by Melody Rose
Suddenly full of energy that I didn’t have a second before, I wondered if I really was dead. Maybe the contamination had gotten a hold of me, and I was in a weird purgatory. Maybe that’s the white space had been all along.
When I went to sit up, the two figures retreated and gave me space. Nevertheless, Queen Irena and Reon hovered like two concerned parents. I rose to my feet and abruptly put as much distance between myself and them as I could.
It was odd, seeing the two of them there together. Reon in his stark black clothing contrasted heavily with Queen Irena’s light blue dress. Dark energy swirled around Reon, and I noticed that a similar aura shadowed my feet as well.
I guess I wasn’t fully consumed by the contamination, but it was still there, making itself known.
“Great.” I crossed my arms in frustration and looked at the pair of them. “So we’re all here. Now what?”
“I never did miss such casual disrespect common from young people in that former world,” Reon said curtly like he was sucking on something sour.
“Look, I’m not going to do this,” I announced as I threw my hands out to the sides. “I’m not doing this small talk bullshit. If we’re going to hash it out, then let’s go ahead and do that.”
“Unfortunately, this is a neutral zone,” Irena said with a polite tone as if she were informing a student of the classroom rules. “We cannot hash anything out here.”
“Then what the hell are we doing here?” I shouted, my frustrating reaching its peak.
“There is no need to be so angry,” Reon scolded.
“No need to be angry?” I exclaimed. “It is impossible not to be angry right now. I’m at death’s door, we’re trapped in a cell, tonight is the Lunar Eclipse, and I can’t do anything to help anyone except draw a bunch of symbols over and over again.”
“It does sound a little hopeless,” Irena admitted gently.
“You think?” I gaped at her. “Now you two show up and tell me we can’t duke it out in here. Then what the hell is the point of being here if I can’t finally defeat his ass?”
I asked this of Irena as I gestured violently towards Reon. I expected some reaction from her, but Irena’s face remained neutral. In fact, she did one of the last things I expected her to do. She looked over at Reon as if asking for some sort of reassurance. Reon responded with his own silent glance that definitely said more than he was letting on.
I looked between the pair of them with wide eyes. “Don’t tell me you two are working together now? Because that would be a twist that I didn’t see coming.”
“I fear we may have taken the wrong forms and made this harder for you,” Irena said without blinking. “Perhaps something more familiar would do?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my voice shaking of its own accord. “Because it sounds like you’re not actually Reon and Irena.”
“We are not,” the Reon-shaped figure said.
I took another step back and tried to call to the light when I remember that it wasn’t working. However, when I had the thought, I swore I saw the Irena figure brighten for the briefest of seconds.
“Then, what are you?” I wanted to know the truth more than anything, but fear gripped at my throat. I swallowed, but no comfort came from the gesture.
“Would these forms help instead?”
As she asked the question, the Irena being shifted. Reon was right behind her. The two of them morphed and stretched, like computer simulations. Blackness rippled off Reon when he changed, and a faint white light protruded from the Irena figure. When they eventually stopped moving, they both had assumed a new shape that made my stomach drop.
Irena was now a middle-aged woman with brown hair that hung at her shoulders. It was thick so that it poofed out in a triangular shape. Her green eyes pierced through mine with a familiar gaze. Reon was still a man, but a blond one with freckles coating along his nose. He had thick-framed glasses that didn’t fit in to this fantastical world but suited the man’s square jaw.
They looked like they stepped right out from a photograph. The exact photograph I had left in a train station locker what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Mom?” I choked out the word. “Dad?”
A wave of feeling slammed into me, and I felt like I was going to throw up. The two figures sensed my dismay and rushed to my aid. I couldn’t help myself, I fell into their embrace like I had when I was a child. Old habits die hard, I guess. Even though I had watched these weird beings shift into the shape of my parents, confirming that they weren’t real, I still took comfort in my mother’s arms and my dad’s hand on my hair.
Unwillingly, tears sprang to my eyes, and I let them fall freely. “This isn’t real, right? You all aren’t really here. It can’t be.”
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, speaking in her exact voice. A voice I hadn’t heard in five years. More tears leaked from me, and I didn’t stop them. “No, we’re not really here.”
“But we are here to help,” Dad said, his low voice making my heart sing.
“I don’t know how you can help me.” I sniffled through my tears. “You’re not really my parents, and I think I might be dying.”
“You don’t have to die,” Mom said as she cradled me. “In fact, we would prefer it if you didn’t.”
“Who is we?” I asked, wiping the tears from under my eyes. “Who are you, really?”
Mom and Dad shared that look again.
“I just want answers, okay?” I rubbed my cheeks with my hands and smoothed out my forehead. “This is confusing enough as it is. Can’t someone just be clear with me for once?”
Mom and Dad, or the figures pretending to be my parents, sat down next to me on either side. It was eery how much they acted like my parents. My dad had never been able to sit criss-cross applesauce, and even now, the figure straightened out his legs and leaned back on his hands. Mom, on the other hand, slouched her back and tucked her legs under her with her hands on her shins.
