"Why don't you just leave me alone?" I spit at him, the anger laced in my voice angered him and I loved it. I watched as he clenched his jaw, staring at me as his eyes darkened; walking up to me, soon towering over me making me realize how small I w...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
─── ･ ｡ ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───
F I F T Y F I V E
C A L A N T H A
I KEPT naming off the remaining couple of pages, my words growing shaky the closer I got to the last page. We hadn't found whatever it was we were looking for yet, and I was on edge, trying to read as clear as I could while thinking about Erised and Vasili, Mattheo, and on top of that, thinking about how I was trying to stay on task.
My mind was spinning at an abnormally fast pace, worse than usual. I couldn't comprehend much of what I was reading, and my train of thought floated off to some otherworldly dimension every so often before I blinked back to consciousness.
Pupils burned through the handwriting on the pages, one word at a time, and I turned another page. My eyes dragged across the top, fingers caressing the edges of dried corners, parts of the outlying pages partially destroyed and jagged.
I stared at the heading on the page, two words drawn onto the parchment in a sophisticated cursive. I sat and stared at it, Lana growing impatient beside me. Mattheo's soft laughter fluttered into my head, and a picture I had painted from a memory made months ago allowed itself to regrow in my mind.
This was it, my mind spacing off into some kind of false reality.
It wasn't the first time it happened. To be honest, it had become a regular occurrence as soon as I started taking the pills Lana had given to me. It was luring, the feeling of complete happiness to be wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, and all I had to do was close my eyes. When I opened them again, I would tell myself, I would be wherever I wanted to be. And it was always real.
"Calantha, is something wrong?" Lana placed her hand on my knee, her silk-soft fingers grazing across my patella, stopping at the top of my knee socks. The image of Mattheo rippled away as if the stage in my mind was made of water, and seconds later I was sitting next to Lana again.
I shook my head, blinking quickly as I tried to find wherever in the grimoire I was. My eyes found the two words again, and I read them out loud to Lana.
"Say the first one again." she tipped her head down, quill in hand, and she sucked on the inside of her cheek, adjusting her skirt with the nod of her head. One thing I had come to learn while working with Lana was that she was an expert in non-wand magic, being skillful with just the movements of her body.
I stared at the first word on the page and mumbled. "Soul."
She looked up at me, narrowing her eyes. "I don't think you're saying it correctly, love. Spell it out for me."
