Darian felt numb.
How could he forget the face that faded into a sky full of dim pigments of red and blue in the night that haunted his childhood memories? The irony was that the memory had never left him. The memory of the scene of his mother being killed by Adelaide had always been the fuel for the fire that had been raging within him for as long as he remembered.
Although the memories never left him, and had always found their way to settle behind the curtains of his mind, the face of his mother and the face of Adelaide both remained a blur. A blur that kept melting into darker colors up until that very moment after he left the labyrinth. For then and only then did the blur begin to sharpen, and the truth unfold before his weary eyes.
Even his feelings didn’t know whether to crumble and fall from the mountains of sorrow and anger that they had risen above, or to ride with the winds and find a higher peak of a sturdier mountain. The blood rushing through his narrow veins gushed to his brain, and his nerves cast their spells over his bones.
He felt Atlanta grab him by the arm just as his knees threatened to buckle underneath him. He could only assume she had figured out the truth like he did. He had felt her touch, had felt the soar of energy racing through him, delicate fingers scraping at his mind and reliving the memories with him. He could hear her breathing heavily beside him, just as shaken as he was, and although he wanted to turn and look at her, to find some comfort in her gaze, he couldn’t. All he could see was the memory, and the tall figure of his mother standing before him.
You died, he wanted to scream. I watched you die!
Lenore had started walking up a set of stairs. The ruby-adorned cobblestone path behind Darian and Atlanta suddenly shut together by another tree-wall that intertwined its branches behind their backs, leaving them with only one direction to follow. Darian could feel the branches against his back, stopping his retreat. He felt them prod him forward, as if guiding him to where they knew he did not want to go. His hand tightened around Atlanta’s, and he fought desperately to stop his body from shaking.
Mother.
A rush of emotions burst through him, a kaleidoscope of raw feelings that threatened to burst and engulf him. He wanted to scream and cry and laugh and shout, all at the same time. For the first time in a long time he was no longer the leader he had built himself up to become, but a mere boy hiding under a table while his mother was murdered.
Darian knew that the veil taken off his blurred mind was just the beginning of what was yet to unfold. He could sense the secrets that Lenore had yet to share, the wealth of information she would bombard him with, relentlessly, and he feared what it would do to him. And like a mystic sky obscured by clouds, the dawn of his past needed nothing but time to begin flirting with his consciousness.
What else? What else are you going to show me?
Darian’s eyes were closed, his face wrinkled as his mind worked in overdrive, burning inside his skull. The curtains of his eyelids were drawn above the paleness of his ocean-blue eyes, and they fell right on Lenore’s identical eyes as she climbed the stairway and pierced his stare with her smile and gaze.
The wind blew fiercely through the window, and the flames that rode the candles on the stairway flickered and danced. The warnings were blowing into Everlore, yet the reception of the signs that came from the outside was blocked by the endless rambling in Lenore’s thoughts.
“You were dead,” Darian blurted as his voice crumbled. “This can’t be true; you’re playing with my memories.” He opened his eyes, rage burning within them. “Cast your spells elsewhere, witch!”
“Oh, Darian.” Lenore shook her head. “What’s getting into you? Why deny? I’m only sharpening the blurred images that already cower in the corners of your mind.”
“You can’t be here,” he whispered. He projected a wall of disbelief into a screen of angry words, but on the inside the pieces were all coming together. He remembered the portraits of his mother that hung on the walls in their house in Lisbon. He criticized himself for never fixing the face in the paintings with the blur of the face in the memory of his mother’s murder. Yet he couldn’t take that memory for granted; the agony of every moment in that memory was a pillar of what built him. His emotions and beliefs were all just pillars mounted in the ground woven by the pain of his mother’s death. And if that was untrue, if Lenore was his mother, then the whole of him needed to be scattered and carefully put back in place.
“All these years, all the pain you put me through,” he caught his breath as he thought of his father and the sadness that had never left his eyes, “and you come now without the slightest shame or guilt. Grinning and flashing your existence in my face as if it’s the truth.” Darian’s words were like a knife cutting through the air, and he could see a spark of pain etch its way onto Lenore’s face. “Even if you are my mother, you’re only so by name. My mother died. She was killed by Adelaide. She’s the woman I’m seeking revenge for.” His voice resounded and rode the flames of the candles, bristling the howl of the wind outside.
