So thanks for all the wonderful feedback already, just hours after I posted. I realized there was some rather terrible flaws in my writing of the first chapter and I wanted to fix them so here's a revised and edited version, mostly inspired by Cypress 16 who pointed out the mis-used Sleep and some other mistakes that I will fix in the latter chapters.
This is my take on what happens almost four to five years after Wanda and her wonderful tale. I hope you enjoy and please shoot me a review if you find any mistake that I need to correct.
Fearing Fire
Prologue
Topaz danced the doll over the bed, laughing as the silky brown hair bounced to her ministrations. Songs played from the radio and she hummed along.
I love this song.
"I do too Penny, but I prefer the other singer."
Yeah well, she'll come on in a little bit.
Suddenly Mrs. Ore walked in the room, pulling off her oven mitts and wearing a very uncharacteristic frown, "Who are you talking to Topaz?"
"Penny."
"I thought I told you that once you turned ten you had to say goodbye to Penny, I told you that it was bad for you to still have an imaginary friend."
"But Mrs Ore, she's not imaginary."
Mrs Ore's face twisted and she sighed harshly, "I want you to say goodbye to her right now or I'm taking you to a Comforter to make this problem go away. You've lost too many adoptive parents because of this imaginary friend and I won't have you losing your chances in school as well."
Topaz gasped, "But there's nothing wrong with me."
"You are too old to have imaginary friends Topaz! Now stop it." Mrs Ore left the bedroom and Topaz stared after her.
That's just a dumb thing to do, why wouldn't she believe you? There's nothing wrong with me being here. I've always been here, ever since we were born.
Topaz suddenly stood and dropped her doll on the ground, "I'm not going to talk to you anymore Penny. You just get me in trouble and I don't think it's right to have you here either! Nobody else has friends in their heads!"
But Topaz-
"Shut up!"
Sitting down on her bed, Topaz held her head and blocked her cradle-hood friend's voice, keeping it in the back of her head. It was well past time for Penny to stop talking, for her to stop being.
Chapter One
Looking down the cliff, Topaz O'Leery decided she didn't know exactly how to go about jumping. Should she leap or just fall?
The cliff was rather small, five stories high, but not as big as if Topaz climbed up higher on the mountain. She'd stopped because she was afraid of heights. Afraid of the sun. Heat, fire, sand. It brought everything back, even if the emotions and range of feelings were vastly different from her memories.
Jumping would end everything, stop the constant pain of her body and mind. It was like a burn, aching like a heartbeat just beneath her skin. Under every thought. The reminders were always around her.
Sun of fire, the same fire that had filled the Fire World.
Topaz was a soul, a parasite that was inserted into the body of a human. She erased minds and took over, living only because of what she'd stolen from a defenseless mind. He'd told her so many times what she was. He'd told her so many times how she shouldn't be on Earth, shouldn't enjoy the freedom the be under the sun and to breathe the soft wind.
Wind and sun had stripped Topaz's body of energy, just as He had striped her of lucidity. Topaz didn't know His name.
He was the Torturer, the Truth Bringer. He was the human who'd shown her the real world, the blood and pain that had come before the peace of souls. Such a small electronic box that held horror and agony, monsters and gruesome stories. A tiny screen that displayed the worst things humans had invented. Murder. Lying. Cheating.
Topaz knew it all now and she hated it.
She hated the sun on her face, the heat of the Fire World memories churning in her head making it feel hotter.
She hated the wind, memories of feeding on the gently curling smoke plumes of dead things for sustenance making it feel thicker – harder to breathe.
She hated her skin, the human body that she'd been put in when it was just a baby.
Had she murdered a baby? Killed it's presence before it had even had the chance to open it's eyes? Topaz had. Murder a newborn baby girl with blonde hair and fragile pale skin. She'd murdered another creature that had no chance to defend itself.
Her fault.
Looking down at the flat rocks below, Topaz turned around and reached up to grip the mountain face, to climb higher. Pulling up, the wounds opened up again and slipped heat down her back, the shirt long since dried too ripped to really be clothing anymore. How long had she worn the clothes she wore now? A week, a month, a year? Time didn't matter when every tick of the clock was another injury.
Her arms ached as she climbed.
