The Ghost of Fiore

Accepting The Past

This is Amber^

My eyes fluttered open as a feeling of peace filled me. The trees swayed gently with the wind and the sound of a brook babbled next to me, this was a scene that had once been as familiar to me as my own heartbeat was.

Sure enough, only a few seconds after I woke up, sounds of children's laughter began to reach me. My head dipped as I began to curse quietly, the last thing I remembered was being sucked into the lacrima in an attempt to stop, or at the very least slow the eitherion bomb. That meant, if I thought about this logically, that I was either dead or trapped inside the stupid thing as my brain was forced in on itself.

Now don't get me wrong, I was aware that the type of life I had lived was not one that would allow me into any particularly good afterlife, but this? This was just mean.

I watched passively from my spot on the forest floor as two little girls ran in from a well-hidden path that I remember I had been so proud to find. This was my twin sister's and my hidden grove where we always came to play and practice with our magic without permission. And yes, that meant that the two little girls who were giggling in front of me were my twin and me, probably around 5 at the time.

As always, I was easy enough to pick out of a crowd, my vibrant red eyes gleaming as my black and red hair shone in the sunlight, looking like a rats nest because I hated when my mom brushed it. There were cuts and nicks all the way up my legs from exploring the woods and a rash running up the side of my neck. I chuckled quietly when I saw that, I remembered that mark vividly as it was a hard-learned lesson on my part. At one point before this, I had refused to listen to my mother's lessons on the plants in the woods, which ended with me falling face first into a whole grove of poison ivy... I tried and failed to hide from my mother and Amber, who teased me mercilessly about it.

My gaze shifted to the person I hadn't seen in so long that I barely recognized... Tears welled in my eyes without my permission as I watched her shove the young me with gusto, giggling about some prank we had likely just pulled off successfully. Despite how similar our names were, we were polar opposites, she was several inches shorter than I was, with mousy brown/blond hair and blue eyes. We shared the sharp eye shape that we had inherited from our mother, but where my skin was pale, which even as a kid caused me to look ethereal, Amber had a darker skin that she shared with our father.

Her hair was pulled back into the braid that she loved because it kept her unruly hair from getting tangled; she hated that my hair was so straight and easy to manage yet I cared so little about it. I forced myself to take a deep breath before I could sob. She was always so patient with me, even when she was obviously frustrated by how little I actually cared to listen, and when I came up with my off the wall ideas, she was the first one to tell me that we should try it out, even if it could be bad.

I knew exactly what memory I was seeing, everything from the rash on the younger me's neck to the small cut in Amber's blood red vest (One that she only wore because she said it matched my eyes) told me exactly when this was. Already I wanted to leave, but I knew that I couldn't.

We were so young, so willing to explore the world, that what was coming next just broke my heart.

The little me pulled out a vial, that I knew contained a small amount of my blood, "Hey Am, watch this!" Amber was the one who really loved to learn our family's magic, but I was the experimenter, getting bored during lessons only to come up with ideas that could only be done away from my family.

Little me pulled the stopper on the vial, ready to wow her with some stupid thing I had learned, but Amber grabbed the vial from me, holding it away in a defensive manner, "No!" I watched as I recoiled slightly, staring at Amber with hurt and confusion growing in my eyes. Amber was the only one who got excited when I experimented, so I knew that little me felt so betrayed right now.