The Starlight Heir

The crone is watching me.

She is older and more wrinkled than I remember. Or maybe I’m the one imagining her features melting into scooped ridges and hollows. I flutter lead-weighted eyelids, struggling to focus on her face, but it keeps losing its shape. Now she looks like a clump of dough with twin starlit eyes blinding me and making the world spin.

I blink again, snatching my gaze away and dimly taking stock of my surroundings. It’s bright from an overhead lamp and it stinks. The sharp metal grate of the ground pinches the skin of my back, and my legs are covered with a ratty woolen blanket. Metal bars surround me like a rusty cage.

Cell. I’m in a cell.