Chapter Ten - The Dream
I open my eyes only to find myself chained up to a wall. It looks like the same room where my clone was created in. I try to move my head but that too is tied and chained to the wall. I’m alone in the room for what seems like forever before the young man with blue skin enters.
“What the heck is going on here?” I yell out to him.
In his hands is a tray with a glass of clear liquid and a bowl of what looks like oatmeal. He sets the tray down on a small table and rolls that over to me. “Just tell her what you know and this will be over that much faster.”
“Tell her what? I don’t know anything and don’t you come near me with that stuff,” I say, right before closing my mouth tight.
Sighing, “There’s nothing bad in this dish, it’s just some grains mixed with fruit to help keep your energy,” Zar-Q tells me. He takes the bowl and a spoon and walks over to me. “Ozma will hurt you if you don’t tell her want you know. Any small detail that you might think is nothing to you might be everything to her.”
“Then why doesn’t she just ask my clone? Shouldn’t she have all my information?”
“No. The cloning technology isn’t perfect and your clone is the first one to be created and live. All of the other clones died within a few minutes of being created. She is your clone but she isn’t perfect.”
“Then why create her in the first—-,” As soon as I say that, Zar-Q shoves a spoon of that food in my mouth. I give him a nasty look with my brown eyes. It takes like mushy sand and berries.
“To trick your friends so they don’t come looking for you.”
Then it hits me, no one knows that I am here. There won’t be any daring rescue and if I want to get out of this mess, I have to do it on my own. Even if that clone isn’t perfect it might just be enough to fool everyone. Miles is the only one that has known me the longest but I’m pretty sure he’s more upset and worried to notice some clone.
The door to the room opens and the lady with black hair from yesterday enters. I think it’s safe to say that’s Ozma. “Zar-Q, please excuse us. You are too nice to be feeding the prisoners that we get in.” She is followed by two guards.
Zar-Q walks back to the tray and places the bowl on it. He pushes it back a few feet before picking up the tray and heads towards the exit. He looks back briefly before walking out and makes his way two rooms down from mine.
Lying on a small bed is a young man in his early twenties. He has gray hair that suits him well and hazel eyes. “Aw, breakfast, you shouldn’t have,” he grins, sitting up.
“It wasn’t for you,” Zar-Q says, with a hint if sadness.
“Ah, they found another one, huh? Might as well eat it anyway, no telling when the big O will stop letting you visit me.”
“They even cloned her,” Zar-Q says, handing the young man the bowl of food.
“So they finally got that cloning machine up and working? That’s not good. I wonder if Vane knows about that one. Wonder if they know anything about this place anymore,” he takes a bite. “I’m telling you, we need to do something.”
“Josh, please they would kill us before we could——“
“Knock it off, man. With your skills and knowledge of this place and my shape shifting abilities, we could do some real damage. And you know if they cloned that girl, they won’t let her live once Ozma is done with her. This has to bother you? How many people have died because of Ozma?”
“Shape shifting? You need to stop saying that; you can only change to look like other people. It’s not like you can change into an animal or something. I need to go,” Zar-Q says, collecting the tray. Josh is right but there is no way that two people could bring down Ozma.
Back in my room, Ozma walks up to me, “Who rescued you from Earth?”
Why would Ozma even care about that? Could it be that she’s after Kyle and not me? However, for some reason, I keep my mouth shut. For all I know, if I name Kyle, Ozma might let me go but on the other hand, why should I say anything. Might is a strong word in this situation. I have a clone now, she could replace me and no one would ever know.
“Very well,” Ozma motions to the guards and they open the door. In walks a young woman, about three years older than me with very bright green eyes and black hair tied into a bun. One of the guards points a gun to this young girl while the other one walks in front of me and aims.
“One last chance, I assure you things will get much worse from here if you don’t answer me.”
Puzzled, I still say nothing. So this Ozma lady is going to kill me if I don’t tell her what she wants? Why bring this other girl into the room? What is she up to?
Ozma nods to the guard and he fires a single bullet that enters my upper right leg. The bullet burns into my skin as I scream in pain. I can feel warm blood pouring from the hole.
