Tag: Fiction

Writer's Wednesday!

The Iris City

AutumnB17

It wasn’t always like this. We used to live together as one.

Shaking the history teacher’s words from her head, Blythe pushed through to the outside world, the bitterness of the notion seeping into her mind like the fetid worms oozing lifelessly on the pavement. Better to let a notion like that die. Drown. Decompose. Rot. 

Anything was better than to think that her people had once been friends, family, peers, with them. Blythe couldn’t even imagine a past like that, nor could anyone for generations back until time had been disposed of and the world was born anew. 

She didn’t know much of what the world was like before the Rebirth – only that it was better now, and that she, much to her delight, had never spoken a word to anyone with a different color eye.

 It was comfort from conformity…why question the wisdom of The Supreme? He, the ruler of all, had seen the Before World. He knew the agony of her ancestors, had felt the disgust and degradation of interaction with them.

Pausing at the intersection and double-checking she had all her things, Blythe gathered herself and drew up the skirt where it sagged around her waist. Breakfast had been skipped this morning, as was quickly becoming custom in her household. 

Food was a scarcity; her mother didn’t want to go to the market anymore. Such was the tension, such was the hate: just the sight of the hazel-eyed worker was indecent exposure. 

Appalling – how the colors entangled like rabid dogs in an alley fight. Blythe wasn’t sure she could spend more than a fleeting instant locking eyes with any one of them. 

Brown was comfort. Fur blankets. Leather-bound novels. Brown was her people: a soft, caressing hue which exuded warmth and earthy sensations. The exact opposite of them. 

The Blues made her stomach knot: the watery clearness, thin and clouded with puffs of too-light pigment. Saliva spread over a crisp white sheet, doused by rotted fruit, dashed with flecks of phlegmy white and gray. 

The Greens set her on edge. Arrogant in their elite few, yet the very sight of them was equally sickening as the so-called “ocean blues.” Chewed cud and pungent vomit, a one-dimensional shine that some would call “iridescence” in the green eye was the film of slime on the surface of a bacteria-riddled pool – one which had a stench of molded fish permeating the air and snarls of loose hair entangling your fingers with every stroke.

A Gray was decent, she supposed, but shifty: the cold, calculating assassin surveying every passerby as a target. Let the Grays be tucked away in their coding alcoves to rot. Better that their danger be contained by monotony. Positions reserved for them were the dreariest of all – dismal work, sorting through paperwork or punching away numbers into a computer for hours on end.

The Mixes, like Hazels, were the worst of all. A Mutt. Best that Blythe not think of them. After all, she had a pure color, smooth chocolate ganache spread richly across a muffin; no imperfect specklings, spots, or streaks. Someone like her shouldn’t have to bear the vision of any shade but her own. They could all rot. They would not be missed.

Deciding she had forgotten nothing – she never did, of course, but the checking was habit – Blythe bobbed across the street, striding quickly down the foggy sidewalk. A weak sun pressed against the haze in a futile effort to break through, just barely illuminating the world as she surged forth into the empty city. 

Today was quieter than the day before, and the day before that, and the weeks and weeks back in the past. Storefronts, so precisely hewn from the cold alabaster stone, didn’t bother to light their signs any longer. 

Advertising was an effort that proved just as futile as the sun fighting the fog – the Browns knew which businesses were theirs, as did all the rest. The scent of bread wafted tantalizingly from an unlit bakery, and Blythe had to crinkle her nose to resist the sugary smell. The baker was a Blue – scum – she felt ashamed to pause even a moment at the aroma.

Though there was no law prohibiting interaction between her kind and them, it was extreme taboo. The Supreme knew best; society was in order…the Browns had their roles, the Greens theirs, and so on through the shades until you got to the Mutts. They got whatever was left – Blythe couldn’t comprehend a life of such disgrace.

Another crosswalk signaled her turn to go and she strode confidently into the street. This was the shortest light in town, she knew: the flashing orange would implore her to stop, the automated alarm would signal the cars to go, and she would not be safely to the other side for fifteen seconds more.

No one would come. No one ever came around this time. Blythe sauntered calmly into the intersection, rifling with the zipper of her bag. Shrugging up the strap that was sliding down her shoulder, and before she could watch the flashing orange turn solid, her world exploded. 

Light flooded her vision, harsh as fire, golden smoke swirling through the fog. She was flung back into the mist. A screech like a dying bird pierced the silence, tires skidding on stone.

Cement.

Wet and porous, oozing like the worms of the words in class. She choked for air, gasping jagged breaths. 

Voice from above, distraught, begging her over and over, 

“Please don’t be dead.”

“Please don’t be dead.”

And like a protest, Blythe grasped her ribcage, bones like shards of glass shredding her from the inside out. 

“Please don’t be dead.” Sizzling trails of agony burrowed down her arms, each petite limb throbbing as the shock faded to fire. 

“Please don’t be dead.” Driven by the intensity of the voice, she fought to keep her eyes open, but the lids sagged lower, and lower still, like the waning moon losing grip on the sky. Blythe heaved another breath – they were coming slower now…why couldn’t she breathe? Why was her heartbeat in her ears, a marching band storming the field?

Warm arms bundled her up, a boy’s face barely discernible through the dim, repeating the plea like a prayer. The dark curtain of her hair fanned across his arms like the sleeping maiden in a storybook, blouse crimson with blood and scuffed from the impact.  

Her vision slid away, but not before she glimpsed his fearful eyes, shining with panic in the headlights. Her limbs went slack. 

This boy was one of them. 

Leather against her back – the seat of a car; she strained in futility against his grip. He wasn’t just a Blue. Or a Green, Gray, or even Hazel. Through the fog Blythe had glimpsed one eye of a soft, pine green. And the other of a bright ocean blue. 

He was a monster in her world. The most revolting sight to grace her gaze in the seventeen years Blythe had lived. But not just that.

This boy, by law, should be dead.

When Blythe came to, her mind was dripping in molasses. A haze fogged her thoughts, slowly noting unfamiliar surroundings: a plush armchair, a couch swallowing her petite figure with cushions, an aroma of rising pastries that aroused a memory of the bakery. The bakery she had never entered…because it belonged to one of them. 

Them! 

Bolting upright, Blythe sprang from the warm pocket of tranquility into an alien world, a house – not the hospital draped in white or the school etched in alabaster. The home of a stranger.

At that moment the boy walked in and she gasped, stumbling back against the couch. Panic splashed her eyes and he held up his hands like a zoologist approaching a feral cougar. She scanned for exits and found only two – the entry he blocked or the window to his right.

“Wait! I don’t want to hurt you!” the boy took a step closer. Blythe grated her teeth and edged around the couch, hands twitching defensively into fists; it was all she could do to hold his gaze, her perfectly matched chocolate eyes begging to flit away from his unlawful mix.

 Two different colors. The thought was unimaginable to her: the worst taboo in her world of prowess through purity, a world where she could hardly stand to share an apartment building with them. 

“I know you must be scared. I swear I didn’t mean to hit you,” he stepped closer and she retreated back, “My name is Henry.” He was about her age – tall, thin, and just as pale as her and most of her peers; the sun was a friendly sight in the city and one not seen often. Henry – what a lovely name to assign to such a strange boy.

His revolting ocean-pine eyes searched hers, running over her taut muscles and mussed hair to land directly on her frantic gaze again. Blythe knew he expected a response; every cell of her body protested as she lifted her tongue to speak. He doesn’t deserve your words. He isn’t even a Mutt. Her thoughts insisted. 

This was taboo.

This was wrong.

He was wrong. 

“Blythe,” she gasped. An amiable smile lit his face. Ragged breaths slowed slightly into cautious ones: that was all she had to say. Her name.

When she got home – not if, Blythe wouldn’t deal in ifs – this wouldn’t be such a grave infraction. She took the opportunity to inch around further, eyes flitting to the window, unsure of the strength needed to break it. 

“I know you’re uncomfortable around me – it’s not your fault. Your city is so segregated, every aspect split by eye color, even the jobs…” Henry fumed, words echoing with intensity and genuine anger. Color rose on his cheeks, a twitch flexing his palm like someone straining to seem indifferent to little avail. Blythe averted her gaze, nodding in a way she hoped would look impassive. 

