"Heart of the Crown" Chapter 73

[seymoure]

Chapter 73

Vision

Cela of Tar had been drunk a sum total of twice in her life.

Once was medicinal. When she had been passing through Mother Pocket’s kitchen on her way to the stage to sing, a knife had fallen from a cutting block and bounced across the room. It cut a small gash in her leg, which Mother needed to sew up.

Mother was a much better sewer of humans than of fabric, and the operation only needed about three stitches.

But they did not have anything to kill the pain, other than some Rotrivian liquor, and that was administered liberally.

It was given both interiorly and exteriorly. So much so that the girl had almost no memory of the accident or the show she had given afterward. There were those in the crowd that marveled at the originality of lyrics to famous old folk songs.

They heard words that were invented on the spot.

The other occasion of inebriation was when Cela was young and spending the night at the home of her only friend of her own age: Melachange of Singa.

Mel (as Cela called her) had sneaked a bottle of her father’s prized Bashenta Ale back to the bedroom, and the two teenaged rebels choked the stuff down at once.

It was doubtful that there was enough alcohol in the single bottle to get the young ladies anywhere near as inebriated as they were acting. But they had been sure that this is how one acted when having too much to drink, so they were acting just that way.

Neither time Cela had been drunk, or had thought she was, did she have hallucinations.

When she awoke on this site, she knew she must be having visions that could only come from within her somehow muddled mind.

She was in the little village below the castle where she grew up. The people running around her were folks she had seen every day, doing things she had seen them do hundreds of times.

The problem was that as a person walked past, they walked past again, and then again. Every time someone waved a hand another hand waved and then another.

Everything she was seeing was a multiplicity of the same things.

But it was only the living beings that were so affected.

All the buildings were as they should be; even the clouds in the sky looked right. The blowing grasses and the waving tree limbs were all looking perfectly normal.

There was another aspect that she suddenly realized.

No one noticed her.

She reached out and could not touch anyone.

It was as if she didn’t exist.

Was this real, or was she dreaming?

If this was a dream, it was a nightmare.

If it was not a dream, it was worse.

© 2008 C. Wayne Owens
Chapter 74 is here.