“This is how this it will work,” Ozma says.
My head and heart are pounding rapidly; I’ve never been shot before.
“The young lady over there has the wonderful power of healing,” Ozma informs me.
Tears fall from my face as my eyes look over to the other girl. She looks sad. So is Ozma going to torture us both if I don’t tell her about Kyle?
“Celestria also can bring people back from the dead if she’s fast enough. Now I will ask you again: who rescued you from the attack on Earth?”
So it was an attack.
My leg is killing me yet I have zero urge to tell Ozma anything. Why am I so adamant about that? I bite my tongue due to the pain my leg is going through. I can now taste blood.
I can see anger starting to build in Ozma’s eyes. She grabs the side arm from the guard and walks up to me. She presses the gun to my forehead. The pressure worsens my headache.
I smirk as I close my eyes. Of course this isn’t the way that I want to go out but I’m not about to change my principals.
Ozma raises the gun and hits my right temple hard with the end of the gun.
The blow to my head knocks me out or at least I hope it did. Dying isn’t something that I want to be doing anytime soon. I haven’t even experience much in my short life. I’ve had a boyfriend that went nowhere; I play video games, babysit and attend a terrible middle school. Now here I am on another planet being tortured for information.
Everything is black until suddenly a wave of familiarity hits. I can see stars within the great vastness of space. Two stars seem to be chasing each other, flying in and out of other stars.
The scene shifts to a castle, looks medieval make. It is early in the morning since the sun is low in the east.
The stars from above seem to be flying towards the planet. One flies straight down into the castle while the other files towards a small town near a body of water.
I can see a bedroom and a woman is giving birth. This woman has black hair but the rest of her and the people around the bed are fuzzy. I’m pretty sure that I am dreaming right now. My mind sure knows how to pick the best time to be dreaming. Or is this something more that my mind is trying to hint at?
The star that had entered the castle makes its way into the body of the baby just seconds after being born.
It’s five years later and the mother is talking to a very old woman dressed in dark robes. The old woman tells the mother that her child has a hidden power caused by an entity from the stars that exists on another plane of existence. The mother grows jealous and tries to extract this entity and its power from her daughter. The father, who is King of the land, learns of this as well. Unable to harm is his wife, he sends the daughter to a floating magic school known as Vane. The King does not inform his wife of this and the only people that know who the child is and where she is are the royal cleric and his daughter. The daughter of the cleric, who is fifteen at the time, takes the princess to Vane.
As the young princess grows up, she learns how to control her natural power of fire. Once she is sixteen, she is allowed to leave Vane to visit the nearby town of Dorter, which is a trade port city.
In this port city, she runs into many different people, some of which are from Vane. One person in particular, a young man with brown hair and is a few years older, befriends the princess and knows that there is something different about her.
A few years later, news starts to spread about the death of the King. The princess has not been allowed to return home, for her own safety. She has not seen her parents since she was a young child. After hearing such news, the princess leaves Vane and heads to the castle despite the young man and the daughter of the cleric’s pleas not to.
The princess’s two closest friends follow her back to the castle while trying to convince her to return to Vane along the way.
The princess finds her mother waiting for her, sitting on her husband’s throne with a smug look on her face, pale eyes gleaming from the sun’s rays coming in from the windows.
Enraged by the murder of her father and unable to control such anger the hidden entity emerges, making the princess’ once brown hair and eyes a dark purple.
The young man tries to reason with the entity that is now controlling the princess. This young man is the other entity that came to this planet all those years ago. He had taken a human body that was near death. He is angry at himself for not finding this entity sooner and doing something about it. He hopes that he can still save the princess.
Unable to control herself, the princess channels in all of her energy and directs it towards her mother. The explosion is so massive that it causes the castle to crumble in on itself.
There’s flashes of fire and destruction that flood my mind next before showing me a cliff where the princess is standing at the very edge. She has killed her mother, friends and so many innocent people. For a long time now, the princess has been fighting this entity but has been unable to gain full control. Desperate to end the killing of innocents, the princess makes one last attempt to control her own mind before taking one final step over the edge of the cliff.
