When Aethera Michaelson entered the Academy, she knew someone like her could never fit in with the elite crowd of rich and entitled students. So, after the quarantine begins, she blends herself into the corners of the library, unaware that she would...
The kind of peace that calms my heart beyond words and emotions;
I find peace in the ease of this breeze that greets me,
Inviting the moon's glow with it some nights.
This kind of peace makes me envious of Nyx,
Envious of the way she gets to bathe in the darkness of the night,
While I, a mortal, can only wish.
━━ αθάνατοι ━━
ANOTHER page ruffles for a split second and then calms down on top of another but my attention isn't on the aged book anymore. As I sit near the window of this unknown room, I can't help but remember my own, back when I was still at the Academy. Now, at this moment, this remembrance seems wrong, as if there is a time limit on nostalgia.
The memory of my time there is blurring day by day, second by second; as if this new life is pushing my older one away from its rightful place, and throning itself as the cruel traitor in my mind. As if along with everything, this is the burden I must accept; the burden of saying goodbye against my will.
However, there is one single day I am reminded of as I gaze outside; the day everything changed. I was sitting and trying to read, just this way, lost in thought, holding a book I wasn't interested in exploring anymore, in a barely lit corner of my dorm room when the clock struck twelve and the day my life would turn upside down began.
It's funny how when we look back on life-changing days, the beginning always seems so insignificant; clouded behind the curtain of normality. How normal our naive, past self hopes for everything to be. I wanted that normal for myself too, especially that night and for once, I had hoped to just end one day and begin another, I craved the mental security of the routine. That night, like one of the rare few nights at the Academy, I waited for my monotonous day to begin at the break of dawn.
I play it again and again in my mind, hoping that at least that day isn't ripped away from my memory, hoping that despite everything that has happened in the last few days, I don't forget at least that single memory which changed everything, of the day that I met him.
I had just finished the first few chapters of the book I now hold in my hand again but it wasn't this tough to read that night. In fact, I had been slower than usual; more distracted by the moonlight that was dancing on the pages and the gentle summer breeze that had been kissing my bare shoulders.
Before I had left the Academy, everyone was mulling over one thing; similar to the one we had been thinking of for an entire year; but that night, in a contrasting spirit, with a divergent emotion.
The pandemic had shaken everyone to the core, and even though I am no more part of that world, I do remember the days I had spent in that room, quarantined like the rest of the students in the Academy for three months. It took them a few weeks to ensure that no one on the property was under the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, to make the estate into a bio-secure bubble and life, at least for the rest of us, protected within the Academy, to begin again.
But that night; that night had been significant to the world outside our Academy's walls, especially for the parents of the ones I lived with. It had been declared hours before that we had won; we had won the war against the pandemic after gruesome months of social distancing, packed ERs, and the failure of countless vaccine trials. After months of hesitancy and tensions, long distances and failed reunions, broken marriages and shattered businesses, CDC declared that the virus was no more. That it had died. It had simply vanished, no longer infectious and even those who were in hospitals, battling it for days were recovering. A miracle, they called it and declared that there were no restrictions anymore and that life, could now go back to normalcy.
Stock markets went into a frenzy, staying open until late and suddenly, everyone seemed to be out of their houses, even those who had feared for days at length to merely go out for groceries. From my own room, I could hear the girls in the corridors, elated that their filthy rich parents were finally back in business and that now, there was no fear of anything.
They could make shopping plans again, they could visit their parents, oh and it was finally alright to visit the city, which they all craved so hungrily and that at least now, they could plan their trips to Cabo or Paris, money was here to stay. By one in the night, they had made their plans for their vacations and by two, a fight broke out between Cassandra and Tori's groups over the other not even thinking about inviting them to their shopping trip to L.A. What an insult!
But I had remained in my room, unknowingly spending the last few hours of normalcy in the peace of the midnight summer breeze. No one checked in on me, I didn't feel the need to go out and celebrate with others either, after all, what did I have to celebrate? Life would go on the same way.
In that life, I had been no one; literally, no one seemed to place me within their known cliches. I wasn't one of the business tycoon lots which made up most of the population, I wasn't one of the few scholarship students either. I was the mandatory admission that the Academy was supposed to take from an orphanage within their district. So, just like my predecessors, I lived rent-free on the property, attending classes just like everyone else and living beside them, not with them. Even the next two students who came from my orphanage seemed to gel better than me, I hardly saw them anymore.
The Academy was a place I found tough to understand for the first few weeks, even from the perspective of a rich kid. If you had the money and the education, why would you not be in Yorkshire or Oxford or in one of the Ivy Leagues? Isn't that like, a rite of passage for them? A birthright to follow their parents and grandparents and utilize the old money? But soon I learnt that this place was tailor-made for them. It taught skills like communication and marketing and whatnot which in an ideal scenario, suited the pretentious assholes that most of them were. After all, the only skill they truly required in their world was how to be phoney and how to be the perfect Machiavellian.
The Academy promoted it. It taught them to sit, eat, study, live and know like a leader. To talk like one, be like one. The difference between traditional universities and colleges and the Academy? It taught these skills only to those who had the fortune to inherit so basically it taught them to mirror their fathers and mothers and for the four years that my classmates lived within these walls, it provided them world-class security and curbed their freedom, in every manner.
They tell me it was fate that made sure I found my way to the safest place on earth for that one year; that life played out in a certain way for a reason; that I was meant to end up in an Academy with the best security setup for the scions and scionessess of biggest and richest business moguls of the world, who were unknowingly protecting me too.
It did make it tougher for them to find us, but nothing could stand between them and us after that night.
We found our own way to them, and we weren't the only ones.
━━ αθάνατοι ━━
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