Dominic felt as though he were dreaming. The dream had begun abruptly, like getting up to answer a complicated question in a theology lecture while half-asleep, then sitting down and finding that the chair had been pulled away. His consciousness plunged straight down.
He couldn't remember what he'd been doing or where he'd been. There was only an endless sensation of weightlessness. The things around him seemed to be rapidly receding, or perhaps breaking apart into particles and then reassembling. Shadows seeped through everything like ink soaking into sand, staining it in dark, muted hues.
He seemed to be at some delicate threshold between dreaming and waking. He could think about his situation, but he couldn't wake himself.
A commotion reached him from somewhere indistinct, near and far at once. People talking, horses whinnying, heavy axles and hubs rolling through mud.
[So it was raining.]
That seemed to explain the gloom, but it also raised more questions he couldn't answer.
Rather than lie there and wonder, he decided to go out and ask someone. It looked like a respectable place, after all. It was old-fashioned, as if it had fallen at least a decade behind the times, and its crude windows hinged upward and had to be propped open with wooden sticks. But there was a Holy Emblem woven from thin branches on the wall.
Nothing could have made him feel more at ease than that symbol.
He failed to sit up on his first try. His hands and feet weren't quite obeying him, and he felt tightly bound.
Instinctively, he shifted into a position that would give him more leverage and tried to pull his hand free. At first it was difficult, but as he strained harder, a dull crack sounded, and he had much more room to move.