by W. J. May
“I’m Lenore,” the woman said, “and I’m very pleased to see you.”
“Yeah, you throw one heck of a welcome party,” Atlanta shot back.
Lenore laughed. “I see you have your uncle’s sense of humor.”
Atlanta froze. “How do you know my uncle?”
“I know a lot about you, Atlanta Skolar,” Lenore said. “More than you think.”
“I know nothing about you,” Atlanta replied tightly. Except that you like to trap people and play games. “So you have me at a bit of a disadvantage here.” Atlanta’s hand tightened around the hilt of her dagger.
“That’s true,” Lenore said, smiling. “But all will be clear soon.” She looked back and forth between the two of them. “I never thought I’d see you both again, let alone hand in hand.”
“Again?” Darian’s voice broke in anger. “What do you mean, again?”
“Yes, again, my dear boy,” Lenore replied, unfazed by Darian’s outburst, “That, unfortunately, is a question to be answered later. I’ve been waiting for this moment for years.” Lenore took a few steps until she was standing right in front of them.
Atlanta’s hand tightened and began to pull her dagger out, when something suddenly made her stop. She was speechless, but at the same time her mind was racing. Something about Lenore made her fears subside, as if staring into her eyes made everything better. Like Lenore could stop Adelaide. Bring James back. Fix everything.
But that was impossible.
I know you. How do I know you?
She searched her memory for a sign, any conversation with James that might have brought up Lenore’s name. A picture, even. Anything. But no matter how hard she tried, the answer remained just out of reach.
“It’s nice to meet you. We’re sorry you’ve been waiting so, uh, long. But we’re getting out of here,” Darian said, his grasp on Atlanta’s arm tightening. He began pushing past Lenore, and just before he stepped into the stream of light gushing into the corridor he bumped into a stiffness of the air. It glowed green.
“I didn’t wait all this time for you to walk away now,” Lenore whispered, her words drowning in a tone of mockery and playfulness. “I haven’t said what you need to hear.”
“You have nothing we need to hear.” Darian glared at her. “Is that why you had us locked in that labyrinth?”
Atlanta felt his frustration. “Where’s Raul?”
Lenore held up a hand to silence them. “Relax, your friend is safe. He’s not a prisoner here, and neither are you.”
“And yet you won’t let us leave,” Darian said, at the same time Atlanta said, “That labyrinth of yours says otherwise.”
“That labyrinth was a test.” Lenore shrugged. “Each puzzle you solved was there for a reason. You were forced to work together, to use brains over brute force and magic.”
“You tampered with my magic,” Darian said, more as a statement than a question.
“Everlore tampered with your magic,” Lenore replied. “People do not know of us, of this city. It exists merely in the minds and hearts of its inhabitants, and those foolish enough to seek it out. It is but a fragment of time and space which, if not known, cannot be seen.” She paused and gazed deep into Atlanta’s eyes. “You know of it because of your uncle, and because of your connection to it.”
“My connection?” Atlanta asked.
“Stop,” Darian cut in. “You’re playing with us. If we’re not prisoners, let us go. Let my friend go. It was a mistake coming here.”
“On the contrary,” Lenore said. Her face turned into an expressionless canvas. She frowned for a moment, then turned back to Atlanta and smiled once more. “You came here to try to save your city, and I can help you. But first you have to follow me.” She turned her back to them and walked past the green glow of the invisible wall.
Darian turned towards Atlanta and squeezed her hand. She looked at him and, in silence, nodded. There was no choice. They followed cautiously and glanced at each other as they passed through the green glow onto the brightly-lit path.
The ground was a series of cobblestones colored green and blue, with red stones scattered in between. The stones glowed bright red whenever they came near them. They almost looked like rubies, and the intensity of their glow was blinding.
Lenore was taking graceful, soft steps, walking in front of them. Her neck and back were straight and her dress glistened with white sparkles as it draped behind her, leading their way to follow her.
