NOTE: the last chapter was in Lilith's POV, but this chapter is in Mist's POV. tn by @fog-star STORY: I am Isleen’s sister. I am younger than her, but nobody knows the exact amount of time between us. All we know is that we’re twins. We don’t know if it’s minutes or mere seconds between our ages—or days. Nobody knows because we never grew up together. We were separated at birth. I was kidnapped, and Isleen was traded away. If i didn’t have the ability to see a person’s past, present, and possible futures at will, i might have never found her, and she would never have believed me if she didn’t have her type of power. Every one of me and Isleen’s type has magic. There are our elements of magic (air, water, ice, fire, earth, and the forbidden elements), each element being controlled by one enchanted gem. Those gems are locked away to where only the current rulers and the kingdom’s physician know where they are so that anyone doesn’t get any ideas about stealing the gem and controlling that element for themselves. Whenever a new one of my kind are born, the exact enchantment in those gems is triggered, which causes those stones to automatically talk among themselves in some way that even magic cannot explain, and they keep talking until they decide what magic that child will get, which can take anywhere from seconds to a few months, depending on how many they currently have to decide for. I have a forbidden element—Time. I am only trusted because i obviously use it for good and to help our queen make decisions. Isleen has a forbidden element as well, but hers is the most dangerous element of all, and it overpowers even the Nature elements as well as the other Forbidden elements. She trusts me not to tell anyone what it is or that she has it. She is already not trusted because she is an outsider of the kingdom. She doesn’t need violence, too. Others with her element have changed everyone’s feelings within the kingdom, making everyone hate one-another to the killing point. Sometimes, i will notice small flashes of yellow in her eyes when she sees i’m upset, but whether she’s risking someone else seeing her magic so that she can calm me down, or if she does it involuntarily and without noticing, i don’t know. The queen has made it a law not to talk about forbidden elements, unless to explain to children the dangers of them, and she has burned all books that even so much as mention them. Those books happened to be the ones that say that, even though we have magic and can live thousands of years, we can still have problems and flaws, just like humans. An example of a flaw would be my own Synesthesia. If you don’t know what that is, an example would be hearing music and seeing colors in your mind in response to that, seeing a specific person and smelling something that isn’t really there, or using colors to visualize specific numbers or letters of the alphabet. Simply put, it’s a confusion of the senses. More accurately put, it’s the production of a sense impression relating to one sense, just like normal, but it’s triggered by a different sense or part of the body other than the one that is being triggered. In my exact case of Synesthesia, i see a specific person, and I automatically see a color in my mind that is associated with their personality or their relationship to me. An example of that would be how i see a nice navy blue (the most calming color in the world) whenever i see my sister’s face. It makes sense, since Isleen is trustworthy, calm, peaceful, loyal, and stable, and the color blue is a symbol for all of those traits. If i have a really good talking-and-laughing moment with Isleen, i will sometimes smell Lavender, which isn’t really there, obviously, but it’s what happens. “Araminta? Can i talk to you for a minute?” I ignored the female voice for a moment, since i am used to being addressed as my nickname, but i remembered soon enough and turned my head to see Isleen. Her voice sounded unsure, and she looked slightly stressed. As if to clarify that, i wasn’t seeing the blue that i normally saw around her—i was seeing red, and i was smelling the spicy scent of cinnamon. “What is it, Isleen? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” She waved my questions away as she walked out from the middle of the doorframe and over to me. “First off, how are you?” “I was fine until i started seeing red with your face instead of blue,” i told her. “It’s almost as if my Time magic is changing my Synesthesia. What’s going on?” “I’m fine…” she responded. “I just need you to get a certain member of royalty for me because i have a certain someone who needs to see that certain member of royalty, and that certain member of royalty trusts you a lot more than that certain member of royalty trusts me.” I sigh and go and fetch Queen Royal, returning with both her and the kingdom’s physician. ||CONT. IN NOTES AND CREDITS||
“I can smell the human scent on you, Lilith,” Queen Royal told her. The queen had lightly tanned skin, coffee-colored hair that reached the middle of her back in coarse, choppy strands, the texture like thick yarn. Her eyes were a nice gray-green, like moss, and she currently wore a royal-blue dress with royal-purple flower embroidery. On her right wrist, she had a bracelet of pale blue diamonds, and on her right wrist, a bracelet of emerald beads. She had strings of pearls around her neck, and she had on moonstone earrings shaped like teardrops. Her eyeshadow was black, her eyeliner thick, and her lips were stained red—and her mouth was forming a frown as she studied my sister suspiciously. “I’m sure Isleen has a perfect explanation for that,” Aubrette told queen royal. She had even paler skin than Queen Royal, and her age showed on her face even more than the queen’s did. She had chin-length, white-blonde hair, and her eyes were as red as blood. Her earrings, which were blood-red teardrops, looked like drops of blood. Her turtleneck sweater was red as well, and her bell-bottoms were ice-blue. Her boots were black, and she wore no makeup. A white bandana was tied over her forehead like a country girls’, and her bandana had an ice-blue shield in the center of her forehead, the center of the shield bearing a blood-red cross. Isleen bit her lip. “Hold that thought.” she left for a moment—then returned with a human girl with pale skin, brown eyes, long straight brown hair, a magenta hoodie, a canary-yellow butterfly clip in her hair, lime-green pants, and bright orange sneakers with black-and-blue striped laces.It then happened way too quick. I didn’t expect it, so i didn’t have time to steady myself. It came too suddenly, out of nowhere, so i didn’t have time to tell Aubrette something was happening. I was being attacked by both my Synesthesia and my time magic at the same time. Bright orange (the color of enthusiasm, creativity, happiness, fascination, and stimulation) and a blinding yellow (yellow being the color that symbolizes caution, fear, and curiosity) flooded my mind, fighting for dominance in ribbons, like an ocean’s waves crashing together in the riptides. My skin felt as if it was on fire, burning to a crisp, as i fell to the ground, the taste of blood filling my mouth—but whether it was my Time magic, my Synesthesia, or me actually becoming injured from the fall; it was impossible to tell. The separate scents of the ocean and a flame’s smoke filled my nose and throat, and i heard screams of strangers and cheers of allies. And then, slowly…my Time magic pulled away and let go of my Synesthesia, and i slowly came back to reality. Aubrette was squatted down next to me, her hand on my trembling self’s back, uttering soft words that i couldn’t hear through my ringing ears. I looked up to see that Isleen had stepped in front of Lilith. Had she tried blocking my view of that human girl? Or was she blocking that girl’s view of me? Or both? Either way, the panic on her face was clear. “Keep that human away from me,” I told Isleen. My voice was hoarse, as if i had inhaled too much smoke, but she simply nodded. “You have messed with what you don’t understand, and we will all pay for it someday, because of YOU.” _____________________________________________ NEXT: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/761703847
