The Lost Crown

Red Fletchings

Walliam was exhausted when he went back to his room in the dormitory.  It was late and the common room was empty.  He went to his room and crashed on his bed.  As soon as he fell asleep he found himself standing in the royal palace, in the hallway by the stairwell that led down to the treasury.  Fear filled him and he wondered how he could get out of the hidden world back to his bed.  He knew he was in the hidden world.  It had a feel that he recognized now.  He walked away from the stairwell and went down the hallway and around the corner to find the exit.  He was about to leave and decided instead to hide behind one of the columns and watch.

He hid and looked at the empty hallway.  A dark figure came around the corner and he saw it was Swyvern.  Swyvern held something in his hand.  It was wrapped in a dark cloth, and Walliam wondered what it was.

Swyvern drew a doorway and pulled it aside and through the doorway Walliam saw what looked like a guard tower on the city wall.  He wasn’t sure if that was what it was, but what he saw on the other side of the hole in the air reminded him of the tower he had been in before.

Swyvern stepped through the doorway and then it fell shut and disappeared.  Walliam was alone.  He stepped out from behind the column and went to where the Magian had drawn the doorway.  How could he follow him now?  How could he find out what it was he had taken from the treasury?

He took a deep breath and thought of the many strange things he had seen in the past few days.  “Where did he take it?” he said aloud.

Walliam felt his stomach flip-flop as everything around him shifted and swirled.  It was as though reality itself had begun to collapse and he jerked and fell to his knees on a stone floor.  He looked around and saw that he was no longer in the royal palace.  He pushed himself up and saw the battlements to his right.  He was on the city wall.

He looked all around.  The wall stretched away ahead of him, but only a few paces ahead of him he saw the strange turbulence in the air that came from the water below.  He was near the area where the city wall connected to the sea arm, which meant the harbor was there on his left, even if all he could see was the phenomenon that rose in the air, so high he couldn’t see the top of it.  The turbulence made him very uneasy.

He looked ahead and saw a guardhouse, quite far out where the turbulence filled the air on both sides of the wall.  Directly above the wall the air was normal, but it seemed to be a thin space between the flummox to either side.  He felt the urge to move forward and he did.  He walked slowly at first, staring at the strangeness that rose up from either side of the wall.  He felt that if he touched it he would be pulled into it and he knew he must avoid that.

He walked forward further and saw that the next guard tower looked like it was a long way ahead of him.  He decided to run and he tried it.  Within a few seconds he was at the guard tower, which stunned him.  The door to the tower was gone, there was an open space where it must be in the physical world.

He stepped through the door and looked around the empty tower.  There were stairs going up and down.  He decided to go down and followed the stairs as they curved down deeper and deeper.  Eventually he came to a small room with hallways that ran off to the left and the right.  He could hear water splashing from both directions and he felt a hand of fear grasp him.  He thought that he must not go down either hallway.

Against the wall, in the center of the small room, was a pile of cloth.  He went to it and realized that it was not cloth, but objects wrapped in cloth.  One of them was a cloth bag filled with gold coins.  He was stunned to find those.  The lump on top was bigger than the others, and he took this and unwrapped the burlap.  He felt his heart pound when he saw the gold crown he held in his hands.  It looked like the crown he had seen in the vision with Penelope, except that there were no gems in this crown.  It was only gold.