Prisoners of Prophecy

Chapter 8

Melany - Friday, July 12th, 2019; 5:06pm

     Xantara was waiting when I pushed through the library's glass doors and into the humid air outside. She jumped in front of me without warning, and I uttered a startled gasp as I skid to a stop an instant before I would have run into her. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but her obvious worry leaked into her features. She hopped from one foot to the other and back again, her head bobbing as she seemed to take in everything but me.
     "What's going on?" I asked her, unease tying my stomach into knots. I had looked up to the stained ceiling this morning once my alarm for school had woken me up, begging to anyone who could hear for a normal day. It appeared nothing had listened.
     "We need to go to your room. Right now. We need to go, before it's too late." She spoke hurriedly, not bothering to take a breath.
     I grabbed her by the shoulders without thought. She clapped both hands over her mouth instantly. I could faintly see her wide eyes find mine behind her shades. A strange electricity ran from my fingers, up my arms, and down my back. It made me weak as well as fill me with an almost overwhelming burst of energy. I forced myself to hang on - to her, to reality. The fear in her words was tangible, and it sent a chill throughout my entire body. Nothing that had happened in the last three days had been in any way predictable and the mystery that came with Xantara was sure to bring a situation just as unusual. That strange dream I had, of that shadow that blocked me from the foreign room I had been forced to stay in, haunted me all day. I saw it every time I blinked. How big it was, and the power that seeped from it. Again, I wondered how and why my life had changed so drastically in such a short time. And how crazy I had become.
     I shook my head like it would clear it of all the panicked thoughts and squeezed Xantara's shoulders tighter. "That's fine with me," I muttered softly despite my unease. I had agreed before even thinking how wild it would be to listen to this stranger. Maybe it was the urgency in her tone. Maybe it was something else. "Just breathe for a second."
     "I can't!" she exclaimed. "Finally, I thought I had some hold on this. Now I'm just as confused as I was at the start." She spoke distractedly, her head swiveling in every direction frantically as she constantly checked her surroundings. She seemed to be mostly talking to herself, like she had forgotten for a moment that I was there at all.
I shoved her lightly. The dazed look on her face was beginning to scare me. It was as if she was getting lost in a place no one could see but her. I didn't like the way she still hid behind her hands, what I could see of her expression scrunched up as if she was in pain. There was something terribly wrong, not just with her but with the whole school. I knew I should run from Xantara now; avoid her and the rest of her friends until I could get out of ShadowWood. But, deep down, I also knew that I could not escape them.
I didn't know what, but there was something not right at all about this place, or the people in it. And if I couldn't run from it, what else could I do but figure it out?
But when I took another look at Xantara, and I felt a pang of concern stab at my stomach, I wondered maybe if the conclusion I had come to was merely only an excuse for the unreasonable curiosity now plaguing me.
"Let's go, then." I let go of her. "Come on."
She nodded jerkily and began walking towards the dorm. If she moved any faster, she would be jogging. Her head swung from side to side, scanning every minute detail around us as we hurried across the field, expecting something I had no knowledge of. She kept ahead of me no matter how much I quickened my pace, murmuring words under her breath that I could not understand.
She led me in the building, jumping at every shadow thrown by the movement of the dingy old lightbulbs swinging slowly above us. She reached for me wordlessly and snatched the keys from my outstretched hand once I realized what she had been asking for and took them from my pocket. Too stunned to speak, I could only watch her unlock my door with shaking hands. She stormed into the room and tossed the keys onto the counter. The noise was achingly loud in the silence that had fallen over us. She locked the door behind me once I had followed her inside, on wobbly legs.
As if she couldn't stand any longer, she collapsed onto the couch she gestured for me to come closer and patted the empty place beside her.
She looked odd in the dimness of the room, almost like a shadow herself. Her constantly jittering form seemed eerily distorted for a moment before returning to normal again, and I hoped it was only my anxiety and overwhelming thoughts. I flicked on the light switch hurriedly when I noticed that the darkness in the corners of the room seemed to suddenly slink towards her. She looked around constantly, almost as if she could see it, too.
When the light came on, Xantara once again covered her face with her hands. "Please," she groaned. "Please, don't..."
"Don't what?"
"Don't be scared of me, please."
