Flames [Slow Updates]

Chapter Sixteen

Dedicated to skye_wolverine7 because she ALWAYS comments and votes and lets me know what she thinks of whatever I've written.

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"Hey Sam," she said, with forced lightedness. Once the door had closed, she pressed a bracelet on her wrist and her appearence changed into how it used to be before, black hair and smooth skin and all. 

I gawked at her. "What are you doing here? I thought you were back at- wait." Something more pressing came to mind. "Why aren't you dead?" According to Alabaster, Inferno, impossibly, had been two hundred years ago. 

She smiled her old familiar smile and I felt like scratching her eyes out. This entire time, I was suffering and she was living in the lap of luxury? And she hadn't done anything even when she obviously knew that I was being held captive. Before, Eva would have burst into the room and mounted a rescue. Now, she hardly cared. "Well?" I pressed.

"The same reason you aren't," she said, still smiling. She was comfortable in the hard chair too, though she was sitting in a much more casual way than Adeline. Eva was sitting leaning against an arm with her legs slung over the other.

"The-the Forests of Time?" I had a little trouble recalling the name, which was a little surprising. I had learned the name of nearly every town in Nezrof (or so it seemed to me) so by then my memory should've been amazing. "What exactly are they? Alabaster didn't say much about them." Curisity and years of friendship had triumphed over anger and jealousy. This was Eva. She would look out for me.

"The Forests of Time are a place that's so cold that even time slows down wthin it. You must have been in there at some point of time and while you were, two hundred years passed outside," she told me. Eva was almost glowing with vitality. The picture of health. 

"What's with your disguise?" I asked her. 

She shrugged. "Alabaster thought I needed it. Something about pretending that they hadn't found the One of the Hopeless." She flashed another smile. "The fun thing about my disguise is that there are a billion interesting back stories I can have. Currently, I'm Alabaster's old nanny who was once a pirate's slave for five years." She suddenly changed her voice. "And aye, he was a mean one!" Trust Eva to think of something like that.

"You're the one of the Hopeless?" I could've slapped myself. I was supposed to be smart. 

She gave me a lazy nod, probably thinking about my supposed smartness as well. "Yup. The spell wore off a few days after you and Lafiah left, though I cried a bucketful for her before it did. It was a fascination spell, by the way. I learned about it when I was in the Forests. So anyways, after it wore off, I realized that I was in the wrong place and I tried to cut and run. Lafiah used to be really paranoid about the people entering or leaving the city but her successor, this weird old guy called Falinor, didn't care that much and I managed to escape. I went into the Forests of Time by accident and got lost. Then I met this hermit guy. He recognized me immediately." 

"So," I interrupted. "You stayed with him for about two seconds and left? Cause I do remember going into a cold forest but I was there for about five minutes. Then we were out on the other side. Lafiah died a little while later."

Eva shook her head, curls swishing back and forth. "There are pockets of different rates of time in the Forests. In the place I was, I stayed for a yearbefore I left. That were equal to two hundred years on the outside. And Lafiah must have been dying when she went through the Forests." She paused. "According to my hermit, 'if Death shadows you through the Forests of Time, it will come all the swifter when you leave.' That's why he never left."