The Thousand Kingdoms

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Unknown location

Hmm. There isn’t much blood.

Eleanor looked at the blade emerging from her chest. It didn’t quite register. Oh… there it is.

Copious blood began to flow from the edges of the wound, saturating her clothes. Pouring down her body to pool on the ground around her. She couldn’t quite lift her head, but she could feel it.

And then, along with that, came the pain, excruciating.

She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t take a breath. And everything was going dark so quickly.

She managed one more coherent thought, How did this happen?

One hour earlier

West 4th Street Subway; Greenwich Village, New York, USA

“Hey, don’t go down there. Charlie! Charlie!” Ella pleaded and with a curse watched as Charlie disappeared down the subway tunnel in a drunken stagger.

“Shit… shit… what am I doing? What the hell is she doing?” Ella muttered to herself as she gingerly lowered herself down the subway floor from the platform. The tracks were filthy with rat leavings, garbage, and who knows what else.

Whoever was at the opposite platform is getting an eyeful, she thought, as her dress rode up. Her heels made contact with the ground and she teetered for a moment before feeling stable.

Ella could hear Charlie singing off key, in a clearly drunken, slurred voice from the dark subway tunnel.

My love is very special, > If you want it, you can have it, > But don’t take me for granted…

Her tall, going-out heels made it difficult to walk, but there was no way she was pulling off her shoes while on the filthy tracks. Hyper-aware of the electrified third rail, she stayed far away and began to follow Charlie’s voice into the dark tunnel.

Ella kept her eyes peeled in case of an approaching train, looking for cutouts and other areas she could dive into if needed.

This might be the dumbest thing she had ever done. It was definitely the dumbest thing Charlie had ever done, and that was saying a lot.

As she went into the dark tunnel, the old sodium lights flickered on and off, periodically bathing the tunnel in a pallid yellow glow. Ella just walked, pulling out her phone to use its flashlight.

Eventually she saw Charlie, standing in front of a maintenance corridor. She was bathed in a whitish glow from the corridor at odds with the sickly tunnel lights. Charlie’s sequined dress was sparkling in the dark.

Charlie stood there for a moment, ignoring Ella’s calls, but then awkwardly disappeared down the exit. Ella hurried her steps to catch up, anything to get off the tracks.

The maintenance corridor was nondescript and dirty, the yellowed lights brighter than the non-functional tunnel’s lights. Ella could see Charlie further up, but she continued to not answer. Ella was going to kill Charlie after this…

The light got brighter and brighter as they got closer to what looked like an opening outside. Was it daytime already? They had left the house party at around two, so it couldn’t be.

“Charlie, this is dumb, come on, let’s go.” Ella pleaded as she came nearer to where Charlie had stopped, Charlie’s silhouette washed out by the bright sunlight.

No answer still.

“Charlie?”

Ella finally reached her friend and came alongside her. And stopped in wonder.

The exit led to a cobblestone pathway that meandered through bucolic environs. The trees were vibrant red and yellows. So vibrant it was as if Ella had never seen fall colors before.

The path wound through the trees and just beyond them was a picturesque bridge of the same stone, and past that… past that was a large castle, black and gold pennants flying from its towers.

Charlie grabbed Ella’s hand tightly, “Have you ever seen anything like this? Where are we? This isn’t New Jersey? Are there castles in New York?”

Ella couldn’t stop looking. The sky was blue like there had never been before. The rocks of the path were more real, more present, than anything Ella had ever seen before.

The castle was decrepit. The stones looked worn. Ella could almost feel the castle’s exhaustion seep into her. Suddenly, it was all too much. She felt overwhelmed by the vividness of her surroundings.

She didn’t know how long they stood there. It could have been minutes or hours. Then Charlie started forward, pulling Ella by the hand.

“Woohoo! Where the hell are we?” Charlie said loudly. Her voice slurring. “We must have been at the party later than I thought, if it is already morning.”

Oh right, Charlie was wasted.

Ella looked up to see the sun high in the sky. It was almost noon. But the sun was a bit too large and pale. “Something weird is going on here. Let’s head back…”

“No way! We are so going.” Charlie took off, pulling off her heels and moving quickly across the bridge. Ella struggled to keep up and fell behind as Charlie went right into the castle doorway. The path itself looked clean, so Ella eventually surrendered and took off her heels.

The castle itself had a drawbridge which had been lowered over an empty moat. They entered the outer gates and across a courtyard until they arrived at the inner castle proper.

