Bow Down, Peasants! (Or Else My Tiny Scepter Might Poke You), Golden Boy Gone Too Soon, and Sawyer's Crash Course in Royal Weirdness 101.
******
Author Note: Well, that took a turn for the… gilded and morbid? Sawyer's traded dingy bathrooms for halls of self-worship, and his welcoming committee is a deceased, miniature version of himself with a serious Napoleon complex. Things are getting interesting, to say the least.
******
******
When Sawyer's eyelids finally fluttered open, he was no longer met by the familiar cold, tiled walls of the cramped bathroom.
Instead, he stood in the midst of a scene so extravagant, so bewilderingly grand, that for a moment he couldn't even draw breath.
Beneath his bare feet stretched an endless expanse of marble — polished to a mirror-like sheen — that shimmered with an ethereal, inner light, casting soft, wavering reflections like water on every surface.
The hall around him was impossibly vast, its golden expanse stretching so far and so high that the distant ceiling was swallowed by a soft, otherworldly mist.
Everywhere he looked, there was gold.
Gold walls, gold columns, gold statues — each surface catching the light in ways that made the entire world seem to pulse with a kind of heavy, overwhelming grandeur.
Towering along the walls were statues, each one larger than life, sculpted from what could only be solid gold.
But it wasn't the craftsmanship that stole his focus.
It was the fact that every statue — every towering, glistening figure — was him.
Or rather, versions of him.
Idealized, glorified versions: taller, broader, regal in posture, their eyes gleaming with an impossible confidence he had never felt in his life.
One statue cradled an enormous jeweled scepter, its facets scattering rainbows that danced eerily across the polished floor.
Another showed him taming great lions — beasts with flowing manes and adoring, almost worshipful expressions — as if he were some ancient hero from a myth no one had ever heard.
Yet another wore an enormous golden crown, so intricate and heavy-looking that just imagining it on his real head made his neck ache in sympathy.
The sheer absurdity of it all hit him like a slap.
The impossible extravagance, the sheer number of grandiose depictions — it was overwhelming, ridiculous, and nauseating all at once.
None of it resonated with the awkward, uncertain boy standing barefoot in the center of this mad spectacle, feeling about as kingly as a stray mutt.
At the far end of the hall, where the golden floor dissolved into shifting shadows, loomed a massive throne.
It sat elevated on a dais of black stone veined with burning crimson, and the throne itself was a monstrous thing of gold, bone, and darkness — carved with shapes that hinted at ancient, forgotten powers.
Even though the figure seated atop the throne was mostly cloaked in the swirling gloom, its presence was undeniable.
It radiated an aura of sheer authority, an oppressive gravity that made the air thrum with invisible pressure, like the world itself leaned toward that single point.
And then, breaking the heavy silence, a voice rang out — sharp, imperious, and absolutely certain it deserved to be obeyed.
"You should show some respect, boy. You should bow in the presence of a king."
The voice rolled across the hall, reverberating off the golden statues and the cold marble floor, sinking into Sawyer's skin like a cold needle.
Each word was laced with a commanding force that seemed designed to leave no room for disobedience.
For a long heartbeat, Sawyer simply stood there, blinking up at the throne, the words hanging between them like smoke.
His mind, still sluggish from sleep and the shock of his new surroundings, tried to piece things together — but irritation sparked before reason could catch up.
His fists clenched loosely at his sides, the absurdity of everything around him sharpening into a defiant, stubborn knot in his chest.
The extravagance of the place, the ridiculous golden statues, the booming demands for deference — it all felt theatrical and absurd, like some child's deluded fantasy of power.
Sawyer scowled faintly, a flash of sharp annoyance pushing through the lingering fog of his confusion.
"What?" he muttered under his breath, the small, unimpressed syllable barely audible in the enormous, echoing hall.
It wasn't much — just a breath of rebellion — but it was his.
A moment of grounding himself against the absurd tide.
"I said, you should bow, you insolent little—" the voice snapped back, a whip-crack of anger slicing through the cavernous space.
