Alex

I walked out of the Morning Prayers meeting and headed straight for the lifts.

The meetings were a real pain, going over and over what we’d achieved to date, and then making sure that everyone knew, down to the smallest of detail, what they needed to do today.

That said, the meeting had gone well, even though I’d had to put that stupid guy from Live Support in his place again.

God he was arrogant, he thought he knew everything, and to top it all he was the most blatant sexist I had ever known. Given the society we lived and worked in today, I didn’t know how he got away with it. That said, he seemed to charm all the other women – some of them simply swooned at him whenever he entered the room. Why they couldn't see through him I just did not know. He was over the top smarmy, and apart from his ability to charm bimbos, he was absolutely clueless.

He’d been insistent that the project could go live a week early, and all those bimbos had just sat around smiling at him and nodding assent. And just because he was the most senior in the room, the guys had all just sat there, cowed and afraid to speak up.

In the end I had to list off the five reasons why there was absolutely no chance of bringing the delivery forward.

They all knew I was right, and by the time I was finished, I had made him look a fool yet again, and his clumsy back peddling had made it even worse.

I had done myself no favours I knew, but what did it matter. The guys, in the main, disliked me because I spoke my mind and did not let up until I was heard, and some just did not get on with me because I was a woman and better at my job than they were.

The other women just plain hated me because I was different, not one of the girls, strange even. At least that was what I overheard one of them call me. "You know the strange one, the one that doesn’t know when she should keep quiet."

Bloody cheek I thought at the time, and I told her so too, she was so very embarrassed that it had been worth being called strange just to see her face.

In a way they were right though. I was not strange exactly, different was how I would describe myself. For as long as I could remember I had been different from the other girls.

As a child I had never played with dolls or the like, and preferred my own company to others. Not that I got offers of friendship or company very often anyway.

My only true friend had been my twin sister, Sarah. We had been inseparable, and were both different; at least as defined by out peers.

My life had been devastated when she was diagnosed with cancer, and then passed away barely six months later.

Seventeen, that was no bloody age to die, she was just a kid. My mother had turned to drink, and dad, wherever he was, had walked out when we were both just infants, we had not seen or heard from him since.

Yes, I suppose I was strange. I liked what I liked, did not give a shit about fashion or trends, and said what I needed to say when I needed to say it and bugger whoever took offence.

Since Sarah's passing I was empty and emotionless. Cold, I suppose some would say.

Before then we had shared a passion – we absolutely loved fantasy stories. Stories of knights, wizards, elves, creatures of the darkness, anything that took us away from the real world.

We hadn’t really had a difficult childhood. We didn't have a dad, and that had set us apart a little, but then loads of other children were brought up with only one parent.

I suppose what marked us as different, or strange even, was that we did not seem to get on very well with other children.

From a very young age, we would both rather have a serious conversation with an adult rather than play with others our age. Adults, on the other hand, soon became bored with two young children pestering them, so in the end it came down to just the two of us, and our imaginations.

We both started off reading science fiction books, but once Sarah came across Tolkien, it was sword and sorcery from then on in.

We read copiously, played Dungeons & Dragons and made up our own stories and worlds. We even started our own book, a journal really, funnily enough about two sisters who battled evil throughout the world that we had created. We would individually, and together, add chapter after chapter whenever the fancy took us.

We talked through the overall plot, the world and various scenarios, but what went into the journal was completely haphazard, not at all chronological, but rather the story went wherever our whims and fancies of the day took it.

Very rarely did we rub anything out, slight edits perhaps, but in the main, if we decided to change something, then two versions would just be left there in the book.

I suppose we thought that one day we would re-write it all, and then it would come together as a coherent story. Even so, at the time we thought that what we’d written was brilliant.

It charted, somewhat haphazardly, the life and death struggles of a whole world against an all powerful demon.

Looking at it now, I could see that anyone without our knowledge and understanding of the world we’d created, would see it as a complete mess, and would struggle to make any sense of it at all.

Sarah said that most of what she wrote came to her in dreams.

Some mornings she would wake up with so much going on in her head that she would play sick and miss school, just so she could spend the whole day writing.

I would spend the whole evening reading what she’d written, and later we would talk it through, making changes here and there until we both agreed on it being perfect.

We even used a torch after lights out, to carry on into the early hours.

Those were the best sections, the ones from her dreams; they were so life like and vivid. When you read them through, her words came to life in your imagination.

Sarah believed that her sections were so vivid and real because, in her dreams, she actually lived through what we would eventually write about.

She said that in her dreams she really was the heroine, and was there in the story as it unfolded, with no recollection at all of the Sarah she really was.

Our writing styles were so very different. Mine was to just get the words down on paper as fast as possible, it was really just scrawl. Whereas Sarah had a wonderful hand – her words were small but perfectly formed, one letter flowing into the next across line after line of precisely spaced script.

