The Majors, Rebuild and Reunite (Book 3)

Chapter 4: The Girl in My Conscience

~Gemini~

I'm not sure how I got there, nor where here was.

It was a dead landscape, stretching for miles with nothing but dry, rocky ground scattered with pebbles and choked out plants that looked as if they hadn't had a taste of water for their whole lives.

The sky was darkened, the overcast of the grey mass swirling above me unnatural and otherworldly...

I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. 

A chill rode up my back like crawlers, their feet digging into my skin to raise goosebumps along my spine. I hugged myself tightly, my arms bare and breaking out in the small uneven lumps induced by the fear and cold that seemed to lay over this land like a blanket.

I bit back a small shriek at the first sound I heard. It was coming from behind me, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up straight. It sounded...like digging, the gravelly noise of dirt being shifted reaching my ears, and the metallic slash of some tool being dug into the earth.

I didn't want to turn around. I didn't want to know what was behind me. A horrible fear rose inside me, twisting and curling from the pits of my stomach up towards my throat like bile. Now I had to decide, would seeing whatever was making that horrid noise lessen my fear, or double it?

Slowly, very slowly, I turned, my eyes falling upon the only other thing that seemed to exist in this strange world.

A rather short figure stood, digging. A shovel nearly the same height as they were dug into the ground, working on a hole that could certainly fit them comfortably inside...or me. 

Their movements were...choppy and broken up.

But slowly, they came to a stop. They froze, dropping the shovel, their face still angled down, until suddenly it snapped up. My breath caught in my throat as their glowing red eyes met mine, bloodshot and wide. Her skin was pale...paper white and clinging to her bones like a corpse, dark shapes carving the angles of her face. 

They began to move forward, stumbling and leaning to the side, unable to walk straight, their arms swinging limp along with the leathery wings, mangled and torn like claws had raked them raw, behind them.

Her head tilted, like their neck was on a broken hinge, strands of greasy white hair tangled and matted with blood and sweat falling to mask their face.

That was until she raised an arm, her elbow clicking, rattling with broken bones that fractured against one another. She grabbed her jaw, snapping it back into place with a sickening crack.

At that moment I came to the horrible realization that I couldn't move as this seemingly walking corpse slowly approached, her bare and bloody feet dragging against the dry terrain. I was frozen to the spot, my limbs locked. 

The closer they got, the more I saw how...dead they were. Skin stretched tightly across her bones, tearing at some point to reveal bone and tissue. Her pointed ears were blackening at the tips, along with her bony fingers that looked as easy to snap in half as a twig. 

A burn covered nearly half their body, spanning over her chest and creeping up her neck towards her jaw, black and sickening to look at. Dried blood splattered over open patches of her skin, shriveled from what was most likely fire...

A wide grin began to spread across the girl's face as she came closer...a grin I knew, a grin I recognized. 

"How?" I gasped, hardly able to manage words as a cold dread wrapped around my throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe let alone speak.