Constance of Arinsia Chapter 1

-Prologue-

What makes a dream a dream? You might argue that the tendency of a dream to be of the extraordinary or fantastical variety is what separates it from reality. But then, what is reality? You might think you know the answer to that too, rather than questioning you assume that what you have experienced your whole life is all that reality is. You assume all this, but trust me; you haven't seen what I've seen. I'm here to tell you that you, or anyone else for that matter, have not got it all figured out, far from it. Let me help you out a bit, you might want to find a good chair and a warm fire because this is going to take a while.

Being that I'm a teenager, you are waiting for me to tell you that I was painfully regular, living a monotonous life in some suburb in middle America with a couple goofy friends and an annoying little sister, but this just isn't that kind of story. My friends call me Tony, but my real name is Antonio Percival Gates-Jones; one old as dirt middle name, and two ridiculously hyphened together last names. I have only my parents to thank for that gem, but after getting through the initial ridicule from my schoolmates about my name (it was about 3^rd grade when they finally realized it was out of the ordinary) I have come to accept it. I really can't hate my parents to much for my name; they have more than made up for it by doing what all teenagers like by leaving me the hell alone. Sometimes I don't see either of them for weeks at a time, and that is all right with me. No they aren't deadbeat parents out doing crack while I sit at home in a trailer, rather the opposite. My parents met on the set of the first movie either of them acted in, they were both extras in the movie Lethal Weapon 2. Three days later my father, actor Justin Jones proposed to fellow actor Abigail Gates, my mother. Five years later both their careers had blossomed, my mother had been nominated for an Academy Award, and even more important to me they decided to have a child. That's where I come in.

Since I can remember, anything I ever wanted or needed seemed to always be at my disposal. Not until I grew up a bit did I understand how money works, and that I had more than I could ever need. Now I know what you are thinking, my life must be so rough, being a spoiled little brat; but it wasn't like that at all. I didn't throw tantrums or verbally abuse housekeepers, I was taught better than that. So I left well enough alone, and I soon learned the more well behaved I was, the more my parents, along with their Personal assistants  and other hired hands left me alone. So I lived my affluent yet normal life, and I got to age 17 in a relatively normal fashion.

-Chapter 1-

 

When babies wake up at night, they cry. When they grow into toddlers and gain the ability to walk, they wake up, cry, than go to their parents bed. Then when kids outgrow that, they morph into teenagers who's only thought at all hours of the day and especially the night are the opposite sex, and how much better off they would be in the company of a significant other.  What this tells me is that from the time we are born until the time we die, people don't like sleeping alone. I won't lie and say that I am different than the average person, but I had gotten used to sleeping alone. I can't remember when I was a baby, but I can only assume that my parents were good and came to sooth me when I cried. What I do remember is being a toddler, about 4 or 5, and noticing my parents being around progressively less time each month. It wasn't as if the novelty of having a child had worn off, but my parents had work to do, on different movies, and in different locations. Rather than deciding whether Chicago with mom or Orlando with dad was the best place, they decided staying home, where I was used to my surroundings, was the best idea.

Like all little kids I had nightmares of the monster variety. I can still remember the genuine terror that I felt when I would awake from a nightmare, convinced I was going to be snatched up by a witch hell bent on throwing me into a burning cauldron. I had a great imagination as a kid. After convincing myself that it was safe to let me feet touch the icy floor next to my bed, I would tip toe through my room, gingerly turn the door knob, and make my way down the hallway to my parents room. The first couple times I did this, I was expecting them to be there, I didn't want to be alone. The first couple times I also forgot that they were both gone, and I opened their door to find a neatly made bed with no one in it. Not wanting to go back to my own cursed room, I would shut the door behind me in order to keep out any demons on my tail, and crawl up onto their bed. While it was calming and I would soon fall back asleep, I was also unconsciously conditioning myself. Soon I sought out my parent's room knowing that they wouldn't be there; I instead just wanted the respite from my own room which I was sure was full of dark spirits. Vita, the nanny my parents had hired to look after me, was positively hurt that I hadn't sought her out when I was scared at night. She assured me that she would comfort me if I was ever scared, that I didn't have to be alone. It was nice, but it was too late for me, I had already learned that I didn't need somebody. Soon enough I grew out of even being afraid of my own room, and into my ability to cope with things on my own.

