The city of stained glasses

Opal spent a few precious second blinking her eyes, staring with the mouth open at something that she so didn’t understand, frozen on the spot where she had landed, incapable of moving even a muscle. She forced herself to rouse only when people started getting uncomfortably close to her. She jumped to her feet, narrowly managing not to slide on the beautiful and slippery flowers of the… pedestal, apparently, she was standing on, and waved her hands in front of her in a panic, in the universal gesture that told others to stay away.

“What ‘Saviour’ and ‘Saviour’?! I think you got the wrong person!” she exclaimed. “Don’t come any closer!” She was probably just causing a scene and creating even more problems, but who cared? She had appeared and fallen from a stained glass between all things, for crying out loud. Those people were already shocked in any case.

The one who had called her a saviour, an oldish man with crow feet around his eyes, stopped in his tracks, moving his hands in a placating gesture, as if she wasn’t a girl but a wild animal needing to be calmed down, and managing not to come off as placating at all. He was wearing what seemed like a priest’s robe, long and white with blue embroideries and ornamental cloths, and had a necklace whose crystal pendant was shaped like a sword. “You are evidently the Saviour. You fell from the Saintess’ stained glass during the tercentenary of her victory against the Golem, and you are her spitting image” he explained, as if those were any actual grounds to call her that.

“I believe that’s just a bunch of coincidences. Also, we don’t resemble each other all that much.” She glanced at the stained glass in question, despite knowing every detail about it: the girl and her both had the same blue hair, even though Opal’s was shorter, and the same stature, but the similarities stopped there; Opal couldn’t deny to be happy to have even a little something in common with the girl depicted there, but between that and being one and the same there was a very big difference.

“Coincidences like that do not exist-” he started trying to convince her again, but was interrupted abruptly by the opening of the entrance door. As one man, everyone turned to the source of the noise: in the space of the door stood a group of knights in blue capes and shiny armour – ‘shiny’ in the most literal sense of the term, since it seemed to sparkle under the light of the sun –. On the cuirass, they sported the symbol of a crystal sword, which she began to think was a thing in that place.

“What’s happening here?” asked the leader of the group, advancing along the central nave and getting followed by the others, with the whispering crowd parting to let them pass.

The priest turned to him. “Sir, I firmly believe this young lady is the second advent of the Saintess.” The situation was getting more and more exaggerated and she didn’t like it one bit.

“Really? This girl?”

“I am certain.”

“No!” she exclaimed. “It’s obviously a misunderstanding! I’m just me, not a saintess or whatever!”

The knight looked at her, then at the stained glass, and then back at her. “Yes, I can see the resemblance.” Afterwards, he glanced at the priest. “In any case, Father, if you say so it must be true.”

“No, wait-”

“My lady,” The knight bowed slightly to her and she couldn’t even begin to explain all the ways she was weirded out by that kind of respect. “please follow me, I will lead you to some temporary lodgings.”

“No, really, I’m flattered but there’s no need-”

He extended a hand in what surely was an elegant gesture, but also a very demanding one: it wasn’t an offer, it was an order. “I must insist.”

She grit her teeth, but for how much her mind frantically searched for one there wasn’t a way out of that. She was in a place she didn’t know, with people she didn’t know and whose real intentions were hidden from her: to say that she was at a disadvantage in that situation would’ve been a euphemism. Moreover, those knights had swords strapped to their sides and she could bet that they weren’t there just for show. “… okay then” she replied, not with a small amount of reluctance. She refused to completely let them win, though, so, for what was worth, she ignored the hand that was extended to her and jumped off the pedestal, landing with a soft thump. The sports clubs members would’ve been so proud of her if they could have seen her, she was sure. “Where to?” she asked, trying to hold her chin high and not to show her nervousness, which was difficult also because, now that she had lost her vantage point on the pedestal, nearly everyone towered over her. She had probably failed miserably, but what counted was the attempt.

If the knight thought anything of her behaviour, however, it didn’t show on his face. He just straightened his back, all diligence, and made a gesture towards the door. “We will accompany you to the nicest inn in the city, please follow us.”

She breathed in through her nose and exhaled softly. “Okay, show the way then.”

The priest looked at her, inclining his head. “We shall see each other again, young Saviour.”

She dearly hoped not, even though she wasn’t so stupid as to say that out loud.

Afterwards, they started leading her out of the cathedral, and what a sight she must have been, a high school girl still in her student uniform escorted by a group of knights in full plate armour. She briefly wondered who the people that were there thought she was, since she didn’t spot anyone at all wearing clothes even resembling hers. Were they posing themselves the same questions as her, just with the roles reversed, or events like that were a current thing in that place, wherever it was? She hoped she could receive some actual explanations soon.

