Hey people! Welcome to Race Against Time, my sequel to Whispers From the Past, which I finally decided to make!
If you haven't read Whispers From the Past yet, I very strongly advise you to do so because I can't go and review everything that happened in this story. Sure, I'll have to do a bit of a recap, but a lot of things will be missing for you if you decide to skip another good story and just read this one (if you read this one at all.)
Disclaimer: I do NOT own W.i.t.c.h. or any of it's places or characters. I really wish I did, but chances are, I'd probably ruin it somehow and the story is perfectly great the way it is!
Chapter 1: The Beginning of the End
Will's POV
Ah, it's good to be out of school for the day, Will thought happily as her bike raced down the sidewalk away from the Sheffield Institute.
"Bye Will!" she heard Irma call. "And don't forget! The Silver Dragon after homework!"
"I won't! See you then!" Will yelled back with a wave.
Things were so great! Matt had finally asked Will out! All the girls, even Cornelia, were back together and a true team again. And even with magical powers, life didn't seem to be so complicated.
"And that's how it should be." Will muttered to herself. "I can't think enough about how good it is to have gotten out of that mess with Phobos and our Evil selves from an alternate universe. Now we can start to lead our semi-normal lives again."
Will shuddered as she thought back to months ago when her horrible nightmares had started. A woman that looked like an evil form of her Guardian self had started to haunt her and whisper dark thoughts in Will's head. Coming from Evil Will, it was either give up the Heart of Candracar, or let her friends die and live in a world of pain and suffering.
The Guardians (excluding Cornelia, who had basically quit the group as she was too busy mourning over Caleb) were later summoned to Candracar where the Oracle had explained the situation that the girls had put themselves in. They found out that when Elyon was born, there was too much power and magic in the universe. All that power would have killed anyone magical, good or bad. Therefore, the universe was split and created an alternate dimension. All of the excess magic that could do harm was cast away into the alternate universe, which is a mirror reflection of the universe in which the good Guardians lived in. Any person good in the more powerful universe was evil in the alternate one. So evil forms of Elyon and the Guardians were formed and the balance of power was in harmony. End of story.
Puh-lease. If only…
But of course, the Evil Guardians weren't happy with having weak powers while the good ones had everything that they wanted. They planned to escape their wretched lives, even against the advice of their Elyon. They just knew that their day would come when they could escape and come out as the most powerful beings who ever lived!
And that day eventually came. After the Guardians had defeated Phobos and brought Elyon back to her rightful throne, Cornelia stole away to her bedroom to tend to her beloved Caleb after Phobos put an evil spell on him and turned him into the flower that he once was. With Cornelia gone, the group slowly started to fall apart. They argued and their powers were diminishing as their unity broke. The balance of power then tipped in the favor of the Evil Guardians, who now had the Guardians' powers! They broke free of their dimension and raced to free the one person who they knew could ensure them victory: Phobos.
What was their plan? To gain control of the universe by capturing the Heart of Candracar and the Crown of Light, which Evil Will and Phobos both thought were rightfully theirs (as if!)
So the two of them had cooked up quite a clever plan of getting what they wanted. Phobos knew about a creature called the Dream Catcher that he could use against the Guardians. The Dream Catcher killed its prey by sending them in an endless nightmare of misery until they came to the point of killing themselves, which was the only way that you were supposed to be able to get out of its wacked up dream world. The bad thing was, if you killed yourself in the Dream Catcher, you would get out, but only to die in real life. So not a very good idea to mess with it in the first place, right?
"Well, unfortunately for us, we got lured into a trap after Elyon came back to warn us about what was happening in Meridian."
She got captured, and Phobos already had Cornelia in the mist of the Dream Catcher, so the Evil Guardians easily led the four girls into it themselves. Once they were inside it, they were being tortured by their worst fears in an extension of reality.
"But at least we fought through it." Will said as she pedaled down the street. "Evil Will took the Heart of Candracar from me and everyone got engaged in a huge battle that nearly killed us all, but we finally triumphed and became a stronger team than we ever were before."
Will breathed in as the cool breeze fluttered her hair as she continued biking toward her apartment. She could already smell the cookies and milk that would go perfectly with a session of tackled algebra homework. She started to pass the legendary Heatherfield Park when she saw something that made her pull her brakes.
"Huh?" she said as she got off her bike. She walked forward in the grass and looked around.
"Weird, I could swear I saw-"
Will gasped as a dormouse jumped onto her shoe and she bent down to pick it up.
"Wait a minute! Dormouse! How'd you get out of my room and all the way out here?" Will questioned. It certainly looked like her dormouse, but he was all scary looking and covered in dirt and grass.
"Look at you, you're such a mess!" Will said as she scratched under his chin. The dormouse bared his teeth and Will pulled back.
"What's wrong with you? Huh, not in a good mood I see." Will huffed. She brought the dormouse over to her bike and gently placed it into her backpack and kicked the bike into gear again and started pedaling back toward her home.
Will walked through the house after her bike ride and hung up her coat.
"I'm home." She said as she headed toward her bedroom.
"Ugh, if my bedroom is a mess too…" Will mumbled as she reached for the doorknob and opened her door.
And what a surprise it was to see her gleeful dormouse bound toward her. Will set her backpack down in shock and confusion.
"Uh oh. I guess I brought the wrong one home."
Will bent down and undid the zipper of her backpack and the dormouse jumped out and into her arms. Her real dormouse stopped and looked at the two of them quizzingly before slowly coming toward Will with his whiskers twitching and his hair on end.
Hmm, I wonder if they like each other at least. It doesn't matter much though considering one dormouse is enough trouble. Mom would practically kill me if I brought another animal into the house.
"Hey little fella," Will cooed as the strange dormouse relaxed in her arms.
I can't help but think that they look exactly alike though…hmm, it's kind of weird.
Will got up and put the new dormouse next to her old one and sighed.
"Well, what am I going to do? I have to bring you back to the park. Hey, I have to meet up with the girls later at the Silver Dragon, so I'll just bring it back then."
Having reached a conclusion, she let the two animals alone as she headed toward the kitchen to have a snack before trying a hand at those horrible math problems.
Will had only just opened the pantry when she heard a loud crash in her bedroom and groaned.
"Brilliant, Will," she said with a roll of her eyes. "You had to leave two destructive animals alone in your room!"
Will sighed and raced toward her bedroom. Before she could touch the door, however, an icy voice stopped her in her tracks.
"Thank you, I've been wanting my dormouse back."
Will couldn't breath. She had to be imagining things. I mean, her being here was impossible, just impossible…
Will pushed the door slightly and it slowly opened. Will felt that once again, she was staring into a darkened mirror of herself. She was drowning in a new realization as she gasped and put her hands over her mouth to cover a scream.
The five of them were standing there as plain as day. Their skin pale and scary. Their eyes, cold and emotionless. Their evil grins spreading at the sight of Will standing in the doorway in a deathly shock.
They were back.
Her new nightmare was about to begin.
Well, you might possibly not know who 'they' are if you haven't read Whispers From the Past yet, but it's so easy that you can catch on. I hope that you liked that chapter, and I promise you, this will be a really good story. I just finished and there are fifteen minutes until midnight where I live! Talk about cutting it close to my deadline, whew! I'll tell you though, typing five whole chapters for different stories these past days has been exhausting, but I'm really glad to have done it. I really look forward to 2007 and hope that it is a really great year. Happy New Year!