Welcome back to a wonderful Writing Prompt Wednesday! Fall has officially come to my corner of the world and the leaves are changing color and falling. We did our first official “Fall” activity this last weekend: visiting the local pumpkin patch. Each of my children got to choose their own pumpkin and my eldest chose the biggest pumpkin in the entire place, I’m fairly certain. There seems to be a certain magic in the autumn air that encourages fantastical thoughts and definitely has been playing a role in this short story that I’m working on. We’re on to part 3 and I’m thinking things need to start progressing more quickly if this story is going to remain “short”.
If you’re new to Writing Prompt Wednesday, here are the links to the first 2 parts of the story, along with the original prompt. We’re just having fun with it and I’m just writing as it comes to me, all Pantser here, no Plot. 😉
https://thisbookbeauty.blogspot.com/2024/09/autumn-festivals-and-short-stories.html
https://thisbookbeauty.blogspot.com/2024/09/writing-prompt-wednesday-short-story.html
When we left our hero and heroine last Wednesday, Malia was having an identity crisis and was questioning everything she knew about herself and her life. Sebastian, bless him, was patiently waiting for her crisis to pass. . . Without further ado, Part 3:
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Sebastian didn’t seem inclined to share any more with me. His face darkened and went blank after I asked my last question and it was like a wall went up behind his eyes. Whatever progress we were making was immediately shut down and I sighed in frustration and exhaustion. For weeks I had been afraid to fall asleep, knowing that the shadows that haunted my nightmares would chase me through any dreamscape my brain created. The wild race through the forest, the freezing swim in the sea, combined with the adrenaline dump and my eyes were drooping despite my best efforts to remain coherent.
I struggled to keep my eyes open as Sebastian swaggered across the deck to the helm of the ship, how did he swagger on a moving ship?
Despite the exhaustion weighing heavily on me, I fought sleep with everything I had. The quiet crash of the waves did nothing to help me keep my eyes open. I grabbed onto the only thing on the ship that could hold my interest at the time, Sebastian himself.
From this distance, I could easily believe the tale he spun about being a vampire that survives on energy stolen from nature and other animals. He’s tall, broad, brooding, and oddly familiar. I think back to the way he talked about the Dark and how it chased us across centuries. Not just him, us. Centuries. That seems to be the spot where my brain refused to go, refused to process what he meant by that.
He’d known me. For a very, very long time.
I clambered onto my shaky legs and followed him to the helm where he was focused on the horizon with steady eyes. Am I ready to face, whatever it is that this man thinks is going on? Absolutely not. Do I think I have much of a choice at this point? Also no.
I stood there in the quiet, listening to the water and the wind and waiting. Simply waiting. Sebastian doesn’t seem the type to openly share but I desperately hoped he would, especially as my own identity felt further away with every moment that passed. Fighting the urge to wring my hands, I bit my lip instead and noticed how dry the salty sea air had made my face.
“You’re what is known as a Renascent,” his voice was quiet as if speaking the word too loud would summon things we didn’t want to deal with right now.
“Renascent?” An odd sense of relief and fear swirl together at the word. It feels right. It feels, terrifying. Like, despite the way it fits, it also has brought great pain in the past.
“Renascent,” he repeats, “an unusual paranormal with dream-walking abilities who can be reborn so long as another soul calls it back.”
I blinked at him, “there is a lot to unpack in that sentence.”
I blink again, sure that I must have hallucinated the small smirk that appeared on his face.
“Unpack all you want; we have a few days but the darkness will continue to spread. We have until the new moon if I’m correct.”
The new moon, right, that made sense, “What will happen if the Dark spreads?”
“Nothing good.”
Frustrated I growled at him and then stepped away, sinking onto the planks of the deck. I needed the distance between us so I could think and I desperately needed sleep. My brain felt too fuzzy to process anything else.
My eyes drooped shut and at last, sleep claimed me.
The forest of my dreams was quiet and dark. Shadows played tricks on my eyes as they formed and reformed into creatures of nightmares and terror. The trees blew in a phantom wind, joining the shadows in their awful dance. Before me, beyond the swaying trees, the soft glow from the kitchen light in my home. I swept through the woods, seeming to float through the mist that shrouded the forest floor, quieting the shadows and blanketing everything around me.
I peeked in the kitchen window of my home and gasped as I saw Sebastian and me laughing before the table, a set of antique plates in his hands, and two metal goblets in mine. His hair was longer, his face not as drawn or serious and he looked. . . happy. Both of the figures inside wore home-spun clothes of wool with tanned leather strings and cuffs. The other windows were covered by leather as well and the kitchen light was little more than a lantern in the center of the table.
I blinked and the scene shifted. The kitchen took on the visage of, what I could only guess was a ship’s estate room, a pirate ship’s estate room. I wondered if it was the same ship my living body was resting on. This time, Sebastian’s hair was short, save for a long-braided section tucked behind his ear. His face was drawn and exhaustion tugged at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Was that, sadness in his eyes? Something was broken there, something that I shied away from and looked around again. Where was I in this dream? He held up a locket and ran shaking, calloused fingers over the image held within.
From inside me, a voice seemed to shout at him, as equally sad and broken as the look in his eyes.
Another blink, another vision, and suddenly that darkness from my earlier dreams eddied around me, burning where it touched, turning the world to ash and ice. I screamed and screamed. An angry curse broke through the darkness and then Sebastian was yelling my name, slowly, ever so slowly pulling me out of the swirling darkness and back into the light of day.
He was shaking my shoulders, desperation warred with fury on his face. He sat back when I opened my eyes and tried to focus on him.
“Don’t scare me like that!” he nearly shouted.
I gulped, trying to wet my suddenly dry throat, “How many times? How many times have I been –” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word that was echoing in my head.
“I’ve known you almost 500 years and you’ve been taken from me three times,” he seems subdued as if the fear of a moment ago had sapped all of his energy. Absently I wonder how often he needs to take energy to stay upright.
“Taken from you?”
He laughed though I couldn’t hear any humor in it, “Haven’t you guessed yet? Malia, you’re mine as much as I am yours. Mine is the soul that keeps calling yours back. And yours is the soul that destroys me a little more each time it goes silent.”
What does being soul-bonded mean? What does that have to do with beating back The Dark that threatens their world? What does it mean to be Renascent? Check back next Wednesday for Part 4!
Happy Reading!
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