100 reasons to love our lives

Eyes and Bodies

Nico

My feet seemed to fly over the ground.

The good thing at getting thrown out yesterday was that I now wore Will's clothes; a big, cozy Camp Hoodie and not that cozy, but still comfortably big jeans. Luckily, I had the power of shadow-travelling; otherwise we would have had to walk through the corridors in sleepwear and half-costumes.
But the bad thing was - despite the sudden stop of that situation -, that I hadn't been able to sleep that night.

Will had tried to calm me down, telling me that having three guys with full attention wasn't a bad thing.
But something about that just had seemed... off. Simon never spoke in my presence because... well, I would be way less frustrated if I would know. But I had my assumptions, and I was just worried. Did he still look so carefully after his voice when he was drunk?

I just wanted to make sure he was okay. And therefore, I had left Will as he went for a shower. It was maybe seven am; I've gotten at most four hours sleep that night, but I didn't mind.

My nerves tingled, the air around me felt cold and distant, as if someone - something - would stalk me from a distance. Nervously I looked back over my shoulder; but there was nobody.

I turned around the last corner and drew my sword from the mist. Because the sword of Hades was way too powerful for my everyday use, Leo had forged me a new one; made from Stygian Iron with a core of Celestial Bronze. It was longer than the first one I had and thinner than the sword of Hades; but still a fearsome blade. Because Will had bothered me with that for three weeks, I finally had given the blade a name - Dormita, the Italian translation for sleep.

It sounded a little cheesy, but Will liked it. Dormita was neutral due to the darkness of the Iron and the lightness of the Bronze, nearly invisible for monsters to make out. But I realized, I maybe should have followed Will's example and trained my body; the sword was unusually heavy in my hands.

Well, I was twenty. The monsters were not interested in me anymore, were they? Surely the only reason I had summoned it was to calm my nerves. Surely.

I hadn't been able to take my room keys yesterday - or more, earlier this morning -, but as I found out now, that wasn't a problem. The door was open.

And leaking out of it was the dread of death.

Dormita felt cold in my palm; I rose the blade a little higher, holding it with two hands. Suddenly, I felt like a teenager again - constantly in danger of getting eaten by something. It was crazy how fast I had been used to the safety of being over eighteen, and it was crazy how... alive I felt.

For a dreadful second, I knew the answer to the question I almost forgot.
But then, I slid through the door... And froze.

As a ten-year old kid, when I had summoned my first ghost, I instantly had been overwhelmed by all the sorrow and death it laid upon me. I had learned after a while to not let it get too close; to feel empathy, but not share their sorrow.

It was a little harder to step back when death was punched into my face like that.

On the floor was one guy, his eyes opened in eternal fear, dry blood on his neck. He was pale, his limbs shattered, sticking out in all the wrong directions.
Leaned up against Simon's wardrobe was another guy, his chest torn apart, his mouth slightly open with red slowly flooding out of it.