A Little…Mishap

     He was a dead man.

     At least, that was the first thought that crossed the convoluted mind of Honoria Wingate, princess renegade and Varich sidhe, when she rolled onto her back and rubbed the bridge of her aching nose. Blinking lavender eyes, she sat up slowly, swallowing hard against the sudden rush of nausea, and took a few slow, soft breaths. The disorientation was bad enough, but the rush of light-headedness was making her stomach do loops it really didn’t need to do. One hand moved over her mouth as she fought the urge to retch. Putting her head between her knees helped a bit, and it was then that Honoria looked at the ground beneath her.

     …silver?

     Since when did Brandenburg have silver asphalt?

     The realization was dawning even as she pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. Perhaps it was the silver road, broad and sparkling, that curved over the gently sloping hill Brandenburg didn’t have. Or maybe the fact that she was vaguely luminescent, her pale skin glowing softly as if she’d swallowed distilled moonlight. Her hair was longer, floating about her slender body as if it had a will all its’ own, and the reddish-gold colour was like blood-coated gold now, shining even in the full moonlight.

     Or maybe it was that giant penguin with a book standing over to her left.

     Honoria looked about herself, at herself, and groaned loudly. The Dreaming! She’d been flung into the thrice-damned Dreaming. If there was one thing the sidhe loathed, it was this place of utter chaos. No logic reigned in the world made entirely from the unconscious dreaming minds of the populace, and Honoria liked working within logic. Knife go into man, man stop moving. Perfectly logical. Now she was in a world that, although fae friendly, would screw with her head in ways she’d never thought possible. From the time she was small, Honoria had hated the Dreaming, and now she was fucking lost in it. Kyle’s little magical GPS tracking on Iris had tapped into this well of insanity in his attempt to make it "easier," and this was the result. His struggles to locate that damn girl had flung Honoria right into the middle of Iris’s true environment. She, however, was not the Gift of the Dreaming, and she could feel the pure glamour seeping into her bones and making her woozy even as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.

     "…where’s Iris when I need her?" Her raspy voice startled her even as she mused aloud to herself. It was no longer metallic or harsh… No, now she sounded throaty and enticing, the voice of a succubus calling from the warm darkness. Her heart-striking face wrinkled in disgust, and even as she idly fingered the elongated, delicate points of her ears, she scowled. She recalled the very few times she’d been in this…nightmarish place, and one of the things she hated the most was that all sidhe became insanely beautiful. No matter how she tried to hide it, in here…she was a vision. Indeed, the penguin seemed to have forgotten its’ book and looked at her with wide, souless black eyes. With good reason: Honoria, princess of the Russian Varich, was a gleaming beacon of vibrant hair, moon-pale skin and those lavender eyes which sparkled like gemstones. That beacon, however, spat virulently onto the Silver Path beneath her feet and huffed loudly. The penguin received the first and only rude gesture of its’ life, and she began trudging along the gleaming road.

     Oh yes…she would find a way out. There was a mage in the city that she owed a pair of severely bruised testicles to, and Honoria never left a debt unpaid.