Atlanta watched her carefully, unable to tear her eyes away from the woman. I know you.
The words circled in her head, over and over, but try as she might she still couldn’t find an answer. A part of her wanted to ask Lenore straight out, to put her confusion at ease, but something told her that the woman wouldn’t be quick with answers.
“It’s a shame you both don’t recognize me,” Lenore said in a soft tone. “Especially you, Darian.” She turned to face them, and her blue eyes seemed to glisten in the sunlight.
Atlanta looked at Darian, the deep frown on his face, and knew that he was trying to place Lenore as well. She could almost feel his mind at work, and just as she was about to ask him he stopped.
You recognize her, she wanted to shout, a spark of envy racing through her. She turned back to Lenore, watching as the woman’s eyes fixated on Darian and her smile widened.
Darian shuddered and Atlanta pressed her hand in his, squeezing to get his attention.
And suddenly it all made sense.
A rush of images flashed through Atlanta’s mind. Just as before, she was pulled out of her body, out of her current setting, and thrust into a world she barely recognized. She was back in the hut, surrounded by Darian’s memories, crawling underneath the table once more as she watched Adelaide make her attack.
She gazed at the young boy hiding under the table beside her, Darian’s blue eyes staring back at her yet not fully taking her in. She reached out to touch him, to comfort him, but her arms wouldn’t move. Darian’s head turned back to the scene before him, and Atlanta did the same.
She watched in horror as green flames licked at the walls around them, the struggle between Adelaide and the woman Atlanta knew to be Darian’s mother. She sat helplessly as Adelaide lifted the dagger and struck, and flinched when Darian began to scream. She was about to rush to him, to take him into her arms, when her eyes caught the face of the dying woman.
Bright blue eyes looked in her direction. There was no mistaking them.
Lenore.
Chapter 21
Darian felt numb.
How could he forget the face that faded into a sky full of dim pigments of red and blue in the night that haunted his childhood memories? The irony was that the memory had never left him. The memory of the scene of his mother being killed by Adelaide had always been the fuel for the fire that had been raging within him for as long as he remembered.
Although the memories never left him, and had always found their way to settle behind the curtains of his mind, the face of his mother and the face of Adelaide both remained a blur. A blur that kept melting into darker colors up until that very moment after he left the labyrinth. For then and only then did the blur begin to sharpen, and the truth unfold before his weary eyes.
Even his feelings didn’t know whether to crumble and fall from the mountains of sorrow and anger that they had risen above, or to ride with the winds and find a higher peak of a sturdier mountain. The blood rushing through his narrow veins gushed to his brain, and his nerves cast their spells over his bones.
He felt Atlanta grab him by the arm just as his knees threatened to buckle underneath him. He could only assume she had figured out the truth like he did. He had felt her touch, had felt the soar of energy racing through him, delicate fingers scraping at his mind and reliving the memories with him. He could hear her breathing heavily beside him, just as shaken as he was, and although he wanted to turn and look at her, to find some comfort in her gaze, he couldn’t. All he could see
was the memory, and the tall figure of his mother standing before him.
You died, he wanted to scream. I watched you die!
Lenore had started walking up a set of stairs. The ruby-adorned cobblestone path behind Darian and Atlanta suddenly shut together by another tree-wall that intertwined its branches behind their backs, leaving them with only one direction to follow. Darian could feel the branches against his back, stopping his retreat. He felt them prod him forward, as if guiding him to where they knew he did not want to go. His hand tightened around Atlanta’s, and he fought desperately to stop his body from shaking.
Mother.
A rush of emotions burst through him, a kaleidoscope of raw feelings that threatened to burst and engulf him. He wanted to scream and cry and laugh and shout, all at the same time. For the first time in a long time he was no longer the leader he had built himself up to become, but a mere boy hiding under a table while his mother was murdered.