It was summer, and I had a pretty fool-proof system that maximized the potential of summer to be as carefree as possible. Being a teenager, it is almost mandatory that I sleep until at least 10 o'clock, and then lay in bed another hour after that on my laptop doing what teenagers do, wasting time. A late breakfast consisting of the always healthy iced tea-bowl of cereal combo, a shower concert for the capacity crowd of zero in my bathroom, and I was ready for anything.

August 4^th I woke up the same way I did every day; the blankets had fallen off of my bed and I had become cold to the point that it woke me up. I had no way to prove it having never watched myself sleep, but I must thrash around violently as if I'm attacking something. That must be how I got over being alone as a small child at night, maybe when I slept I flailed so that anything that could possibly come close enough to hurt me would catch a rogue foot in the face and be deterred.  I rolled to the edge of my bed, decided it wasn't worth it to expend the energy to re-cover myself and rolled to the center of the bed on my back, looking up at the ceiling. The sun through the skylight told me it was another sunny day in Los Angeles and I mustered up what energy I had to get out of bed and stumble down the hall. I passed by the closed doors of my house that told me I was alone, like I do every day, and lazily scratched at my stomach as I carefully navigated the stairs to the bottom floor in search of food. Vita didn't have to stay at the house anymore because I had been able to take care of myself since I was 13, so she just showed up for an hour to make sure I hadn't died, and to clean what little dishes or laundry I had. She had given up trying to make food for me, because as I was afforded the luxury of her buying any food I wanted from the grocery store, my diet spiraled into microwaveable foods and chocolate milk. As a last gasp of protest at my eating habits, she kept a fruit bowl stocked with the fruits that I occasionally ate, allowing her to justify her not making me a balanced breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.

Vita came earlier than usual that day, and she clucked her tongue at me as she observed my breakfast, a mixing bowl filled with honeycomb and milk, and ice tea straight from the gallon jug it came in.

"Tisk Tisk little Tony. You know what? Maybe one day I'll stop buying all that sugary crap and all you'll find in the cabinets will be dried fruit and wheat bread, what would you do then?" She queried in her trademark Vita exuberance as she capped the milk and put it back in the fridge. "You'd wither away to nothing, that's what would happen."

"I'm not that unhealthy Vita, how could someone so healthy look this good?" I replied, adding my trademark muscle flex to reveal my less than muscle toned arms. "And I was going to put that away." I took a generous swig from my iced tea and brought my bowl over to the sink.

"And I was going to actually stop buying you all that crap," she winked and scoffed, "As if I would sabotage the world's easiest job." Vita and I had a running joke going that taking care of a house with basically one inhabitant and doing an hours-worth of work a day, if that, had to be the easiest living ever made. So easy that we decided she was basically robbing my family, and we would always joke about what her life would be like in prison. I would always tell her I was going to start throwing garbage everywhere and asking her to make me 5 meals a day so that she earned her pay, but we both knew I was joking. I had a soft spot for Vita, she had been around since I could remember, and I knew that she wouldn't mind doing more. At the same time, I barely needed the help that she gave me so the happy medium for us is the one hour she spends with me per day.

"You do remember I have my license and a car, right? I can do my own shopping and you could just retire to the countryside." Now I was just begging for a fake fight, but Vita didn't seem too keen on squabbling so I kissed her on the cheek and retired to my quarters to take a shower.

After completing the morning ritual of a good scrubbing in the shower, I dried myself off with a towel in one hand while checking my phone in the other. There were the obligatory texts from both of my parents, both on location god knows where, giving me updates and dates of arrival, departure and so on, I have learned to generally skim and forget these. A couple of friends asking me what was going on, most of them just looking for somebody to talk to during work, something I was able to avoid because of my own financial situation. The only thing left to see was a missed call from my grandfather, which I pretended not to even have seen. Better to make an excuse for not returning a call next time he shows up at the house then to return his call and spend 45 minutes explaining how to un-pause the tiVo he was playing (my parents idea of a Christmas present that only served to add another remote to confuse him even more).  As I put my phone back on the sink and turned to go get dressed, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. From my second floor bathroom it is possible to see the front gate to our driveway, and something was different about it. I turned and took a couple steps towards the window, and I could see the outline of a figure on the other side of the gate. It was at that point that I slipped on some water that had pooled on the tile floor of my bathroom where I was supposed to have put some sort of rug or towel, but had forgotten to.

