Crystal Skies

Chapter Three

Leaning my back against the old oak tree, I stared at the stars with my journal in hand.

            I couldn’t choose between writing what happened today and pouring my confused heart out in pieces of paper. Chase was all I had in mind. It bothered me.

            “What are you doing here?” I heard his voice.

            I ignored and started to write. 

I stopped. The top part of my journal lit up. Without second guessing, I threw my journal on the grass, trying to put out the flame.

            “Stop it, Chase,” I panicked. 

            The fire vanished and I stared at my journal on the ground. It’s not completely burned but an enough amount of ashes were already scattered on the grass. I bent down.. My knees felt weak.

The damage? A lot. 

            My whole life was on those paper.

            The night became more silent. I could hear the beat of my heart speeding to God knows how many beats, more than the wind howling the night, scratching the leaves. His calls for me seemed to blur. He called my name again in again, in the same icy tone.

            My heart shattered into pieces. 

            My mouth tasted bitterly. 

My cheeks heated up.

            My hands started to shake. 

My lip trembled and I couldn’t be able to control my tears anymore.

            So I ran.

❅

 I haven’t slept, looking through the window all night, observing the leaves as the wind howled, and as my heart broke. 

            “You’ve got to take this pill,” Kyah said behind me. “Come on. It’ll help you better.”

            Nothing was going to help me feel better. 

            I felt Kyah’s hand caress my shoulders. “Don’t you think it’s time to let go?” 

            From the start of my journey, I was unknown.  A stranger to my surroundings, a stranger from people, even a stranger to myself. There were only two things I was sure about. First, Mother raised me as her own and gave me an identity to live with when I didn’t know who I was. 

Where was she now? Gone. Settled to the unknown. Although she told me much about myself and encouraged me to pursue to be who I wanted to be, what I wanted to be, I still doubted. I would look at myself in the mirror – the tiny broken glass I got from the city – every day just to see myself anonymously in my own eyes. 

I was a stranger to my own eyes. 

            After doubting myself, I would learn to begin embracing what is and what I will face. I made those memories the meaning behind who I am. I made every adventure and every moment special enough to actually explain in any possible way who I was and who I looked forward to be.

            Now they’re gone. Half of them took a whole of me when they turned to ashes. 

The difference between Kyah and I, she only used her journal to draw odd symbols when I wrote my life. So, no. It was hard to let go.

            “I’ll be heading off to trainings,” she said. “You have to go too, you know.”

            I shrugged. I didn’t want to get up, how much more to go out and attend class?

            “I’ll call someone to be here for you,” she decided. I shook my head. “No. You have to get up, Cassie. It’s not healthy to grieve for five to ten pages of a burnt journal. You know that. I know that. Mom knows that.”

I checked my watch every now and then after Kyah had left. I spent my time alone, looking at the blue sky. 

            Three light knocks came from the door. When I reached my hand to open the door, I stopped and stared at my reflection on the shiny silver knob. There was just so much of me I didn’t know and with the journal gone…

            The person from outside knocked again. After fixing my hair as quickly as I could, I twisted the knob and opened the door.

            Benedict. He wore a blue sweater making him look like a geeky student than a professor. His hair was also in its usual style. 

            “I came here to see you,” he said with a small smile. His hands were both kept inside his pockets. “You weren’t in the fields.”

            Benedict’s eyes reminded me of Chase.

My hands started to shake. I rolled them into fists, stopping my tears. I bit the insides of my cheeks. 

❅

I had followed Benedict, my arms crossed on my chest as I bite my cheeks harder. He was giving me a tour of the usual facilities of the school. A lot of people would stare at us or scowl at me after waving a hello to Benedict. Here I was. Special treatment and all.

            We stopped walking in front of maple doors with a “C” carved on it. It looked antique and neat. You see the colors – gold, silver and the natural wooden maple brown beautifully as they coat the exterior of the building. It looked like those churches Mom described she saw in the mortal world.

            “Amazed?” he chuckled. I must have been gaping. “Wait till you get to see inside.” 

            The door opened and revealed the library of the academy. I never imagined the inside to be five times bigger than its exterior. Books were flying everywhere from where we stood. There were also a few students flipping pages, getting books piled on their arms and much more.

            Maple covers, golden ones, silver, plain black, royal blue, leather – different covers with different colors were stacked in eighteen-story shelves. There were also ladders on each side, making the students grab every book they needed whether they may be in the highest shelves or the middle.

