"Where am I, Lumai?" taunted a voice. In the foggy bush, shadows circles me like sharks. They laughed like kookaburras and teased like a spider would a fly in its web. "Just point me out? I'm right here, just find me."
Mocking laughter erupted the dead trees, seeming to come from the fog itself. I whipped around, looking for a body that wasn't ghostly black. But what if this person was a shadow? They're all just silhouettes, how would I tell them apart!
"You don't have to tell us apart," the voice read my mind, "just follow my voice." it laughed, knowing the sound came from everywhere and nowhere. I turned left and right, front and back, but nothing but identical shadows and haunting black bushland shrouded with white fog. No colour, no direction and no individuality. There wasn't even a light for the shadows to be made! Or the world to be seen for that matter. Who's shadows where these?
"Where am I, Lumai?" it called more angrily now. My heart rate speed up, the running figures going faster with it until everything was an impossible speed. "Where am I?"
Everything stopped.
The fog wasn't rolling. The voice wasn't speaking. The wind wasn't blowing. My heart wasn't beating. The shadows weren't running.
The shadows had changed, instead of being identical humanoid figures, they were little humans –their physique made me thing they were all female– with towering wings. Still identical, still shadows, still incorporeal but with ominous wings protruding from their backs. They were all in a symmetrical circle of winged silhouettes, facing me purposefully.
"Where am I?" they all asked in unison... with my voice. They all stepped forward in a thundering step just as a singular beat of my heart did. "Where am I?" another step, another heartbeat but this time I heard theirs, too. "Where am I?"
The pattern continued in a perfect rhythm: ask, step and heartbeat, pause, repeat. Then, when they were all only a few strides away, they disappeared. Except one, directly in front of my, wings and head drooping wearily. She stepped forward and seemed to take form as a shadowed figure rather than a shadow itself.
"Where am I?" she whispered, lifting her head to reveal her face. All her features were shadowy, as if she was carved from solid black marble. Except for one thing, one different thing that bore into my soul, telling me the answer to the question.
Dead grey eyes.
"Wherever I am," I lifted my hand to gently cradle her cheek before continuing, "you'll be there with me." she leaned into my hand, closing her eyes for a moment. Her marble skin flaked, floating upward like black cinders and revealing me underneath but with grey, feathery wings rustling gently on her back.
When her eyelids lifted, her grey eyes were looking kindly at me, full of life that I'd only seen once before... when I watched myself fall off a building with the same wings on my back.
- - - - - - - -
A bright light blinded me through my eyelids.
My head pounded so much but I felt completely disconnected from my body, as if I were a ghost.
The light faded as soon as it came, taking the pain with it as it become darkness again.
- - - - - - - -
"Stop! Please stop!"
"Shut up, whore!"
YOU ARE READING
Lumai's Mind
FantasySome people you can't help but hate. Not because they're irritating or did something wrong, not even because they're weird, but you just hate them... Unfortunately for one little girl, she was one of those people. Lumai's life in thrown into a whir...