I felt like I was back in the living room at home, as we gathered around the fire or watched a movie. I used to wonder why we even had a couch when all preferred to sit on the floor, just like this.
I clutched my temples at this memory and tried my best not to start crying again. I didn’t have it in me, I really didn’t. There was something so wrong and so right about this situation, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Feelings and thoughts swirled inside me, and it was so difficult to sort them all out.
“Why do you think you keep drawing Irena’s symbol over and over again?” Mom asked me.
“I don’t know,” I answered, not feeling like I had a choice. I had to play the game to get to the bottom of this whole thing. “Because it means something.”
“It’s been with you through this whole journey, right?” Dad wondered, quizzing me as if this were a math test.
“I mean, yeah,” I said, not understanding what they were getting at. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“What do you think it means?” Dad continued the quiz.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Do we really have time for all of this?”
“We have less time each time you ask stupid questions like that,” Mom scolded. It had been so long since I heard that tone of voice, I almost laughed.
“Okay, okay,” I relented. “It’s a circle with a jagged line running through the middle. She used it for everything. It’s on the Menagerie, it was the shape of the key to Rictorus.”
“Exactly.” Mom pointed her finger at me enthusiastically. “So, why that symbol?”
“I always thought it represented the union of the creatures and the humans,” I admitted. “Or at least, that’s what I remember being told.”
“Could it be the union of something else?” Dad prompted. He tapped his chin with his pointer finger, just like my father used to do.
“You all are doing a really good job,” I complimented though my voice was coated with snark. “Of pretending to be my parents. I mean, well done.
It’s effectively creepy.”
“We do not want to creep you out,” the Mom figure said, returning to the staccato speech of the people of Andsdyer, losing all contractions. “We want to help you. We really need you to figure this out.”
“Figure what out?” I lamented. “Why can’t anyone just tell me straight up what is going on? Why does everything have to be deciphered, solved, and figured out? It was Irena’s riddles, then the mermaid king’s test, and don’t even get me started on the library.”
“If it were easy, then anyone could do it,” Dad said with a single shrug. “This quest is not given to just anyone, Eva. Not everyone can handle the responsibility it brings.”
I sensed something in his tone that made me raise an eyebrow. “Like Reon, right? Reon couldn’t handle it. So now he is too powerful, and someone has to stop him.”
“What has he said to you? When you have been in this space together?” Mom asked innocently.
I gripped my shins, mirroring her, but I leaned back with a groan. “I don’t know, lots of things. The last time he said he was coming for me and that I had something he wanted.”
“Do you know what that is?” Dad scooted closer to me, eagerness written all over his features.
“If I had to guess,” I paused, thinking. “I always figured it was the light. He wanted the light for some reason. Because when we played chess, that was his prize for winning. A little piece of my light.”
“How many pieces did he get from you?” Mom asked in a worried tone. She reached out and put a hand on my forehand. I moved out of her touch, and while my real mother would have been offended at that rejection, this figure simply looked confused, bewildered even.
“Just one,” I confessed. “We didn’t end up playing many more games after that. I chose that on purpose, so I could take some time to learn the game.”
“Did you ever figure out why he wants the light?”
I sat there and looked between the two figures acting as my parents. There were close to me, close enough to reach out and touch, as the Mom figure had previously tried to do. They looked like parents, even sounded like my parents, but something about the whole situation was off.
It was unnerving, sitting there between the two of them. A place I was once so comfortable. But I had spent the last several years processing and trying to comprehend their deaths. While I knew I would be forever changed by that day in May, I couldn’t just back to that place. It was unhealthy and something that would never benefit me.
I left that world behind. While I never left my parents behind, they were always with me, I couldn’t return to that part of myself. Swallowing some courage, I made my decision and made a request of the beings.
“Can you go back to Irena and Reon?” I asked. “Or something else? While I appreciate the consideration, I am not that person anymore. Not when they were alive, or even those five years after their death. I will always have their memories, but right now, I need to focus on being in this world. Being this person that I am now.”
“That is very wise of you,” the Mom figure said. As she spoke, her face morphed back into the serene expression of the former queen.
On the other side of me, there was a small whoosh sound as the male figure changed back into Reon. “Very astute indeed,” he agreed.
“Thanks, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I’m always going to be working on balancing who I was in that world and who I am in this world. I will be both, but sometimes, life calls for one side of me more than the other.”
“Again, very wise,” Irena complimented. “That philosophy applies to many things.”
“Sure, it does,” I stated the obvious. “What are you getting at?”
As if I prompted something important, both figures rose to their feet. Each of them stretched out an arm, Reon his left and Irena her right. Before me, the pair moved their arms through the air. Trailing behind them were lines of white light or black darkness. Together they drew half a circle and then slide their fingers down the center, in a jagged shape. They finished their work with a flourish, and the shape disappeared, leaving only an outline of smoke in its wake.
Hovering before me was Irena’s symbol, plain as day.
My thoughts rushed together, like a crashing train. I studied the Irena figure with her white glow and then shifted my gaze to Reon’s dark aura. I closed my eyes as if that would help me concentrate.
