Coruscate

Chapter Six

Despite my exhaustion, I flicker in and out of sleep, although I'm not coherent enough to fully process everything that's going on around me. Somebody is lifting me up from the comforting embrace of the ground, and I can make out small tidbits of a conversation:

"—is she still asleep—"

"—shhh—you'll wake her—"

"—is this really the girl that's supposed to sa—"

---

I wake up a little later, lightheaded and disoriented, in a small, cramped room. I'm lying on some kind of straw pallet, a thick quilt draped over me that's stifling in the warm temperature. The only light source in the room is a candelabra attached to the wall that threatens to give out every now and then, casting ghostly shadows against the walls.

It's a very lonely, isolated room. The walls, ceiling and door are all painted a sterile shade of white, while the ground seems is made of uneven stone, although it's hard to make anything out in the dim light. From what I can tell, it's entirely devoid of any furniture save for the pallet, although the room is so small that it probably couldn't fit anything else either way.

I push away the quilt, my limbs protesting with the sudden movement. Somebody's removed my robes, so all I'm wearing are my underclothes, and they must have given me a bath or something as well became my face and hands are no longered plastered with dirt. I find that I don't care about what might have happened in my sleep so much as the need for me to find out where I am and what I'm here for first.

Placing a hand on the ground for balance, I slowly work myself up into a comfortable standing position. Standing up gives me a better perspective of just how small the room is: if I were to raise my hand, my fingertips would brush against the ceiling. 

I push open the door, nearly colliding into whoever's been standing behind it in the hallway that it leads to and flooding the room that I'm in with harsh white light. The other person yelps with surprise, and I can't help but start backwards, until our gazes meet and I'm staring at the tall, dark-haired boy Rei had pointed out to me earlier in the Ceremony. Prince Jonai. What's a member of the royal house doing here, and how exactly am I involved?

"Oh, you're—" Prince Jonai says, and then stops abruptly, realizing my current state of dress. He looks away politely, placing his hands in front himself as if trying to prove something. "I didn't know you were awake. Let me go get Rei." He turns around, heading down the left side of the hall.

"Wait," I say, before I know what I'm doing. He stops when he hears me call out, but doesn't look back. Somehow, I'm annoyed by that, even though I know that he's doing it out of respect for my privacy. "How do you know Rei? Where is this place?"

"She'll explain everything to you," Prince Jonai says vaguely. My exasperation grows even more at that non-answer, but I don't bother trying to get his attention again. It's clear his answers will only lead to more questions.

While he's gone, I take that time to examine the hallway. It's painted in the same shade of white as my room, although a thin layer of dust coats the entire wall so that it looks brown from some of the farther away places. It's so narrow that only one person can walk through it at a time comfortably, nothing at all like the spacious rooms and halls I was used to back in the Temple. 

The Temple. Thinking of it makes me all teary-eyed again, and I wipe away the moisture from my eyes with my arm. How long has it been since the ceremony ended? It couldn't have been any longer than a day.

Luckily, Rei arrives before I can dig myself into a ditch of confusion. She looks completely different, dressed up in a fancy grey robe that looks ten times as expensive as anything I've ever seen her in before. She's also wearing new, subtler makeup, something that she'd normally never touch on non-Ceremony days.