Finding Winter

Chapter 6

Light streamed past my curtains, despite my best efforts to cover the window and block out the relentless mid-day sun. I would usually be a lot more productive on a Sunday, but the events yesterday thoroughly traumatized me. I didn't want to do much.

Autumn, on the other hand, was miraculously fine- chipper, actually. There were a few minutes in the morning where she was alone in the kitchen looking quite somber and daunted with a secret that burdened her hunched shoulders, but the instant she saw me her face was glowing with joy. Though I have grown to understand my sister down to a tee, there were things I could never know. She could be pretty two-faced. If there was something she didn't want you to know, you would never know it. Autumn hides the biggest of secrets, even parts of herself, very well.

I always thought she could do well as a secret agent or spy. Autumn could live a double life without the two worlds merging, to where the other wouldn't know that an alternate exists.

It's hard trusting her sometimes, since you could never know what she's really thinking, but there was one part that I could always admire about this side of her. If she felt a fraction of the fear that I have been facing, she was hiding and handling herself admirably- especially since she was the one that was attacked twice by those shadow monsters.

Sarah probably had no idea of what we encountered. With Autumn's positive energy and laughter, it just seemed like any day out of the ordinary. Even though both of them were just hanging out and talking in the basement, I could hear their laughter and energetic squeals from the second floor.

Groaning, I flipped over on my bed facing the wall. Why did they have to be so loud?

Last night was not kind to me. Though I had slept, vivid scenes of our near death experience overshadowed the darkness of my closed my eyes- black shadows haunting my sister's pink walls, sharp, jagged smiles, and skeletal hands dripping with oily tar. My mind, thankfully, had been able cut off memories of the monsters before I became petrified with trauma, but then once I managed to do that I was overwhelmed with questions from my later experience with the blue orb. I couldn't stop thinking about one event without being reminded of the other.

Yesterday evening, Autumn lay limp in my hands, and the cold air was brisk against my skin, causing chills and bumps to flare across my body like fire as I ran outside. But it wasn't as cold as my sister's blood. When the early fall wind shrieked past me, it's cool breath would chill the trickles and patches of Autumn's blood on my arms in such a sinister and haunting way, reminding me that her life was draining out from her like the warmth from her body. She was losing too much, and it had dripped down from my arms and splattered across the ground in such a way that it created a perfect beeline, a skarlit path towards the forest trail by our house.

Blindly, I had followed the call of the blue orb and did as it told me. I set Autumn down on a bed of freshly fallen, yellow leaves and cleared patches of ruby red in Autumns blonde hair as best I could- streaks of maroon running across her forehead.

And I stared, devastated, at her face to see if her eyes would open, but instead they remained completely sealed shut while her breathing slowed down considerably. Panic welled in my chest because I knew very well that this was my fault, and in desperation I finally glanced up at the blue orb for it to quickly help her in any way it could.

But that was when I found it wasn't a blue orb at all, nothing like how I previously imagined it.

Instead of a levitating ball of light, it was more like a rupture in the plane of our existence- a portal.

Crystalline, white walls bordered with the the spectacular flare of ever changing colors of the rainbow glistened out to me, and passing in and out from my window view, of this other world, in a frantic pace were human figures with the most unnatural colors for hair and eyes. Some, even at their young age, had hair white to the roots, the old with hair like fire, and others with dark shades of green. But eventually, two younger helpers and one elder pulled a young man with messy brown hair and disturbingly green eyes to the front of the portal.