SCRATCHED

Chapter 13

2025, The Basement, Solshore.

As the trees whistled and darkness extended its dominion onto the quiet earth, the shadows grew blacker, slowly crawling out of their rotting shells with horrors the world was not ready to face.

People had forgotten how to make sounds, and living in silence had become as normal as rain on a rainy day. Lips never moved. No one dared to speak. Except...

"The prophecy was living to become true. Haven collected all five symbols, the witch was a spell away from immortality. All she needed was the blood of a fallen viking, the left ear of a black horse and the rarest of all, the leaf of a kok tree. They only grew in the Grim Woods, a place no mortal had gone and lived to tell the story.

With the kingdom falling to its knees at the hands of the Smolls, it was only a matter of time before the other emperors would take advantage. The Alpha Brothers were still recovering from the battle, still fighting to transform. But the damage was beyond such repair.

Mason, the youngest, had his wounds to be the deepest. For weeks he had been unconscious. His brothers had to act fast, or else a lot of blood would be on their hands. The Smolls-"

"Do you want to kill everyone! Why would you make them so powerful and the Alpha Brothers so hopeless?! You're so cruel," Kara cut in, frustrated.

"First of all, you're being impatient. Second, until the Night Witch casts that spell which will take some few hundreds of years, the Alpha Brothers are the most powerful beings in the six pure realms," Freddie said.

"What about the seventh?" Kara asked.

"Let's not go there," he warned.

"All I'm saying is... if the Smolls destroy the kingdom, I'm going to destroy you! Has my warning been heard, young warlock?" Kara mimicked, bursting into a giggle.

Freddie laughed. "You sound just like the Night Witch."

"Maybe I am," she said, "I'm the Night Witch and you guys are the Alpha Brothers."

"The Alpha Brothers are three, mind you," he said.

An evil silence filled the space between them. He could see her eyes slowly blinking in sync with it. It was like the sudden stoppage of rain. One second the earth is beaming, the oxygen particles are dancing in joy, and the next it's nothing but silence, mud and the smell of the soil. She breathed, her usual frown happily returning.

"You, Henric and-"

"Let's not go there either," Freddie cut in, shaking his head, noticing a stubborn tear in her eye.

She fought to keep the waves of images and emotions at bay. The battle had been ongoing since that night. But today she met with her biggest failure. "We never left brother," she whispered, "We never left."

Stabbing them in the dark was the dagger of time, perhaps a consequence of tearing it open and traveling through its sacred dimensions. But it had happened before they became time criminals. So it was hard to think of it as a punishment. It was hard to think of it at all.

"You're gifted Freddie. Finish the book," she said, "I'd love to read it."

She walked back to her desk, back to her numbers. The lights bounced on her face, revealing the heavy bags swimming under her eyes.

The numbers were not co-operating, they never did. The one time she had found a match was nothing but luck to help pull her brother out of the grip of the dinosaurs. Normally his scenario should've been harder, given that he had been sucked millions of years back into time, but science was always unpredictable. Well, time travel was.