Hi peeps!
Sorry for no update yesterday, but 5 of you saw that in 1 day. I thought I'd wait until a few more people saw it overnight.
I was tempted to sort of explain the spell more but I had no ideas, so I'm going to skip right ahead to when the spell goes into use.
MyDimension- Aww, thx. I have the weirdest ideas… it makes the story good though, I like to think.
Wolverrina-Well, maybe not THAT bad. Bad for Reyanna? Definitely. Possibly bad for the distant future? Yes. Immediate end of the world as we know it? Not really…
Rythian Pov (This is all in the spell until further notice.)
I open my eyes.
It's very, very dark. There is no apparent source of light here, but it is all twilight zone in dark purple/black.
I know what this is- I've used this spell before. As always, the spell starts off in the subconscious.
Shadows whisper around me, hissing about horrible things- murder, corruption, the end of the world. It's the same as my subconscious.
Or, better known as our Ender-sides.
It's not pretty, is it? This is what we face every nightmare and every hateful thought. It's always there, tempting us to let it rule. Let it destroy everything we've known.
I won't say I haven't been tempted before.
I know I have to be careful here. If I turn the wrong way around and get lost, the spell may backfire in unforeseen ways.
I glance in every direction. The light still doesn't seem to be coming from anywhere, but it is. I hold out my hand, watching in near-darkness for the shadow. It stretches away from me to the left. I head away from the shadow, towards what I know will be the conscious.
After what seems to be a long time, I arrive at my destination.
It appears as a dome of thin glass, tinted blue like a warm ocean. It looks so fragile and I know it's what holds back these malicious thought behind me every day.
I could break through right now. I wouldn't even have to punch it. But that's not my goal. I'm here to heal her, not to cause more damage.
If my idea is right, that her subconscious has breached it, then there's already a break. I have to find it.
I take a guess and go right. I slide my hand along the dome as I go, seeing it appear out of the darkness in front of me.
It doesn't take long to find.
Before long, the glass darkens, turning indigo and then increasingly darker shades of purple. I move faster. Then, hairline cracks start to appear. Finally, I arrive at the actual break.
It's not as big as I feared but still plenty big enough to be a serious problem. I step through carefully.
I hadn't realized just how stifling the darkness had been until I left it. Inside the conscious is literal fresh air, clear and cool. But it's not as it should be.
You ever seen food colouring spreading through water? It's like that. The darkness seeped through the giant crack, polluting the inside.
Suddenly, a wave of force pulses through the air around me. The glass begins to crumble at the edges of the hole. More cracks spread through it. More darkness seeps in.
I'm distracted watching the dome weaken for a moment and at first I don't realize the air and darkness are swirling together in front of me. As I focus on it, it takes shape and turns into a ghostly appearance of Reyanna. She glares at me.
"You're not supposed to be here." She says, but her voice is faint towards the end.
"I'm trying to help you, Reyanna." I say as calmly as possible.
"You can't help, Rythian." She says. "It's a cycle. It's like I'm falling over and over again, and They get stronger every time it happens. Sooner or later my defenses are going to be nothing at all and They'll corrupt me. I can't stop it."
"Why?" I ask her. "Why can't you, Reyanna? This is your head, not theirs. Take control again."
"You of all people know that's not true." Reyanna says. I can see her better now. But something's different. "The cycle keeps weakening me. It makes Them so much stronger each time. Leave. Go stop Herobrine."
I noticed her mask isn't there and I can't help but wonder if it's somehow symbolic. Her eyes, too, are different. They shine with too much sad wisdom for a girl of seventeen.
"I can't leave you. We need to fight it." I insist. "And what's this 'cycle' you keep talking about?"
"It's like I'm falling." She says distantly. "Over and over, I have no control."
"Then I'll reach out and catch you." I say firmly.
"You can't. It will tear you apart." Then she starts fading a bit again.
Her eyes open wide. "It's starting again." Her voice is panicky and she's starts to hyperventilate.
