Princess Etheria and the Battling Bucks Read online

PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Battling Bucks

  A fairy tale that anyone can realize.

  PART 1

  in the Princess Etheria Chronicles

  Written and Illustrated

  by

  DWAYNE R. JAMES

  Copyright 2013 by Dwayne R. James

  Visit the Princess on the Web:

  https://www.princessetheria.com

  Also by DWAYNE R. JAMES

  Gingers & Wry

  Available from https://www.gingersandwry.com

  The Princess Etheria Chronicles

  A five part series from Dwayne R. James

  PART I

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Battling Bucks

  PART II

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Lost Queen

  PART III

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the King's Surprise

  PART IV

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Stone Trees

  PART V

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Magic Words

  DEDICATION

  For my daughter Violet,

  who fills my waking world with wonder.

  The whole thing’s for you Peep,

  especially Chapter 24.

  May your dreams always be happy,

  May they all come true.

  May they live inside your memory in daylight too.

  And if you start to lose your faith in what dreams can do.

  Just remember my best dreams came to life with you.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 - The Bucks in the Glade

  CHAPTER 2 - Thinking and Knowing

  CHAPTER 3 - Magical Theory Part 1

  CHAPTER 4 - RealiTea

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  The Homewood Institute for Mental Health

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  From the Journal of Cyan Daniels, patient

  Female, age 14.

  July 22, 2011

  My Mother came to visit me today.

  I wasn’t expecting her, but she apparently wants to come with me to my appointment with Dr. Stevens later this afternoon. I immediately begin to wonder if this is a good thing.

  Mother greets me warmly at the security desk, and I have to admit it’s good to see her in spite of the obvious tension between us. I usher her into the visitor’s lounge. As she sweeps into the busy room, all the eyes there swivel and lock onto her, and it’s like I’m noticing her for the first time too. She looks out of place here, I realize. She’s dressed way too colourfully. Not that I’m judging mind you, because it’s how I would be dressing too if I had the choice. It’s just that her outfit stands out in explosive contrast against the institution’s soft whites and muted pastels.

  We sit down across from each other at a table by the window, and engage in banal small talk. She’s clutching her oversized purse to her knees, and is perched densely on the bench like she doesn’t want to touch any more of it than she has to. She’s coiled and wound tighter than a spring. She doesn’t want to be here. For once I’m in agreement with her about something.

  We exchange a few pleasantries. Mother is perfectly civil, at least until she starts in on me again with the guilt. Apparently, her life is hard without me at home, and she’s having to do all of my chores for me. What’s more, friends and neighbours are asking awkward questions to the point where she doesn’t want to even check her e-mail, or answer the phone anymore.

  Funny how she can make my being in an institution all about her. Why is it that her odd behaviour is acceptable, but mine gets me locked up? Oh yeah, I’m the minor here.

  Finally, she sees fit to include me in our conversation. By this point, the warmth I had for her earlier has evaporated, and I’m starting to feel a little edgy. I can sense the argument coming the same way you can smell an approaching storm sweeping down the river valley.

  “So, how are you Cyan?” Mother asks stiffly.

  “Well, it’s not the RestEddy cabin,” I respond calmly while gesturing around us. “But the food is actually pretty good. Better than Dad’s is,” I add jokingly. I look at Mother. She’s not laughing. In fact, her whole body seems to be folding in on itself. I imagine that this is what the Big Bang was like: everything being sucked into a central point, in anticipation of being blown wildly out across the Universe.

  “The grounds here are nice too,” I continue carefully. “And there are a lot of humans to talk to as well, which I’m not used to. So that’s something.”

  I swear that I’m not trying to pick a fight with her. I’m just fed up with being told what to believe, and that I should doubt my own perceptions. I’m trying to reject my Mother’s attempts at control as gracefully and as kindly as I can, given the circumstances.

  Across the table, Mother swallows heavily. She’s clutching her purse so tightly now that her knuckles are white. When she speaks, her words are measured and drawn out. “I see you’re still holding on to that fairy tale.”

  “Thenken’s real Mom,” I respond immediately. “It’s as real as this chair that I’m sitting in. You should know—you’ve been there yourself. You were even the...”

  “CYAN!” she screeches harshly at me. Then, realizing how loudly she’d spoken, and that people were now turning to look at her, she reigns herself in. It’s like watching a bolt of lightning getting pulled back into a cloud. She continues to bristle with unreleased rage though and, when she speaks, her voice comes out like water being forced through a hose with a thumb blocking its nozzle.

