Board Thread:Short Stories and Fanfictions/@comment-43311054-20191230215000/@comment-43311054-20200126164042

Chapter 4

Grady narrowed his eyes as Sophie explained what she wanted him to do. She was pretty good at explaining all the good points about why it would benefit her, but she knew that Grady would fight his fight.

“So,” Grady started, “what you’re telling me is that Keefe is suddenly a very powerful Mesmer, and you want me to train him? And that he’s so powerful that he could control you with ease?” Sophie winced at the eerie calm in Grady’s voice.

Swallowing, she said, “If you helped him, maybe he would actually be able to control it more. I think it would be beneficial to everyone around him, including me.” Grady nodded and ran a hand through his hair.

“Okay,” Grady said, his voice gruff and annoyed. “Okay, I’ll help him.”

Sophie’s eyes lit up and she leapt forward to hug him. Grady returned the hug, but Sophie could tell that this wasn’t something he was happy about.

“Thank you,” she told him. And then she was flying to her bedroom and hailing Keefe as quickly as her body would allow.

“Keefe,” she said breathlessly as his face appeared. “He said yes. He’ll help you. Keefe—he said yes!” A tense, somewhat forced smile appeared on Keefe’s face. but Sophie was too lost in her moment of relief to notice.

“He can help you, and then everything will be under control, and then everything will be perfect, and then—”

“Woah, woah, Foster. Calm down. Why are you so excited?” Keefe asked, his eyebrows arched skeptically.

Sophie flushed a little and said, “Just happy that I convinced him to do something. That’s all.”

Keefe nodded, his eyebrows still perched atop his forehead. Sophie could tell he didn’t believe her, and for some reason she didn’t feel like revealing that she wanted Keefe and Grady to bond. Maybe it was because she felt like someone would immediately mess it up somehow. Now, she had absolute faith in them that they wouldn’t, but she just felt like something would go wrong if she told Keefe and Grady the real reason why she cared so much. So she didn’t, and just smiled until Keefe’s face relaxed into a smile as well.

When the pair finished hailing, Sophie went outside to check on the baby alicorns, Wynn and Luna. Lately, keeping them out of the other animals’ pens was a struggle. They would use their teleporting ability—that Sophie had just found out existed—and skip several feet at a time, just out of her reach. She spent most of her spare time outside, keeping them out of trouble.

But when she finally sprinted outside, she didn’t only see the alicorn family she loved so much.

There was someone else.

Sophie could see her out of the corner of her eye, and she chose to ignore her.

A small sigh sounded from Calla’s Panakes tree, and Sophie bit her lip to keep her swirling emotions in check.

She took deep breaths.

One, two, three, four, five, six…

Another small sound came from the tree, and Sophie slowly turned around on her heel, her previously enthusiastic energy rapidly disappearing.

“Hello, Oralie.”

Chapter 5

Councillor Oralie, Sophie’s biological mother, let out a small sigh and walked over quietly.

“I suppose you were going to watch the alicorns, weren’t you?” Her voice was monotone and apologetic simultaneously.

Sophie stared Oralie in the eyes and replied confidently, “I was. Ever since I found out about their new teleporting abilities, I’ve been watching them to make sure that they don’t get into any trouble with the verminion and Verdi.”

Oralie nodded, softly flinching at the ice in Sophie’s voice. Sophie had been treated like dirt by every kid she’d ever gone to school with, and it wasn’t hard to inflect the same tone of voice on someone else. It tweaked her heart a little bit to be rude—she didn't exactly know why she was being so cruel—but it made her feel a little better to watch Oralie crumble a bit before they had to work together. After all, being the leader of Team Valiant ensured that Sophie was a part of the nobility, therefore she had to work with the Councillors on certain things that could help the citizens of the Lost Cities. And opening Oralie’s cache just happened to be one such thing that would probably benefit them—at least in Oralie’s eyes.

Sophie often wondered what kinds of things the Councillors hid away in their memory safes. What kinds of things were so terrible that they couldn’t even remain in the witnesses’ minds but couldn’t be destroyed either?

“Oralie,” Sophie asked softly, tugging at her eyelashes, “What do you think you might’ve put in your cache?”

Oralie’s expression triggered her stomach to flip and twist, her hands sweating in the silence of the moment.

“Oralie?” she asked quietly.

Oralie tore her eyes from the ground and looked into Sophie’s before her mouth twisted.

A beat.

And then the older blonde elf sighed and began to talk.

“I don’t really know, Sophie,” she started. “It could be any number of things. It could be a secret that might wipe out the elves if in the wrong hands. It could be a memory so horrible that if I focus on it for too long, I won’t be able to function. It may be something so horrible…” Oralie cut off, wringing her hands.

“What?” Sophie asked, her voice barely a whisper against the swaying of the Panakes tree.

“It might break me, Sophie. It might be so awful, so guilt-wrenching, that it will shatter my mind. Why else would I lock it away? I don’t really want to remember, but it will help benefit my citizens…I hope.”

Sophie stayed silent, imagining pain and guilt so awful that she herself would want to lock it away.

Sophie shivered, involuntarily remembering blood glistening on her hands, slick and wet. The glint of metal, the raspy breath. Suddenly she watched as memories flashed in front of her eyes, scream after scream.

Sophie felt herself collapse as if she was in third person. She heard the dull thud as she hit the ground, but what she was really hearing was screams. Images flashed in front of her mind—everything was out of order. There were sneering faces, young, there was a building burning with roaring flames as she hurtled towards the ground, there was a piece of metal glinting on the side of her head, there was pain. So, so much pain. It enveloped her, her thoughts encased in red. Her head pounding frantically, her hand aching harshly, desperate gasps slipping through her lips. She couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.

She heard voices, taunting, “You’ll never be good enough. You don’t deserve to be here. All you ever do is hurt everyone you love.” The person saying it kept changing, and then Keefe’s voice filtered through her mind and, sharp, said something that Sophie herself had been thinking.

“If it wasn’t for you, I would be happy.” Sophie was lost to the shrieks and memories slashing across her brain, and she couldn’t place whether or not it made sense.

Suddenly she was little again, she was with humans, and she watched in a daze as kid after kid taunted her and rejected her. She saw Mr. Forkle, heard breath ragged and slow. And she was back where she’d started, blood glistening on her hands, slick and wet. Metal shining brightly as everything faded to black.

The last thing she imagined as her eyes flicked shut was Keefe’s face, hurt and angry, sneering at her.

And with that, the world fell silent and Sophie lost herself to the darkness.