"Calm down." I say. It's no use, though. She won't listen. Her face has gone pale from fear and tears start rolling down her cheeks.
It's not until I see the tears I really realize the full extent of what's happening.
If her Ender-side takes over, she'll wake up as usual. Except it won't be her. And the first thing the Ender-side will do is start to kill everything in its path.
And Reyanna will be gone forever, worse than dead.
I refuse to have it happen.
Reyanna starts to disappear. On impulse, I lunge forward and grab her sleeve. The scene in front of my eyes turns hazy and shifts.
I see the scene in front of me and I recognize it.
It's my sixteenth birthday, the day I left our small desert town for adventure.
"I'm going to miss you." Reyanna says sadly. I ruffle her hair.
"We'll see each other again, when you're sixteen." I promised. "We can explore magic together and adventure everywhere we want."
Her eyes brighten and she smiles. "I can wait for that then, I guess." She says.
"Be good for mother. And don't pick all the flowers, okay?" I tease.
We'd spent all day picking flowers for the house, because Reyanna loved flowers, I remembered.
"Why is this here?" I ask out loud. I can't see the Reyanna from earlier, but I hear her respond.
"Because it made me so upset that you left right away." She responds.
The scenes shift again, faster. I see the day our mother died from a creeper blast, Amber adopting her, and the funeral. It shifts ahead several years next.
Reyanna's about twelve and she's standing the shade of an overhanging rooftop in the corner of the market. Amber's bustling among the stalls not too far away.
A group of boys a few years older than Reyanna come up to her.
"Well, look, dudes, it's the little witch." He snarls. His buddies laugh.
"Hey, I heard the village elders say that your father was an Enderman. Is it true, Freak?" Reyanna clenches her jaw and pointedly ignores them, but they crowd in front of her until she's forced to look at them.
"Hey! I asked you a question, b*tch witch." The boy says again.
Reyanna doesn't answer.
"Look at me when I talk to you! And answer me!" He smacks her in the arm, hard. She doesn't react.
"C'mon, tell us." Another boy says.
"Yeah, what have you got to lose?" another chimes in.
The boy from before, clearly head of the group, nods to two of his buddies- two guys close to three years older than her, many inches taller and almost pure muscle.
They grab her by the shoulders and shove her into the narrow alley between homes. The two huge guys pin her shoulders against the wall.
The leader steps in front of her and stands so close to her, their noses almost touch.
"Don't make me ask again, witch!" He tells her.
I almost miss her reaction. That's how fast it happens.
Her eyes flash dark violet with anger. Her knee comes up and hits the guy where the sun doesn't shine. He crumples.
She tries to flee, but the two huge dudes shove her back into the corner. Judging by the expression on their faces, it's the first time she's fought back.
"Why do you still even bother living?" A dude asks her. "Nobody gives a sh*t about you!"
"Where's your brother now, huh? He left because he didn't want to look after a little b*tch all his life!"
"I heard that because you're part Enderman you can teleport. Why don't you just escape now?"
All these insults and more rain down on my sister like hail. She just bows her head, staring at her combat boots silently.
After a while, the boys leave, bored. She flees to Amber's house, tears streaming down her face.
"This happened almost every single week. I was homeschooled by Amber, but they still bothered me." Reyanna's voice is choked, like her invisible self is crying as well.
"I…" my voice trails off. The rest of the images are a blur as I process this. I remember seeing many more bullying sessions. I see the day the town is blown into New Tekkit-Topia. I see the day she finally leaves that town. I see her fighting me to save Lalna, escaping from Castle Duncan, her first death, and then her fighting Israphel.
I hold my breath as I see Reyanna's eyes roll back into her head. As her body goes limp from lack of oxygen, her eyelids flicker with purple light. She teleports up both floors in a flash of shadow, ending up where Lomadia found her later.
"I was going to die." Reyanna's voice is still shaky. "I gave up on fighting right there. They seized control and saved my-our life, but They started this cycle. I can't break out."
I take a deep breath. "Reyanna, you have to wake up. We care about you. We need you. Toby and Kim, as far as I know, are still out too. We need everyone."
