Briar & the Dreamers of Midnight

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

My mother and father did their best to make me comfortable. Soft sheets and plump pillows. Lace drapes around the four-poster bed. A hidden tower of my very own in a secret location.

But none of that makes being helpless feel any better. I’m supposed to just lie here until someone comes to rescue me.

It’s been a long time since anyone came to visit me. I know that my parents would visit if they could. But since that horrible butcher murdered them and declared himself the Dark King, there’s no one to miss me anymore. I don’t know what happened to the other people I grew up with, but I know enough to know that they’re no longer alive.

I roll, tearing myself a little from my body, and begin the arduous process of pulling myself out. It’s like trying to pull away from sticky tar. It seems to be getting harder and harder to get out of my body these days.

I struggle and push, trying to keep the worry at bay. What if I can’t get out?

It took me forever and a day to learn to get out in the first place. It took me half of forever to even wake up. It was a little like becoming awake while your body was still cozy asleep, except that I couldn’t curl up or shift or roll onto my side. I simply became aware while my body slept.

I was trapped there for a long, long time. It felt like hundreds of years, but I learned later that it was decades.

For every second of my time trapped in my immovable body, I was desperate to get out. Desperate in a way I had never experienced before. I wanted to cry, scream, plead. But I couldn’t do any of that.

It must have been insane desperation that eventually got me to escape. When I finally did, I swear it was almost worse than being trapped in my frozen body.

It was a complete nightmare for a long time. I didn’t understand what was happening. There I was, standing over me. Was I a ghost? Was I dying?

No. My chest continued to move up and down steadily. I could hear my soft breathing, so I was still alive. I was still the maiden princess who fell asleep when she pricked her finger.

Aside from not understanding what was happening to me, I had another problem. I kept seeing the room as I assumed it would be in real life.

A lot of people these days don’t know that the original purpose of bed canopies was to catch the bugs that drop from thatched roofs. It was designed to keep bugs out of your sleeping space. Disgusting, no?

Well, my bedroom tower has a stone roof. But when I first “woke up,” and then eventually managed to get out of my still-sleeping body, there was a rotting pile of bugs on top of the canopy.

It stank. The weight of the decomposing bugs had soaked through the canopy for years. While I watched, the canopy slowly ripped, dripping squirming bugs and a brown mush of decomposing bugs onto my face and chest.

I screamed and tried to pull my limp body out of the bed. I couldn’t, of course.

I couldn’t even get a grip on my arm. My hand just went right through it. I was insubstantial—a ghost of a sleeping body, even though my mind was fully alert.

All I could do was to watch the canopy slowly rip and dump all that disgusting, squirmy goo onto my chest, my legs and, worst of all, my face.

I screamed and cried a lot in those early days. I probably went crazy for a while. Heck, for all I know, I could be crazy still.

Whenever I let myself think about it too much, I become convinced that I have gone mad. And who could blame me?

But if I spiral like that, I’m letting that fairy b***h who cursed me win. It was bad enough that she started the cascade that brought my parents to be murdered and dethroned. Everyone said they were good people and good rulers. They were certainly good parents.

It’s bad enough that I’m still suffering through this wicked curse. If I let myself spiral, I’d be letting that evil fairy win over my mind, over my entire being.

I can’t do that. I won’t do that.

She stole everything from me. Killed everyone I loved and took away everything I ever cared about. I will never give her the satisfaction of taking away my sanity.

So even in those early days, when things looked as bleak as could be, I survived. I held on to my fury and clawed my way back to sanity.

I discovered and created a new life. I made myself accept and think through whatever it was I was experiencing, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disorienting.

I learned to navigate the Dreaming.