Legend has it, if you stand in front of a mirror, shuffling an enchanted deck of cards, you can open a doorway between dimensions.
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Prince Teodric of Springport remembers the promise he made his father: to *not* try to reenact the legend of dimen...
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Pain flared from one side of my head to the other. It was a striking, thundering agony I'd never before experienced; not even after a night of drinking from Father's forbidden alcohol reserves. Or smacking my head on the head-board as I rammed into my nightly conquest.
My eyelids were heavier than the drawbridge leading to our front doors, and a sticky saliva coated the insides of my mouth. What in the world was wrong with me?
"Ugh." I swatted at the air, my arm heavy and drooping.
Flowery aromas enveloped me, making me gag; but there was also a faint sea-scent that scattered into my nose. That was familiar, yet still...distant.
Was the balcony window open? I couldn't hear the usual port activity below, and worried I'd become deaf. I must have smashed my head quite hard, to lose my senses like that. What time was it? Where was I?
I needed to stand up and gather my bearings. The mattress was stiff beneath me, cold and unforgiving. It didn't feel like a mattress at all; it was rigid and painful on my spine. My fault, I supposed. That was the price I paid for all the wine I consumed. I deserved this agony if I'd brought it upon myself.
I almost wanted to laugh at my disheveled self. How long had it been since I'd embarrassed myself by drinking so much I couldn't wake up the next day? It had to have been two, three years, maybe. Since my twentieth birthday, I thought, when I'd been so distraught by all the ladies ogling me atop the dais that I'd needed liters of booze to forget their pouty faces.
I raised my arm again, wincing, preparing to summon a servant to clean up the mess I'd made when jamming into that damned mirror—
"Oh." A flicker of a memory jolted through me.
Jamming into the mirror? No, that wasn't what happened.
"Oh...oh, dear." It was all coming back to me, and not subtly.
Playing cards falling to my feet, a screech in my ears, fire flaring through my veins, silky arms grabbing me and pulling me through—something.
Through...the mirror?
The mirror opened, right? And those arms, they slurped me up, into the mirror, drowning in its depths, and the world spun, and I fell, fell, fell—
"Hello?" A distant voice drew me from my terrifying recollections.
"Ugh," was all I could manage as I smacked a palm to my forehead and grimaced at the dampness I found there. Had I imagined all that? Finding the deck of cards, deciding to defy my father to prove him wrong, then being eaten by a mirror? It couldn't have happened, but even my imagination wasn't that vivid. "What is it?"
"Hello?" The same tone, but closer, richer. A deep register; masculine. Suave. A pinch of sassiness, a hint of maturity. Intriguing. "Are you alive?" The accent was...different. Sharp yet with smooth edges at the same time. The rhythm was unlike how my staff talked, and it wasn't Benson, nor anyone in my private guard.
