Realms Apart

When My Life Changed Forever

TW: Descriptions of physical Abuse, Alcoholism, and Gun Violence

Everything's pitch black. What am I doing here? I can't move my body. I'm just floating here. Am I dead? Is this what death feels like? It's much warmer than I thought it would be. Heh, it's funny, I can still see her face. The way she lit up the sky as if the stars were nothing more than dots painted onto a background. Sapphire, her name was Sapphire. And she was just as beautiful as a sapphire. No, far more beautiful. Even though I saw her vanish, I still... Feel like... She's right here... With... Me...

My name is Jake. I'm around 5'8" with brownish-black hair and light blue eyes. I'm a bit on the athletic side but I could still lose a few pounds. I would say I have a personality that can make anyone smile if they didn't sneer first. I've always been picked on, ever since I was little. I can hardly remember a time when someone wasn't teasing me or beating me up simply because they could. It got so bad that at one point I had to change schools altogether. But the dark cloud that hung over my head only continued to follow me through life. But everything changed when I met Her.

I was walking down the street on my way to school. Once again anyone who saw me either ignored me altogether or just laughed and whispered to each other. About three months before I dropped out, the most popular girl in my High School, Katherine, asked me to meet her at the burger joint down the street from Divinity High. When I got to the parking lot it seemed like every kid from our classes was there. They started pelting me with paintball guns. A few kids were shooting be-be guns instead. Everyone was laughing at my humiliation. I tried to find Katy to see if she had planned this or not but she was nowhere in sight. I never made any friends at that school, nobody would even talk to me. I didn't find out the true reason why until shortly thereafter.

I've always known I was different. I never got sick or anything like that. I'm not exaggerating either, I've never been sick in my entire life. I always got perfect grades and everyone says that I must be cheating because i don't have to study. My parents died when I was an infant so I never got the chance to meet them. I was forced to live with my uncle who would beat me every day if I didn't help him cheat at his poker games. Somehow I'm able to tell if someone's: bluffing, lying, cheating, winning, losing, or strategizing just by looking at their face. I've never met a poker face I couldn't read. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there, I can also read and feel the emotions that other people are feeling. I can almost know a person's traumatized childhood without them ever having to say a word. A skill like that is frightening even to myself. Well, three years ago I ran away from my uncle because he had gotten drunk again and almost blew my head off with his shotgun. I say almost because right before he did I felt something come over me, something that allowed me to know what he was trying to do. I dodged the buckshot and threw him into the wall 20 feet away. That day I ran away and stayed in an old abandoned house that even the police steered clear of. I ran away because I was scared. I wasn't scared of my uncle, I was scared of myself.

I continued to go to school to avoid any problems but people would look at me as if they knew something I didn't. The story was that my parents died in a car crash but my uncle would constantly say I killed them. I never understood how a baby could have possibly killed two grown adults yet for some reason I still believed him.

I always had the ability to jump higher than everyone else and I was always stronger than everyone else. My problem wasn't that I had this ability, it was that I had it but I didn't know it. Ever since I started getting picked on I never understood why. Why pick on me when there are thousands of other kids to pick on? Because everyone could already tell I was a vessel. My mother was a Seraph and my father was a Hellion but somehow I'm neither. However, because I was born and raised in the human world I looked and even though I was human. But somehow everyone knew that I was this abomination yet they didn't know at the same time. Everyone knew I was different, I was weird, I didn't belong, but no one knew why I didn't belong. As far as everyone knew I was just another human that just seemed a little off from the rest and that made me easy prey.

About a week ago I started showing signs of strange things happening. All of a sudden my fingers would get longer, skinnier, and sharper out of nowhere. I also started growing wings. They weren't very large, no bigger than my hand... at first. I was growing little nubs out of my forehead. This is when I found out something was wrong. Unfortunately, since I have no friends I couldn't tell anyone and I couldn't ask for help. I researched anything I could find about what was happening but every file was either Conspiracy theorists or under classified folders in the Pentagon's system. I managed to hack in (don't ask me how, a barely remember it, as though I wasn't in control of myself) and found out about being found on a nuclear test site as well as some random comments about half-demons, half angels, and "The Vessel". I was having small horn-like bone growth tearing through the topmost part of my forehead. As well as a small set of wings, dove-like in nature yet they glowed with a smolder as if having just been on fire. Nothing made sense anymore. My wings were growing at a rapid pace. After about a week my wings were now two-thirds the length of my arm. I started freaking out because I couldn't do anything to stop them and I was having a hard time hiding them. It wasn't until a few months ago when I met Her that I dared even try to find out why this was happening. She told me I had to trust her, so I did (I didn't exactly have many other choices), I listened to her explain what was happening. Then I followed her into indescribable places that exist only within one's dreams (nightmares). I had gone too far to turn back and I wasn't planning on doing so. This is the story of how my life changed... Forever.