Moonlight

Chapter 8- Dreaming and Getting Started Again

Chapter 8- Dreaming and Deciding 

The darkness of the room didn't bother me . 

I had been sitting there for a few hours. I knew it was night - they wouldn't lock me in here if it wasn't. During the day I was allowed to move about, or at least have some light. Night was a dangerous time for me. Or, rather, for him, and he made sure I wasn't a danger by locking me in here. 

The room was small. A storage room, I was pretty sure. But it had eventually become my makeshift prison. Besides, I had grown used to it over time. It wasn't exactly pleasant, but at least it wasn't a surprise. 

Night was almost over. I could always feel, at nighttime, the tug of the moon behind these walls that kept me trapped in the storage room. They were thin and weak. I could feel its power and the gravity of it through the walls, beckoning me, pulling me inwards. I knew better than to listen to the pull, though. It was dangerous. It made me dangerous. It was what made me a bad person, right? That's what everyone taught me, right? That's why I was locked in this room. 

"You can come out." 

The voice startled me. I nearly jumped out of my skin, scrambling towards the wall. 

The door slowly slid open. Dull lamplight flooded into the room. I immediately pushed myself farther away from the light. 

Lamplight burned. Sunlight burned more, though. I'd learned that a long time ago.  

The man at the door was dressed in long black robes. His face was young, maybe even kind, but the sinister look on his face gave away the person that laid beneath. He held a book in his hands with golden letters on the front in a different language, one that I couldn't understand. Dread crept over me as I started at that book, my skin crawling and my eyes shutting tight. 

"Come out." He grabbed me by the shoulder, pulled me into the lamplight and then we were standing outside the door. It burned on my skin, but I had something else that was weighing on my mind beside the tingling, hissing sensation. The hand clenched me tightly, pushing me towards the door that led into the next room. I hated that room, too. No, I loathed it. My fists clenched on their own. 

He yanked me through the door.  

The door swung open. I was pushed into a room full of people, some standing on the sides dressed in black robes, and others just normal people. They were chatting politely amongst themselves, except for the ones in black robes, which were silent. Each man in those robes had a gold necklace with a swirling golden symbol on the end hanging about the middle of their chest. If you stared at it for a long time, the symbol seemed to move on its own, like an illusion. Suddenly the room fell silent as we entered it. 

The man beside me smiled, although his sinister look didn't disappear. But no one else seemed to notice, captivated by the illusion that this entire place was. He spread his hands, guiding me up to the platform in the front of the circular-shaped room. It curved to the sides to match the walls. It had three steps leading up to the top, which I shakily climbed as the man behind me followed. All eyes were on me, and stayed on my small, shaky body. I was in the center of the platform now, the black-robed man still behind me.  

He put both hands on my shoulders. I tried not to wince or follow my urge to run away. 

"Today is the day where we can rid this town of evil."

The man's voice boomed throughout the room, which wasn't designed very well for speaking to everyone in the room. It bounced off the walls, echoing in strange places and disappearing in others. "The evil that has perished this land," The man's hold tightened around my shoulder, "And taken over our children. This child here was taken over by a demon. It lived among us, and then selected the girl you see here."