Darian shook Atlanta’s hand from his and stormed up the stairs. Atlanta ran after him.
“The memories you have of me being killed by Adelaide aren’t false, my son,” Lenore said in whispers as she stood by the door at the top of the stairway.
Darian’s momentum ceased halfway up the stairs and he fell on his knees. He felt his mind wander again through the holes of induced visions that she cast.
“I was cast to a netherworld in the west that I turned into the beautiful paradise you see outside.” Lenore turned her head towards the windows that showed a vastness of green, shadowed by the grey walls of Everlore. “She stole a book that I was enslaved by, and so I became enslaved to her. But with the help of Marcus, and the elder Vampires, we were able to get the book back from her. Then she fled to another netherworld.”
Darian felt he was drowning in a gloom of uncertainty. Yet, in the midst of it all, he saw what he had previously failed to see. He saw himself in Lenore. He realized the purpose behind the visions that were awoken when Atlanta had touched him. Lenore had meant for all this to happen, and everything had been set so he would understand the truth. “Mother?”
Lenore opened a door to a dimly-lit room. As Darian stepped through the door, the far wall caught his attention. Three books glowed on a shelf. Their red, black, and grey bindings on the side of the wall flashed, caught by the rays of the full moon’s soft light through the windows, as if it too was drawn to the books. Darian couldn’t tell what time it was anymore. It was as if morning and night had somehow become one in Everlore.
“I’m fascinated by your silence.” Lenore stood in the middle of the room. “I know that words may not be enough. Pictures could be worth thousands of words, and dreams worth eternities.” She raised her arms and her eyes closed. The wind was blowing, but not from the windows; it was rather seeping through the pores of her skin and flooding the room. A beam of white light engulfed the room, and the only color breaking the whiteness was the blue of Lenore’s eyes as they opened and fell on Darian and Atlanta. “I owe you both more than a dream; I owe you eternities of them. And there is nothing better than a conscious dream to enlighten you,” Lenore whispered softly as the whiteness of her skin beamed ruby-red. “My son and daughter, brother and sister before me. Glide through this sky of truth and back to the moments that have for too long been obscured and hidden from you both.”
The white light engulfed them, pierced their skin and warped their minds. Darian froze in his place; beside him, Atlanta shook and fell to her knees. Her thoughts and feelings rushed through him. It was as if they were one, a sudden burst of epiphany coursing through them both, binding them to each other.
Brother? Daughter?
He could hear Atlanta’s thoughts as clearly as if they were his own. Upon hearing the word daughter, a word she hadn’t heard in a lifetime, her heart crumbled and melted into the heart of a newborn baby, wailing in disbelief at the world that their eyes were waking to. Voids within her began filling with an alien feeling of belonging.
Atlanta looked at Darian, and he could see in her eyes that sense of familiarity. He could see she wanted to deny it just because it was in her nature to deny before examining and looking for the truth, but she couldn’t. She could not deny that the moment her eyes met Darian’s, all as the words son, daughter, and brother were ringing in her head, she felt that the truth had been lavished upon her by some white light. And more was still to come.
Darian’s anger had ceased and the flames were mollified by the feelings coursing through him. He remembered the first time he saw Atlanta at the Dome. Emotions had gushed up and filled his mind, and had fallen like rain on his heart. He had confused the feeling with romantic admiration, yet something in him had told him that it was absurd to conclude the feeling as such.
But it all made sense now.
He knew that the heart was a compass beyond comprehension.
He knew that his heart understood what he couldn’t make sense of, that he and Atlanta were bound together, more than the simple connection between two people who had just met.
The world blackened and a single speck of light roamed around them. The blue speck of light was like a small balloon that grew larger, and inside it was a story to be unveiled before their eyes. Lenore’s voice began to echo from every direction, through the veil of white, under the sky of black, and in the valleys of Darian and Atlanta’s minds.