I had been walking for an interminable time, groping through a thick gray fog. The space I traversed was barren in all directions, with only the vague notion of a smooth surface across which I was slowly drifting. I was gliding along gently a few inches into the air rather than walking. When I thought I saw something in the distance, I could briefly increase my speed tremendously and when I arrived then I would find it was only my eyes playing tricks on me. As time passed, I became numb to the strange state I found myself in and I flitted about from nothingness to further emptiness and deeper into void.
A spark of reflected light caught my eye, and I darted over to examine it. The gap between it and me annulled with sharp thought and brisk motion. The object was in my hand without me even reaching down. The orb was cool in my hand, and it pulsed in a way reminiscent of the flow of my arcana, but with a different rhythm.
"Laura," Tommy said from behind me and I could clearly hear the sneer smashed across his face.
"What?" I said, surprised. "Why are you following me? It is dangerous here." I carefully turned to face him.
"Tsk-tsk, you're completely powerless, aren't you?" he chided.
All Monday I had been without any magic and unable to defend myself when Tommy had grabbed me. Surely by now, especially here, my energy stores must have recovered. I prodded them gingerly and found they were unchanged from Monday, still empty.
"This is impossible," I muttered.
"Talking to yourself now?" Tommy said, taking a step closer. "What sorts of secrets have you been hiding at the river?"
"Tommy, I must reiterate that it is not safe here. It would be best if you left for your own safety."
"I think you're the one in trouble here," Tommy said rushing me and easily shoving me off my feet. I could only yelp in distress as I fell backwards. My arms shot to the sides of my head to protect it, and I landed heavily on my back.
"What the hell?" I said, scrambling away.
"What's this? No flashy sword like you had at the river? It's just you and me. No one is coming to help you."
He easily closed the distance to me and kicked me in the side. I expected an explosion of pain, but instead all I felt was a dull impact. The violent motion had momentarily set him off balance and his face contorted in rage. "So, you do have some stupid trick," he sneered. He wound his leg back for another kick and my eyes went wide as I tried in vain to crawl away.
His shoe slammed hard into my leg. There was a strange lack of pain despite me still feeling the blow. Even so, I still clutched the site of impact as if my nerves were shrieking in pain. My leg was twisted and could not support my weight. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
"Quit your complaining freak. I know what you did. You're the reason they're dead. You couldn't save any of them. They're all dead because you let that witch kill them." Tommy leaned down over me. "And now I'm gonna make you pay for it. You're a miserable failure, Aurora."
His right fist drew back and aimed directly at my face. There had to be something I could do. I had no magic within me. My right hand was still clenched around the sphere I had retrieved earlier. As his fist shot towards my face, I found a spark of arcana beating there and drew on it. I easily dislodged the energy and forced it all within me. The husk still gripped between my fingers was now dead and silent. My arcane spark lit and grew into a furnace of pure power and roared to life within me once more. A part of me that I had not realized was asleep awakened with that rush of energy.
"That is not my name!" I shouted while releasing a mote of reclaimed power. Ice blanked the ground around me as a rush of frigid wind blasted away from me in all directions.
I blinked and all at once the void was gone and Tommy along with it. Instead, I found myself sitting upright in bed. As I looked around the dark room the walls seemed to shimmer. As I rubbed my eyes dazed from the abrupt end of the dream something dropped from my hand and clunked as it hit the ground. I turned on my bedside lamp and found the ceiling, the floor, and walls were all coated in a thin glistening layer of ice.
-*-
I was mentally exhausted after another day at school even though I only had one test. The reason was simple: it was the test I had been dreading ever since I found all my memories of the class had vanished. For the entire day, I had agonized over the subject and the act of taking and completing the test had not alleviated the problem. Waking up in the middle of the night had not helped either. The room stayed cold all night and even with my thick blankets it had been unpleasant. School may have been over, but I still had plans today. Finally, I would get a chance to relax and spend time with my friend Chris rather than using all that time to study history.
"Hey Chris," I called as I approached his car. As usual he was standing just to the side of the driver's door and watching the parking lot rapidly empty.
"How did you do on the history test? When the bell rang, I saw you were still working on it," Chris said eagerly as he opened the driver's door and got in.
"Well. Better than I expected, I guess," I muttered as Chris drove the car out of the school's parking lot. I finished that test only after most of the class was already done. I had walked up to the teacher's desk and handed in my history test and when I turned around, I noticed many of the eyes in the class were on me. As I returned to my seat, I blocked out the rest of the room and instead thought about all the time I had spent studying. The days last week at Chris's house, this morning on the bus, and even multiple homeroom sessions had all led up to this. I had felt drained, yet confident that I had done my best. Even if it was far worse than what I assumed Lucas would have pulled off even if there were no memories to reference.
