Protagonist Bound (8 page)

“Not bad, Crisa, but you’re overreaching with your strikes again. You need to learn to stop overestimating the length of your sword and quit doing so many of those swooping motions. They aren’t effective and leave you wide open.”

“Right. Got it.” I nodded as I swallowed my ever-injured pride.

Blue and I practiced for another half an hour and evidently I did not “get it.” I made the same mistakes over and over again throughout our drills. As a consequence, I found myself repeatedly landing on my butt in that same pile of hay.

I could not describe how frustrating it felt to not be as skilled as I would’ve liked to have been at this. Overall, it just really burned on the inside to not be good at something you loved.

You know?

Still, even if I was not the best at sword fighting, I was at least fairly skilled at it. And (my low level of raw talent aside) I adored the practice. I didn’t care how unladylike or non-princessy it was; fighting was fun. If anyone disagreed, well, I would have been more than happy to fight them to resolve the issue.

Wand
.

I restored my trusty, magical friend back to its original form and placed it in my satchel. I had a couple more classes that afternoon and it was time for me to make my way back to the main grounds.

It was always a bit disappointing to leave the practice fields but, as it turned out, the second half of my classes went just as smoothly as the first. As a whole, it truly did end up being a productive and unusually pleasant first day of school. Frankly, it was an unusually pleasant day at Lady Agnue’s in general.

Too bad unusual things aren’t known for lasting that long . . .

Unexpected Unpleasantries

or most people, sleep was a time of rest and rejuvenation. To me, sleep was a time of exhausting burdens.

Every night I went to bed wondering what fresh torment the night would bring. And in the mornings, I found myself feeling slightly jealous of Mauvrey’s mother. What I wouldn’t give to sleep like a rock for a hundred years. For maybe in the depths of a Sleeping Beauty-like slumber, I could finally find some peace, a break from the otherworldly visions that haunted me on this night like they did on so many others . . .

The air was cold and dry, and the wind was blowing hard without repentance. Such weather made it feel like I was standing in a barren desert in the throes of wintertime. However, in taking in the surroundings, it soon became obvious that the atmosphere did not correlate with the setting. Despite its deteriorated state, it was evident that the place housing these environmental conditions was not some sand-covered wasteland, but a sort of cynicism-laden metropolis.

Cement sidewalks everywhere were riddled with plastic wrappers and lined with dirt and sewage. Streets were packed with metal, horseless carriages that honked angrily at one another. And the only sign of nature was a limp tree planted by a gray building. This tree was skinny, dusty, and enclosed by a fence feebly trying to protect it from the outer world. The poor thing was so badly withered that I didn’t know what kind of tree it was supposed to be. I wondered if maybe it didn’t remember anymore either.

On the stairwell adjacent the tree, sat a girl. Her hair was a curly, maple-colored mess, put up in a haphazard bun. She wore black pants and a white collared shirt that needed washing. Her shoes arguably had more scuffs on them than the aged strip of sidewalk between us.

The girl sat motionless at first—her brown eyes lost in some distant nothingness. There were two slips of paper in her hand. One was pink and official-looking, and the other was a piece of notebook paper. After a few moments she shoved the pink one into her pocket and re-opened the white one, which read:

“Natalie, let this be a lesson to you. Get in my way again and a job won’t be the only thing you lose. —Ever Yours, Tara Gold.”

The disheveled girl wiped a stray tear from her eye with the back of her hand. Then she grabbed a tan backpack sitting next to her, got up, and went inside the building she’d been crouching in front of.

The worn yellow hallway she walked into was cast in looming shadows. Sounds of babies crying and the aroma of burnt pasta filled the space, but they faded away as she made her way deeper through the corridor. Eventually she came to a door marked “3C” and entered by means of a rusty key pulled from her pants pocket.

Wordlessly, she entered an apartment in such a horrid state that it would have made grown men cry had it been forced to be their home. The carpet was worn green shag, which may have been elegant once but now looked like the fungus between a giant’s toes. Shelves of books and faded paintings in cracked wooden frames lined the walls, collecting time in the form of filth.

There was no natural light, except for a few streaks that came in from behind a boarded-up window in the back. But even those rays offered nothing but dreariness, as they simply allowed you to more vividly recognize the lint dancing in the humid airspace.

The girl, whose backpack had the name
“
Natalie Poole” sewn into it, stopped when she arrived at a ragged bedroom at the rear of the apartment.

The thick maroon curtains of this room were drawn shut and there was dust collecting on the few knickknacks decorating the shelves—among which was a picture frame made entirely from popsicle sticks. The frame held a worn photo of the girl, a man in his early forties, and the woman lying on the bed in front of her. This woman looked old and tattered like the apartment around her, but she had the same vibrant shade of hair as Natalie did, give or take a few gray streaks.

