The last of the adults were long in bed when Timmy snuck out to explore the castle. 

When he had heard “castle”, he thought cold stone walls with perhaps a tapestry or two.  What he found was closer to a late Renaissance palace with fancy plaster foliage and trompe l’oeil painting. 

His favorite was the fake dome full of figures in the great room.

That was his destination on his little midnight exploration.

“Are they all asleep yet?”

“Yeah, we should be good.”

To Timmy’s surprise the voices were coming from the ceiling of the great room!

“Arg, that is awful.  I can finally stand up and stretch.  I’m so tight.”

“You’re tight?  You’ve been sitting on your fat behind all day!  I have to keep this idiotic pose with only a bit of wind-blown cloth covering my privates.  Ugh, I need to sit!”

“And I need to wrap something around me!  All of those gross men staring at my stone-cold breasts.  Terrible.”

“Ha! Your breasts?  No, they’ve been staring at my bare bum, that’s what they’ve been looking at.  And this idiotic club is getting heavy.  Who in their right minds thought someone would be swinging such a thing when they are so exposed?”

“Enough, everyone.  I think I’m the most ill-used, listening to your complaints every night.  Gar!  Hey, Champ, Hero, chase those birds away so we can eat in peace.  There’s a couple of good pups.”

Timmy snuck into the room and looked up.  The figures were all moving about, now fully clothed.

He involuntarily gasped.

One of the dogs in the ceiling started barking at him.

The king, no longer nude but wearing a heavy purple robe, pointed down.

“You there!  Yes, you!! What are you doing?  Come here for your judgement!”

Timmy stood and ran for the door.  Just as he was about to go through, he had an odd sensation of flying through the air.

*

“Have you seen Timmy?”

“No. But have you seen this ceiling painting?”

“Painting?  Your son didn’t come down for breakfast and when I went up to check I see he didn’t sleep in his bed all night and all you can talk about is some stupid painting I’ve seen a thousand times before?!”

“I’m sorry, I’ll ask the servants to keep an eye out and…”

“I already did that!  Why don’t you go look for him?”

“I will, in a moment.  But as to that painting that I’ve seen a thousand times before, I never noticed the boy in it.  Funny, he looks just like Timmy.  Come and look…”

***

This was written for the writephoto challenge. The writephoto challenge was started by Sue Vincent on March 3, 2016. Yep, seven years ago to the day. We all miss Sue very much, but the challenge lives on through the prompts KL Caley has been posting the last two years (give or take). This week KL posted the photo at the top with the key word “Ceiling”. In her challenge post she paid tribute to Sue.