Hello!

Happy 2020! I hope you are all well and the new year hasn't been too bad. I'm really pleased with this next chapter, so I hope you all like as much as I do.

Let me know if you enjoy it!

Ooh, also, I wanted to say a quick thank you to Emily325 who has been reading this from the start, your reviews are always great to see!

Enjoy!

As soon as I've flipped open the pages of the book, I'm intrigued. Whether it's by fascination or horror I can't decide, but I'm overcome with the need to investigate, to find out what on earth it is that I'm seeing.

I'm staring at pages upon pages of drawings, scratched onto the parchment with coloured ink. Next to each one is a series of strange symbols that have clearly been inscribed by a person. I can't read or understand them at all, and the amount of uncertainty residing inside of me because of it is scaring me. I can only imagine what any of them mean, my imagination running wild in a frenzy, creating and thinking and wondering, filling my head full of visions and possibilities that terrify me more than I'm prepared to acknowledge. I need to stop as I'm scaring myself too much, but the images have been seared into my mind's eye, and even if I press both eyes shut to block out the possibilities, they're still haunting me. Stop thinking about it, I tell myself. Don't do it. But since I don't know what the truth behind this book is, that's all I'm able to do.

A person can be afraid of many things; the dark, spiders, heights, but nothing is more terrifying than the imagination. When left to its own devices, it's capable of building entire worlds, exaggerating the things that give us nightmares, the things that chill us to the bone. When let out of its cage it's capable of making us doubt even the most secure situations in our lives to the point where we are filled with anxiety at the possibility of a situation that is purely fictional. It's capable of coaxing our darkest fears out of the shadows we have created in our minds, and installing them into our thoughts, in made up situations that we have concocted ourselves. Our imagination can wander, thinking into everything too much, it can come up with ridiculous outcomes, under the disguise as a scene that has the potential to happen.

And we believe it.

Because we're the ones thinking it.

So as much as I try to stall it, stifle it, stop it, my imagination refuses to die down and keeps wondering what these sketches are, and what they could mean for my future here. What could they have to do with Gabriel's plan? I have a closer look at the drawings.

On one page there is a picture of a woman in a red outfit, speckled with black polka-dots. The patterns on her outfit kind of remind me of the ladybirds that I used to conjure up back in my old cell. Huh. That was quite a while ago now, in fact, it's been ages since I've done anything like that. Back then, my mind was an empty vessel, filled with the same actions of the same routine that amounted to absolutely nothing, my body was a system made of organs that sat like clockwork and breathed in and out but with no purpose, no human inside, so of course I had nothing to do all day other than sit and look at ladybirds. But after transferring here, I have been busy each day with my thoughts, just as I used to be. I've been ensnared by my own little bubble of emotions, contemplating and weighing up possible plots that Gabriel might have come up with, desperately trying to figure out where I stand with Adrien. I've been so wrapped up in discovering the new tasks I am capable of with my powers. Casting my mind back, I realise that it was back then that I had no idea to what extent my magic would work. Compare that to how much I know about my own abilities now! How dramatically things can change in the shortest amounts of time.

I carefully turn the page to see another drawing of a man in a black suit, two black cat ears perched on top of his head and a gleaming silver baton in one of his hands. Around his other hand is what resembles a crackly black forcefield, pulsing and bursting from his fingers and forming a sphere around his whole hand. Surely it must be magic of some sort. I'm instantly transported back to when I first walked into my cell, and how destroyed everything was. I remember being so terrified, thinking that I was going to be killed by the person I was staying with. Recalling my initial reaction to being locked up with Adrien, I'm sudden burning with shame at how quickly I judged him. Shame so bad it burns my whole body, reducing me to black ashes of regret. One small fact from his past that had been twisted and made to seem a lot more black and white than it truly was allowed me to make my mind up on how I was going to act around him. When really it was more of a lie than it was truth.

I flick through more and more pages of similar designs; there's a woman in an orange and white fox suit, a girl dressed in bee themed attire, a boy wearing a bright green turtle themed suit with a large disk in a similar theme under one arm, and a woman wearing a long blue cape with a frill of peacock feathers around the bottom of her long, blue suit. Each one looks extremely detailed and well thought out, as if they have all been well tested and developed over time. Well, that is if this grimoire is as old as I suspect. I sense that the next few pages are going to be along the same lines, so I flick a few pages forward until the book settles and the pages stop flipping. I gape at the drawing etched into the parchment, trying to work out what I'm seeing.

It's a picture that I've seen before.

A picture that looks vaguely familiar, like it has already been pasted onto my brain and pressed there until it remains. It's so familiar, almost as if the place I know it from is on the tip of my tongue, the truth just about to slip through my lips and spill out of my mouth. I pace back and forth in front of the desk again, trying to remember where I've seen this before. Why can I remember every horrible thing that anyone has ever said to me, and yet this particular detail slips my mind? Typical if you ask me.

