I awoke with a jolt. A second of confusion, and then everything flooded back to me: Baba Yaga, Calla, Mr. the Deathless, the sword, capture, bleeding-how long had I been asleep?!
I jumped up, feeling an adrenaline rush-and nearly fell over as my vision became covered with colored spots. I used my left hand to grip the chair, but finally had to slump to the floor and lie down for a few minutes until I could see straight again.
Right; let’s try this again. First of all, better check my hand.
I pulled it up from my chest, where somehow I’d been able to keep it for all this time, and took a look. Thank goodness, the bleeding had stopped. Now it was just clotted with a lot of dried blood.
I miss Xen.
I tried to make some sort of noise; the spell, however, had not worn off, making it impossible even to croak. Not that I really needed my voice at the moment. It would just be nice to have it back eventually, you know? I decided to focus on getting out of here.
Now that I was actually free, and wearing the shaded glasses, I could see that my prison was made out of some kind of stained glass. It was actually quite pretty, now that it wasn’t searing my retinas and I wasn’t tied to a chair. The voices were back, too; to my surprise, their conversation made me suspect they were the voices of tourists.
“Come look at this!”
“How long do you think it took them to make that?”
“Derek! Come back here!”
“I’m bored…”
“Do you know if we can take pictures? All the signs are in Russian.”
And those were just in the languages I could understand.
My sense of smell was cut off by the glass, so I couldn’t tell if it was all an illusion or not. So I began looking around the room, trying to find any other potential spells or curses that might be set up. Eventually, in the far corner I found what looked like an alarm spell-probably set to go off if I broke the glass, since it hadn’t been triggered by my freeing myself from the chair.
Unless I just didn’t notice it went off, and he’s now watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do…
I’ve got to take that chance.
Quickly I found the loophole in the spell, and unraveled it. A very big risk, but it might buy me some time. Then I crouched down, and smashed a hole in the floor with my uninjured claw.
It turned out that I was forced to break a few more holes before it was big enough for me to squeeze out. But once I did so, I leaned my head and shoulders out, bracing my arms against the sides. Beneath me there appeared to be an entire horde of giant people walking around, examining Russian artwork. This startled me, before I realized: They aren’t giants. I’ve been shrunk!
One of the people had noticed the little shards of broken glass that had fallen, and had gone to a security guard; he was pointing at where I was, and I could make out the words, “...think the bulb burst...might want to get that fixed…”
I’m in a lightbulb? Must be something like that-those fancy stained glass light fixtures up top would do the trick, if Mr. the Deathless kept a tiny dimension or something inside one, like a genie bottle...Well, better get out of here before they come to investigate.
I jumped out of the hole I’d made in the glass, and glided down to the ground, ignoring the wave of dizziness that overcame me as a result. I landed in a corner of the room, by the doorway; a good thing, too, because a few seconds later I found myself growing back to normal size (thankfully along with my clothes).
That makes things a bit easier. Now, question: am I still in the right place?
I suddenly heard a voice call, “Stop that man!” and saw two frog-headed men* in Russian guardsman’s uniforms running toward me.
Yup, I’m in the right place.
Barely taking time to look at my surroundings, I turned into the first corridor I could find and ran.
*Disguised to any humans, of course.
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