What Country, Friends, Is This?

The Lady Viola of Messaline has the strangest feeling of déjà vu.

(Well, assuming such a term is in use in this time. It can be hard to say. But still, that's just a label, isn't it? That which we call déjà vu by any other words would feel as familiar.)

She hasn't done this before. She knows that. There are, after all, a limited number of times one woman can be expected to survive a catastrophic shipwreck.

For that is what Viola has done. She knows that. It's why she's standing on a shore, with wet hair and clothes. She was on a ship --

(Where was she going?)

-- with her brother, her twin brother, Sebastian, whom she loves, and that ship was split --

(Was there a storm?)

-- and that ship sank, and she has come to shore here, without her brother.

Wherever here is.

Wherever he is.

(Drowned?)

She knows these things.

But she cannot quite remember them.

(Still, that's not uncommon, after trauma. That's the theory, isn't it? Or won't it be?)

No, she hasn't before been through a shipwreck in which her brother was probably drowned and she herself saved only by miraculous chance.

And yet . . .

The Lady Viola of Messaline has the strangest feeling of déjà vu.

She looks around.

She does not know this country.

She does not know it at all.

. . . that's strange.