"Hey, that's great!" Chris said cheerfully. The brightness in the way he said it made me feel significantly better.
"Thanks for all your help. I would have left most of that test blank without your help, especially the essay," I said. As if a drain had opened, I suddenly felt the anxiety of that stupid scholastic hurtle leaving me completely.
Chris glanced at me and a wide smile spread across his face as he said, "I'm glad you're feeling better about it, Laura." I realized I had been smiling too.
"I guess so," I said. The other events of the day which had been eclipsed by the test now felt a bit less overshadowed. Now what I had dealt with in gym for the last two days jumped to the front of my mind. Running into Tommy on Monday and then spending all of gym on Tuesday actively avoiding him had occupied my focus far more than it should have. I knew I had to mention Tommy's new hobby. "Tommy was apparently following me last Friday."
"That seems like really creepy and stupid thing for even a creep like him. Did he see anything? I wasn't there. No guardian, too dangerous, remember? Dan told me nothing really happened." Chris said, barely masking his frustration.
"Oh, right," I said as some of my cheerfulness faded. "We were looking for the source of the shades, and we ran into a few of them along the creek. There was a quick fight and one of them hit Dan. His guardian blocked most of it, thankfully. We did not even find what we were looking for, and Tommy saw at least some of it based on what he said."
"What exactly did he say he saw?" Chris asked.
We had been keeping a lid on magic being real at the request of Corona and Chromos. They had recommended we not involve any conventional law enforcement based on their previous experiences. Aurora's own memories had a few unpleasant instances of her bonded getting injured or apprehended by police even when guardians and their paired humans were working towards the same goals as those officials. They were technically vigilantes, but why did the police not have a magical division or guardians of their own? Maybe something about conventional police pushed away guardians?
"He saw me with a sword, he called it a stick, and at least some of the fight," I said thinking back to the conversation I had with Tommy. "He did not really give specifics, and he delivered all of it in the form of some crude joke."
"That sounds like Tommy, yeah," Chris said, his mood souring further. "Do you think he'll be at the creek again tonight?"
"No. I implied he might get cursed. Like I did," I said, shifting in my seat. It certainly was not a curse to me.
Chris paused for a moment, his cheeks flushed, and he started laughing. "You told him he would turn into a girl? That's incredible. That'll keep him away for sure."
"It is not entirely a lie, but it is extraordinarily unlikely. Sounds like you have dealt with him and his friends outside of homeroom period," I prodded curiously.
"Well, I did a try-out for the football team earlier this year," he said. I thought it was a bit strange that he would wait until senior year to try to join, but I decided to leave it. "Basically, he told me that I'm not strong enough and that I don't have enough weight to be able to play. Eventually they let up on the teasing and said I should try basketball since I was so tall."
"There were no spots that would work well for you?"
"Guess not," he said, defeated.
After a few minutes of silence, I realized we were heading into the middle of town and away from where we found the guardians. "I thought we were going to the creek," I said as we turned onto the main street and passed by several stores.
"I need to drop off some library books, and I thought that we should take a peek at that address we found on the way," Chris said as he started slowing down.
"We are passing by and not going inside," I said sharply. Frigid and cold as ice. My hand shot to my mouth. That was how Aurora talked to bystanders and not how I talked to my friends.
"Of course, of course," Chris said easily as he fixated on the building numbers passing by. As he leaned over the steering wheel for a better view he said eagerly, "That's the place!" He pointed down an alley between the stores Codlies and Danger. Chris calmly took the first turn off the main road after we were out of sight of the storefronts.
"How did you see all the way down that alley?" I asked.
"I didn't. There are numbers on the corner of buildings for stores with entrances on the side, I just happened to see the one from the receipt. It wasn't hard to find; they are in order after all," Chris said. "I'm surprised that it is basically the middle of town. Hopefully the witch wasn't summoning shades there."
I thought it was unlikely if they were trying to be secretive. If anyone was looking for arcane traces of spells here, then they could check the entire main street with a short walk down the road. It was much easier to hide magic back at the witch's house where someone would need to be on her property or at least close by.
"I doubt it. It would be hard to keep it a secret if anyone had the slightest magical senses and the mass grave we saw was at the creek," I said reassuringly.
