Red Mountain Chronicles: The Illusionist

Chapter 10

     "Don't worry my sweets, just text me when you can." My mother stood up, looking slightly taller than I remembered her last.
     I looked around. I was at my old school— the high school I attended before moving to the Academy. It looked just how I remembered it: a three-story building with tons of glass windows tinted blue, to match its cyan-painted steel roof. I was in the front of the school, where parents dropped off their kids. Everything seemed normal, except something was off...
      Perhaps it's the fact that Mom was not in her car. In fact, there were no cars at all. And it feels like it's only me and Mom here— no one else.
      Despite it feeling off, I did not bother investigating. But it was strange— was there supposed to be something behind Mom... like a road? Or a lot?
      Whatever it was, it did not matter, because in a matter of seconds the terrain changed again. We were now standing by a dirt road. I looked behind me to see an overpass— it looked like I25.
      It was the same road where I last saw my mother. But this time, I detected a bit of sorrow in her eyes.
"No matter what happens," she started, "just know that I will always love you." She then started to turn around walking away toward the desert.
I became confused, part of me felt like I knew where she was going, but part of me was not sure. I wanted to stop her. But I could not move...
"Wait!" Someone cried behind me.
Was that my voice?
I turned around to see myself, trying to talk to my mother. "When will I see you again?"
Then it hit me: these were the same words that I said the last time I saw her. I turned my head to look at my Mother, who stopped in her tracks with her head hung low, as if she was deciding what to do or say next.
This is different from what I remembered. When this actually happened, she did not have nearly as much emotion as she does now.
It was strange, because the reaction she had now seemed more natural than the reaction she gave that day. Then it hit me.
When I was dropped off that day, she reacted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. The same way she would end a call if she was just ten minutes away from the house.
But that wasn't the case here. On that day, she left me to go to a school in a different world. My heart began to pound, as my thoughts began to stir in my head. She knew she was not going to see me again in ten minutes. She knew I would not be able to contact her. She must have known.
But she didn't tell me.
And that was how I knew that this must be a dream.
Dream Mom turned around, facing Dream Me at an angle. There were tears streaming down her cheeks, yet she still looked beautiful. She then forced a smile. It was the same type of smile a Mother put on to reassure their kid that everything was going to be alright.
The same type of smile that protects kids from the truth.
"I don't know," Dream Mom said, trying to sound joyful and optimistic. "They didn't say when your breaks were." She then let out a chuckle. A fake chuckle, meant to lighten the mood. A chuckle meant to distract Dream Me from the true intent of the event.
«Wait. Mom!» I tried to call out to her. I needed answers. I needed answers as to why she left me here. Why she failed to tell me about being a witch, or about this world. Why we lived in the human world to begin with. And most importantly, why she lied to me, and why she reacted the way she did: with no emotion.
Because, despite as much as I knew that what I was experiencing must be a dream, I wanted it to be real. I would have traded all of the money in the world to have this genuine goodbye— a goodbye that I knew any mother could replicate if they knew they were not going to see their child for a long time. But not my mother. Instead I got a stale, insincere farewell. Was this how you treated your only daughter? Your partner in crime? Your best friend?
What was the act: the love, or the goodbye?
This was the question I wanted an answer to most. But as much as I urged myself to move towards her, or yell, nothing happened.
The world was starting to go dark, as Dream Mom said her last words to me.
"Goodbye my sweets," she said.
And then there was darkness.
"Have fun, and be safe."