Souls didn't function on pain. Most had a calling and they did it with all their mind, might, and stolen strength to honing that goal. Working and striving to give more of themselves to others. Souls loved and laughed, they were truthful and never prone to rage or anger. Sometimes the human emotions like jealousy or dislike arose but that was easily solved with a session to a Comforter.
Topaz didn't really know if she was a soul anymore.
Topaz barely remembered her calling. It had been something artistic, but it had made her body muscled and strong. Her life had been filled with hours of practice and training, to torque her body into a better spin or a longer leap…
But her life was a stolen life. A life that should have belonged to the baby she'd erased, just as easily as a human would have murdered someone.
Remembering the movies, Topaz flinched. He had never hurt her, never touched her unless it was to turn her face back to the TV. The hands that had put in movie after movie had never physically hurt her, but then again he hadn't made any of the other souls go mad with his hands either.
Seeing the four faces of the souls that had made it through the five months alive, Topaz's hand gripped the wrong rock and it went flying backward. Scrambling for a hold, she continued climbing. Every nook of the mountain was a part of their faces.
Blind eyed and moaning as they tried to dig out the memories. While Topaz had watched the one with brown hair had done the last act that a soul could do to protect itself, to destroy their body and die.
His blood had run from his nose. It had been His greatest cruelty, He had let her look at the dead one for at least an hour before taking the soul away to bury him with "the other dead ones" and promising that she'd get to be with him one day. Topaz had broken a few days later, broken free.
Free of sanity and her bonds.
Dirt rubbed her raw hands, stinging and infecting as she pulled her body higher. It didn't matter that she wouldn't be able to get back down, at least not alive.
She'd woken up, right minded and understanding the blood that had dried into the carpet, into her clothes. A shovel had been in her hands, His stiff body collapsed on the floor of the house. Topaz had dropped the shovel and run, straight out the backdoor and into the desert.
Mountains had loomed up behind the underground bunker house, no more than a mile away. It had been easy to get to the foot of the cliff.
Now her body folded in on itself, she tumbled over a shallow rise and lay spread eagled on the shallow flat. Looking over her head, she could see that she had a lot of the mountain left to climb if she wanted to get to the top.
The top of the mountain that would allow her, once and for all time, to die and never be able to hurt anyone again.
A year ago she hadn't wanted to die. What seventeen year old wanted to die, before their life had even begun? But then He'd caught her, told her and shown her the truth of her life. Scenes from movies swirled around in her head, like a sick whirlpool of knowledge that she knew would settle out into a wave that would drown all of who she'd been her whole life.
It wasn't the knowing what the humans had done to each other that made her want to leave the world behind. Topaz could have forgotten everything in time. What terrified her was what she'd done with that knowledge.
Topaz had killed a man. With a shovel, painting the floor red.
Even if she couldn't remember the event, she knew what it must have looked like because she'd seen it on the TV. Murder wasn't something a soul should be capable of but Topaz had changed. Like a fruit from the Tree of Life, she'd learned of the true nature of human kind and with that knowledge she had sinned.
Glad that souls didn't have a heaven or hell, Topaz looked forward to the blank serenity of nothing.
Breathing in the dry air of the desert, she absorbed the dead place around her like a balm. What a fitting place to die. A place absent of life. Her death would fit right in with the rest of this place.
Standing up, Topaz looked at the ground to make sure she was going to the edge, but something else caught her eye.
Maybe two feet away was a large dent in the ground, a sharp zigzag line filled in with dirt and dried mud.
Turning away from the edge, Topaz's eyes followed the dent all the way until she saw the small hole. Dropping away into black, the basketball sized hole made Topaz frown and think. Black inside a mountain? Was the mountain hollow?
Walking forward, Topaz had every intention of turning back once she'd checked out the strange absence of cliff.
When her foot fell on the dent, it didn't stop like it should have. Instead Topaz toppled forward. The ground crumbled below her, a flash then she sank into the dark with the ground around her. Topaz closed her eyes and waited for death to hit her as it would have had she jumped off the cliff.
Instead of death Topaz hit dirt.
The ground that had so kindly made way for her to fall landed on top of her like boulders. Curling up and covering her head with her hands, Topaz felt like she was being buried alive by nature.
Everything stopped moving as suddenly as it had started. Shifting, Topaz realized she was weighted down. Her hands sunk into the mud as she pushed herself up in a burst of energy that came from somewhere in her center, the weak little part of her that wanted to live.
