1-Prologue
The moon was so bright I could see my own shadow running beside me.
Branches whipped my arms. Something sharp caught my ankle and I kept going, because stopping meant thinking, and I didn't want to think yet. My cheeks were wet. I hadn't even noticed when I'd started crying. I dragged my sleeve across my face and it only made things worse, so I let it be.
My legs gave out before my lungs did. I stumbled against a tree, one hand flat on the bark, and bent over until my breathing slowed down enough to hear the jungle again. Insects. Something rustling far off. My own heartbeat in my ears.
I swung the backpack off my shoulder and dug around until my fingers found the water bottle. The first sip was warm and tasted like plastic. I drank anyway.
Ten minutes ago I was in the house. No wait it had been hours, but my body hadn't caught up with that yet.
I'd heard them through the wall that afternoon. My mother's voice, bright and careful, the one she used when she wanted something. My father laughing about a man I'd met twice, the one who always stood too close at dinners and called me "a good investment" like it was a joke. They were talking numbers. They were talking about me like I was a car with a price tag. They were deciding an arrange marriage against my will with that old, fat, bald man. Eww... I am just 19 and virgin. I am not ready for marriage.
I didn't cry then. I packed. Clothes, my charger and phone, the little cash I'd hidden inside a book. A new set of knife,spoon and other kitchen things that i had bought during my one year cooking and bakery classes. My hands were steady, which scared me more than anything.
My father came up the hall just as I zipped the bag. He started in on me before he'd even reached the door, and I picked up the first heavy thing I could reach, the metal weight he kept next to his gym stuff, and swung it at his head. He dropped without a sound. My mother screamed my name from the top of the stairs and grabbed for my arm, and I stuck my foot out. She went down the whole fell down the stairs. I did it and didn't feel any regret.
I walked down the stairs and stepped over her bag on the way out.
I waited for the guilt. It's been hours, and it still hasn't come because I wasn't. I screw the cap back onto the bottle and tell the dark that out loud, just to see how it sounds. "𝗜'𝗺 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘆"
It sounds true. That's the strange part.
I look around properly then, and my stomach turns. There's no road. No lights. Just trunks and vines and the same silver patches of moon on the ground, over and over. I turned in a slow circle. Had I come from the left? The right?
I picked a direction and went.
The leaves ahead were huge, each one wider than my sillhoute, hanging in a heavy curtain. I shoved them aside with both arms, and they let go all at once walked ahead and then stopped walking at what was in front of me a huge building.
Stone, dark with moss, steps climbing up to an open doorway as if someone had been expecting me. Moonlight lay across the stairs like a rug.
I should have turned around. Instead I went up one step, then another, my sneakers scuffing loud against the stone.
Inside it was a long gallery with pillars on either side, and it was quieter than outside, which didn't make sense. I passed one room, then another, then a third, glancing in at empty floors and cracked walls. I wasn't looking for anything. I was just walking.
Then I reached a door and my feet stopped on their own.
Nothing about it was special. Same stone, same dust. But something behind it tugged at me, low in my chest, the way you feel someone staring at the back of your head. I put my palm on the wood. It was cool. I pushed.
Green. That was the first thing. The whole room was green with plants climbing the stone walls, spilling from stone pots, curling around the window frame. Leaves that looked wet, like someone had watered them that morning. I walked in slowly, my mouth a little open. This place was ancient. Nothing should have been alive in here. Who was feeding them?
I touched one of the leaves. Soft. Real.
Further stood a statue, a woman carved from pale stone. She had an voluptuous figure with tiny bloat belly almost flat. Her huge bossom naked and it's mount were covered with furr pasties and she wore a fur skirt which hugged her curves,if she was real any man would be drooling over her, then again i am no man. She has four hands, one had a pot and a child was carved on it, symbolizing fertility,in her second hand had a wapon and in third had a shield and her fourth her hand was in front of her. My eyes slid right past her to what lay in those hands.
A crystal ball. Baby pink, round and smooth, no bigger than a grapefruit, same size of peach?
I took a step toward it before I realized I'd moved.
Something flashed in the corner of my eye and I turned my head toward the window. A shooting star was dropping across the sky, and below it the pond outside held two lights in its surface, the full moon and the star's reflection sliding to meet it. They touched on the water.
Behind me, the room went bright.
I spun around. The crystal ball was glowing, pink with white threading through it, getting stronger every second. I couldn't move. I couldn't even lift my hand to shield my eyes. The floor tilted a little, and my head went light, and I shut my eyes without deciding to.
When I opened them, I was still standing in the same spot.
The light was gone. And the crystal ball was in my hand. I was holding it against my chest like something I'd been carrying for hours.
The room looked the same. Plants, statue, window. Everything was where it had been. That was what made my skin crawl. I backed toward the door without looking at it, then turned and ran, down the corridor I remembered.
Except nor it wasn't the corridor neither night time.
I came out into air, and sunlight, and people. So many people, standing in rows, and behind them low houses made of stone and mud and thatch, nothing like anything I had ever seen. Smoke drifted from somewhere. A child's face stared up at me from between two adults' legs.
I turned and looked back at the building I'd just run out of. It wasn't the temple. It was another one, smaller, with a different shape, a different color of stone.
Their were people in weird outfits. Every face was turned to me. Mouths open. A woman near the front had dropped to her knees. They'd been facing this doorway, I realized. They'd been praying to whatever was inside.
And I'd walked out of it, from nowhere, with a glowing pink ball in my hands. I stood there with my chest heaving, my backpack still hanging off my shoulders and for the first time since I left home, I had no idea what to do next.
~~~
