by Jessica Grey
She did not want to be heard.
She had been running for a long time; it felt like forever. Her lungs were burning, and her breath came in shallow gasps. The heavy gold necklace around her neck was banging into her chest with every step. Lyssia’s legs were beginning to shake and she didn’t know how long they would hold out.
Finally there it was, a large tree with a hollowed out base. She and Viola had spent hours as children playing there. Hours exploring the strange powers they had. Powers no one would answer many questions about. Her father pretended that they didn’t exist, and the girl’s tutors just hushed their inquiries with worried glances at each other. Even Margaux and Luce just shook their heads sadly and refused to answer. Eventually the girls had stopped asking. Now they were running because the wrong people had seen them using their powers. Because they had crossed an invisible line they didn’t fully understand.
She skidded to a halt in front of the tree, got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the hollow space. The moist dirt of the forest floor clung to her skirts, smearing into large dark stains as she squeezed her way through the opening.
Her heavy breathing rasped loudly in the close confines of the tree base. Viola wasn’t here yet. Lyssia reached out with her power and tried to see her sister, but all she saw was the dark interior of the tree. She cursed and tore the necklace off of her neck. It lay cool and weighty in her hand, the heavily worked gold surrounding a single, flawless diamond. She put her hand down, the diamond resting against her palm, and grabbed hold of the dirt floor. Burying her fingers into the soil like roots, she pressed the diamond into the soft, fertile soil. She concentrated on the pulsing energy of the earth and called her flowers to her.
The alyssum bloomed immediately, boiling out from the dirt near her fingers in a rapid tumble. The sweet scent filled her nostrils and she reached for her power again, her eyes going softly unfocused as the bright white of the flowers danced on the edges of her vision.
There. In her mind she could see Viola running through the forest, heading toward their meeting place. Lyssia let her power flow out, searching for signs of pursuers. They were there, but far off. She could tell they didn’t know which way to go.
She saw landmarks in the forest as Viola ran past them and knew she was getting closer to the tree. Viola turned her head and smiled, as if she could see Lyssia running alongside her. She was almost there.
Lyssia focused her eyes and crawled back through the small opening, eager to welcome her sister. The alyssum followed her, spilling out into the forest like a snowy carpet.
There was someone standing outside of her tree, but it wasn’t her sister. It was a man, an extremely tall and handsome man, with dark blond hair that curled at the ends. He turned slowly toward Lyssia, his face grave. She scrambled to her feet, wondering if she should prepare to defend herself. The man seemed very familiar, but she was sure she had never seen him before.
“Lex,” the man said, his voice serious, his accent foreign. Now that she was standing, Lyssia could see that he was a very young man, not much older than she was. Even though she had stood to her full height, she still had to tilt her head up to see his face. She had never seen a man as tall.
“Lex,” he repeated.
Lyssia looked around the clearing, unsure of who he was talking to. He saw her glance and smiled softly.
“I think you may be dreaming someone else’s dream,” he told her quietly. “The power is very strong, and they don’t know if you can control it yet.”
“They?” Her voice sounded different, she had a strange accent, one that sounded like the young man’s.
The man looked off to his left, and Lyssia followed his line of sight. There were three women in brightly colored cloaks standing several hundred yards away in the forest. She couldn’t make out their faces. In fact, it was hard to discern much about them. The air around them was so charged with magic that it was hard tell where they ended and the magic started.
“Who are they?” Lyssia asked. Even as she said it she felt like she somehow knew the answer.
“Don’t you know, Lex?” the man asked again.
“Why do you keeping calling me that?” Lyssia looked up again at the young man. Luke—the name flooded into her mind. Her vision shimmered for a moment, the alyssum brightening, exploding with light at the edges, and then her eyesight cleared.
“Luke,” Alex breathed, and his smile widened when he saw that she recognized him. She looked toward the three women in the forest. “The three sisters—Lilia’s aunts.” The women moved slightly, the edges of their bright cloaks fluttering in the eddies of energy swirling around them. “You can talk to them?”
“Sometimes,” Luke replied. “Mostly right before I come to talk to you.”
“How are you coming to talk to me; why can I see you in my dreams?”
Luke shrugged slightly. “I’m asleep. I suppose I can feel when you are too. Somehow then I can grab onto the thread; otherwise the roses are too strong. She’s too strong.
”Briar Rose?” Alex’s voice was sharp. “Can you see her? What does she want? What can we do?” She broke off as behind Luke a tree trunk suddenly darkened. She could see the movement of the vines, which had been laying dormant and beneath her notice, awakening at the sound of their mistress’s name.
“Damn it!” she burst out. She ran toward Luke trying to wrap her arms around him, as if somehow her thin, pale arms could hold back the onslaught of roses.
Luke caught her chin in his large hand and forced her to look up into his eyes. “Wake up, Lex.”
“No. Help me fight her!” she screamed tearing at the vines beginning to encircle his chest, the sharp thorns ripping through the sensitive flesh of her palms. Blood began to run down her arms.
