Page 1 of A Touch of Stars and Stones
one
. . .
Ever
Lyle never looks scared.
She keeps her feelings, thoughts, and every emotion sequestered away, at least from me.
But not tonight.
I can see that her usually calm demeanour is rattled, betrayed by her wide eyes and ashen skin, reflecting how I feel.
The rest of the room comes back into focus around her, looking over me. Her pale blonde hair framing her in light, her eyes pinned to mine, the misty blue shrouded in fear.
I’m downstairs in the front room of the house.
On the floor.
The large table, which often overflows with items to trade and sell, is crooked. Its contents littered around me like fallen leaves from a tree.
“What happened?” I croak out, fighting to fill the gaps in my memory and remember why I’m on the floor. I raise my arm towards Lyle, asking for help, but she pulls back, and I feel it like a slap across the face, jarring me from the hazy recollections.
She’s never not held my hand or hugged me before. I’ve fallen plenty of times in the past, often climbing too high in the trees to the north of our cottage.
“I’m sorry, Ever. I shouldn’t have risked it.” She turns from me as confusion mounts in my mind, and as if I can summon a physical reaction to my feelings, the floor begins to vibrate around me—shallow quakes fracturing the ground where my hand rests as if answering a call.
It stops Lyle in her retreat from me, but only for a second.
My fingers dig against the stone, grasping for any purchase to anchor me.
“What’s happening to me?” I shriek after her, fear shaking through me with every shudder of the earth beneath us.
Fear grips me, tightening around me along with my confusion. The more I try to search for an answer, the harder the task feels. Flashes flicker across my mind with the mental strain, like a memory, perhaps. A dream, maybe. The images don’t make any sense. A man and a woman I’ve never seen before, their faces obscured through some kind of mist.
And Lyle.
And me.
My room. The sea, although I have never visited any of the market towns on the coast to the south, with blues so crystal clear, so vivid, they can’t be real. Nothing makes sense, and as I focus on the image of the ocean, grappling for more, pain erupts as if in warning, splitting through my skull.
Pounding. Beating me back into submission.
This is far worse than last time.
Several months ago, my dreams started to creep into daytime hours. I’d be dressing or cooking, and I’d be struck with visions. Images and glimpses at first, like seeing through a window into a different place. The pictures that flashed in front of me seemed out of a book—a fairy tale—until they merged into a nightmare.
After they faded, I’d be left bereft. Lost. As if time had skipped, and my mind had run away with itself on an adventure, leaving me where I stood.
When people visited the shop to trade, it was worse—as if their presence disrupted my thoughts, mingling with my own and giving my imagination room to play. Only, I didn’t think I consciously found these thoughts. They happenedtome.
I never told Lyle about any of it, not when there were no witnesses around me to vouch for my strange visions, my episodes. But then she noticed. She witnessed me struck, rooted in place by my mind, trapped in my body, unable to move and only able to pay attention to the scenes infecting my head.
She quickly snapped me out of it, but since then, she’s kept watch. As if anticipating—no—expecting it to happen again.
And it has. Only far worse.
The only home I’ve ever known has slowly grown into a place that holds trepidation, something I never thought I’d experience within these four walls.