Darian knew that the veil taken off his blurred mind was just the beginning of what was yet to unfold. He could sense the secrets that Lenore had yet to share, the wealth of information she would bombard him with, relentlessly, and he feared what it would do to him. And like a mystic sky obscured by clouds, the dawn of his past needed nothing but time to begin flirting with his consciousness.
What else? What else are you going to show me?
Darian’s eyes were closed, his face wrinkled as his mind worked in overdrive, burning inside his skull. The curtains of his eyelids were drawn above the paleness of his ocean-blue eyes, and they fell right on Lenore’s identical eyes as she climbed the stairway and pierced his stare with her smile and gaze.
The wind blew fiercely through the window, and the flames that rode the candles on the stairway flickered and danced. The warnings were blowing into Everlore, yet the reception of the signs that came from the outside was blocked by the endless rambling in Lenore’s thoughts.
“You were dead,” Darian blurted as his voice crumbled. “This can’t be true; you’re playing with my memories.” He opened his eyes, rage burning within them. “Cast your spells elsewhere, witch!”
“Oh, Darian.” Lenore shook her head. “What’s getting into you? Why deny? I’m only sharpening the blurred images that already cower in the corners of your mind.”
“You can’t be here,” he whispered. He projected a wall of disbelief into a screen of angry words, but on the inside the pieces were all coming together. He remembered the portraits of his mother that hung on the walls in their house in Lisbon. He criticized himself for never fixing the face in the paintings with the blur of the face in the memory of his mother’s murder. Yet he couldn’t take that memory for granted; the agony of every moment in that memory was a pillar of what built him. His emotions and beliefs were all just pillars mounted in the ground woven by the pain of his mother’s death. And if that was untrue, if Lenore was his mother, then the whole of him needed to be scattered and carefully put back in place.
“All these years, all the pain you put me through,” he caught his breath as he thought of his father and the sadness that had never left his eyes, “and you come now without the slightest shame or guilt. Grinning and flashing your existence in my face as if it’s the truth.” Darian’s words were like a knife cutting through the air, and he could see a spark of pain etch its way onto Lenore’s face. “Even if you are my mother, you’re only so by name. My mother died. She was killed by Adelaide. She’s the woman I’m seeking revenge for.” His voice resounded and rode the flames of the candles, bristling the howl of the wind outside.
Darian shook Atlanta’s hand from his and stormed up the stairs. Atlanta ran after him.
“The memories you have of me being killed by Adelaide aren’t false, my son,” Lenore said in whispers as she stood by the door at the top of the stairway.
Darian’s momentum ceased halfway up the stairs and he fell on his knees. He felt his mind wander again through the holes of induced visions that she cast.
“I was cast to a netherworld in the west that I turned into the beautiful paradise you see outside.” Lenore turned her head towards the windows that showed a vastness of green, shadowed by the grey walls of Everlore. “She stole a book that I was enslaved by, and so I became enslaved to her. But with the help of Marcus, and the elder Vampires, we were able to get the book back from her. Then she fled to another netherworld.”
Darian felt he was drowning in a gloom of uncertainty. Yet, in the midst of it all, he saw what he had previously failed to see. He saw himself in Lenore. He realized the purpose behind the visions that were awoken when Atlanta had touched him. Lenore had meant for all this to happen, and everything had been set so he would understand the truth. “Mother?”
Lenore opened a door to a dimly-lit room. As Darian stepped through the door, the far wall caught his attention. Three books glowed on a shelf. Their red, black, and grey bindings on the side of the wall flashed, caught by the rays of the full moon’s soft light through the windows, as if it too was drawn to the books. Darian couldn’t tell what time it was anymore. It was as if morning and night had somehow become one in Everlore.
