To Love Victoria

6: The Black Sun

The light faded and I stepped out into a reality that was not my own. The bunker was no longer there and I was now standing in an open field. Around me, strange metallic rings and lights hovered all around. Above me, a large black sun, darker than anything I had ever seen before, hung in the midst of the red sky with many rings orbiting it. Despite being so close, I barely felt any warmth coming from it and its rays didn't hurt my eyes. I fell to my knees, terrified of what was before me. I had no idea where I was, it felt like a place that didn't truly exist anywhere in reality, like something in its own bubble separate from our Universe.

The warm inviting feeling I had felt before had died. Now, I was cursed with a sense of dread as I stared up at the black sun. They say if you stare into the abyss then the abyss stares back at you. Well, they were right. The sun felt alive, like it was somehow the source of all of this.

Why? Why did I step into the light? It tricked me. I lost control of myself, I wasn't the one that was moving. It was as if the light was controlling both my body and my mind, luring me in like a predator hunting down its prey.

I heard a voice behind me. "It's okay, you're safe. It won't hurt you, for now." I turned and there behind me was a woman with long blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and wearing a dress, the same colour as the sky.

"Who are you?" I wanted to reach for my rifle but it was gone.

"There's no need to panic, I'm here to help you. My name is Olivia."

At one point in my life, I was trusting of strangers but with years of experience, I learned to correct myself. As friendly as she looked, I couldn't just blindly follow the words of a stranger, especially with the situation I was in. She noticed my hesitancy and how standoffish I was.

She frowned. "It seems that you don't trust me. Look, I understand. There is so much I want to tell you but I can't, but I might know a way to make you trust me more." She held out her hand and a glow appeared just above it, similar to the light in the bunker. A knife materialised out of the light and she brought it to her wrist. She slashed it. The woman raised her wrist to show me the black blood dripping down her arm. "See, we both bleed black. That's what makes us different to humans and vampires, it's our blood. Theirs is clean, ours is tainted."

I took a step forward. "You're like me. You're also a Blackblood?" She nodded.

"Do you trust me now?"

"I'm sorry, I still don't know."

She frowned. "I know a way to get you to trust me then." She approached me and I took a step back, she leaned in and whispered something into my ear. Something that shook me to my very core. I stood back, terrified. How did she know? There was no way she knew that, I had never told anybody. Her words, they echoed in my head, the secret that I would take with me to the grave. I felt my entire body tense up, she wasn't supposed to know, nobody was. My chest felt tight and my breathing became constricted. I tried to calm myself but I couldn't.

"How- how did you know?" I put my hand over my aching chest, trying to process the thoughts that were racing through my mind.

"Look around you." I turned to stare at people in the fields. They were us, many versions of us. We were laughing, crying, hugging. There must have been hundreds of versions of us together, spread out across the field.

"These are all future versions of ourselves. Listen, I have spoken to you many times before, I know you. This may be the first time you are speaking to me from your chronological point of view but in the future, we become very close. And in the future, you tell me that secret." That was how I knew I could trust her.

She was someone I barely knew and yet I trusted her more than anybody. I stood there with my mouth agape, still trying to process what she was talking about. "I understand that you're confused but at least you trust me now. I've been trapped here for many years. You can leave at any time but I can't." It seemed like she wanted to say something else but she stopped.