“And then your leadership!” he scoffed, gesturing vaguely towards the window. Her eyes locked on the region his hand indicated, desperate to glimpse the towering city walls with no success. An idle gesture. Just my luck. “That monstrous dictator–” 

Blythe’s eyes snapped to him, hand flying to cover her gaping jaw. Words leapt from her lips before she could gather the thought to stop them.

“The Supreme?!” her eyes bugged, free hand knotting in her dark tangles of hair. The words ricocheted in her ears. Monstrous dictator. Segregated city. And the obvious fact, the one she couldn’t bear to think about: two different colored eyes. A trait punishable by death. 

Scattered pieces of the puzzle zipped into place, interlocking in a conclusion so frightening Blythe’s throat spit bile onto her palate. Henry looked up at her suddenly, startled by her reaction.

“The Supreme?” he repeated, puzzled. “Your leader. That’s what you call him, right? That sociopathic, manipulative, lying son-of-a…” Henry cleared his throat. Blythe stared back at him, fists uncurling in shock, too stunned to answer the question.

“Blythe, are you–”

“What do you mean, my leader?” Silence fell over the sunlit room, thick as the velvet drapes framing the window and crimson with tension. Blythe watched fearfully as realization dawned across his sculpted face.
“You don’t know, do you?” he ventured, eyes wide and disbelieving. She was frozen to the spot in anticipation. Tongue dry. Lips parted. Breath hissing. “I came to your city for an intelligence operation. I couldn’t just leave you in the middle of the road and trust that system to fix you–” 

“Tell me,” she insisted. Segregated city. Monstrous dictator. Horrible laws… She couldn’t gather the thoughts fast enough as they whizzed through her mind. Henry drew in a deep breath, realization melting into solemnity in those strange mismatched eyes.

“Blythe, you live in a dictatorship. They tell you The Supreme rules all land.” She nodded – this was a fact drilled into her countless times in school. 

“He doesn’t. The only place in the world ruled by him, the only place in the world like yours is the city you live in. Blythe…” His face turned down, feet shuffling. He had stepped closer while he spoke but she couldn’t conjure the coherence to back away. 

“The world isn’t separated by eye color. The rest of the planet has been trying to liberate your people for generations. Here we are free to work with the other eye colors. To live with them. To go to school with them. To love them.

“Outside your concrete walls is a whole new reality of acceptance. Welcome to the real world, Blythe. All the eye colors…together.” Henry stepped forward and caught her hand; skin on skin contact with a Blue-Green hybrid. Her eyes rocketed to his, growing so wide her eyebrows were in her hairline. Short-circuited. 

In one fluid motion Blythe snapped her hand from his and launched herself through the window. Glass exploded all around, a thousand shards catching the sun in a shower of razor-sharp, iridescent rain. Henry gaped after her, staggering towards the remnants of the smashed window. 

Blythe’s retreating form bolted away until she shrunk into a singularity on the horizon, a spot of dark hair whipping into an endless city maze. Only one thought lingered on her mind, one set of words crashing through the chaos: To love them. I could be free to love them.

Heartbeats. What a strange thing: in books they stall or flutter, in movies they are soundtracks to the most horrific suspense, but after minutes of sprinting, when Blythe rounded a corner to the most appalling sight she’d ever seen – it wasn’t her heartbeat that failed. It was her legs. 

She dropped to the sidewalk. 

They were everywhere. Hundreds of people meandering down the streets, strolling in and out of shops, her own kind intermingled with them. Chatting. Holding hands. Sharing earbuds. Locking eyes with no judgement, no revulsion, no animosity. 

Blythe’s ribs throbbed, fingers tingling where Henry’s hand had gripped hers. She kneeled there for a few moments, chest heaving with sobs, and hoped with all hope that no one would question her. Some passerbys shot her strange looks and she scooted against the bricks to let them pass – a young girl with uniform hanging loosely on her frame, disheveled hair, tears welling in panicked eyes. 

Minutes flowed into an hour, an hour into two; Blythe drew her knees up to her chest and suppressed her sniffles, watching the ebb and flow of humanity around her. Face phased into a mask of faux disinterest, none seemed to question the teen huddled on the sidewalk – a sight considered bizarre in her home city was just an everyday occurrence in this one. 

An elderly couple hobbled by, chatting idly about the merit of chrysanthemums versus posies for their garden. Blythe raised her gaze to watch them pass, flashing an uneasy smile in response to the woman’s genuine one. They resumed their conversation, one pair of eyes a soft cocoa and the other a steel blue. Both lit with affection. Ease. Love.

Her world was shattered into a thousand pieces. Basic facts of life, the ones she accepted without a second thought, were flipped inside out: The Supreme was the ruler of all. They should not be associated with. Each faction is separated for the good of the world, preordained by the ancestors as the way to salvage a cruel, inefficient Earth. 

Watching the loving couples and blathering friends intermingling in an illicit swirl of action was like watching her life unravel itself. Scents of fresh baked bread and blooming flowers wafted on a light breeze and suddenly she thought of the bakery. 

How many times had she walked past that damned store, slumping her shoulders as the enticing aroma beckoned her inside? How many times had she lectured herself that she could never enter, lest she speak to the owner? A Blue – a woman with a kind face and smile lines, one she had thought disgusting for such a simple thing as pigment, something you couldn’t control. Coded by genes. DNA. Interacting chemicals and molecules…was that truly all her life had been based around?

Perhaps this scramble of colors wasn’t so awful after all. 

Suddenly a hand grazed her shoulder and she whipped around to see a boy grinning at her with eyes she scolded herself for finding pleasant. 

“Henry!” Blythe leapt up, not backing away. 

“I searched for hours – I’m so sorry, Blythe. I know I need to take you back–”

“No,” she stated. He cocked his head, confusion slacking his face.

“No?”

“No. The people I see here…the baker on the route home from school…the girls I see in my apartment building…these are all people I’ve never spoken to. Every day I pass them, every day I recoil and rush past.” Blythe gestured widely to the road, the town, the world. Henry’s eyes glowed.

“You said you work in intelligence. That your people have been trying to liberate my city, infiltrate it?” she demanded. In the heat of the moment, his eyes didn’t seem quite so grotesque when she locked her gaze with his. The watery saliva blue was a tropical breeze, the vomit-cud green was a summer fern speckled with dew.

He nodded, shell-shocked to hear so many words spoken to him from a girl predisposed to hate him. Animosity drilled into her. Culturally. Economically. Socially.

And yet, Blythe found herself relishing in the spark that lit his eyes, studying the turquoise-surf blue and fir-forest green with curiosity rather than loathing. 

“I think I can infiltrate the city. I think…” she inhaled sharply, melting in the sweet scent of fresh-baked bread and cultural dystopia.

“Henry, I think we can start a revolution.”

Writer's Wednesday!

WW Elementals Finale Part 3– Soul and Saviors

AutumnB17

Screams. Deep, throaty, bellowing groans in discord with the silence of the graves. That was what the goddess wished to hear as she approached the crypt. This spark in her deadened soul, this wisp of something…an emotion? An impulse? 

A fire in the eyes of the devil.

  A bitterness on the tongue of a critic.

A harsh word on the ears of the deaf.

What would someone call that? Not a feeling, the goddess decided. She was not wistful for the sound of screams, not hopeful. She was inconvenienced. Inconvenienced by an impulse–the hard metal heart rotting in her chest was incapable of the experience “hope.” So, perhaps, Artemis was experiencing distraction. Irritation. 

Niggling at her gut, the annoyance disguised as hope for her Huntsman collected her soul together again. As a goddess, it was simple to fracture herself into various forms and disperse them throughout the Earth and heavens at the drop of a hat. But it required the lack of emotion–no, distractions, she reminded herself–that she could not currently obtain. 

It was a cosmic lift from her mind: the weight of all the monitored realities condensing into one form, a merging rather like mixing the ingredients of a pastry; after all, it is easier to carry a single cake than all the flour, eggs, and milk that went into it.

Whole again, the goddess moved with renewed vigor, cautious to monitor her speed lest she overshoot the crypt by a mile at sonic pace. It felt awkward to run again; she hadn’t truly run at a human speed since she ruled the Hunters of Artemis, back when tracking down boar and overconfident cougars was the task of all tasks. 