I walked to her and sat down beside her. She flinched as if she had not invited me to sit next to her a moment ago. Her hands dropped limply to her lap, but she hung her head so her dark hair would obscure her face.
"Why do you keep saying that?" I asked her. I tried to speak softly, afraid that in the state she was in I could scare her off if I simply raised my voice too loud.
"I don't know what to do. If I'm supposed to avoid you or not. I don't want to scare you, to see you go like the others, the way they looked... I had time to warn you and I waited and now I'm scared I waited too long..." she rambled, then paused abruptly and uttered a heavy sigh.
Her rushed words made no sense to me, but the emotions in her tone as she said them draped me in this heavy shroud of unease. A million questions fired off in my head; but with none of them answerable, I could only drown in them and hope to keep my sanity.
"What are you talking about?" I ask in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.
"I do know you," she confessed to her hands, which were clenched into fists. "I knew you a long time ago."
Instantly, my head began throbbing so painfully that it made me nauseous. My heart leaped into my throat and goosebumps erupted all over my skin. I fought the desire to run, at the same time sure that I was too weak to even make it out of the door. It surely was impossible, for I could not recall a single memory of Xantara being in my life before ShadowWood. But, then, I thought of that sense of recognition that filled me momentarily the moment I really noticed her the first time; I thought of the fact that there was so much of my childhood that I refused to remember... and realized that it could be true. Another coincidence to pile on top of the growing chaos of my short stay at this reform school.
For a while I could not answer, lost in my bewilderment and utter disbelief of what Xantara had claimed. When I could speak, it was low but rough with the sudden anger of being lied to, or of being held from things I needed to know, without any real proof of her and her friends or even the entire school doing either to me. "Why didn't you tell me before?"
Xantara glanced up at me for an instant, her dark hair curtaining half of her face and a hand over her mouth. Behind the shade of her sunglasses, the one dark eye that I could see was wide with shock, as if my response was one she had not expected. She looked back down at her lap before she spoke. "I wasn't sure if you were who I had thought you were."
"Why can't I remember you?" I questioned as if she would know what was so bad in my past that I always denied any part of it to fully come to light. "What the hell is wrong here? Why won't you look at me?"
"I want you to do something for me," she said seriously, ignoring my questions. "Just avoid me for now. I'm sure you wanted to anyways. You see me, turn the other way." Her voice broke no matter how slowly she talked to try and hide her emotion. It leaked into her tone like poison.
Although that had been all I wanted since the moment I found myself barging in on one of their strange occult meetings in a crumbling basement only days ago, Xantara's suggestion brought on a stubborn feeling of doubt. Why would she seem to follow me around almost obsessively the moment we met, just to immediately decide that it would be in my best interest to stay away from her, once she had realized she knew me in my blurred past? That anger simmering beneath my skin grew, boiling in the pit of my stomach. What had I done to deserve to be put in a place that was constantly proving itself to be Hell on Earth? I wondered as I glared at Xantara's cowering shape. And what did she have to do with it? Three days had never felt so long. Maybe following her advice would keep me away from the odd things that seemed to follow her and her friends. Maybe it wouldn't. But how could I possibly avoid her now, after the guarded way she had admitted we had once known each other?
"I won't do anything without a reason," I stated simply, even though there were a hundred reasons I had to get away from her, a hundred questions I wanted to ask her despite that nagging feeling that I needed to escape.
"I'm a monster."
I glanced at the bracelet on her wrist while rubbing at my own. These labeled us as monsters. But did that mean it was true? Because I surely wasn't one, despite the horrible things I had been accused of. I thought of the sincerity in Xantara's eyes when she had assured me my first day that she was quite the opposite. The kindness in her smile when she helped me during class. There was no doubt that there was something that she was keeping from me, but it wasn't that she was as terrible as I had first assumed she was.
"But you're not," I said with conviction. "I know you're not. No more lies. Look at me and tell me what's really going on."
Xantara didn't respond, only continued to study her hands, which I noticed were shaking. She had taken off her glasses at some point and was now holding them tightly, like it was the only object keeping her tied to reality.
You can make her look at you. The voice that suddenly echoed in my mind was not that unknown one that filled me with dread and a power that I wanted nothing to do with, but it was a version of my own voice that I could hardly recognize. The ice in its intonation froze the blood in my veins.
