Memoirs of a Tourist

((This short fic is based on a prompt by ysabetwordsmith in this week's Creative Jam in the crowdfunding community: "Contradictions as a necessary source power, for challenging assumptions."

Context:  To better understand Evelyn Alvar's character, you can read both her Character Profile and Galatea's Character Profile.  Evelyn and Galatea are different points in the timeline of a single character.  Vaelius, who is mentioned, also has a Profile.  This drabble is a slice of time from within a narrative thread I'm in the process of writing with a friend on Tumblr: Slow Fade.  It does contain spoilers for the thread, because it references a scene we haven't yet written.  Trigger warnings for deliberate violations of body and mind autonomy apply, as well as chronic physical illness.))

Evelyn Alvar was acutely aware of the frailty of her body.

It was a constant source of frustration to her, that the very thing that gave her freedom, that allowed her to slip the constraints of the Here and emerge Elsewhere, also seemed to be the very thing that was draining the life from her.  And because of this, they were here, prisoners.  They had walked heedlessly right into a classically Machiavellian trap.

This illness, this fragility of body, was a thing that had been done to her.  She had learned this here, drawn across the universe by Vaelius' meticulously executed ploy-- displaced, snared and cornered like a wild animal, and the thought of it...

Well.  It made her angry.

There were vague memories swirling along the edges of her consciousness, of being strapped into a chair, of some sort of device that seemed to somehow exist in multiple locations at once-- no, not multiple-- deeper locations, as if a larger portion of the device hid somewhere within its three surface dimensions-- being attached to her, and it was unsettlingly familiar, this device, though she couldn't actually remember why. And there were memories of a huge, dark sphere peppered with red lights hovering overhead, the harsh white glow of the ceiling lights haloed around its mass so it looked like an omen, like an eclipse.  Of the sensation of being pulled from her body, drawn into an indescribable space that seemed to be somehow composed of pure, unadorned mathematics--

She was dreaming now.  A part of her knew this as she wandered through the winding, endless corridors of her home (had it always been this big?  It was like a whole universe in here...), opening doors and peering through them as she hovered on their thresholds, gazing enraptured at mirage-like images of rippling starscapes and barren planets and glittering alien cities teeming with life.

When she came upon the brass-fillagree-framed mirror, standing straight, tall, and alone in the center of an otherwise bare and plain room that was a jarring contrast to the lavish worlds contained behind all the other doors in this place, her head tilted slowly to one side, short brunette waves falling across her cheek and forehead as she stared with large brown eyes. The woman in the mirror-- her other Self, the Self that broke free of the three-dimensional bonds of her everyday form and took flight to the furthest stars every night-- stared back with equally large jewel-purple eyes, head tilting in tandem with Evelyn's as long hair the color of moonlight cascaded in silvery spirals over one shoulder.

This white-haired, marble-pale ghost, this ephemeral embodiment of the hidden, forgotten layers of who she was, evinced an endless Mobius tangle of contradictions-- of life and death, of weakness and strength, of slavery and freedom.

Vaelius was smugly assured he had her in his grasp. But she would not be bound.

"It's time to wake up," her other Self said, and Evelyn spoke the words in tandem.  And she began to Remember.

An excerpt from Evelyn Alvar’s first book in the Memoirs of a Tourist series, in which her heroine, Tara Midas, tries to describe her journeys:

“This world is so… three dimensional,” Tara said. "So flat. You can only move along its surface, back to front, side to side. The circumference of a clock. But I’ve learned how to slip past that, through it. I’ve learned how to fly.“ She considered these words in silence for a moment. "It’s not something that can be described. Words are only symbols, after all, representational. Powerful only because of what they describe, powerful because they bring a flimsy sort of tangibility to the intangible. But the actuality is so much greater.”

An entry in Evelyn's private handwritten journal.

When you fall in love with a star you may not even realize it at first. Night after night after night, you will step from your safe little house, slipping past the threshold to emerge beneath the expanse of shimmering infinity, and you will look up and see it, that one star. And you will smile, and you will say, “Such a beautiful star. It shines so brightly, and so intensely. So furiously!” And you wonder at its ancientness, wonder what things it has seen, the aeons that have swirled endlessly beneath it on worlds you’ve only ever dreamt of. For a fleeting instant on one of these nights, you may think of it as Your star, but then you realize what a foolish notion that is, how thoroughly offensive even. As if anyone could ever own a star.

And the star is distant, and you often believe that you can detect a kindness directed your way, a gentle fondness within its silvery light; but still it is always distant, though paradoxically you feel as though you could touch it simply by lifting a hand. It looks cold, an icy luminous diamond against the eternal blackness of the sky, but you know it isn’t cold, not really. It’s just very, very far away, and you wonder what it would be like to be close to the star– truly close. You would be vaporized, of course. In an instant. Obliterated within the unfathomable pressure, the burning, untameable inferno of its core. One does not try to embrace a star. But sometimes, just sometimes, you think it might be worth it.