𝗡𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗘 , sophiana

𝟬𝟰

THE SECOND SHE STEPPED FOOT IN THE HOUSE, EDALINE AND GRADY WERE OMINOUSLY WAITING FOR HER AT THE TABLE. Sophie walked down the stairs awkwardly, tugging one eyelash out cleanly and letting it drift to the floor. "Come here," Edaline said, and she enveloped Sophie into a tight hug.

"Am I going to see a therapist?" she mumbled once she pulled away from the embrace.

"What's that?" Edaline asked, frowning.

"It's like someone who tries to help other humans who are suffering from traumatic events or hard things coming in their lives," Grady explained. Being an Emissary, he naturally held more knowledge on the topic of humans than the average elf did.

"Oh," Edaline said. "Well, I don't think we have an elf equivalent. . . Usually circumstances where we'd need a therapist doesn't really occur." She stared at the table, and Sophie guessed she was thinking about Jolie.

"It's supposed to be a perfect world, but it really isn't. Humans had it right with the therapy idea," Grady said. "At least instead of everyone expecting everyone to be all right, humans had some people who spent their whole lives trying to help others. That's more than you can say for us."

It always felt strange for Sophie to hear her parents talk about humans like that, considering she was raised with humans. But she was slowly getting used to it.

"Yeah," agreed Sophie.

"So, Grady told me about what happened today," Edaline said quietly. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Sophie shrugged. "I guess I'd been shoving it to the back of my mind all this time and I just didn't wanna acknowledge it."

"Well, you can talk to us anytime," Edaline said. "Don't feel as if you need to bottle it up. That never works; it always makes things ten times worse."

"I know," Sophie said. Her parents gave her another hug and she closed her eyes, fathoming that the slight frostiness she sensed inside of her chest was just after tremors from everything that happened today.

She hadn't paid much thought to it, but the cold continued to nip at her insides, like a breeze on a winter day. It was so faint, like the heartbeat of a dying man on his deathbed, his final breath steaming the skin around his frigid lips that were quivering with each palpitation that quaked his unmoving body.

And though it screamed distantly, the cry of alarm went brushed aside by the young girl.

* * *

"Sophie!" Amy's face blurred in front of her, morphing through various stages. From when she was an annoying preteen, to the years she'd lived without Sophie, her mind wiped clean of the life she'd led just before the Washers made it seem like her family belonged to three people. And finally, to when Sophie discovered her alone, her shaking figure hiding behind the blinds of the two story window from the Neverseen, who had taken her family.

"Sophie! You need to save me!" She pleaded, and then her face turned blank.

Her eyes, her eyebrows, her lips, her nose— every single characteristic that made up Amy's face had vanished.

Marring her empty canvas of a face was now deep lines, blood gushing out the sides. Slashing at her face with an invisible blade, each stroke appeared mere seconds after the last.

"Amy, no!" Sophie screamed. "Stop!" But the blades kept cutting into her skin, slicing faster and faster, the darkness swallowing her whole. The last thing Sophie heard before Amy tipped backwards into the void was a scarring laugh echoing itself from Amy's throat.

And then she fell, too. On her fall, she saw many discarded bodies hovering beside her, limbs splayed out as if they were floating in the airless vacuum. Sophie wanted nothing more than to leave this nightmare of a place, which she deeply despaired to herself that it was just a dream. Some horrific, fucked up dream with traumatic flashbacks stemming from her subconscious. Maybe it wanted her to face the music. But Sophie couldn't, she wouldn't— make herself live through these horrors again.

And yet here they lay.

Sophie continued to fall, passing dead humans from Vespera's experiments, their eyes gouged out with a black glow emanating out of their sockets, rimmed with a sickly green color that Sophie suspected was not the usual glow corpses were supposed to have.

And then there was Umber's body floating in the goo of the troll nest, her lips spread in a final moment of victory, as if she was content with the lives she'd destroyed throughout her livelihood and fluid satisfaction that she had built enough of a domineering platform. The life that now shook before Umber's unalive corpse was trembling at the scarily accurate portrayal of Umber in her final minutes— and with each horrific face Sophie saw, more tears flowed freely down her face.

"Please! Make it stop! Make it stop!" Sophie howled. Begging— for these ghoulish images to disappear from her mind. To stop tormenting her tonight. She'd thought it was over.

But how it only re-emerged.

It wouldn't stop. Of course it wouldn't. This was just the beginning of what Sophie would find to be not only her prominent past, twisted into a nefariously sharp control that had Sophie hanging by the strings— but soon to her future.