I'M BACK!

Yes, it is me! I'm back to finish what I started...

First, though: an apology. I am SO SORRY, it took so long to get this up. It's been a busy, busy year of joy, sadness, exams, new experiences and, overall, ONE HUGE WRITER'S BLOCK.

But it's OVER. For this story, at least.

I also wanted to say THANK YOU SO MUCH for all the reviews I've continued to get. I can't do what I usually do and list all you guys with a personal note, because that would take me at least a year to do so.

So instead, THANK YOU, you guys are all so funky and great and fantabulous and fantastical and wondifferous, and I lub you all.

This is for Anna Suswillo: LARA SUSWILLO LARA SUSWILLO LARA SUSWILLO. LARA SUSWILLO.

Hehehe. Now you're not alone, Joyce.

Enjoy, guys. It's not particularly long, funny or exciting, but I'm hoping that will come later.

Bon appetit

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


Well, I thought, there you have it. The brothers Grimm missed out on something here.

I mean, seriously. 'Turn the pages and learn your fate…' Bit heavy, really.

And who are they – whoever 'they' is…or are…or were…or was…whatever – to tell me what to do. What if I learn my fate…and ignore it? Then what? Huh? Waste of time, if you thought about it. Imagine if I wasn't a Mediator – Shifter – and I just happened upon this book?

However, just as I thought that thought, a breeze fluttered in through my open window, seemingly blown in from the tingling stars I could see scattered across the ink canvas sky, and the page with the scrawled verse lifted.

So much for 'Turn the pages…'

On the next page was another short verse and I couldn't help but hope it didn't go on like this throughout the whole book. It was a waste of paper, for one thing. And for another, it was kind of annoying. I can barely handle Robert Burns let alone this amateur limerick…

'Only ye with life and beat

Can continue with your wizenin' read

Only ye with blood so pure

May read your Destiny and Lore

Another breeze, this time much stronger, rushed in through the window and blew the page over.

"Cliché much…" I muttered, and smoothed the newly exposed page. This time there was a picture.

A woman – a female at least, she looked kind of young to be classified as a woman – had been drawn standing in the centre of the page. Her posture screamed out 'Xena: Warrior Princess' with her stance defensive and sturdy; shoulders back; chin tilted up stubbornly; one hand fisted and the other held slightly to the side and behind, fingers splayed and palm down turned. Even her eyes were challenging, green and searing, seemingly coming right out of the page to pin me down.

Her hair was chestnut and swishing out to one side, the long tresses flung out like hundreds of fingers all reaching towards some invisible thing in the margin. It made the girl look as though she'd just spun round and stopped, ready to attack again.

Her whole aura was active; wary; tense and ready to go at the slightest twitch. The 2D image impossibly projected a tension like that of a coiled spring trembling with energy that had nowhere to go but outwards and upwards.

So perhaps this was why my eyes were irrevocably drawn to the image painted with delicate detail so intricate and tiny it was like magic. On the girl's left shoulder sat a cat. Calm and still, sat in usual cat form with its head high, front legs straight and back legs firmly bracketing its front ones. Its tail was curled around the girl's shoulder and the tip of it came to a rest where, on a living person, the girl's heart would be. The drawing had managed to capture the ineffable essence of regality that a cat wrapped itself in like an ubiquitous blanket of poise and etiquette and royalty.

With the girl's electricity, the black, sleek cat's serenity was a stark contrast, but one that seemed befitting. It felt as though, if I erased that cat from the picture, the scene wouldn't be right.

It would be like Mona Lisa without her smile.

The cat's eyes, like the girl's, sparkled emerald and held a glint of danger and warning; a wariness that any battle-plagued soldier carried.

I shook myself. Dear God! It was only a picture. But no matter how much I scorned myself for getting lost in a sea of awe because of some stupid cartoon… I couldn't tear my eyes away.

Because the closer I looked, the closer I saw the resemblance to…well, to me.

Stupid, huh? But every detail, every feature, was what I saw every morning when I got up and beautified myself for school. Not just the obvious features – the green eyes and chestnut hair, but the lesser ones that only a mother would notice about their child, or a lover about their partner.

For example, the tiny freckle I have on the side of my nose that makes look as though I've got a nose piercing. Or the tiny scar on the middle top knuckle on my right hand that I got from a rather long-stretched fight where I managed to wear away several layers of skin after quite a few roundhouse punches.

Both those imperceptible facets were sketched onto the figure staring so blazingly at me from the crisp, aged parchment.

And suddenly the book wasn't quite so clichéd as I originally thought.

An enquiring meow sliced through the air and I jumped back from the book, where it fell from my fingers and bounced on the bed viciously and landed precariously on the edge.

I looked down to my side of the bed and saw Spike perched innocently on the floor, gazing up at me with big yellow eyes.

