A/N I'm seriously, honestly, truly sorry I've been gone so long! Writer's block is a terrible thing. Forgive me, I beg of you! Let me just say this, in response to The Littlest Ragamuffin and anyone else who may be wondering where Cat is: I can't tell you what's going on with her without basically ruining the entire story; all the suspense and mystery would be spoiled. The reason for her absence is a major plot device; however, if I get reviews that let me know you guys are all on the brink of insanity trying to figure it out, I might let you know what's going on. Maybe. Though I seriously doubt that'll happen.
Disclaimer: I'm feeling unimaginative today. I don't own Victorious.
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Jade's PoV
I blinked, disoriented, as a stream of fiery colors swirled around me. All I could remember as I revolved in this unknown space was the last few moments of my confrontation with Samael; after the faint recollection I possessed of him touching my forehead (Which, by the way, I would've gladly killed him for if I had been able to), there was nothing.
Caught up in my thoughts, I didn't notice the slowing pace of my movement until I came to an abrupt stop, apparently face down on a flat surface. I slowly pushed myself off the ground, stood, and looked around in awe and confusion.
All around me, stretched as far as the eye could see, was a rocky terrain of dark rocks split by jagged streaks of molten lava. What I once thought were mountains on the horizon actually turned out to be volcanoes; all thankfully seemed to be at the end of their eruptions or dormant. I could feel the earth quaking beneath my feet as I watched my hypothesis disproven before my very eyes; one of the farthest-off volcanoes suddenly erupted in a spray of glowing lava, spewing chunks of molten rock high into the air. Thankfully, it looked to be at a safe distance from my location.
A scraping, scrabbling sound on the rocks a short distance away drew my attention from the strangely beautiful spectacle. As I looked, the dark bundle on the ground I had thought to be a boulder stretched into a more recognizable shape; a human form. It slowly rose, swaying a little as it stood and turned around to face me.
Samael smiled, a hint of malice in his grin as he walked toward me, chin held high in arrogance. His dark hair, swept back from his high brow, ruffled in the hot wind that continually blew through the landscape.
"It seems you've created this marvelous tableau inside your mind…. Congratulations. This is the mark of a true artist." He smirked.
I shook my head angrily as he looked around, surveying the land around him and gazing almost appreciatively at the nearby magma vents. This was my imagination; my own little world that I could escape to, inside my mind. He shouldn't be here. This is my fantasy and mine alone. I took an angry step forward, growling under my breath.
"Get out of my head!"
As I shouted, the volcanoes on the horizon rumbled ominously; the magma vents and cracks in the earth bubbled more viciously and became dangerously close to erupting.
The pale man merely smiled again, and turned away from me, hands clasped behind his back, as he admired the fiery terrain. I hissed in anger, forehead growing hot. He seriously thought he could just ignore me like that? I clenched my fists; they were shaking a little with anger. The vents nearby began to smoke, releasing a stench of sulfur. Rather than taking my attention away from my building fury, the smell merely exacerbated my anger; my fists tightened until I could almost hear the bones creaking.
He didn't even turn around as I approached him, my combat boots crunching on the rocky ground and making my presence clear. The magma in the vents looked ready to explode; but I didn't notice it or care. As I approached him, I remembered the lighter I had in my pocket; maybe I could teach him why most people didn't trust me. Or like to be near me.
I pulled the black rectangle out of my pocket, flicking it open with a practiced motion. Though I'd never smoked once, having the lighter around was like a comfort thing for me; I wasn't a pyromaniac, but there was just something comforting and fascinating to me about the light and heat of a fire, however small.
As my thumb flicked the little lever, Samael turned back to me with a smug look on his face; was he really challenging me?
Not a wise idea. I looked back to the lighter as the tiny, flickering flame leaped up as usual; but it didn't stop when it reached the usual size. The once-miniscule flame quickly grew until it became a raging blaze; hypnotizingly iridescent streams of shifting fire flowed from my hand. I knew in the back of my mind that the lighter had begun to melt from the sheer heat of the blaze, but I didn't care; but for that one detached part, my mind was focused solely on the rush of unexplained energy that was flowing through me.
