Moon Flowers (Book 1 of the Flower Trilogy) #Wattys2016 #Featured

BOOK 2 - Snow Flowers - Chapter 1 (part 2)

HALIA'S POV

I lost count of time. I can't be sure of how many days, or weeks, or months I'd spent with the Oceanides.

Eventually, I heard them say it was winter. 

"A layer of ice covers the sea over our heads," I heard Una announce.

I was thus living under a sheet of ice, where the water was barely over the freezing point. And although the Oceanides had showed me how to cover myself with blue fire, on bad days, I sometimes didn't. 

Those were the days I remembered the pain, days where I preferred to let the cold numb me -- but never to the point of between life and death like when the Una and Reka first found me.

I felt if I did that, I wouldn't show how grateful I was to the Oceanides for everything they did for me.

They'd welcomed me, without asking me questions. They did as if I was one of them, made me share food with them, and participate to their excursions across the sea.

In fact, when I was with them, I was almost a new person. I was almost happy.

It's when the night came that my past caught up with me. I was frequently visited by nightmares. 

I would dream I was on the mound, laying flowers on Phi's tomb. I would then blink and find myself in front of an empty grave; Phi's body was no longer there. I had lost her once again. I had lost her in life and in death.

It could have meant she was alive again, but I knew she wasn't. In the tomb, instead of her, rested the necklace she had given me, symbol of our ever lasting friendship.

If she were alive, she would have kept it with her. Now, it was as if she had never existed or will never exist.

It was a horrible thought, but it a way, that was perhaps what I was trying to do here, underwater, trying to erase her from my past, and my future. That scared me. 

That scared me but I found no other way to live -- or rather survive. If I stayed with her, I have no real doubt that I would have died.

And I shouldn't die, should I?. The truth is that wasn't even sure. I was not sure if my life was worth living. I wasn't sure if I knew what to live for.

Still, with the Oceanides, I was sometimes able to forget all that. And sometimes I though that those good moments, if I had enough of them, one day would overthrow all those bad memories and fears.

But one day, after winter and spring slowly passed by, I felt a strange sensation in my stomach. A sensation I knew all too well, it was the oracle inside me that wanted to let me know that something was going to happen.

I feared that moment all morning. I tried to stay away from the water, in a dry part of the silver cave, knowing that the oracle usually manifested when my skin came in contact with water.

That was ridiculous, of course. I couldn't run away from having a future. 

Soon enough, Sedna, a local mermaid I had befriended, came to find me.

"One of your people is waiting for you in a boat, "she told me. "You should go see what he wants before he drifts too far out. It's not safe for him here."

I sighed and swam half-heartedly towards the small dot resting on the blue sky above me, the surface. It was a canoe, made with birch and elm bark and stretched over a wooden frame like those the First Creatures used.

"Tönx," I said once my heard emerged from the water. I recognized the sturdy figure of my childhood friend. "Are you lost? It's dangerous for you here, you're too far out."

"Halia!" he complained. "You know, you could not make it any harder for me to find you."

"Maybe I didn't want to be found," I said rolling my eyes.

He smiled, laughing at my false indignation. He was my friend and of course he knew I was happy to see him, even if I said otherwise. 

"You have to come back," he said, all playfulness wiped from his face.

"I can't," I replied. "Too much pain..."

"We need your help," he insisted. "Moisa blames us for the death of her son. She lets us stay because of the promise she is forced to keep but the rivalry between our two people is restless."

"What do you expect me to do?" I asked.

"I never told anyone you and Phi were married," he said. I felt my expression stiffened. I didn't want to talk about this. This was exactly what was too painful, what I was trying to forget. "So no one knows her powers are in you."

"And?"

"You are the most powerful of us fairies. You are a royal."

I was still confused. "You want me to go beserk on the First Creatures and start a war?"

There is no way I was going to take part in that. I didn't know the First Creatures well, but I had seen enough horror during the last war. I had had to kill people, and slice off the head of the king, something I still saw happening in front of my eyes whenever I closed them. I had to live with that for the rest of my life. I didn't want to cause more death.

I couldn't control myself. I felt the anger raise inside of me, and my eyes started to burn.