The Butterfly Girl: A Star is Born

#99 Belligerent Forces

[Sophia]

Late one night, I was sitting at my desk doing some late night drawings. Headphones plugged into my phone that's been playing music for the past two hours. Every now and then, my mind drifts away from the page and into the memories of the past. I was a little concerned about Apollo and his dreams. We have been through a lot these past couple months and maybe all this training is putting a little too much pressure on us. I admit, even I was feeling a little out of it. I hardly had any energy to make food for myself. The battles we've been having against those creatures. Each of their appearances flashed back at me and I realized... that I should've seen this sooner!
I stopped my music and got out of my chair, walking over to my bookshelf and moving a couple things out from the bottom until I found a few old composition notebooks. Most of these were already filled with plenty of sketches and old drawings. They were supposed to be for school notes, but they never really told us to use them for anything so...
I found a few empty ones and brought one over to my desk.
The beasts and monsters that we've all encountered have had the same appearance. Dark, cloudy black bodies and those deep, red eyes. I filled the first few pages with an introduction and sketches of the Shadovians. I tried to be as accurate as possible and quickly realized that it kinda didn't matter since their body isn't entirely physical, since they are made out of black smoke or who knows what else. I was going to do the leech things from the lake and those bird creatures that Apollo ran into. But I don't remember the leech creatures that well and I haven't seen the bird creatures before. I wasn't sure if those blob things from the caves counted, but I decided to record them anyways just in case. They definitely weren't ordinary creatures. I left a couple other pages blank and started making a timeline of events and encounters of all the times we were attacked.

Okay, first is the first encounter I had with the Shadovians and then... all the other times me and Apollo ran into them. And then when the leech creatures that attacked Apollo and Teri. They also got attacked shortly after while I was stuck in the caves. Oh yeah! The Twins and I went out in the middle of the night and got ambushed. And then... Apollo got taken and we... failed to save him. But then with Teri's help, we found him and that was the first time we ran into the Shadow Boss. And then we decided to train and I got taken and Apollo got attacked too. And when I got out, Teri and I got ambushed by the Shadow Boss again. Aaannd..... Teri's kingdom got destroyed. That counts right? Oh wait, before we went back to Teri's place and I got attacked by those leech things too. How did I even forget that? Okay, then... the Twins went through character development and they got ambushed looking for medicine..... and that's about it. Right?

It was just a bunch of little doodles and notes off to the side, illustrating everything that happened. I didn't fill up the entire notebook which wasn't surprising, but I knew there would be more to follow. As I flipped through the pages, I began to think to myself.
There had to be something that could tie these events together. I started making a few adjustments to the doodles after I noticed some mistakes, but that didn't stop me from thinking. I began to theorize that maybe, the giant shadowy creature was actually controlling all the Shadovians and everything to attack us without confronting us directly. Maybe it even created them? They all had animal-like appearances, but the larger beast spoke perfect English. It recognized who we were. The only question was... why?
Why us?
Why try to kill us and for what purpose? I knew it was only a theory, but it kinda made sense. At least, I think it did. When I fixed the mistakes, I decided to call it a night and show my findings to Apollo.

The next morning, I showed him my notes and he began to theorize with me. I knew he wanted to argue, but he wanted to bring it to Teri and the Twins to see what they thought. We quickly got dressed and met them at the tree house.
"Hey Sophie! What brings you guys back here?" Teri asked as she pulled herself out of the little pond.
"Sophie's been making some notes, she might be onto something." Apollo said.
"What do you mean?"
"Come over here."
Apollo brought everyone over to the low table underneath the tree and everyone gathered around. I opened the book and let everyone look through it.
"Sophie, what is this? These drawings are... kinda scary." the Twins remarked.
"Yeah, I know. I tired to be as accurate as possible and that was all I could remember."
"Okay, but what does this mean?"
"I just made a thing of all the times we were attacked, because I think it's all connected."
"Um... I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means." Teri said quietly.
"Well... okay. This is just a theory, but when you look at these..." I flipped back to the sketches of the creatures, "They all kinda look the same, don't they? The Shadovians, the leech things-"
"Cardosulks?" Teri corrected.
"Yeah, those things. The blob creatures and those... bird things. They all have the same appearance, right? The black, shadowy bodies and those red eyes?"
"Yeah, how could we forget?"
"And then there's the other one. The bigger shadowy creature that we all saw."
"You mean the one that showed up when I found you and the Shadovians attacked us? That one?" Teri pondered.
"Yeah. All these other creatures look like animals, but this thing is just a big cloud of black smoke with eyes. And it speaks. It knows about us."
"Okay... but what are you trying to say?" Teri asked.
"Well, it's uh- I was just thinking that... uh..." my words began to escape me and I stuttered heavily. I sighed in frustration until Apollo spoke for me.
"She told me that whatever that thing is, it might be controlling all these other creatures to attack us. We don't know why or how, but it wants us dead for whatever reason."
The Twins leaned forward and Teri narrowed her eyebrows. I could tell some of this might actually make sense, but I stated again that it was only a theory. Teri flipped back to the page about the destruction of her kingdom and I really hoped my depiction didn't upset her.
"Sophie, I think you might be missing something."
"What?" I asked nervously.
"I know this is a record of all the attacks, but what about the other clues?  My Mothers room was all torn up and we found that book. What about that?"
"You mean the one we can't read because it's ruined?"
"Yeah, I know it's not much use. But what do you think that means? Do you think that creature was the one that did that and broke my Mothers room?"
"What if there was something in the book that could've helped us and it didn't want us knowing that information because we could overpower it?" the Twins thought out loud.
"But then, it would've known that we would go looking for it after... after your mother disappeared?" Apollo questioned.
"If that's true, I don't even know if that book had anything that could help us. I haven't seen it before, so I wouldn't know if that book had anything useful."
"But that thing did. It knew about the book and it knew where it was. It must've known about your Mother too. It had to have known about your home before it got destroyed."
Teri suddenly raised a hand to her mouth in shock.
"But that would mean... that thing has been watching us. It's been watching us this entire time. Look." Teri pointed at my illustrations.
"It didn't matter what we were doing or where we were, as long as we were in this forest. If we were all together or not paying attention to our surroundings, it sent the Shadovians to try and get rid of us."
Teri's eyes widened as she flipped back to the page with Apollo being taken and my failure to rescue him.
"It tried to go after us one by one, picking us off."
"Yeah, but it didn't kill me. It put me in a cage as a trap for you." Apollo mentioned.
"Exactly. You have the strongest powers and it tried to get you first because it knew we'd go after you. It did the same thing to Sophia when we were training. But instead of trapping us, it let Sophia wander around so that when we tried to find you, we would stay separated long enough so it would send those creatures after us to try and kill us before we ever found Sophie. And when you escaped, it went after us because it got tired of waiting for us to die."
The longer I listened to Teri, the more her own theory started to make better sense than my own.
"But we still don't know why. If that's all true and it is trying to kill us, then why? Why go after us? What is it planning to do if it succeeds in getting rid of us?"
"I don't know. That's what we don't know. If that thing is making those creatures to hunt us down, then the 'why' is what we need to know."