I look up, suddenly.

I remember.

I'm staring right at it.

I'm staring into its eyes.

The power hungry, dark, gaping, blazing, bottomless eyes that are staring right at me, piercing my ribcage and peering into my soul. It's a terrifying picture hung so large on the wall, every overpowering detail so large and exaggerated that it makes my skin crawl just looking at it. This must be it. This must be the ultimate power that Adrien was talking about. This must be what Gabriel is after.

It has to be.

Nobody can do something so sick, so twisted and malevolent, imprisoning so many people and condemning others to miserable fates for no reason at all. Not even someone like Gabriel, whose seems to smile at the chaos that seems to happen around him, whose eyes seem to sparkle every time someone is brought for torture for no apparent reason. Not even someone that bad could have no reason, no fuel, no motive at all for doing this.

There must be something in it for him. Surely there is something he wants, and something that he needs to get from all of this. Something related to ultimate power.

Something doesn't add up. I've found quite a lot of information, or at least I think that I have, and it feels like everything is going right, but it's also all wrong. It doesn't make sense. Why would he do this, to become like that? To have this absolute power? And then what? What could he possibly do with all of that power that would end well?

I'm standing in the middle of his office, grasping desperately at straws, thousands upon thousands of mismatched jigsaw pieces littering the place in mountains, they're everywhere, and I've got handfuls, fistfuls, pocketsful of pieces. If I put them all together, they would form the whole picture, everything would fall into place and I'd finally be able to step back and have a look at the bigger picture, Gabriel's plan becoming as clear as day.

But I'm stuck.

None of the pieces will fit into place. They're all backwards, broken, distorted, upside down. I'm stood with fistfuls of jigsaw pieces clutched in my hands, not knowing what goes where, only managing to put a few pieces together at a time. I've got leads and reasons but none of them seem to match, solutions and reasons are everywhere, overwhelming and all consuming, as if they're about to break and collapse on me at any moment. Nothing is linked together and everything seems random and pointless. I'm not sure if I'll ever figure it out.

There's something I don't know.

The final piece that will link everything together.

It's hidden somewhere, buried so that I'll never find it even if I have all of the time in the world. Which I don't.

I feel like it's right here, right in front of me and I'm just too blind to see it.

Unless... unless he wants this absolute power, unless this ultimate power is what he wants. I just have no idea why or how he'd get it, that's the problem.

I'm struck by an idea. When I was younger, I used to love reading mystery novels, stories about secret missions to rescue people and tales of crime and how the detective would somehow uncover the secrets of the villain. In those stories there would always be some secret passageway, some secret room that's hidden completely from view. Maybe...

I move forward to get closer to the picture on the walls, thinking there could be a secret switch or button hidden in them. I'm so wrapped up in my own fantasy of feeling like I'm part of one of those stories, I completely misjudge where I'm standing and stub my toe on the foot on the desk.

I wince in pain and clutch my foot, teeth clenched.

Then I do that thing, that thing that everyone does. If you trip and fall over, or stub your toe, you glare at the object that you bumped into. You kind of just stare it out and curse it for just, well, being there. We all do it, it's just a thing that we do. I glare at the corner of the desk, and notice a piece of paper I must have dropped whilst rifling through the pages of the book before. Going to pick it up, I bend down and as I stand again, trying to ignore the agony my toe is in off that stupid desk, I look at what is on the paper.

Now, I just expected it to be a bit of paper I'd seen before, an unhelpful one with writing covering the whole page.

But it isn't.

It isn't at all.

I tighten my grip around it, clutching it tightly in my hand, in disbelief at what I've just found.

This, this is the final piece.

My brain is swimming with knowledge, too much of it. Things I wish I didn't know, things I don't want to know, things I hate that I know. I know too much, too much, too much.

Now that I've put the final piece into place, I can see the links. Hear them all clicking into place. Feel the dots being joined right before me, the pieces locking together and sliding to where they're meant to be in front of me. I understand now, and so many more things make sense. Knowledge reaches behind me and unties the blindfold of ignorance that I had wrapped over my eyes, exposing me to a world of realisation.

I know why I'm here. I know why I was put in a cell with Adrien, I know what this absolute power is meant to achieve. I know why Adrien was being tortured.

I understand how Gabriel needs to get absolute power.

And now that I do, I'm sure of one thing more than I ever have been in my entire life. I'm so sure of it that it centres me, a new form of gravity so intense that it is my anchor, my stability that keeps my mind from caving in at this realisation.

Adrien and I need to get out of here.

Quickly.

Because we're the solution to every one of Gabriel's problems. And he's going to use us.

No matter what the consequences.