The Spark

Chapter 3: The dreams of an all-American girl

Kahlan

The click of the bathroom door resonated in my ears as loud as a bomb. I couldn't breathe. Stupid Luna. That freak always made everything worse. This was her fault. All her fault.

-No. Not hers. Yours. Just yours.

I bit back the sob trying to claw out of my throat. Whirling around I met the flickering bathroom light. The intermittent slashes of darkness forced my heart to pound frantically. I was in the kitchen again. I could smell the blood. The viscera. Hear Casey's crying. The darkness started drawing closer.

-It should have been you.

I pushed my face into my palms. I couldn't do this anymore. I wanted the pain to end. I wanted this nightmare to end. Yet it wouldn't. I'd fallen asleep so many times, hoping to find myself back at my house, drowning in the scent of morning pancakes, with my dad sitting at the counter reading the paper, and my mom adjusting her itinerary. To my boring, normal life, my boring, normal, upper-class family.

A dark feeling blossomed in the pit of my stomach.

-Was it ever really normal?

Had I ever been normal? Was this a dream? If it was, then waking up should have released me from it. It didn't. The horrid dreams of blood and... and... unnatural monsters destroying my family were bleeding into the real world. Or was this the real world? I didn't know anymore.

I leaned onto the bathroom sink, my whole body shivering. I tasted salt on my lips—it made my cheeks wet and taut. There was a small old-fashioned metal razor on the sink.

-It should have been you.

It was going to be me. Ending it might be the only way to wake up from this nightmare, the only way I could go back to being Kahlan Johnson, the annoying high school nerd everyone hated.

The metal felt cool against my skin. I unscrewed the head to expose the razor blade.

Arcata, California

One month earlier

The world was singing. The threads of blue, gray, white, and gold vibrated in a violent cacophony of music, enveloping me in a cloak of life. The music rose and fell, as the emotions woven within it dipped and skyrocketed, from anger to sadness, happiness to fear, love to hate, then anger again.

So many voices, speaking all at once, buzzing like angry hornets around me, in me. Then the pain came. The burning, the cutting, the slashing, the pressing, all of it descended on me at once, robbing me of breath, of being. It felt like my body was being ripped apart, the very fabric of my flesh, down to the atoms was disintegrating, the particles pulled like magnets to every corner of the world. To feel each soul, to know each mind, to touch the universe, to taste a galaxy. To be everywhere and nowhere.

"Who are you?" The voice asked, the same voice I'd felt calling me since the beginning. Since my birth, my death, my existence, and destruction. The voice, which was neither male nor female, alive or dead, human, or spirit. I could feel it reach into my core, caress my bones, fill my mouth with the taste of stardust, fire, and brimstone. It tasted like another world. Like hell. Like pain.

"Just a girl," I responded my voice a whisper, a deafening scream.

The song grew louder, turning bitter and cooked, a sticky kind of blackness encrusting the music threads. The universe around me began collapsing, the sun, the stars, the souls, and minds vanishing into a black hole. The burning pain vanished, replaced with icy cold, an eternally frozen scream that gnawed on my blood.