Shatterskin

by Beca Lewis

This was not at all what I thought I was coming to this dimension for, and now that I was here, I realized it was the last place I wanted to be. Dimension traveling was supposed to be fun and exciting. What was happening to me wasn’t either of those two things.

  I liked Suzanne on Earth. Here she scared the ziffer out of me. Either I needed to wake up from this nightmare or go home. Someone had to take me back. I didn’t realize that I was crying until Beru dabbed at my face with a napkin.

  “I don’t understand, Beru. What are they talking about? What are they going to train me to do? What am I going to learn?”

  “Fighting and magic,” she answered. “One you know, one you don’t.”

  “I don’t know either,” I said, now openly sobbing.

  “And that’s where you’re wrong. Don’t make me use my magic to get you moving. You won’t like it.”

  “What won’t I like, Beru? Your magic or your fighting.”

  “You won’t like either. Good thing for you, I am on your side. Even if I hadn’t been ordered to stay with you, I will. I will be with you no matter what, because my people are counting on you. All of the inhabitants of this world are counting on you.”

  “Nothing like making a girl feel welcome,” I mumbled as I followed her as she headed for another door off of the atrium. I hadn’t noticed all the doors before. How would I remember which ones to go through? Where did they all go to anyway?

  “Okay. Here’s your first training,” Beru said, stopping beside a fern that grew higher than my head. “Close your eyes. Say to yourself, ‘I see these doors. I know these doors.’ Keep saying that. Feel it. Reach out in your imagination and feel yourself inside the essence of the door. Let yourself know the door.”

  This was the training? Stupid, but not so hard. I closed my eyes and tried to do what she was telling me. Saying the words was easy, feeling the doors, not so much. How could I feel the doors? How could I know the doors? I heard Beru say that we were not moving until I experienced the doors. It made me angry.

  She hissed at me, “Feel the doors. Do it. Do it. Do it.”

  I got angrier. Beru kept prodding me until I was so mad I thought I would burst.

  “Use it, Hannah. Turn the anger into wanting to know the door and feel its essence.”

  At first, the anger just kept growing and I could feel it eating away at me. It scared me. It scared me enough that I decided to do what Beru had said. I imagined turning the anger around to serve me instead of hurting me. I used all the emotion the anger had created to know the door.

  Then magically all of the anger vanished, and I knew. “Open your eyes, Hannah, and look at the doors.”

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the doors differently. Each one was unique, and each one had a faintly glowing number on it. But I didn’t need to look with my eyes. I had already seen the doors in their true essence. I knew each door personally.

  “Why the numbers?” I asked.

  “The numbers are there just in case you need to call their name, but the numbers can’t be seen unless you’ve opened your mind to see them. Good job, Hannah.”

  I basked in the glow of her praise. For the first time since leaving home, I felt hopeful. Knowing the doors had felt wonderful. It would be amazing to know other things like that too.

  We walked through the door marked with a number three and headed down a dimly lit hallway. The low light wasn’t scary. It was comforting. I wondered if the lights would be brighter during the day. Not that I could see any lighting fixtures.

  The entire hallway was the light, including the ceiling, even though it looked like stone. I didn’t understand how that could be, but there it was.

  We turned a corner, and I saw another door at the end of that hallway. I knew it was my door, my room. I imagined a soft, cozy bed and realized that I was exhausted. A good night’s sleep and more training to know things in the morning, and maybe all of this wouldn’t be so bad.

  “Will all my training be like that?” I asked.

  Beru turned to look at me, and I could see the sadness in her eyes. “No. That didn’t hurt.”

  With that cheerful note, she opened the door to my room and after I walked in, locked it behind me.

  Ten

  When the lock clicked, my first instinct was to cry out and beat my fists on the door so Beru would open it again. But now that I had felt the life of a door, it didn’t seem like something I wanted to do anymore. I wasn’t sure if beating on them would hurt them. I knew it would hurt me.

  Besides, I was so tired my eyes were barely open. All I could focus on was the big cozy looking bed waiting for me. I chose to let the fact that I had been locked in not bother me, for now.

  What felt like only minutes later, the door opened and Beru, looking fresh and rested, was at my bedside shaking me. “Get up, lazy bones. Your first trainer is waiting for you, and she hates to be kept waiting. You have five minutes to get ready. Go.”

  “Bossy, bossy,” I mumbled as I stumbled into what I could see was a bathroom. Everything I could need in a bathroom was waiting for me. I brushed by teeth, splashed water on my face, found something I thought might be face cream and put it on my face, and brushed my hair back into a ponytail.

  There was no mirror to check what I looked like. I assumed that was on purpose. Looking down on a different body was freaky enough. They probably didn’t want me to see my new face.

  “That’s not the reason,” Beru said as I came out of the bathroom.

  “What’s not the reason?” I asked.

  “Why there isn’t a mirror in your room. You won’t find any mirrors in our section of Erda.”

  Seeing my puzzled look, Beru added, “He can see through them.”

  “He?”

