“My lady? Lord Frare? What is-” Lillian asked as she turned around to stare at the back wall of the carriage, then back at them, “I don’t understand. I haven’t done anything to offend you, have I?”

Sorore said nothing, feeling a gut-wrenching sorrow that had no apparent cause. Her brother turned to her and the two embraced, holding each-other as they always had when such memories advanced. She could feel the boy, even with seemingly limitless endurance, shudder like a tree in a storm. Smells, sounds, and sights of some long gone person flickered across their perception.

Lillian’s hand was on her sword belt, already peering from window to window. She began to call out, telling Niche to stop the cart, to prepare for battle. The rocking of the carriage slowed to a stop as Niche swung down.

“What is it? What’s happening?” he said, sword already half-way out of his sheath, glancing around at the forest they were in. The sun had already dipped over the trees, the first shades of indigo and purple creeping across the eastern sky. Sorore and Frare cared nothing for this, in fact it felt distance, as if they were merely watching it happen. The twins were, as far as they were concerned, lost among the tangled roots and gripping branches alone.

They were stumbling around a different forest then, where the trees were thick and green, taller than than any they had every seen. The trunks stood so far into the sky, their trunks seemed to narrow into peaks. The roots were almost as tall as they were, so they ducked under and clambered over.

As they thudded across the forest floor, flooded with ferns and small bushes, tangling vines and great purple flowers, they heard a sound. It sounded like running water, but distorted and strange, with whispers and great occasional thunderclaps. Sorore reached up, pulling herself up a boulder that might be better described as a small hill, with complete ease.

Her brother was behind her, that she was completely sure of, but when she turned back, she saw someone else. A person, dark and tall, reached for her as the dream began to melt and run. The last thing she saw before she faded into dark was the ghostly remnants of eyes, sparkling like cut gems, although she found it difficult to tell what colour they were.

Then she was somewhere new, atop a great chasm, rocks drifting along plumbs of fog, much like waves on the ocean. Crackles of lightning arced within the banks below her as she lept from stone to stone. On the far side, a great waterfall steamed in the chilly air, only it was falling upward, coalescing into a great sphere.

The cliff side cracked like a storefront window pelted by errant stones, shards of water and mist and rock falling into somewhere beyond. Sorore fell with it, past a dizzyingly blur of other places and times, and into darkness. As the wind pitched past her faster and faster, she shut her eyes, closing off everything but the noise.

When she opened them again, there was nothing but a grey sky, clouds roiling slowly across the sky. Icy drops laid themselves down across her bare skin. When she sat up, she came face to face with the dark waters, coiling and wavering like a mass of dark eels.

The Gray Strand. Again.

It was not a welcome sight for her, nor her brother, who lay in the sand beside her.

He sat up, looked around, and whispered.

“Fuck.”

In any other circumstances, she would’ve smacked him for such language. But she understood him, his each and every thought here, wherever ‘here’ was. So instead, she took his hand and stared out onto the lethargic waves. The half-light of this place might’ve been beautiful, but it had a corrosive quality, as if it was eating away at the twins. The countless stranded shellfish, laying dark and dead upon the shore were not exactly assuaging that feeling.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The twins were silent in the face of this though. They’d been here enough to know that there time of their departure was not in their own hands. No method or trigger had ever been discovered by them to end it until they had seen what they ‘needed’ to see.

In a short while, or maybe it was a long while, for time was near impossible to gauge in such a place, something black formed above the water. Or perhaps it was always there. Memories to the girl were already slipping away, like so much fish on a listing vessel. Even as she realized this and attempted to grasp at the slippery things, they flopped and thrashed and vanished through her fingers. Did she even have a name? What was a ‘name’?

The shadow scared the ‘girl’, or maybe she was a ‘he’? Or maybe neither?

Still, it came closer and closer, right to the edge of the shore, were the waves left wet sand in their wake. There it stayed, seemingly unable to leave the waters behind. But it looked, it saw, and it focused on her - a terrible growl from deep underneath the world bubbling up through the waves to crash upon her ears.

