Pain like a wooden beam getting shoved through his skull woke Jem violently. He jerked into a sitting position just in time to vomit what little there was in his exhausted stomach out into the world. He then lay back down, clutching at his head with both hands in a feeble attempt to hold it together. He was mildly surprised it didn’t disintegrate into dust between his fingers. After many, many minutes of taking long breaths and trying to keep his head from doing something rebellious, he managed to slowly edge himself into a sitting position and look around through squinted eyes, his entire head pounding so loudly it seemed to echo off the walls. It also didn’t help that his eyes had gone crazy and his whole vision was kind of bouncing up and down. Luckily there was nothing left for him to throw up. What would life be without small blessings?
He was in some kind of cave, round and formed of rugged stone with a dark cloth dangling from the roof making up one of the three walls. There wasn’t anything else in the room besides the small straw pallet that he was laying on and an iron ring set deep into one of the stone walls. A long chain was fastened to that, which ended in an iron manacle securely clamped around his left wrist, clanking whenever he moved. He stared at it for much longer than he should’ve, trying to decide if it he was dreaming or his eyes were playing tricks on him or he’d gone crazy or what. Eventually he came to the reluctant conclusion that the shackle really did exist. Why in the name of the High Gods was he chained up?
Still holding his head (it wasn’t really helping but at least he could pretend), Jem shuffled in a small circle to make sure that he was alone and that there was nothing else of interest in the room. He was and there wasn’t. But with his vision all wonked up it couldn’t hurt to double check. Then he set his befuddled brain to trying to work out how in the High Gods he’d ended up there. He couldn’t even remember what he’d last been doing. The memory part of his brain had slammed the door on him and didn’t seem to want to open back up. There was some memory he could sort of half detect, some memory he could just grasp the corners of but couldn’t quite decipher into anything intelligible. All he got was blurriness. It kept running away from him and he didn’t quite have the energy to pursue it like he should. He got the feeling that it was important, whatever it was, and that figuring it out would tell him why he was where he was. And possibly how to get out of there.
It came back to him so swiftly he felt a small gasp pop out from between his lips. There was the soft throbbing song that had called him there in the first place. Then the sudden gold-and-white light amongst the ordinary trees and rocks, emanating from an arch, the beauty of which had punched the air out of him. It had seemed to be made of a million facets of glass or crystal, each of them sending tiny rainbows in every direction like dancing fairies, and he’d been so stunned that he couldn’t recall thinking anything at all. At some point he’d realized that there were goblins in the clearing around it, talking and going through the middle of arch... and he could see, through the nauseating ripples, the sky and the sun and a place that was not the Deeps. And then he’d noticed that there was also a human there, a human girl who he remembered shuddering at the sight of, either because it was clear this arch-thing was her work or because she was obviously with the goblins. And then he remembered the girl suddenly whirling to look at him with green eyes that felt like they were killing him. And then the goblins had come surging toward them—had they been yelling something?—and he’d tried to run but he’d tripped, fallen, and known that it was all over in the instant he’d felt the cool earth beneath his fingers. The last thing he remembered was throwing his arms over his head as a hoard of goblins descended on him like frenzied animals with brown blurs in their hands (he thought they were weapons of some kind, although he couldn’t be sure) and the girl was coming behind them with a shocked expression and her mouth was moving but he was beyond interpretation.
The first thing he thought was, Why the Fire am I alive? If nothing else, he clearly remembered thinking he was going to die, right there on that soggy piece of earth. The second thing that came rushing in was, What in the name of all the High Gods is going on here? Then his head gave a sharp pulse that pressed the air from his lungs and he had to lay back down and stop thinking.
