"Maria?" it was her mom's voice.
Maria closed her math textbook and rubbed her forehead, hoping that somehow it would cure the pounding headache that had crept on her in the past few minutes, but with no avail.
She stood up, and a blinding pain shot through her skull. She let out a gasp and had to grab her dresser for support to keep from falling over.
Images shot through her mind: Stella, bound in chains, the ruins of a crumbled building, a violet-eyed woman with long, pale blonde hair and a scar marring her face...
They came faster and faster.
A shield of light being cracked and corrupted by a darkness that spread through it...a crystal amulet, glowing with energy...
Maria felt her grip loosen on the dresser and her body hit the carpet, yet still the images continued.
A storm, gathering in the distance, a man crying out and falling to the ground...
Asilvercirclettheoutlineofawolfdrenchedinscarletaglowoftwoorbs:brownandgrayablurofblueagoldenhairedgirllyingmotionlessfieryteardropsrainingfromtheheavens...
Make...it...stop, Maria thought with more than a little difficulty.
Themoonlightilluminatingaforgottenpastthestarsshiningwithhiddenlightahealingtouchloveandhateandstrifeandchaosand...and...
The sound of footsteps rushing up the stairs barely penetrated the sort of emotional fog Maria felt.
Neither did her mother's voice, asking, "Maria, honey, are you all right?"
In fact, Maria felt as though she were fading away to some distant, unknown place. Yes, that was right, she found herself thinking, she should just give in to the sudden exhaustion that gripped her, holding on was far, far too difficult...
"You were not meant to hold such power," a voice seemed to whisper.
Maria blinked, and she found herself standing...no...floating before a woman dressed in white. She might have been beautiful once, but now she looked old and sad and tired. Her long, silver-whitish hair looked dull, as did her eyes. They were a pale, pale gray-almost, Maria found herself thinking, like the light and life had been sucked out of them.
"You have come so close to the end, child," she said softly. "Your mind very nearly cracked under the pressure."
"I'm going to die?" Maria asked. "A-are you a angel, then?"
"Of a sort," the woman said. "But-no, you are not going to die."
"I-"
Her body flickered between being there, being visible, and not.
"I cannot make a connection with any of the others," she whispered. "Something is barring my way. You are the only one..."
Maria tried to make sense of what she had said.
"What others?" she asked.
"In time, perhaps-" her form flickered once more, "you will understand."
Maria felt herself slipping away from this odd, dreamlike state.
"This burden was not meant to be yours," the woman whispered, her form flickering once more. "But you must bear it. You will...return to the realm of the living...and, spirits willing, you...will stay there for a long time yet."
She was disappearing, even more so than before.
"Remember the visions you see, child...remember them. When the time is right, you will need them. All of them will...all of them..."
Maria had only ever ridden a roller coaster once before, but what she felt right now was rather like that time. Only, instead of rushing forwards at incredible speeds, she was getting pulled backwards fast...faster...faster...
And then she was lying on the floor of her bedroom, her mother leaning over her.
"Maria? Maria?" she was asking, shaking her.
"Mmm..." it was all she had the energy to say.
She couldn't remember being so tired, not ever-not even New Year's day, when Mom and Dad had gone to bed as soon as they had watched the ball drop and had shepherded Maria inside to keep her from blowing her little paper horn down the street and annoying all the neighbors within a fifty-mile radius, but hadn't told her or Stella they had to go to bed, which meant Stella stayed up until two in the morning so she could read in peace, and that Maria stayed in her room with her, mostly, except when she ran back outside to scream "It's 2019! It's 2019! WOOOHOOO!"
In the morning she had been really tired, because her alarm for school that she hadn't remembered to turn off for Christmas break went off again at 6:30 AM and she couldn't go back to sleep. She'd spent the whole day in a sort of mental fog where she didn't have the energy to do much of anything.
But that had been nothing compared to what she felt now. Her whole body seemed unresponsive, her mind sluggish, and her surroundings fuzzy and indistinct, even though she could still feel her glasses on her face. She felt miles away from this room, from everything, and she was just barely aware of her mother placing a hand on her forehead, then checking her temperature with the thermometer that beep-beep-beeped three times before lapsing into silence.
She could feel her mother picking her up and carrying her down the stairs easily, like she was still a tiny, tiny baby, though of course she wasn't.
A random memory surfaced in her foggy mind: being too young to go to school still, three or four, and her mother dropping her off in that big green room in the Y where lots of other little, little kids like her played and whined and sometimes tried to eat the toys, like that one boy Ethan who had chewed on the blue plastic dinosaur, while they waited for their parents to finish exercising.
Maria was pretty sure that had happened a lot. And...come to think of it, whenever Maria knocked on Mom's bedroom door in the time before school, the early morning, Mom was usually in the middle of some sort of exercise routine or another.
Distantly she realized her mother was a pretty hard worker. If she'd had the energy, she would have said so. But she didn't, couldn't even focus on the TV screen she vaguely, vaguely noticed was on to some Disney movie she couldn't think of the name or at the moment or pull the blanket Mom had placed over her when she had set her down on the couch.
And when Mom forced some absolutely foul medicine in her mouth, she didn't fight like she would've normally, just obediently swallowed, relieved she could still do that.
Soon she found herself drifting off-not to that maybe-dream place but to sleep, regular, blessed sleep...