Sohrab stood on the threshold of the door and observed Kory’s shadowy figure sitting rigidly at the table, with little more than a red glow around her right arm to prove it was her. He moved in silence across the room, turning his back to her as he collected a glass full of ice for himself and another of wine for her. He slid into the bench on her left side and placed both glasses on the table, before retrieving the same bottle of vodka from earlier out of the pocket of his gray robe. There wasn’t as much missing from it as she imagined there would be. He poured some of it over the ice, and then slid the wine over to her.

  Kory took the glass by the stem with her left hand and took a tentative sip, eyeing him with suspicion. He didn’t seem phased by her wariness. “I thought you went to sleep,” she said.

  “I did… for a time,” he said as he stared thoughtfully at the flickering light from the window. “But I don’t keep the same schedule as most. There wasn’t any such thing as time on my world.” He plucked an ice cube out of the vodka and chewed on it.

  “What?” Kory questioned; her face scrunched in doubt at the bizarre nature of his statement.

  “Be that as it may…” he rambled on, facing her as he took her left hand in his. Were his fingers chilled from the drink or were they usually that way? “I’ve made up my mind to take yours somewhere else. It doesn’t take a telepath to see your pain, but one might help.” The effort and violence of the preceding day took a toll on Kory that went beyond the physical agony of her shattered arm. She opened her lips to protest Sohrab’s exhausting proposition, but he raised his right index finger to them before she could speak. “I’ll tell you about the time I was poisoned by my own people.”

  “That can’t be right,” she whispered, half in disbelief. Whether he was telling the truth or not, she had to give him credit for saying something so obtuse that she couldn’t help but forget her tangible condition for an instant.

  “I assure you; it was. Now close your eyes,” Sohrab said quietly, leaning in closer.

  “Why?” Kory retorted. An unsettling tingle crept down her neck.

  “It helps if you shut out all visual stimulus, so you can see what I want you to see.” The grip of his left hand around hers tightened ever so slightly.

  “But what if what you want me to see is dumb?” She teased; the hint of a smirk played across her face.

  “As dumb as I am?” He returned her wry glance with a disarming smile of his own, expending every ounce of effort to hold back the fire that raged behind his eyes. “But really though, Nash was much more trusting when I asked the same of her after she picked me up last year.”

  “That’s before she knew how shady you were,” Kory chuckled, enjoying the little parry and riposte ritual, playfully unaware his figurative blade was as modified to maim as her real one.

  “If you only knew the half of it.” He lowered his eyes before raising them again with an intentionally softened gaze. “Now I won’t ask you again, shut them,” Sohrab threatened gently, placing his right hand on the side of her face. He closed his own eyes and inhaled deeply, almost performatively. Kory thought better of talking back again and followed his lead, surrendering her mind to whatever vision he planned to impart.

  #

  You’ll remember, I’m sure, what little I told you of my world, on the night of the party. It seems like ages have passed since. There was the snow, thin and serene, never falling but somehow always there, underneath the perpetual lavender evening. Through the thicket where you left me, laid the rough little village, at the center of which stood the vainglorious, stone castle. I got my bearings for a few months among the poor and simple folk in their hovels. It took a while, of course, living with the peasants as I learned to speak without words, letting my hair grow out; a sacred thing to them. It's the only vestige of my culture I care to cling to. Once I deemed it long enough I ventured into the twisted ruin at last to find the answers I sought. Inside the massive halls lived what could only be described as a cross between medieval nobility and a cult.

  Day after endless day we all sat locked into the most tiresome of rituals, arm in arm, meditating, undulating, chanting with one mind for any hope of contact from our fathers out of time. They believed whoever had planted the seeds of their civilization was listening for them out there in the darkness. My off-world youth certainly sparked their imaginations. The collective trance states, the wine, the silent dancing; I’m not sure what the point of any of it was. Surely, they must have seen I’d be no help to them. At one point, a few of them led me to an ancient chamber below the castle and gave me some books that must have been thousands of years old. No one knew how to read them anymore. I certainly didn’t.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  These people, this tangle of lives, in the center of which I dwelt, were wholly obsessed with the idea that I was sent to save them, to bring them into the light after age upon age of waiting. Though how they measured these ‘ages’ I’ll never know. How do you suppose one accounts for time in the frozen twilight of a planet that never rotates? Perhaps, it was the passage of a lifespan that marked their eons. But you couldn’t, by any means, consider each life to have equal length or bearing. At least that was true of the one to which they chained me.

