A Fever Dream

CHAPTER 9. New Constellations

When I jolted awake, I was soaked in sweat. It was still dark in the room and the crickets chirped peacefully behind curtains. There was no trace of a man from last night, almost as it was all a dream.

Pressing a palm to my chest, I fell back onto the pillows. Somehow I got into my own bed. My own heartbeat reverberated through the bones of my arm like a drum. As if I still was running as fast as I could through the woods of Summer.

What the hell has just happened?

Did I just see myself?

I would have never guessed that dress looked so hideous from afar  – but that was not the point.

The point was – did I watch someone else's dream?

"Not someone else's,"  I muttered to myself because that's what all truly mad people did.

Clearly, the owner of that one was definite.

But that was impossible - the dead didn't dream.

It must have been a memory.

This realization that I have just witnessed Elliot's memory, was him in it, witnessed it firsthand, suddenly threw me over the board headfirst into the rising tide of nausea, and I jumped off the bed. The moonlight draped the floor, and the cushions and tall ebony wardrobes that lined the walls.

I ran out onto the balcony.

Summer nights here were heady and thick, like spiced summer wine. They smelled like night flowers and sweet dreams of the sea and kissing your lover under the blooming trees in June.

I leaned over the railings and threw up, heaving until my diaphragm ached.

Right onto the dark gardens and artificial ponds that mirrored constellations. All that beautiful, fairy-tale stuff didn't sit well in my stomach anymore.

I'd been looking in the same sky for years. Nothing ever changed in it. And it was good and bad at the same time.

I used to look at the stars and make wishes, but I didn't anymore. It was even hard to remember what those wishes were, I thought, breathing hard into the dark night.

There was love, of course, true and strong, and traveling the world, and writing the stories - so beautiful, that the people would cry and laugh and go to their beds with their hearts full of joy and their pockets full of gold that could buy them magnificent dreams. There were friendships, and riches, and dazzling rooms.

Those dreams turned out useless.

They grew old in a place where time wasn't a currency. Summer-dwellers were blessed with the very long lives, that counted millennia.

Unless someone took them away, I thought, feeling nausea once again, at the memory of pixie dust ghosts in the vaults of the ballroom.

There was a legend- Summer seemed to be full of them and somehow, I felt obliged to collect them, - that the souls when they left bodies became stars and the soulmates became new constellations.

A cruel gust of wind clawed at my hair.

I straightened up, fixed my nightgown, and rubbed the sweat from my forehead. When you looked at the sky it seemed so close, just stretch a hand and you'd pick up a star. But when you actually did it, it moved out of reach.

Like everything that I had not become.

The train to the future only went one way, I thought coldly, walking back to my room and drawing the curtains. 

Back at the room, my gaze fell on a black leather book, that rested on the nightstand, where I left it next to the knife and the stock of letters, which I didn't know what I was going to do about.

I picked the book,  puffing away the dust left from when I hid it in the ferns prior to entering the castle.

Despite my expectations, a soft leather clasp came undone easily. Yellowed crispy pages of notes spread in front of me, covered in neat handwriting, as if the author was afraid there would not be enough space.

On a whim, I brought it to my nose and sniffed.

Ink,- I noted, and paper and something else – that strange sulfur and stardust smell that followed me on my way from the caves.

I took it to bed and nestled among the pillows, lighting the candle. 

Some of the notes were in the language I didn't understand, but mostly they were readable when I brought them closer to the stripe of light falling on the pillow. Mostly formulas, graphs, and quotes about woods and plants.

"Sleepless Concoction" - said the heading of one page. "Protection properties of lavender and sage" - announced another. "How to open the doors that don't have locks"- the third. "Pros and cons of using family silver in full moon nights" - fourth. I turned and turned and they never ended. There were so many pages, so many notes.

Too many, I realized. Much more than should have fit in this binding judging from appearance.

A rush of goosebumps ran up my arms.

Magic, I realized, dropping the book on the bed. I edged from it, almost involuntarily. 

A minute passed.

It lay there perfectly still and unthreatening. It didn't look like it was about to lash out at me, as its owner would.

Carefully, I picked it up again. I turned a couple more pages.  I was becoming more and more sure that these pentagrams and pictures and undecipherable words all were part of an honest effort at dark magic study.

I couldn't know for sure, as it was forbidden in here. Darkest of magic – the darkest of sins. My skin crawled the more I looked through the notebook.

"Enough for tonight," I muttered, about to close the diary, but not before my gaze fell on a page I didn't notice before.

Spread across two pages was a map, charted in blank ink, with castles, and forests and lakes. I've never seen such a detailed map of these places.

I traced the lines, following the drawing with my finger. It came full circle, just like the sea that was around the continent. "To the lands beyond" was written above a thin line that ran from the heart of the land and connected the dots all across the four sides of the map.

Not a line, I realized a railway.

I turned the page to see if there's more. But there wasn't a map, but a big chunk of text, written hastily as it seemed. 

"The girl is still here." It said. "He seems to enjoy her company, a sentiment I don't understand. Not a drop of charm in her blood, mundane through and through. What did grandfather find in her? Well, it was not her technically, but her ancestor. 

Whatever. 

Sometimes I ponder the question of what love must be like. Or friendship. Does it make a fool out of a man? Does it feel good? But when I look at them, I am grateful that I don't have a soul. Perhaps if I had a soul or a conscience I would have to advise her to return where she came from, while it's still possible."

The next line was the list of things you needed to call a demon. 

I closed the book with a thud and threw it onto the floor, not really caring if it fell apart.

For a moment I just stared into the darkness.

How foolish it was of me to think that something of substance could have been found in Elliot's notebook. Like man, like his diary.

I barely managed to close my eyes, when someone knocked on the door.

"Madam," murmured a servant girl, her face solemn and sad. "You're invited to pay farewells to the prince."