"Toby and Kim?" Reyanna says, her voice holding concern for her friends. "What happened?"
"Toby has mild broken ribs. Kim got hit by an arrow and lost a lot of blood." I tell her.
Her eyes grow dark. "I want to see them again."
The air around the vision shimmers again and we're back at the dome.
"We need to seal it back up." I say.
"I don't know how!" She says as the hole gets bigger.
"Reyanna, you do know. They've trapped you like this because they need you constantly stuck in unhappiness to fuel Their power!" I say.
Reyanna pauses.
"Don't say you can't. It won't help." I remind her. "Think of what your Enderside hates."
She grows quiet for a long moment. Then she turns and runs to the far side of the dome.
"We don't have much time here." She says. "We'll get sucked in again soon." She kneels at the dome and brushes her hand along the base silently.
As I watch, she pulls her hand up along the glass and presses her palm against it.
Around her hand, the glass slowly starts to turn into a thicker, taking on an interlocked diamond shape and pattern.
For long seconds, the change moves across the dome's shape. But still too slowly. The air swirls again and shimmers. Reyanna falters. I step next to her.
"Fight it." She murmurs. "Don't let them pull you into it." Her expression hardens.
I try and focus on the magic forcing us to go on this cycle.
Not again. She is not scared of you anymore.
As we resist the magic, I see the air stop swirling as much.
"Their magic feeds off fear and anger." I say out loud to my sister. She nods.
Suddenly, though, a ripple goes through the air around us. The pattern has reached the hole. It slows to almost a stop, then, delicate glass starts to form at the edges.
I almost want to cheer.
"Remember that time you made blue cookies?" I ask her instead. Her lips twitch up.
"It wasn't even a week ago." She says, but more like she can't believe that it was so short a time.
The new glass is dangerously thin- so thin it isn't even coloured- but it's still creeping across the hole.
"Keep going." I tell her.
"I've lost track of how many times I've thought that. Just keep going. Something has to be better than this." She turned to look at me. "You wouldn't believe the amount of times I just kept going because I wanted to see you again."
Her voice drops as she continues. "Then I started to hate everyone in the village other than Amber. They all hated me openly without mother. I decided that I'd rebel. So I went for science, because nobody in the village knew it. I'd planned to come back one day and give them a taste of their own medicine for a while, then move on. But… that never happened. I don't think it ever really was going to."
I nod. "But now you have Zoeya and Teep and I, and everyone else. Lomadia's like a big sister to you. Kim's always willing to hang out with you for a while, and now you get to tease Toby and steal his cookies."
She laughs, and the sound is like a gunshot, it is so out of place in this dark. I continue.
"You get to bake and practice every day, and you even built your own home."
She nods.
"Did I ever tell you that I may have… signed you up for high school this fall?" I say.
She spins towards me. "You did?"
I hold a finger to my lips.
"It was supposed to be a surprise. You didn't hear anything, okay?"
"Oka- Rythian, you're disappearing!" She says.
"The spell's wearing off. I have to go." I say. "Keep it up, and you'll be awake in no time."
She's giving me a hug when I disappear completely.
And then I'm awake, in the room with everything physical around me again.
I feel my sister's forehead. It's normal. Her pulse is normal, too.
I'm about to leave when she shifts her weight on the bed. She's asleep, now, and not unconscious. She'll be fine. A smile plays on my face under my mask.
It disappears as I think of what I saw in her memories. That many years of bullying and not having any family, but she never said anything to me about that.
Maybe I just saw my sister at her weakest, but for her to stay strong like that and never say a thing?
She's stronger than I thought.
Yeah, that got a bit more cliché and cheesy than I thought it would.
Area 11 fans/ Elevens: Did you catch the tiny, sorta reference to part of Vectors earlier on?
Also, what are your thoughts on Nightcore/Sprinkles* and Area 11 years old? I'm really into it right now, but I can't decide if I like it better than the originals.
Until next update, Spirit.