Reborn.
Shaking her head to clear it of the haze of poetic thoughts, Topaz shakily cleaned her face of enough blood mud so that she could look around.
Light from above filtered in and helped her eyes adjust, the forms of close to fifteen people standing in front of her. Topaz pushed out of the pile of dirt, eyeing them calculatingly. Maybe they would just let her pass if she told them she was okay. Souls were so easy to lie to, they never suspected you of not telling the pure truth.
Even as she was thinking it Topaz realized a horrifying thing.
Not one soul stood among the crowd in front of her.
The hostile expressions and battle ready stances were those that only a human could understand how to have. Their eyes didn't reflect the light shining from the cave ceiling, the dirty contours of their faces hard and narrow.
Had she really fallen into a human lair? Fear filled her, an ingrained reaction, but she frowned at it. What was the difference between humans killing her and jumping off a cliff? She'd end up the same either way.
"Jared."
Topaz blinked as a human suddenly spoke quietly from the back, the front most member of the group nodding his head in acknowledgment of the voice before telling the humans around him, "It's a soul people, nothing special." He had tanned skin and light eyes, the hair on his head bleached blonde.
"But... it fell through the ceiling! Like literally, the roof collapsed and it fell onto the carrot patch-"
The one called Jared nodded his head, "Yes."
Protesting stopped when a porcelain skinner woman stepped out from behind Jared, wide grey eyes fixed on Topaz. Wide grey eyes that were ringed by a delicate band of silver that reflected diamond patterns onto the walls.
"Hello. I'm Wanda, a soul just like you."
Topaz stepped away quickly, careful to not trip over the dirt pile behind her. The silvery cast to the woman's skin made her seem like a harmless soul, one who wouldn't hurt anything if her life depended on it.
Topaz stepped away again. What would Wanda think of Topaz when she found out what she'd done, that she'd blacked out and murdered someone.
The words the woman said didn't make sense to Topaz, her head had begun swimming around in her skull. Her steps backward quickened until she stepped on something that wasn't dirt, instead it was springy and...
Green?
Glancing quickly down, Topaz blinked at the green. The humans were standing in a dark brown patch but Topaz was standing in a large rectangle of green. Plants? Shifting her gaze up and around the group, she realized it was some kind of field, the humans standing in front of her having harvested half of the... carrots? Hysteria threatened but Topaz pushed it away, again meeting the grey eyes of the soul.
"We won't hurt you. I just want to help you. What's your name?"
Topaz shook her head quickly.
Her name had been one that the orphanage had determined would fit a soul from five years on the Fire World, it meant fire in one of the languages here on Earth. If Wanda knew that then the kindness would fade and she'd look at Topaz with distrust, just as all the adoptive parents had just before they'd ask for another child to take home with them. Five life times on a planet that had been known for death was something that made souls feel the uncommon feeling of distrust.
Suddenly something slapped onto her skin and Topaz turned at the shock.
Stuck to he upper part of her elbow was a silvery square patch, it's top emblazoned with the black word Sleep. Topaz looked to her left and realized there was not just the fifteen people in front of her, but several more to the side. One was holding a plastic pistol with an odd wide square end, a nozzle that could fire the inch wide square patch. It was pointed straight at Topaz.
She'd heard about the new weapon for Seekers, a gun that could shoot a patch that would knock out a human in five seconds flat, as long as it touched skin. Water repellant and heat resistant, the patch had been a phenomenal success.
Topaz wondered if the Seekers knew that humans had them too.
Slowly Topaz's knees failed and she knelt on the plant covered ground, closing her eyes and falling to her side. Numbness spread through her body and she felt oddly cold, not drifting off like the Sleep mist medicine made her do.
Rolled over, Topaz pushed her eyes open and looked into the silvery grey.
The soul Wanda was leaning over her and holding her head up from the ground like she actually cared about Topaz. Her voice was concerned but not shocked enough to make Topaz believe that she hadn't known the Sleep patch was coming, "Can you tell me your name?"
"T-topaz." Shivering, she didn't care that her name would tell her story. Perhaps it would make the soul let the humans kill her. Then at least there would be no danger of Topaz hurting the gentle grey eyed soul the next time she blacked out.