We gathered around what I presumed was Syrda"s chalice. Her name was also in the parchment, the dagger. This person might have been a G.o.d for them."Syrda"s haras alleha ram a.s.seti," Ms Aleinher said. As the parchment burned inside the chalice, water started to flow inside it, "every one of you must drink from the chalice. Whatever may happen or if the pain is too much to cope, you are obliged to continue drinking it if you want to live. The last one standing will be the reymir of your group."
The meaning of those words was all transparent to me and absurd in every way. In her mind we should have drunk it even though we could have felt pain, but since for them we were a bunch of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts, it was better if we stopped considering how death awaited us if anything might have gone completely wrong.
"Are you okay?" Mitsuko asked.
"I feel that for some reason, they"re trying to leave the life and death part until the end and then they might inform me about it, which I guess it"s not some important information here but for me? Sure, why wouldn"t I be okay?"
I took a big breath, it was not the worst thing I had done, and it probably would not have been the last since I was going to stay here. Everyone took a sip from the chalice until I was the only one left who was still required to.
"Ms Wilson it is your turn," Ms Aleinher said.
I started drinking, while images flowed through my mind, sad memories which were not mine. Every sip was intolerable misery, it was as if I was swallowing thousands of needles which were piercing my body.
I could sense the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I touched my lips to see if I had any wounds, but nothing was there. As I swallowed the last drop of water, the voices became louder and clearer, my eyes were wide open and yet what I saw would have made sense only if it was a dream.
I was not in Syrda"s room anymore, but rather it seemed to be a castle, perhaps a throne room. It was all destroyed and what seemed to be a younger version of Mitsuko laid lifeless on the ground with her eyes wide open. Her hand was holding tight another girl, someone I did not know, since for some reason I could not see her blurred face, which did not change even though I got closer to her.
Behind them a girl with curly blonde hair and milky skin was trying to crawl to them, her doe eyes were crying from the atrocity which had just happened. She came closer to Mitsuko kissing the forehead of her deceased corpse.
"You both need to live," she whispered in Mitsuko"s ear. Her eyes became pitch dark with only two tears of blood as they flew down her bitter eyes, which fell softly on her snowy cheeks. With her last effort she touched their hands, while a beam of light covered the entire room as it nearly blinded me.
I thought if I prayed enough, perhaps this hallucination would have ceased, but once I reopened my eyes I was merely in another place. I stood in a dazzling garden surrounded with diverse types of roses on every corner I gazed at. Mitsuko was alive and healthy, however, this time she was chasing someone I felt I knew.
"Nathan wait up," she yelled.
"You are too slow," he said, giving her a shy kiss on the lips. He was quite different from the Nathan which I encountered only seconds before.
"You"re always with her," he added.
"Are you jealous?" she laughed.
Even though his face seemed clearly embarra.s.sed, he took one of the red roses and gifted it to her.
"I promise I"ll always protect you and the people you love, you"ll just need to wait for me," he said while he started running away once again.
"Wait, Nathan!"
Suddenly a gap materialized behind me, it seemed as I was reliving pieces of memories which did not belong to me. It might be what the Syrda"s test was about, I had to discover pieces of lives of my own team which might have been valuable for them. I walked through another memory, I guess it was Nathan"s or Mitsuko"s once again, although this time the atmosphere was unusually tense, as I could have cut it with a knife.
"You promised me," Mitsuko shouted.
"I"m sorry," he whispered.
"You didn"t save her," she said, slapping him with such remarkable force, I could feel his pain. On his right cheek the imprint of her hand was what he had left, as he tried to cover it with his own hand.
Were they talking about the same blonde girl of before? I kept running in various directions, I did not know where I was going and I was starting to feel weary of all these memory jumps. When, from the distance, I saw a young Rob with the mysterious girl who everyone was connected to somehow.
"You keep it," the girl said.
"But, I"m a rae," Robert insisted.
"And what does it mean?"
"We"re not supposed to love."
"Absurd! Anyone is capable of love and once my father is the king, he"ll abolish such an absurd rule."
"We"re too different."
"I believe we"re soulmates."
"You can choose anyone, why would you ever want me?"
"The same reason why you"ll choose me if you were in my place. I want to give you both the rings and when you are brave enough, you"ll give the other half to me."
"Hey Siobhan, I"m always brave."
He put the ring gently on her finger as his hand kept trembling. It was the same ring he gave to me, an object which meant more than I could have ever envisioned, a part of his life which I was not aware of. If I thought of the Rob I was glancing at, it made me realise how much he kept from me, an entire world of secrets.
"Now, we"ll always be together," Siobhan said.
They suddenly dematerialised in the air, as I hoped this was the last of the memories I had to experience. I would have loved to wake up by now.
"Sarah," a voice behind me kept calling me.
"Go away," I pleaded, shutting my eyes.
"Sarah look at me."
Even though I was shaking, I turned around to identify who could have been lurking behind me. There she was, standing in front of me yet again, the same spitting image of myself, with those pitch-black eyes and blood on her palms.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
"Blood will be on your hands, death will be your destiny," she said over and over, every sentence louder than the previous one.
"Leave me alone!" I shouted while closing my eyes harder than I could. The noise stopped at once, as she touched my cheek.
"I can"t leave you, I"ll constantly be a part of who you are. Keep in mind, like the past, the future is filled with blood and death. If you don"t recall who you are, how can you help them? How will you be capable of saving yourself?"
Every slight detail in my head was becoming fuzzy, and yet, it was full of the many questions remained unanswered.