"Meow?"

I eased a sigh and my heart's heavy thudding recessed. "Are you trying to kill me at an early age, Spike? Because I'm the only who feeds you and cares for you, you big dumb ginger sack of cra-"

Spike sneezed and, clearly bored with my human whining, yawned an impossibly long and huge yawn, his little pink tongue curling in on itself, seemingly carrying the essence of scorn on it.

He finished his yawn and blinked up at me, then picked himself up and padded contentedly away to the open window, where he hopped up onto my window seat, onto the window ledge, and, with one last glance at me, hopped away into the night.

I stared, eyebrows raised, at where Spike had gone. Huh, I thought. He didn't even scratch my skin off for food.

A dull thump brought me back to my senses and I realized the book had tumbled from the bed and onto the floor. I crawled across the bed and leaned down, unceremoniously yanking the book up by its spine and plonking it down in my lap.

The front cover fell away from the book and a few other pages were dragged away. They settled down and left me with another page to view.

This time there was another picture – one I recognized. It was the same one that appeared every time I had my tarot cards read. It was the Mediator. The old man with the lantern glowing in the dark.

Underneath this drawing was scrawled:

A god's strength, a king's wealth,

A pharaoh's power in thyself.

A pirate's heart, a lion's greed,

Darkness, madness: a mind too weak.

If of mind noble and strong

If of true words and tongue

If of heart warm and red

A righteous divinity lies ahead.

This time, I actually stopped and considered the words. I only did this because the picture, though familiar to the ones on those cursed tarot cards, was different. This time, the frail and wizened old man looked a heck of a lot like Dr Slaski. And I was beginning to see a pattern.

"A god's strength, a king's wealth, A pharaoh's power in yourself"? That's pretty much what Dr Slaski was prepared for when he got into this Shifting business. He even told me once he thought he was a god. "A pirate's heart, a lion's greed, Darkness, madness: a mind too weak." Dr Slaski had warned me about that too – how power can go to your head. As it had done to him. And look how he ended up – with people thinking he was mad while whittling his days away in a wheelchair. Because he was too weak to fight against the powers of…power.

Or maybe all those English analytical-poetry classes were going to my head.

Whatever. My bones were rattling along to Shiver Me Timbers and it wasn't a pleasant sensation.

I flipped the page, hoping there may have been something a bit lighter there, maybe a couple of unicorns? The lyrics to Britney Spears' Toxic?

Only I should have known that a book which could seemingly change its font to blood wouldn't have any sense of pop culture or niceties.

My heart slammed against my rib cage with a force that sent me choking when I saw the latest drawing.

A guy; dark hair; dark clothes; dark smile. But eyes so light and clear it was like the maker(s) of the book had taken a piece of the sky and somehow stuck it onto the page. The figure was stood defiantly, with broad shoulders squared, as if he was trying to stare whoever was reading the book down. His long legs were shoulder width apart, soft leather boot toes pointed to each bottom corner of the page. His trousers were tucked into the boots, and as dark as them.

His shirt was garnet color and it took me a while to realize why it freaked me out so much – it was almost the same color as the blood writing. Black buttons tracked up the centre, holding it together. The left side of the shirt was tucked into his trousers, but on the right the pointed tip was left out, flapping up in an invisible wind to reveal a small portion of flat abdomen.

The guy's chin was tilted up stubbornly, and he looked down his nose with a devil-may-care attitude. One corner of his sultry mouth tipped up in an ironic fashion, laughing at something that wasn't meant to be laughed at. His aquiline nose had one disjoint in it, near the bridge, where it veered slightly to the left, like it had been broken in a punch-up. Slashes of black made up his eyebrows, straight and bold, casting a faint shadow over the hood of his eyes.

My eyes got snagged on the drawing's again. There was something so familiar, so haunting about them…I dragged my gaze up to the figure's hair. Curly, the same brown as his boots, and with a soft sheen that spoke of silkiness. My finger trailed over separate curls and I almost felt the gentle spring of a lock of hair bowing under the pressure of the tip of my finger.

I spent a while studying the guy. He looked menacing and evil but I wondered why I wasn't frightened or intimidated by it. Then again, it was only a drawing…

It was then that I noticed his hands. Kind of strange that I didn't before, cos a guy's hands are what I look at first. After his eyes, of course. His left arm was held straight down his side, the red cuff of his shirt hanging open and wide. His actual hand was facing palm inwards, so I could only see the back of his hand, with light veins snaking between the bones of his fingers. The fingers themselves were bent at the tips, cradling something out of view that was being held steady by his thumb, which curved inwards to his palm.

Stupidly, I moved my head at different angles to try to get a better view of what might have been behind his arm.

There was a reason I skipped art class.

