Your Narrator is Very Confused

I bolt upright, gasping—

And promptly fall off my bed.

Oh, thank God. It felt so real—the pain felt so real. Tires swerving and brakes screeching, my airless cry as the car slammed into me, the flash of bright blue sky as I was tossed in the air and hit the ground with a crack—But no. I was fine. Look, my right arm. In the dream, it had twisted beneathh me, sending pain scorching up my shoulder. But in reality, I’m able to move it just fine. I can turn my elbow in any direction—

I freeze.

In horror, I stare down at my right arm. Flip it forward s and backwards.

It works just fine. But it looks—my skin looks—

It was white, on both sides. Creamy and smooth, with just a smattering of freckles on the back of my wrist. My skin was the skin of some model on Vogue, not me, Gemma Tran, very Asian and with skin that writers might poetically call sallow from being indoors year-round.

I swallow. Heart jumping like a rabbit inside my chest, from the floor, I look away from arms, and up at my surroundings.

I had fallen out of a bed onto the floor. But the bed isn’t my twin from Ikea, it’s not even really a bed. It’s a sleeping pallet, fitted with straw pillows and fur blankets. And the floor isn’t soft dark carpeting in a nice three-bedroom house, it’s roughly-fitted wooden timbers in a one-room cabin. In front of me, multiple bows and stacks of arrows sat neatly arranged on shelves, looking far too deadly to be just props [1].

“You okay, honey?”

I jump, whipping my head to the right.

A feminine silhouette stands backlit by the door. As I squint, trembling, she steps forward, and suddenly I can make out her features. She’s so tall it makes me jealous, with fiery red hair that she’d swept neatly off her gentle face in a bun, and soft smile lines around her mouth and eyes. If she were still this gorgeous in middle-age, I can’t imagine how beautiful she must’ve been in her twenties.

The lady frowns. She places the platter she’s carrying down on the table in the middle of the room, and then moves across the room to lean down towards me. The back of her hand is cool against my forehead.

“You don’t feel hot,” she muses. “Are you feeling sick? You don’t usually wake up so late, and you look—”

I scoot away from her touch nervously.

“I’m fine,” I say, with a fake smile. “Bad dreams, just fell off the bed.”

I’m definitely not fine, given I’m in the wrong place and the wrong body. But I’m not going to tell her that, nice as she seems so far. Until I know what’s happening, the lady’s going to have to deal with a lying Gemma [2].

For a moment, she looks dubious. But then she visibly shrugs it off, and straightens. “Well, I suppose if there’s a day to oversleep, it’d be the Harvest Festival. And you weren’t planning to go hunting today anyway, right, Aurelia?”

Aurelia—?

The Harvest Festival—?

Oh no.

I have a really. Really. Bad feeling about this.

Slowly, I inch my head to the side, just enough to peer over my shoulder. Falling down my back were luscious curls in a deep, auburn red. Just as I feared.

“Aurelia?” The lady—Mrs. Morrell—says again, more uncertainly this time, as if to confirm my nightmarish conclusion.

I am, somehow, Aurelia Morrell.

Aurelia Morrell, the childhood friend of the protagonist of Chess Game of Blood, Alexandrius Silverwood [3].

Aurelia Morrell, the beautiful eighteen year old girl whose murder sends Alex off on his revenge quest, the one that ultimately leads him to ascend the kingdom’s throne.

Aurelia Morrell, one of the many victims of the surprise attack on Silverwood Keep, on the night of the Harvest Festival.

By magic or my comatose brain or some twisted version of the afterlife, I am Aurelia Morrell. And I’m going to die tonight.

Again.

—

1. I know very very little about bows or arrows—funnily enough it wasn’t in my high school education—but I’m pretty sure props look so heavy and well-oiled and sharp.

2. If all the books I’ve read have taught me anything, it’s that the dumb honest ones are always the first to get themselves in trouble.

3. One thing I’ve always wondered: why didn’t the author just name him Alexander? Did Alexander not look pompous enough, so the author decided to stick the -us ending on to make his name more of a tongue-twister? But then doesn’t nicknaming him Alex—which was the name of like, three kids in my kindergarten class—defeat that whole point?