The sole remnant of the collapsed world, I didn't have a body. Stuff around me was no longer ruined, but unfamiliar and rustic. I was indoors, in a room larger than our kitchen. Polished birch wood of the paneled walls glowed with the shades of sand and honey. Sunlight that streamed through the cast-iron grate of a glass-free window. Beyond it, a myriad of blue colors composed the sky, bright the way it only gets in the spring. Birds chirped nearby. 

This place wafted such serenity!

So, Earth had either resumed its course after the catastrophe, or shifted onto another track, taking my consciousness along for the ride.

I grew up in terror of three men. Tsar Ivan the Terrible was the first. Our homicidal weapons master, Nikola, was the second. The third man in this trinity was my uncle, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii.

No! This knowledge wasn't mine. This was someone else's consciousness whispering things to me. It wrapped around my mind, entangled with whatever was left of me, like our souls were two kittens sleeping in the same basket. Separate, but not apart.

The person thinking so loudly in my mind was a brown-haired guy, shorter than average and slim.

I could have described myself in those same words, plus we looked about the same age. His clothes, though, were a far cry from ordinary. He wore a shirt embroidered at the collar, tied up with a wide belt, loose breeches stuffed into pointy-toed boots—of red leather. In short, his outfit was something a man who knew Ivan the Terrible personally could have worn.

In my timeline, the old-fashioned finery belonged on a movie extra. Except nothing felt like it came from my spacetime. The serenity of the atmosphere...

...Tsar Ivan the Terrible is seven years dead by Our Lord Almighty's designs... Nikola must be sleeping off his drink somewhere...

Serenity? What serenity? I was back to my normal, with anxiety rubbing me raw, even though it was his anxiety. 

Maybe he was my sixteenth century reincarnation, and I was recalling my past life? Or I found myself in a parallel universe, in sixteenth century Moscow? My grasp of physics was far too tenuous to come up with a reasonable explanation on the spot, but after the world had ended, stranger things could happen, right?

Is the end of the world nigh?

This was the guy's panicked thought, bleeding into mine, as mine bled into his. I flinched from the doubled emotional load. I don't have a timetable for it, okay? Chill.

My admonition fell on the deaf ears, since the guy's tortured consciousness already dashed to the more immediate threat.

"Uncle Vasilii! Have mercy!" he cried.

Uncle Vasilii wasn't in the guy's head. He loomed over him and twisted the embroidered collar of his shirt into a noose.

"Why did you leave the Prince's side, Besson?" Uncle Vasilii screamed.

Prince? What Prince? The question zapped through my head to receive a lightning-quick answer from the guy—Besson.

Prince Dmitrii!

Well, duh! There was no time to confirm if Besson meant Prince Dmitrii, the unfortunate youngest son of Ivan the Terrible—also murdered, so authentically Russian!—but not by his dad.

Uncle Vasilii's cheeks popped out of his graying beard like Red Delicious apples as he raged, displacing everything else in my new world. "Addled I was to overlook your treacherous father's rotten seed! Addled and blinded by the love of my kin!"

Besson didn't close his eyes in terror, but flung them open. Wider and wider, taking in the shades of red and purple in his uncle's cheeks, mouth and nose.

We're all cursed wretches! My curse is that I can never look away... why can't I look away?

The princes and tsars evaporated from my mind. What, you too?

Besson's heartbeat skyrocketed, pounding into me worse than fists. Demon!

Who, me?

The images bobbled in his head, hairy, ugly, and writhed with fire. Opinions varied about my appearance, but this was too much. Seriously, dude... friend... Besson!

Demon, begone from me! Cursed I am for my sins and for my Sire's sins. Cursed! Woe is me, woe!

Beyond his brainless scatter, I glimpsed a fragment of a childhood memory. A crone bent over the cradle with a wailing babe—him.

"What a besson child!" she said in a sing-song, yet hoarse, voice. "He does nothing but sit and peer all day long, quiet as you please, but come the night... What's this? No soothing him, not for all the gold in the tsar's coffers! What a besson! Hush, baby! Hush, Besson. Hush."

The exhausted nursemaid picked Besson to rock him. Her murmurs grew softer as the memory faded away, leaving behind a bitter taste in his mouth. Why can't I close my eyes? And why closing them changes nothing? I'm cursed.

So, that's what his problem was! It was one of my many afflictions as well, and the twenty-first century medicine held an answer. The moment I cleared my throat, however, to diagnose Besson in sixteenth century terms, he redoubled his anti-demonic incantations.

His uncle didn't facilitate our telepathic dialogue either, hollering into Besson's ears till they rang. "Why, Besson, why?"

"Ah..." Besson dodged the stench of onions, pickled fish and the spittle. "Ah..."

Lucky for his collapsing throat, the third corporeal man present in the room stepped in. Yes, he spooked me, too.

"Don't you incur the Lord's wrath, Vasilii," this man pleaded. "I know you've sailed from Moscow in all haste and must investigate urgently, but in our Lord's name, I beg you to reserve your wrath for murderers and rioters! Unhand this innocent boy before we lose another Christian soul in this piteous calamity."

I 'googled' Besson's mind to find out that the reasonable man was Father Nikifor of the Resurrection Monastery.

The priest's words got through to Uncle Vasilii. He tossed Besson aside and crossed himself. "Satan tempts me, Holy Father. O how he tempts me!"

"We reap what we sow, Vasilii," Father Nikifor said. "The Good Book says that whoever sows wickedness reaps trouble, and the anger he uses for a weapon will be destroyed."