The contrast was startling, but somehow seemed to work, as the change in style dictated the change in the story that followed.

My efforts were fast paced and action packed, whereas Sarah's set the scene. She told of the history leading up to an event, and described in detail those dark, scary scenes that led onto some horrific act of violence or a dramatic and heroic deed that saved the day.

When Sarah died the book died too.

Oh, I still loved that book, held it with reverence even, often read and re-read what we had written as children. But I never added to it, never would.

I suppose I was strange, it was in my briefcase now even – in all the years since Sarah's death it had never left my side. At that thought, slowly my hand wandered to the side of my briefcase, touched the leather, knowing that the book, our book, lay just under the surface.

Silly, really silly, I thought. But then after all, wasn't I the strange girl from Project Management, the one who bossed everyone around, and always got her own way.

The lift door opened and two men, obviously embroiled in some technical conversation or other, got out. For whatever reason something about the one guy caught my eye. It was a strange feeling, something about him teased at my mind. Did I know him? Had I met him somewhere before? No, I knew for a certainty that I had never seen him before in my life. And yet the feeling did not go away.

We passed each other as they exited the lift and I stared openly, I could not help myself. A part of me wanted to stop the guy and ask who he was, ask if we had ever met. But I'd had my fill of confrontation for one day, and so, very unlike me, I said nothing.

###

David

We were just getting out of the lift on the ninth floor, a few more steps and we would be in the meeting room, and I would be able to sit somewhere far, far away from Dwain. God, he was a bore. Lately one of his favourite topics was Cloud Computing, he spoke about it incessantly to anyone he could collar. If you were unlucky enough to bump into him twice in one day, you’d get it all over again.

And it didn’t matter that you might interrupt him and mention the fact that he had bored you shitless once already, he would still drone on and on until you either dropped dead or circumstance drove a wedge between you, like the heaven sent lunchtime financial meeting I was headed for.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I laughed inside at my thoughts of Dwain, pleased that my sense of humour, my sarcasm was beginning to return. I had been serious for far too long; it was good to be able to make light of things.

The message had set me back some. I had spent days fretting over it, constantly watching my back, watching for anyone or anything that could explain where it had come from.

Someone had put it there, and that someone had to have come from Ellas, or be somehow communicating with someone there.

But I could not fathom it out – who were they? How did they know about me, and what was the warning about?

The He in the message was my master, Dar'cen. It had to be, it could refer to no one else. But he was on Ellas and I was here on Earth, so how could I not be safe from him?

And if, whoever it was, really wanted to help me, then why send a message? Why not just come to me face to face? What were they afraid of? What were they hiding? Those were the thoughts that had occupied my waking mind and my dreams for weeks, and yet here we were a month later and nothing more, nothing at all – no clues as to who had sent the message and nothing since.

So I had slowly begun to slip into the normal life that I spent so many years praying for. I was still alert to my surroundings, but the message lay behind me, a part of the world I was trying to leave in the past. If another came I would deal with it then.

As we stepped away from the lift a feeling caught me, someone was watching, looking at me. We had just passed three women getting into the lift, but Dwain's incessant drone had stopped me taking any notice of them at all. I knew then that my survival instinct must have dulled considerably since my return – innocent as they might be, only a few months earlier, I would have taken them in from head to toe as they passed.

I would have to pay more attention, not let myself drift so far back into my old normality. Someone was watching me though, the feeling was real and I could not ignore it – less than a year ago, to do so would have in all probability led to my recapture and suffering beyond belief.

Aware of my, now much more civilised, surroundings I turned slowly back towards the women getting into the lift.

I caught sight of her just as the lift door began to close, and involuntarily gasped. The hair was shorter, and the clothes were obviously different, but there was no mistaking that face, the face in the middle staring back at me, it was her, really her – it was the woman Carthia.

The shock was instantaneous. Adrenaline coursed through my body as I became fully alert. Dwain was gone now from my world, all that existed was the woman in front of me and the doors closing between us. The human mind is a wonderful creation, because even as my body surged forward calling her name, my mind was analysing the situation, questioning how she could possibly be here, here on Earth. Her last words echoing through my mind, “Kill them all.”

###

Alex

As the doors were closing I noticed the man's shoulders tense, and he turned toward me. A look of shock came over his face, but in an instant it was gone, replaced by anger, fury even.

The doors closed completely, the lift jerked and began its descent, and then someone pounded on the door and a man's voice shouted, almost screamed, "Carthia!"

Then it was repeated again, louder, and the pounding continued. Neither of the two girls next to me were named Carthia, and then I thought, why would they be, it was not really a name at all was it.

