Can You Hear Them Calling

Chapter VIII

3:47 am

Hope, what all may think is of good things, but it isn't of all good things---but both a sign of good and bad omen. Now I am both your prisoner and captor. 

It felt like I was walking on a tight rope, I see no footing yet there my feet were---hovering in mid-flight. My stomach went to churn, I felt nauseous, light-headed in fact. Then there it was again, the gnarling sensation, this time it whispered behind my ears.

My feet were slowly sinking as sweat now crowds my face. It felt weak and soft all of a sudden, till I fell on both knees with both my hands touching the surface of this enchanted path that I now crawled upon.

A scream came crashing on my eardrums while I struggle. That voice is all too familiar, my eyes shifted further down below, Xiao was screaming almost to the top of his lungs.

with haste---I exchanged glances between Reins and Rio who seems to also be looking at the same thing, they both shared a common expression behind their look---"impotent flux of pity"

Dreadful wails continued to play melodies between my ears. Something small and heavy rolled out of my back pocket as I was about to stand, it gave a crashing sound upon landing the path of tiny glittering light. It rolled and expanded as it does---until it was about the size of my palm. 

It was the sphere...the orb...the artifact. My eyes scattered towards Reins and Rio with great haste, they didn't seem to notice the loud crash. A wave of relief came over me but I can't help to notice that something was...off. I was dead sure that something loud as that would certainly catch their attention.  

Let alone, the fear of being seen by others magnetized me towards that sphere. It slowly radiated as it rolled forward, and where it goes I followed---scrambling to the path ahead, it seems that the sphere was rolling faster as I did too.

I was limping as fast as I could with one good leg but it seems that the sphere could not be outrun. I fell on one knee as exhaustion took over my body, it took me this exact moment to see---that the path that was laid out for me was in a spiral yet still in a straight line. 

From afar there stood still the sphere that glowed in a radiant light. So very still---are my eyes making a fool of me? the line between deceit and truth wore thin, wishing I could say the same for reality---for my...reality.

Again, I stood up, upon taking a step the sphere also moved forward and then froze in place like it once did. "What is this!?" a question that was merely the tip of an iceberg, a question so simple yet so complex. 

A growl shivered from the back of my neck and waved all the way down my spine. My sense of sight crippled in the smoke of haze. My eyes shimmered in crystal fog, it flickered once, twice, then trice.

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3:47 am

I drifted in a place where my heart sunk just by feeling the floorboards. I crumbled from where I stood. Somehow, I lay upon the carpet of a living room where memories of old came to past.

Mere fragments of reality came to my sensation as for other parts of the house were filled with grey buzzing lines, similar to a television on a stormy night. Missing pieces of ceiling, floor, wall, and furniture were everywhere.