  “What you claim to dream is one thing,” she hisses as she crosses herself furiously, “but then to insist that it’s all real!” Her voice drops to a raspy whisper, “A dreamworld where animals can speak,” she scoffs. “It’s simply ridiculous. It’s insane!” She emphasizes her last word by gesturing with her eyes at the pyjama-clad residents at the other tables, and the clinical white panelled walls that surround us all.

  I sigh deeply, and drop the subject. As usual, she takes my refusal to argue as an indication that she’s won, and continues, more to herself now than before.

  “It’s just another one of your father’s legacies I suppose. I’d hoped that, with him gone, you’d have come to your senses by now.”

  I stare blankly at my Mother, and she looks at me expectantly. What she just said should upset me, but I know that she’s just lashing out so that she can provoke a response from me. She’s hoping that, if she can get me to yell at her in public—especially here in the institution—then suddenly she’ll be the victim, and she’ll get justification for putting me here.

  Still, I’m surprised that she tried to bait me using Dad’s death. That’s a first, even for her. She must be running out of ideas on how to pull me into an argument, which is understandable with what I discovered about conflict resolution that time in the glade.

  “I knew things were starting to go just a little too well last year,” she continues. “It had to come to an end somehow, and it certainly did, what with your father dying, and you going off the deep end. I can’t wait to see what happens to me next!” She says more than a little sarcastically. “You know what they say: Bad things always happen in threes!”

  I chuckle inwardly and struggle not to crack a smile at her turn of phrase. GOOD things happen in threes as well Mother, I think to myself.

  I look calmly at my Mother. To be fair, I don’t think she’s really trying to be mean. Self centered? Absolutely. Spiteful? Perhaps. But not mean.

  Sure, she and Dad had been divorced for years, but
his death last year still hit her pretty hard, and she was obviously worried about my feelings at the time too. I saw how upset she was after the funeral, so I tried to reassure her that Dad wasn’t really dead, and that I still saw him every night when I dreamed of the Thenken forest.

  That was my first mistake.

  The second one was writing about the forest in my journal, and then leaving the journal someplace where she could find it (like locked in my bed-side table for instance).

  My final mistake was not renouncing the whole thing as fantasy to the legion of child psychology professionals my Mother subjected me to over the next six months. It would have been easier to lie I suppose, but I couldn’t. Something deep down told me that I had to stay true to Thenken, and not falsely deny it, even to protect myself. Dad agreed. So did our Royal advisors, even though they all warned that the path I was headed down was a difficult one.

  “It is rarely a good thing to lie about what you know to be true,” said Oberon, one of Dad’s closest friends and advisors. “You risk learning to deny it to yourself. Just look at what happened to Ephemora.”

  And, so that brings me here: A private mental health facility where my Mother’s stubbornly held signature is the only key that can open the door to the outside world for me.

  I smile at my Mother, and it unnerves her even as it seems to help her realize that she crossed a line. She changes the topic.

  “I was at the bookstore the other day and saw your friend Christine...”

  “Catherine,” I say before I can stop myself.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what I said,” she retorts.

  I should know better than to correct Mother; she doesn’t like to be shown to be wrong, even when she is. She stares at me icily for a time, sighs heavily, and finally speaks.

  “Dr. Stevens says that you’re not coming along as well as she’d hoped,” she says, a healthy hint of I-told-you-so in her voice.

  “Good ol’ Dr. S.” I reply as I look out the window towards the glass and steel of the tall buildings beyond. The sky over the city is a dirty blue, and the sun seems to be fighting with the clouds to brighten up the skyline. In spite of myself, I’m imagining that I can transform into a bird, and shoot out through the window, past the skyscrapers, and escape into the forest beyond the city.

  “We’ve agreed to try drug therapy on you,” Mother says, shifting uncomfortably on the bench.

  This gets my attention, I look back at her sceptically.

  “We?” I question her with an obvious doubt in my voice. I’m pretty sure I know whose idea it really was.

  “It’s a new drug I read about on the internet,” she replies as she looks down at her purse. “It suppresses dreams.”

  And there it is. Now I know whose idea it was.

  “Lovely,” I say.

  Mother continues to talk, but I’m not really listening anymore. I’m staring past her at the dust particles in the room that are dancing in the beams of sunlight and, for a moment, I’m floating in a vast cavernous room amongst the stars.

