Chapter 21
752 Words
There was no response as everything came to a halt. The goblin beneath me was gone. Darkness took everything around, and white apparitions emerged. Every one of the apparitions appeared to be in a world to themselves: talking, playing, communicating, and fleeing. I heard echoes of their voices as it thundered under the sheer weight of so many speaking at once as my body was pulled forward to a bright light that had formed
The darkness was gone, and I found myself in a mostly destroyed room and my sister gripping on to a doll. A single candle lit the room, and many books lay on the floor. From the candle, it revealed the state of her attire.
There were tears in her eyes as she kept calling my name over and over to the doll. The clothes she wore were worn and torn at the sides.
“Malaka!”
I called her name, and the doll’s lips moved on its own. My body was pulled into the doll. In this new position I saw my sister’s face. Her long black hair fell across her face and her brown teary eyes peeked out as her head moved.
She pushed the hair from her face. “Kiran, is that you?”
I felt the breeze on my body. “How was this possible?”
“Kiran, Kiran,” she said, as her tears fell to the ground. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know. So much has happened since you died. The world, the nobles they betrayed the people and now everything has fallen to darkness.”
“Slow down… tell me ---.”
“I used a f*******n magic that I stole from the grand library before it was closed and those that once worked its halls now labour the mines.”
“Isn’t the demon King defeated?”
“The nobles never wanted to end the oppression. They only sought to work with evil itself. At first we thought it was a tragedy. They told us you had died to defeat the demon king. But then…”
My eyes turned towards the window to notice how thick the darkness was outside.
“Darkness came, one that we had never seen before. At first we thought it would pass like an eclipse but it continued and the nobles changed no longer were they helping us or the common man.”
I sense magic in it.
She nodded. “If you stay to long in the darkness, it turns people into monsters.”
I noticed the amulet around her neck as she drew me closer to her in a hugging embrace.
“First it was taxes so much that the common folk couldn’t pay and then it rose and rose that people began to flee. They seized those that tried and dragged them to work through labor as payment.”
“Then how did you end up here?”
“Master Zachery sent me back with a few others to safety, but the portals sent us all in different directions as we land. I have been here ever since. Reading the scrolls and trying to figure out how to push away the darkness, but I can’t do it alone I need you. I am scared.”
I bit my lip, thinking about the situation. My eyes focused at the outside. It was not something I knew how to solve. “And what became of Master Zachery? Is he still alive?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I know little. They might have dragged him to the mines.”
“He would be the one to know how to solve this. How do you survive up here without food and water?”
“He had given us all the ring of substance. We wouldn’t need food, water or even sleep. He said to find the clue to solving this.”
Before my body felt heavy as it fell on its own, and I left the puppet form.
“Malaka!”
Like a hand pulling me back into the dark, I found myself among the apparitions lost in their own world, calling to people that weren’t there.
“Dammit!” I shouted.
I was back in the forest; the goblin was beneath me and the others were looking on.
In my rage, my blade fell upon the goblin.
- Writer
