Luminous

70 - Overridden

Lord Hadrian's deafening snores drowned out the song of midnight crickets when Heloise ducked inside. Using the noise as cover, she let the tent's flaps fall with a clap, heaving a sigh of relief with utmost abandon.

She looked around and scanned the tent's layout, then stuffed her mouth with her first to stifle a scream of fright.

As she lay on her mattress in the near solid darkness, Meya's eyes remained wide open—two disembodied orbs as glowing and acid-green as the third revolving in the water bowl before her.

Yet, the dragon girl did not twitch a toe nor finger, and Heloise soon calmed, reassured by the continued drone of Coris's snores. If Meya wasn't stirred by this, then nothing would wake her.

As her frenzied heart slowed, Heloise filled her lungs with a deep breath and surveyed the tent once more. As her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, darkness precipitated into silhouettes. She saw the rigid lines and sharp corners of chests and crates, and the shapeless, yielding forms of bundles of clothing.

She would need more to find what she had come for, however. With trembling fingers, she reached for her bracelet and tugged it off her wrist.

The effect was immediate. It was as if the light from her eyes had illuminated her path. Patches of darkness became riddled with gleams of silvery-gray from polished metal. Black morphed into the muddy brown of wood and the dull purple and red of carpets and blankets. Coris's and Meya's pillows, once stark white in the light of day, shone like silver, smooth against the coarse pattern of their hay mattresses. And there, just beyond the head of Coris's mattress, sat the familiar rectangular chest.

How thoughtless.

She crept towards it, one tiptoe after another. She knelt down behind Coris and tugged the chest towards her, careful not to snag it on the wrinkles of the carpet. With her thumb, she nudged up the clasp and tipped the lid over. On the wooden bed, a lone eye glowed in its hole.

Heloise knew what the obvious course of action would be, and she knew that Coris would have foreseen it. Fyre, he would have foreseen all possible courses of action she could take. However, she doubted he would have fathomed how far she was willing to go for her mission.

Heloise's hand shivered as she raised it to her eye. She circled the region, searching for the sweet spot as she recalled how Meya had done it, back at the Pearly Falls. Her finger stumbled over a pea-sized bump, barely half an inch from the corner of her eye. As she struggled to relax against mounting anxiety, she strained her eyes open as wide as her muscles would allow, and pressed the trigger.

A squelching, nauseating pop. A lukewarm, slimy weight dropped onto her palm. Like parchment sliced apart by a falling blade of obsidian, half of her world blinked out. She could no longer see the snoozing couple to her left without turning.

Swallowing the urge to vomit, Heloise wiped her freed eye dry and deposited it in one of the holes in the chest. She picked up the other dragon's eye held it against the gaping hole where her own eye had been.

After a few fevered breaths dogged by hesitation, she pushed it in.

A deluge of memories overwhelmed her. She was Persephia. Yet, he was also Evander. She had closed her eyes to welcome what should have been a lonely, peaceful death on a deserted battlefield, only to open his eyes to a stranger's life in a body that was not his.

No! I'm Persephia!

Take it out. Now! While you're still in charge!

She slapped the heel of her hand onto the button. Then, she was back in control once more. Evander's eye lolled on the carpet, its green glow hazy behind a film of clear slime. Yet, she could still sense foreign memories in her, threatening her reality. What was hers and what was another's, she was no longer as sure as she used to be. Just as she had feared, his memories had evaded her remaining eye, and she could no longer bear it.