Center of the Flames

Chapter 6: The Meadow

Chapter 6: The Meadow

Section Seventeen: Astrid's Perspective; These Ghostly Hands

My eyes flutter open and I stare at the ceiling, the cream color turning brighter as the sunlight trickles in through the translucent curtains, patterned with stars. Were those here before? It doesn't matter. I feel an icy cold breath run down my spine, as if... as if someone was there. But I'm alone. The sun is shining, heat filling the room, so what could it be? I once heard an old saying, back at home, before everything, that if you felt that familiar sensation of freezing fingers traveling down your spine, ghostly hands around your neck, someone is walking on your future grave. Maybe that's the truth.

I hear a rather passive aggressive cough, catching my attention, and a voice starts a sentence. It's familiar yet distant, like I've heard it before, but it was buried by a sea of voices, moving quickly but somehow slower than the rest. ...Someone's in my house?

I try to bolt up out of the bed and look around, but what ends up happening is a slow sitting up, my eyes moving towards a tall person with a black cloak, white hair, and white eyes sitting in a rocking chair, switching between looking at its nails and me.

"I'm guessing you didn't hear me, but what I said," it stands up, and starts to walk around, its head almost touching the ceiling of this little room under the stairs. "-was that you're finally awake. I've been waiting." This strange yet familiar being stares directly at me as I slowly shuffle back in the bed of thick blankets and pillows.

"Don't be scared, I'm here to help, It's not like I can read your thoughts," it says sarcastically. Can it? "But, I have to say you called this house yours about five seconds ago. It's not. You've been here for what, 2 days?" I feel my eyes widen, and my mouth starting to open. It can.

"But come, come, sit." It flicks its hand, and something starts to materialize. A short red, something starts to form. A cream stump, white dots- A mushroom. It just made a mushroom chair.

"Is this not your style?"

"It- No- Um," I sigh. "Yeah." I slowly get up and walk over to my new chair as this entity moves it in front of the rocking chair they were just sitting in, inviting me to sit down with it. I reach the chair and sit down, my knees reaching my chin. It tries not to snicker at me, but fails miserably as it sits back in the rocking chair, and I let out an exasperated sigh, and smile with this person, laughing quietly, but just loud enough so we can both hear.

I study this person's sharp features, pale, purple toned skin, green? I can never tell, haven't much time to work on my color theory. -The way the shadows highlight their jaw and cheekbones, their nose too. The way they contrast their dark, thick eyelashes and its white eyes and hair, dark gray eyebrows. Their eyes slowly flicker between hardly open and closed as they laugh, the curves in their thin, rosy lips, more life-like than most other parts of their face, parting to reveal its sharp canines and straight teeth, getting more crooked as they reach father back into their mouth. My eyes start to move from a scene that would make a great painting, to right behind its head, and it takes me a second, but I see something. My bat, and Hadeon's sword.

My smile drops as I stare at a small sculpture of our respective weapons making an "X", sitting on a light wood grain panel, attached to the wall. The light frames them almost perfectly, but a sharp, tilted shadow separates the weapons. The dark mauve shadow covers my bat, the vines and flowers fading more into the background, the cracks becoming more prominent.

This unnamed person looks at me with a questioning, and slightly concerned look on its face, which is surprising, considering how they acted towards me not even a minute before. It turns its cloak covered, fluffy white haired head to match where I was looking before. I try not to focus on that thing on the wall, and I direct my gaze towards the person now. It quickly shakes off any expression it had before, left with just a blank face as it looks at these mounted weapons, exactly to the tee of how they are in real life. How I remember them, at least. They're bent and broken in real life, but I always chose to ignore that when I thought about them. Plants and vines wrapped around my bat, covering the big cracks, I always imagined them covering their sword too. That's how they are here. What is this place?