The group of knights accompanied her outside of the cathedral, which was absolutely awe-inspiring from the exterior too, and through the streets, and with each new thing she saw she lost a small piece of hope that she was still in her world. The inhabited centre they were walking through was a part of what seemed like a bigger city, full of shops of all kinds, wide streets and simple but elegant houses, different from everything she had seen even in photos or documentaries. While the roads were paved with a multiplicity of colourful stones that created kaleidoscopic designs, the majority of the buildings were in marble, as with the cathedral, and their windows were all stained glasses. Every now and then there were sword motifs on the glass, or crystal pendants shaped like swords – similar to the one worn as a necklace by the priest – hanging from doorknobs and whatnot. What truly shocked her, however, was seeing people in the streets – adults and children alike – all doing magic with stones, either playfully or absentmindedly: some of them made the rocks literally shine, others created all sorts of shapes with them, and that was what finally convinced her of the fact that she somehow wasn’t in her world anymore – which posed a whole other stack of problems, but she didn’t want to think about it too much at the moment –. She spent half the time she was walking looking around and craning her head in order to absorb every detail she could – for purely scientific reasons, of course –. She risked tripping over her own feet a few times, but she managed not to fall horribly, which she counted as a success.

“Hey, where are we exactly?” she asked the knights, when the shock has subsided a bit and she could focus on conversations again.

“Where?” the leader replied, breaking character for a moment and glancing at her with a flummoxed expression on his face, as if he couldn’t fathom the idea that someone didn’t know that place, not even if the someone in question evidently didn’t come at all from there, like her. He quickly got back to looking on the road ahead, though. “We are in Kruos, the royal capital and brightest gem of Kristallia, the Kingdom of Light.” A fancy name if she ever heard one.

In any case, if she wasn’t already convinced before, that would’ve decidedly been the last nail on the coffin of her feeble hopes of not being in another world. She had also briefly entertained the idea of it all being just a lucid dream or an intricate illusion, but the sensations, the scents and the sounds were all way too real to be faked and she didn’t have that much imagination anyway. “I see…”

Thankfully, she was saved – they both were, probably – from having to engage in stilted small talk by the silhouette of the inn becoming more and more visible by the second. That too was an elegant building, in line with the city’s architecture.

“We have arrived. Please wait for me here.”

The knights – and Opal – stopped in their tracks in front of the inn, while their leader entered. He got back a few minutes later, with a key in hand that he extended to her.

“Here, the key to your temporary accommodation. I will return tomorrow in order to show you to more appropriate lodgings befitting your status.”

She took it with a somewhat dubious expression. “… Sure.” She expected them to leave at that, but they didn’t, as if waiting for something, and she got her clue. “See you tomorrow, then, I guess” she said, entering the inn. Once inside she greeted what seemed to be the owner, who reciprocated politely but watched her with attention, and then she went to her room, whose number was written on the wooden keychain.

After duly locking the door behind her, she looked at said accommodation: it was pretty spacious for a single room – at least for her, who was used to the cramped and messy bedroom she had back home – and it was tidied neatly, with a faint, pleasant scent of cotton and lavender permeating the air. There too the windows were beautiful stained glasses, but, despite the charm of it all, she felt a sharp and painful stab of homesickness that made her heart constrict and kept her rooted on the threshold. Now that she could think in peace, all of her emotions came crashing down on her. Were her parents beginning to worry, not seeing her returning home at her usual hour? What would have they done once they understood that she wouldn’t have done that and that she wasn’t at a friend’s house either? How would her friends react? How much time had passed in her world? Was it even the same as where she was now? There were way too many questions she didn’t have answers to and she had never before wished so strongly to be home – what a fool she had been, taking it all for granted –, but now she was completely alone in a world whose rules were hidden from her and she was the only one who could help herself.

The first thing she thought about doing was going outside, but, if the way the inn owner looked at her was any indicator, someone would’ve either stopped or followed her and she didn’t know what was worse. Moreover, she didn’t know the city, so she would’ve probably just got lost. It wasn’t easy, but she forced herself to think rationally without acting foolishly. First she would’ve gathered information and then she would’ve created a plan of action: as people said where she came from, after all, knowledge was power and one had to know their enemy to win – now, maybe the people she had met weren’t enemies per se, but she didn’t like at all how they were treating her, as if she was some kind of golden goose they couldn’t allow themselves to lose, and for the moment assuming that was the safer option –.

Her mind made up, she decided to inspect her room a bit more, to pass the time until dinner. That evening she went to sleep early, ignoring the nightgowns that were put at her disposal and stubbornly staying in her school uniform, hoping to be ready for whatever would have come next.