Natalie sat on the edge of the bed, but the woman did not open her eyes. She was asleep, but breathing slowly and with great difficulty. Her eyes were scrunched up tight like a child kidnapped by nightmares.

Delicately, Natalie took the woman’s hand in hers. The two sat in silence for a few minutes while Natalie traced the pale red flowers on the crème-colored bedspread with the fingers of her free hand.

Eventually, Natalie stood up. She walked closer to the aged, wooden headboard then bent over to give the sleeping woman a kiss on the forehead.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered into the fading woman’s ear. “I got fired today. But I’ll get another job. I promise.”

Natalie began to head for the door of the room, but stopped short just before leaving.

“I love you,” she said, her voice shaking.

The tears built up in Natalie’s eyes, and she dashed out of the apartment just as they became too much for her to hold back. Sadness streaming down her face like rainfall, she ran down the hallway and collapsed to the ground under the weight of the world.

“Time to get up,” someone called to her from a distance.

She didn’t respond.

“Time to get up!” the voice shouted louder this time.

The whole room abruptly began to tremble and for a second it felt like it might crumble right there with the tormented girl trapped inside it. But then, just as suddenly, my eyes burst open and I re-entered the world of the living.

Blue was standing next to me in her turquoise bathrobe, shaking my arm.

I bolted upright and gasped for air like I had been underwater. “Where? What?”

“It’s time to get up. It’s almost eight o’clock. Classes start in, like, twenty minutes,” she said.

Comprehension clicked in my brain and I jumped out of bed to head for the bathroom. I guess the rush was far too sudden a movement though, because I stumbled almost immediately and had to stop and lean against my desk to regain balance. The whole room seemed to be spinning. My head felt like I’d left part of it on the pillow somewhere behind me. Only then did I notice how cold I was despite the fact that my pajamas were soaked with sweat.

“Crisa, you okay?”

I turned slowly and stared at my friend hard—willing my vision to return to normal. Thankfully, after a few seconds she came into focus again and my dizziness faded away as quickly as it had come on.

I stood up straight and surveyed the room as if I was only now properly awake.

“Which dream was it this time?” Blue asked plainly.

“Natalie again,” I sighed.

Blue nodded. “Sorry, that’s rough. But hey, at least that’s better than one of your, you know, darker dreams, right?”

“Yeah, but those are at least vague. The Natalie dreams feel so much more resonant, and lately . . . I don’t know it feels like she, like
they’ve
been getting worse,” I grunted, shaking my head.

They’re getting clearer too
, I thought, but kept myself from saying it out loud.

“You want to talk about it?” Blue asked.

“No,” I responded like I always did. “I’m fine.”

My friend nodded once more and then patted me on the shoulder as she returned to the bathroom to finish getting ready.

When she had gone I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

SJ and Blue knew all about the vivid nightmares I had suffered from for years now. Even so, I still didn’t let them see just how great an effect they had on me, or share too many of their details.

The broad perspective, which they were aware of, was that my dreams could be broken down into two categories:

The first half of them took place in a world that was strange and that I didn’t recognize in the slightest. It was nothing like our realm, or anything else I had ever seen before either. Most of the buildings were gray and metallic and stretched to the sky like iron giants. The people in these dreams dressed plainly—fading in with the background that surrounded them. And there were all these tiny, shiny devices that made noise constantly and never seemed to leave people’s sides. Overall, it gave me the creeps.

The subjects of these dreams were always suffering at the hands of horrible people and circumstances. None of them had ever made a second appearance, except that one girl. Natalie Poole. Over the years she had become a far too frequent and unwelcome visitor to my subconscious—especially lately, given that dreaming about her was like watching a private performance of a tragic play with absolutely zero comic relief to get by on.

While I didn’t know what kind of place my imagination had intended Natalie Poole’s world to be, it seemed that the second type of nightmares I suffered from consistently chose more traditional areas of Book for their subconscious settings.

It was true that I had no way of verifying this as I never saw the visions clearly enough to guess at specific locations. But every once in a while, I would register buildings or forests or mountains that struck a chord of familiarity.

Furthermore, it just felt like Book. I wished I could have explained it better than that, but after years of trying and failing to articulate a more acceptable reasoning, I found that beyond gut instinct, there was none. I just knew these dreams were based in Book as surely as I knew that the ones featuring Natalie weren’t.

In retrospect, this second type of nightmare I was tormented by should have been a lot less off-putting than those of Natalie’s gray world. These dreams were in places my brain understood. And since they were way blurrier than my dreams of that metallic city, they shouldn’t have bothered me as much. After all, how could I be upset by fictitious, nocturnal glimpses of people I didn’t know saying and doing things I didn’t understand?