Twilit Mage

Chapter 53: A Flash of Memories

She was falling.

Mercury opened her eyes, but she still couldn't see anything. Complete darkness surrounded her. Everything was pitch-black, the nothingness stretching out into infinity on either side.

Something felt strange. How had she come here? She tried and tried to remember, but her mind came up empty. She was simply here. Wherever this place was. And wherever she was going.

Was she dreaming?

No, that wasn't it. This didn't feel like a dream. It felt like...something else. Something she had never felt before, but for some reason it still seemed familiar. Not entirely real. But not like a dream either.

Mercury felt for wind, but there was nothing. Even though it should be all around her, pulling at her hair and clothes and slowing her fall, she couldn't feel a single thing, a single breath of air as she sank down into nowhere. She was going fast, she felt, but she wasn't getting any faster. The nothingness passed by her at a speed she could only guess, taking her from nowhere to nowhere.

Little by little something glimmered up in the distance. At first she thought it was her imagination, but it grew bigger and bigger, turning into a bright light that slowly pushed aside the pitch-blackness until she fell right into it and landed gently on her feet.

Mercury looked around. She was on a white, perfectly flat plain, the ground hard and seemingly made of no known material but simply there, no ceiling above her head, the sky as spotlessly white and undefinable as the ground. Mercury looked down at her feet, but she cast no shadow. The colors of her body seemed just as flat and unshaded.

Something drifted to her from afar. A sound. She couldn't tell what it was, but it seemed to be calling her, her feet automatically starting off into its direction. She started to walk, then to run. She ran and ran and ran without getting out of breath, not knowing how long she had been running when she abruptly stumbled and landed inside a scene.

She was standing in a small apartment. Whose it was she didn't know, but it didn't look modern, the furniture and the equipment looking about thirty years old. A little girl was kneeling in front of her feet, looking barely old enough to be in elementary school.

"I'm sorry," she whimpered, curling up and raising her arms in front of her face to protect it. "I tried...I didn't want it...Mom, I'm sorry..."

"Enough."

Mercury spun around at the sound of the voice. The figure standing above the little girl was a woman around thirty, bearing no resemblance at all to the child in front of her. Where the little girl was pale, skinny and black-haired, she was tanned and curvy with light brown hair, looking almost pretty except for the cold mask of fear and hatred distorting her face.

"How many more times do I have to tell you?" she shouted at the child, who flinched and curled in on herself. "Control it! I don't want to see your powers, you monster!"

Her hand swished through the air at the last word. Something whipped past Mercury and struck the little girl across her hands and arms, leaving them red and bruised as the girl crouched even lower in a way that made Mercury realize a fearsome truth.

This wasn't the first time this happened. Not the second time either.

"What," the woman shouted, "are you sorry yet? Maybe if you were, you wouldn't keep on doing this! If you're really that sorry then stop being what you are!"

The thing swished through the air again, and this time Mercury recognized it as a belt. The metal clasp struck across the child's arms, cutting into the flesh and leaving a trail of blood to run down her skin, dripping onto the ground.