Lydia was back there keeping an eye on Malia and her endeavor when she had a sense of déjà vu around her.
Everything turned black on her eyes for a moment. The Music beats stopped in a snap.
But she wasn't that teenager who would easily shed tears for small things, she wasn't the same sixteen-year-old girl who would cry for hours in her car alone when she felt embarrassed, she wasn't that envious, ostentatious, pretend-to-be-dumb Lydia Martin who would wear a false façade with confidence just for the sake of gaining popularity at high school. Times have changed, and so has Lydia's personality.
In the past decade that she spent with her friends, she learned the truth about herself, knowing that life had much more meaning than just being popular at high school or have the hottest boyfriend of all time. Those times of struggles, those times of loss and mourning, times of enjoyment with her friends transformed and redeemed her into a strong, bold, and confident girl who no longer needed just a mere façade to pretend to be the strongest or the smartest one in the tank.
But to that date, she was thankful to her late best friend Allison Argent for changing herself for most of the part. The Allison Argent that made her embrace her best part of herself, the Allison Argent that taught her to stand up by one's own feet, The Allison Argent that still had a place in her heart although she was not in this world anymore.
Predicting intuitions from her alter ego and making out conclusions from her Banshee premonitions was almost like a commonplace for her, so she stepped forward cautiously.
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Lydia turned around, rotating her head in almost all directions, trying to make logic out of it, and saw that everything around her was completely dark.
"She made me do it..." a pale voice from a girl almost of her age, reached her ears.
"Who is this?" Lydia asked out with a shaky fear-induced voice, to the absolute darkness and complete silence all around.
After that, she heard that same sound, which started weeping. The voice was successively getting more lurid every second making it sound irritating and scary at the same time. But it was irresistible, uncontrollable, for the source of the sounds was unknown.
"Oh...banshee..." it was the same voice.
It felt like she was a character in a puppet show where the puppeteer ruthlessly played with the strings. And some sadistic child was playing with the spotlights, making them constantly flicker. The rapid influx and efflux of lights made her flinch every time she took a step forward.
"Oh..banshee..let your spirit combine with my soul..."
Who was speaking? Lydia could comprehend that whoever it was, wanted to speak to Lydia.
She felt the need to cover her eyes with her elbow, as the darkness around her brightly faded out to somewhere in the lonely woods. But it was not the usual Californian trees she was used to seeing, it wasn't those thin, tall trees that remained silent behind Beacon Hills high school. It was something else this time. The trees between which she was standing were letting out a negative and dark presence.
"let your mind know what's the power of control...May you see what the Achylis will make me do..then you shall find all your required clue..."
Lydia had no idea what that person was talking about but she had to find out about that until its too late for something bad to happen.
As the light faded to black, the colors of the grass and leaves remained in her mind almost like a fragrance. The forest became a tone of psychedelic silver between the shadows that stretched out as if yawning. Already the warmth of the autumn day was quite gone, only ever-present in the sunshine, and the first bite of cold winter paled her skin.
She treaded forward slowly, stepping on the uncountable dry, crisped, and sun-baked leaves scattered on the ground, which was quite spooky and illogical in comparison to the weather and atmosphere she was in. The path at her feet faded as it led into the darkness of the woods, yet she followed it for the sake of her friends. Somewhere in there were the answers she needed, somewhere in there was a victory, if she witnessed her fears then, and so her feet followed the narrow strip of naked earth among the giants of root and leaf.
She let her hands touch the freezing coldness of pitch-black darkness as she passed, feeling their gentle spirits soothe her own. For this was their world as they stretched towards the light they never saw yet sensed, and she must do the same... open up her other senses... to sound, to the aroma and listen so very carefully to every instinct.
She navigated the path not by sight yet by faith, memory, and confidence. It released the sounds of a plethora of nocturnal ghosts, of they who may move safely within the hug of grey shadowed night. those weren't real ghosts trying to seek revenge from those who took their lives, those ghosts felt like real people who had no clue that they were about to be dead in the near future.
And then at the next moment, Lydia stopped.
She froze at the sight of a horrible visual. In front of her were the dead bodies of many persons, but not just random people, Lydia believed she knew them after taking a look at their physical features. The more closer she went to those bodes, the more disbelieving she started to find it.
At that time, those dead bodies were the most horrifying thing to look at in the whole world for Lydia, not just because those were lifeless corpses, but because those were the bodies of her friends, and the two of the dead bodies which were clearly recognizable were of Scott and Stiles. Behind them were the bodies of Theo Raeken, Derek Hale, Isaac Lahey, and Mason Hewitt. She even saw and recognized many of her old high school classmates, her house neighbors, the sheriff, but all of them were lying lifeless on the ground.
Their souls, however, didn't seem to have been passed into the arms of angels, to whom it took the soul to its rightful home. the souls looked like they were left there because nobody bothered to pay their last respects to them, it looked as if nobody cared for them. She felt that some apocalypse had arrived without fanfare because everyone got killed so quickly.
