Legend has it, if you stand in front of a mirror, shuffling an enchanted deck of cards, you can open a doorway between dimensions.
***
Prince Teodric of Springport remembers the promise he made his father: to *not* try to reenact the legend of dimen...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I jolted awake.
Not that me jolting was anything unusual; but this jolt was different. More violent, as if someone or something had yanked me out of my slumber before I was fully rested. As if someone or something had reached bony arms into my head, wrapped skeletal fingers around my brain, and squeezed, digging dirty fingernails into my membranes.
Ouch. My head ached with a fierceness that weakened me, more so than it normally would after a nightmare. But had I been in the middle of one such horrid dream? Or had something truly snatched me out of slumber? I couldn't tell, and would need to fix myself a refreshing, awakening brew to determine that.
I pulled myself off my mattress. I'd sweated so much, the sheets clung to my back. When in my underground lair, and all my enchantments were up—the blockage at my door, a spell of illusion to prevent anyone from being able to look inside—I slept in the nude. After spending days on days wearing the heavy, thick cloak of my mage position, I yearned for freedom and air on my skin, if only for a few hours of sleep.
My bare feet collided with glacial cold as I set them onto the concrete-like floor under me. I was used to the sensation, actually enjoyed it most days; but today, it made me wince.
Cracking my back, my knuckles, my neck—that all made me wince, too.
Why was I wincing so much?
I didn't have many facial expressions that I knew of. Spending one's life living underneath a veil that cloaked one's face taught one to not bother making faces. No one would see them. Sometimes, when I glimpsed myself, uncovered, in the mirror, I practiced grimacing and smiling, just to see if I still had the ability to do so. To see if I hadn't forgotten how to show my emotions, in case one day...
In case one day someone would see them.
That was a fool's dream, of course. As long as I was Arden, Ace of Spade Island, advisor to the monarch of Acewood, I would never reveal my face. Never reveal the lines along my skin, nor what my skin color even was. Never showcase my eye-color, the length of my nose, the shape of my jawline. Not even if I were to somehow take up a lover—but I'd never dare that. Aces didn't take lovers. It was forbidden.
And I didn't miss it. The gazes across a crowded room, the dashing about to find a place to hide and fondle one another, the sweaty aftermath of sex—it was all overrated, to me. Sure, I'd indulged in it in my youth, but since donning the role of Arden, I didn't particularly care whether I was ever intimate again with another person. This—my position, my abilities, my responsibilities—was more than enough for me.
As I moved away from my small bed tucked in the corner of the rectangular room, the ground shook. Not the quick, subtle shudder I tended to sense often here in the basement, whenever guards ran across the upper floors and made my entire room shiver. I was so far below solid ground, yet I still knew when they were agitated, practicing drills in the castle's corridors.