  An attendant approaches the table, and tells us that the doctor is ready to see us now. We follow him down a long hallway with its calming Plexiglas covered artwork, all of it fastened securely to the wall.

  We turn a corner, walk through a set of doors, and finally come to a stop in front of a half-open door with a brass plaque on it that reads ‘Dr. D. Stevens’. Inside the office, the occupant is whistling something bright and happy, something that is totally out of synch with my mood.

  The attendant knocks lightly, and Dr. Stevens welcomes us into a small office that is understated and, above all, comforting. Overflowing bookcases choke the room from floor to ceiling, and a couple of framed pictures and diplomas compete for the wall space that remains.

  I settle heavily into the arm chair by the window, and stare up at the large painting that hangs behind the doctor’s desk. It’s an image of two young, obviously twin, boys playing in the water on the shore of a river, and already the forest behind the boys is drawing my eyes, and distracting me. It’s pretty much the same forest that I was imagining myself in as a bird earlier.

  The two adults in the room chat politely. It’s Mother’s first visit to this office, although I’ve been here loads of times.

  “Are those your boys?” Mother asks gesturing to the painting. I’m presuming that this is just a power trip for her, and that she’s trying to form a maternal bond with the doctor in order to create a clique that I couldn’t possibly be a member of.

  “Yes they are,” answers Dr. Stevens proudly. “That’s Kirk on the left, and Mason on the right. They’re almost two years old now, and so much like their father.”

  I can’t hold it in any longer, and snort out a derisive laugh in spite of myself. They both look at me. Mom’s glare is disapproving, but Dr. Stevens is staring at me like she knows better, and so should I. There is admonishment in her gaze, but it’s reassuringly gentle.

  Mother assumes that my reaction had been because of the word ‘father’, so she quickly apologizes, and tells the doctor that my Dad’s death has been particularly hard on me. “They were very close,” she explains by way of an excuse, but the resentment in her voice makes it sound dirty somehow.

  “Yes, that would certainly explain why she continues to dream so intensely about him,” offers Dr. Stevens kindly.

  “But she’s been here a whole month,” counters Mother loudly, “and she still insists that the dreams are real! And that he’s still alive! Shouldn’t she have accepted his death by now?”

  Calmly, Dr. Stevens answers, “People do grieve in their own way Mrs. Daniels, but I understand your concern, which is why I agreed to this new therapy.” She turns to me. Finally, they seem to realize that I’m still in the room. “Do you understand what we’re going to do today Cyan?”

  I look up at the doctor, but can’t form any words. The enormity of what my Mother is doing to me is just finally sinking in. She’s trying to sever the last connection I have with Dad. My bottom lip quivers, so I shore it up by clenching my jaw, and I nod quickly.

  Dr. Stevens smiles, and I begin to feel better almost immediately. Then, she explains the plan to me. The drug they want to give me has some complicated name that would be worth a fortune on a Scrabble board, and it’s supposed to interfere with REM sleep in some way to keep a person from dreaming. It’s usually used on people who suffer from debilitating nightmares, and is not supposed to have any side effects.

  It’s obvious that Dr. Stevens is simply deferring to my Mother here, and trying to keep her happy which, as I well know, can often be a full-time job. Today’s appointment is clearly not a debate, the decision has been made for me. This fact is all the more clear when Dr. Stevens draws the conversation to a close by using the intercom on her desk to call somebody into her office.

  A young nurse enters and hands me a little paper cup with pills in it, along with another cup full of water. Everyone stands there and watches me put the pills in my mouth, and then wash them down with water. I’m then asked to open my mouth and stick out my tongue to prove that I’ve swallowed them.

  “Thank you Kimberly,” says Dr. Stevens to the nurse, who nods her head and quickly steps out.

  I settle heavily into my seat, wishing that my pyjamas had pockets so that I could bury my hands in them. Dr. Stevens gets up, walks around her desk and holds something out towards me. It’s a thick book with a black cover. I take it, mumble a thank you, and flip through it. All the pages are blank.

  “It’s a journal,” she says. “It’s part of your new therapy. I want you to use it to record what you’re feeling without worrying that anybody will read it.”

  I look up at her surprised. So does Mother.

  “This is PRIVATE Cyan,” emphasized Dr. Stevens. “It is yours. You have my word that nobody will read this book unless you want them to.”