            “I know. It still amazes me, too. There are more than a hundred thousand books in this library,” Benedict said. “There’s no librarian though.”

            We came across the big desk where an enormous golden-brown book – which looked from centuries back – rested on the center. I could already smell the soothing scent of its pages.

            “Let’s continue, shall we?” he said. I nodded and looked away from the back. “Here we have the potions section,” he said. Blue, green, pink, purple – different liquids were in different tubes. I saw a girl in gloves and Jason, too, working on a bubbly liquid next to her. Benedict approached them first, me following behind. “What are you guys working on?”

            The blonde haired girl looked at Jason with a wide smile. 

Jason seemed too focus with his work to notice us.

            “I’m working on that antidote I told you about,” she lifted her goggles on top of her head and placed her hands on her lab coat’s pockets. “I’m trying to perfect it. It won’t only make us invisible from the human eye but also the other creatures that roam around the universe.”

            “That’s...” I tried to make a comment but stopped myself. She looked at me, her brows narrowed but her smile still present.

            The crease on her forehead disappeared. “I’m Cara.”

            “Cassie.” She nodded her head, making me go on. “How could you test it with no human in the academy? And are you sure that the ingredients of your antidote won’t do any harm to anyone who’d use it?” 

            She chuckled and looked at Benedict beside her. “I test them outside the country. Sometimes in big cities: New York, Canada... I can teleport,” she smiled sweetly. “It’s a great advantage when you work with this stuff or if you simply want to get lost. You?”

            “Me?” I asked pointing to myself. 

            “Of course, you. What do you do?”

            My eyes found Jason who was already staring at us, pulling his gloves out. “I fly.”

            “That’s really cool!” she adored.

            “It is,” Jason butted in before I could thank her.

             “Jason, if it’s okay, I’ll leave Cassie to you.” Benedict said and shifted his eyes to mine. “Cara and I have to talk privately.”

            Jason made a face, a teasing one to both Cara and Benedict before they exit the library. 

“What are you working with?” I asked, stuttering at first.

            He shrugged and pointed to his works. There were a few concussions in tubes but there were more solid, powdered ingredients. “Healing tablets.”

            I raised a brow out of curiosity. 

            I nodded. “So how do you make it?”

            “Like the Joker said, ‘Once you’re good at something, never do it for free,’” he said. 

            I looked at him confusedly.

            His jaw dropped and he straightened himself. He held both of my shoulders and I winced. He didn’t notice, though. He was too clouded that I didn’t know who he was talking about. “I can’t believe you,” he said.

            “What are you talking about?”

            “Let me get this straight,” he dropped his hands and crossed his arms. He clicked his tongue. “You don’t know the Joker nor the Batman?”

            “Is there supposed to be one?”

            He looked offended. 

            “A war? It’s too soon,” I heard Cara’s voice in the back of my mind. Followed by Benedict’s murmur about someone hearing them. Cara debated in a whisper, “You’re overreacting! There’s no one here.”

            I blinked a couple of times, trying to look for Cara and Benedict again. Their voices already faded but the question still remained inside my head.

            A war?

            Why did I even hear them?

            “You have a lot to learn,” Jason said.

I agreed. “Yes, I do.”

❅

I ran my hand over my hair and stood from sitting on the field grounds. Jason was the one who was assigned to train me today. I didn’t understand why I would have a special training. I don’t see myself that special. Though it bugged me a lot, I didn’t want to put much air inside my head.

“Shouldn’t you be working with your pill?” I walked towards Jason as he prepared the punching bag. He wore a band tee that was as dark as his jet black hair with pink graffiti all over it.

“Shouldn’t you be happy for your ‘actual friend’ to train you?” He mimicked me and made air quotations. He eyed on me and placed his hands on his hips. “I’m sorry your boyfriend can’t be here.” 

I scowled at him and he brought up his hands in a defensive matter. 

Jason was the school nurse. He grew up wanting moments, memories over the money he practically bathed in when he was a child. He was more sentimental. He said before at the clinic that he never wanted to leave his parents behind but he felt the urge to help. That why he’s here. 

Someone who has the ability to heal people can break people.

But as he said when we first met a few months ago, he knew he was born to do the job.

I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off. He said, “I really can’t imagine why you don’t know any of them. They are immortals, Cassie. They never went to be the shadows of the limelight. They are pretty popular.”