I didn't know how long I had been out, it could have been a couple seconds and it could have been a couple days. I was lying on my back, I knew that, but I had yet to open my eyes to assess what else had happened while I was out. I had momentarily tried, but the light from the bathroom seemed to have become brighter than my eyes could handle. I reached out my left hand in search of the edge of the shower, but instead I found air. In the downward path of my hand that had apparently missed the edge of the tub, it landed on something soft, almost spongy. At first touch, I was puzzled, but then I realized it must be the mat that usual is outside the shower that I had failed to replace. I used the floor to pull myself up and that is when I first felt the searing pain in my head. My pulse pounded in my ears as I reached up with my hand to my forehead where the majority of the pain was to assess the damage. My fingers found what I was sure was a gash, and as I pulled them away I was sure the liquid on my hands was blood, I shielded my eyes from the light with my other hand while I opened them to see if my assumption was correct. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that I was right; I must have smashed my head off the counter of the sink because my fingers were smeared with blood. As my eyesight grew better, the gash on my forehead and the blood seeping out of it suddenly became the least of my worries. The tiles of my bathroom had somehow turned into grass. A neck cracking swivel of my head confirmed what was becoming an increasingly strange turn of events. I wasn't in my bathroom anymore; I instead found myself in a grassy meadow.

The blinding light that was supposed to be the light of my bathroom was the sun, which was still to blinding for me to look at or around. As a gentle breeze danced across the meadow that I found myself in, I was taken aback by the beauty of the setting. The grass was short, but not like someone had mown it; short like someone had taken the time to use a scissor to cut it all but not enough time to make sure it was all the same length. And if someone had actually cut the grass in the meadow, they had left a good amount of long, thinly stemmed daisies to grow. They bobbed and swayed in the wind like synchronized dancers in a beautiful ballet. It felt oddly peaceful in the meadow, and after about half a minute of observing the dancing flowers I noticed something else, I had clothes on. Not the standard t-shirt and jeans combo that comprised my usual wardrobe, but strange clothes I had not ever seen before. I was in a gold jumpsuit of some kind, of what material I didn't know. It couldn't possibly be a regular fabric, as the reason I hadn't noticed my new clothing before was that it was light as a feather; I couldn't feel it on any part of it on my skin even as I bent and extended my arm to examine it more closely. Though I was sitting out with no shade, the gold fabric wasn't reflecting the sun, rather the shimmering cloth was soothing to my eyes as I further examined my new digs. I wasn't quite done examining these alien clothes I had found myself in when my attention was called elsewhere. The steady gentle breeze in the meadow had stopped and it was eerily quiet. Just quiet enough for me to hear a steady thumping on the ground in the distance behind me. I may have never lived on a farm, but I had accompanied my father to the set of one his films, Open Range, and I knew what the hooves of a four legged animal sounded like when they were in full gallop. Whatever it was that approached was getting closer, and even though I still couldn't fathom where the hell I was, I wasn't about to let myself be run over, so I stood up and turned to face what was planning on running to me or through me.

Pain shot from my forehead brought on by the sudden change in altitude, reminding me that I was still hurt and bleeding. After a moment of uncertainty as to whether I could remain standing, I found my balance amid the pain, and once again shielded my eyes from the blazing sun. I was now looking of into the distance of land that had been behind me while I had sat on the ground, and I learned that I had woken up a couple hundred yards away from the edge of a forest. More importantly, I learned that the origin of the thunderous gallop was in fact the largest bull I had ever seen.

Now I would never claim to have extensive knowledge of how tall bulls were actually supposed to be, or even if this was a bull (I was just assuming because it looked like a cow with horns it was a bull). Yet when a bull as tall as a school bus is bearing down on you, extensive knowledge isn't helping anyone. I was frozen with fear as this animal came at me like a freight train. What had I done to enrage such a beast? And once again where in god's name was I? I looked around franticly, hoping for some way out. What I had assumed until that time was an oddly detailed dream had turned into an inescapable nightmare. Why wasn't I waking up? I couldn't have hit my head that bad. There was no time to ponder the increasing realistic dream world I found myself in as I was about to become a shiny gold pita for an ornery super-bull.

