Different worlds

9. Seers

POV Aisha:

When Kalatril had gone to the village, his last words were 'Take a rest.', so, I decided to listen to him and as soon as he had started to jog off, I picked up my satchel, after checking on the Mother tree's stem, and went towards the cave on the other side of the lake. Even though I had never gone there, I knew thanks to the animals in the forest that there was a small cove and I really needed a good bath after all this running in daylight in the middle of summer. I felt like my clothes were sticking on to my skin and that my pores were completely blocked out. A bath would had meant the world for me right now.

I enter precausiously the dark cave without having to lower my head because of a low ceiling like I had to when I was at the elvlin's village.

A feeling of dread makes its way through my stomach as I went deeper into the cave, drops of water dripping of the ceiling with loud noises. It wasn't a secret that Granny was awfully cold with others, and I already knew she would give her life for the village, but mine?
When I had come to the village, I didn't expect any motherly actions from the strangers whom had saved me from my loneliness in the woods. Granny sending me to a most probable pig slaughter wasn't either a part of my expectations. The chances of me actually saving the continent as the prophecy had predicted were near to naught and it would have been a miracle if I made it alive and in one piece at the end of the year. It was so unfair. I hadn't asked for those powers, why was I the one the gods chose? I don't think Kalatril wants to be the hero of the story either.
And in all of it, everyone I ever loved either left me or knew a gruesome death, Kalatril was probably not an exception to the rule.
Tears roll down my cheeks in frustration and I wipe them of with the back of my right hand, the other one holding firmly my bag crossed over my chest, rested on my shoulder.

At the moment I start thinking the animals of the forest were wrong about a cove being here, I smell a crystalline scent and hurry my steps towards the source of water illuminated in light from a small crack in the wall.

I crouch down next to its smooth surface and look at myself in its reflection.

I see a girl that didn't look very feminine, a soldier that didn't look like a man. The dark brown hair with royal blue tips curled slightly on themselves, crowning her face. The girl's skin was far from being pale like a noble's but not chipped like a villager's on the outside of the empire. The stern, arabian, hazelnut eyes look right at me, hiding something behind that mask.
Another person, an entirely different being, sad, depressed and angry. Nobody should see that feeble and savage part of myself.
I close my eyes firmly and when I open them up, she wasn't there anymore. But somebody else was.

I spring to my feet and turn a 180 degrees in the split of a second to see who was there. I take my father's dagger out of its sheath, and then freeze as I look at the person, the creature, in front of me.
If my heart hadn't accelerated when I saw the shadow of it behind me, it did now that I had seen what it was. A seer.

Seers are one of the most dangerous creatures walking on the surface of the earth, they are messengers and minions of Luidmila, the queen of the shadows. Word was that if you upseted them in any way, you received divine punishment, only when they were with each other did they behave as they wished. They didn't all look the same, but the one I had before me was one of the most recurrent, and it wasn't very complicated to recognize them.

Their carnal envelope was the one of a human given in sacrifice by a shadow loving tribe or population to their goddess. Once they are dead, they are given a wish from the queen of shadows in exchange of their bodies, then, a damned soul of Luidmila's choice enters the body and serves her on earth, the mortal's realm. Ironically, they couldn't be killed, only liberated from the body once it fully decomposed. Sometimes, parts of the body were replaced by new ones from the moment the heart and the brain stay the same, in this case, this seer had definitely gone through some changes.

Her pale and slightly yellowish skin was peeling away in some place and one of her arms was shorter than the other one. Like all the other seers that were like her, her right eye was sown closed as were her lips sealed and her left eye was no more and all that remained was an empty socket. Clumps of her once humain hair had fallen out in some places and her female body had been mutalated, probably due to the sacrificial ritual.

I feel cold sweat drip on my forehead and I start to seriously regret having taken out my dagger. If the seer before me felt as if she was being threatened, I wasn't going to make it out alive of this cave alive. I can feel my feline ears twitch as they always do when I am nervous and the hair on my tail stood up. Something inside of my head was telling me that I could take that seer down, that I could end her on the spot, and even though I am some times hot blooded, I know better than to listen to that voice. I don't plan on dying, not for the moment anyway.

The seer just stays there but I know that she knows that I am here. It's remaining eye behind the sown eyelid seemed to penetrate deep into my soul, and as irritating as it is, I feel like I shouldn't close my eyes in case she moves to attack me.

My pupils keep shaking, in search of an exit other than the one she was guarding behind her back. My heart was beating faster by the second and when the seer took a step forwards, I almost have a cardiac arrest.

She tilts her head with a smile that would have looked conforting on somebody else's face, as if she wanted to reassure me.

Why are you scared? I won't hurt you. I feel my eyes stretch at the sound of her strange voice, as if she was talking a different language.
I didn't expect her to talk with her mouth but surely not with her mind, unless she hadn't talked and I had just loosed it.

A grin on her face indicates me that the latter wasn't the right option and deep down, a little hope makes it's way through, telling me that she maybe wasn't going to kill me.

You ask strange questions, why would I kill my sister? Even though she wasn't talking out loud, the edge of her voice give me goosebumps.

For the first time in the last 40 minutes, I open my mouth to speak.

-Why are you here?

The words come out with effort since there was a chance that the seer in front of me might disapprove of such behavior.
For a moment, I think she isn't going to answer but her cryptic voice comes ringing back into my head.
Mistress told me to, and being the loyal server that I am, I followed her orders.

A new question came in my head accompanied by a new tension in my hand and this time I didn't feel the need to formulate it aloud since she seemed to have already understood.
You don't need to know what she sent me here for, and I do not have permission to tell you anyway.

Up till now, I hadn't realized that she was standing before me because I was so concentrated by what she was trying to say to me, it was obvious that she wasn't intending on killing me so i had let my guard down.
She lifts her hand and with her finger, strokes my neck.

My heartbeat exelarates at the touch of her morbid white skin and my hair stands on my neck.
You should go to your friend, he got himself into trouble.
I arch my eyebrow and before I can ask her what she ment I hear a voice.

-Aisha!

Kalatril? I turn my head towards the entrance and when I turn to the seer, she isn't there anymore.

I hold onto my bag and start running towards the exit. But when Kalatril's voice had called for me in distress, I had finally realized that the language I had been speaking with the seer had never been the mortals but the one of the gods.

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Hello and Sorry I didn't publish a chapter last week, had a horrible cold.
🙂

Hope you enjoyed the book as well as the school vacations!

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