“You might not like me as much – having a different personality and life experiences have definitely made me a weirdo,” I add, trying to sound lighthearted.
Arianna snorts, “You were always weird.”
We laugh before slipping into a comfortable silence. A warm feeling of contentedness washes over me at having her safely back with us. But then I look at her and see how much she’s changed. The Arianna in Cassandra’s memories was younger, still a teenager, and was full of light and life. She got into all kinds of mischief at the temple but still trained hard and took responsibility for helping to train the younger children.
The girl in my memories is a far cry from the one who sits next to me today. The faraway, vacant look in her eyes hits the hardest. Like any light that used to live there has been crushed. After spending two hundred years locked under the Council’s castle, I can only imagine what she went through.
“So, do you want to talk about it?” I finally ask tentatively.
Arianna sighs and turns to sit so she’s facing me. I do the same, and we sit cross-legged on the stone wall, facing each other. “I – I’m not sure I can. If I start to let myself feel the sadness, the pain. I think it might consume me.”
I nod, completely understanding. “That’s fair.”
I wait to see if Arianna will start to share or change the subject, fully prepared to put on a stoic face no matter what she says.
Arianna purses her lips until exclaiming, “I’ve got it! We’re going to play who suffered more!”
Her excited outburst is entirely at odds with the dark, haunted look she just held.
I gape at her. “Excuse me?” The words are enough to spark a memory of Arianna and I sprawled out in one of the temple gardens, one-upping each other’s bad days. It was our favorite way of dealing with the ugly things we’d see.
Arianna smiles brightly at me. “That’s how I’ll get to know you in this life, and you can catch up on mine!”
She’s completely serious. What a morbid creature.
I like her already.
A pang of nostalgia fleets through me, like a whisper from Cassandra. Her memories must be closer to the surface around Arianna.
I shrug. “Okay, but be prepared to lose.”
Arianna beams, and it transforms her face into someone more familiar. Someone less broken. “You have no idea what you’re in for. You start.”
I laugh. “Okay, I hid my super powerful boyfriend from you back in Atlantis, and then I turned out to be part of a crazy prophecy, only to break up with him, and then he sunk Atlantis.”
I wait for Arianna to react, but she only rolls her eyes. “I already knew all of that. Morgana told me everything when I decided I wanted to stay here.”
She sighs like she’s disappointed in my efforts.
I laugh, scoffing at her, before challenging, “Okay, top it then.”
Arianna shrugs. “I pretty well sold my soul to the Council so that I could infiltrate their inner circles. So, I went from being groomed as a puppet for the Guardians to becoming a puppet for the Council.”
I purse my lips, slowly shaking my head at her like I’m bored with her confession. “I started seeing ghosts a few years ago, and then my childhood best friend convinced my entire class to kidnap me, and they tried to stone me to death.” I hold out my bare arms for added effect, showing off the scars.
Arianna looks at my arms quizzically. “They’re still stoning people in the Mortal Realm?”
I frown. “Not for a long time, at least not where I’m from.”
“Wow,” Arianna muses. “So, they got creative.”
“They certainly thought outside of the box. At least it wasn’t cyberbullying,” I add, shrugging.
At Arianna’s confused expression, I remember she’d been locked up for two centuries. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
Talking about my trauma with Arianna like this is surprisingly painless. Turning it into a twisted game is actually helping.
“When the Council gave me immortality, I developed powers they’ve never seen before. So, they gave me really shitty jobs. Mostly assassinations. It got tough, pretending to kill people when I was really sneaking them back to the Shadow Realm,” Arianna says, sighing dramatically.