But midway through the threat, something unexpected happened.
The regal tone fractured, cracking like thin ice underfoot.
A sharp, very human yelp of pain burst into the air, cutting through the heavy atmosphere with jarring clarity.
"Ouch! Ouch! Sweet mother of mercy, my tongue! What in the blazes did I just—?!"
The sheer absurdity of the cry — so painfully real, so devoid of all the grand posturing — made the golden hall seem to tilt slightly, the illusion faltering at the edges like a badly patched dream.
Sawyer stared up at the throne, his irritation momentarily replaced by blank, blinking confusion — and just the smallest, reluctant flicker of amusement.
Sawyer blinked slowly, his vision swimming slightly as he struggled to process the sheer, unadulterated surrealness of the scene unfolding around him.
The longer he stood there, the heavier the sense of unreality grew, pressing down on him like a weight he couldn't shrug off.
It felt less like he was living through an experience and more like he had been dropped without warning into the middle of some bizarre, low-budget theatrical production — a fever dream stitched together from scraps of absurdity, rendered in blinding gold and echoing, overblown pronouncements.
His mind, still trying desperately to tether itself to some sense of normalcy, finally gave up.
"What the actual hell is this?" he muttered under his breath, his voice low and rough, like the words themselves were reluctant to disturb the ridiculous sanctity of the place.
A disbelieving shake of his head accompanied the words, and with it came a strange, bubbling mixture of emotions — part utter bewilderment, part reluctant, simmering amusement.
The raw absurdity of it all — the golden statues, the self-important voice, the fractured dignity — was starting to creep under his skin in a way he couldn't quite resist.
He simply couldn't help it; even against the backdrop of his confusion and the lingering remnants of fear, a thread of humor began to pull taut inside him.
The mental image of a supposedly majestic, awe-inspiring king — a figure that had radiated an aura of unshakable command only moments before — now reduced to yelping pathetically about a tongue injury, was just too inherently comical to ignore.
At first, a small, almost guilty chuckle slipped from his lips, the sound uncertain, like he was testing forbidden waters.
But the laughter found fertile ground in the sheer absurdity of the moment, and within seconds, it grew into a full-bodied, unrestrained laugh that burst from his chest.
The sound rang out through the colossal golden hall, rebounding off the towering statues and swirling up toward the unseen heights above, a living, breathing thing that seemed almost to mock the grandeur itself.
It was liberating, in a way — a reckless, cathartic defiance against the confusion and fear that had so tightly gripped him since waking in this strange place.
For once, he wasn't frightened or lost.
He was simply laughing, savoring the absurdity for what it was.
And as if the universe itself wished to reward his rebellion, the situation took an even more ludicrous turn.
Out of the heavy, shifting shadows near the massive throne, a figure emerged, walking — no, strutting — with an exaggerated pomp that would have been hilarious even without the rest of the ridiculousness.
Sawyer blinked again, certain that his eyes must be lying to him.
The figure couldn't have been more than four feet two inches tall, if that.
He wore what could only be described as a miniature king's regalia: a velvet cloak so ornate it seemed to drown his tiny frame, trimmed dramatically with fur that, on closer inspection, looked suspiciously like cheap rabbit pelt.
Perched precariously atop his head was a slightly tarnished golden crown, tilted just a little too far to one side, as though even the crown itself recognized the farce.
In his hand, the tiny monarch clutched a comically oversized scepter, struggling slightly under its weight but determined to maintain an air of gravitas.
And then Sawyer's breath caught in his throat for an entirely different reason.
The miniature king's face — it was his.
Or rather, a slightly plumper, more cherubic version of his own face, twisted into an expression of ridiculous, puffed-up self-importance.
Sawyer stared, mouth falling open slightly, caught somewhere between outright laughter and horrified fascination.
The sight was so deeply surreal that it hammered a wedge right through the remains of his skepticism, leaving him standing there, half amused, half frozen, wholly dumbfounded.
⁕
"And you are… exactly?" Sawyer asked, the words slipping from his lips before he could fully compose himself.
