Through Time and Impossible / The Fate that Seals Us

Chapter 2: It Didn't Look Cheap

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The next day went by in a blur to Sophia by the time she knew it, she somehow found herself in a four-poster bed with gray-brown stone walls enclosing the room.

Waking up from her deep sleep, she stretched and sat upright, looking around the familiar room. She got out of bed as memories of this room in her Gran's castle flew back into her mind. This was her room whenever she stayed at her Gran's castle.

She embraced a pleasant memory of her Gran reading to her in this very bed as her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She reached to check the notification as panic flooded her, realizing that she slept until two in the afternoon on Sunday.

As she took slow steady steps down the hall, passing old Anglo-Saxon paintings and a Roman marble bust of an old man with a funny long beard, she couldn't help but admit that it had been too long since she's walked these halls. When she was a child, her family would come every summer, but since she entered high school, things got busy with camps and other part of life. She tried to remember the last time she spent a full summer here and realized that it had been at least two years.

When she got to the giant staircase, she frowned as she looked down it. She had walked down these stairs many times over when she was younger. Back then she always felt like a princess, but now that feeling was gone, just like her grandmother, never to return.

Her grandmother was the one that would fill Sophia's imagination with tales of princesses and princes and evil rulers. But without her there, the thought about those stories just brought tears to Sophia's eyes, convinced that this castle would never bring the same joy in her life again.

As her feet touched the cold wooden floor of the ground level, she stopped in place as she looked around, unsure where she was going next. She quickly decided that her parents were the best people to find however, she knew it would be impossible to find them in this massive place with no signs of clues.

Abraham saw the young girl walk down the stairs quietly. He hadn't seen her in years and almost didn't recognize her as she passed. He gave a small smile as he remembered the last time he saw her; she had to have been five maybe six, playing outside in a field of flowers. She insisted on putting flowers in his hair until her gran came back from a trip. "Sophia, good, you're awake. We've been waiting for you," Abraham said as he came up to her, not willing to wait any longer to speak to her.

Sophia raised her eyebrow in confusion as she looked at his outfit. He looked about 30, dressed in a white button-down shirt with black pants that stopped right below his knees with knee-high socks. He had an old-time looking outfit, and she wondered why he dressed so differently. She also wanted to know who he was and how he knew her name since she had never met him. Quickly discarding that question, convinced that he must have seen her from the photos that her Gran had around, she nodded. "Yeah, do you know where my family is?"

"In the parlor, down the hall, first door on the left. Oh, and I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself. My name's Abraham," he said, and gave a small bow. He wished he could tell her they already knew each other, but he knew that her grandmother would have not wanted that, not this soon. Her request was to stay quiet until the time was right.

"Pleased to meet you, Abraham, do you work here?"

He shrugged, going along with her guess. "You can say that," he said and smiled at her as he walked up the stairs.

Sophia, not caring about his response, nodded, then walked away, motivated by trying to find her family. She walked down the hall filled with more paintings hung up on red painted plastered walls and on the first door on her left she found the door was open with her mum and dad sitting in chairs, talking. They looked up at her as they heard a floorboard creek when she entered the room.