As another tidal wave of power flowed through me, the melted black remains of the lighter oozed from my hand, vanishing swiftly into a crack in the earth below. I didn't care, however; I was too consumed in the blaze that writhed around me, and somehow inside of me. I don't know how that was possible, but it felt like the fire was spreading out from the inside of me; it demanded my attention, forcing my thoughts away from anything else as the surges of energy rushed through me. The flames seemed to amplify with each wave of power, whipping around me in an almost-frenzied fashion. Strangely, not one hair on my head was singed; my clothes and my flesh weren't melting off my bones yet (from the looks of the fire, the heat alone should've reduced me to a crisp by now). In fact, the only thing I could feel as the tongues of dancing flame moved around me was a faint, pleasantly warm breeze-like sensation. I watched, my vision somehow drawn to a certain point, as a particularly large, reddish-orange rope of fire flickered around my head a few times, seeming almost alive, before suddenly lunging towards my chest at a point right over my heart and emerging through it, leaving me unharmed. A strange, hot, buzzing feeling emanated from the spot it had touched. The feeling began to spread over my entire body, leaving me shivering as wave after wave of heat rushed through me.
The dancing flames seemed to grow larger as the tingling, almost-burning sensation flashed through me, building and building until I could hardly remember a time in which I hadn't been experiencing it; though the heat wasn't exactly painful, it was far from comfortable.
Suddenly, the burning I felt manifested itself as the flames halted in their motion, drew inward, seemingly vanishing into me, then exploded outwards in a massive eruption of fire.
The red and orange tendrils, dancing madly, flickered for a moment, then began to latch onto my fingertips, seeming to slowly spread up my hands as I watched, hypnotized by the shifting flames. Strangely, the slowly-moving fire didn't burn me in any way; from its appearance, it was hot enough to easily melt steel, but I remained thankfully unscathed.
I watched, slightly awed and motionless, as the tongues of fire quickly snaked up my arms and legs, uniting at my chest so that my entire body, head to toe, was enshrouded in flickering flame. I extended my arms, gazing wide-eyed in wonder, and marveled at the shifting tendrils dancing across my skin. Constantly in motion, their movement seemed to follow a hidden pattern barely discernible to the eye; like a stream of water, fire's opposite, the flames gradually pooled into the palms of my hands, forming small, undulating globes of fire that brightened and grew slightly when I clenched my fists and dimmed and shrank slightly when I opened my hands.
Marveling at this heady new sense of power that flowed through me even as the flames flowed over me and somehow, I felt, inside of me, I lifted my eyes to the horizon as the volcanoes on the far skyline erupted at once. The strange, primal beauty of the rivers of molten lava spewing from their flaming mouths made me halt once more, strangely exhilarated.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn from the explosive marvel; I turned my head from where I had been looking behind me to see the darkly robed Samael attempting to stealthily edge closer to me.
As I turned around, he halted instantly in his motion; while the fear I expected did not cross his face, nevertheless a look akin to that of a guilty child appeared in his expression, then vanished into his customary sneering smirk.
I yelped in anger and surprise as I caught sight of him, then quickly and furiously reached out to shove him out of my personal bubble. I understood the whole "good vs. evil" thing, but beyond that….the dude was acting like a creeper. There just wasn't any other word for it.
As my hands made contact with his chest and I full-on shoved him away from me as hard as I could, there was an explosion of flame that seemed centered on the contact between my hands and his robed chest. The flames flashed out, seeming to imitate my anger with their scorching blaze, and then dissipated instantly. He skidded a good ten feet away from me, feet leaving furrows in the soft, ashy black ground as his movement plowed through the surface, punching through the accumulated shell of volcanic dust. As he came to a stop, Samael hissed angrily, face contorted in fury and pain. He looked down, wide-eyed, at the smoking hole in his robe; the charred edges of the area that had been burned away by searing flames still glowed brightly with heat. The pale flesh of his chest shone through, with two dark hand-shaped markings becoming clearer with every second. The smell of burning human flesh pricked my nostrils as a faint wisp of smoke drifted from the rapidly darkening burn.
As he glared at me, I stared right back with an intimidating expression of my own. Eventually, our gaze broke as he looked down to the seared marks on his chest and hissed at me again, and then spoke angrily, his jaw clenched in fury.
"I'd expect nothing less from someone of your elements."
My left eyebrow furrowed as I stared at him in angry confusion.
"What do you mean, elements?"
Samael smirked, then shook his head in mock sadness.
"I thought you'd know this by now, child, but it seems I'll have to tell you…you're unique, even among Elementals. A combination of two elements….As you've already seen, fire, of course, is the more prominent of the two; but the second may come as a bit of a surprise…Darkness."
My mouth hung open for a second as I took in his words, then shut my jaw resolutely and took an angry step forward, infuriated by his statement. I hissed at him in a barely restrained undertone, the menace in my voice as sharp as a knife.
"That's a lie and you know it."
He merely grinned wider and shook his head, then sighed mockingly and leaned in conspiratorially, speaking in a hushed tone even though we were the only ones around.
"I'm telling you nothing but the truth, little Fire-Heart…Trust me, I know these things; I've been around quite a bit longer than you. The things I could teach you, the sights I could show you….You'd be an even greater Shadow-Wielder than your ancestor. I can see it."
