A Siege Through Time

After a stressful day at work, I decided to take a bath. I closed my eyes and may have dozed off, as I woke up coughing and feeling breathless. The water was over my head.

What the hell is happening?

I got to my feet and tried to get out of the tub, but I ended up falling again. The water was too high. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I decided to swim outside, but the door was locked. With much struggle, I managed to open the door, but I found that my entire house was flooded. But then I realised something strange—this wasn’t my house.

How can this be? I just—

I turned around to find my bathroom door gone. And it seemed that I had somehow found myself in a castle. Was I dreaming? Hallucinating? I pinched myself. No, it was all real.

“Do not fear. You are not losing your mind.” There was a voice behind me.

“Who’s there?” I turned around and found a woman swimming towards me.

“I’m Princess Austra, your ancestor,” she replied.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve travelled back a thousand years into the past.”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I looked away from her and saw that there was a window, sealed shut, towards the end of the pool. I swam to it and looked out to find her words to be true. The world outside was that of the middle ages. Green hills stretched as far as the eyes could see, and a silver stream raced ever eastward, vanishing into the embrace of the towering trees that stood firmly in the distance.

“How did I get here?”

“I summoned you. I’m sorry, but I had no choice.”

“What? Why me?”

“You’re the only one of our descendants who possesses the arcane magic in your blood.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around what she was saying. “Wait, if you summoned me here, then you must also possess magic.”

“That is indeed true, but mine is nothing compared to the powers that lay dormant within you. With you at our side, we can push back Revalt’s forces.”

Princess Austra went on to explain to me what the situation was. Revalt was cousin to her father, the late King Ashvar. Austra said that Revalt was gathering forces to besiege the castle, and that my powers were the only way to ensure victory for the kingdom. Revalt’s army outnumbered the kingdom’s by threefold. Austra said his army would reach us in a week, and that we needed to make haste to help me harness my powers by then.

I trained hard under Austra’s supervision and was able to draw out powers I could have never imagined. I found myself being able to control the energies around me, and I could, with ease, move objects with my mind. When the day of the battle dawned, Revalt and his soldiers stormed the castle, but unbeknownst to them, we had laid magically reinforced traps that none of them could have foreseen. Many of them were swept away in a sea of flames, some fell to their deaths in bottomless pits, and others were slain by showers of blades. My strength, combined with Austra’s, brought the enemy’s numbers down to equal ours, evening the odds for our soldiers to take the lead while Revalt and his army’s morale plummeted.

Through a tempest of fire and steel, our kingdom finally emerged as the victors, and Revalt was captured and imprisoned in the deep dungeons beneath the castle, never to see the light of day again. A week passed by as we mourned the dead, and once the castle was repaired, Austra held a feast in celebration of our victory, and in honour of those who lost their lives. By then, I had been there a month and a half; and although the serenity of the castle and its surroundings filled me with awe, I still missed my life back home. Austra agreed that I needed to return to my own timeline. Our goodbyes were bittersweet.

“I’ll miss you,” she said, wrapping her arms around me.

I hugged her back even tighter. “Me, too.” We both found tears flooding our eyes.

Austra handed me a bracelet. “Here, take this.”

I could feel the magic coursing through it. She then pulled back her sleeves and pointed at her wrist. She had an identical one. “Goodbyes aren’t always forever, my friend,” she said with a smile.

I was thrilled to hear those words. Austra said I would be able to traverse through our timelines with far more ease since my powers were thrice her own. She then showed me the spell she had used to summon me. We performed it together to open the gateway to my timeline. I stepped through it and looked back once more to wave goodbye.

Until next time, I thought.