Sorcha's Secret World, Part one.

Chapter 8, A little help from my friends.

"Mom. Mom! I think it's working!"

Jessie? I opened my eyes. Everything hurt. It wasn't Jessie, it was Kyra. I slowly sat up. I wasn't in the cave anymore, but outside the mine. Above the mine, Filth was circling in the air like a black tentacled tornado. Kyra was sitting next to me, and Ami was standing nearby with her eyes closed and her hands lifted up. A raven sat on a tree stump nearby.

Ami stopped chanting: "Oh, I didn't actually expect that. I thought you were dead."

The bees must have whisked me away, meaning that the cave was considered too dangerous for me to awaken there. That was bad news. The good news was that the world was still in one piece. Beaumont, no Loki, had not finished what he had started yet. There was still time!

"We got here as quickly as we could," Ami explained, "I could feel the tremors in my head. It is all coming undone..."

"I have to stop it, I have to get back in!" I said.

"Yes, we're going to fight it... right mum?" Kyra asked.

"I don't think so," Ami said. "It is like a tapestry being undone, and I don't know how to fix it."

"Well, somebody must know?" Kyra said in exasperation. "We can't just sit back and watch the world end?"

I agreed with Kyra, but even if I got back in I wasn't sure how I would be able to stop Loki or fix the damage to the Gaia engine.

"Joseph would know. He was always the one who knew what needed to be done."

"Let's go and see Joseph!" Kyra and I said at the same time.

It wasn't that easy. Ami and Red hadn't spoken with the rest of the tribe in years. Ami was convinced that they would not be welcome, that they'd be turned away. Their family issues weren't my problem right now. I had a villain to stop, a world to save. And while Kira and Ami argued, I started running towards the Wakanabi trailer park. The raven followed.

The Wakanabi trailer park was overshadowed by a huge building site. Before the fog came construction on a casino had started from the look of things. Multiple trailers surrounded a building made from wooden logs that suspiciously resembled a tourist shop.

The people at the trailer park were all armed, but when they saw I was part of the living and not of the living dead, they let me pass without a word.

"I feel terrible for what happened to Ami, for what happened to our whole tribe," Joseph was soft-spoken, his old eyes looked sad.

"I don't blame her for not trusting us anymore. Her father was killed, did you know that? He stood up for our beliefs, he tried to stop the miners from digging too deep.

Some of us, we thought he was being unreasonable. That he was asking for trouble. That blood would be shed. And it was. Foreman put a bullet in his head, emptied the rest of his gun at us."

Joseph shook his head.

"The foreman was yelling like a man possessed, like something dark was inside him. His eyes were burning, his shadow... was twisted."

Joseph rubbed his eyes.

"After that, there was a rift in the tribe. Some left, others, like me and Red, stayed behind, but it could not be mended. It's a terrible thing, to have to choose between the people you love."

Tragedy permeated the island as much as the darkness did. Or perhaps it was merely cause and effect.

"I took the wrong path, and now it might be too late. But we have to try. Something in the land has been displaced. An oath has been broken. If we had kept our word, if we had maintained the wards that protect the mountain, this would not have happened."