I frowned in frustration and was just about to look away in defeat when I saw something. A silver something, small and pointy, just peeking out from behind the inside of his arm, halfway up to the elbow. I peered closer and saw it: a knife point. The peak of a sharp, sleek, sparkling dagger. I looked down at his hand and this time saw more: the handle of the dagger, an ivory handle with swirling carvings and embossments.

And suddenly his eyes seemed brighter than before, the sky blue darkening like a summer storm.

His other arm was hanging loose in comparison to his carefully held left arm. Carelessness emanated from that limb like a stream trickling down it. Indifference hung to the very tips of his fingers like heavy icicles weighing them down. And dangling precariously from those fingertips was a glass bottle. Actually, it was like the measuring cylinders we used at the Mission during Chemistry, with the wide circular base that pyramided up to form a lip like a tulip opening up. Except instead of a small hole at the top, there was a cork, shoved deep into the glass, effectively sealing it off.

The glass itself was cobalt blue, transparent but distorting that image that was drawn inside of the bottle, blurring the object trapped inside.

Although the harder I strained my eyes, the more convinced I became that there wasn't actually a distinguished item to see, it was more like a glowing white form, almost human-shaped, but with no details, no features. A mass of pure white light, trapped inside the dingy green glass.

And then, for a split-second – so fast I'm pretty sure I imagined it; I must have – the white form seemed to glow so brightly, and something struck my heart like lightning. Then it was over, and I was left with a slightly breathless sensation, and an incredibly furrowed brow.

But I couldn't shake the feeling of dread that was suddenly shrouding me.

What did it all mean? What did it all mean? And why did I have to be a part of it?

I remember when breaking and entering to steal dead people's most treasured possessions had seemed like child's play compared to this. It suddenly seemed as if a new door had opened to me with shadows hiding the opportunities that were waiting for me to come to them.

I shut the book suddenly, finding I didn't want to look at it anymore. Finding I didn't want to discover what it all meant.

Call me crazy, but I was scared by a book. True, the idea of reading my way through Moby Dick for English class had made my stomach clench with disgust. But this was different. This was genuine terror.

"Urgh. What is wrong with me?" I threw the book on the floor and then threw myself backwards on my bed with disgust. After staring at the ceiling for a few restless minutes I sat back up again. "So much for helping me," I said, glowering at the book.

And then another breeze lifted the air in my bedroom, at the same time dropping the temperature, and I heard the sound of the book's heavy front cover as it rose and fell open. The pages flapped, making sharp cracking noises until they stopped, and silence drifted across the room as the breeze departed as quickly as it had come.

With an ice chip in my heart, I crawled across the bed, ignoring the heavy weight of my limbs, and I stared out over the edge of the bed until my eyes dropped to the book.

When greed twists and greed turns

And the power within begins to burn

And from it grows a blackened tree

With limbs that grab and roots that bury

And so the greed and so the power

Grow into plants that do not flower

Then the seed of this hateful thing

Must be punished for his sin

To say realisation struck would be a lie. What it actually did was unfurl itself slowly inside of me, as though someone had just injected cold water into my veins that was spreading with every accelerated pump of my heart.

On the opposite page of the rhyme was a drawing of a man – the same man with the sky blue eyes and the dagger and the jar – bent backwards in pain, his arms crooked and outstretched with his hands mid-clench. The veins in his arms and neck were bulging with the pain that was etched sharply on his face. The man's knees were bent under the force of it.

And from what I could tell, the source of the pain was the tornado-like blur the illustrator had drawn, originating from the man's heart and spiralling outwards, growing larger as it went.

I stared at that picture for a while, horrified. Was that what was happening to Paul? Was his soul being ripped from his body? Or was that his life, just draining away? What was it? What did it mean?

God, this stuff was giving me a headache.

So far I had been told – in a rather evil and malevolent manner – of what was happening to Paul, but there was no sign of a cure. I flipped the page.

Another drawing. My heart plummeted.

This time it was the me look-a-like and the guy, hands braced with each other's in the prayer position, turned to face each other with their eyes closed and faces tilted upwards.

Above them, the sky was pink and yellow before it blended into midnight blue. And in the middle sat a fat circle, out of which a white crescent moon shone and the rest was a cold yellow sun. On the side of the sky with the moon, stars twinkled against the dark, and on the side of the sky with the sun, thin clouds gathered.

It was the two figures' hands that caught my attention, though. Because surrounding them was a subtle glow that had nothing to do with the stars or the moon or the sun painted on the page. And, I was guessing, everything to do with how to cure Paul.


Next chappie will be soon, my dudettes of lub. Fear not. Or, depending on you, FEAR IMMENSELY.

Mwaw.

P.S. Sorry if I made any glaring mistakes or discontinuities. I haven't had a chance to read what I actually wrote previously, cos I was so excited to have enough inspiration trickling through me to write this much.