Lucky

Chapter 4

Deaglan sat up straight in bed… and then lay back down almost immediately. His head felt like there were little men living inside his skull dancing on his brain, and his body felt like it had been racked, stretched out and then put back together. If it weren’t for the memory of what had happened just before he had woken, Deaglan probably would have rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. But no sooner was he awake, had everything that had happened – from the three-headed dragon to the oak tree eating him alive – come flooding back.

He sat up again, this time ignoring his body’s screams for mercy. His eyes shot open as he braced himself for what he was going to see. A part of him hoped that it was all just a dream… a nightmare more like it. It had to be, right?

But then his vision adjusted, he took in his new surroundings and felt this resolve fall from him like water through a drainpipe. It was real.

Deaglan was in a very strange bedroom. Circular in shape, it was roughly the size of his room back home; but that wasn’t what had him gaping. It was the walls, built from large chunks of grey stone like you’d see in a medieval castle. And when he paired this with the single wall hanging – a red banner featuring the silhouette of an animal he had never seen before – and the huge, wood carved four-poster bed that he was laying in, he thought that perhaps he was in a castle.

The room was shrouded in darkness, but with the single curtain closed up tight, he could still make out a slither of daylight trying to creep its way in. This alone told him that he had somehow slept all night, which meant that he could be literally anywhere. Heck, he could be on the other side of the world for all he knew.

Grimacing in pain, he swung his legs off the bed and got to his feet. The floor was covered in a thick woolen carpet; so soft that his toes literally sunk into it. Still struggling psychically, he hobbled across the room toward the single window with the closed curtain. He stifled a yawn as he grabbed at the curtain, braced himself, and threw it open. The second he did so, he wished he hadn’t.

How to describe what Deaglan was seeing? It was almost impossible and as he looked out his window, he found himself wishing he had about eight more sets of eyes, or better yet, that he had just stayed in bed.

It was the sky that caught his attention at first. Where it looked at first to be a natural blue color, the longer Deaglan watched it, the more he realized that it was actually closer to purple… or was it red… or was it pink? There was no sun, and there were no clouds, yet the colors seemed to shift and change before his eyes. He decided that it must be his headache playing tricks on him… but then he looked down.

Beneath him, and spread as far as he could see, was what could only be described as a city, although that was for wont of a better description.

It was a sprawling metropolis comprising what must have been hundreds of thousands of buildings and even more people than that. Beyond the city Deaglan could make out high walls built from white stone that surrounded the entire city. The stone used to build the walls literally glowed and sparkled, as if it had crystals embedded into the motor and a light was shined directly onto it. And beyond these walls were rolling fields, open, empty and limitless.

 The buildings within the city were a combination of medieval towers, fortresses and keeps of varying size – some as big as football stadiums, others the size of houses – and single to double story buildings of varying styles. But again, that is a vague, almost simplified way to describe what Deaglan was seeing. And the longer he gaped, the harder it actually became to quantify the city and what it really was.

The buildings were all possibly made from stone, although the colors varied from pinks to yellows to purples to greens and everything in between. They too shone and shimmered despite the lack of actual sunlight. The roofs were mostly slanted and tiled, but again the colors were a tapestry of varying hues. It was as if a child had found a coloring book of Camelot or something of the like and went about haphazardly coloring in the buildings at will, without care for style or consistency.