I jerked back from him, mind reeling in shock and confusion at his words and his taunting smile. Full of chaotic rage, I followed the most familiar impulse that presented itself to me and struck out, lashing out wildly in Samael's direction with a clenched, flaming fist.
He snorted disdainfully and quickly moved out of the way of my fiery punch; moving alongside of me almost faster than the eye could follow, he grabbed my wrist with one hand and put another hand flat on my stomach, then flipped me into the air as if I weighed nothing. I felt a strange jolt in the pit of my stomach, then a dull sense of tiredness as I soared into the air; the horizon flip-flopped as I came down quickly. I curled into a ball, anticipating a hard and painful impact with the ground.
My expectations remained unmet as I felt a jolt, and then the horizon flipped again as I was placed gently back on my feet, about twenty away from where I had been a moment ago. Samael stood next to me, a blank, calculating expression on his face.
"You need to learn to control your emotions, child. You were completely at my mercy; I could've done absolutely anything to you, and you couldn't have prevented it…In fact, I did so something. But it's not of particularly great consequence. You're just lucky I decided to catch you…"
His voice trailed off as he looked at me pensively, the same strange expression on his features, and then resumed speaking, a thoughtful frown on his face.
"I can see that you have potential…However, right now wouldn't be the best time to teach you anything, seeing as you're so…Drained." He smirked and looked away, then turned back to me as I hissed angrily at him.
"I can't believe you're so delusional that you think I'd ever want to learn anything from you… or do anything other than cause you pain…fool." I spat on the ground and coughed violently as I tried to stand straight and failed; a wave of exhaustion rushed through me and my head spun as I struggled to see, my vision suddenly fading to black around the edges.
I heard Samael mutter what sounded like an archaic curse, and then he swiftly moved to catch me as my muscles spasmed and I went limp. The strangely embroidered fabric of his robes swished around me as he grabbed my collapsing form, and he bent his head close to my ear to mutter something.
"I'm going to leave your mind now before you faint from exhaustion, but remember, child…your heart is as dark as mine. Why do you think you like so many things others find 'disturbing'? Why do you think black is your favorite color? Black, like your soul…And mine. And that of every Shadow-Wielder to ever exist. You can't escape your destiny…I've known for years that you would come, little Fire-Heart, she of the Dark Flame. Just come to me when you've accepted who you really are. I'll be waiting."
He murmured, "Recipe tua, tenebrosus, et exibit cum stadium tuum verum si."
A stream of energy flowed into me, bolstering my flagging consciousness, but my vision continued to fade until everything was black, utterly still and silent. After an eternity of this, or perhaps a single second, a faint ringing sound began to build in my ears, growing louder and louder until it seemed it would never stop.
Suddenly, the ringing vanished and the darkness dissipated; I felt a solid floor beneath my feet and a hand on my shoulder, and sighed to myself with relief. Anything was better than that seemingly endless void; I never wanted to experience that again.
I slowly opened my eyes to see the now-familiar room I had stood in before; turning around, I saw Robbie, stretched out on the floor and seemingly still unconscious; Tori, André, and Kaure were standing over him, talking in hushed voices. Beck stood beside me, a worried and fearful look on his face; it was his hand that rested on my shoulder, a comforting gesture that looked slightly like he was clinging to a lifeline. I smiled at him reassuringly and rushed eagerly into his open arms, then lifted my head to look him in the eyes. He leaned in to capture me in a passionate kiss, which continued, gradually growing more heated, until André let out a short cough to remind us of where we were. Blushing slightly, we pulled apart but grabbed hands, standing beside each other with fingers entwined.
Samael stood motionless for a second, blinking as though dizzy, and then quickly regained his composure and took a slight step back from the five of us, now all facing him adamantly with the exception of the unconscious Robbie on the floor.
Suddenly, he smirked cryptically, the turned to the open door and shouted into the darkness that lay beyond.
"Egredere servum meum!"
I heard a shuffling noise behind me, and turned to see Robbie standing there, shaky and pale-faced. Despite his obvious weakness, he nevertheless pushed between me and André, who stood on my other side, to gape at the open doorway.
As I turned my head back to the shadowy entrance, a chorus of gasps, mine included, sounded out from around the room. In utter shock and horror, we all spoke simultaneously.
"Cat?"
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A/N Mehehe. Enjoy that cliffhanger. I'm already working on ideas for the next chapter, having finally rediscovered my inspiration, so hopefully you won't have a long of a wait for the next installment! In the meantime…let me know what you think happened to Cat in your reviews. Please.
So, yeah. Stuff.
~IF7