As they entered a long hallway, with small hexagonal cutouts cut in the walls and ceiling, the rich ragged, floral patterned rug underneath continued to disintegrate as they stepped on it, kicking up dust.

It opened into a grand atrium, light shining from the ornate wrought iron and windowed ceiling above. The floor was a dizzying pattern of black and white and two large stairwells encircled the atrium leading to a pair of ornately decorated wooden doors.

“I’m going to be sick.” Charlie declared, and proved it by beginning to noisily vomit into one of the very fancy, very expensive-looking vases flanking the entrance.

Ella pulled Charlie’s dirty blonde hair out of the way and comforted her friend as she continued to sick up.

“Ella,” Charlie said piteously, “Don’t let me drink so much next time…”

“Charlie, where the hell are we?” Her voice sounded cool and calm which was not exactly how she actually felt. She didn’t know how she felt. Strange and alienated from everything. The intensity of the reality she was surrounded by continued to assault her senses. Even the stench of her friend’s vomit had a profundity to it.

Her feet just start drifting upstairs of their own accord. Charlie called something after her, but Ella could not bring herself to answer.

She rounded the staircase walking past moth-eaten banners and pennants. As she stepped up to the upper floor, the two beautiful carved ebony doors floated open silently.

Inside was a grand hall, set in black tiles, two candle-lit, golden chandeliers, each the size of a small house, hung from the ceilings. The flames cycled through colours before settling into a white that had no business coming from a simple candle. The shadows they cast were crisp and razor sharp.

And, against the back of the room, sat a large piece of quartz shaped into a large throne. A lone figure sat on the throne, leaning on a sceptre with what looked like a long quartz crystal on top. He was wearing a gold, tined crown which seemed to reflect the harsh candlelight right into Ella’s eyes.

The figure muttered something incomprehensible and when Ella’s look of confusion had barely touched upon her face, the figure waved a hand over its mouth.

“I thought it was over? Certainly, the clock has no mercy for the past.” Quietly spoken, in a voice that sounded, well, like anyone’s. Except that where Ella’s voice had been distant and oddly flat, the reverberations of this figure’s voice resonated right into Ella.

Ella froze, the odd feeling having brought her to the door warring with some implicit understanding that to respond, to acknowledge, was to take an irreversible step.

And yet that awareness wasn’t enough in the end, the odd compulsion drove her into the room, and she knelt to one knee, hand down, more gracefully than she had ever moved in her life.

“What is your name, young lady?” And this time the voice took on a cultured cadence. Like something from a 60s movie, that strange halfway accent between English and American.

Still looking down, she responded, “Eleanor. Eleanor Jindal-Witten.”

“Rise, young lady. The past weighs too heavily on you. I’ll not have it make you a slave.” The figure waved as if swatting away at a fly, and Ella shot straight up, the compulsion guiding her actions gone. Now fear held her straight, for when she beheld the creature sitting the throne, it was nothing human. Onyx black skin, prismatic crystal white slitted eyes that matched the sceptre, two small holes where a nose should have been, and no ears. The golden crown had an inset gem which almost matched the crystal of the throne and sceptre, but was slightly different, that slight difference bothered Ella more than it should have. The triviality of that detail snapped her out of silence.

“Who… what… where am I?” Her questions tumbled over each other. Her knees trembled some but the unreality of the situation maybe kept her from being too scared, she thought. And then she added the thought, maybe it is the molly, and… at least I am not peeing myself.

And the absurdity of that thought sobered her the rest of the way. Her senses shifted and were suddenly assaulted as she smelled decay and rot, the lights that were already so glaring became even more so, a keening that was just out of hearing became more present. The creature in front of her eyed her, his slit pupils dilating a bit and although she could feel her legs about to give way she managed to still stand.

“Young woman, how did you cross? We have been so lost, for so long… sleeping until the end, no returning should be possible.”

“Who… are you?” Ella whispered. The echoes louder than before.

“We? We are the old and forgotten king of many conquered lands. So long ago and so distant…” the voice faded to a whisper. But making Eleanor jump, the figure suddenly raised his voice, “and now, when we thought it was over, when we had slept for millennia, some child comes here. Why?”

Eleanor said, “… Sir, who… no, what are you?”

“Oh child, Eesha,” and the figure knowing her real name scared Eleanor more than it should have, given that even she thought of herself as Ella in her head, “you know so little and, well, one must make do. We… no, I am sorry.”

