Page 4 of Somber Prince

Darkness thickened around me, suffocating like a heavy blanket. It crackled with odd yellow sparks. The sensation of the energy gathering around me felt far more potent than anything I could compare it to. It skimmed down my arms, slid over my face, and coursed through my veins like a physical presence, invading my entire being.

At some point, a pink shimmer joined the gold. For a while, it got easier to breathe. I felt weightless, floating in light and shadows that curled all around me in the pink mist.

Then, the darkness flooded my vision once again, and the heat rushed in. The sensation of weightlessness was gone. Gravity tossed me down to the ground. Hot sand scraped my hands and burned my knees through my pajama pants.

The darkness thinned but didn’t dissipate completely. The night sky was above me. The bloated moon looked perfectly round, surrounded by twinkling crystals of stars among the feathery clouds.

I was outside. And I wasn’t alone.

“To your feet, human.” Someone yanked me up by my arm.

Disoriented, I tried to obey. I had no shoes on, and my socked feet sank into the hot sand. The carpet of our basement floor was gone.

Where was I?

The ground was black, just like the sky. Moonlight streaked the crests of sand dunes with silver.

As my eyes got used to the night, the dark figures surrounding me came into focus. Elaine was kneeling to my left. She patted the ground around her, likely searching for her glasses since they weren’t on her face. I spotted their metal frame twinkling in the sand in front of me and picked them up.

“Here you go, Elaine.”

“Thanks.” She put them on, getting up.

Melanie spat the sand out of her mouth, climbing to her feet too. “What the fuck is this shit? What happened? Where are we?”

“Alveari, the Kingdom in the World of Under.” The person who had helped me up spoke.

Slightly taller than me, the person was dressed in a peculiar garment. It looked like a piece of fabric held with a belt in the middle around the waist. Half of the fabric draped down like a skirt, reaching just below the knees. The other half was lifted over the person’s head like a cloak and secured with a clip around the head. The fabric opened in the front, allowing me to see the chest covered by bejeweled chainmail. It draped over a pair of breasts.

This was a woman, then? Though her deep, powerful voice could’ve equally belonged to a man. Her skin was as dark as the night around us, and so were her clothes. Her gaze skimmed over the three of us.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Take us back home.” Home… Where we left my dad lying on the floor. Helpless and alone. “I need to go home. Now.”

I whipped around. A hill rose into the sky behind me. As I watched, a faint golden glow died on top of the hill, swallowed by the silver moonlight. Rare patches of grass and black rocks littered the side of the hill. But there were no houses, no cars or streetlights, no town, nothing I would recognize.

Elaine grabbed my arm while Melanie spat and cursed, trying to get the sand off her tongue.

“Where are we?” I whispered, my throat closing with dread.

“I already told you where.” The strange woman’s voice was edged with annoyance this time. “I’m not wasting my breath on repeating the same things if you don’t care to listen.” She glared at me, then squinted, peering at my face. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Was anything right with anything at this point? But I brought my hands up to my face, quickly running my fingers over it. Other than the fine layer of sand covering every inch of my skin, my face seemed normal.

“What about my eyes?” I blinked.

The woman winced and glanced away. “They don’t match.”

“No. They don’t. Never did.”

I had heterochromia—one of my eyes was blue, the other brown. Most people commented on that when they first met me, though no one ever looked as disturbed or repulsed as this woman did. I had no idea how she even spotted my eye color at night or why it mattered.

I stepped toward her, fisting my hands to stop them from trembling.

“Will you explain what’s happening here? How did we get here? Who are you and what did you do to my dad?”

Dad.

The last I saw him, he was…

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