Finally at the cusp of the leering concrete structure, she took a moment to examine it with cold, calculating eyes leering in the anxious light. It was a beautiful tomb: carved with the intricacies and care of craftsmen from a time before. A time of refined workmanship and gentle, deliberate chiselings and chips. 

Not like today. Cheap plastic. Mass produced goods. Hasty assembly lines–the festering mortal laxity disgusted her. She was born from the cosmos into a world of art. Beauty. Grace. And–consequently–meticulous hours of work behind each vase and script.

But craftsmanship passed with the years and without note, of little matter to an immortal and even less to a human. The true reason why she trudged through this graveyard was infinitely greater than the tomb.

What lay within. Who lay within: the cause of this annoying distraction of hope. Because despite herself, a shrapnel shred of her iron heart held fondness for him.

Orion. Orion, who once upon a millenia she had loved against her will and against her better judgement. Orion, who was destined to be a mortal, who’s scorpion sting should have seeped toxicity through his arteries and stolen his breath. Orion–for which the goddess had rewritten the stars themself.

She allowed this annoyance to broil in the silence, regarding the stone with daggers in her eyes and shoulders defiantly broadened, despising the silence. Her name did not reverberate from within. No prayers echoed dimly through the crack in the door. This wasn’t good…not at all. There should be screams; that fact, and that fact alone, decided it.

The goddess charged violently at the door, lashing a bolt of crisp white light crackling towards the cement. From the silence the burst of power rattled the air into a frenzied hum. Her gossamer hair lifted and spiked from its sheen, frazzled by the static and the door exploded at once. 

Shards of stone and rock thrashed violently against her skin, assaulting the paleness and careening off like a pebble on a bulletproof window. The atmosphere thrummed with the blast as a cloud of suffocating dust billowed from the decimated crypt.

Unmarked, clothes artfully disheveled and hair frizzed, Artemis stumbled forward through the clouds of soot and sucked in a breath. Panic overtook her glass eyes: the rubble was immense. Cradling her thin hands close to her chest, an unexpected regret fizzled through her fingertips in the place of the power she had come to know. Tightness seized her chest. Too much. Too much, I used too much, what if…? 

“No,” she breathed, eyes roving the debris, the annoyance of hope rearing strong in her gut. Shiny, platinum hair. Strong hands. Cloth. An arrowhead. Something, anything, to show her she hadn’t…but what if… 

What if I killed him? What if he was suffering? What if my flicker of effort crushed him, what if? What if Orion is dead? It shouldn’t matter to her. Another feeble-minded mercenary, blindly following orders on the chance that Artemis will show them love…wasn’t that all he was?

The goddess, clutching her arms against her heart, scrambled to comb the rubble. She flung aside rocks with the frenzy of a starving hyena stumbling upon a fresh kill. Minutes screamed by and thousands of shards spiked the earth where she had thrust them from the debris. No sign of him. Drawing back in fright, the goddess examined her work in terror. 

“What am I doing?!” she sobbed to the hazy clouds of ash, to the sky, to the unhearing wind. Dread pooled in her gut.The sky was darkening.  Pressure squeezed her brain. Shivers trembled down her spine: what is happening to me?

Artemis had no time to ponder the question when her vision scattered in a crack of light. Lightning burst from the sky, forking a fiery tongue down directly into her aching chest and bursting her conscious thought into shrapnel. Thunder rumbled in the sky, a crescendo like a bowling ball hurtling down the lane. They stepped forward, emerging from the haze like phantoms floating on the fog.

Four girls wrapped in glittering light, angels gliding through the dim cemetery with elegant strides like a young queen at her coronation. Another burst of lighting struck the goddess. She fell back, back arching with the electricity, fighting to condense her being back into this moment. A girl rose her hand and flame emerged, climbing the silk strands of Artemis’ hair and licking down her simple, threadbare clothes. Rain came pounding in then, icy cold and blistering heat ravaging her skin in a torrent, the charge still buzzing along her body.

The Elements overpowered her one by one, pummeling her figure with bolts of energy and wind and gasps of fire so sweltering her skin burned red. Moon dust choking her lungs, stuffing the delicate trachea full of toxicity and smoke. Lightning sizzling her arms. Fire drowning her eyes. Sea spray whipping down on her head like gravel lashed from a truck tire. 

Artemis clawed at the earth, reaching for a stone to throw, something to cease this pain, a pain like she’d never felt in all her existence.

Instead, her groping hand found skin. Skin. 

The world came back into focus. All the fragmented particles of her essence raced back together in a surge, solidifying in a burst of raw emotion so intense she rocked on her side and screamed. The barrage stopped at once. The four girls were thrown back like rag dolls in the path of a tormenting toddler, thrust on stone mausoleums, bones cracking against graves. 

All the millennia of her life suddenly focused, each minuscule moment notable or worthless jamming themselves into her mind, and suddenly Artemis felt like a human. Frazzled, lying in a pile of rubble and soot, desperately clinging to the hand of her long lost love.

Orion. 

Orion. A romantic love, perhaps, or a friendly one, or maybe not love at all so much as a mutual liking…but whatever they had, she suddenly could think of no happier moment in all her life as when she felt her fingers on his.

Paying no attention to the moaning Elementals behind her, she sat up and drew the warm skin of his hand against her face, gently cradling it against her cheek. A pulse fluttered weakly through the veins there, throbbing in time with her flooded head. All the memories, all the years flurried through her brain, a great burst of humanity ravaging her soul. And there was a soul. She felt it now, festering inside her, thrumming and glowing as bright as Selene’s moon.

Dusting the debris from his body, Artemis pulled him close, golden hair splayed across her lap like a sunburst. Willing a morsel of her mind to focus, the power burst eagerly to her fingers and streamed into his broken body, knitting tissues and mending bones. The years of hunting experience coalesced into a healing energy, one she wasn’t sure she had ever used–not on the dying leper during the plagues or the wounded huntress she had taught since youth. Never would she have thought to try. Never, except for him.

When she was certain Orion had healed, she delicately lowered his head onto the stone, brushing the ash from his lids. Turning her head to face the four powerful girls, she was met with a pair of beseeching midnight eyes.

“Selene,” she whispered. The teen girl stood not far from the goddess, legs twisted at disturbing angles and fingers trembling. 

“Artemis.” The words were cold, doubtlessly intended to ring with strength but quaking with weakness instead. Kenna the fire girl, Daria of water, and Talia of storm gathered themselves and stood, each bloody with the impact of the cosmic blast. 

Stumbling forward, each flashed each other meaningful looks, striding to Selene’s sides and linking arms with her. A row of four girls, meant to be five, full of enough power to rock the universe from its foundation.

There they stood, eyes trained on one lone goddess, the huntress, the eternal maiden. A sense of cumulation permeated the scene, a sense that every instant in their lives, as unique and different as they may be, had been building to this moment. This hour. This minute. This very instant in time.

 The final fight was about to begin.

Writer's Wednesday!

Midnight Rogue 3–Dawn

AutumnB17

When the bell had struck hours ago, she should have run. A messy murder was better than a risk like this: to be so far from home and take her time going back. He had taken too long to die. 

When the bell had struck hours ago, when her knife had plunged into his beating heart, she shouldn’t have waited for his last breath to be drawn. It was too late. Even before she left the alley, she knew this. She had gone too far, waited too long, been too careless.

The girl slunk from the hallowed place; she was alone again. Bloody morning sun rays painted her face in gold, glistening off a pallid, milky mask: the face of a killer. Beginning to perspire, little beads of pearly sweat adorning the pale canvas, her boots struck hard on the concrete as she started to run. 

Her feet were slick with the sweat, boots stuffed with paper upon paper to disguise her actual shoe size…a smart tactic. A smart tactic, but a disgusting one; her feet were swimming in greasy newspaper, toe sweat, and blood that had seeped through the fabric. 

Uncomfortable. Not an uncomfortable like wet socks after a water ride. No. Uncomfortable like the fact that her mind no longer lingered on the fresh blood on her hands. Uncomfortable that the swampy sweat bog of her boots was of a bigger concern to her than the man she just slaughtered. Oh, well. Discomfort could pass. Guilt, which she decidedly shut out, would have passed too. The girl had greater things to worry about.