He took that scepter in his hand with a reversed grip. Ella realized it was not a scepter, but rather some sort of weapon, the crystal a long blade. She started backing up as he threw it at her, spearing her right through her chest and pinning her to the wall behind her. Pain blossomed and Ella tried to scream in pain but couldn’t catch her breath. Her vision began to fade quickly while the figure rose up and reptilian scaled boots stepped in front of her.

“Poor child…”

The next day (Friday, September 10, 2021)

Ella’s studio, Greenwich Village, New York, United States

Her morning podcast blasted from her phone startling Ella

A rash of deepfake photos of strange creatures has the internet abuzz! Tiktok viral craze or clever media campaign…

Ella sat there for a moment, not quite absorbing the words, but then memories of last night flooded in, and she shot out of bed gasping. Her hand went to her chest, and she could feel a sheen of sweat. She was still wearing the dress from last night, one heel dangling from her foot and the other lost somewhere in the sheets.

“What the fuck!”

After taking a few deep breaths and calming down, she looked at the clock, “Oh shit!!” She scrambled off the bed, ran into the bathroom stripping off as she went and rinsed off fast, brushing her teeth in the shower to get the scummy taste out of her mouth.

“OK, that was a real, bad trip… no more drugs for you girl.” she muttered to herself, toweling off and grabbing some jeans and a shirt before racing off to class.

She raced from the dorm over to the classroom by Washington Square, through the arch, across the pathways, jumping over some passed-out guy and a bit of hustle through a small cultural event, and she just made it in a minute late.

Soon, Ella stood at the front of the class to try and drum in an introduction to cosmology into the undergrads in front of her. Her mentor had left a voicemail to say “she had this”. This being her first week as a grad student didn’t even cross his mind.

After class, one of the students came up to her, the one she was pretty sure had a crush on her, “I like your coloured contacts, light grey is kind of weird, but cool.”

Ella had forgotten her glasses in her rush this morning, and hadn’t really noticed. Had she slept with her contacts? She didn’t own coloured ones. Ella pulled out a compact to look at her very light grey eyes, “yeah… ummm… just trying them out.” she said shakily, “I gotta go to the bathroom.”

She raced out to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. “What the hell?” poking at her eye trying to catch a contact that just wasn’t there.

“Ok. What is going on… shit, shit, shit, ouch.” She took a good look in the mirror. Her eyes weren’t light grey, they were crystal white eyes, they looked like prisms with faint rainbow hues.The white crystalline irises were surrounded with a dark line around her cornea separating them from the regular whites of her eyes. She had a sudden flashback to her dream last night and the strange figure that had stabbed her.

It took her an hour to calm down, before she went to the student eye center. They actually rushed her in without an appointment, and the doctor had her chin up on some brace thing and was shining a light on her eye.

“Damndest thing I have seen,” he said. “And you woke up like this?”

He had her read the chart: “PEZO… LCF… TD,” she rattled off.

Her vision was 20/10 and probably even better. She had never gotten better than 20/150 without glasses before.

Then he made her put her head on another similar chinrest and it had a large dome like thing. Small lights would flash and she would press a button when she saw them. The doctor yelled at her not to move her eyes when doing a field test since he couldn’t map her blind spot.

“There is nothing wrong as far as I can tell. Your vision is too good if anything. Are you sure you normally wear glasses? Normally I would think this was some sort of strange crystal deposition disease, something that I would have to look up. But then your pupils wouldn’t move and I would expect inflammation and cloudiness in the vitreous and, or aqueous. Ultrasound was strange though, like it was scattering, see this distortion here.”

Ella didn’t really follow what he was saying. The doctor was more talking to himself than her and he looked a bit shaken.

“I am going to order some blood tests and have you do an MRI. Want to check if it is some sort of auto-immune disease just to be sure. But I don’t think you should worry quite yet… Hmmm overnight iris depigmentation?” He kept talking, working through a differential diagnosis, but none of them fit.

Ella focused in on the part where he said he didn’t see anything wrong. Six hours later, she left with a preliminary negative MRI, a doctor very excited to write a paper on her, and a promise to come back to get her lab results back.

A thought struck her, and she ran back to the clinic just before it closed to get a contact lens sizing and an order for some colored contacts to hide her eyes. He handed her a few samples to start with. She went with hazel, because why not?