the seas are alive,
and they are raging with monsters, old sport.
| based on the voyage of the dawn treader |
| BOOK TWO OF THE KING IN DISTRESS DUOLOGY |
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Present Day, Narnia
THE DAWNTREADERviolently rocked back and forth the further it sailed into the sea of storms, vicious winds howling as the tides sunk its savage teeth into the wild wild ocean. Jamie lay staring up at the ceiling, as the ship shook, the floorboards creaking beneath her bed. Lucy and Gael slept soundly on the other bed at the far end of the room, huddled close together, while the Warrior Queen took to herself.
Thoughts wracked her mind, memories blurring with one another. She lay there for what seemed like forever, until she eventually fell asleep, dreaming.
In her dreams, Jamie was falling.
Perhaps it had been the song of the wind thrashing against her ears, or the magnetic sensation of gravity pulling her towards the very core of the world. Yet, one way or another, she was aware that she'd been succumbing to the depths of the earth. Falling deeper and deeper and deeper into the earth. Until she wasn't.
For a moment, the nauseating dizziness from the pressure of the fall overwhelmed her senses, and it took a few minutes before she regained her composure. When she finally had, she resisted the grueling urge to let out a gasp — for the world around her was so much more than magnificent.
In her time as the Warrior Queen of Narnia, she had visited many lavish kingdoms, seen grand structures that dazzled with all the glamours of the physical plane, but no such realm had she yet encountered that had been just as beautiful as this. With colors more vibrant than the last, everything seemed to glitter with an afterglow. A forest of red and yellow and purple spread around her, and the sparkling sky shades of gold, that one could easily get lost in its beauty.
Feeling her sword on her belt, she unsheathed it and held it at a defense position in front of her, just to be sure. Senses heightened, Jamie grew alert, ears strained on the look out for any sign of endangerment. Leaves crunched beneath her feet, crisp but dewy, as if dawn had just broken over the land. But to her, time felt as though it were at a standstill, feeling every breath slower, and the earthen ground frozen in place.
She wondered what had prompted her subconsciousness to dream of such a place, and if there were some old god or goddess that controlled her dreams. This was the first that she had dreamt of something as magnificent and vivid as this, that it made her think why she would conjure such imagery in her astral state. Wandering further for a while, a structure presented itself in her line of sight at last, a trapezoidal edifice with intricate red and gold trimming — a temple. With her sword still drawn, Jamie reluctantly inched inside, and found that it was much larger than it looked to be. Embossed jade marble varnished the floorings, and eastern-inspired imagery were etched on the walls above a high mezzanine. The art style was clearly from the olden days of the Cangshuonese Empire. How old this structure must have been then.
Olden Cangshuonese text was carved at the arc by the entrance, which took Jamie some time to translate. Yūnghguài Temple. The name was definitely familiar, a lost term forgotten in the tales woven by bards and drunkards in dimly lit taverns, stories spun into haunted portraits by mothers to tell their children as bedtime stories. She wasn't sure which of the folklores it belonged to exactly, as the years had fogged her memory of those accounts.