"The what?!" Chris yelled before giving me a frantic look.
For a moment, I did not understand Chris's reaction. I had not mentioned that part and I had just tossed it out into the conversation like a live grenade.
"I do not know exactly how the spell to summon shades works. The guardians do know that creating them requires human sacrifices," I said quietly. "Sorry. I will do a better job of keeping you in the loop. The guardians have seen this type of spell before. It is the sort of thing that makes the guardian enchantment activate. One of many."
"So, Kim was just killing a bunch of people behind her house near the river?" Chris said unevenly and I could hear the plastic creak as he tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
"Yeah. Corona said they might just be a byproduct and whoever cast the spell was actually after something else," I said.
"That first night didn't Chromos say something about a reserve? Or something like that? And he stole it?" Chris asked. Chris had been present for that huge fight between us and the shades on Friday two weeks ago. That day his three closest friends had received bonds with guardians.
Then Lucas and Aurora had died.
"Laura, you there?" Chris said as he poked my shoulder and I nearly jumped.
I took a few seconds to relax before answering Chris's several questions. "Yeah, that reserve was the only reason we were able to handle so many shades," I explained. "Also, it provided the energy needed for Aurora—or the bond, or whatever caused it—to transform me."
"Could you do that transformation spell again? Couldn't you turn yourself back? You know, if you wanted," Chris was genuinely interested. "Or can you only cast it on", he paused, "Someone else?"
"That spell took a huge amount of energy," I said. "It consumed everything that was left over after the fight from that reserve Chromos stole. Even if I had that same wellspring of arcana, I would not waste it on myself so frivolously."
"What if it was easy? You wouldn't rather go back?" Chris gave me an inquisitive glance.
"Nope," I said easily, opting not to explain further.
I would not want to go back to being Lucas. I could not be him and interact with his dead friends, it would feel even worse than it already did. That was without even thinking about Lucas's father which would be even more messed up. I had already stolen his life, but at least this way there was a clear line where I could definitively state 'this was my beginning'. The silence stretched on until Chris turned into the library parking lot and parked.
"I'll be quick if you want to wait here," Chris said before opening his door.
"I am going to check if the books I requested are back," I said and Chris smiled before leaving the car. As we approached the building, I decided to ask, "You sure you still want to go to the creek tonight?"
"Yeah. I doubt we'll find anything, but I want to look around," he said as he pulled open the door for me. "Ladies first." I hesitated briefly. That had felt like something that I was supposed to do, not have it done for me. I brushed it off and walked quickly through the door.
Signed in with my library card at one of the terminals in the far corner of the building while Chris waited in line at the front counter. According to the machine, the four books I had added to my 'wish list' were still marked unavailable. It had only been three days since I requested the books, but it felt like it was forever ago. Frowning, I hit the exit key to free the machine for someone else and headed back to the front desk. Chris was still waiting, so I took the opportunity to observe the library's patrons.
As my eyes drifted, I saw several people sitting at one of the tables, likely from the local community college based on their age. There were several individuals roaming the isles of books and occasionally picking out a book to flip through. Everything seemed normal, but a feeling kept poking the back of my mind. I was missing something.
"These are due back next Tuesday," the librarian said to Chris while I was still scanning the library. Then I spotted a middle-aged woman with red hair and glasses. She was staring directly at me from the end of one of the rows of shelves. I looked away as soon as our eyes met. I moved abruptly towards the door to leave, giving her one more quick glance as I was about to push open the door. She was still looking directly at me. My heart began to beat faster as I exited and walked quickly back over to Chris's car.
"Whoa, what's up?" Chris called as he caught up.
"Get in, quick," I said pointing and waving at the car's door.
We both buckled in and Chris quickly pulled out onto the road while I watched the entrance of the library from the passenger seat. I had to shift in my seat to look out the back window as the car turned.
"Seriously Laura, what's gotten into you?" Chris said as his eyes flicked between me and the road.
"She did not see your car. It should be fine," I said as I repositioned in the seat and put on my seat belt.
"Who are you talking about? It wasn't her somehow, right? Wasn't she—" Chris trailed off and his face paled.
"No!" I blurted. "Not the witch. Sorry. It was someone else. Some woman was staring at me, and I have never seen her before. She was older, over fifty at least, with auburn hair, and maybe a bit more brown than Sarah's hair, some gray, too? White blouse. Glasses."
"And she was staring at you?"
"Well, I had a strange feeling and then I saw her looking at me. Then she kept watching me as I left, too." As I spoke, Chris's face shifted to a frown.
