Chapter 3: Prisms

Shai's POV

As we walked towards the smoke trail unsettling images began to form in my head. Images of sacrificial fires and strange symbols drawn on monuments. Suddenly the silence wasn't comforting anymore, It was suffocating. No noise pressed in on me making me claustrophobic, desperate for open space despite the fact that we had about five acres with nothing but space, plants, and silence. I shuddered and forged ahead.

Most people wouldn't have thought twice about the smoke, probably not even noticing it at all. But I'm not most people. In fact I'm one of the two people in the world like me. The other person was walking a few steps behind.

I'm the Chosen One, a direct descendent from the Egyptian princess, Amneris. Not only that, I've also learned that the Chosen One is considered a bridge between the spirit and physical worlds. Kind of spooky when dead people haunt your dreams but you get used to it. Ethan was my Osirion, my protector. Maybe being my protector by birth is the only reason he listens to my weird instinctive moments and seemingly absurd suspicions but the fact still remains that he's here and following me to one of the most secluded places in the school, that's all that I care about at the moment.

Soon the woods thinned and I found myself standing at the edge of a clearing. The clearing gradually got steeper until it created a reasonable sized hill. That weird instinctive feeling returned tethering me to the hill. I circled it looking for anything to explain my gut feeling. I found it in about five seconds. A couple of branches were piled up at the base of the hill. It was obviously not natural, it almost looked like the work of a child. I moved the branches and revealed a hole two feet high and three feet wide. When I crawled on my stomach I could just fit. When I had managed to scramble through the hole I found that it was actually tall enough for me to stand. The hill had been transformed into a child's hobbit hole. It was all so small. Small breaks in the dirt let sunlight in and a small wooden table sat in the path of the sunlight. A small piece of a tree trunk sat beside the table as a makeshift chair. Small trinkets and strange objects were pressed into the soil walls. In the 'windows' small shards of glass hung from worn threads tied to roots. The glass shards caught the light and sent rainbows into the space. On the table there lay a jumble of weathered drawings. When I picked up a coffee colored piece of paper the corner of the page broke into dust in my hand. I set the paper back down and I examined the picture. There was two stick figures one with a hat and the other with long hair. Above the stick figures Mommy and Daddy was scribbled in a child's print.

Behind me a scratching sound brought me back to reality. Ethan was struggling to fit through the tiny entrance. No words passed between us as we used our hands to widen the hole. When it was finally large Ethan crawled through and joined me in the hill.

"I think it was a play house." I told him after he took in everything. He nodded at me, "Do you think it was Sarah's?" He asked. "I don't know. Spirits tend to leave energy on places they visited a lot before they died, I don't feel any here."

"Maybe she didn't visit this place a lot." He offered, "I mean according to the stories mom told me, Sarah was watched by Victor's dad a lot. Maybe she didn't have an opportunity to come here a lot."

"Maybe..." I echoed.

"You could always ask her." It was a quiet suggestion, so quiet if it came from anybody else I would've thought I imagined it. But it came from Ethan and there was no doubt in my mind that he said it.

"You know I haven't been able to contact her since the whole Rufus incident."
"I also know that spirits never truly move on and that if they want to they can be contacted in any part of the spirit world."

"If they want to." I reminded him.

We continued to search the playhouse in silence. I managed to open a latched box hidden in the corner, inside was a large collection of books, but they weren't children's books, they were large volumes written in different languages. I spotted regular languages like French, Spanish, and Chinese. But I also spotted old languages like Latin, Greek, and Hieroglyphics.

At the very bottom of the wooden box there was a stack of drawings tied together with a piece of string. Kind of like a newspaper stack. The first drawing was very unlike a child's, it was a man's face complete with symmetry, depth, and shading. Worst of all a pair of very realistic red eyes stared up at me.

I shuddered and then I returned everything back to the box and I relatched it.

I looked up to see Ethan leaning against the wall watching me. "This was obviously a kid's play house. But, whoever it was they seemed to know a lot of stuff about whatever Rufus was planning." Ethan said nothing for a minute. Then, "Look at the wall. What do you see?" I did what he said and I looked at the opposite wall were the weird objects had been jammed into the dirt wall.

"I don't see it?" I confessed, angry that I couldn't connect the dots. "Stand where I am." He instructed stepping aside. I mimicked his previous position and I glanced at the wall. I saw it now.

The objects created a patter in the wall. It look like a crescent moon with a a thick middle on the right side that gradually got smaller as it turned. A star was in the center if the moon.

"Where have you seen that before?" Ethan asked as realization dawned on my face. I looked at him unable to continue staring at that horrific symbol.

"Rufus wrote it on the stone at the ceremony. It's the symbol of the spirit world."

Okay so I had major writer's block and it's the last day if school tomorrow, it's just been a long week. Chapter 3 is up and a picture of the symbol can be seen on my profile.

-MockingJay