She had been sloppy today. She was never sloppy–never. Gloves cleanly disposed of. Knives properly cleaned, soaked in chemicals, restored to their place. Boot prints left, yes, but in a size that was almost laughably big. Those grimy shoes had been passed around among relatives so many times the purchase was virtually untraceable. None of those were the problem. Not at all. 

Her problem was the sun. The sun, and the thousands of dirty, drug-shooting, poor saps rising with it as the outer boroughs spurred to life. Panther-like steps were abandoned. It was a race against the clock, a race against any early risers. This time, she had taken it too far, too lightly, too late. Sprinting now, her boots thudded so loud that she was more likely to wake up the people with the sound of her footsteps than the sun through the windows.

Idiot, idiot, idiot…how could you be so careless? It was at least a mile left to go; she had traveled so far through the night, hopped up on sadistic adrenaline and practically unfazed by the trip to the victim’s apartment. 

But her energy was waning fast. The Midnight Rogue persona was slipping through her sweat-slicked grasp, the addictive, psychotic energy dissolving. 

She had killed at midnight. 

Recounted their sins. She was the devil. The cruel Fates of hell. Anubis burning a sinner alive with the flames of their own wicked crimes. 

An easy dagger thrust. She was an assassin. 

Pierce the heart. She was Death. 

Watch the life bleed from their eyes, draining like thick soup through a strainer…make sure the victim is dead. She was vengeance.

The girl shifted through her roles easily now, easier than the first times. Each kill was smoother than the last; this broken shell no longer felt guilt. 

Why not? Simple: does the grim reaper feel guilt? No. Then neither would the Rogue.

She had killed at midnight. 

It was four A.M. 

The time in between had slipped through her grasp, springing through alleys and dodging the sleeping masses of homeless people, stewing in their own filth.

A dingy street flew by, she passed onto a silent avenue. Movement in her peripherals, just a flitting shadow. The girl faltered. There was a shape in the window, a heavyset figure: a silhouette wreathed in the brilliance of an old-fashioned light bulb, a set of eyes staring out into the void, a man. Did he see me? Is my cover blown? 

The girl hoped she was unrecognizable as the Rogue. As dangerous as it may be to face down the Midnight Rogue as a criminal, it was twice as dangerous to be the Rogue at the mercy of a citizen. In this lawless, disgusting place, who would falter to kill her?

 The vacant-eyed Reject on the street–some ex-politician from City Central, a broken man swaddled in urine-soaked blankets–who would turn her in for a scrap of cloth on his back? 

A criminal wandering the avenues, haunting restaurants and clubs, waiting for a young girl he could prey on to stagger from a bar?

Not even a mother, wreathed in cigarette smoke, puffing her lungs with toxicity to shut out her grief? Desperate to make ends meet? Living paycheck to paycheck?

Even her only friend would condemn her to hell if he knew. So why not every other sinner in the boroughs? She had no right to play reaper. No right to play God. No right to deal justice where none existed. Yet she still kept running. Somehow, inexplicably, she would not let herself die.

She knew what had to be done. There was no time to get to the bunker. No more shadows to hide in. Now was the time to be the girl she’d grown up as, the girl she was before the triggers, before the ugly monster inside her reared its head. It was time to shed the disguise.

Shrugging off her cloak, the Rogue ducked into the first alcove she saw off the street. It was dark, humid, with a dumpster that smelled disturbingly close to human feces. The boot slid easily off her foot. Sweat-soaked newspaper shook loose from its pungent prison. Remorseful, the girl stuffed the royal purple silk into the lining, cringing as the hand woven cloth was smashed into a moist boot. When she stuffed the boot back on, she was equally delighted and regret-filled by the coolness of the cloak on her foot. 

Pony tail holder: it had carved a pinkish track in her wrist. Her hair felt coarse under her greasy fingers; she quickly tied it up in an unflatteringly high ponytail. Shrugged off her jacket, loosely knotting it around her waist. 

Then, the worst problem. My dagger…the bronze etched handle was laughably visible. The sheath at her belt, so easily concealed by her cloak, was now glaringly obvious. Choking on laughter, she surveyed the sharp edge of the dagger, the designs on the sheath. Very uncharacteristic of a teenage party girl. 

Such a beautiful sheath. Shining black leather. Perfectly crafted to caress her dagger. Easy draw. And without a doubt, the most expensive thing the girl owned. 

Every nerve in her hand rebelled at the motion. A tangible ache gripped her gut, but she knew she had to do this, no matter how much it hurt. The dagger slid easily into the soggy newspaper of her left boot. 

And the perfect dagger sheath fell to the concrete. Abandoned. Ripe for the pick of any drug-hungry Reject scouring the dumpsters. The thought made her sick.

“Hey, missy. You lost?” She jumped. A voice. So close it couldn’t be more than six feet away. She pressed down the scream that clawed at her throat. A wave of terror crashed over her: what could she do? 

Panic. Hot in her veins, on her cheeks, in her throat. Hide the dagger hilt? No time. Flirt with him? No experience. Pretend to be a party girl? Drunk? Lost? Maybe…but only because killing him would be too much of a fuss this late in the morning. 

The Rogue turned. Attempting a casual pose, she gave a dopey smile, heart pounding her ribs. A man stood at the mouth of the alcove. Beefy. Heavyset. No more than a few feet away. Threateningly close. 

“Um…who are you?” She managed, slurring her words. She tried to think of what a blackout-drunk party girl would say, how she would act. The exact way her eyelids would flutter. The drool dribbling down her lip. No time. No time! Any truly drunk City Central girl would never stop talking, never, especially if she was with a man who was even slightly interested. She was panicking. Desperate to conjure something flirty, stupid, bewildered. Yet what spilled from her lips was the most idiotic thing she could imagine.

“Rebecca? Is that you?” 

Idiot. 

Idiot! 

But wasn’t that something a drunk girl would say? She didn’t know. The Rogue had never had a drink. She was only a teen…too young. Too impulsive. Enough sense to know that alcohol would send her spiraling further than blind rage ever could.

The man screwed up his brow. It was obvious he was male–masculinity practically radiated from him, dashed with the usual arrogance and self-righteousness. He frowned, uncertain,

“Uh, no, I’m–” 

“Thank god! I left my bag at the club, do you have it? My mom would killlllll me if she knew! Kill me, Becky! Becca…Rebeccs…Rebie, some rando Reject could, like,” she hiccuped, “steal it and then I would be all like, ‘mom my bag got stolen’ and she would be like ‘your nice one?’ and I would be like ‘yes, mom, the one with all my I.D and money in it!’” 

Fanning herself, the girl started to tear up, wavering on her feet, clutching the bricks for support. Her eyes were wild. She looked down, rifling through the crumpled papers at her feet. Dazed. As if her bag was somehow in the newspaper. 

“I’m not Rebecca. But if you want–”

“Oh! My. God.” Her lip quivered like a plucked bowstring. The jacket around her waist sagged, falling down to her knees as she trembled, clouds growing in her gaze. Perfect. Even in a fake stupor, she could appreciate her acting skills. 

“Are you alright? I can take you hom–”

A piercing shriek cut the air. She wailed like an air horn. He could have sworn her eyes crossed for a second.

“Where. Is. Gerard?! I promised him that I was going to give him my number! Oh, where is he?” The girl stamped her boot. 

“I totally forgot after I lost my bag! Oh…he’s never going to…Rebecca!” The girl whined, practically whimpering now, oblivious to the fact that the man was backing away.

“Becca…Gerard was like…” her eyes glassed over. Silence hung for a second, a strange interaction coming to a halt in a little divot, on a disgusting avenue, in a trashy borough, far away from the glittering lights of City Central. Silence.

Then she wretched. Doubled over. Gagged. Saliva splattered the ground, gruesome chunks of god-knows-what painting the concrete. Vomit. Vomit! Hot, thick, clumpy, moist vomit. The man cringed back, sprinting from the alcove and down the street. 

As soon as he was out of sight, the Rogue stood up, eyes clearing. With a decisive motion, she let her hair down, pushing the hair tie onto her wrist and shrugging the jacket back on. Always the actor, the girl, name unsaid, ungiven, strutted confidently from the steaming stew of vomit and saliva. 

Just as she shifted through her roles of justice, she transitioned from drunk-party-girl-with-a-lost-handbag-and-a-crush-on-Gerard to confident young woman returning home at dawn.

