The world is not what you think. Love isn't what it seems to be. Life is a cycle of magic. And Scarlet is the girl who has that magic. Once they called her a halfling, an aberration that shouldn't have existed but now others say she's special.
In a...
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"The dead are scary. They feed off of life whenever and however they can."
We were back at her house. She had changed and I had a towel wrapped around myself as we sat on the floor in her parlor. It was what she called that room where she welcomed her visitors although it had nothing in common with a real parlor.
"It's not often that a living person goes to the other side so when someone like you or like Lucas does, they try to take that life for themselves."
Listening to her, no matter how reasonable it sounded, I could find the holes in her explanation because even if she said the dead were supposed to attack the living once they stepped a foot inside their world, it was not what had happened mere hours ago.
They had tried to reach me, to hold onto me, to tell me things but they never attacked me. I knew the difference. I'd seen what they tried to do to Lucas when he came to take me back and it wasn't the same.
Whatever the dead wanted from me, my life wasn't it.
"They tried to speak to me. They chased after me but they didn't attack me. So how do you know they wanted to take my life, Oracle?" I voiced my thoughts aloud.
"It's what I've heard from other necromancers, Scarlet. It's what Lucas always said too. That's just what they do."
"Then why didn't they try it with me, Oracle?"
Silence. Long after the question left my lips the only sound I could hear was her silence. Her hands folded in her lap, her unseeing eyes looking distant as if she was somewhere far away from this place and not right in front of me, a few minutes passed in that same quiet.
Then, as soon as her lips moved, a strange sound came out of these pale, desert-dry lips.
"They recognized you as one of them because it's where you belong, Scarlet," her voice resonated through the room, penetrating my skull like the whisper it was only to turn into a scream inside my mind.
'It's where you belong...'
"Wh-what do you mean, Oracle?"
Hands coming undone, she clasped them over mine, pulling me to lean closer to her until there were mere inches that separated us. 'Listen to me and remember what I'm going to say,' the gesture spoke.
"It seems that you've already made your choice, Scarlet. The day Lucas came to the other side for you, when he convinced you to return to the world of the living, you died that day, Scarlet. And when you came back you left a part of you behind," she told me, her breath fanning over my face sending a chill that reached deep into my soul. "It's either that or you are..."
