To Be Luminous || HP [REVIVAL 2021]

Chapter Nineteen

"I don't understand where we are."

"These woods have gotten much deeper and much darker, Kiara. Did you think you could just take a casual stroll through the forest? No. You wanted to be lost. Now, you are."

His body leans over her, casting a shadow. She feels cold within it. She's never felt cold around Albus before. It's as though she's lost something now, and it makes her want to cry. Albus makes her feel trapped. The emotions that she was developing for him all-at-once feel suffocating.

"Do you know what these flowers are?"

He holds one up in front of her eyes. She tries to make it out with her weirdly distorted vision, but can't. If they are the same flowers that have been following her, then they are tiny, dainty, and white. They puff up and dispel a fine powder, and when she inhales it she gets very sleepy and sick.

"Are they poisonous?"

"Highly intoxicating, very hallucinogenic. It can cause mild paralysis in large doses. Go ahead, Kiara. Tell the flowers to let you go, and they will. Or . . . you can stay here. You'll disappear. Just like you want. And you won't feel a thing. Isn't that what you came out here for? To not feel a thing? For me? For anyone?"

His hand tightens harder around her throat until she begins to choke. Her heart feels hollow as Albus frames these words between pink lips. A hollowness that's emphasized only by how full she's felt it has been recently.

"Let me go," she tells the flowers. "Let me go!"

Her vision darkens behind her eyelids. The sunlight disappears. In fact, it is the dead of night. There are no songbirds, no babbling creek. Crickets chirp. Frogs sing. A stream trickles nearby. Kiara's eyes snap open, and she tightens her grasp around a rock and swings wildly at Albus.

But there's no one here.

She is still completely alone, save for a startled rabbit that was chewing on the flowers' stems that were binding her arm to the forest floor. The rabbit takes off, no longer interested in freeing her from the growing vines.

Her heart is pounding. Kiara grabs a chunk of her skin and twists hard, wincing as pain erupts across her arm. She smacks her cheek with her open palm repeatedly until tears sprout at the corners of her eyes. Angrily, she wipes them away.

"You are awake now. Pull yourself together," she scolds herself.

She looks down at her body. Although tattered, she still has clothes. The little white flowers seem almost to glow in the dark. Kiara watches several puff out their petals and dispel the powdery clouds that, before her fever dream, she thought nothing of. She blows a thin trail of cool breath over them to dissipate the poison. Hundreds of needle thin stems twist together, black in the dark, and sweeping across her body in thick, engorged veins. When she had passed out earlier, they must have grown quickly across her.

Kiara takes a fistful and tears them away. Again, and again, and again, until at last her other arm is free and she can sit up. She works on her legs now, staring out through the night with adrenaline amplifying her hearing.

In the distance, about a thousand yards from where she sits, Kiara sees an abnormal, nearly blinding luminosity. It flickers in and out of the trees as though alive, and it casts light across her skin in slices. She can see the forest floor enough to find a large, heavy stick, and she wields it like a baseball bat tight in her trembling fists.

Stars twinkle across her vision as she stands, and she knows she is close to death simply from exhaustion. But she will fight until her dying breath, and she will do everything she can to leave this forest, go home, and tell her family that she loves them.