Hope in Ruins Book III: The Fountain and the City of Salt

Chapter 26: The Forgotten Home

ANDA

Purple and blue and orange blackness, like the backs of her eyelids in the dark, filled her mind.

Cold. So very cold.

Bits and pieces of the future flashed through her mind, sparking and snapping in splashes of light. She struggled to hold onto them, to see the right path, but everything jumbled and swirled, and her mind went dark.

More snatches of light.

And Peter. Always Peter.

He smiled down at her.

Her breath came faster. It was like... like being in a small space, everything sounds close.

So cold.

And her eyes snapped open, and she was awake.

It took a fraction of a second to realize where she was.

A kiln.

As the word rolled through her mind, crashing and wrecking and smashing through her brain, she shrieked. The sound of her scream only amplified itself behind the glass, bouncing back and forth between the panes of glass again a million times. When her lungs gave out, and her cry had settled to a faint echo, her ears rang with her own voice.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Did she pick the wrong future? Where was the garden?

The kiln she was in stood upright. She thrashed, trying to break herself out, but restraints crisscrossed her body. As she moved, the needles poking her in a million hidden places turned and shifted and pricked like thorns. Then she saw through the light reflecting off the glass in front of her. There, beyond the bright and the glass, they lay.

Three kilns laid out like three coffins.

Those three kilns held people. She gasped. Behind those kilns, shimmering in the low light, in straight lines like rows of vegetables in a garden, lay row upon row upon row of kilns, stretching out of sight into the shadow. Each one held a person, each one pale and shaved and still. Beside some kilns sat men next to terminals, images flickered in front of them in flashes of black and white.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight, desperately trying to see the future.

Nothing happened. A warm and thick feeling covered her mind like wet wool. Panting, she opened her eyes and stared at the kilns in front of her.

"Hello, little one," a voice said. A chill shivered down Anda's spine—she knew that voice. Anda searched for the speaker, scanning the wide stone room for Henrietta Loraine. Then she found her: a crouched figure almost out of sight, kneeling and folded in on herself, but staring up at her with intense and bright and black eyes. Slowly, Loraine stood, unfurling and uncoiling like a snake. Anda watched her with a wild beating heart, but Loraine walked out of sight and around the kiln. Her slow steps echoing like slow drips in a cave.

The Eternal's face suddenly appeared beyond the glass, blurred and bright in the smears of light. She came closer, and the blurred lines sharpened, and Anda stared into the unmistakable face of the Eternal Mother. Henrietta Loraine stared at her intently with her mouth just slightly open and her eyes wide and ever-roving over Anda.

Anda's skin tingled all over, and she shuddered.

Loraine smiled at her tremor. Anda studied the grinning face she knew too well and yet not at all. Loraine's skin stretched tight across her face, pulling her eyelids and nose back towards her ears and making the whites of her eyes even larger and more exposed. A dark braid, tight and glossy, snaked around her neck and trailed down out of sight. Anda felt the shriek rising in her gut, clawing its way through her belly and up her throat.