Book 8.5: Unlocked

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Sophie's POV

All the color left Tiergan's face when the question left Sophie's mouth. Sophie instantly regretted it. Her heart was racing, making Thump! Thump! beats as she watched Tiergan's eyes glaze over in horror. She let her hands fall to her side.

"I-I am so sorry that I listened to you. I wasn't thinking straight and I am sorry. Just forget it. Ok?" Sophie breathed.

"It-it's ok..," Tiergan assured her.

Sophie would have believed him if he wasn't shaking so violently. Sophie walked up to Tiergan to steady him before he toppled over. Her photographic memory remembered where the picture was and when she spotted it she gasped. It showed a younger version of Tiergan in his usual bland clothes with a crest that looked like a dragon holding up his cape. His hair was in a tiny ponytail, and he was kissing a beautiful girl on the cheek. Her smile lit up the whole picture. The girl had teal eyes and loads of brown hair that faded halfway into ocean blue with a few streaks of white in it. She wore a ti di jacket that had every shade of blue with some white in it, and a blue half shirt and blue cape encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, and pearls. She also wore long blue leggings with blue army camo covering the back of her leggings. She wore a dragon crest identical to Tiergan's. Sophie registered it all in. Tiergan looked so happy and compared to what he acts like now she could tell the girl brought him joy.

"Who is that?" Sophie had to ask.

Tiergan grabbed her hands that were steadying him and gestured toward a seat in front of his desk . Sophie knew this meant this was going to be some heavy hitting news. So Sophie crossed his desk and sat down on one of the brown, wooden chairs. Sophie let out a breath she didn't know she had been holding when she looked into Tiergan's eyes and found that they weren't glassy anymore.

"You don't have to tell me. I can tell this is too hard for you," Sophie observed.

Tiergan was silent for a while but he eventually said, "But you won't ever stop wondering,"

"That's...true," Sophie found herself admitting.

Tiergan looked away for a long time studying the ocean like it held the universe's secrets. "Her name was Calista but she went by Breeze in the Black Swan,"

"Was?" Sophie thought. "Black Swan?"

"She and I worked in the Black Swan together for a while. Until one day she left saying that she needed to explore the elements. Breeze was gone for 14 years before she came back and in that time I missed her a lot. But when she came back home everything went back to normal except for one thing. Breeze told me that her research she did in the 14 years that she was gone was dangerous if in the wrong hands. Breeze knew that people would kill her for it. So she gave me this," Tiergan explained showing Sophie the heart shaped necklace.

"Breeze said it was important and to protect it. That was the day the...Neverseen took her. I woke up to screaming and I looked outside the window to see that Breeze was sedated and surrounded by the Neverseen. Around that time I knew nothing but rumors about them so I could only watch as they light leaped away with her."

"I am so sorry that happened to you, but what do you mean by 'was'?" Sophie asked. "You never saw them kill her."

"I actually questioned Gethen when we had him in our possession. He shared a memory of how Breeze was killed when she wouldn't tell them about the Black Swan or her research.

"What if the memory was a fake one?"

"Mr. Forkle looked into that and found nothing but truth,"

Sophie sighed. Then she reflected back to the other mysteries she solved. "Things are rarely what they seem," she thought. "That was the main theme of solving all those mysteries," That was going to be Sophie's new goal. To find out the truth about Breeze even if the truth was that she was dead.