Fire and the Flood - KitTy

Chapter Five - Kit

Okay so I apologize profusely to those who are still reading this. Stuff happened and I was in the hospital, then school started, and I had no time at all to write. Right now I have a cold and no schoolwork to do, so I stole the chance to write!!!! Hope this chapter is worth the wait!!

A bright light danced across the insides of Kit's eyelids like a sharp knife piercing his brain. Instead of the black emptiness he was used to when his eyes were closed, a painful yellow spread over his vision; it was all he could see. Reds and oranges and golds joined the yellow, various shades overlapping each other continuously, creating a wriggling map of movement in his mind's eye. The endless polygons and lines were getting to be too much for Kit, but he was afraid of what he would see when he opened them; he somehow knew that it would not be comforting.

Would he be in a familiar setting, with his dresser and figurines and poster-covered walls, Tessa sitting in a chair by his bed? Would Mina come running in and jump on him, squishing his lungs and knocking the wind out of him, like that time when he got a fever on his birthday? He could almost imagine it all, force it to become his reality in that moment. And who knows, maybe it was possible. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, he could bring Cirenworth Hall, along with his family, to him. Wherever he was.

The image in Kit's mind dissipated as his senses came into better focus; he was aware of a sharp prickling sensation all over his bare skin, a constant and barely-noticeable rumbling sound in the distance, the occasional shift in the air around him, bringing the taste of something burning to his lips. And though the scenario with Tessa and Mina was gone from his mind, it still felt like a toddler had just jumped on his chest.

Two sides of Kit had a battle in his mind: the lazy teenage boy side that wanted to lay where he was until he died, and the newer Shadowhunter version of him that was telling him to open his eyes, stand up, and figure out where the heck he was. He very nearly listened to the lazy side of himself, but somehow, over the years of living with Jem and Tessa, the Shadowhunter side had grown stronger than the other, so he slowly lifted his eyelids.

When they were just a crack open he was nearly blinded by a brilliant light coming from the distance. A painful headache had formed once both his eyes were fully open; the white light in front of him was all he could see. It was coming from quite a bit away, past a huge mass of something, but it still reached him.

He sat up, propping himself up on his hands while he shook his legs awake--he didn't want to try to stand up, and end up falling over because his legs were numb. That would just be embarrassing. As he did this he took the opportunity to study his surroundings. He decided that this was definitely not Cirenworth, unless he had missed out on some major renovations.

It was a desert. But unlike deserts that he was used to finding in L.A., the ones with rocks sticking up out of the dirt ground and small trees and brittle shrubs growing haphazardly around the rough, worn-in roads, this one consisted of tiny sharp shards of black rock instead of the soft dust of L.A.. Crooked, twisting trees, their branches infinite tangles of knots worse than when Mina tied his shoes, replacing small cacti and patches of dried-up grass.

And the sky. It was beautiful; like a thousand overlapping stones of amber and ruby and carnelian, it sparkled, so much so that Kit thought for a second that it was the cause of the blinding light. But it was just an effect of the light; it reflected against something beyond the scarlet clouds, causing it to appear as though the sky was made of precious gemstones. There was no sun, Kit realized with a start. He had been unconsciously searching for one, but as he made an actual effort to look for one, he didn't see anything. Only red, orange, and yellow, like an eternal sunset.

As Kit marveled at how different it was from the calm blue sky that he was used to, with the sun that, even if there were clouds covering it, he always knew existed, a ridiculous description popped into his head: the Eye of Sauron.