Page 42

Many readers report becoming lost in a story, the mechanics of reading subsumed in unfolding events. Less commonly noted is the fact that we are all of us lost in our own stories from birth to grave, and likely beyond.

Taking Witness Statements: Metropolitan Police Handbook 6B , by ChatterPG AI code

Livira

Livira blinked. She saw nothing but whiteness. There had been writing too? But the dream left her, withdrawing its roots from her memory. The whiteness was a ceiling. Livira sat up, spilling bedclothes, and found herself alone in a bed in a circular room lined with bookcases.

She ran her fingers up into her hair, trying to squeeze the sleepiness from her head. The dream had seemed so real, and although she could remember no detail from it, a sense of urgency remained, as if she should be somewhere else, doing something important.

“I hate that…” She muttered the words to herself, still staring into nothing as if she might force the fleeing nightmare to unveil its secrets. But no, it was gone.

At the back of her head Livira’s hair seemed to end in a single shock, as if a great thickness of it had been shorn away with just one cut. Livira looked down at herself. She wore a plain white nightgown, thin with age and reaching down past her knees. It didn’t feel like hers. None of this did. The dream appeared to have been so determined to make off with its secrets intact that it had stolen most of hers as well. For the moment at least, Livira couldn’t remember what she was doing here, or where “here” even was. She stood, unsteadily, taking some small comfort in the fact that she had woken up with a similar confusion in the past, infrequently, and never this profound, but memory had always returned.

The path to the nearest window required that she negotiate her way over and around several stacks of books that seemed to have no place on the curving shelves.

“A tower…” The window afforded her a view of a heath and beyond it a line of sea where white-topped waves speckled beneath a grey sky. The view held her gaze for a long time, at once unchanging but all in subtle motion. At last, she drew away and returned to the bed, trailing her fingers across book spines. That at least felt familiar.

A book lay open on the bedside table, a picture book. The page showed a fairy-tale tower and in the single room at its top, a sleeping princess, a great length of hair coiled beside her bed.

“Sometimes the knight is too late.” She ran her fingers beneath the words on the page. “And the princess can’t be saved.”

The door to the room burst open, taking Livira’s eyes from the book. Had there even been a door? Filling the frame stood an armoured figure. A stranger, but one Livira felt she had seen before. A narrow twist of a man despite his blackened breastplate and chainmail sleeves. Eyes of an indefinite colour, and set slightly too close together, watched her from beneath the rim of a helm that doubled as a crown, each of its jagged spikes gilded. Somehow, she knew the forehead hidden behind that steel was large and pale and that behind it cruel thoughts multiplied.

The man took a step forward and she noticed the blade in his gauntleted hand. Soldiers crowded the space behind him as far as the stair’s curve allowed her to see.

“Amacar whore!” A snarl twisted the man’s mouth, and he advanced another step, raising his sword.

The first scream, distant and echoing up the spiral of the staircase, made him pause. The second and third made him glance towards the door. Sounds of fighting reached them, steel on steel, cries of pain and rage, and above it all, beneath it all, a roaring that made her would-be murderer’s snarl seem like a puppy’s first attempt.

“Stop him!” The king turned back towards the doorway, urging his troops to stand fast.

Stop who? Surely one man couldn’t be fighting his way through the dozens queued behind this familiar stranger who had come to kill her?

One man had no chance. And yet, with surprising swiftness, the clatter and clamour of battle advanced towards them, seeming to circle them, as if a lone wolf were running the perimeter.

Closer, closer now. The soldiers cried out in fear but the presence of the king at their rear prevented them from running.

The king cursed in frustration and ran metal-clad fingers down the length of his blade, setting black flames dancing along the length of steel. Livira felt the sucking void of those flames even from halfway across the room. This was why his men would rather die than retreat. However great a warrior was coming up those stairs, the flame would end them.

With a yank Livira pulled the topmost blanket from her bed, and giving herself no time to reassess her plan, threw herself at the king’s back. The jarring collision spilled both of them through the doorway and down the stairs. The king’s sword didn’t so much burn the blanket as decay it where they touched. The blade hit a soldier’s back, reducing him to bones and skin that tore like paper. At that point the king tripped. Both Livira and the blanket-wrapped king went tumbling.

The king, now swordless, crashed into the legs of another soldier and knocked him over just as something large and dark threw itself onto the man. Livira arrested her slide down the stairs with a groan. She managed to focus in time to see the last soldier stabbed half a dozen times before being tossed behind the oncoming attacker.

Uttering a guttural snarl, the warrior reached for the blanket covering the king. When he snatched it away…there was nothing, just the stone stairs and an abandoned sword, smoking gently.

The figure looked up. “Livira?” The bloody daggers dropped from his hands. “Livira? How are you here?”