He struggled, and mostly failed, to suppress the wide grin that had spread across his face, the sheer, maddening ridiculousness of the situation overwhelming any attempt at maintaining a straight expression.
It was like trying to stay serious in the middle of an absurd, over-the-top school play — only this stage was impossibly grand, the stakes strangely weighty, and the participants utterly bizarre.
The absurdity of standing in a hall of golden grandeur, facing a tiny, self-proclaimed king who was a chubby caricature of himself, was just too much.
Every fiber of his being was screaming that this couldn't possibly be real.
And yet, the sharp texture of the marble beneath his feet and the cold, dry air brushing against his skin whispered otherwise.
"I am you!" the small figure declared grandly, his voice rising with a self-importance that would have been impressive — if it hadn't been coming from a boy barely taller than Sawyer's waist.
He puffed out his chest in a dramatic display of pride, his miniature frame barely filling out the oversized velvet cloak.
"I am Samu'el, the once and future king! The—"
"Yeah, yeah, I get the gist," Sawyer interrupted with a dry, almost lazy wave of his hand, as if swatting away a particularly persistent fly.
There was no edge of cruelty in his gesture, only a deep, gnawing sense of disbelief laced with growing amusement.
"You're me from the past, or some alternate timeline nonsense, or maybe even a really weird dream sequence my subconscious cooked up after too much caffeine and not enough sleep," he muttered, half to himself.
He had seen enough low-budget science fiction movies, read enough cheesy fantasy novels, and lived through enough of life's random absurdities to recognize the flavor of this kind of nonsense.
Still, part of him couldn't help but wonder — what if it wasn't nonsense?
"But what do you call yourself?" Sawyer asked, his voice softening slightly, the question slipping out before he could stop himself.
There was a strange undercurrent to the encounter now — a tug of curiosity threading through the humor.
"You know," he added, tilting his head to the side, "your name?"
The miniature monarch lifted his chin with an exaggerated air of dignity, his small fingers tightening around the too-heavy scepter.
"Samu'el," he proclaimed proudly, the word stretched out with a peculiar, almost sing-song lilt.
It was the kind of accent that could almost be charming if it weren't so thoroughly strange — a curious blend of theatrical flair and childlike earnestness, as though he'd practiced it in front of a mirror a thousand times.
Sawyer blinked, momentarily thrown.
The name didn't fit neatly into any box his brain wanted to place it in.
It sounded familiar and alien all at once — an echo of something biblical, perhaps, but twisted into something new and strange.
For a moment, Sawyer simply stared at the boy — at Samu'el — feeling a subtle, uneasy shift in the air between them, like the faint ripple of a breeze before a storm.
His hands, almost of their own accord, drifted down to his sides, brushing against the rough fabric of his jeans.
Instinctively, he glanced down at his own attire, a small pulse of anxiety beating against his ribs.
Was he still clothed? Was this still real?
Relief washed over him in a muted wave when he saw the familiar, mundane comfort of his old jeans and worn gray t-shirt.
The denim scratched reassuringly against his palms, the cotton clinging lightly to his skin, and for a brief, precious second, he clung to that feeling — that simple, tactile proof that he hadn't been completely unmoored from the real world.
Yet the longer he stood there, the harder it became to ignore the dizzying strangeness of it all.
The scent of polished marble and cold metal filled the air, a sterile, almost ancient smell.
The golden walls seemed to pulse faintly at the edges of his vision, as if breathing.
And standing before him — wearing his face, his smirk, and yet something wholly other — was a version of himself he had never, in his wildest dreams, imagined meeting.
Sawyer drew in a slow, unsteady breath, steadying himself.
This was either the most vivid, elaborate dream he had ever had… or he had somehow stumbled into a reality where logic had been left behind entirely.
Either way, he knew one thing for certain: nothing about this was going to be simple.
Turning his full attention back to the pint-sized version of himself, Sawyer let his amusement fade into something far more cautious — and curious.
He studied the small figure in front of him with a seriousness he hadn't realized he was capable of in such a ludicrous situation.
