cosmic scars ▸ ONC 2022

▸ five;

As a child, Cynthia used to read stories about people from far off worlds. Storybooks would talk about princes, knights in shining armor, wizards, warriors and even pirates that would visit earth for certain purposes. They would be told to have magical powers and abilities that they would use to either benefit or destroy humankind. Some stories detailed the origin of these beings, but some others would just focus on how they interacted with humans. And in most of the stories, the human protagonist would fail to discover the unearthliness of such beings till it was too late.

As a child, Cynthia used to laugh at those protagonists, unable to believe how one could let themselves be fooled by a non-human in disguise. She used to roll her eyes at their cluelessness and the amount of faith they put in a stranger they knew nothing about.

But right now, as she stood before Amare's glowing eyes that seemed to emit beams of the same cerulean blue she had come to admire so much, Cynthia found herself to be in the shoes of the clueless protagonist that didn't stop to think about the amount of faith she was putting in a stranger.

A stranger that, as she could now see, wasn't human.

Unwittingly, her mind raced back to think of all the interactions she had had with him, looking for things that she missed or misread. Of course, the very first time she saw Amare had been peculiar and very absurd, given how he had been naked and covered in dirt. He had looked lost and she had stopped to help him, assuming him to just have been mugged and left stranded.

But now that she thought about the scene she had walked upon again, maybe that had been the time when Amare had entered this world. He had given her vague answers, called himself a "messenger from afar" and whatnot, and maybe that had held some semblance of truth – just in a very different context that she thought.

Amare suddenly moved his head to focus his now normal eyes on Cynthia. She met them with a heavy heart, the beauty she had been so fascinated with was no longer appealing to her.

As he kept staring at her without a word, she saw guilt, pain and regret slowly swim up in his gaze. The emotions made sense in a way, but Cynthia felt like she would have preferred him not looking at her like that. His guilt, pain or regret kindly stood to remind her of the very obvious fact that Amare knew what he was doing and that he chose to keep the reality of his existence from her.

She had so many questions, and yet hadn't a clue how to begin putting them up with him. Before she could have assembled her thoughts, though, a call of her name in a voice and accent she had never heard, broke her spiraling trance of heartbreak –

"Cynthia! My child!"

Confused, she turned away from Amare to look in the direction of the trees that had been cleared, only to draw away with a shocked gasp.

Right there, in front of her eyes, lay an entire village. The place that she thought housed dense forests beyond the thicket of trees that made a fence around it, stood before her with a huge colony of a large number of people walking around really modern buildings that looked nothing like the houses humans lived in.

Who were these people? Were they more of Amare's kind? What were they doing here?

How did they even get here?

Nothing made sense to her.

She was still gaping at the astounded sight in front of her, when two silhouettes suddenly started to walk towards her. Blinking, she tried to squint at them, immediately recognising one of them as her grandpa, Orvin.

The other man was a stranger. He was dressed in white and azure garbs, with an elaborate headgear over his platinum blonde hair and sparkling, shining cerulean eyes that she had now been well acquainted with for a while. Immediately, her gaze flew to Amare to make the comparison, but she found the guy bent at the waist in a deep bow.