When she looked at those bodies in the coldness of the night, there was no love in those eyes, all she saw was deadness. Their souls were not meant to be over with. It belonged to Lydia, who reclaimed what was rightfully hers. She still had a life left, a life with her friends and loved ones and her allies, which she wanted to cherish with all her heart. Those were her friends, her family.
"You did this...Lydia...It's all...because..of you...You killed them all!!"
She couldn't believe it.
That voice, the same old voice that was with Lydia all those times back in her high school, the voice that previously wanted to show her love, warmth, and support. It was the same voice that was blaming Lydia for killing all her friends. It was the voice of Allison Argent. But she could neither see her nor find any traces of her presence near those bodies.
"No...NO...NOOO..." She was starting to lose it, Lydia was starting to lose her mind. Sure, she saw plenty of premonitions before..but this? this was not just a nightmare, it felt like the end of the world.
Lydia screamed out in frustration and confusion as she ran her way towards those bodies for letting out her grief. After all in the sorrow of death is the proof of love, of the bonds that exist beyond our reality, beyond the spacetime, matter, and energy that makes our world real.
But in her quick sprint, all the bodies disappeared in a blink of an eye, and she was back again standing like a clueless and hopeless entity in the dark night in the middle of those giant creepy trees. It was the same old dark woods.
The dark woods stood as noble black knights, fresh from the fields of an unknown legend, a lost myth. They didn't look just like normal ones. They stood there affixed at their roots, trying to reveal the mystery of an unspoken crime, the patterns made by their barks in the cold darkness looked like human faces trying to hide something from her.
'Breathe Lydia......Breath.....' She tried to calm herself down.
Every time Lydia stared at the colossal trees in the dark and foggy surroundings with her incredulous eyes, the same question played itself on her mind like a tape recorder:
What's happening?
The soil beneath her seemed sentient of each of her steps. The piercing beam of moonlight penetrating from the top of the trees was the only thing that symbolized hope in the darkest hour of the night.
"She made me do it..." The same voice note danced from behind one of the hundreds of tall trees she was standing amongst.
Who was it? Lydia wondered.
As she moved on to the back of a tree, the fractional bits of moonlight revealed a girl digging out the soil, with a shovel, her tangled up black hair bouncing on her back, and she was wailing over the same words over and over again.
As Lydia kept stepping closer and closer to her she started noticing the details. She had a bluish-violet cloak with a hood on her head. From that cloak creeped out the millions of untidy hair strands that looked like they hadn't been brushed in a lifetime.
In front of her were two graves, one of the two had the word 'Argent' written on it.
Argent?
Why did it have to be an Argent? Was it of Allison?
Lydia wondered, her heartbeat rising slowly thinking about the closest person to her with Argent as a surname. She found it confusing and overwhelming at the same time. She rubbed her eyes and saw the words again, It was Argent, but she couldn't see the first word nor the second name on the grave.
With the evil sparking out of her activities, rage, and fury leaping out from her hands, determination to perform something cruel anyone else could've easily judged her character from the external, but that was for anyone except Lydia.
Lydia believed 'Not all monsters do monstrous things.'
She started to walk closer to her with diminutive anticipation of knowing her problem, gently calling her from the back, as she tried to reach her shoulder from the back the black-haired girl turned back to her unpredictably and shrieked with a high-pitched voice
"SHE ...MADE ...ME... DO... IT!"
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Seconds after the scream, she was back from her hallucination, she could see the club, and hear the music beats once again, and that too in a snap.
Though Lydia was back in her reality all she thought about was that scream. In that empty scream was the pain of the indifference, of a powerful entity who sold its soul for ease and instead found hell. Her green eyes were a knife on Lydia's ribs, the sharp point digging deeper.
Where there possibly had been love before, was an emptiness, but not in any vulnerable sense. Uncomfortable with the void, she had filled it with an emotion she was more at ease with - raw anger. That gaze was accompanied by deliberate desperateness like she was fighting something back and losing.
The most uninteresting part of her vision that would make anyone go bonkers was that it was not her first time seeing that dead body. Sure, she didn't see all those bodies at once before, but she had been seeing specifically the same dead body over and again from the past week. It left her anxious, it left her depressed, it turned her into a moody person.
That same individual corpse was the very reason she was trying to call Stiles several times before going to college, that morning, it was the reason why Stiles' phone was left with tonnes of missed calls from Lydia.
In the morning Lydia even had made a stern decision to tell stiles about the same body she had been seeing for a while, but when he didn't pick up the phone in time, she decided to never lay light on that topic in front of Stiles again. She promised herself about that.
But why was she so tight-lipped and non-communicative about the dead body towards Stiles?
Because that one dead body she had been obsessively thinking of, and seeing visions of, was none other than of...Stiles Stillinski himself.
---XXX---