“I’m fascinated by your silence.” Lenore stood in the middle of the room. “I know that words may not be enough. Pictures could be worth thousands of words, and dreams worth eternities.” She raised her arms and her eyes closed. The wind was blowing, but not from the windows; it was rather seeping through the pores of her skin and flooding the room. A beam of white light engulfed the room, and the only color breaking the whiteness was the blue of Lenore’s eyes as they opened and fell on Darian and Atlanta. “I owe you both more than a dream; I owe you eternities of them. And there is nothing better than a conscious dream to enlighten you,” Lenore whispered softly as the whiteness of her skin beamed ruby-red. “My son and daughter, brother and sister before me. Glide through this sky of truth and back to the moments that have for too long been obscured and hidden from you both.”
The white light engulfed them, pierced their skin and warped their minds. Darian froze in his place; beside him, Atlanta shook and fell to her knees. Her thoughts and feelings rushed through him. It was as if they were one, a sudden burst of epiphany coursing through them both, binding them to each other.
Brother? Daughter?
He could hear Atlanta’s thoughts as clearly as if they were his own. Upon hearing the word daughter, a word she hadn’t heard in a lifetime, her heart crumbled and melted into the heart of a newborn baby, wailing in disbelief at the world that their eyes were waking to. Voids within her began filling with an alien feeling of belonging.
Atlanta looked at Darian, and he could see in her eyes that sense of familiarity. He could see she wanted to deny it just because it was in her nature to deny before examining and looking for the truth, but she couldn’t. She could not deny that the moment her eyes met Darian’s, all as the words son, daughter, and brother were ringing in her head, she felt that the truth had been lavished upon her by some white light. And more was still to come.
Darian’s anger had ceased and the flames were mollified by the feelings coursing through him. He remembered the first time he saw Atlanta at the Dome. Emotions had gushed up and filled his mind, and had fallen like rain on his heart. He had confused the feeling with romantic admiration, yet something in him had told him that it was absurd to conclude the feeling as such.
But it all made sense now.
He knew that the heart was a compass beyond comprehension.
He knew that his heart understood what he couldn’t make sense of, that he and Atlanta were bound together, more than the simple connection between two people who had just met.
The world blackened and a single speck of light roamed around them. The blue speck of light was like a small balloon that grew larger, and inside it was a story to be unveiled before their eyes. Lenore’s voice began to echo from every direction, through the veil of white, under the sky of black, and in the valleys of Darian and Atlanta’s minds.
&nb
sp; Chapter 22
Mother?
The word echoed in Atlanta’s head, filling her mind with images she didn’t know. I don’t have a mother. She died. So did my father. All around her the white light flashed against her pupils; dim shapes of moving objects slowly took form. A hand grasped hers, and she didn’t need to look to know it was Darian. His presence comforted her, and although she still couldn’t grasp the concept that they were related she held his hand tight.
Lenore’s voice somehow sounded far away and at the same time a whisper in her ear. The dark images took form and Atlanta gazed at the scene unfolding before her, the colors bright against the white canvas behind it.
“I remember like it was yesterday, and in a way, it could be. Time has no meaning in Everlore, and memories take many shapes and forms. All convolutes into one, yet remains dispersed all the same. But nothing will change my memories of a happier time, a peaceful time, one when I was young and naïve, and believed all was good in the world.”
The image shifted and changed, bringing with it the scene of waves crashing against a sandy beach. A little boy prancing in the sand, bending down, splashing in the water, gleefully dancing in the sun. His blue eyes were unmistakable. Atlanta could feel Darian’s hand tighten around hers.
“Darian, my son. How bright your big blue eyes were, and still are. You had a smile that could brighten anyone’s day. You’d be sitting by the beach, eyeing the ocean as if it were a canvas. Since the day you were born, there was no doubt in my mind you had a big heart and an even brighter mind that was meant to cast serenity over this world.”
Atlanta could sense every emotion in Lenore’s words. She could feel the pain, the ache of a past longed for, one that had once been happy, yet was stripped away. Her heart yearned, as if that same pain had found its way into her soul merely through Lenore’s words. She shuddered, and Darian squeezed her hand again. She turned to look at him but he was watching the scene before them, his eyes glistening with unshed tears.