#5 - How They Caught Me

I don’t want to write about how they caught me.  It was her.  And the damned animals.  The dogs snarling at me, the cats fleeing me.  I only lasted a day.

I thought I was smarter than that.  I pled illness and they finally let me alone in the room half the size of my bedroom.   

The chapel door was still where it was in my room.  But nothing else was the same.  The windows had horrid ripple glass in tiny leaded windows. The city outside was a tiny town compared to the Innéthel I knew.  I could recognize the Hunter’s Cathedral though it had far too much blue and green on it… Demon’s Drowning colours.  But this so called palace of theirs didn’t even have walls to keep the stinking masses away. The gardens came right up to the palace walls and were open to the streets. Madness.

The clothing in the cupboards, bright and gaudy, every waistcoat a riot of colour and metal thread embroidery.  I had several such waistcoats but not in those colour combinations.  The worn scabbard of the sword hung on the hook by the door. Nothing like the Flamen. The books in the headboard of the peasant’s bed I’d woken up in finally told me what I had to know.

I was no longer in my own world.

I was in a Coalition… a group of countries that actually made up my Empire at home.  A world where the Demon was worshiped alongside the Tiger Master as his equal, as his wife. Such a twisted world. I found their image of my brand and realized what a fortuitous escape I’d had.

My brand shows the Flamen, the flaming sword of Empire within the box of oak leaves.  Their brand shows the sorcerer’s hand.  I wore a night shirt with long sleeves that covered up my brand and the self-inflicted bite calluses on my arms, thank the God.  I couldn’t make myself open the chapel door realizing I’d see their hideous female deity and her creatures and plants all as if they were sacred, painted on the walls with my God.

My much maligned, and I thought fictional, God.

A child’s history book, pulled from a shelf of nothing but books for children – did he read to his children in his own place, that other me?  Hold them as if they were anything but sickening little grubs that would one day replace him?

These people printed books specifically for children. Hundreds of them.  But.  It was one of those that told me what happened.

Two hundred years ago, what I know as the Mob Rebellion, or the Peasant Rebellion, take your pick, here was the Brother and Sister War, or the War of the Vote.  My esteemed ancestor, Ahrimiar the first, apparently never had a child.  The leader of the country was his sister.  A voted in Hand of the People.  Her child was the one, in my world, who became Emperor after Ahrimiar, as his son.

Was that man the boy’s uncle rather than his father?  Did he kill his sister and make the Empire?

Here, he never succeeded. She and her mob beat him and he is reviled in their histories as an evil man who would have stolen the vote.

I broke into a cold sweat.  How had I come here?  I woke up here! I had to hide from them, until I could get away, find allies, found my Empire here in this peasant world.

But it was the blasted war-cat and a pack of dogs that made Yolend suspicious.  I never knew she had truth-teller in her family.  That means she probably does in my world and I am in a fire of agony just thinking that she kept that secret from me, all those years.  The stinking duplicitous bitch deserves another beating just because she can see my secrets and never told me, never gave me access to that talent.

Ahrimaz put the pen down, pushed the heels of his hands over his eyes. They burned as though he could weep, though he hadn’t done so in years. His head felt heavy and the burning lump in his chest, that always lived there, blazed up hotter and his throat constricted.  He took his hands down from his eyes, sank his teeth into the pad of raw and ragged callus on his right forearm, then bit into the one on his left arm as well before forcing his palms flat upon the table and compelled himself to breathe calm onto himself. Control.  When his hands no longer shook he took up the pen once more.

In this world, she and Pelahir came back in, with a tray of food, lay down with me as though we were married… in this world we are married. I had double rings on my hands, same as them. They fed me with their fingers and I forced myself to be soft and feed them, relax in their arms as if they were helping me.  But I didn’t see the look she gave him and the next thing I knew I was trapped between them, them lying on my arms, he clamped the cloth over my face and everything went dark before I could kill them both.