"Are you sure you're not overreacting a bit?" Chris asked, his voice suddenly even.
"No. I do not think so," I said. I crossed my arms. Why was he not taking this seriously?
"So, we're good to go to the creek then?"
"Yes. Stay away from Kim's house though," I said.
"Of course. It would be a further drive, actually."
"Oh."
The rest of ride was silent as I thought about who that woman from the library could be. Hopefully, she was not looking for Kim.
-*-
We had looked around the clearing again and we even had taken a brief detour to look at the broken open silk eggs—or cocoons, a possibility which seemed less and less likely. I was pretty certain they were skin stitcher eggs now. Especially after one attacked Dan at Kim's house not too far from here. Chris and I had not said a single word as we kept watch for shades or giant spiders. I was not sure which of the two would be worse for us to run into. We searched and searched, looking around for anything we could have missed. There was nothing that interrupted our search even as the time we spent there stretched past an hour.
We found nothing.
"I think we should call it for the night," I said.
"Maybe if we wait until dark then a spirit will show up," Chris said.
"What are we going to do for another two hours? Staying around too long does not seem like a good idea. You saw how many of those spider eggs there were."
"You're saying there's more of those giant spider things?"
"At least nine. Judging by how many eggs there were," I said as I began to head back to the car. "Maybe ten if the one that attacked us was fully grown. Could be even m—"
"Wait. Stop," Chris said urgently as he grabbed my hand and pulled me gently back. "You don't understand. I need to do this. I need magic."
"No—" I started. Chris cut me off, "You're not an all-powerful guardian anymore. You need help and I can do that with a guardian." His voice lowered to a whisper. "I got abducted and then Dan killed someone because I was unable to defend myself!"
"Not the first time I have seen someone die," I said, clenching my fists. Aurora had many hosts and not all of them had survived the tasks I had given them. I had also used my power to kill humans the guardian spell had directed me to kill.
"What are you saying?," his voice rose, he grabbed my shoulder and spun me abruptly to face him. "You're not Aurora. You even said you're a new person. And I believe you. Watching someone die is still going to be fucked up. Even if it was to keep you and me alive."
"Chris there aren't any guardians here. We should—"
"I'm not done. You're only human Laura! We grow and change. It's okay if you're different from before."
"They are both me. I have not changed at all," I said, but I could not look into Chris's eyes.
"Maybe before, but you can’t be two people at once now. And I can prove it. We both know you've never done a marathon study session before. Luc would have just let the bad grade happen. Aurora's never been to school. That was all you. All Laura. Things are allowed to affect you differently than them."
"I said not to say their names!" I had to force my voice down to keep from screaming.
"Sorry," Chris said. I felt him squeezing my hands with his own. My eyes were beginning to cloud over with tears. I absolutely could not let myself start crying now. "What I was saying wouldn't've made much sense to you if I had said Laura and Laura. And it was important. So, I said it."
"Fine." I let that singular word hang between us for a while. I did of course understood why he said their names. I still did not want him to. I was Laura. I was not a guardian and not a boy. "I do not think we are going to find a guardian for you here, I am sorry," I said uneasily.
"Yeah," he sighed.
"Where did you get that line from?" I tried changing the subject.
"Huh?" Chris's hands fell away from mine.
"The part where you said 'we grow and change', you are not usually so dramatic," I said, forcing a laugh.
"Oh, it's from Leyline Rising," he said sheepishly. "I started it over from the beginning last night after you left. I'm only skimming it."
"So is the story a real thing that actually happened?" I said, grateful that we had left the topic of my past selves behind.
"No idea, but the main character and her friends get their power from 'mantles'. They talk to them. That's how they cast spells and learn about the circles," Chris explained.
"They always use circles?" I asked.
"No. It's a mix. I think the mantles are basically guardians with a different title."
"Do they have names?" I began heading to the car again and this time Chris followed.
"They don't have names like Corona does. The closest is when they get referred to by their elements: 'Frost', 'Fire', and 'Wind'. Stuff like that."
"You should lend me the first book in that series when you are done with it."
"Of course," he said and his smile returned. "And I'll let you know if my reread finds anything useful."
"Sorry we could not find you a guardian," I said. I considered putting my hand on his shoulder to reassure him but decided against it.
"I'll just have to come back at night," Chris said with a chuckle.
"Oh no, you are bringing all of us if you do that. Sarah, Dan, and me," I said sternly.
"Yeah, you're right. I will, relax."