This World is Outrageous { BOOK 2 }

Chapter 1--Bay

Chapter 1

Bay

I hear a voice in my head, and it doesn't belong to me.

The voice calls me Bryony and it's persistent. I don't recognize the voice as anyone I know, but it belongs to a female. She talks mainly in my dreams, though I've heard her a few times when I'm awake, as well.

As for my dreams, they have been strangely vivid as of late. It scares me more than anything. They all correlate to my father's death, but also to me, in a strange kind of way? I don't know how to explain it. The dream that keeps reoccurring is my fear of the dark.

Ever since I was little, I was terrified of the dark. It's a common fear, and I still dread when darkness falls to this day. I remember waking up in panicked frights from dead sleep. I couldn't see anything, I couldn't hear anything, even though I'm sure I screamed. Often, I couldn't even feel my bed beneath me. But then I'd feel a hand on my arm and the cooing voices would begin to come in over my screams. Touch. I could feel it. I could sense it.

My senses would collect themselves and my eyes, swollen from crying, would fly open and my screams would stop. Then I'd realize the light to my bedroom was on. It hadn't been on before. Dad told me it had been on for five minutes. That's the only thing I could never remember when I had night terrors. I could never remember the time in between.

Ten nights ago, it all came crashing down. Life changed right then and there as I saw my father again months after he was presumed dead. He stood there, and just like how I could never remember the time in between with my nightmares, he couldn't remember me, or his family. Those memories were all gone, cleared from his mind and forever vanquished.

What I did still haunts me. I don't think it will ever not haunt me. What I did and how I did it. To see him after what felt like years when in reality it was only months. To finally see him and then have to take him away. I had to snuff out what used to be my father, and that forever changed me as a person. Every time my eyes close, I see my father and I relive what I did to him.

Bryony. Calm down.

The voice I've never heard before, belonging to an unknown woman, says coolly. It makes me nauseous. Even though I have no recollection of ever hearing the voice, it calls me by the same name my father did—the name he mistook for my own. The name the Jotunn kept calling me when I was strapped to that damn metal, surgical table. Bryony. I don't know who the hell Bryony is but I wish she'd go away.

Get out of my head. I force the reply. I can feel my body breaking out in a cold sweat; the sweat stealing over me from my head to my toes.

There isn't a response, just memories of my father flooding before my closed eyes, haunting my sleep. The voice seems to stop for now, but I can't help but feel like every time the voice says something, or every time I am called Bryony, something awakes within me. Something is stirring, and whatever it is, it's not a good thing. Whatever is awakening within me needs to stay dormant. I feel like I'm going insane, which makes sense since I hear voices in my head.

Guilt riddles my body as memories upon memories pile up in my dreams of my father and I, and our happy family of five. All these memories lead up to his inevitable end. His death, caused by the hands of his first born.

This makes me sound even more twisted and insane, but when I killed the other Jotunn on the shuttle with Calyx, it felt good. It felt rewarding to wreak havoc on those who've been in control for so long. It felt right and justified to kill them. I had suffered at the Warriors hands for so long, suffering from the dread of living in a world with such creatures, suffering when they took my father from me the first time, suffering when they killed Eli, Ariel, Diego and Calyx. It feels justifiable to kill the Jotunn. But not with my father. One might as well have ripped my heart out and trampled over it time and time again. That would've felt better than killing my own flesh and blood. Killing my father didn't bring me the same joy it did to kill the other Warriors. Instead it filled me with guilt.