The mistakes wouldn’t go unnoticed. Unremarked. The Midnight Rogue was sure of that. Only that. She flowed through her forms fluidly as the devil changed faces. The only role switch she had to control was the shift from Midnight Rogue to guilty teenage girl. All the rest came naturally.

The girl stepped into the street, thoughts of the approaching day already clouding her mind. She was no longer the Rogue; her rage had dissipated with the night. The only signal of her crimes was the dagger in her left boot and the cloak in her right, a vague recollection of bloodthirsty rage, a memory of a scream. 

She had been invited to meet up with a friend at 8:00 A.M., which meant she would have to jog home, further matting down the beautiful cloak–

A hand encircled her throat. Cloth against her lips. She flailed her limbs. Feet lifted from the ground.  Immediately, a wall of rubbing alcohol scent smashed her nostrils, deep, pounding. Her vision blurred. She drew in a breath as her feet scrambled for purchase. The regret was instant. Nausea roared at her like a gut-punch. Chloroform. 

Breathless, dripping with sweat, the man from the alcove lifted her into a car trunk. She lost consciousness before he could even close the lid. 

Karma, she thought. The world was paying her back for her sloppiness. Karma, and arrogance, for believing she could so easily outsmart every passerby. Her mistakes were not unremarked. Justice comes at a hefty price in the outer boroughs. The Midnight Rogue would soon pay it.

Up to date on all your Writer’s Wednesdays and articles? Tell me what you think! At the bottom of the articles page, you can take a quick survey to tell me about your experience with Life and Lemons!

Writer's Wednesday!

Writer’s Wednesday! Elementals–Afterlife

AutumnB17

On a day like that, it was impossible to feel like everything is okay. Some people have an unfaltering belief in the positive outlook: rainbows always come after the rain–as long as you let the sun shine through.

 I used to think that way too, when I was Mira Casse, a starry-eyed teen with a passion for the sky. But there was no silver lining for the cloud that had eclipsed my life. I had been as normal as I ever could have been, a month ago. Now I was huddled in an alley, clutching the limp form of a girl I’d barely known. 

I shuddered, letting the tears spring to my eyes. I hadn’t cried in a long time, it seemed, and with every petty little heartbreak I’d endured in my high school years, the cries had felt freeing–as though the warm torrent of tears that slid down my cheeks carried all my sorrow with it, lightening the swirling storm in my heart.

This cry was different. It was a cruel, empty, shameful act of cowardice in the face of death. It was trying to hide from my grief, wake up from this enduring nightmare of the last few weeks. I cradled in my arms a lifeless prodigy that I had barely known, a sweet Italian girl without the slightest inkling of how vast her powers truly were. A heavenly embodiment of the sea with endless possibilities. Killed within the course of a few days. A wound from a ship. An arrow to the back. Daria was dead.

Zara had taken off with determination in her gaze, chasing after a young woman, screaming after her insistently and leaving us in the dust. Talia said the name was that of her long-lost sister: the one who had disappeared years ago after running away to Kommetjie… the one that had never come back. Zara was gone, too. A poor girl with a missing sister and a tortured past, condemned by her whole village for trying to help them. Knowing Artemis’s games, the “sister” Zara was chasing was nothing but an illusion to lure her away. If that was true, as I suspected it was? Zara was dead.

Curled in a dank, fetid alley, I willed death to come take away my suffering. Kenna and Talia sat on either side of me, leaning their heads on my shoulders. Kenna conjured sparks and swirling ashes in the air, tinkering with the curling threads of fire that hung suspended in her control. 

Her left knee jittered, body wrought with tension and unasked questions that I could sense on her tongue. How much longer will we rest? The mercenaries were without a doubt nearby, canvassing the area. But I was thankful she didn’t ask the question. I couldn’t imagine moving right now, taking a step forward and running away again. Running away was what had brought me here, to the stench of death congealing on the humid air, to the darkest shame of my heart: I wished I was human. 

Somewhere in me I felt Mira Casse, striding boldly down the dark hall, smelling the scent of cherry blossoms and fresh grass wafting in from the open window. A beautiful high school girl dreaming under a blanket of stars, gazing up at the brilliant Ohio sky and yearning to be a part of the vast unknown of the heavens. Human. Loving and living, heart cracking and mending, carefree and vivacious under the blazing starlight. I wanted more than this twisted, power-filled life that I was trapped in. I wanted more for all of us.

I was going to be an astronomer. Kenna could have been a firefighter or a military officer, Daria a marine biologist. Talia might have become a lead meteorologist, growing out of her shyness and lighting up the screen. Zara could’ve been an environmental biologist, studying the natural world and the Earth. Now two were dead. Three quivering in an alley, waiting on a command from some unknown force, longing for an apparition to show us the way, to drink some honeycomb elixir and let myself fade away into the stars. 

Footsteps sounded, not far away. The drum of sound grew with each passing moment, a heavy tread like a large man in boots. I could feel myself floating away, detaching from reality. Kenna’s hands grabbed me roughly, pulling on me. I cried out, blind with pain, batting away her hand. 

“Leave me! Run! I can’t leave her alone.” Clutching Daria to my chest, I stroked her hair, tears spilling over the girl that I had barely known. Kenna shook me with increased fervor, urging me with words that I couldn’t hear. The world was a haze of tears, a meaningless blur of voices and dead eyes. 

“Selene, she’s dead! We have to go!” Talia insisted, her clear, frantic voice cutting through my hysteria. More than anything, I yearned for Mira Casse. I wanted to be a human; I never wanted to run again. Let Artemis kill me. Let me drown in my sorrow and join Daria. Perhaps I’d meet my mother again, face framed with blonde locks. Braiding my hair, gazing at me with pure, human pride. My beautiful angel. One day you will be among the stars, where you belong. But we need your light on Earth, Mira. Let it glow. 

I had failed her, the mother who had never truly been my mother at all. Kenna squeezed my hand, as though in a silent goodbye. She knew better than anyone that I wouldn’t move unless she physically dragged me away. That wasn’t what I wanted, they knew. Embers and Storm, bright-eyed, able to change the world. My time was up.

As the pounding footsteps grew ever louder, the two girls slipped out of the alley, disappearing from sight. On cue, a man thundered into the dank sliver of space. Stark red hair, ghostly pale skin sprayed with freckles, a silver knife clutched threateningly in his palm. Hugging Daria close, I closed her eyes with a butterfly-soft touch and waited to die.

🌊Daria

Daria had always imagined life after death a certain way, the way that had been ingrained in her head since the moment she was born. Good souls go to heaven. Sinners go to hell. 

Heaven, a billowing landscape of pillowy white clouds, beams of golden sun streaming through the puffy wisps. Everything you’d ever loved and lost, your family you’d never gotten to meet, or the ones that had gone too soon. A childhood dog trotting energetically with a bone, youthful as a small puppy and as soft as the cotton-candy clouds themselves. The chiming of the Saint Maria Assunta church bells filling the air with warm, joyful chords. 

Hell, a fiery chasm of endless tortures. Sinners on every level uniquely punished by twisted demons. The flap of leathery winds. A stench of brimstone and diseased breath.

Instead, Daria found herself in midnight’s blank grasp. Nothingness. Empty black as far as the eye could see, neither hot nor cold, but an uncomfortable sensation of…no sensation at all. There was no tether to the outside world, nothing but the faint sound of lapping water somewhere in the blackness.

“Mom? Are you out there?” she asked the dark in her native language, hopeful phrases rolling off her tongue. Daria expected at least an echo of her words, to hear the sweet Italian syllables cascade into the air. It was as though her sound was immediately quenched, a towel thrown down onto a bass drum.

 Disappointment swelled in her unembodied conscience. Water. Just water, a soothing lap like the waves on the shore outside her Positano home. She should have known better than to hope: for a spirit-filled heaven with soaring white clouds, for her late mother’s warm touch and sweet bakery smell, for anything more out of death but an infinite oblivion. 

Out of the dark, a great sob came to her, nothing like the church bells from her seaside home. Selene, she’s dead! We have to go! 

A voice! Was it her own thought? Surely not; it was a voice like raindrops on the roof, rapid, frantic. Was that what the angels sounded like?

Daria wished she could feel something: the blissful warmth she imagined of heaven…or even the fiery cold of hell. Instead, she felt no sensation at all: no underlying feel of being. It was a sensory-deprivation chamber, a distant sound of lapping water and screams and pounding feet. Of ragged breath now, a distant voice coming from all sides then not at all.