  “The Evil One. Abbadon. He who wants to destroy our Kingdom while killing everyone who doesn’t agree with him, or look like him. Or what he used to look like. He appears different now. Or so I’ve been told. Seeing him is usually a death sentence. Only a few have managed to escape. Even then, they rarely live for long after that.”

  Beru kept on walking as if what she said wasn’t terrifying. I rushed to catch up wanting answers to all the questions in my head. However, one look at her face and I knew she would be giving me nothing. She would be answering questions only when she was ready to, and not a moment before then.

  I chose a safer subject and asked her what we were having for breakfast. Would we be eating in the atrium?

  Apparently, this was not a safer subject because Beru snapped at me that I wouldn’t be eating until after the first class and that the atrium food was not something I should expect every day.

  When I opened my mouth to say something, she interrupted me with a raise of her hand and said, “There will be water.”

  By then I realized that I had no idea where we were. We had not gone back to the atrium to find the door that Earl had told me to go through for the training.

  Instead, Beru had twisted and turned through hallways that all looked the same to me. Without her, I would be lost, maybe forever.

  Finally, Beru opened the door to what looked just like a yoga studio back home. I sighed in relief. Yoga, stretches, meditation. It all felt comfortable. I could do this.

  Beru started to laugh. It was a lovely laugh. All tinkly and stuff. But I knew she was laughing at me. I began to give her a snarky response until I saw something out of the corner of my eye. What I knew must be the instructor floated in. Literally.

  Still laughing, Beru backed out the door. But right before she closed the door, I saw her exchange looks with Miss Floaty. They were enjoying themselves at my expense. Right.

  This was not going to be pretty.

  *******

  Miss Floaty’s feet touched the floor as she walked over to me to shake my hand. The regular way. No sli
ding, wiggle fingers for her. Other than levitating across the floor, she looked as I expected her to look. Yoga clothes, sleek, strong, and more beautiful than anyone had a right to be. But I wasn’t planning to hold that against her.

  I had too many other things to worry about. Like this class. I had been taking dance lessons in the Earth dimension, so I harbored a hope that this class wouldn’t be too hard for me. Except for the levitation part. But I didn’t think that it would be part of these lessons.

  After shaking my hand and telling me her name was Aki she disabused me of that notion. Yes, I was going to learn to levitate. She said the word in a sarcastic voice which I took to mean that I had the wrong word for what she had done. However, she assured me, we would not be doing that today. She promised me that today would be an easy first training class, a warm-up.

  An hour later I staggered out of the room to find Beru waiting for me. “Today you get to have food before you go to your next class. You’ll need it.”

  Too tired to answer I followed Beru as she led me through another maze of hallways to a small room with a platter of food on it. She sat with me as I ate, but didn’t say anything and I didn’t care. All I could think about was trying to fuel myself.

  “Luckily your next class is about magic,” Beru said. “Otherwise, I am pretty sure none of that food that you are stuffing in there would be staying down.”

  The rest of the day was a blur. Beru was right. Food did not stay down. After the magic class where I didn’t understand a word of what the instructor said, everything else was a blur of physical torture.

  I didn’t even think about complaining when the door locked on me again that night. Who cared? Not me. I didn’t care about anything. I fell into the bed even more tired than I was the night before, and I dreamed.

  Eleven

  A blue haze hung around me. It looked like the haze I had seen surround the Castle. I thought it was fog, even though I had never seen blue fog.

  Now that I was alone with the haze, I had time to study it. It was not like any fog I had ever experienced. It didn’t move like fog or spread out like fog. It made shapes of itself.

  Once I realized that it wasn’t fog, it was as if it didn’t have to pretend anymore. It shaped itself around me leaving me feeling like a hole in a donut. Then it split into big bubbles that danced in circles. One landed on my head, and if it had been a person, I would have said that it laughed.

  I laughed, too. Who wouldn’t with a dancing blue bubble on their head.

  When my teeth started chattering, I realized that I was cold. Before falling into bed, I had stripped off the leggings and top I had acquired as I stepped through the portal hoping somehow I would get new clean clothes in the morning. I had found a large white shirt lying on my bed, so I had put it on. But that left my legs bare, and I was feeling colder and colder.

  I stopped laughing, and the blue haze pulled back. It looked just like water pulling back before a tidal wave. I screamed, thinking it was preparing to rush me, drown me inside of it. Maybe sweep me away. I wanted to run, but my feet wouldn’t move. I looked down and saw that my feet weren’t feet anymore, they were oval gray rocks.

  The haze rushed forward encasing me from neck to toe in a thick mist. If the rest of me had turned to stone, I couldn’t see. But I was shivering and able to wrap my arms around myself which I figured I couldn’t do if I had turned to stone.

  Within seconds I started to warm up, and I realized that the haze wasn’t cold. It was cold outside of it.

  “Where am I?” I asked the haze. There was no answer.