  I could tell she was doomed to die young. Sickly, unseemly, always one complaint after the other. One day it was her stomach, the next her head. Who could keep up? In a primitive world like this, there was no chance of her lasting long. Nevertheless, she was the only surviving child of whatever ruler they’d had before. The group seemed to hold the old dead man in high regard, so they propped up his homely, incompetent daughter for their unforeseen Prince from the Stars. How lucky I was.

  As I mentioned before, the time of our day was wholly without structure. Apart from our rites, eating, sleeping, and any other basic act could take place whenever we wanted. But I wouldn’t call it freedom. In the waking hours, our thoughts were not our own as we all shared one mind. Only in the refuge of sleep, could I dream alone at last. And in the later months, I dreamt increasingly of escaping yet again to the blessed darkness of the space between the stars, as lovely as your eyes if you recall.

  I must have spoken a word or two aloud in my sleep or otherwise had my desires spied upon, because the general attitude of the others grew sour, impatient even with my reluctance to commit myself to them wholeheartedly. Soon, the rituals became more frequent, more rushed, and more ceremonial in nature. At some desperate juncture they decided to throw a big party and crown me their king. The whole spectacle made me very withdrawn and anxious, and I’m sure they could perceive it. We were supposed to be as one after all, withholding nothing, not even a thought, not even a single emotion. It’s only natural my otherworldly longings were corrupting their peaceful existence. I needed every bit of what they had done for me, but it was not their place to know of the wider world. I couldn’t hold onto them forever, nor could I take them with me.

  In the chaos of the event, I slipped away but for a moment. My head was reeling, and it was getting hard to see. The twisting hallways and passages of the monumental tomb we inhabited closed in all around me. I recall my breath was shallow, when I finally burst forth into the cool air atop some deserted tower. The locator ring Nash gave me, I always wore, and never let out of my possession. I activated the beacon as I collapsed into the snow, nearly falling over the parapet and off the edge.

  When I awoke I lay not outside, but in a room somewhere deeper within the castle. Thankfully, it was not the great, central chamber where most of the nonsense occurred, but a private one with a large window pointing toward the lighter half of the sky. By some miracle, the ring stayed on my finger, with nothing but the occasional, invisible vibration to assure me it was still active. The temporary solace of my limited isolation proved to be meaningless as dozens of them filtered in throughout the following days. I was uncommonly ill, feverish, and delirious, and they never left my side nor let the crown fall from my brow, even as they wiped the sweat from it.

  For as long as I was sick, I must have been weak twice that duration. Once I was able to walk with help and even stand for a few minutes, they propped me up between two of the other men, draped the fine and threadbare robe from my coronation day over my shoulders, and dragged me downstairs to be married off to that dreadful thing they passed off as a ‘princess.’ In our moments alone, I never ventured to touch her. Not that I would have wanted to if I had been able. I know she resented the attention I showed to her attendant, the prettier girl with the green eyes whom I’d met when I first entered the castle all those dim years before.

  As my strength returned, I found myself wandering further from my betrothed’s cold bed and deeper into wherever else I preferred. It was after one of these choice encounters that the dark ring illuminated at last, meaning Nash’s ship was about to land. I slipped away, threw off the strange, kingly garb and donned the cloak of a peasant once more, sprinting as far as my body could carry me through those twisted woods, fully aware I might have been pursued, but unable to care either way.

  I found her right where she landed the first time. She sat on the ramp, covered in a blanket. The thought of some futuristic, traffic-laden city filled her with the same longing to be back in civilization that I felt. At once, I knew I’d made the right choice. Regretfully, you were not with her. But perhaps it was all for the best. I had forgotten we didn’t really bathe at all back there, a fact she reminded me of quite bluntly once we were underway.

  There’s more to tell, but I can feel us both fading. The night, artifice though it may be, is slipping away. Until next time, my dearest Koritsa.

  #

  With another deep breath, Sohrab took his hands away from Kory as they each opened their eyes. She met his self-assured gaze with bewilderment, as if this whole experience had been more for himself than her, and unfulfilling in spite of its duration.

  Her eyes absorbed every bit of the red light as they bored into his. “I have more questions than answers,” she whispered.

  “Then I’ve done it right,” He gloated, leaning back in his seat as he raised the now watery glass of vodka to his lips.

  “Yeah and thank you… for the wine too I guess.” Kory replied sheepishly as she again abandoned the half-full glass and slid out of the booth.

  “Feel better,” he said as she crossed the threshold.

  “Thanks, you too,” she trailed off.

  “Thanks, me too?”