Chapter 5 - The Shadow
634 Words
I see her pale face, blank eyes, and tears. As she is curled up on her bed, Rosa the Guardian looks and feels like a human. A tiny noise could shatter her. Her sobs are like pus-filled wounds, aching from the core. Oddly, she is grieving for a little human girl. It is even odder that someone like her could attract my presence.
“She should pay yet she will not. How is that fair!” She is muttering through her sobs now. Her face twisted in agony. I am not foolish enough to call out to her immediately. Rosa is not the kind of person who would agree to murder someone. Yet, that potential Is inside her. A whirlpool of darkness just waiting to be awakened. It all depends on how I play my cards.
“Ember…” I call, although I am not sure if she remembers the name anymore. The name that befits the fairy who is as fierce and bright as her red dress and thick red, curly unmanageable hair. Any way you look at her, she is not a Rosa.
She looks up, confusion in her eyes. A sigh escapes her lips.
“You can stop it now, Siren. You got what you wanted.” She says.
“She is not the only one with the capacity to get into people’s heads, darling.” I laugh. “And you, my dear, have many things to worry about.”
Her eyes dart here and there and then she sits up. She lets out a sigh.
“Who are you?” She asks.
“Don’t you want to know what I want?”
Rosa’s eyes are burning embers. “I know what things like you want. You…You are here because…”
“You have hatred in your heart that you wish badly you didn’t have. That doesn’t fit your narrative of being a good little Guardian, does it? The fact that you want the Guardian Angel of Dreamscape to turn into ashes?”
“I do not want her to die just…She killed a child today!” Hot tears spring to Rosa’s eyes, which she promptly blinks away. “ How is she any different from the people who she claims to be evil?” How is she…”
“I understand your anger, Ember. I do.”
“That’s twice you’ve called me by a name that is not mine.” She says, bewildered. “I don’t understand….”
“Who said that it is not your name?” I smile. Already I’m anticipating how the information I have is going to throw her world into chaos. If she is not ready to demolish Siren now, she will be once she knows what I know. “That has been your name for a long time.”
“My name is Rosa. And I have had enough of your mind games.” She sits up, trying to shake my presence out of her head. I can feel her will push feebly against mine. As if she has any hope of getting out of the dark times she has unwittingly set in motion.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? That you carry the name given to you by the creature you claim to despise…Rosa…How sweet and pleasant and yet…How unlike you.”
“What the hell are you talking about! Siren didn’t give me my name! The Guardian in Charge gives the newly blossomed fairies names! My Guardian in Charge was not the Siren. It was…”
“Autumn…That’s who you mean, isn’t it? But what if I told you, you were originally not hers but someone else’s? Someone who is on her way here to Dreamscape, right now?”
“I don’t…”
“Oh…You will understand what I mean soon, Ember,” I say, watching her eyes widen. “There will come a day you will have to make a choice. And you will decide to stand by and let the world burn. You will decide that certain things shouldn’t exist,”
Her face drains of colour and a choked sound escapes her lips. I leave her cottage, satisfied. Some information needs to be fed in spoonfuls.
- Writer