  A flock of birds flew overhead. It reminded me of geese, the way they fly in a V formation. But they didn’t sound like geese. One bird left the flock and headed straight towards me like a bullet. As it flew closer, I could see that it wasn’t a goose. It was shaped more like a falcon. It dove straight at me. I screamed again, but instead of attacking me it hovered in front of my face, grabbed the edge of the haze with its claws, and threw it at the flock overhead.

  Immediately the bird in front of me and the flock disappeared, and I was sitting cross-legged in front of a fire. A shadow handed me a stone cup filled with blue haze, and said, “Drink this.” The shadow’s voice was so kind and gentle I obeyed.

  I felt a warm cloud of mist move down my throat, and a deep heaviness came over me. I fell to the floor beside the fire.

  The gentle hands of the shadow covered me with a blanket, and as my consciousness seeped away, I heard, “Now sleep. It will be easier tomorrow.”

  *******

  When Beru came to get me, I was already awake and thinking about my dream. Was it my brain trying to work things out or was it real? Either way, I hoped the shadow was right about the day being easier because every muscle in my body hurt. My legs felt as if they had been beaten with a stick, which was true. They had been.

  Excuse me, not a stick, a staff. Not the kind that wizards carry. The type used as weapons, although maybe wizard’s staffs are weapons too. I haven’t met a wizard, so I’m not sure.

  My instructor yesterday looked like a gazelle on steroids. A huge graceful being who looked as if he could squash me with his hand. No need for a weapon. He was the weapon. I gasped and fell back against the wall when I saw him.

  Beru had led me to the training area and then moved away as fast as she could. I had wondered why until I saw Gazelle man standing there.

  At first, I thought he was a statue because he was so still, and his dark skin glowed as if he was carved out of marble. Didn’t take me long to discover that he wasn’t a statue because he threw a staff at me. Luckily, or maybe on purpose, it missed because I flinched as it came at me. It clattered to the floor. I stared at it. What was I supposed to do with it?

  He yelled at me to pick it up and then started running at me holding his staff by his side. I ran. Apparently not the proper response, although I still think it was the right thing to do. If you can run, run. “Not so,” Gazelle man told me after catching me and whacking me with his staff. “Today we are going to learn how to stand and fight.”

  At least I thought that was what he said because he spoke so softly it was hard to understand his words. He preferred to show me the fighting movements he wanted me to learn.

  Maybe because his moves were so far superior to his vocal communications, Gazelle man chose to teach by example. He’d demonstrate the proper stance, then point at me to do the same, poking me with his staff to move my foot, or hip, or back. He’d attack, and I’d cringe or run.

  He’d grunt, point, and show me what I should have done. By the end of the session yesterday, I had mastered one simple block and one way to hit someone with the staff if he was as slow as a turtle and blind as a bat during the day.

  I prayed that I wouldn’t be facing Gazelle man today.

  “Do you even know his name, or his history, or his race? Do you know anything about him at all, Hannah,” Beru asked me, once again proving that I was not good at shutting her out of my thinking.

  “No, don’t answer me. You don’t know anything about him or any of your other instructors. They are all here for you. To teach you what you need to know. Perhaps you could show them some respect and find out something about them.”

  I knew what Beru was doing. She was trying to make me angry enough to survive the day. She was volunteering to be the provoker.

  It was hard to see her that way with her sweet face and all that. But I knew she was much more than she appeared to be. Plus, she was right. I didn’t know anything about anyone. I didn’t even know where I was in time or space. I was in the realm of Erda in a castle on top of a mountain. That was all I knew. Oh, and they expected me to save their world somehow. From what? From whom?

  It was time for me to get some answers, and stop being such a wimp.

  Twelve

  When I walked in
to my session with Aki, I thought that the shadow from my dream might have been telling me the truth. There was a small table set in the middle of the room, along with a teapot and two teacups.

  Aki glided into the room a few inches off the floor and gestured to a cushion set by the table. I had been too stunned and tired the day before to notice my surroundings. Today I saw that the walls were lit the same as the halls, with an invisible light source. The floor was a polished wood of some kind, and there were scrolls hung around the room. They reminded me of some of the Japanese paintings I had seen in one of my school books. Did they mean something?

  “Today, Hannah, I am going to tell you a part of a story. You can decide if it is a fairy tale, or reality, or maybe a mix of both, as most stories are, you know. Since all stories can be changed or re-written, it will be up to you to decide what you want to do about it. That is, if you take it as real. Or find the meaning behind it.”

  Aki poured tea in both our cups and took a sip from hers. “Drink please; it will help you listen without falling asleep.”

  I did what she asked me to do, keeping my eyes locked onto her face instead of avoiding it as I had done yesterday. As I stared at her, I realized that there was something off about her. Her face was beautiful, but what made the beauty even more striking were her eyes. This was another example of my not paying attention since I arrived on Erda, because her eyes were hard to miss.

  As Aki put her teacup down and turned her full attention to me, she slowly closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they were the palest blue I had ever seen. Very freaky. Then, as she told the story the color of her eyes would grow brighter, or darker, and then fade again. I began to wonder if what she looked like wasn’t her true form. And if that was the case, what did she really look like?