Out of the castle. Olga Zhvan

and live further in a quiet current of own only reality. The child is in this cocoon for seven years. During this time threads of a transparent web are absorbed by his skin a layer after a layer, remaining on it with strange hardly visible pattern. By the time of the end of this period almost all layers are absorbed by the child's body, becoming his part and forming his abilities to exist out of time. The world which is created and changed every second obediently by the will of the people who were living in it, demanded stabilization for preservation of its integrity and lives of the beings in it. So The Timeless appeared. However, despite a name, time was the only master, the only truth and the only meaning of life of such children. Growing, they spun their own webs, repaired the existing web of the general current of time and watched its continuous existence …

      Nobody knew how the children appeared in a cocoon, what seed created that new life. Some of those few who knew about existence of such people, considered them as aliens, others considered them human beings from the future, and someone confidently claimed that they were ordinary children of our time, who were placed in infancy in a cocoon, and got necessary qualities in it. However, it was not important. For most people occupied with the daily cares they simply didn't exist …

* * *

      Aurelia was sitting at the wooden rough almost clean table in a small room of an inn, inclined over the book which pages were lit poorly by the smoking candle. Borg continued to carry out functions of the teacher and after her leave. In couple of days after departure, during the rest break Aurelia found in the bag which was carefully packed by the castle owner, the thick book in leather cover with the name «Creating Beings». On the first page there was the message written with the sprawling handwriting: «You wanted to know about this world … Read and remember … And when you start understanding and accepting, you will become its part …». Lines seemed to her a little pompous then, however the further Aurelia went deep into the pages which were accurately covered with small roundish handwriting, it became more clear to her that it was only the beginning of her studying … She could not trust in everything at once. And that moment, she was reading about The Timeless like about some nonexistent monsters, and didn't even try to imagine how they looked … Not to mention an assessment of reality of their existence.

      «However, – Aurelia thought, – some don't believe in opportunity to treat by the vital force, and I, perhaps, for someone is simply the fairy tale …». The girl was lost in contemplation of a candle, and her thoughts habitually began to flow on the course which was already laid by the equal read rows: «So, perhaps, the people who are living only in the past were simply deprived of the future by some not really patient Reaper, who does up a baby in a cocoon?»

      … After seven years this child appeared in very thin cocoon from one layer of threads. The Reaper met The Timeless, accurately untangling the remained threads carefully to return them to owners … In old age such people have light regrets about the lost opportunities which weren't recreated up to the end …

      Aurelia wondered how The Timeless feel the time … Why all of them have the same names, why not to call the child, for example, Timeless Bern or Timeless Turan? How do they distinguish each other at a meeting? The following question arose from the previous one. How does she feel the time? Sometimes Aurelia had a strange feeling inside as though she appeared out of time and space. Places and faces of people around seemed unfamiliar. At such moments surrounding voices sounded in her head as a thick background, the removed echo, and she tried to tie her to reality with routine tasks. A daily routine – as the scheme, as a skeleton which fleshed out with events, everyday clothes in which pockets sometimes one could find bright, unexpected, and sometimes inexplicable and unclear thing to the owner.

      The candle burned down, and Aurelia with regret thought that despite the love to the reading, nevertheless it was necessary to go to bed. Crude and cold bed. It was strange to pay for spending the night in not heated crude room on an attic, and to spend the night free of charge downstairs– in the huge heated and lit hall … However, today Aurelia was glad to a privacy, she desperately didn’t like to be among crowd of drunk, talkative and not really familiar with hygiene people.

      That night Aurelia hardly managed to be warmed, and she fell asleep only towards morning‎. During the short dream which didn’t give any freshness she saw the man with an unwinking stare. He offered her two metal balls. She obediently took them, having habitually seen in hands medium-sized skulls. She looked up from them making in the head a question, but as the girl could guess, there was nobody any more next to her. She was standing alone on the snow-covered street, flakes of snow were covering her skin, falling on her face, and Aurelia, for some reason, desperately wanted to cry.

* * *

      Sense of danger woke Aurelia. It wasn't clear who was in danger. Did it again affect brothers? Veres had to sleep peacefully in the next room. Borg was sleeping in the gloomy castle. May be he could not sleep? Wiping a face, wet from tears, Aurelia tried to prolong short moments of rest and privacy. However persistent knock at a door didn't leave any chances for this.

      The five-year-old fair-haired girl was crying at the door. Her face was amazingly familiar, and Aurelia, wiping own tears, tried to think jerkily how to calm the child.

      – Mamaaaaaaaa! Maaaaaaaaaaaaama! – the girl outstretched hands to Aurelia and got claws into her foot.

      Aurelia fell on knees and froze. Looking at the small copy of her own self, she tried to lay the events in her overwrought consciousness. As though one more thread which connected her to the reality broke, and she again didn't understand, where she was and what was happening around. It seemed the ground gone from under her feet and there was no opportunity to find a steady support.

      The child, meanwhile, continued to cry, and there was nothing for Aurelia but to embrace the girl and press to habitually responded heart.

* * *

      Having screamed, Aurelia jumped up on a bed and jerked to a door. She stopped and listened. It was silent. She looked out the door and didn’t see anybody. Aurelia sat down on a bed. It was a dream. It was a dream. It was a dream. Only a dream. The full reality of feeling of presence of the native little person was so obvious that now Aurelia's half-asleep consciousness refused to accept the reality surrounding it. The day broke, the first roosters were going to announce about it to all this world, and strange tired girl was sitting on a bed, trying to restore own borders of consciousness and listening to internal feelings.

* * *

      She saw Veres downstairs. He was as usual thoughtful, and that thoughtfulness and reticence reminding Borg slowly started to irritate Aurelia. Behind it the consciousness reduced in a point fixated on the injuring experience was felt. He had no Borg's ability to rivet on himself attention by one phrase, to force him to understand, having appeared at once in the center of your own life. Aurelia suppressed the flashed irritation, and reminded herself that few time passed for Veres to become the same he was before – the cheerful and self-confident young twenty-nine-year-old man. However, it was difficult to girl to imagine him like that, and she rather simply trusted words of his elder brother. The early gray hair on temples reminding about endured events, didn't add the age, but made his features more finely-cut. Aurelia caught the thought that as soon as she ceased to be irritated, involuntarily was fond of examining and solving his features and character, allowing thoughts of him if not to appear in the center of her own reflections, but very close to it. Having a little been confused by own attention, she sat on a bench opposite to Veres and silently pulled the plate with the steaming porridge and to a mug with hot broth.

      – Good morning, – the girl said with a little delay.

      – Good morning, – he answered without looking up from a plate.

      Exactly that day Aurelia desperately wanted to share the endured vision with someone alive, for some time it was not enough for her just to write down everything in a notebook, imagining