  I look down at the book on my lap. Suddenly, it seems a lot more valuable to me. My imagination is immedia
tely engaged. Off in the distance I can hear Mother protesting the privacy condition, and claiming that it was only through reading my journal at home that she was able to discover the depth of my ‘disorder’.

  Dr. Stevens raises her hand to silence my Mother. “This is important,” the doctor says. “If you want me to continue supporting the drug therapy, then you have to respect this.”

  Mother backs down immediately, and the doctor turns her attention back to me. “There are two key aspects to my therapy. Journaling is the first one, and is the only way that we can hope to get honesty from your daughter. This will allow her to speak her mind, especially when she’s used to not having a say.”

  I’m beginning to like the way the Doctor speaks to my Mother. “What’s the second aspect?” I ask.

  “Lots of sleep,” she answers.

  Fascinating.

  Later, standing at the door by the security desk, my Mother and I exchange uncomfortable good-byes. She’s still staring at the empty journal that I’m cradling against my chest as if it’s going to jump right up and bite her.

  Finally, she turns to leave, and I say, “Mi’raute, Mother.”

  “What?” she replies, clearly alarmed.

  “Nothing,” I respond with a heavy sigh. “See you next week.”

  I watch her until she’s left the building, and then walk back to the lounge, where I find Cedric and Nigel playing chess at a table by the window.

  Nigel looks up as I approach, and asks, “How’d it go Princess?” We all freeze at his choice of words. I look over my shoulder nervously and spot Nurse Kimberly standing over by the computers. I’m pretty sure that she heard what Nigel said. The look on her face is obviously disapproving.

  “Nigel,” I say quietly, “It’s dangerous for you to call me that here.”

  This is a real concern for me. I don’t want anyone believing that I’ve polluted Cedric and Nigel’s minds somehow. It would just make their stay in the institution more complicated than it has to be. “And besides, in the waking world, I’m just Cyan.”

  “We talked about this Nigel,” says Cedric who finally sets the chess piece down that he’d been holding in the air above the board.

  “Sorry,” replies Nigel clearly embarrassed. “Force of habit.”

  I reach over and rustle his thick black hair. “No harm done.”

  They go back to their chess game, and I settle into a comfortable easy chair. I’m looking at the empty journal again while I ponder the events of the last hour.

  Mother was certainly her classic self today, but I’ve grown used to her. She rarely upsets me anymore. Yes, I’m still trapped here in this institution, but Dad always says that every negative has a little positive in it. This place may not be the greatest, but at least it’s better than being at home right now with Mother the way she is.

  I smile internally. My trepidation at this situation is suddenly mixed with hope. Mother might be trying to stop me from dreaming, but I’ve got memories of dreams that would fill a whole book—this book—and I now have a lot of time on my hands in which to do it.

  Yep, I’ve got me a heckuva story to write...

  Wait, now that I think about it, I’m actually going to have to agree with Mother on this one: this isn’t just a story, it really is more of a fairy tale isn’t it?

  And, as I look down at the thick empty journal in my hands, I can feel most of the words begin to flow.

  But, where, and how, to start?

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  INTRODUCTION

  I want to tell you a fairy tale but, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to begin.

  “Once upon a time” is such a cliché, and not entirely accurate anyhow. It seems to me that the “when” of my fairy tale isn’t nearly as important as the “where”. You see, I want to tell you about something that happened in an enchanted forest called Thenken.

  The concept of an enchanted forest certainly isn’t a new one. In fact I’m pretty sure that, by now, you’ve read about so many such forests, that you might think that you know what to expect from one. Still, I doubt that you’ve heard of another place quite like Thenken, and I’m pretty sure that this is the only enchanted forest that you’ve actually visited yourself.

  Does this surprise you?

  The thing is, we’ve all been to Thenken before, in one form or another, as we are all connected to it through our thoughts. A part of us goes there every time we have an idea, or zone out in a daydream, or use our imagination, or close our eyes to dream.

  Yes, that’s right. You read that correctly.

  Thenken is a dream world. This means that anything you can possibly conceive of in your mind can also appear in Thenken. So, this forest can seem pretty normal, yet pretty extraordinary and weird all at the same time. More importantly, because the forest exists in an astral plane where our dreams are made manifest, each and any one of us can visit it any time we want to.

  In essence, Thenken is like every sense of déj­à-vu that you’ve ever had rolled into one, and stretched out to span the horizons. When you’re in Thenken, you know that you’ve been there before, and you know that you’ll be back.

  Is it coming back to you yet?