As the lift continued its journey to the next floor, the man yet again shouted out the name and the girls burst into laughter as if the situation was hilarious.

Neither said anything to me, although they did give me the odd furtive look, almost as if whatever the hell was going on was my fault.

I, on the other hand, was cold all over, a shiver running through every nerve in my body, and my every hair standing on end. Something about him had caught my attention, something about him was familiar in some way, and I had wanted to confront him. Then he, I am sure it was him, had called out, no shouted out, that name.

That was what had made my hair stand on end, the name he had shouted. Sarah’s heroine from our book, from the world she and I had created, from her dreams, her name was Carthia.

###

David

I was too late, the doors closed as I got to them.

I pounded on the door and called her name again and again, until common sense finally prevailed, and I turned and ran towards the stairwell.

Dwain had a look of shock on his face as he realised where I was going. As I burst through the doors his voice call out, "Where are you going, what about the meeting?"

A small part of my mind knew that I should answer, but it was already too late, my body seemed to be racing as fast as my mind and I was already almost at the next floor. I crashed through the doors to the eighth landing but it was empty, the lift had already passed, and so I turned back into the stairwell and rushed on downward.

###

Alex

We reached the second floor in a few moments, only stopping once to let people on. But in that short time my mind had been racing – silly, silly thoughts, but racing with them nonetheless.

There was something about the man, and he had stared at me, I was sure it was me. And then, he had called out the name, Carthia. How could that be? How could he know that name?

Then all the What happens next games that Sarah and I had played came back to me.

One of us would be stuck in the middle of some part of the story, and would read what they had so far to the other. Then we would brainstorm and bounce ideas back and forth until we both agreed on a way forward. More often than not we would end up in fits of laughter at the over the top scenes we would hatch between us, but eventually we always came up with something good that we both loved. Just like those games we played, my mind now reviewed what had just happened, and what could possibly happen next.

My stock response to any situation since Sarah's passing was always pessimistic, if not downright negative.

In this case the lift would breakdown, we would be stuck here for hours before we were set free, and in the meantime some madman, who had entered the building illegally, accosting every female he met whilst looking for his long lost girlfriend, would have been arrested and carted off.

Sarah however, was the romantic. She would have said that the man, who was to be my prince, the one who had come to rescue me from this life, would be waiting for me on the other side of the lift doors as they opened. But this was no game, no fantasy story that Sarah and I were writing. This was really happening, the guy was real, and he had shouted the name Carthia, and pounded on the lift door. And, picturing the look on his face just as the doors closed, I knew that he was very, very angry.

There was a slight lurch as the lift came to a stop at my floor, and then, what seemed like a lifetime later, the doors slowly opened.

I didn’t have a clue what I really expected to happen, but I suddenly realised that I had been holding my breath. I sighed at my own stupidity, and walked forward through the doors into the second floor foyer. Hordes of people were passing through going out for lunch, the lazy were queueing up for the lift, whilst those in a hurry headed for the stairs.

My prince was nowhere to be seen. So much for sword and sorcery. Sorry Sarah, but all the magic went out of the world when you left it.

###

David

Despite how fast as I moved I was beginning to believe this chase was senseless. All the way from the ninth floor, and as I reached each floor the lift had already passed on its way down.

If she had gotten off at any of the floors between, she might well have exited the foyer before I got there. She could now be in any one of the myriad of offices that led off the lift foyers on any of the floors after the seventh. I was sure that I had gotten down that far before anyone could have left the lift and reached the offices, besides not many people took the lift for just a floor or two.

But I knew that as I descended the chances of finding her still in the foyer had decreased with each floor I reached. I was now on the second floor, scanning the faces in front of me. There were a great deal of people here, passing through to the stairs, and many of them were scowling at me, some voicing expletives or some such.

On my way down the stairs I had pushed passed a number of people, apologising as I went. But my frustration increased as the chances of finding Carthia decreased, and I had just barged through the stairwell doors to this floor, and in so doing upset a number of young lads coming the other way.

Well I was a freelancer here, and if they were that upset about being jostled a little, they could make a complaint and I would move on.

Finding the woman was all that mattered to me at the moment.

On the way down I had began to question myself, question what I had seen.

How could it possibly be Carthia? She was from Ellas, not from here on Earth. And yet if this woman was not Carthia, then who was she? A twin, a sister, another version of Carthia in this world?

The message – had this woman left it? But why would she? If she was truly Carthia, she would not help me. Or was this woman the one who I was warned against?

“You are not safe” Was she one of his servants?

The woman in the lift, whoever she was, had been looking at me, directly at me as the lift doors had closed. And, if my senses were still true, she had been watching me before I even turned toward her. Coincidences were for those who had not lived my life, for those whose lives were either safe or very, very short.

I had to find this woman. She held answers, I was sure she did.

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