The sun's rays shone through the gap in the silver drapes, blazing a slanted stretch of light across the sleeping person tangled in the red duvet.
Her blue-black hair was a shocking contrast to her creamy white skin. Her long lashes grazed her sharp cheekbones as her eyelids fluttered, the orbs hidden beneath the soft skin seeing images from her dreams.
The figure standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed glared balefully at the sleeping girl.
"So much trouble for one inconvenient girl. Would it not be simpler to kill her and be done with this prophecy?" he wondered aloud, his dark eyebrows scrunched together.
Walking around to the edge of the bed, he brushed the hair away from her forehead.
Gently, as to not wake the slumbering girl, he pressed his lips to the pale skin there.
"I hope you are worth the trouble you unknowingly cause." He breathed before striding to her balcony door.
Stepping onto the railing, he turned and cast the girl one more pitying look before jumping off the edge.
Rayne sat stock straight, her feline like eyes glued to the wall. She, along with her sheet, was drenched in sweat. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps as her heart pounded an erratic beat on her ribcage.
'Alright, Rayne, calm down. It was just dream.' She scolded herself, placing a hand over her breast to soothe her frantic heart.
She couldn't shake the feeling that had settled in her gut. The feeling that the very air she was breathing had been polluted. An overall feeling of wrongness, which had begun with the end of her horrendous nightmare, settled over her and she couldn't seem to shake it.
The words her grandmother had told her as a child played through her head.
"When your nightmares haunt you after you've opened your eyes, remember. Look through the images you were shown and find a way to dismiss them as nothing but a story your mind told that night."
Closing her Indigo orbs, Rayne took a deep breath and let herself relive the nightmare.
The sky was painted the shades of sunset; Periwinkle, sun drop orange, and rose dust pink.
Wind whispered through the trees, carrying the sweet scent of honeysuckle and newly bloomed lilies.
Only one thing lay untouched by this gently caressing breeze.
The inky, black water of the lake lay smooth as glass, appearing almost solid.
Rayne was sitting on the shore, staring out across this deceiving lake, feeling nothing but contentment from the roots of her oddly colored locks to the tips of her bare toes.
A small sigh of happiness escaped her tender pink lips.
"I could stay here for the rest of my life." She spoke, letting the breeze carry her words through the sycamore trees.
A crisp snap drew her attention from the tranquil water to the tree line at her back.
"Hello?" she called.
Still stuck in her serenity, the temperature change went unnoticed, as did the approaching fog.
An alarming splash sent her whirling back toward the black lake.
"The hell," she muttered leaning closer to stare at the still glassy surface.
Her reflection stared back, her blue-black hair hung around her heart shaped face like a curtain, the curls framing her sharp cheekbones and indigo eyes. None of this held her attention; she saw these things whenever she looked in the mirror. What held her attention was the chocker wrapped around her slender neck.
The shining silver had been molded into the appearance of two hands encircling her neck, the thumbs sitting directly over her windpipe, as though it were choking her. A blood red garnet set in the place between the palms, at the dip in her collarbone. It shone in the last rays of the sunlight, pristine and mesmerizing in an unnerving way.
The movement under the water brought her attention from the alarming, yet beautiful, chocker to what lay beneath her reflection.
Time seemed to slow to a stop as the image that seemed to be the flipside of her own reflection took shape before her abnormally blue eyes.
Where those blue eyes once sat, there was an empty socket. The cheekbones she had so often been complimented on were threatening to puncture through the taught and sunken skin. Her prized silky hair hung in disgusting tatters.
Her breath caught in her throat at the repulsive image that lay below the surface of her own strikingly attractive one.
The mouth of the one below fell open and a nerve-racking voice rasped through the trees.
"Your beauty will be your demise. Your power will be your ruin. You will find yourself murdered and left to be fish food. You will rot in the water and you will look as I do now."
An earsplitting scream seemed to shatter her eardrums as the metal at her throat began to tighten, slowly choking the life out of her. All the while, the one below smiled, the teeth that once set in its fleshy gums long gone.
She felt herself dying. Slipping away from it all and going cold as she fell forward into the icy water, shattering the reflection of both her and the one below.
She was shaking again, but this go round she ignored it.
"For starters, I've never been to a lake like that in my life. I wouldn't go out in the woods by myself. Evil other versions of me don't exist, and metal doesn't suddenly grow a will of its own and strangle people." She muttered, picking at the holes so the picture fell apart.
Throwing back the red duvet, she walked across the icy wood floor into her kitchen. She grabbed a bowl and poured out her fruit loops and milk. She sat out the kitchen table and ate. She dressed in jeans and a V-neck t-shirt. She went to the store and bought her groceries. She did her laundry and watched TV. She filled and passed the time until the time came to turn out the light and go to bed.
And she spent every minute looking over her shoulder.
When she woke the next morning, she wasn't drenched in sweat and shaking in terror from and awful nightmare. Quite the contrary, she felt well rested and ready to take on the day.
She repeated the same routine from the morning before, with only two exceptions. She wore black slacks with a ruffled top rather than jeans and a tee, and she didn't look over her shoulder every second.
Rayne washed her bowl and put it away before retrieving her bag and heading for the park.
The walk was a short one, even with tourists and puddles dotting the sidewalk; Rayne had long ago learned how to weave her way through the crowds without stepping in the ankle deep water.
The trees were a deep green, and the usually blue sky was a gloomy gray color. Due to the muggy weather, the park was mostly empty with the occasional soul walking along.
Rayne sat down on one of the many benches and pulled out her sketch pad.
Anybody who happened upon this beautiful young woman, her brow creased in concentration as she scribbled away on the paper, would have assumed she was drawing the landscape of the park. Her pencil drawing the delicate lines of the trees and flowers, the gentle curve of the hills, and the fountain in the middle of it all.
Anybody who dared to come close enough would know the truth. She was not sketching the landscape as it lay before her, she was drawing it as it would be in the end.
Fire consuming all life, the sky cracked open, and the ground trembling, as the angels and demons fought the never ending battle between good and evil. She was drawing the battle between light and dark that had begun with the creation of the world.
When she'd completed the final touches on her work, she flipped through the others.
A women and her husband clinging onto each other as fire rained from the sky and demons danced around them, weapons at the ready.
The next was the angels as they swarmed through the crack in the clouds, their wings magnificent and their arrows lethal.
Each picture told its own story. Each one was a piece of the puzzle that swarmed around Rayne's thoughts.
Rayne had always assumed that the pictures she drew came from the far recesses of her mind. She thought they were figments of her imagination.
If someone had told her that the images she saw in her mind every time she closed her eyes were pieces of a lost prophecy, that she alone held the key to who won this battle, that if she could put the pieces together before she found herself six feet under, she'd have called them crazy.
Then the angel came for a visit, and she had coffee with a demon. She found her true power and was pinned against what would save her, and what would make her powerful.
She was born ordinary, and through her will she'd made herself remarkable.
She was the keeper of the prophecy.