  If not, then just sit back and relax, think very carefully, and try to remember your dreams. Don’t worry if you can’t think of any right away, because that’s perfectly normal. A lot of our dreams don’t come back to us immediately but, rest assured, they all leave an impression.

  In fact, I’m pretty sure that, if I were to tell you to close your eyes while I described the Thenken forest, chances are you’d begin to remember what it feels like to be there.

  If I described the smell of pine trees on a warm summer breeze, you’d remember that dream where you were standing in a pine glade looking up through the branches at the blue morning sky. Or perhaps you’d be able to recall the dry warmth of the bright sunlight on your face as you sat on a rock on the edge of a sparkling lake or river. Or what it felt like to float in that warm water without a canoe or a boat, or how you could swim underwater without having to hold your breath.

  You might faintly recall walking along a forest path with the branches brushing by you, tiny twigs crunching underfoot, and wildflowers of every colour imaginable springing up all around you. You might even have a fuzzy memory of running along those same paths using all four of your legs to propel you.

  It’s starting to sound vaguely familiar isn’t it?

  Perhaps you might even recall that, on your last visit, you had a long conversation with one of the forest’s many resident animals, and it didn’t seem at all unusual to you that you were talking to an animal who was returning the favour. It was a dream after all, and an enchanted forest to boot, so animals chatting over a cup of tea was perfectly acceptable, under the circumstances.

  Yes, the animals of Thenken are a very civilized lot. Nobody gets preyed upon or eaten, and each species has its own particular role to play in the Kingdom.

  Oh, did I mention that Thenken was a Kingdom as well?

  Thenken’s Royal family, are also coincidentally the only human residents of the forest: King Rowan, and his daughter, Princess Etheria.

  You’ll meet the King as we go along, but I want to tell you a bit about Etheria, since this fairy tale is mostly all about her. At only twelve years old, Princess Etheria was wise well beyond her years, and already very powerful in the many forms of Thenken magic. In the forest, she could manifest whatever she wished from thin air, and she could assume whatever form she wanted as well. Indeed, the Princess was like a force of nature in the Thenken forest. She could even command the rain to fall and the sun to shine, but usually didn’t, because she liked to be surprised when she woke up in the morning.

  Etheria was like most other girls her age. She was bright and full of energy and was always asking questions, and breaking rules. Her face was framed by a thick mane of dark red hair, and her eyes were com­pletely black, and glowed in a way that blackness shouldn’t be a
ble to.

  I’d wager that Rowan and Etheria weren’t a thing like any of the Royalty that you’ve heard about in the waking world. For one, they didn’t live in a grand castle, and didn’t have an army of servants at their beck and call. Instead, they lived in a modest log cabin called the RestEddy on the rocky shores of the Sweetwater River. They cooked their own meals, washed their own clothes and cleaned up their own messes—sometimes, right away.

  Under King Rowan, Thenken was a Kingdom of peace, for Rowan knew that the moment you amassed an army to protect yourself from conflict, you created the very conflict that you were trying to avoid. So, Thenken was without a military, without massively destructive weapons and, most importantly, entirely without war. To be sure, it still had knights, as well as its squires (knights in training), but, instead of fighting, it was their job to serve the residents of the forest with as much chivalry and gallantry as their title implied.

  I’d like to tell you that danger did not exist in Thenken either, but that would be lying. Rowan did not sugar coat things for Etheria, and he warned her about the hazards in the forest that lived side by side with the wonders. He didn’t do it to scare her (he certainly didn’t want her to live in a state of constant fear) but simply to help improve her awareness. He never discouraged her daily explorations of Thenken, because he knew that she had her magic to protect her, but he did assign two Royal squires to her, more for company than for anything else.

  The squires were two wily and talkative squirrels named Cedric and Nigel. Affectionately, they were known in the Kingdom as the “Squirrel Squires”, but Etheria found this to be too much of a tongue twister, so she simply called them her squire-els.

  The three of them quickly became the best of friends, and their explorations of the forest became the stuff of legends.

  In Thenken, that’s saying a lot.

  There is so much more to say about this enchanted forest, but this is just supposed to be a simple introduction, so I’ll fill you in as we go along. Besides, I’ve still got to figure out where to begin my story.

  Well, perhaps it would be appropriate to start this particular fairy tale as such:

  Once upon a dream…

  Princess Etheria was walking through the Thenken forest with her squire-els Cedric and Nigel...

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