More than that—they were talking about me. I could hear my name mentioned here and there. I could hear Alyana mentioning my mother. But why? What was it about me?
"Does she know?" the female asked, her voice quieter this time. "Does she know about?—"
"No," my aunt interrupted. "My sister is dead, as I suspected, but she never told her. She… Gods, Elandra, she didn't prepare her. I warned her what would happen. Not what could happen, but what would inevitably happen, and she still chose to keep her in the dark. She still blinded her own child to the truths of this world. How are we going to fix this? How do we handle this?"
"Carefully," the woman, Elandra, said. "Slowly and carefully and as much as it pains me to say, maybe your sister was right. Maybe she wanted her daughter to live a carefree life because she knew what was coming." What the fuck was going on? "But we need to act fast. We need to start preparing and we need to meet with the others. He won't wait long and we both know he has eyes and ears everywhere in this place."
"What about," my aunt quietened, "you know?"
"I haven't spoken to him in years. If it wasn't for Grimm popping over at my place every now and then I would've thought he was already dead. But he must have felt something. He must have."
"I saw him this morning when I went to greet her," my aunt admitted. "He didn't exit the forest, but he was there. I think Grimm was with him."
This morning? Was she talking about the man on the edge of the forest I had seen? The man that disappeared the moment my aunt appeared?
"Does she have the sight?" Elandra asked. "If she does, then we need to be even quicker than I initially thought."
My aunt took a deep breath, releasing it before she spoke. "I don't know. We haven't seen anyone this morning, so I can't be certain, but if she's here, if she survived that, then she must have. I didn't speak with her long enough to gather all the information, but I can feel her. I can feel her, Elandra."
The woman, Elandra, kept quiet for a second before speaking again. "We can all feel her, Alyana. The moment she approached the shores this morning, I could feel her. The moment her foot stepped on the ground, it was as if the energy went wild. Haven't you looked at the forest?"
My heart kept hammering in my chest because the way they spoke of me, of this place… It couldn't be. It simply couldn't be. They were talking about energies, about someone, but none of it made sense. Nothing made sense anymore. I've been here for just a couple of hours and I only got more questions than before.
"Alyana," Elandra suddenly said. "We're not alone." That they weren't.
I slipped out from my hiding spot, only to come face to face with a woman with almost white eyes and snakes looking at me from the top of her head. My entire body froze, my feet refused to move, and everything I wanted to say died on my tongue as my eyes tried understanding what it was that I was seeing.
She… she had snakes instead of hair. Living, breathing snakes. Snakes that were looking at me. Snakes that were moving like they were a separate entity, watching me carefully.I closed my eyes, rubbed them, and reopened again, only to be met with a woman with the same eyes but no snakes in sight.
Her hair was as black as midnight, falling over her shoulders in soft waves, right over the white shirt she wore, tucked inside black pants.
"Hello, Kaira." She smiled, kindly, too fucking kindly for my liking, and stepped toward me. "It is nice to meet you."
"What the fuck is going on?" I said, my limbs still frozen from what I had seen. Or what I thought I had seen. "Who are you?"
"Kaira," my aunt interjected. "I told you to stay."
"And I told you I wanted answers," I bit back. "I am not staying in the dark anymore, and seeing as you were discussing me, I'm pretty sure I have every right to be a part of this conversation. So I'm going to ask again—what's going on?" I asked my aunt directly and then looked at the dark-haired woman. "And who the fuck are you?"
The soft smile she carried slipped from her face almost instantly, replaced by the look of a predator if I had ever seen one, and the snakes… The snakes came back, slithering over her head, dancing to the music only they could hear.
"My name is Elandra," she purred, coming even closer to me. "But you might know me by a different name." I suspected as much. "You know me as Medusa."
I was a rational person,searching for logical explanations in every single aspect of my life, but right now my logic was failing me. Terribly. When I woke up today I only had one thought in my mind: find out more about my mother's past. And I guess I did, in a way, but not exactly in the way I expected it to unravel.
My eyes were still glued to the small coffee table in front of the sofa in my aunt's living room, after I screamed fucking murder when I saw those snakes.
I couldn't speak.
Couldn't look anywhere else.
Couldn't even think.
The dark, beady eyes of those snakes were etched in my mind and no matter how many times I tried to move, I was frozen, my mind working overtime, trying to conjure the most logical explanation to what I saw. But there were no logical explanations and this was not another one of my weird dreams I could wake up from.
Elandra, Medusa, whatever the fuck was her name, was sitting on my right, giving me space, but she didn't leave. She didn't laugh at my outburst either, deciding to stay and apparently let this unfold while my aunt kept calling my name ten thousand times, only for me to stay silent.
Silence was good. Silence was perfect right now, but every now and then one of them would speak up, breaking my perfectly comfortable silence, reminding me I wasn't alone.
