The Isdïra Complex

Childhood memories

Again she saw that huge garden in her mind's eye - the kid's playing hide and seek and running around, up and down the hills which were all around her. The sun shone and from where it was visible in the sky you could tell that Miranda stood here in the early afternoon. There were people next to her talking about something, but she couldn't hear what they said. It was as if she was underwater in terms of how the sounds from this world reached her ears.
"Miranda? Hey, Miranda?"
When another girl said her name she did hear something, so she turned her head to see her friends - people she had known when she had been ten. Two of them had blonde, curly hair and the ones of the other were black. Their names didn't come to her mind, but that wasn't that important after all.
"Are you with us?" another one of the girls asked.
Finally, Miranda replied. "Yes, I just... I don't know what just happened to me."
The girls shrugged their shoulders, not caring too much about it - not what they had actually done in Miranda's last life, but at that point she had to remind herself that whatever she saw, heard and felt right now was a vision... of the past.
"So will you come along to the waterpark this Friday?" one of the girls said. "Mom agreed on it and said it was a good idea. She can get us to the Bently Beach. That's the place you always wanted to go to, right?"
"Yes, it is", Miranda said without a tone in her voice.
The girls didn't seem to notice because they kept smiling at her.
Torn from this one of her forgotten past memories, Miranda was immediately thrown into another one. Now she was at the waterpark and lots of kids jumped into the swimming pool next to her.
A man in his fourties with a mustache smiled at her, but what he did next was more than a sign that he couldn't be trusted: The man pushed Miranda into the water, then grabbed her neck and made sure she didn't get any air to breathe.
It was a terrible nightmare and the situation didn't get better when Miranda figured that in the real world she stood next to Charles who had put his hands onto her shoulders, now solicitously looking at her.
"What's going on with you?" Charles asked. "You're sweating!"
Miranda gasped for air. "I know, I... I don't know what that just was..." She explained what happened to her while Charles tried to comfort her, telling her there was nothing to worry about now and she was at a - more or less - safe place. Here they were in another hallway with those fancy lights anyway, and no one else was there.
"Do you believe that's what happened in you last life?" the young man wanted to know.
The other nodded. "There's no doubt about it. I just don't understand why I saw the worst images of that past of mine."
"What you saw is probably somehow created by the Isdrad," Charles thought out loud. "From what Jessa said they want to find out whether or not we're one of the Vengeants. We already have a high probability of being one of them because if we weren't we wouldn't be here."
"I'm not in the mood of going through past experiences if pain is all I'll have to go through, I can tell you that much," Miranda straightened out. "Don't we want to get going?" She looked in front of her, but couldn't see anything in the darkness which hung in the air - the darkness that could be extinguished if they illuminated the hallway by moving.
Charles merely nodded.
As they kept walking, new lights kept illuminating. They got lighter and lighter until they blinded Miranda's and Charles' eyes which is why they closed them and turned away from it.
None of them knew what happened and they both knew that, so there was no reason to ask what was going on this time.
The lights slowly began to dim and that's when Charles opened his eyes again and saw a small note on the floor. He picked it up. "'Listen to the wind,' it says here," he told Miranda.
"Is that all it says?"
"Yes. We probably have to find a way to go outside agai-"
A breeze suddenly blew from where they had come to the part at the hallway they were at now. There was no explanation to it where it came from, it was just there out of nowhere.
"I can hear someone whisper," Miranda said and she knew, only a day ago she would have laughed at how ridiculious this very situation was. The Isdïra Complex might be mysterious, but that wasn't a reason for her to like it.
Whatever, she didn't have a choice.
"There's a voice telling me to rotate," she heard Charles say.
When Miranda wanted to look back at him instead of focussing on the wind by staring into space, he left through a door without saying a word - it seemed like someone else had taken control of his body, and therefore his actions.
'Look into your past,' was what the girl heard the wind say.
"How?" she replied but didn't receive an answer - of course not.
The Isdrad played a game with her and she had to follow the rules, whether she liked it or not.