Valene:
Days of restlessness and worry had taken its toll. So, when I finally fell into hours of a peaceful sleep, I knew that it was because of my mate. Ares.
I hadn’t even noticed that I was what one would call ‘dead to the world’ until I began to stir to semi-consciousness, and even then, it was peaceful. Then, I finally opened my eyes.
There was darkness all about, and suddenly, I felt a foreboding feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“A-Ares?” At first my voice was low, hardly audible. “Ares?!” I exclaimed a bit louder than before. Still no answer.
When the thought of exploring my situation came to me, I hesitated. On the other hand, I knew that I could not bloody well stand there forever. So, with reluctance, I took a step forward, hoping that some shape would eventually come into view. Then maybe it would inadvertently lead me to a way out of this place.
Ha, if only I was so lucky.
As I continued to look around in hopes of some semblance of an explanation to my circumstance, things began to take shape in the darkness, but that’s all it was; sharp shapes in a dimly lit darkness.
Shapes of chesters, dressers, sofas….maybe a television or two. I was most definitely in a room of some sort, but I had no idea what room it could have been.
The longer I stayed in this place, the creepier it began to make me feel. What was this place? A room…in furnished darkness. I had never experienced such a thing before.
“Ares!” I called again with far more urgency than before. Where was he?
“He’s asleep,” a throaty soft voice suddenly sounded through the darkness.
“F-Fierya?” I recognized her voice immediately. “Fierya is…is that you?”
Was someone playing tricks on me? The only person that I imagined would have the power was Dronnigan and he wasn’t around? Right?
“Yes, Vale….” The voice became louder, far more familiar than before. I realized quickly that there was no trickery. That I was talking to my other half. “It is me,” Fiery answered.
Then, through the darkness, the silhouette of a curvy human figure surfaced, the light igniting the room in a way that only made Fierya visible to me and nothing else.
“Fierya?” I started to walk toward her and gradually a smile played on the face that I had never seen before.
Fiery’s form was not at all what I had expected to see in a counterpart. I had learned from my father that usually a counterpart would be physically met as soon as they were awakened. The first meeting was a melding of souls, so there had to be physical contact.
It wasn’t like that for me though. It wasn’t like that for any of us Gold blood inhumans. We never met our counterparts but we were immediately connected to them.
This was the first time that I had ever physically seen my other half and seeing her, and there was definitely a darkness in her beauty.
Her skin was pale like a cold death, her ears were sharply pointed. And the scleras of her eyes were as black as tar while her corneas were red like a gradually dying rose. Veins spread slightly from her bottom lid to the top of her naturally flushed cheeks. She had double-canines, one shorter than the other, but both visibly sharp in their sparkling white. I also noticed the tips of her pale fingers were an almost frost-bitten black, her nails sharply curved like a dangerous beast.
Her hair swayed around her, extremely long and flowy-so flowy that it almost seemed as though it carried its own gravitational atmosphere as it swayed protectively around her. Had I not a keen eye I would not have noticed the wings that would stretch very slightly and then rest again at her back. There was something about her beauty that was dark and almost overwhelming.
“I know that it’s a lot, seeing me for the first time,” she finally said in her ethereal voice.
“That’s a bloody understatement,” I murmured as I tried to accept the reality of meeting my counterpart for the first time.
Fierya chuckled. She was obviously amused by my remark.
“Why…” I looked around, “ are we here, Fier?” I asked her.
“We are here because we need to be,” she said. “And thanks to our hunk of a mate, we are finally granted the peace to actually be in this space.”
The thought of Ares being so near to me in the real world made my heart flutter and a heat rise in my stomach. It was still hard to believe that an inhuman as prominent as him was my mate.
“It is surreal, I will admit,” said Fierya, who had obviously realized what I was thinking.
Instead of delving further into a subject I wasn’t exactly sure that I was ready to talk about yet, I reverted to the topic of before. For the time being, it was more important.
“What do you expect us to find here, Fierya?” I asked her.
“We do not need to find anything, Vale. You just have to accept what is so that we can move forward.”
I already knew what she was talking about without having to ask her to clarify. Admittedly, it frustrating to have this conversation but I knew that it needed to be had.
“I told you, Fier, I don’t bloody remember that night-”
“Except you do,” she interrupted and then approached me closer. “Vale, there are things that you remember from the night of your death. We both remember but you are the one in control of this form and the things that we have access to. I do not have the authority to show it to you. I can only support you as you go through the measures of revisiting it.”
Almost as soon as my counterpart made mention of this so-called locked memory, a large door appeared before us; one steel and bolted in various forms of metal and the like.
I started to take a step toward the door when I thought better of it. “What….what is this?” I asked in a hushed voice as if speaking any louder would force the door to open on its own. I didn’t want that. Because deep down, I knew what was behind that door. I was just in full denial at this point.
“You know what it is, Valene,” cooed Fierya. “We both know what it is…and we both know what has to be done.”
It was quite clear, that if this truly was our shared mind and if I was at the helm, that whatever was behind that door, I wanted absolutely no parts of. Seeing the mental hoops I went through to keep this door closed, only terrified me even more than I had ever been before concerning that night.
“I….I know,” I finally confess. “I know that I need to go through that door. That I need to find out what happened that night but I….I can’t. I just can’t do it.”
“Valene, you are the one who begged me to show you the truth! You wanted this! Now you’re backing out when we are so close?” Fierya was obviously becoming impatient with me and understandably so. “You keep up with this mental gymnastics and it will cost us one another. You know that. Is…is that what you want? Would you prefer that I d-”
“No! No, I could-Fierya, I couldn’t fathom my life without you being a part of me,” I quickly clarified as the thought of being without my counterpart was perhaps the most frightening thing that I could think of. “It’s not that,” I reassured her. “It’s not you at all.”
“Then what is it?” she asked me. “Tell me what the problem is.”
“You already know,” I said. “We’re one.”
“You’d be surprised at the things you can hide from me, girl,” she said. “I’ll teach you about that stuff later. Right now, I need you to tell me…why you are suddenly deciding to turn back when the answers to moving forward are literally right in front of us.”
“I’m afraid,” I said without hesitation. “I…”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m…afraid that…whoever murdered me….a small part of me is afraid that…it’s someone that I knew.”
“Knew?”
“Know,” I corrected.
“You know everyone in town. It was once your job at one point,” she said to me then shrugged. “We both know that it will most likely be someone you know, Vale.”
“No, Fierya, I mean someone that I really and truly know,” I sighed and then I looked at my counterpart with concern. “What if…if it’s someone that I thought I could trust? What happens then?" I didn't even need her to answer to realize that this would make my life far more difficult than it already was. "I'm not sure I'm ready for what comes next, if that is the case."