Was she being held in the arms of her mother, awoken from a nightmare that had lasted years and years? A nightmare where she set off to work one day, still smelling like pastries from the day before? A nightmare where Daria’s mother never returned except for a motionless body in a casket, a dismal funeral on a rainy day? Or was she laying on a coroners’ table, being examined for her strange powers, poked and prodded and shocked with electrons?

All she knew was that this was the end of the line, and…somehow, she knew that she was being held. There was no sensation. No contact. Just a gut feeling. As though from an echo in a deep, dark cave, Daria could hear the sounds of sobs, gasping breath. 

Someone out in the other world was crying for her, someone she knew if only in a dream. She wished she could tell the voice that she wasn’t in pain. Memories of an arrow rose and fell, crumbling in the oblivion. Barely an inkling anymore…but the person sounded as though their heart was breaking, as though watching whatever was left of Daria hurt her soul. She wished she could tell the voice she wasn’t in pain there.

There was no suffering, no joy either: she supposed that was all she could ask of Death. Greedy of her to think that her failure to live would be rewarded by clouds and a smiling face. 

Suddenly, something called to her. She felt a tugging at her thoughts, a power, a strength–water? An invisible tether snapped into creation, an olive branch extended from her to the other side. 

They weren’t by the sea anymore; the water that called her had to be tears. Selfish. Selfish! But Daria grabbed onto them, pulling the droplets through into the nothingness. A drop of water splatted on her nose.

Wait! She was dead. Yes. Certainly. Embroiled in darkness, she was dead–so why did she feel the splat of water hitting her skin? 

A feeling! 

A sensation!

A state of being was forming in the dark. More water called. She received it, pulling it closer, hearing a vacuum suction as she dragged each tear through. Another splat, another…baffling. Baffling! But unmistakable water…

“Mamma? Mamma, mi senti?” Mom? Mom, can you hear me? The words echoed this time, the darkness accepting them rather than suffocating them. Still no response–her heart dropped with realization: the tears I am summoning are not the tears of an angel, of my mother bringing me closer to Heaven. They are the tears of a human. I’m being pulled back! 

Abruptly she stopped seeking out the water. It hovered somewhere out of reach, itching for her call. She could feel her nose now, wrinkling as the droplet slid down her cheek and slithered down her throat. 

Was this what she wanted? Each tear Daria pulled through to that side–death’s side–was strengthening her tether to the living world. Was she prepared to go back to pain, to the prick of the arrow throbbing in her back, to the metallic gush of blood through her tattered black swimsuit? 

This should be easy, she thought, wrinkling her nose, still trying to spread the state of being down to her legs, her toes, her fingertips. 

It should be an easy choice: seize the connection her power brought, spring forward into life to help that suffering voice. But–in a way–the nothingness was comfort. It was uniquely sweet in its blankness. 

She was mortally wounded in the living world–flesh torn by a wooden hull, skin pierced by an arrow. But there, floating in the black…she was nothing. No pain, but at the hefty price of no pleasure. Daria was willing to pay that price.

Just as she began to let go of the sensations of face and nose and teardrops, just as she was ready to hope for a heaven beyond this black, she heard a voice. 

Take me. Kill me if you want to, I won’t fight! I’m done running from Artemis for my choice…I’ll never be ready to live forever. But if Daria…Her face contorted, startled to hear her name in the disembodied words…if Daria, an innocent, had to die for the Huntress’ agenda, it seems right that I die too before she can torture me for her own gain. I will take every opportunity to steal her pleasure. I will relish the fact that I will die here, with Daria. So do it. Do it! Kill me. Because I will not leave this alley alive.

Daria didn’t even have to make the choice. She didn’t have to know who it was, the voice on the other side of the void. She called every single drop of water from the girl’s tears, every ounce of humidity from the living world, every essence of being from the place where she lay dead.

In a rush of light, life sprang forward to her body. She felt the thud of her heart in my chest. Her eyes snapped open, tears splashing across her skin, tangling themselves in her hair. An odor foul and bloody as death itself washed through her nostrils. 

Selene was above her, midnight hair tickling her chin, face gaunt yet strikingly gorgeous in its moondust pallor. Daria’s side throbbed, her back throbbed, her head throbbed, and yet when she sucked in a breath, hope flooded her now-beating heart. She was alive. And she wasn’t going to let Selene die.

Writer's Wednesday!

Writer’s Wednesday! Into the Crypt

AutumnB17

*This is a continuation of a series. Find the rest in the archives under the Elemental series.

Crisp daylight fell in choked slivers through the cracks in the crypt door. Dust danced in the bright white light, falling and settling restlessly down onto the hard concrete slab of the tomb.  The cloying stench of death and decay stifled the air as he hastily sucked in a breath, prying the door open with a resounding creak. The thick layer of dust stirred on the concrete coffin as a cold wind howled into the damp chamber for the first time in years.

His calloused fingers hesitated on the lid of the tomb. A deep chill permeated the air as though a faint whisper of the tortured soul imprisoned within the crypt still lingered, seething at the injustice of her death long ago. 

The huntsman had slaughtered innocents in the name of his mistress Artemis, tracked prey around the world, stared into the wide eyes of a poor man and slit his throat because of a simple accident when he had stumbled upon Artemis in the bath.

 All of it in her name; just to see satisfaction light the goddess’s cold yellow-hazel eyes that he loved so much, just so he could hear the barely perceptible hint of admiration in her voice, sinning endlessly to earn a love he knew she would never give. 

But at least those innocents had been sacrificed at the request of his lady, for some greater heavenly purpose. This task was his least sinful on paper, but as he stood still in the light-flooded secret crypt, he felt chilled to his bones. Every fiber of his being tingled and shivered with a cold as deep as the ninth circle of hell. Please forgive me.

Orion lifted the cover of the stone tomb and immediately recoiled. Pungent aromas of blood and decay exploded into the crypt. A body lay crumpled in the confined stone case, barely recognizable with the rotting skin and glassy eyes: Inara Nightlock. Dried brown blood stained her forehead in a nasty wound, her fingernails caked with grime from fighting back against her kidnappers, ebony hair matted and tangled. 

Orion thought of the Earth girl, of the brief moments he’d seen her jetting across the waves with his captives, hope still tangled in her heartstrings that her long-lost sister was out there somewhere when all the while she’d been here. An innocent murdered and dumped in a dusty crypt, her name engraved into the cement lid by the sick, twisted killer that had left her here. A man Artemis killed years ago! She has already been avenged, and my lady Artemis using her to weaken the rebel goddesses is nothing more than a way to honor Inara. I have already failed my lady, and now she has sent me here to do a simple job. I can’t fail her again.

Even as he thought it, he knew what he was about to do was vile in his culture. In any culture. The very marrow in his bones shuddered with cold now, the harsh daylight doing nothing to warm his shivering frame. With Artemis’s cruel, ethereal face hovering in his mind, he resealed the lid. Dragging the chisel out of his pocket with a quaking hand, he brought down a mighty slash straight across her name. In a spray of grit the meticulously etched letters were scarred beyond recognition. 

Orion was still for a second, his uneven breath rasping in the death-like silence. It felt as though his heart suffocated in his stomach as the realization of what he’d done set in: he’d just desecrated the tomb of an innocent, even if that tomb had been sealed by a murderer. 

Out of the blue everything went dark along with the screech of the crypt door being shut. He heard a muffled heartbeat faster and faster, reminiscent of the Tell Tale Heart. Artemis’s tinkling laugh bounced off the walls, becoming more and more demonic each second and all the while the tick of the heart raged on. A young woman’s scream sounded from the dark, echoing around the huntsman from every side. 

“Please! Let me out!” Orion groped blindly for the door. Sobs tore his throat, darkness swallowing the room whole like he was in the damp maw of a beast. He found no knob, no handle. Each limb of his fine-tuned body shook uncontrollably from a bone-rattling fear that sent him spiraling into hysteria. 

“Your sins have caught up to you, huntsman. Did you think I would not judge you because you have some convoluted love for a maiden goddess? You will perish as you have made others perish: slowly and without a shred of dignity.”

