The sole remnant of the collapsed world, I didn't have a body. Stuff around me was no longer ruined, but unfamiliar and rustic. I was indoors, in a room larger than our kitchen. Polished birch wood of the paneled walls glowed with the shades of sand and honey. Sunlight that streamed through the cast-iron grate of a glass-free window. Beyond it, a myriad of blue colors composed the sky, bright the way it only gets in the spring. Birds chirped nearby.
This place wafted such serenity!
So, Earth had either resumed its course after the catastrophe, or shifted onto another track, taking my consciousness along for the ride.
I grew up in terror of three men. Tsar Ivan the Terrible was the first. Our homicidal weapons master, Nikola, was the second. The third man in this trinity was my uncle, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii.
No! This knowledge wasn't mine. This was someone else's consciousness whispering things to me. It wrapped around my mind, entangled with whatever was left of me, like our souls were two kittens sleeping in the same basket. Separate, but not apart.
The person thinking so loudly in my mind was a brown-haired guy, shorter than average and slim.
I could have described myself in those same words, plus we looked about the same age. His clothes, though, were a far cry from ordinary. He wore a shirt embroidered at the collar, tied up with a wide belt, loose breeches stuffed into pointy-toed boots—of red leather. In short, his outfit was something a man who knew Ivan the Terrible personally could have worn.
In my timeline, the old-fashioned finery belonged on a movie extra. Except nothing felt like it came from my spacetime. The serenity of the atmosphere...
...Tsar Ivan the Terrible is seven years dead by Our Lord Almighty's designs... Nikola must be sleeping off his drink somewhere...
Serenity? What serenity? I was back to my normal, with anxiety rubbing me raw, even though it was his anxiety.
Maybe he was my sixteenth century reincarnation, and I was recalling my past life? Or I found myself in a parallel universe, in sixteenth century Moscow? My grasp of physics was far too tenuous to come up with a reasonable explanation on the spot, but after the world had ended, stranger things could happen, right?
Is the end of the world nigh?
This was the guy's panicked thought, bleeding into mine, as mine bled into his. I flinched from the doubled emotional load. I don't have a timetable for it, okay? Chill.
My admonition fell on the deaf ears, since the guy's tortured consciousness already dashed to the more immediate threat.
"Uncle Vasilii! Have mercy!" he cried.
Uncle Vasilii wasn't in the guy's head. He loomed over him and twisted the embroidered collar of his shirt into a noose.
"Why did you leave the Prince's side, Besson?" Uncle Vasilii screamed.
Prince? What Prince? The question zapped through my head to receive a lightning-quick answer from the guy—Besson.
Prince Dmitrii!
Well, duh! There was no time to confirm if Besson meant Prince Dmitrii, the unfortunate youngest son of Ivan the Terrible—also murdered, so authentically Russian!—but not by his dad.
Uncle Vasilii's cheeks popped out of his graying beard like Red Delicious apples as he raged, displacing everything else in my new world. "Addled I was to overlook your treacherous father's rotten seed! Addled and blinded by the love of my kin!"
YOU ARE READING
The Tetrachromat (On HOLD)
Historical Fiction||UMBRELLA ACADEMY x THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER|| In 2023, eighteen-year-old Grisha is upset over missing his admission to a prestigious Art Academy. Worse, he's drafted to fight in an unjust war he hates. In a fit of rage, Grisha rips his second-hand...
