Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Chapter 56 - Branka - Lost Time

You ever get that feeling where you know that you want something - that you have this indescribably strong desire to do a specific task or be with a certain person, but you can't put it into words or figure out what that thing or who that person is.

My chest caves with such wants, making my fingers tingle and my body yearned to be touched by something, but I don't know what. I took all night to sit and talk with my long-lost sisters - though the last part was my doing. I listened to them tell their own stories through the years, listened as they laughed at the memory of such things, and forced laughs where I knew they'd be listening for me to do so. It's not that I didn't want to laugh, it's that it's hard to do so when the one person I want to talk to, to listen to, hasn't been back to do such things.

Rohana hasn't been seen, heard, or felt, and neither has Darius. I can feel my sister's unease as they stand guard outside of the room, all wondering where their leader is. It's not that they're lost without her, they know what to do should a threat appear, it's that from what they say Rohana only ever leaves their side for no longer than a few hours on average. She's stayed closer to them ever since I faked my death, and to have her gone for little under a day is making them tap their feet and grow restless, that same fear now imposing on them. They won't move from their stations, but the idea is nagging at them.

I know Rohana better than any of them, or at least I think I do. Who's to say she hasn't changed in forty-two years? From how I remember her, she wouldn't have stayed this long away from us even when we were on better terms, and if she did come back still loaded with anger, she wouldn't speak unless an order needed to be given. She wouldn't ask for space knowing full well that we'd give it to her, and she wouldn't let her issues within us cloud her judgment on her sworn duty.

But who am I to tell anyone who Rohana is? I haven't been here to see her in ages.

Being trapped in the soul stone wasn't as bad as one would think. There was mostly darkness. Dreams of mine made both into colorful joyfulness and the darkest of fears. It was like sleeping, only dreams were carried out in more depth and longer than any I've had before.

It's hard for a dream to suddenly stop when there's no one nor anything to wake you up. It made me mad when the nightmares turned into night terrors due to their length, then more so when they wouldn't end until the story had nowhere else to go. Funny how stories can be continued for centuries in one's mind, yet when it comes down to the mind to speak it, it's shortened and left without an ending not yet finished.

I don't remember most dreams, though a few nightmares and others still pass through my head as I sit here beside Clarice, watching over both her and my mother who fell asleep in her chair hours ago. She refused to let me out of her reach after we walked out of the neighboring room. She kept playing with my hair or my hand, tracing the lines there without looking as if she memorized their paths. I missed her smile and warm eyes and how she would always be the first to make a dirty joke that had us squirming with the grossness of imagining such comments when we were younger, but even with her just sitting beside me I could tell that she too has changed.

I missed her - deeply - but for me, those forty years passed like four hours. The dreams would drag on and make it feel longer, yes, but like all dreams, in reality, they lasted no more than a few seconds. The forty-two years as Hira, however, run perfectly through my head, which makes me missing everyone feel as long as those days. The times in between when Aracely slipped the drugs into the healer's food are fogged, but it's the fog that indicates the times she did so.

I remember healers starting their education when I did, and their progress throughout it, aging where I didn't but forgetting me as soon as they'd start to ask me what my secret was to youthful skin. I could probably name all twenty healers who have returned to Fernweh in the past two days if someone asked me to. I wouldn't do so in front of them, of course. The last thing I need is for them to run their own minds crazy trying to comprehend the fact that an immortal posed as one of them for longer than they can remember and that a witch messed with their minds without their permission.