A sharp sting pricked his throat, fire spreading through his muscled neck. His eyes bulged as the memory came back to him in flashes as though it was trickling slowly through a leaky faucet. Beady black eyes of the scorpion. Artemis, an avenging angel above him. The crunch of the scorpion under her boot. Sic itur ad astra. But before that, something that the world was sure Orion had long forgotten under a haze of ambrosia and ebbing pain. 

“I love you too.” Artemis. His one true love. On some level, he knew that memory was Death’s last gift to him before the pain of all his sins caught up to him all at once. Yet he still extended one final reach for life.

“Artemis! Please, have mercy!” The deep cold dragged him into the darkness with the force of the undertow pulling a sailor into the depths. With his back plastered to the cold crypt wall, Orion screamed, his head splitting, and prayed for the sliver of light to reappear. It was time. After years and years, he knew it was time. But he couldn’t let go. Could she?

🌍Zara

Inara ducked down another side street, her shadow flitting out of view. The pound of her boots pummeled her legs with each thumping step. Time was an amorphous deity, dragging on at seconds where each bounding stride was a shot of pain and then racing ahead like a bullet train; one moment she was on the street, Inara just a spot on the skyline, and in the blink of an eye Zara found herself in an alley with her long-lost sister directly ahead of her.


It’s not her… her brain hissed. Instinct was riding high– her whole body itched with the wrongness of the figure she chased. It’s not her… They always said you can’t trust your eyes. You have to trust your gut. And her gut? It felt like a hurricane was ripping through it, flurries of fears and false hope funneling into a roiling vat of searing frustration. Frustration… frustration that Inara was just beyond her reach around every turn, that her whole village, destitute and droughted, wanted to burn her at the stake for bringing prosperity to the land, at the reality that she had been traveling with a mysterious stranger for the past day and would probably never see her family again.

The girl paused for a fraction of a second in the middle of the intersection, looking back. Zara’s breath hitched at her sister’s pale jade eyes staring back at her. Inara. Ebony skin dashed with off-white flour, long hair loose and flowing as though it had been hastily tied back and then had fallen out again. 

“Zara? Is that… is that you?” Her musical voice carried on the rustling breeze. Zara’s knees were weak, legs shaking like the jello her family never could afford from the “big-city” markets of Kommetjie. The words that left her lips next were a blubbering string of emotion-choked sounds.

“Yes–I–can’t believe you’re alive! Where have you–do you own a bakery now, like you dreamed? Why haven’t you contacted us? Inara, it’s been…” 

“Years?” She offered with a strained laugh. A funny look crossed her face, an unbecoming blankness, emotionless as shards of ice: lips set in a hard line, glazed eyes, perfectly smooth brow. It melted away as quickly as it arrived. Zara took a careful step closer, just feet from her sister. The traffic light above them flickered uselessly… the street was eerily quiet for a few long seconds. 

“Are you okay, Inara? The police searched years for you! You ran away, I could have sworn you were dead–” 

“Where are your friends?” Inara blurted. 

“What? How could you–” Her sister’s shoulders tensed, the delicate gold flecks in her jade eyes brightening wildly. They had always been a light tone but with each passing second, it seemed to Zara that the gold was taking over Inara’s soft eyes. 

“Answer the question,” Inara hissed, ripping away her flour-dusted jacket to reveal a tank-top. Crimson bloodstains darkened the white fabric. Scars marred her arms in poorly-healed-over pink gashes. A cloud passed over the sun abruptly, throwing shadows over the intersection. 

“Talia is with the others, helping Daria. She’d been shot with an arrow… please, Inara. Stop. You need to see a doctor right away. This,” she gestured vaguely to the sky, the air, the world itself, “can’t be real. I’m mixed up in something bad, Inara. And it looks like you are too.” 

Inara’s eyes were solid gold marbles in their sockets, not a trace of the pale jade. The perfect skin of her forehead was peeling away in grotesque layers to reveal a bloody gash, the smooth ebony facade on her wrists falling away to reveal rope burns. She didn’t look like Inara, the aspiring baker that loved the city. She was a blunt-force trauma and kidnapping victim reanimated. She was a demon.

“Little sister, you’re wrong about one thing. This is real. Even if I’m not.”

Zara stepped back, tripping in a pothole and plummeting, black hair flying. Panic mounted in her heart. Nausea barraged her stomach in hot waves like her gut saying a huge “I told you so!”, bile searing her throat.

“Who are you?” She gasped. “Where is my sister? Why are you doing this?” The bleeding girl cocked her head, an uncanny portrait of Inara painted with blazing gold eyes. 

“Lots of questions, little goddess girl, all with easy answers. My name is Artemis, huntress and eternal maiden. Your sister is dead.” Before Zara had time to gasp, Artemis laughed, flakes of the facade falling and taking to the breeze. “And why am I doing this? Well, two reasons. One: I wanted to crush your heart. Like mine has been for thousands of years. You’ll find eventually that you prefer it that way… it hurts more at first but you will never feel another pain. For who can break what is already shattered?” 

Those last words hung on her lips as though they were meant to be a rhetorical question, but she had discovered an answer. Eyes flitting to the sky, Artemis tensed, suddenly on high-alert. It reminded Zara exactly of the feral look on a wolf’s face when they catch a whiff of a rival pack. Artemis had undoubtedly heard some kind of signal, one that answered her own question. Whatever it was, it was from something or someone that could break her heart for good. With a decisive motion, she slammed her shoe down onto Zara’s shin. A sickening crack sounded.

“Second reason? To lead you away from your friends. The plan is simple, really. Break all of you pathetic goddesses down one-by-one, luring each one away until all that is left is my target. Selene, my best friend.” A cat-like grin spread over her face, one that didn’t linger. 

“There’s nothing you can do to find them. I led you miles away, and you followed as willingly as a gullible puppy dog. Goodbye, Zara. It’s a shame I won’t get to see you die.” 

Artemis disappeared, taking with her the only trace of Zara’s long-lost sister. Crumpled on the ground, her shin wasn’t the only thing shattered. For her sister was dead… and Zara would never visit her grave. Just as she summoned the strength to cry out, a bus hurtled through the intersection. The wheels screeched like a banshee, in perfect harmony with her screams. The world. Went. Dark. 

Writer's Wednesday!

Writer’s Wednesday! 🌎Earth 2- Frenzy

AutumnB17
Kommetjie, Cape Town, South Africa. Image from South Africa Info

Shoutout to Jina Bazzar (check out her blog, authorsinspirations.wordpress.com,) my friend Kamina Lambert, and my amazing aunt Teresa Arend for commenting on the last edition! You are all amazing!

The smell of coffee and a good story was in the air. Crescent Cunningham breathed in deeply, a sly grin spreading over her thin lips, unkempt black hair ringing her face with a halo of frizz. Sunlight filtering through the cafe window bathed her freckled skin in gold. If she tried hard enough, the reporter could imagine it was a spotlight, beaming blinding white light down at her like a model walking the runway.

A thin blonde waitress slid a towering cup of double chocolate cappuccino onto the table before ducking away hastily, as though she feared what would happen if she lingered even a millisecond longer. Crescent shot her a glare as she scurried off, blonde hair swishing frantically in its high ponytail. Every other day of the year, she would have scolded the girl for her wrinkled blouse even as she walked away- but today, she was in a good mood. The best.

You see, Crescent Cunningham was ruthless. She knew it would hit Manchester hard, as it was the home of one of the subjects from her article- Kenna King, the missing girl and murder suspect. But that never stopped her. The lines of connection had been drawn in bold red ink that no one could seem to see but her. Until now. 

People shouted in the streets, crowding around the big red news dispenser. Papers fluttered in the breeze, coins clinking to the pavement as passersbys scrambled to get in line. A dark-haired woman cried out at the headline, wiping a tear from her eye and hurrying off, still sobbing at the front picture. Teenage girls stood in a cluster, whispering and trading a newspaper around. Crescent smirked, eyes roving ravenously over the scene, ears hungrily taking in each sound. The clank of coins entering the slot, the scuffle of hasty feet, conspiratorial whispers, the crinkle of a turning page. 

Each time a person walked by holding a newspaper from the Manchester Post, her heart leapt, clinging to that feeling. A twisted joy, a strange triumph, a guilty pride. Success. Every time she heard the clink of a coin slipping into the newspaper dispenser, giddiness flooded her senses and she could forget about the brutal harshness of reality for a moment. 

