𝓟𝐫𝗼𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝓢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐞

Chapter #18 - Glimmer

Kenric hesitated a moment before nodding.

Vespera laughed coldly.

Sophie flinched. Glimmer didn't.

She had heard enough of those laughs to not be scared by them. In fact, they had almost become background noise to her.

"Fools," Vespera muttered.

"Look— we don't even know who you are. Your name and everything was erased from my mind, and Oralie hasn't even talked to you before. All we know is that we need to ask you about something called stellarlune— something we heard from talking to Fintan, but the rest of the Council doesn't want to investigate."

Their conversation with Fintan must've been in one of the other memories.

"If you ask me," the Neverseen member said, "it seems pretty pointless to ask about stellarlune if you're just gonna forget it."

"It'll be in my cache," stated Kenric.

Oralie turned to look at him, "You mean our caches. You promised you'd put my memory of this in my cache too."

"Whoops," he said. But clearly she saw right through the lie.

She didn't say anything, though.

"If you must..." Vespera sighed. "Stellarlune is part of my vision."

Stellarlune. Gisela had mentioned it before— Project Stellarlune, to be specific— and it triggered something in the back of Glimmer's head. She just couldn't quite put a finger on it.

Suddenly, she remembered something. Something that happened to her right before the red. Gisela had said, "She has stellarlune in her genes too."

Or maybe she was just imagining it...

"That's all I can say," she added when the Councillors' mouths turned to thin lines of disappointment. "Actually— let's make it more fun. You can each ask me one question. One. And only because it is admittedly amusing to taunt people with knowledge they're simply going to forget."

"You go first," Oralie and Kenric said to each other at the same time.

"No you can."

"No you."

"Okay," Kenric conceded with a small smile. The first one since the beginning of the memory.

"You can monitor my pulse to see if I'm lying," said Vespera, quickly adding, "but don't read my thoughts. It wouldn't work with this, anyways." She tapped her headdress thing.

They didn't argue with that.

Councillor Oralie extended her arm to Vespera, grabbing her wrist so she could feel her pulse— Vespera was an Empath after all, if they lied their heart would skip three beats (Gisela had mentioned this several times; explaining ways she could take advantage of her son's and husband's ability). Glimmer swore she could see Vespera smile a bit— a cold, clever smile. Like this was all going according to plan.

Kenric opened his mouth to ask a question.

Sophie and Glimmer simultaneously sucked in a breath. This was the moment.

"What does stellarlune do?"

"Simple. It gives humans the potential they need to be better. Puts it in their genes— for the price of going into Elysian for a little while, as they call it."

He turned to Oralie for confirmation.

"She's not lying."

That was... vague.

But for Glimmer, it actually gave an answer. Well, a lead.

Silence followed in the memory. The Councillors seemed to be thinking about the information they were just given— putting it in their mental file boxes. Even if they would later voluntarily get the boxes yanked out of their mind.

Glimmer had to agree— it seemed pretty dumb.

"My turn," Oralie said quietly. She took a deep breath, her lips forming a word, but then suddenly shifting, like she had changed her mind in that split-second. "Who are you working with on this vision of yours?"

"My group's name is the Neverseen," Vespera replied, oddly hesitantly, as Oralie exhaled like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. "Though certain members of the group, let's just say, are taking my vision the complete wrong way. They think triggering that potential in humans should be done unnaturally."

It became clear what Vespera was doing. Genius, really. She was giving the Councillors just enough information to keep them on the edge of their seats, but not quite enough for them to actually learn anything valuable. Glimmer knew the technique well.

Oralie nodded and began to pull away, but Vespera held tight.

"You're forgetting one thing. When you can feel my pulse, I can feel yours. And read your emotions. Which means I can ask you two anything I want."