short and round fluffy ears and brown bristly facial hair did nothing to dispel his ursine appearance, which made Sawwse giggle as he gestured pointedly at the lute with his little finger.
‘Please play me something soothing,’ he said.
Though beautiful in its own way, Sawwse didn’t quite understand the grunts and groans of the ogre’s tongue, but a glint in his eyes told her to keep the music slow and sweet. She bumped her fist against his not-so-little finger and tittered.
Marius smiled his big grin again and stood up fully, raising his bag gently and resting it on his back.
Sawwse retrieved her lute once more and began to play a soft tune. While playing, she tried to remember as much about this moment as she could: the first request of her journey. Back in the Blue Forest she had never been asked to play for anyone except Dannse Gan. Her whole life so far, the music she played was somehow ‘un-Gnome-like’. She wondered whether people outside the forest would think the opposite. Maybe her music would be too ‘Gnome-like’ to them. At the very least, Marius seemed to appreciate it.
Clearing her mind, Sawwse instead focused on the landscape around them. The beck gently flowed over, under and through a bed of rusty coloured rocks. On their left, the ground jutted up leading back to the beech grove. Meanwhile, on their right, the less travelled path led them steadily downhill. The large fern bushes and brambles were familiar to the gnome, but she had never seen the pyramidal trees that hung over them.
From time to time, Sawwse had to duck out of the way as Marius picked tiny pink fruit from the trees and threw them into the backpack next to her for future snacks. Occasionally, he would stop altogether and examine the fungus growing along the woodland path. All the while the little gnome played her slow, meandering melody.
After walking in this way for some time, the land levelled out and Sawwse spotted a large congregation of trees: their branches and trunks twisting around each other. It wasn’t possible to see through their tight netting, but in the centre there appeared to be a stone hut. With some effort, Marius pulled open the heavy stone door and gestured for Sawwse to enter.
Inside was a very modest home. There wasn’t much in terms of furnishings, just a simple straw bed, a few shelves, and a wooden desk.
‘Through here is my garden, Garmish,’ said Marius, pointing to a large plank of wood that covered a circular hole in the wall.
Although Sawwse couldn’t parse the Ogreic, she almost recognised the word ‘Garmish’. She wondered whether it was friends with the Dwarven words ‘Ghar’ and ‘Misf’, meaning ‘safe’ and ‘haven’ respectively.
Having placed the gnome on the ground, Marius removed the plank from the wall. Multicoloured lights came flooding into the hut as a glorious garden opened up in front of Sawwse. Mesmerised by the lush, verdant growth now surrounding her, she stumbled forward through the hole.
There were all kinds of plants, flowers and fruits in Marius’ hidden garden. The amiable ogre walked slowly through his grounds, gesturing at this plant and that, occasionally taking seeds from his pocket to scatter in the wildflower sections. Sawwse, s
tupefied, followed close behind, awed by the garden’s beauty, and, in part, awed by Marius too. It was true that there was something different about the ogre within the garden. Was it an aura of power? or even wisdom? Perhaps it was simply because he was now quite clearly within his element, but perhaps it had been there all along, and in Sawwse’s haste, she had failed to notice it.
They strolled around the garden until daylight’s slow darkening. Marius sat down in a coppery coloured chair, which was clearly in thrall to various creeping vines, and fell asleep immediately. Sawwse took out the Gnomeopedia and planted herself on the ground. She began to write down everything she could remember about Marius’ garden until Elra’s light had almost entirely faded.
A large gentle hand on her shoulder brought her out of the writing spree. The ogre gestured that they should go back inside the hut. Having been helped up onto the large desk, Sawwse was delighted to see that Marius had made her a tiny bed: straw wrapped in the familiar, ogre-sized picnic blanket. She settled into the bed and only then realised how tired she was. Her eyes drifted closed as she watched Marius return to pottering around in his garden...
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The next few days passed in a similar pattern. First, Elra would softly peel back the night until the hut was too bright for sleep. Then Marius would rise and prepare a variety of roast nuts to break their fast. After this, the two friends would spend their time walking through the vast gardens (it turned out that Sawwse had misunderstood quite how far they extended). When Sawwse came across a plant that particularly intrigued her, she would sit with it for a while and create music that she felt befitted it. Marius would describe this flower and that in his typical laconic style, often picking out fruits that they could eat throughout the day, and Sawwse would sit and listen, slowly beginning to grasp the ogre’s language. And then they would sit together as the evening drew in, either in a comfortable silence or accompanied by Sawwse’s peaceful humming and strumming. In times of trouble to come, when she was far away from the Blue Forest, it would be the pattern of these days that would bring the little gnome comfort and solace.
In the Grip of Time Page 3