May 17st
I have found myself in a unique position. Could it be that I have been given a second chance?
At night he shivered by himself in his tent. During the day he sweated and squinted into the scalding sun, sitting limply on the back of a camel, that stupid parasol clutched between his damp hands.
May 20th
What is this new life I have found myself living? Where are the horrors that haunted me? Have they melted away into dreams?
In the grip of dehydration he often found himself twisting his head back and forth, heart bobbing up and down in his chest as he tried to shake the convincing mirage of a grunt lurching down a far-off dune, or the phantom rumbling of Brennenburg's unsteady foundations.
May 24th
I do not know the men around me. I do not know the place to which we are going and I do not know what people or things might await me there. I am lost in confusion. How can I possibly live like this, if indeed I am meant to continue my sorry existence in this manner?
At the crack of dawn he got up and paced about outside, where the servants were already awake and preparing for the day's journey. He awkwardly stood with them and busied himself, then made a nervous apology and dashed away to circle around his tent again. The thought had occurred to him that he should have snuck into Herbert's tent while he had the chance and dropped the orb down a well. But they were only a few days from Algiers now, and his opportunity was gone.
June 3rd
This is the present now. This is my life and I'm going to take control of it.
He said goodbye and overly tipped the guides who had accompanied him back through the desert. Algiers was bustling with life and he took advantage of it, eating all the local foods, talking to everyone he met, walking through the fields to admire the beauty of nature. It took some effort to find someone who would take him to Gibraltar, but a few days and several payments later he was on a small trader's sailboat gliding across the Mediterranean. He was pleased to get going. He was not pleased to be confined to a small rickety wooden craft surrounded completely by tumultuous waters.
They arrived by dawn, by which time he was a nervous wreck and could barely contain his shaking. The trader shot him a suspicious glare and practically kicked him off the boat. He stumbled wet and pale into the nearest inn.
The following morning, jittery from lack of sleep, he reserved a cabin on the SS Hortensia.
June 11th
It has been three days since we embarked for London. Every night I lie awake in my cabin, tensing at every muffled splash, never extinguishing the dim oil lantern swinging from the low ceiling. I tell myself that it is only the water that unsettles me so, that my mind really is healing. Once I reach dry land again, I will be alright.
After breakfast he lingered on the deck of the ship, gazing upwards at the sky. It seemed a different blue than the color it had been over the sands of Algeria—slightly dimmer, perhaps? Was that how the sky worked? He wasn't sure.
He recalled a different blue, one incomparable to any sky that could possibly appear in this world. A blue glimpsed only in the glow of a perfect, unearthly sphere, and—very briefly—through a portal to another world entirely. A blue so bright it could ebb away reality.
In the reality he knew, the orb had saved Agrippa and let him pass through the portal unharmed. In turn, it seemed that Agrippa—or Weyer?—had saved him from the orb's terrible guardian. But with that same orb empty and lifeless half a year in the past, how could it possibly have been used in the future to send him backwards? Was the power of that dimension so great that it could support such a paradox?
It wasn't important. The only question that mattered now was what the color of London's sky would be.
June 13th
My memory remains incomplete. I do not know if I shall ever be whole again. But, I exist. I am Daniel of Mayfair. And I'm coming home.