Riddle Of The Owl - YA Fantasy

Chapter Nine

Alleria couldn't understand how she managed to survive the two weeks before the Exam. She always believed that the human body needed sleep, oxygen and food to live, but she had done without. Hours flickered by, the sun rose and fell in flashing sequences surrounded by pink and orange. Once she read in daylight, once she read in lamplight. There was an insistent cramping in her neck. Sometimes she read on her bed with the book held over her face until her arms grew numb. Sometimes she drifted off at her desk, and when she awoke every ache and pain in her body was tenfold.

Mam came in time and again bearing trays of food. Small, neat things that Alleria could pick up with her hand and not spill on her books. But after a few bites, her mind would wander back to what it had been doing, or she'd need her hand for writing rather than eating. In the back of her mind she knew Mam was worried when she came to retrieve the nearly untouched trays, but it was like a thing that happened in a dream, never registering for more than a fleeting second and failing entirely to raise up emotions.

When first she had been faced with this task she experienced colossal panic. Though the moment she sat down to study, everything vanished. She believed she was in a state of perpetual calm, there was a blank emptiness in her heart.

She felt absolutely nothing.

But then, three days before the exam, she started shivering and sneezing. She put down her pen as the words on the page became nothing but black blotches. She looked around. It was night-time, all was quiet. The lamp on her desk cast shadows in the corners of the room. They looked woozy.

And a fist of despair rammed into her stomach. She gasped, pulling back from her desk and bringing her knees up to her chest. Her heart constricted and the shivering grew harder.

Then tears spilled down her cheeks, followed by sniffles and gulps. She pressed the backs of her hands to her face, trying to reduce the pressure that suddenly formed behind her eyes. But somehow that only increased everything, her shivering became shaking as she did her best to hold back the racking sobs.

A soft knock at the door, and Mam, hair laden with rollers, padded in on fluffy white slippers. "Oh, darling," she said in that sweet voice mothers use and hurried across to Alleria. She hugged, patted and cooed, stroking and shushing and saying all the right things, in the right tones, until everything became uncomplicated and Alleria felt that she was once again little.

"Mama," like a child, like a baby, she was just so miserable and she didn't even know why. She clung to her mother, her tears streaming freely now. Then Mam pulled away, and placed a tenderly firm hand against Alleria's forehead.

"Oh no, 'Leria-love, you're burning up." She pressed her hand to Alleria's cheeks and looked with concern into her eyes. "You've gotta rest, duckie. Get into bed, love, and Mam'll warm you some soup."

It felt so nice to hear Mam use dialect and call her the old abandoned pet-names that Alleria complied without even the slightest argument.

Perhaps she drifted off, because Mam returned with warm soup and buttered toast in what seemed like mere seconds later. She somehow managed to both braid Alleria's hair and help her eat at the same time, before giving her some cold medicine and tucking her in.

Alleria lay snug and drowsy in her bed, her thoughts drifting like leaves on a pond. Her shivering had stopped, and now she was warm and heavy, like her bones were going to roll out of her flesh. But she also felt secure in a way that she hadn't in years. The music of the demon world played softly in the background.

She would likely fail, she knew there wasn't much of a chance. But maybe it wasn't a bad thing. She could be a child for a little longer.

Just a little longer.