I c****d a brow. “You didn’t seem to know I lived in a forest almost all my life.”

 “You’ve been isolated from technology and everything except for woods, leaves, trees and shadows your whole life?”

I shrugged casually. I wasn’t hurt by that reality. “If you like to put it that way.”

He mimicked my shrug. “That explains.”

I rolled my eyes “So what are we going to do now, Coach?”

“It sounds weird,” Jason commented. I chuckled. He added, “Body building, body something, and everything about physical strength and physical power.”

“Wow,” I said sarcastically. “You look very fit yourself.”

If Chase was here, he already would have insulted me instead of the other way around. 

“Then thank you,” Jason grinned. He handled jokes, insults, and sarcasm really well. He maybe treats life as a joke or something.

 I couldn’t tell. 

He seriously pointed at the punching bag, his eyes buried in mine. “You try to hit as hard and as fast as you can. The faster you go the more chance the enemy doesn’t notice.”

During the first few blows, my knuckles hurt and reddened. A few punches and a few kicks later, I was already breathing heavily and Jason laughed beside me, his arms crossed near his chest.

“I’m skinny and I’m not that fit,” I defended myself.

“Ms. Obvious, thanks for pointing that out,” he laughed. “You’re not even doing it properly.”

“What?” I asked, gaping at him in disbelief. “Then you’ve got to teach me.”

He raised one brow proudly and started to demonstrate. “You go like this and keep tension where it has to be.”

He threw punches at the bag in front of him and I was like looking at somebody prepare for a boxing match rather than a person doing it as a hobby at a nearby gym.

 It reminded me about what I heard Cara and Benedict were talking about. I swear I heard that part of conversation in my head. If it weren’t for Jason’s wild imagination and river of a mouth, I would have dwelled in my thoughts about the war Cara mentioned. 

It would start soon, they said.

It made me question. Was my training for that war?

 “See? That’s how you do it,” Jason said. Without that I wouldn’t have noticed he was finished already. Jason looked at me teasingly. “Missing your boyfriend?”

I wanted to say a cruel remark about Chase but I chose to say something else. “What were your pills for, anyway?”

He laughed and it sounded a little bitter. “I’m making those to succeed in performing my obligations the same time I give time for myself and have a little fun. It would be a great discovery, too. A mind blowing invention that would put other painkillers out of business. And, you never know when Mother Nature calls for you. I had to be taking my s**t and others would disturb me because someone’s hair was on fire and got his wounds too deep, lost a lot amount of blood, someone broke his bone, some people got injured - you get the point. It’s really a killer sometimes if you ask me.”

“It’s not for something... big?” 

He looked puzzled for a moment and he quickly masked it up. “It’s a matter of life and s**t, Cassie? Do you expect it not to be important?”

My voice came out louder than I expected as I ran my hand on my face, annoyed and confused. “Anything more serious than s**t. Please!”

“Fine!” He tried to level my voice. “Nothing other than that.”

I closed my eyes annoyingly; my hands were already in fists. “Then tell me about what Cara’s antidote is all about, the reason behind it. What is she preparing it for?”

“She already explained it to you,” he said and crossed his arms. He knew I wasn’t convinced. “The rest... I don’t know. I have no idea what she’s planning. I know nothing about it.”

“She must know something.” 

Wait.

What?

I think I heard his thoughts.

It wasn’t actually his thoughts, right?

“s**t now what have I done? She’s confused. I should tell her... Wait. Sht. To tell her or not to tell her? This Shakespeare s**t isn’t helping.”

I think I’m going insane.

“Tell her, Jason. She deserves to know.”

“Tell her, Jason!” I screamed and dropped my hands. “She deserves to know.”

He looked like he had seen a ghost. 

I threw my hands in the air and wished his voice to get out of my head. 

I surprisingly heard nothing from him now. 

“You read my mind,” he spoke slowly. 

I shook my head trying to figure. “Please do enlighten me.”

Jason muttered something under his breath. It was like watching all the tools inside a clock turn into different directions at the same time.

“I can’t understand what you’re talking about.” My fingers went numb. I shook my head. “I have a bad migraine.”

He walked away, making me feel down and more confused.

“Jason,” I called for him. “Where are you going?”

“You need to know,” he said, keeping his pace.

“Know what?” I stopped and felt my heart beat and beat and then beat again. This time faster.