Reversal (The Dark Triangle #2) [ON HOLD]

Three

Who double-updated today?

Me!

Up there ⬆️ is a picture of Nya in her current state that I drew. I might have more art on my chapters now because my sister, traintocrazytown , has been drawing some awesome fan art for TBHN! :)

Welcome to chapter seven! Read closely because every sentence in this book is a clue to what's really going on. Just saying.

Nya's POV

"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three."

Three.

It's a number that has always held importance for me. As a child being taught how to smelt weapons in my family's blacksmith shop, I was always told to count to three when I held my creations in the water after they came out of the forges.

"Count to three, Nya. One second less and the blade will warp. One second more and it will be pliant. We want our weapons to be strong."

So I would count to three and bring out a perfect little dagger. Kai never understood how I did this; he tried to craft larger swords but got too impatient, dunking them in the water and ruining them every time.

I was always put in groups of three as a child. In school. Everyone else was in pairs and quartets, but never me. And when my teacher told me to count by two's, she ended up having a parent-teacher conference because I would say, "Zero, Two, Three, Four, Six, Eight...". My parents told her that it was just me, and that I was special.

I had two friends in elementary school, Charlotte and Jasper, and people called us the 'inseparable trio'. Until one day, Jasper moved away. And then, a few months later, Charlotte didn't show up to school.

I never saw either one of them again. I think something terrible happened, but my parents died before they could tell me.

And I liked to pretend I had a sister when I was little, a girl two years younger named Trinity. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to have two siblings instead of one. Kai, Nya, and Trinity. I drew pictures of us together (Trinity had brown hair and blue eyes. I didn't know anyone with blue eyes, I'm not sure where I got the notion from). I knew Trinity wasn't real, but I loved her like she was.

When my parents died, so did she.

I lost three.

My whole life has changed now. The only constant is three. Three tubes in my arm. Three hours to sleep at night. Three meals to stare at and never eat. Nine people in this house. Three who try to fix me. Three who know they can't.

Then the last three. A love. A hate. And something in between.

Now I count as I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling. "One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three."

I tap the rhythm on my left hand with my right. It goes in time with my heartbeat. When my taps are slow, sluggish, barely brushing my skin, a deathlike pace that seems frightening, that is when all is well. But if my fingers grow sporadic, harsh, quick slaps to the back of my left hand, that's when I know the shaking will start. After the shaking comes the silence. Then the noise, and the shadows, and the light. Numbness, pain, fear. Last is the dark, pooling at the tips of my vision with my tears.

"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three."

Luckily, at the moment my words are separated by commas, ended with periods. I picture them floating through the air, dancing around me, the curves of the words curling around my head like the purple mist that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck when I did the reversal spell. One, two, three.