Peter’s Diary part 9: The Fae Summit

In The Doom that Came to Amber

The 22^nd Day of Bull in the Amber calendar.

I awake, and drink green tea and eat rice and cold fish that is placed in front of me by the Minjoninita servants. They are poor conversationalists and a worse audience, so even though I have a new story to tell, I do not tell it here.

Instead, I concentrate. Faerie is close to Emeraldheart; the stone circle is one such place that I might draw power for lights from, but I do not. Instead I reach out across moonbeams to that thing which lies beneath the Castle of Amber, and like a young beau with his sweetheart, I gently caress the power that the Castle is built on, seeking to shape it to my needs.

I recoil, faster than a slapped swain, and shake. The power there is immense, and real. More real than any I have touched before. How could I have been so arrogant as to think that such a huge power could be shaped for illusion? Whatever that power changed things into, they would be real. More frighteningly, I believe that they always would have been real, and would continue thereafter.

And the power does not know me. It knows some I felt it asking who I was, and by what right I sought to twist and tame it. It laughed. Not yet, it said. And perhaps not ever!

I open my eyes, and the day is gone, though it had been just an hour after dawn when I had started. Fatigued, sweating and starving, I gesture to one of the servants who brings me food and drink, though what it was to this day I cannot tell you.