There was something undeniably strange about Samu'el — something that went beyond the absurdity of his appearance or the setting they found themselves in.
Despite his diminutive stature, Samu'el exuded a presence, an air of quiet authority that seemed far too weighty for a boy who barely looked old enough to have survived middle school.
The details of his clothing only heightened the oddity.
He wore a meticulously tailored black jacket, the fabric pristine and heavy-looking, adorned with gleaming golden buttons arranged in intricate, almost ceremonial patterns across his chest.
Every element of his outfit seemed carefully chosen, from the sharply creased black pants that fell in clean, severe lines to the highly polished black dress shoes, their soft clicks echoing off the marble floor with each deliberate, measured step he took.
Over it all was draped an oversized red coat, rich velvet trimmed with thick bands of white fur.
It pooled around his small frame like a liquid shadow, the hem dragging slightly on the ground behind him in a way that suggested the coat had been made for someone far larger, far older.
The opulence of it — the sheer regal quality — looked almost grotesque on a figure so young, as if he were a child forced into playing a role he could barely comprehend.
Sawyer felt a strange ache stir low in his chest, an uncomfortable awareness that whatever this was, it wasn't meant to be funny anymore.
"How old are you?" Samu'el asked suddenly, his voice slicing clean through Sawyer's thoughts.
The question, asked in a tone that was both surprisingly serious and unmistakably businesslike, caught him off-guard.
Sawyer blinked, feeling the weight of that piercing, intelligent gaze fix firmly on him — eyes that seemed far too old for the boyish face they inhabited.
There was no teasing in Samu'el's expression, no mischievous glint; only a quiet, burning intensity, as if the answer mattered more than anything else in the world.
"Nineteen," Sawyer replied automatically, the word slipping out before he had even processed the question properly.
Only afterward did he realize how strange it was that he answered without hesitation, without sarcasm or suspicion.
It felt, somehow, necessary — as if this place, this moment, demanded a kind of raw honesty he couldn't explain but also couldn't resist.
Samu'el nodded once, a small, almost imperceptible motion.
For a moment, it seemed like the conversation might drift into something lighter — a joke, maybe, or a bizarre piece of trivia.
Instead, the boy straightened his posture, his hands folded neatly behind his back, and delivered the next line with the emotional flatness of someone reciting the weather.
"I was thirteen when I died."
The words hit harder than they should have.
Sawyer sucked in a breath, a sharp, involuntary reaction that made his chest ache.
There was no drama in Samu'el's voice, no mournful undertone, no anger.
Just a quiet, matter-of-fact statement, as if he were describing the color of the sky on a particular afternoon.
Before Sawyer could even formulate a response — before he could even process the weight of what had just been revealed — Samu'el turned his back to him.
The tiny monarch's small figure moved away, swallowed almost immediately by the cavernous grandeur of the golden hall.
He walked steadily toward the massive throne at the far end of the room, a lone, fragile shadow dwarfed by the towering statues of forgotten kings and the cold, imposing seat of ancient power.
The casual pronouncement of his own death lingered heavily in the air between them, a chilling echo that twisted the surreal encounter into something darker, heavier — and far, far more real than Sawyer had been prepared for.
He stood there frozen, heart thudding painfully in his chest, the vast silence of the hall pressing down on him like a living thing.
The strange dreamlike haze that had cushioned the absurdity of the moment was beginning to crumble.
Reality, or whatever strange version of it this was, was sinking its teeth into him.
And Sawyer was starting to realize that whatever was happening here — it was only just beginning.
⁕
The stark, matter-of-fact pronouncement of his own death — delivered with chilling nonchalance by this miniature, regal version of himself — hit Sawyer like a sudden jolt of icy water straight to the spine.
A shiver, sharp and involuntary, raced down his back, leaving a cold, unsettling ache in its wake.
For a moment, he could do nothing but stand there, rooted to the spot, the words looping dizzily in his mind.
Had he heard that right? Had the boy truly said he died — and at thirteen?
