The Keepers' Evil

Twenty-Six: That's enough

Song- Rolling in the deep: Adele

"Stop it, that's enough."

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The sound of a thousand heels followed me from the school, their steps cracking to a familiar beat which almost resembled the harsh clap of a drum. I let the rhythmic cadence carry me away, fuelling the twitch of bitterness that lingered as a pulse in my skull. Each step I heard behind me represented a suppressed sentiment that had once been forced to obey into submission; courage, strength, anger, I could hear them all following me, encouraging each gait to match their periodicity.

I couldn't see the landscape through my eyes, and the world seemed tinged in a shade of red that I wasn't accustomed to. It wasn't a rosy pink, it wasn't a light, it was a dark, blood-red tint that grew increasingly saturated the longer anger's footsteps clipped in my head. It was like encouragement, and whilst the red burnt a little, it felt powerful.

It was as though the enmity held a stamina with a brute strength I had never seen in another human being, not even Sebastian. It was a being that shook me awake, that scolded me for not having realised the power before now. It was a living entity that falsely filled the wounds on my soul with antiseptic and it stung with a profuse heat, but it felt somewhat healed.

The shadows that sprung from the corners of the world past the school's safety no longer felt like the devil's advocates, but rather a dark angel's right hand. My right hand. I sulked through the grounds, allowing the caliginosity to pity me, to hold me, to gloat, as it watched the clean magic drip from the ends of my fingers and back into the earth as though it had cycled through me entirely.

I hadn't given a moment's thought to where I was supposed to go, where I needed to go, but the crushing weight that lifted from my limbs as I stepped past the threshold of the castle instantly flung me into a nauseatingly twisted tunnel of apparition, and my mind took me to the only place that it could manage to conjure.

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was at my choice of location; my brain had become so accustomed to ignoring the brutal truths and reverting me back to what it assumed was safest, that it couldn't rationalise with the factuality of the situations I ended up in, I couldn't handle the sincerity of Sebastian's perfidy.

I stood squarely in-between an old wooden gate, its hinges cracked with rust, and a fractured stone wall that lined Feldcroft with grey slabs and a hint of moss that freckled the gaps. I supposed it was fitting, the wall, seeing as Feldcroft was a crumbled town itself, it wasn't too far- fetched to assume that the wall was simply there to warn me of the emotional ruins I already knew to be scattered around the borough.

The wind whistled away the sound of my gulp so that I didn't have to think about him. The pound of the anger's drum carried me forwards so that I didn't have to feel for myself. The night's clouds ran through the air so tightly, so darkly, so that I didn't have to pretend to see a light where there wasn't one. The lock on the door didn't rattle, so that I didn't have to regret leaving Sebastian and Ominis silently with that look on their faces.

Remorse.

It was as though the world around me was finally fighting for me, and when the door to the Sallow's home jolted into the gold lock behind me to shut it out, I'd never felt such a strong shiver of discontent. In the quiet I could hear the thoughts that the drum had droned out. In the quiet I could feel the uncomfortable sink of my memories returning to the files in my mind where they seemed to belong, and it reminded me of settling in the calm normal mess of slotting my books back into the library beside Sebastian.