Author Games: Golden Age

Entries Striking

Please note that the chapter title doesn't have any correlation to the substance of the entries; we simply strived to relate it to the task title.

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500 BCE: Alba Minor

NO ENTRY RECEIVED.

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250 BCE: Ishani Pemmaraju

There was trouble in the air the day after Kanwalinder's betrothal.

Some might have called Ishani a worrier, a nag who jumped at shadows and never learned to walk the sensible roads of thought like an adult. Deep down, she herself wondered the same things on more than one occasion. After late nights when she awoke at dawn, the slender line between nightmare and the first few hours of the day frayed. Eyes heavy with weariness picking up flickers of light invisible to the servants.

It was always on those nights when she had the dreams. Dreams like the ones that had woken her an hour before sunrise, gasping for breath.

Ishani slipped out of the house, closing the door behind her with a careful click so as to not disturb the rest of the household. The light of dawn was all but obscured by dark, oppressive clouds, leaving barely enough illumination to guide her down the well-trod path to the morning market. Moving more with memory than eyesight, Ishani stepped over a gnarled root and ducked beneath the low-hanging branch of the courtyard's frangipani tree, leaving the courtyard and closing the gate behind her.

Though she knew she could always arrange for a servant to do the day's shopping for her, Ishani preferred to go about this particular chore herself. Her husband handled the finances of the entire empire— what sort of wife was she if she couldn't manage the spending of a single household?

A step, a hop to clear the worn rut of the road; she moved on autopilot, her mind drifting of its own accord away from her path and towards the events of the night prior.

There had always been a difference between her usual dreams and the nightmares. She could understand the surreality of the mind asleep; she had once believed for a good two hours after she had woken up that her husband had bought her a pink elephant as a gift, to the point of panic as she wondered how on earth she would manage to keep and feed such an animal. Even if she never experienced them herself, Ishani understood nightmares as well; the women she spoke with as a girl had mentioned dreams of pursuit and public humiliation, of abandonment and drowning and attack by any number of wild beasts.

It had not taken long for her to realize her nightmares were not the same as those of her friends.

Still not focusing on her destination, Ishani sidestepped a flower seller, waving away the shrill cry that promised blossoms of the highest quality for a fine woman like herself. As was always the case in her nightmares, she was tiny and surrounded by giants. Patches of harsh light and shadow alternated between blinding her and hiding her surroundings as she was taken by the hand and led down a hallway, the floor impossibly smooth and chill to the touch. The giants spoke with each other and to her in a harsh tongue full of sounds she was incapable of replicating while awake; while asleep the meaning of their words was clear and terrifying, even though the significance slid away when the dream ended. She entered a pale blue room with a shining device in the center, and a hum unlike anything she had ever heard upon waking drowned out other senses in a haze that jumbled sight and sound and touch. Ishani dissolved in the light, losing all sense of herself and crying with the shrill voice of a child with just enough reason to know fear.