It's been four weeks, exactly a month, since Scarlett Solaris took to the throne and has been leading her nation, Goldaria. She and her friends still hurt from the traumatic mental wounds inflicted on them during their captivity weeks prior, but the...
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✰✦✰ Chapter Twenty-One ✰✦✰ " Scarlett "
"YOU REALLY DOthink you're better than everyone, don't you?"
"What?" My voice trembled. "No, I-I never said that, I n-never—"
"Please," Mia scoffed, rolling her evil eyes, "you don't have to say it. I feel it every time we look at each other."
It's just a nightmare. It's just a nightmare. You'll get out of this soon, I repeated the mantra to myself. My mind had locked me in this disaster and I knew that was because my sister—The Shielder—had somehow tricked my brain into believing she was welcome here. Into thinking it was alright to take control of my mind. Meaning I was now stuck in one of the most depressing nightmares I'd ever had, standing across from the shell of what used to hold my sister in this garden.
She stepped forward and the world revealed its sick sense of humour when she was illuminated in the softness of the angelic moonlight. "I know you think you'll beat me, dear Scarlett. I know that some part of you actually believes you and your little friends are going to escape me unscathed—perhaps even that you'll beat me. But don't you think that's a rather bold assumption to make when I practically formed your whole group?" She laughed. "You all have a strange weakness. Each other."
I held my ground, raising my chin in order to feign a confidence I did not feel one bit. "Why do you keep coming back?" I choked. She tilted her head like I was some odd animal trying to communicate with her. "I don't understand you, you know. You say you loathe everything I am and became but you keep coming back. How many nightmares have I experienced with you now? Three a night for the past few days?"
Her smile didn't reach her eyes when she said, "I need some amusement while I prepare for war."
"War?"
"Yes, war," she repeated, revolted by me. "One you will lose."
"At least tell me when."
"The likelihood of that happening is about as much as the two of us reconciling."
And then she was whispering under her breath, muttering curses I recognised from times before where she'd hurt me. I gripped onto the bench behind me like it would save my life as the shadows arose from behind her, swallowing all remaining moonlight and taking my throat, stealing the breath from me until it all felt too real for my liking.
I begged for her mercy but all she offered was memories of us as children, ones where she twisted my behaviour and made me look like the bad guy. She made me watch our mother and father talk about me in his office like I was a situation to be handled.
"She needs to be put down!"
"Damnit, Ivan, she's a child, not an animal!"
"Do you not realise the damage she caused on the boat that day? Do you not see how she ruined any chances of us uniting our nation with Yuadam?!"