Besson cowered in one corner, gripping the hair-shirt he wore underneath the outer shirt. It itched so badly; I was glad to be incorporeal. Eventually, the pain distracted him. His breathing slowed down, thoughts calmed. Even better, he stopped probing his mind for my 'infernal' presence. We scrutinized the two older men in peace.

They looked close in age, around forty. Where Vasilii Shuiskii dazzled in his silk-sewn knee-length coat, the monk stood stark in a black habit. Vasilii was stocky and straight-backed, while Father Nikifor was thinner, taller and stooping. The livid gray-blue eyes of the nobleman met the docile brown gaze of a priest. Red spots from anger splotched Vasilii's saggy cheeks. Father Nikifor was tanned and gaunt. Finally, Vasilii neatly hid his receding hairline under a fur-trimmed velvet cap, while Father Nikifor's corkscrew curls would not lay flat under his monk's cap.

The odd couple belonged on a page of an illuminated manuscript.

Aye. The title would be 'Prince Vasilii Shuiskii argues with Father Nikifor of the Resurrection Monastery in Uglich on May 19th, 1591.

It was great to chat with him without all the screaming. Cool.

We ought to add Besson, the unfaithful companion of the deceased boy-prince Dmitrii.

I could sense a wry smile in Besson's thoughts. We weren't friends yet, but we were getting somewhere.

So, Prince Dmitrii... is that the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible?

The one and the same! The half-brother to Tsar Fedor of All Russia. He died three days ago, and it had to be my uncle who Tsar Fedor sent to seek truth and restore peace!

Upon mentioning the tsar and his uncle in a single sentence, Besson heaved a sigh and hung his head low, nearly between his knees. Cold, sticky moisture trickled down his back. I was feeling it second-hand, along with the hiccups. Bodies... meh.

Woe to me, a sinner. I am a mangy pup! I am a wretched creature, undeserving of Thy mercy or my uncle's benevolence!

"Don't underestimate the boy," Father Nikifor said to Vasilii Shuiskii in the meantime. "He had suffered for his youthful transgressions immensely. Through such suffering, our Lord's grace befell him. He might yet be of use to your inquiry into Dmitrii's death."

Nikifor handed over a shred of canvas to Vasilii, who spared it a glance, then shifted it back to Besson.

The sky outside didn't change from its spring-time azure, but the room fell darker. And darker. And darker...

Gracious God, have mercy on a fallen man, Besson prayed as the walls closed in on him.

"Spawn of Satan! Wake up!" Uncle Vasilii shouted.

A slap landed on Besson's cheek—so sharp, it nearly knocked me back ten more centuries.

"Wake up! Good Lord, the fool barely sleeps for eighteen years. Now he swoons like a knocked-up doxy?"

"I'm fasting, Sire," Besson whispered. As if to confirm his words, his stomach growled. It was also twisting in knots from guilt, but hunger seemed more pronounced, at least to me.

Uncle Vasilii harrumphed and lumbered to the carpet-covered bench under the window. He sat down and smoothed the painting over his knee. The color in his cheeks lowered from scarlet to blushing pink.

"Did you paint what you saw on the day of young Dmitrii's murder?" he asked Besson. "Answer me!"

"Yes, Sire. I did. In the workshop of the icon-painters here at the monastery."

"All lifelike? You'd vouch for it?"

"This is what I saw." Besson didn't as much as glanced at the canvas.

I knew why he didn't need to look, just like I knew why he had cried all night long as a child.

The figures, the painting, everything—it was stuck in your head. You had to fix them on the paper for everyone else to see, because you long for colors when the night swallows them.

Besson didn't shy away this time or yelled at me for being a demon.

It stands before my eyes. If only painting it wiped it clean, but now. It's lodged in, like a thorn.

It doesn't go away. You remember every blade of grass, every thread on young Dmitrii's coat and every drop of his spilled blood.

Aye.

I nodded my absent head. Our affliction has a name, Besson. We're called the tetrachromats. It means that we see colors that the other humans don't. Sometimes, we see more than the extra colors. We see longer, and farther, and beyond what's obvious.

Besson grasped our kinship. He stopped pushing me out of his memories, so we both saw what he saw, while Vasilii and Nikifor had to be content with contemplating the painting. It gave them plenty to mull over anyway, because Besson was good for a sixteenth century maverick.

Prince Dmitrii sprawled on the dusty ground in the corner of Uglich's kremlin's courtyard. A covered staircase shielded him from the windows of the Hall of the Prince. In death, the body took too much space compared to when he was alive. Dmitrii was a boy of ten and hadn't yet sprung to his father's gigantic stature. But his splayed arms and legs stretched out of the shirt, sewn heavily with seed pearls and gems.

His knees locked stiff in death, so his boots pointed toes like daggers. Leather was redder than the drying blood. His head rolled back to lie in a nimbus of flaxen curls.

The fatal slash across Dmitrii's neck didn't draw an eye next to the splendor of the jewels and the thread-of-gold. But once you saw it, it was hard to see anything else. Red and straight. Deep. Fatal.

The official version was that Prince Dmitrii had a seizure while playing a knife-throwing game and cut his own throat.

I grew up five hundred years after the prince had died, and I had played that same game with my childhood friends occasionally. As far as I knew, nobody else had accidentally slit their throat while playing the knife-toss since that one time in the sixteenth century. Not a single person.

However, men were tumbling out of the windows a lot in my spacetime, so in five hundred years the Russians hadn't grown any less clumsy.