Nightmares Fade When The Sun Rises

Where am I? What time is it? Where is everyone? I’m scared. Mother, where are you?

Esda felt lost and confused when she walked through the castle’s long corridors. Usually there would’ve been lots of other servants and in this part of the castle even lords and ladies with their beautiful dresses that Esda wasn’t allowed to stare at. But now there was just Esda. And the long cold stone walls with an unnatural feeling of loneliness hanging in the air.

Esda looked out of one of the castle’s many narrow windows and found out that it was dark outside. There wasn’t even a single one torch burning on the wall and she couldn’t see any guards patrolling on the yard or up on the wall. It wasn’t right. Esda knew that guards couldn’t just stop patrolling! She backed away from the window trying not to panic. It was hard because everything just felt so… so not right.

Now when she thought about it, she had no idea how she had come onto the corridor in the first place. Why wasn’t she sleeping? She definitely should be abed. She started to hurry towards the servants’ sleeping places.

The silence of the castle was extremely disturbing. Even at night there should’ve been somebody. She estimated that it couldn’t be long till morning and the kitchens at least should have been full of noise, but even from there Esda found only a dead silence. It was like a nightmare and Esda started to be really scared, but she didn’t know how to wake up. It was too quiet everywhere. She started to run.

The room where Esda and her family and a couple of other servants slept was as empty as the rest of the castle. There was not even the smallest sign that anyone had ever lived in those rooms. She started to run around, from room to room, calling people with panic growing inside her small chest. She wanted her mom and dad and her brothers and Perla and even Biata who never gave her any lemon cakes even if there had been plenty of them! Right now Esda would have given all the lemon cakes there were in the world if she just had had all the people back. She wanted this loneliness to go away. 

While running around she noticed that in some of the rooms some tables where covered with glass craws. There were also shelves on the walls, all protected with glass. It was strange because behind all the glasses there was just some old and in most cases broken stuff. Nothing really valuable as far as Esda could see – cracked plates, rusty swords and unusable pieces of chainmail… Esda couldn’t understand why these things were here but it terrified her. It has to be some kind of sorcery, how else could the castle suddenly become empty? Besides servants always more or less knew what was happening in the castle and Esda hadn’t heard anything about covering everything with glass. 

Esda didn’t know what else she could do so she ran out of the castle. Maybe she could find somebody from the town, because a whole town just couldn’t vanish in the thin air, could it? Though apparently a whole population of a castle could, but Esda didn’t want to think about it. The thought that she could be completely alone was too horrendous to think about. What had she done? Why was she being punished? Why was she left behind when everybody else had vanished?

Outside it looked like the dawn was just about to break. Esda’s heart jumped to her throat when she finally saw another, real, breathing human being. A man was just stepping out of… something, that looked like a horse wagon except there was no horse and no shafts, but that didn’t matter. Esda was just incredibly relieved about seeing that she was no longer alone. She could have cried for relief. The man was wearing strange clothes, but Esda couldn’t have cared less. This was a human and she wasn’t alone. She went timidly closer.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, my lord”, Esda began. The man could have been a lord of some strange land and of course Esda wasn’t supposed to speak to her better unless they spoke to her first. This time she could happily take a risk to be hit. “I wonder where everybody is, sir.”

The man didn’t even look at her; it was like she hadn’t even been there! He just started to walk towards the castle yawning and sleepy look in his eyes. Esda tried again and again to get his attention but the result was the same. It seemed like he couldn’t even see or hear Esda at all! Esda stopped in the middle of the yard feeling desperate and scared. What was happening? Tears started to run down her cheeks while she felt like drowning into hopelessness. She could understand nothing and she feared that she was never going to see her family again. It was the worst feeling in the world, it was. She didn’t want to be invisible and alone the rest of her life!

She saw the first ray of sunlight creeping over the thick stone wall and suddenly everything started to fade around her. Or – she realized for her terror –  she was the one fading away. She felt so thin, she couldn’t hear anything and the whole world felt like melting. It was like nothing was real and she was the most unreal thing of all. She felt so light and her vision was steadily blurring but at that moment she realized she didn’t even care. Everything was grey, she was grey and couldn’t feel a thing. She wasn’t crying anymore, she wasn’t scared anymore, because nothing mattered, really. She was just… air. She didn’t cast a shadow and the sun was shining right through her… Then…

There was nothing.

And then…

Where am I? What time is it? Where is everyone? I’m scared. Mother, where are you?

****
Jei, piti nyt kirjoittaa vaihteeksi englanniksi because of reasons. Kuulisin tietysti mielelläni mielipiteitänne tästä pätkästä!