She glanced frantically back to where the three women stood, but they were gone. And in the next moment Luke was too. Alex stood alone in the middle of the forest, the blood from the wounds on her hands dripping down onto the petals of the alyssum at her feet. She began to cry, deep, wracking sobs that filled the air around her.
“Alex! Alex! Wake up!” A voice came from far away and very high up. Alex looked up in confusion at the tops of the trees and suddenly she felt herself being shaken violently. The ground rolled under her, and then it came up very fast as she fell toward it in a faint.
~
“Alex?” The shaking stopped and Becca leaned down to peer into Alex’s face. “Are you awake?”
“Yes, I think so?” she croaked. Her throat was amazingly dry; she felt as if she hadn’t had anything to drink in weeks. She sat up groggily, wincing at the horrible crick in her neck—a souvenir of her awkward sleeping position on the bean bag chair. She held her hands up and squinted at them. Even without her glasses she could see the fine pale lines of the scars from where she had torn at the thorny vines. Scars that hadn’t been there when she went to sleep.
“Did you have another dream?” Becca asked. “You were screaming and then crying in your sleep.”
“Screaming? Oh no, what time is it?”
“It’s 8:30; your mom’s already gone.”
“Good.” Alex pushed her hair out of her face and as she ran her hands through her bangs Becca’s eyes narrowed.
“What are these?” Becca demanded as she grabbed Alex’s hands and stared at the scars.
“I have no idea.” Alex shook her head, still trying to clear it. “No, that’s not what I am trying to say. I know what they are, but I have no idea why they’re there. In my dream I was talking to Luke, and the rose vines came again. I was grabbing at them with my hands. It hurt like hell. Made my hands bleed.”
Becca looked troubled as she dropped Alex’s hands and offered her the glasses. “And you woke up with scars where you’d hurt your hands in the dream? These dreams are getting scary.”
Lilia leaned over and took one of Alex’s hands in her own, running her fingers lightly over the scars.
“I am starting to think these are more
than dreams,” she said gravely. “Dreams and visions are not usually—I am not sure what the right term is.”
“Participatory? Physically dangerous? High contact sport?” Becca supplied.
“Yes, high contact, that is a good way to phrase it. Your physical body is now being involved in them in ways it has not before, and that frightens me. I do not know if that means you are having more power over your dreams, or they are having more power over you.”
“In my last dream, I felt like maybe I had a bit more power over it, at least at first. I was alone but I thought of Luke and then there he was. This one I didn’t feel like I had that power at all. But they are basically all ending the same with Briar Rose snatching Luke away with those horrid vines of hers.”
“Was there anything really different about this one?” Becca asked. “This is the only one that’s marked you like that.”
Alex rubbed the scars on her right palm absently with her other hand. She could still feel the remnants of the magic in the thin sliver lines. It flashed painfully into the tissue and muscle in her palms. It was worst in her right hand, but it was slowly fading from both palms. “This could be just because of what we read on the stone yesterday, but at the beginning of the dream, I was—well, I wasn’t me.”
“Who were you?” Lilia asked.
Alex raised her eyes from her hands and looked into Lilia’s clear blue eyes. “I was Lyssia.”
“My sister?”
“I’m assuming so, and really, like I said, it could be totally down to the suggestion from yesterday, that the name was just present in my brain.”
“How do you know you were Lyssia?” Becca asked.
“It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t like anyone called me by name or anything, I just sort of knew who I was. If you had walked up and told me I was Alexandra Martin from the twenty-first century I would have thought you were insane. I was running through a forest, wearing this long dress and brown boots and I was scared. I thought there might be someone looking for me, pursuing me, and I knew I was supposed to be meeting Viola at a secret place.”
Lilia looked distressed. “Were they all right? Did Lyssia and Viola meet? Who was pursuing them? Were they in danger?”
Becca put a comforting arm around her shoulder.
“Do you think it was real? That it was something that may have really happened to Lyssia and Viola?” Lilia asked Alex.
“It certainly felt real to me,” Alex said. “But what would that mean? That I’m having visions of what happened hundreds of years ago? I don’t believe in past lives and all that nonsense—” she broke off with a short, harsh laugh. “On the other hand, I certainly didn’t believe in any form of magic before yesterday.”
“I don’t think we can assume anything at this point,” Becca stated. “I’m more inclined to base all future actions on whatever is happening to us now as opposed to what we’ve thought or believed in the past. Otherwise we’d be currently committing ourselves to a mental institution.”
“Which by the way, still seems like a completely viable option to me,” commented Alex wryly. “Oh,” she continued, “Lilia, I think I saw your aunts!”
“Really? This is wonderful. How funny that if your dream is true, you have probably seen more of my family than I have.”
Alex winced at that and snuck a look at Lilia’s expression, but she didn’t look upset at all, just curious and excited.
“Maybe you had better tell us the whole dream, start to finish,” Becca instructed. “Better than getting it piecemeal like this, and it’ll help if you get it all out at once so you don’t lose any of it.”
