Hidden Mysteries: Soulforce

Chapter 37

                                                     Chapter 37

                                                        Alexa

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” – Terry Pratchett

The phone rang in the middle of the day. The fourth of October. I instantly knew who it was! Blaise! She was alive! We hadn’t had time to call each other during the week or after the battle and I couldn’t be happier to see her number on the caller ID!

My fingers curled around the sleek back of the phone and pressed the button seconds before the device reached my ear. “Hello?” I called and snuck away from the rest of the family to reside in my room.

My best friend’s voice relaxed me as she replied, “Alexa! Man, you should have been there! Not a lot happened, but Fred got locked up in the magical mental hospital.”

The what? “A place like that… exists?” I asked, taken by surprise.

“Yeah and it’s run by nine – oh…” her voice abruptly stopped.

“He’ll kill them won’t he?” My own voice was now just a whisper, scared to hear the answer. “And the king… he’s dead, isn’t he? I think… I think I felt it… During the night, my heart hurt badly, as if I was the one being stabbed from the back – that was how he died, right?”

“Yes… and no.” Blaise responded and then went into full detail about the battle. She told me how they had left with Serina and Chris and they had appeared near one of the black holes. Curious, Blaise had thrown a rock towards it and to her amazement, the stone tumbled across it. It wasn’t a real one… though that didn’t mean that they didn’t come across real ones. On their way to the battlefield – because Blaise had teleported them almost on the other side of the moon – she had almost fallen into one. One of Metus's upgraded shadow creatures had been positioned farther off, intending on stopping backup from coming to aid the soldiers or warning his side that intruders had appeared. The three of them had taken it down and Serina had dealt the finishing blow. Apparently, my Guardian had jumped on the being’s back while Chris was standing there, being used as live bait. Blaise would have helped if she hadn’t slipped and fallen into the crater a black hole had formed. She yelped and had clung onto the rocky ground, trying to pull herself away from its pull. Thankfully the black hole she had almost landed in wasn’t a very strong one.

Serina had driven her sword through the shadow creature’s neck, hearing the crunch of its bones under her. The distorted soul had let out an inhuman shriek before it had crumbled to dust under the woman’s body. The Guardian had landed gracefully on her feet – and was fuming about how her dress had gotten blood on it. That didn’t last long though because they had gone to help Blaise afterwards.

My friend then described how they had come to the battlefield. At first, Blaise had thought that the ground there was black… but after a closer inspection, she had noticed that the ground was moving – no, the shadow creatures were moving. “I was just staring at this… this sea of black things with glowing yellow eyes. Of course there was a small clump of two or three elementals gathered together and were fighting our soldiers but… imagine a sea of shadow creatures. Remember a few months back how when we saw just one, we’d freak out?” Blaise narrated.

I shuddered at the thought. “That sounds sort of scary. But what happened next?” An insatiable curiosity had filled my being and I wanted to know more. To know every single from how Fred, sorry, Metus, was carried to the wacky house to how Arctos had died. The last part, I’m sure I could do without though. After our first and only talk, I felt bad, somehow even guilty… but if that was how things were supposed to be-