Amentia

Chapter 31 - Someone else's emotions

After they finished the song, it was time to wash the dishes and rehearse for the play they'd chosen for the day. Nina left the caravan and went to the woods with Adam and Azariah to put to the test the ideas they'd had for special effects. Zoe went back upstairs with Maylin: the room was practically finished, but they still had to piece together the three beds. The rest of the girls had time off. Nati went over to Meiko and asked her if she was willing to talk to her about the incident of the night before. She agreed, but she asked that Anna be present. So they went outside and sat under the shade of a tree, a bit far from the caravan so they could have some privacy.

"It was the same thing we saw in the human village, wasn't it?" Nati asked first, just to be sure. Meiko nodded. "Can you tell me what it felt like?"

Meiko thought for a minute, trying to remember the negative emotions without feeling them again. Anna grabbed Meiko's hand on her knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. The warmth of Anna's skin was more than enough to help her stay calm to continue the conversation.

"At first, it was in the back of my mind. Bad thoughts, sadness, anger, nothing too unusual" Meiko said quietly. Anna and Nati refrained from commenting. "But then it just... took over me. And it felt like a sickness that... fed off my own sicknesses. Does that make sense?"

Nati's expression puzzled and she took a moment to think it over.

"Zoe used the same word," said Anna, a little surprised by the coincidence. "The first night we were here, she told me there was an invisible sickness in the earth, and we're assuming it's connected to the black thing that attacked the Temple."

Nati nodded; she'd already wondered if the two events were connected. A coincidence like this was too unlikely.

"What did this sickness do to you?" Nati asked Meiko with a serious expression, taking mental notes of everything.

"It turned my own thoughts against me and made them stronger, harder to ignore. It didn't let me think anything nice," Meiko continued, focusing on Anna's hand again and feeling comfortable and safe enough to open up about her feelings. "I wanted to... kill Anna... and then myself. I would have if she hadn't managed to pull me from the edge."

"You were already fighting it," Anna interjected. "You could've just not listened to me. But you chose to."

"That's what's been going around in my mind," said Nati enthusiastically but keeping her expression serious. "You came out of it more or less unharmed. How did you do it? It didn't seem like the people in the village had any choice in the matter. They didn't even seem to be aware of their condition."

Meiko thought about it for a moment, but couldn't come up with an answer.

"Maybe it's because we've been exposed to it for a lot less time than everyone else," ventured Anna.

That made an incredible amount of sense. If there was a disease in the ground, they'd only been walking on it for a week; their symptoms wouldn't be as strong as of those who had been living in Amentia for years.

Nati asked Meiko if she could elaborate a bit more on what she felt during the episode.

"I felt my energy changing throughout the day; I could feel it getting infected. It was like fighting against the ocean. I felt so angry..." Meiko paused and frowned, thinking back on the emotions she'd experienced, remembering more details now that she had some perspective, and trying to make sense of them. "But I had never been angry like that before. For a moment, I was angry at life itself. I felt alone, deserted, resentful." She paused again, feeling more certain about her feelings. "My anger is different; it doesn't feel like that. Some of those emotions weren't mine."

Natalia had to lie down on the ground to even begin to process what Meiko had just said, knowing she wouldn't say something so unusual if it weren't true. "Whose emotions were they, then? What the hell is going on? Ugh, my brain hurts."

Nati had a mini mental breakdown trying to understand how someone can be infected with someone else's emotions and then turn violent from their own negative emotions, which became erratic after said infection. That, plus the repeating specific nightmares they'd all been having, plus the stuff that had happened at the Temple with the Seers stabbing themselves in the eye. It bothered her that the only answer she could come up with was something like black magic. It was too vague. Had someone put a curse on the entire land? If that was the case, why hadn't the entire population gone mad at the same time? If it wasn't a curse, if it was some kind of natural magical disease, how did it get passed on? Did you have to be compatible with it to be infected? Could you be immune to it somehow? Is that why some people had only gone into a coma while others went crazy? What was the logic of it? It had to have logic, even in the parameters of magic.

Anna listened to the wind and knew Nati was asking herself the right questions. She would figure everything out eventually. Maybe she was the only one in this world who could; she was just that stubborn. The wind seemed certain that the knowledge Nati was seeking would ultimately find her. She was on the right path. Hopefully it wouldn't drive her crazy in the process.