“Reon has the darkness already,” I said, speaking my thoughts out loud in an effort to slow them down. “It gives him the ability to destroy, but Reon never wanted to destroy, not really.”
“What did he want to do?” the Reon figure prompted. His voice was very close to my ear as if whispering directly into it. Still, though, I didn’t open my eyes.
“He wanted to create a new world,” I recited the false king’s goals from memory. “He wanted to erase this world so he could build the ideal one. But his gift from the black dragon, Rubeus, only let him hurt.”
I squeezed my eyes tighter and clenched my fists together. The tension built inside me like a spring ready to bounce.
“Monte’s gift of light lets me heal,” I said the words slowly, deciphering them as I went. “But not create, not really. Wait, no, it does! That’s how I heal people! I create what I think it should look like.”
“Like when you are drawing,” Irena whispered into my other ear.
“Exactly like when I’m drawing,” I agreed. “To create the world he wants, Reon needs the light. But he tried to do it without the light. Without the light and the dark. He needed both.”
I felt a warm rush of air surround me on all sides, like a deep exhale. Only then did I open my eyes. Both figures were gone, vanished from my sight. I darted around, spinning in a circle to see if I could spot them.
When I realized I was utterly alone, not even the imaginary figures there to comfort me, a new sense of dread overtook me. I was on the verge of something important, some sort of breakthrough, but the train of thought ended. It felt flat and left me no better off than when I started.
I leaned my head back and released a groan. Then I let my head fall into my hands. Before I completely wallowed, however, I noticed something wrong under my skin. In my right hand, the white light glowed in its vine-like streaks that cascaded up my arm. That was a normal sight, but on my left hand was something completely different. Mirroring the white vines were a series of black veins crawling all over my palm and forearms.
I turned my hands over, palms down, but the features still remained. Getting an idea, I called to the light. The streaks on my right hand intensified. Then I used the same technique but called to the darkness instead.
This was an odd sensation, like reaching my hand into something sticky and hot. I shivered a little when I made contact with the darkness, but I aimed to treat it with as much respect as I did the light. The darkness seemed to crackle and warp when I spoke to it. However, the inky black on my left hand also deepened, just like the light had.
My hands stretched out in front of me like I was holding a bomb in each and trying to get it as far away from me as possible. Yet, there was a level of fascination that couldn’t outweigh the fear. I brought my hands back closer to me, and I put them together, lacing my fingers over one another.
The simple contact of one hand to the other allowed the light and dark to meld. They switched hands and wove together, braided streaks lining my skin. When I pulled my hands apart, the colors retreated back to their original hands.
“Okay then,” I said to the air.
I thought back to when I pushed Julei out of the way, and Reon struck me with the contamination. “So that’s how you got here,” I spoke to my left hand, addressing the darkness.
A laugh bubbled up from my throat and burst from me like a burp. I covered my hand, embarrassed even though there wasn’t anyone around. I snorted, then, making an even more humiliating noise.
“Oh, Reon,” I said from behind my hand. “He thought he was killing me when he was ac
tually giving me the exact thing I need to defeat him.”
I chuckled again, warming up to the idea of this darkness. I twirled my left hand in the air, leaving a short trail of black behind my movements, like a ribbon dancer. I spun my arm in circle after circle until an idea struck me. I drew a circle of the same size with my light-infused hand. The two shapes lingered just long enough for me to push them together right in front of me.
The light circled glowed out from behind the dark one. It looked exactly like the Lunar Eclipse destined to happen tonight.
“When the light and dark will be truly balanced,” I realized.
Another realization hit. I had to get out of the white space. I had to get back to my people and help them. I didn’t know how long I was going to have this power, but what I did know was that it was going to be as its strongest when the moon and the sun were in perfect alignment. That was when Reon was planning his attack, but it would also be when I planned mine.
The circled spun in front of me, and another thought struck me. I had used Irena’s symbol as a way to transport to other places before. It awakened by my gift and opened a portal into this kingdom. Maybe, just maybe, the symbol had the power to transport me back.
I reached to the top of the circle with my left hand and dragged a dark line down to almost the center of the floating shape. Then I dropped low and drew another line, this time white, up to connect with the first line. When the two ends attached, they glowed and sent that fierce glow throughout the whole symbol.
I stretched out my hand and found the symbol was solid before me. Then, to be fair and balanced, I made sure I had both hands on the symbol before shoving forward, as if to open a door.
36
My eyes snapped open, and I recognized the position I was in, the same one from before I passed out and transported to the white space, lying flat in Kehn’s arms. Yet, before I felt miserable and weak. Now, I was invigorated and pulsing with power. I could feel it swirling in my veins and pumping through my limbs.
“Eva?”
Someone spoke my name in a delicate voice. It was curious and cautious, but I didn’t answer them. At least not verbally. I responded by sitting up and then maneuvering to my feet. A gasp reverberated around the room in reaction to my sudden movement. I didn’t say anything and moved as if I were possessed.
