Ruler of the Mind

1 Misty

The trip out of Tempe was long and arduous. She'd been numb except for the ache in her broken arm. She ate and drank, talked to Laney and Miles when she had to do so, and watched the landscape change in a daze as they passed through New Mexico and Texas.

Had it been so wrong to want to fit in somewhere? She just wanted to belong. A few friends were all she'd asked, to have a place to fit in, people who understood her. The price she paid was too high. Misty blocked it out.

Arriving at Draoithe was like going from the worst situation she'd ever found herself in, to a high-class luxury hotel. The log cabin-style resort with its library and garage buildings crafted the same way was over the top gorgeous. A woman she later knew to be a sorceress and a Valkyrie, Jewel, used white magic to fix her arm and erase the poisonous drugs from her system. It was as if it had never happened, physically.

Only, no one could erase her memories and the horror she'd lived through. Still, Draoithe was beautiful and calm. That helped.

The healing began, slowly. Life at Draoithe took on a routine as life usually does. A little at a time, Misty started to claim her life back. Her youth and mental fortitude struggled to overcome the pain and fear. A few cups of hot tea, plenty of good books, meditation, and a bit of communing with nature saw her slowly begin to feel like herself, albeit a broken version. Being herself rather than some stranger had to be a step in the right direction.

Draoithe allowed her to see a world she'd never even dreamed of. People were filled with magic and power, but it was good rather than the evil she'd been recently subjected to. She wasn't viewed as strange or some misfit to be avoided. Misty truly fit somewhere for the very first time.

It seemed that her friend Miles had stumbled on a haven for the gifted and magically inclined of the world when he sought help from Fox. The art dealer had once accidentally learned of his secret telekinetic painting style and offered him help. Being who he was, he'd simply kept the card she gave him.

When Misty and Brenda were abducted and he thought he'd lost Laney too, Miles had called in a favor from the mysterious benefactor on that card. He'd found a place for misfits and one-of-a-kind people, a realm of magic and immortality. No one thought her out of place. It was a bit surreal.

Misty's lifelong love of books quickly led her to a library that was in the beginning stages of being set up and cataloged. She began slowly learning about immortals and magic as she sifted through boxes of manuscripts, scrolls, and journals. Working with the books and learning about magic made her life make more sense.

The curse she lived with, as she learned about magic others were cursed with, seemed not so bad. She just leaped from her own head. Some were afflicted with uncontrollable lightning, shadows, fire, etc... She occupied her first days in her sanctuary looking over and helping to catalog the items in the library.

Trying to understand how magic worked took a lot of her focus. Better to be obsessed with that than what had happened to her. She blocked out the past with research and hid from her fears in the books in the library.

The library was quiet. That suited both her former self and the broken person who struggled to put herself back together. She needed quiet time to figure out who she was and what she wanted to be.

She read everything on the gifts she and her friends had along with bits and pieces here and there on other magics and immortals. If knowledge was power, she wanted as much of it as she could get.

More information was made available every day. The library accepted and cataloged all kinds of magical information. Everything was being scanned into a computer database for cross-referencing and research. The immortals were quick to whisk away any harmful magical artifacts and were seriously happy with her offer to help them with all the rest.

Artie, Fox, Andrei, and Nadine were the ones who seemed to run most of the affairs in the library. They were kind to her and let her browse through as she helped sort the new materials. They answered questions when they could. She offered to help each day and wanted to keep busy. They understood her quiet need to work and smiled enthusiastically at her every morning.

Nadine crashed and slept after being awake for days at a time suffering from insomnia, but no one complained. They just covered her with a blanket, and Andrei would find her and teleport her to her bed. When she woke up, she would simply rejoin the work effort. Acceptance like that felt good. Tolerance was nice.

Misty got good at remembering where things were and using the cataloging system that Draoithe had chosen. Focusing on work seemed to be good therapy. Artie talked to her the most as Nadine and Andrei seemed to keep late hours.

She didn't know Andrei was a vampire at first. She thought he was simply an overly beautiful, nice-smelling foreign man. When she learned the truth, she was alright with it. He was nice, not horrifying at all. He was just one more thing that Hollywood had gotten all wrong.

It was Fox who finally asked her if she wanted to work for the library permanently early one Friday morning. It was a gentle request. If she wanted it, she had a permanent place among the immortals at Draoithe. There was no pressure. Misty knew she could leave at any time, but the sanctuary couldn't last forever.

She had worked in a bookstore before. Misty loved the dusty old tomes and had always been more at home with the books than other people her whole life. Her curse couldn't accidentally invade a book as it could a mind.

The job offer to work in the library certainly fitted her skill set. If she contributed to Draoithe, she could stay and become a meaningful part of the community. No one could live anywhere for free. She knew that. If she could make a meaningful contribution, that would be better than money from Fox's perspective.

So, Misty took on the librarian position at the university. Her life in California was too dangerous to ever return to it. After her ordeal, she wasn't sure she could have gone back even if she had chosen to leave Draoithe. She needed a new start. She could live at Draoithe, be safe, and avoid the horror. The past could simply stay in the past.

Just the chance to start over in a safer place had warmed her heart. The opportunity to stay wasn't something she could pass up, especially when she knew that Fox's offer was genuine. He needed help.

Misty was slowly escaping from the nightmare during the daytime. It was the nights that were still hard. Would she ever break free? Sleep had never been easy. Misty had often found herself in someone else's mind in the middle of the night.

After Tempe though, it was her own mind that she wanted to escape from. With her curse, leaving her head wasn't an option she wanted to pursue even if it was quite possible.

Each night, Misty put her blindfold on, blocked the light, and put in the earplugs to block the sound as she'd always done. Turning off the senses was how she kept her mind in her head. It didn't always work, but it helped.

Too damn bad she wasn't able to escape her mind when she'd been drugged. She shook her head at that thought. Truly, she didn't want to think about the nightmares she would have if she'd been able to do something different.

Artie had helped her get what she needed that first day. Too little was known about her curse for her to learn to handle it properly. The search for reliable information had continued with the others setting anything about what they called the Ri altoir aigne gift to the side for her.

The term Ruler of the Mind sounded cool, but it was laughable in her situation. Some Ruler of the mind she turned out to be. She couldn't manage to stop even one of her attackers. Nor had she had any ability to save Brenda. She shook away the evil memories. There was no going back.

The nightmares still interrupted her sleep each night. They haunted her when there was nothing else to think about when her subconscious could replay the scenes she'd lived through.

When the dark and the night stole into her soul, and the quiet nothing of sleep surrounded her, the whole abduction and gang rape replayed in her mind like scenes from a horror story. Only it wasn't a movie, it was her life. It was her past she must contend with.

Thank you for reading ch1. Please be kind and leave a comment to let an old tiger know what you think. -OK