Dragon Kin 2

16

 Vlad

Lying on the spread next to her, I closed my eyes and waited for her to fall asleep. She flopped beside me. Eyelids heavy. It wasn't too late, though most of the manor had retired to their chambers. I would not sleep. Not this night. My chest thundered with too many questions.

Carmen looked exhausted, and well she might be. It turned out to be a long day for both of us. Once next to her on her bed, she spooned me from behind and was soon breathing the cadence of slumber. After listening to her breathe for an hour, I retreated from the bed, careful not to wake her.

She affected me.

I slipped out of the sliding glass door and into the back gardens of the Manor.

In the vales which looked like deep cuts into the jutting mountain range to the east, mist formed whispers of white and silver before fading again into stark night. Clover and iron, rich soil and wet stone, these and many other scents touched my awareness.

I succumbed to the wracks of love, once.

I was sixteen.

My first crush crushed me.

Ingrid. That was her name. Ingrid. She was the daughter of a leather merchant.

Me being the fourth son of a minor warlord, I wasn't an embarrassment as a suitor, but my first encounter with love altered that fact. Love, in fact, altered every fact – facts of nature, facts of state, facts of life.

Ingrid affected me too.

Her beauty, which had its own gravity and mass, altered perceptions of standing, strengths, interests and beliefs. That is to say, her beauty altered my perceptions...

I walked east, and then south for a time until I came to the back walls. One-hundred and forty feet of shear drop into the stone and grasslands that stretch out to the mountains. Once I was close to the edge, I ran three fast steps and leapt into the empty grip of gravity and rolled in the chill breeze.

I needed sky. I needed distance. My wings snapped and exploded out, the sails filling with the rush of life.

Once pulled into Ingrid's orbit I became aware of the concepts of concurrent alternative universes, and unstable temporal distortions. Until then, indeed all of my life previous, every day every hour I experienced time as more or less a constant measurable flow, where events happened one after the other, in linear sequence.

Sure, there were a few hot summer nights I thought would never end, and class lectures that I felt would go on forever – but in an academic way. It may have seemed or may have felt – but the watched pot would eventually steam. Overall, time flowed. It didn't muck-about with leavings coming before arriving. The sun would rise, in a few hours, the clock on the lecture wall moved ... clockwise... only.

However, distortions in the temporal fabrics lurked in Ingrid's shadow. Random and unstable, these odd pockets of time dilation or distortion formed. Impossible to see. Lacking any scent.

Stepping into one, even for a moment might cause two hours to be taken from your life. Pruned from the memory. Snip snip. Gone.

Push too hard searching around in that empty space and you might get a flash, then an afterimage burned into the memory, of Ingrid's profile.

Once established these temporal quicksand-traps could even impinge from great distances through topical thoughts in her direction. The wormhole would turn and hours would pass with only vague tattered ideas to show for them afterward.