The Sleeping Beauty

Love at First Thought

Her Highness, Illandra of Kilmesh, slept. Yet in this magical sleep she dreamed and her dreams were her prison. In them she had witnessed the slaughter of her people; had seen one of the many princes who had come to court her slay her father as he feebly tried to rise from his bed. She had not been able to rush to his aid. She could not move. She could not even weep.

All through an Age she watched her country and her people through the dreams. There was no control to them, they jumped people, race, rank and time. One had focused on a lowly peasant, following him through the years. Her heart had broken over the gut twisting hunger, his fierce pride in his tiny lot of land and the all consuming love for his family – particularly his wife who was worn, bent and ravaged by disease. That one life on its own had wrought a change in the Princess and in her dreams she lived countless others.

Other times the dreams had no focus - flashing from face to face, event to event - as if stopping only long enough for her to witness the full extent of an action but not why it happened or its consequences. She saw the dead body hanging from the gallows with a child staring up into her father’s sightless eyes; the perfect present for a young girl granted on her woman’s day; the final moments of an aging Matriarch surrounded by her family. She witnessed births miraculous and tragic, deaths both natural and other’s horrifying in their baseness. Murders she wished she could wipe from her mind as they lay there, ever imprinting on her conscious.

She had looked back over her own life in the context of her dreaming, and seen with new eyes the rule of her father as foolish and unjust. His withdrawal, his grief and selfishness over the death of her mother, had led to the suffering of their people and their enemy’s victory.

Ahh... The enemy. Her dreaming had shown them to be as any other powerful family: at times greedy, selfish, and murderous; and at other times kind, gentle and merciful.

Illandra was tired, so tired of seeing into the hearts of her fellow humans, only to be repulsed by what she saw there. She had turned into a dispassionate observer to her own kingdom’s plight. Now, as she slept the dreaming no longer held revelations into the hearts and minds of her people. Instead they seemed only to replay past wrongs or good deeds clothed in the guise of different faces.

Still, one emotion remained; a desperately vast loneliness.

“Hello?”

Silence echoed through Illandra’s mind and then there was nothing. The dreaming had ceased. A dark well surrounded her and for the first time in over three hundred years, real fear coursed through her. Madness beckoned, encroaching into the panic that filled her. Then the softly spoken and puzzled ‘Hello,’ once again intruded into the never ending night.

“I’m here,’ Illandra cried out and the panic subsided. Since the beginning she had never truly been alone. The dreams, disturbing and heart wrenching though they were, had been her companions. Yet now there was a voice in the nothingness.

“Who are you?” It came again, tentative, curious - and male.

“Why are you not afraid? I was… but then the dreams came.” The words dropped into the darkness, pebbles in a still pond and silence followed in ripples.

“You’re Illandra.” His voice was hushed – filled with a pleased amazement, almost awe.

“You know of me?”

“Everyone knows of you, Your Highness. What happened to you – the curse at your birth – your disappearance became a story, a feytale told around campfires, the heath fires and finally children’s beds.” The voice explained.

“I have become a story?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Please, don’t call me that… You said a curse. What curse?”