It was so absurd, so grotesquely casual, that part of him almost wanted to laugh.
But no laughter came.
Only a growing knot of disbelief and unease twisted tighter in his gut.
"Wait—wait, what did you just say?" Sawyer called out, his voice cracking slightly despite his attempt to sound steady.
The words tumbled from him, raw and unpolished, as he took an uncertain step forward, his earlier amusement now all but dissolved, vanishing like mist in the morning sun.
The chill that had settled over him deepened into something heavier, a prickle at the back of his neck that whispered this was no dream, no harmless fantasy spun by an overstressed mind.
But Samu'el didn't slow.
He didn't even turn to acknowledge him.
His small frame moved with unwavering purpose toward the distant throne, each step echoing in the vast, golden hall, each stride making him look even smaller against the looming, almost godlike statues of forgotten kings.
The massive, shadowed seat of power at the far end seemed to draw him in like a magnet, its presence as heavy and inevitable as gravity itself.
Sawyer watched helplessly for a beat, his heart hammering in his chest.
Then, desperate for some kind of foothold in this avalanche of strangeness, he called out again, his voice laced now with a brittle mix of hesitant curiosity and rising fear.
"Which... which life are you, exactly?"
The words tasted ridiculous even as he said them, but something in his gut told him he needed to ask, needed to understand, even if the answer shattered what little grip he had left on reality.
This wasn't just a dream.
It felt too real — the marble cool beneath his feet, the faint, almost metallic tang of the air, the distant, rhythmic creak of ancient stone.
Samu'el paused then, just a few steps from the base of the towering throne.
For a moment, he simply stood there, small and still beneath the cavernous ceiling.
Then, slowly, he turned his head, just enough for Sawyer to catch a glimpse of his face — a young face, yes, but one marked by a weariness that no child should wear.
"The eighth life," Samu'el replied, his voice soft but carrying, as if the walls themselves strained to hear it.
There was a sigh buried within the words, a breath weighted down by an exhaustion that didn't match the youth of his body.
"One of the shortest, too... if I recall correctly."
Sawyer staggered back a half step, a fresh wave of confusion washing over him.
One of... lives?
What did that even mean?
Reincarnation? Rebirth? Some twisted metaphor?
Nothing made sense anymore.
Every second in this golden nightmare dragged him further from the world he thought he knew.
"You'd be surprised by quite a lot, Sawyer," Samu'el said, and this time when he spoke, there was a slight tilt of amusement in his voice — but it was not the light, teasing kind Sawyer was familiar with.
It was the weary, knowing kind, as though Samu'el had lived too many years in too many bodies to find much left in the world that could truly surprise him anymore.
A small, knowing smirk curled at the boy's lips, but the eyes — God, the eyes — were ancient.
Vast, and sad, and far too knowing.
Sawyer's mouth opened, then closed again, the questions piling up faster than he could speak them.
"But," Samu'el continued smoothly, cutting through the thickening air between them, "we're not here to delve into the intricacies of reincarnation or the cyclical nature of existence."
He turned fully now, standing before the massive, ornately carved throne with the grave solemnity of a monarch addressing his people.
"We have a great deal of crucial information to cover," he said, his tone sharpening into one of authority that demanded attention, "and unfortunately, a severely limited amount of time in which to do so."
For the first time since this bizarre encounter had begun, Sawyer realized — with a bone-deep certainty — that whatever Samu'el had come to tell him, it wasn't going to be easy.
And it wasn't going to be good.
Sawyer frowned, his brows knitting together as his gaze remained fixed on the colossal throne towering at the end of the golden hall.
A creeping sense of disbelief tightened in his chest as he wondered — genuinely, irrationally — how the miniature version of himself possibly intended to ascend such an enormous, almost monolithic seat of power.
The sheer disparity in size seemed ridiculous, insurmountable, like a child trying to scale a mountain with nothing but bare hands.
The throne stood at least twenty feet tall, carved from what appeared to be solid gold, its intricate designs gleaming under the cavernous hall's distant light sources, casting long, distorted shadows across the marble floor.