“She is near,” it hissed, neither male or female, but dark and terrible in character.

“Who is ‘she’?” she asked, numbly, the words trigging a faint memory within.

“She, is near,” repeated the voice, setting the whole world abuzz, “find her.”

“How?”

“The hate. The hate will show you,” said the shadow, twitching and twisting.

From up the beach, someone called out to the pair of them, a familiar voice. A woman’s voice.

The sand fell away into flames and water and time, folding over and over as she tumbled through the layers. Scraps of other places traced their way up and over her body, like little bubbles escaping to some far off surface. Though she could not see anything, she felt the warmth of her twin’s hand, and clung on all the tighter.

Then she started forward, reality rushing back to meet her. Her twin let go of her hand to vomit across the ground, heaving at the sudden reemergence into the evening woods. The paladins were calling their names, trying to guess at what was wrong, to which they promptly shut up as Sorore raised her hand.

She squeezed her eyes shut, the waves of nausea threatening to crush her stomach. Finally, when she could take no more, she roughly pushed Lillian out of the way to vomit at her feet. A healer was promptly sent for, one of the several knights that had stopped with the carriage ferrying one from the front of the line.

Sorore tried to stop and speak, but was doubled over by another reoccurring of illness.

“Lillian,” she gasped, “help me stand.”

The paladin helped her to her feet, offering a scrap of cloth to wipe her mouth, which she accepted gratefully.

“My lady,” she said, “what just happened?”

“I know,” she said, gulping as another wave smashed into her, albeit less severe this time, “I know where we need to go now.”

“Was it a vision?” Lillian asked gently, as she stooped to help Frare. For his part he waved her away, and hauled himself to his feet with a groan.

“More like a nightmare,” he said.

“Get the commander,” Sorore said, a sense of genuine joy beginning to spark now that the nausea was finished, “he needs to hear this.”

He brother placed his hands on the side of the carriage, bracing himself and squeezing his eyes shut. She placed her hand upon his taut back, feeling the heat of his body through the cloak. Their scars yawned wide, both feeling the hot iron beads coiling around their bones.

“Just breath Frare. We’re almost through,” she said, with a edge of laughter that made some of the soldiers look between themselves.

Sorore, in the back of her mind, understood that the euphoria she felt at the pain. It was a bizarre, unnatural, bubbling thing that rose through to play at the edge of her syllables. The world seemed so full of colour, everything so bright and alive, even in the waning light.

“Can you see it?” she asked her brother.

“What?” he gasped as he struggled.

“See the hate,” she said.

For there it was, a cold cloud of grey, hanging above the trees to the north. A cloud that did not see or think, but hated none the less. The colour was sucked out of the world where the angry mist touched it, in dire contrast to the rest of the verdant trees. Tears were starting to run down her cheeks, rising in tandem with an absurd sense of gratitude as the pain snaked its way up her arms.

“Don’t try and fight it,” she said, not knowing how she knew it, but knowing it was true, “lean into it. Accept it.”

Her brother looked at her, confusion clear upon his face. Maybe he was wondering if she had been driven mad, but it mattered not, so long as he heard the truth.

“Come on,” she said, tugging him from his supported position, “we have to go.”

The paladins, who had been watching in increasingly concerned silence, stepped to block her path.

“F-Forgive me for asking, but where?” asked Niche.

He was afraid, poor man, wearing it plain on his face, for all the soldiers to see. Sorore, at this point, held his reputation with little interest. Lilian by contrast was looking on with no small touch of wonder, but more concern than abject terror.

“We have to go. Prepare your swords and armour. There’s much danger up the way.” she pointed to the woods the north.

“Why there? What danger?” said Lillian, her jaw tight, eyes piercing Sorore’s smaller body, though now had no effect on the mind of the girl.

Sorore cocked her head, and for a moment to the paladin, the muddy green eyes of the twin seemed to flicker a bright red and yellow, like leaves in fall. Something cold and hard pulsed it’s way up Lillian’s spine, nearly making her squirm.

“She’s close.”