No more rich-smelling coffee shop, no more small apartment, no more crappy desk job. Just Crescent Cunningham in the spotlight for once, and all the newspapers in town trumpeting her article on the front page. The headline? “Elemental witches at large! Five missing girls in the past week, all disappearing without a trace. Each of them with a connection to an element and demonstrating strange powers. Police may want to consider changing their approach from investigation… to witch hunt.”


*************************

“Selene, Kenna, Talia, Daria, Zara. Starlight, Embers, Storm, Sea, Earth,” I looked up at the frail blonde girl with confusion, the names still roiling in my head like angry bubbles on the surface of boiling water.

“Did I get that right?” My voice sounded loud and boisterous even to my own ears- the English language seemed so brash compared to my native tongue. Talia winced at my voice. Maybe I was just talking loud.

“Yeah, that was a lot better, Zara. How do you know so much English? I noticed some other children in your village spoke it too, during the ri-” The bus lurched over a pothole, sending the petite young woman bouncing off her seat. She yelped, smoothing her ruffled navy skirt.

“Riot?” She repeated, looking me over with disdain as I sat calmly, completely unmoved by the jolt. I resisted the urge to snicker at just how fragile my savior was. How could such a small girl conjure such a vengeful storm? She was incredibly short and waifish- I practically towered over her even sitting down!

Glancing out the window at the golden fields, a sob threatened to escape my chest. The earth had always been a part of me, a constant in the turmoil. My brother’s death. My family’s horror at my gift. Lonely nights under the cold starlight, echoes of my parents’ yells shattering the stillness, my only solace the chirp of crickets and the grit of dirt on my palms. 

Image from Framepool

Now, with the world gleaming right outside the window, I yearned to smash the glass and dive into the fields, letting the power surge through my body in a warm golden tide as life sprang from my hands. Longing to release the anxiety of a cramped bus, bury myself in the plants until I melted into the earth, feeling it thrum with life beneath my fingertips. I could still sense the distant pulse of the earth’s energy, beating like a far away heart. Pressing a clenched fist to my heart, I exhaled slowly, trying to flush out the chest-tightening anxiety. 

“In school, they taught us basic English. Are you sure your friend is going to be here?” I asked, looking over at Talia. She looked pensive, surveying all the other passengers with those ice-chip blue eyes as though she could find the secrets of the world in their faces. To me, almost everyone looked the same- just one blur of life, fighting to survive but never taking time to think. About life, the earth, the universe, that there might be something more than the endless shuffle of money and people. 

No one cares about the earth, no one else notices the way the ethereal white-gold sunlight filtering through the leaves at dawn. Nobody sees the elegant way the fireflies sashay through the sky at dusk like a glowing ballet, no one runs their hands along the grass just to feel the sweet tickle against their fingertips. No one gazes at the shadows the moonbeams scatter on a quiet night, no one smells the earthy musk of dirt and grass. No one loves the chirp of crickets or the gnarled bark of an old tree. No one but me. It was a lonely thought- but it just may have been a true one. Everyone on that bus that Talia was studying so closely were all infuriating to me. Mindless, in search of money and survival- nothing more, nothing less. My parents had been the same way…

“Yes, I’m positive!” Talia said, halting the hurtling freight train of thoughts to a screeching stop. “We can rent a boat from ARK Inflatables in Kommetjie, Cape Town,” she stumbled over the name, pausing to gather her thoughts. 

The mention of a familiar city sent torrents of deja vu crashing into my thoughts- memories of a trip to Kommetjie years ago: the jostle of a rickety old truck bed, my sister Inara’s mellifluous laugh, a long winding road from our village as we made the journey to deliver crops to the city. It had been the furthest I had ever been from home. The small, less than 3,000 population town, had seemed like a metropolis. Streets. Cars. People. Shops. A cacophony of foreign sounds grating my ears: tires grumbling across pavement, church bells clanging, footsteps thumping on cement.

 Inara had loved the bustle of the small city. Her pale jade eyes had lit up as the truck thundered down Gladiola Way, the tiny golden chips glinting in the fluorescent shop lights. I remembered joking to her that she should move to the city, the pang of despair that struck deep in my heart when she smiled that radiant smile of hers and agreed. My sister’s dream life didn’t involve me and the family farm anymore. She had loved the city the moment she got there, giddy with glee as I cringed at the noise and scent. It was her dream. It was my nightmare. 

“Kommetjie, Africa! I can’t believe I’m here, all the way from London. But they will be coming through here, I know it!” Talia clapped excitedly, either ignoring or not noticing the old lady’s harsh stare from across the aisle. “Selene said it herself in my dream. She overheard the kidnappers say they were going to sail past the Cape of Good Hope. They will be there. And we are going to intercept them.”

The bus thunked over another pothole, roaring down the dirt road and kicking up billowing clouds of dust in its wake. 

“I’ve never been on a boat,” I said plainly, Inara’s pale eyes still haunting my thoughts like a wrathful ghost refusing to be ignored. If I closed my eyes tight enough, I could imagine I was on the truck with her, thumping towards the town- the chatter of passengers replaced by my sister’s snort and our out-of-key singing interspersed with bursts of laughter. Before she had gone. Inara, my shining light, my sister, my best friend. Before she had gone.

Talia said something, put a hand on my shoulder, but I was far away. So far. Of course I was looking forward to the plan, saving all the other Elementals and overthrowing the tyrant Olympians… but I couldn’t focus when we were returning to the place I had gone long ago, when everything had been different. I was back in the time where my long black hair whipped in the wind and laughter floated on the breeze. When starlight shone down from the heavens like billions of spotlights on our grand stage, just my sister and me in the bed of a truck.

I felt Storm put her small head on my shoulder, and just as blissful sleep began to take me away, I heard them- sirens. Oh no. I jerked upright, Talia jolting out of a light doze. Looking back, blue lights painted the horizon. The color of the South African Police cars. The specks grew, hurtling towards the bus. I yelped at the ear-splitting moan of dozens of sirens and the screech of the bus brakes as it pulled over. 

“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Talia shrieked, standing up in her seat. The bus driver shot her a confused glance, brow furrowed. I shoved her aside, and we plowed down the aisle. Passengers shouted at us, hands raking my body and bringing intense flashbacks of yesterday’s mob careening across my mind’s eye. 

“Hey! Sit down, ladies!” The bus driver shouted gruffly. We charged up the aisle, chaos erupting in our wake. Screaming sirens blared louder with each passing second, my breath hitched. Panic and adrenaline warred in my chest, a tide of newfound emotions. 

Talia jerked the wheel out of his hands in a blur of flying blonde hair. Reeee!!! The wheels shrieked in protest and the bus swerved, plowing through the field. I waved my hand as we thundered over the golden fields, the trampled crops rising immediately to full height. A man grabbed me, valiantly trying to pull me away from the driver. With a flick of my fingers, vines exploded around his legs, curling into makeshift bonds until he fell back into a tide of panicked passengers. Police cars swerved after us, the crackle of their radios echoing on the wind. 

“We’ve found the missing girls. In pursuit.” Not for long. I thought as Talia yanked the wheel, nicking a tree in a huge U-turn that sent us bouncing along the road. My powers repaired the damage as we went, the slack-jawed farmer watched from a distance in awe. I gave him some extra height and produce (for his trouble- and to pay for any consequent shock therapy).

Just as the police cars emerged blazing and plant-covered from the crop field, Talia jammed her elbow into the driver’s face and sent the bus spinning back towards Kommetjie. Thrill exploded in my veins in bursts of adrenaline. Sirens blared like bleating sheep being herded by a Border Collie. 

“Can you even drive?” I yelled as Talia swerved the bus side-to-side in a zig-zag. 

“Depends-” She gasped, flooring the gas pedal, “what’s your definition of driving?” I laughed, not even caring about the cacophony of sounds pounding my ears. Me, Zara Nightlock, a simple farm girl from South Africa, not only had powers… but was in a car chase! Well… bus chase. I smiled, visions of Inara’s dark hair and pale eyes fading from my mind in the waves of adrenaline. Kommetjie was on the horizon, the police cars blaring behind us. 

We were on a quest to save Storm’s friends and save the world, running on nothing but a few dollars, gasoline… and a lot of luck.