It was absurd. Impossible.
Yet even as Sawyer told himself that, even as every logical fiber of his being rejected the idea, he saw Samu'el take another step forward — and then another — his small, polished shoes landing not on the floor, but seemingly on thin air itself.
Sawyer's heart gave a sharp, disbelieving lurch in his chest.
There was no visible staircase, no shimmering magical bridge, nothing that should have been holding the boy aloft.
But there Samu'el was — ascending, as if invisible steps had formed precisely underfoot to bear his weight.
Each measured step lifted him higher, the sharp, soft clicks of his shoes against the unseen stairs sounding almost defiantly real in the vast, echoing silence of the hall.
Sawyer blinked rapidly, the image before him swimming briefly as his brain struggled to process it.
He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his palms, half-expecting the vision to vanish, for the laws of reality to snap back into place like a taut rubber band.
But when he looked again, the impossible sight remained.
Samu'el climbed higher, growing smaller against the immensity of the throne, until he reached the wide, ornate seat at the top — a throne so massive that even the boy's strangely regal bearing seemed almost swallowed by its grandeur.
Sawyer's stomach twisted with an uneasy knot.
Whatever dream, vision, hallucination — whatever this was — it was dragging him further and further from anything familiar.
And he wasn't sure how much further he could follow without losing something vital within himself.
Despite the persistent voice of reason screaming that this was madness, Sawyer found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the unfolding spectacle.
He watched, almost hypnotized, as Samu'el, with the slow, deliberate grace of someone much older than he appeared, settled into the throne as though it were a chair crafted precisely for him.
He shifted slightly, repositioning his small body against the deep carvings of the seat, adjusting his posture with the practiced ease of a ruler familiar with the burdens of power.
There was no awkwardness in his movements, no sense of a child pretending at kingship.
Every subtle motion, every small adjustment of his limbs, radiated an innate command that Sawyer could feel pressing against him like the heat of a too-close fire.
Finally, Samu'el settled fully into place and looked down.
He squinted slightly, his expression marked by a faint, amused curiosity that didn't quite reach the ancient sadness lurking in his eyes.
"You're standing awfully far away, aren't you?" Samu'el called down, his voice light but carrying an unmistakable undertone of knowing.
His small head tilted slightly to one side, a boyish gesture that clashed unnervingly with the gravity of the moment.
Sawyer opened his mouth, struggling for a response, but no words came.
His brain lagged behind, still too busy trying to process the reality-defying scene playing out before him.
But before he could even begin to gather his scattered thoughts into anything resembling speech, the world itself seemed to shift.
No — collapse.
The massive hall, the towering statues, even the dizzying height of the throne, all seemed to fold inward on themselves in a single, gut-wrenching moment, like a great invisible hand crumpling a fragile piece of paper.
The golden expanse disappeared, replaced by an impossible proximity.
One moment, Sawyer was yards away, barely able to make out the finer details of the boy on the throne.
The next, he was standing directly before Samu'el, so close he could see the tiny freckles dusting the bridge of the boy's nose, the almost imperceptible twitch of a muscle in his jaw, the vivid, ancient intelligence burning in his young eyes.
The sudden and disorienting shift struck him like a physical blow.
His stomach churned violently, and for a terrifying second, he thought he might actually vomit from the vertigo assaulting his senses.
Sawyer staggered slightly, swallowing against the nausea that rose sharply up his throat as his body struggled to recalibrate to the new, impossible reality.
Nothing — not dreams, not fear, not even imagination — had prepared him for how wrong everything felt.
And yet, despite every warning signal firing off in his brain, despite every instinct screaming that none of this could possibly be real, Sawyer stayed rooted to the spot, pinned in place by the weight of Samu'el's unblinking, ancient gaze.
******
Note:The Institute for Advanced Surrealism would like to remind all patrons that while golden hallucinations and encounters with deceased miniature royalty can be artistically inspiring, they are not considered standard tourist attractions. Please report any such occurrences to the institute for further (and likely bewildered) study.