The shadows came back then. They didn't stay at the edges of my vision in the way I had yet to get used to - they came from everywhere and gathered around us. They looked unusual in the yellow light, almost cartoonish. I watched unbelievingly as they climbed up the sides of the couch, slinking into Xantara's lap, swarming around our ankles. They looked like dark splotches of thick smoke with minds of their own, slithering between her pale fingers as if they had a destination. Again, a disturbing thought came to me that these shadows were mine; not a figment of my crazed imagination but a physical and perhaps sentient thing that I could control. It wasn't hard to believe in the light, seeing them climb up Xantara's chest and wrap around her neck like a noose made of the darkest ink. They did not move aimlessly, they moved with purpose. I felt deliriously close to losing all sense of rationality as well as knowing everything.
Xantara gasped, her head jerked up quickly by invisible hands. Maybe not so invisible, I thought fearfully as those shadows continued to squirm restlessly around us. Her eyes found mine instantly. She seemed not to notice them. I wondered if it was because she found something more interesting in my face, which she seemed to read like a book that she could never put down. Then I wondered if maybe those shadows were all in my head; and though it was a scary thought, compared to the other it was a blessing. That would be better. If I was just crazy. Hallucinating them.
There was horror in Xantara's expression as well as curiosity, but those emotions were muffled by whatever she was trying to find in me.
I inhaled sharply. The shadows blinked out of existence like they were never there, and I dismissed them instantly.
I could have excused how pale she had gotten. I could have even convinced myself that one of her eyes had never been blue - that they had always both been so dark that they sometimes looked black. It would have been so easy, compared to the unbelievable and unexpected end of my normal life, to tell myself she had gotten sick and I had not paid enough attention.
But there was no reason that came to mind as to why I wouldn't have noticed the two faint pink scars that tore into her cheeks and touched the corners of her lips. I was sure I hadn't even seen them when she unexpectedly greeted me at the library door.
For the first time since I could remember, I grasped at my memories - the ones that slinked from the shadows of my mind from the sight of those scars, but they wouldn't come.
To my surprise, after I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, there was no fear nor confusion. In this moment, my tired and aching muscles relaxed. A comforting thought came to me; comforting now, but I knew it would hit me later and flood me with terror. For now, though, I took the knowledge calmly and without restraint.
This is only the beginning. This is nothing. You knew the moment that you walked through those gates that there was something wrong with this place.
And now it's starting.
"Oh, Melany! I'm sorry, please." Xantara pleaded hurriedly. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you. Don't be scared."
"Why would I be scared?" I murmured, knowing exactly why I should be but not caring why that fear was absent. "Just a little confused, is all," I say, though all I feel is numb.
"C-Confused?" she exclaimed, her dark eyes wide. "That's all?" She ran a finger over one of those fresh wounds that were somehow scars, staring at me with shock as if she couldn't believe that I was there at all. "But they're still there. Why aren't -"
"I know. You're changing." I interrupted. "Your eyes, your skin..." I trailed off, momentarily silenced by the absurdity of what I was saying and the impact that the appearance of those scars on her cheeks had on me. I sighed before I continued. "Why, I don't know. Right now, I'm too tired to care. I'm sure I'll change my mind in the morning. But that feels like a life time away."
"I'm sorry," Xantara whispered with an agony that I could not comprehend. Tears suddenly brimmed in her coal - black eyes. "I've been thinking about you a lot since I've been here. I wondered why." She exhaled heavily, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time.
I searched my memory helplessly, knowing that I would come to a blank if I tried to think about anything before my mother's death. I had built a wall around that part of my past, one that not even I wanted to break down. "It must have been when my life was..." I could not finish, for I had no clue exactly how my life had been. Or how she would know about it.
But she nodded like she knew all of me, countless things in her gaze. But she said nothing. I was grateful for that. I didn't know how fragile this relaxed feeling of acceptance was, and what would happen when I would finally break.
"I think it's time I go to bed."
Xantara opened her mouth as if she were about to protest, then decided against it. Her shoulders sagged and she sighed again. She stood up slowly, like she was carrying the weight of the world. "Goodbye, Melany."
Her sentence seemed final. But I knew, just as sure as she did, that this had only just begun.