My instinct to run was quickly overruled by the fact that this bull seemed to be covering 20 feet with every bound, and I would get about 15 feet away before I took a horn through the back. "Your just dreaming", I said to myself, "all you need to do is close your eyes and you'll wake up back where you're supposed to be. "So I closed my eyes and stood my ground, certain that the moment the bull reached me it would vanish into thin air and I would wake up, in a towel on my bathroom floor. I relaxed a little; quite happy with my choice to just shut this weird world out by closing my eyes. Even still, I couldn't help but recognize how real it felt was as the ground shook under my bare feet and I heard the bull's ominous breath shooting out of its nostrils. I was sure the bull was seconds away from reaching me when something buzzed past my left ear, so fast I was sure a passing hummingbird had taken time out of its life of plant pollination to dive-bomb me. I opened my eyes just in time to watch the bull crumble and fall, shaking the ground like an earthquake as he did, ending in a massive heap that stopped sliding at my feet. An arrow with golden feathers was buried in the center of the beasts head, sticking out like a third, unbent horn. I was in shock for a moment, and then I realized that an arrow doesn't just fall out of the sky and stick in a bull's forehead, someone has to shoot it there.

Hoping not to take the next arrow in the back, I put both of my hands into the sky, the international sign of please don't shoot me.

"You can put your hands down ya fool, if I'd wanted you dead I would have let the damn bull kill ya." The voice I heard was rough, much like I would imagine an old cowboy's voice, which was fitting for the current situation. It did nothing to sooth me though, as I was now completely confused as to what was going on, and if it was all real. "Go head and turn around, let me get a look atcha." The voice said, and being that I was not about to upset the man with the golden arrows, I slowly turned to face him.

To say the least, what I saw was not what I had expected. Now I wasn't incredibly tall by anyone's standards, but at 6'0" I was used to being taller than most. What I did not expect is that my bow and arrow toting savior would be a foot shorter than me. Adding to the unexpected were the clothes and tools that adorned his slight stature. He wore golden clothes and lightweight boots like I found myself in, but also had  some sort of golden sunglasses held on to his head by a single strap from one side to the other. He held the bow that had saved my life in his left hand, and he had a pack on his back with a sheath of arrows in a pocket on the side of it. He had closely cropped hair and a moustache, and the rest of his face and the skin I could see was quite tan, presumably from the unbearably hot sun I felt overhead. This strange apparition that had taken down the charging bull with pinpoint accuracy was a peculiar mix of what I would consider the past and the future, some kind of futuristic warrior that relied on medieval weaponry to survive. I realized I must have been staring at him for an extended period of time, and in an attempt not to upset him I cast my eyes downward, my hands still hilariously stuck in the air.

"I said you can put your hands down man, this isn't a mugging." The man said to me, swinging one leg behind the other while he rested the end of his bow on the grass and used it for support. "You sure are lucky I showed up, he wasn't about to stop." I thought back to the he that the stranger was referring to, the extremely large bull that had not two minutes ago almost done a tap dance on my lifeless corpse.

"Who are you? What was that? Where am I? How is this possible?" The questions flew out of my mouth before I could determine which one I wanted answered first, and I finally put my hands down as I stared intently at the stranger, waiting for his answer.

He chuckled to himself and said, "You got a lot of questions dontcha there big guy." I was having a hard time finding the same humor in the situation that the strange gold clad man was.

"This can't be real; I must be in some extremely vivid lucid dream. I'll wake up soon, I'm sure of it. You can't be real, this can't be real." I said to him as I started to back away, but I had forgotten about the bull. I tripped over the massive head of the now deceased creature, and ended up sprawled out on the ground with one leg resting on the bull's massive nose. The strange man walked up to me until his head was right in front of the sun, the rays of which were making his golden ensemble even more interesting as the material shimmered like mine did. He offered a hand to help me up, and I took it as he said,

"I got no way of showing ya how real this is, but trust me kid. Take a look at that bull, seen or felt anything like that in a dream before? Sure as the sun is hot and the grass is green this here is real life." At that point he took of his sunglasses and looked me in the eyes, all the while putting a hand on my shoulder. I don't know if it was the look in his eye, the pain in my head, or a combination of the two; I just could not take it anymore. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The severity of the situation began to dawn on me, and absolute fear moved through my body like it was travelling in my bloodstream. When it reached my legs, I just couldn't hold myself up anymore and I went crashing to the ground like a sack of potatoes. For the second time that day, I was on the ground, unconscious.