So Alex told them about the running, her thoughts as Lyssia and the amazing magic she had done when she coaxed the flowers out of the ground. She described her visions of Viola, Luke calling her “Lex,” the trio of powerful women obscured by magic, and finally the painful and bloody altercation with the vines covering Luke.
As she told the story Lilia’s eyes got brighter and brighter, especially when she mentioned the hollowed out tree.
“I think it is real,” Lilia pronounced excitedly as she finished. “I do not know how it is real, or why you would be inhabiting Lyssia’s body and mind, but I know of that hollow tree. I used to play there as a child as well! Also, you thought of Margaux, whom I told you about, but I never mentioned the name Luce to you—she is Margaux’s sister and was my nurse when I was quite young.”
Alex wasn’t sure if she was comforted or frightened by that bit of information. “But how would I know that? The thought being someone else kind of freaks me out.”
“I don’t think you were her.” Becca looked thoughtful. “Luke said you were dreaming someone else’s dream. For that matter, we don’t know that what you dreamed really happened to Lyssia and Viola—the running and being chased and all that, or if it was just something that happened in her dreams.”
“Which I somehow stumbled into? Why would I be able to access her dreams?” Alex pushed her bangs up off her forehead in frustration. “I have enough trouble just being me, dealing with my dreams. I don’t need to deal with the nightmares of a long dead princess.” She glanced apologetically at Lilia. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No, it is fine,” Lilia assured her. “She obviously is long dead. They both are. I did not know they existed until yesterday, so it is hard to properly mourn them.”
“Maybe,” Becca said slowly, “it had something to do with what happened yesterday in the storage room. I know we’re kind of avoiding talking about it, but something happened when we did that blessing, something more than just Alex and I getting sucked into whatever ambient magic we were near.”
Alex swallowed painfully. “You’re right…I really would like to continue avoiding talking about it. I totally think avoidance is a completely valid game plan.”
“Not if it isn’t working. And frankly, magic dreams tearing your hands to shreds kind of defines ‘not working’ in my book.”
“We do not know that they are related though,” Lilia said. “However, it is probably less surprising to me that you both seem to be able to work magic than it is to you. I am used to these things.”
“We weren’t working magic,” Alex insisted. Her voice sounded weak and unsure even to her own ears. “I am sure there has to be some other explanation. Wouldn’t we have to know what we were doing? Or be doing it deliberately?”
“It definitely wasn’t deliberate action on my part,” Becca agreed. “Just more of a natural reaction.”
“Right, me too. So doesn’t that suggest that the magic was working through us instead of us working it?” Alex argued.
Lilia shook her head. “Actually, that would tell me that you were weaving it. Fae and demi-fae do not so much think about magic, unless they are weaving a specific spell and even then it is more thinking of how to mold what is already available—it is just there inside you and in the things around you. And I can tell you for certain I did not have enough power to instill that spell into that stone, you each added power of your own.”
“Pretty sure we aren’t any part fae,” Alex said.
“It might make sense, though,” Becca said thoughtfully. At Alex’s sharp look she added, “I’m not saying we’re fairies, obviously, but we have some sort of magic in us.”
“I refuse to believe I am a magical being, fairy, fae, whatever you want to call it.” Alex smoothed her bangs back down nervously. The conversation was starting to stress her out.
“You’d rather believe that you’re totally insane?” asked Becca pointedly.
“If those are my only two options, then yes, I’m seriously leaning towards insanity,” Alex snapped. “I don’t know why this isn’t freaking you out as much as it is me!”
Becca shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday. Since before the burial stone, actually. I am pretty sure neither of us should have been able to access the crown’s magic in that way, no matter how powerful it was. Do you think if we walked up to any random pe
rson on the street and handed them that crown the same thing would happen?”
Alex stayed silent because she didn’t like what her answer would have to be.
“So I did all my freaking out last night, actually,” Becca continued. “I think you know it too, but you’re suppressing it and it’s coming out in these dream/vision things.”
Alex folded her arms across her chest and stared mutinously at the wall over Becca’s head. She wasn’t sure who she was trying to ignore, her friend or the small voice inside her own head that was telling her Becca was most likely right.
“Even Luke, at least your dream Luke, agrees with me. He said that you couldn’t handle the power yet. That implies you have power. It could be a good thing; if we do have magic powers maybe we can use them to help break the spell.”
Alex finally looked at Becca, and then at Lilia who seemed to be in agreement with everything she was saying.
“You seem pretty convinced,” she said.
“I am pretty convinced,” Becca said. “I wouldn’t say I’m sure. I think we need to field test.”
Alex almost choked. “Field test? The magic?”
“Yup. Try another spell to see if we really are contributing to the magic and if we are then I think we need to learn to control it.”
“I can teach you some things,” offered Lilia, “but much of it is intuition. And as I said, I did not receive as much training as I would have liked.”
“Training?” Alex squeaked. “That’s just what we need some kind of magic training regimen.”
Becca snickered. “With the music from Rocky playing in the background?”
Alex laughed in spite of herself. “Okay,” she said slowly. “This is in no way me agreeing with your outlandish theory, but I suppose it would be okay if we tried a spell to see what happens.”
