The Apprentice meets the Seer

“My name,” he begins and the skin where his lips should be pulls back to reveal two gleaming rows of sharp white teeth. It takes me a second to realize that he’s grinning, but it’s so contorted on his misshapen face that I can’t help, but shutter in disgust “It’s been so long since anyone has bothered to ask me that question.”

He takes another step towards me, close enough to reach out a finger and place it under my chin, so that I’m forced to look him in the eyes. Eyes that are more than just black like I had previously thought. Where his iriss’ should be, shades of gray swirl like a miniature whirlpool. I want to look away, but I can’t. His finger nail, which is more like a jagged claw, is digging into my skin, effectively holding me in place. I’m suddenly overwhelmed with frustration. All of that training. All of the late nights, bruises I couldn’t explain to my mother, and pushing myself past my limits to go another round with my mentor, Castor, just to be frozen in place with the touch of a finger.This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m a Guardian’s apprentice. I’m supposed to inherit the fight to protect the Sensa stones, our source of magic, the last remenants of our history. Being captured was never an option, and yet here I am as an unwilling plaything for something I’m not even sure is human. I’ve always been the weakest out of my five teammates, even Sara could beat me in most matches. Would they have fared better than me in this situation? A stupid question. They wouldn’t have let themselves be captured in the first place. 

Hot tears prickle at the corner of my eyes, threatening to spill down my face. 

“Don’t cry,” I tell myself. “Not here. You will not cry here.” But my body isn’t listening to me. My lip trembles as I stare into his eyes, forced to watch them swirl and swirl and swirl until the tears finally come. It’s in this moment that I realize what I’m looking at. 

This is despair. Despair, in its truest form, seeping from his eyes and flowing into me, showing me the deaths of everyone I ever loved one after the other. Castor with his graceful limbs twisted and broken so unnaturally that my stomach turns.  Sara dead, just as she was in my dream that seems so long ago now, her lifeless body lying limp in my lap. I’m forced to live through each of their deaths. Clarisse’s, Derek’s, my mother’s and my sister’s and even the other Guardians until only Charlie is left, and then he dies too. In the worst way, because he tries to save me. 

I’m standing in the same dimly lit room, but now my hands are tied behind my back and I’m forced to kneel beside the throne of my captor. Somehow I know I’m being used as bait. They knew Charlie would come for me if I was still alive, and he did. He’s here, but so is an army of shadow knights, the same ones we’ve been plagued with for weeks now. Even at a distance, I can see the pain contorting Charlie’s face, but there’s determination there too as he fights his way towards me, a hurricane of flailing arms as he stabs, and parries, and pushes forward through a sea of dark armor, and for a while it seems like he’s making progress, but he is human and they are not. I see the moment he fails to catch the blade of one soldier and it penetrates his left side. He falters, blood spreading out from his wound and across his shirt like a scarlet spiderweb, but he doesn’t give up. He dispatches the knight and keeps moving forward, but he’s slower now. 

“Please,” I plead with him, “leave me. I’m not worth it,” but he either can’t hear me or he chooses to ignore me. I want to go to him, but I’m paralyzed unable to even turn my head away, so I must watch as he gets overwhelmed, no longer able to block any blows that come his way. 

There’s no part of him that isn’t injured, but he’s still moving. It shouldn’t be possible, but he won’t give up. He has resolved not to die here, and he believes he won’t, even covered in wounds, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side, until he does. A sword through the back pierces all the way through his body. He stares at the gleaming silver metal coming through his stomach as if confused, and then his eyes find mine, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I see the fear that I didn’t even know he had. He’s scared, and he’s dying, and he knows it. His eyes stay on me even as he falls to his knees, my name on his lips, even as the light leaves them and his life ebbs away. I want to cry and scream and, worse than that, I want to die. This is what despair does to you. It beats you down until you’re nothing but a husk of your former self. All you know is emptiness. There’s no point in fighting. What’s even left to fight for?  These thoughts run through my head as I watch Charlie die, and then suddenly, I’m back in the present, because that, those damn swirly eyes tell me, is my future. I feel my knees begin to give, but this man, this creature is still holding me up. 

“My name,” he says finally, removing his finger from my chin and watching with amusement as I fall to ground, “is Le Voyant. The seer, if you will. So, tell me little girl, little apprentice” he spits out my title with such malice it’s like the words are poisonous, but then his grin grows impossibly wide until half his face is just rows of teeth, “just now, what did you see?”