Broken Visions

Chapter 2

As we hike down the path toward the unknown, I watch my father out of the corner of my eye. He looks so much like me; brown hair, fair skin, tall, and of course the violet eyes. It’s almost too good to be true and with faerie/Foreseers like Nicholas roaming around, who can turn into a mirage and make me see things that aren’t real, I have to wonder if my dad isn’t real or nothing but an illusion manifested, perhaps, by my death. Maybe Aislin’s mirage protection spell isn’t working anymore. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead.

“Am I dead?” I dare ask.

He shakes understandingly. “No, you’re fully alive.”

I continue to study him; sharp features, a warm smile, confidence in his walk. “Are you dead then?”

He shakes his head, a sparkle in his eyes. “Not quite.”

“Is that even possible? To not quite be dead?”

He considers this carefully, gazing off at the columns lining the path. “You’re here in your vision form.”

I swallow the massive lump in my throat. “So my body is still back on earth? Passed out?”

“Yes, pretty much.” He pauses. “But don’t worry, today isn’t the day you’re going to die, Gemma. I promise.” His silver robe swishes across the floor as the path curves upward, almost as if it’s bowing into the sky and carrying us along with it. “We only have a few minutes before you have to return and I have something very important I need to show you.”

“Okay.” Light glimmers from the ceiling. “Is it how to reset time and bring back Alex?” I half expect him to yell at me, for putting a guy before the world’s needs, but he simply nods.

“If all goes well and you’re able to pull it off, then yes, Alex will come back too,” he says, nodding.

“So this is all in my hands?’ I ask. “I mean resetting time?”

“You sound skeptical?” He notes curiously as the path dips downward again and I have to work to keep by balance and not fall to my ass and slide down.

I shrug with my hands out to my side. “It’s just that I’ve seen and heard things that make me think that it’s not possible to change time. Or that I should.”

“You’ve seen them in your visions I’m assuming?”

“Sort of…” I gape at him. “Wait, you know I can see visions?”

He smiles as we arrive at the bottom of the hill, then we veer to the right down a slender hallway lined with porcelain columns engraved with gold leaves. The ceiling is swirled with various shades of yellow and blue, creating an effect similar to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The place is surreally gorgeous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

“Where do you think you inherited your Foreseer gift?” my father asks as I gaze at the beauty around me in awe. “And, just like you, I have unique Foreseer abilities.”

I tear my attention off the scenery and focus on him. “So you can do things besides just see visions?”

“Yes, but that is a story for another time,” he tells me with a sad smile on his face as if it’ll never happen. “Right now, you need to focus on creating a better future for the world.”

I have a ton of questions I’m dying to ask him. It’s my first time meeting him, and I want to know everything I can about my mother, my past, him. But there’s urgency in his voice that keeps my lips sealed. And besides, deep down in the pit of my heart, most of my attention is on Alex, back at the beach house, dead, something I need to fix. In fact, just thinking about it makes my heart feel like it’s rupturing open and bleeding out, but whether that feeling is coming from the star or from my own emotions, I’m unsure.

I bite on my nails and remain stuck in my own head and the what if’s as we make the rest of our journey. At the end of the hallway there’s a stairway stretching up a sloped floor toward a brick mausoleum. Two massive pillars form an entryway to the heavy wooden door on the front of it where there’s a red light glowing from a barred window.

“What is this place?” I ask, hoping that it just looks like a mausoleum and doesn’t actually have dead bodies inside it.

He doesn’t answer as he climbs up the stairs toward the mausoleum. I rush after him, the steps cold underneath my bare feet, making me aware that I don’t have any shoes on and painfully hyperaware that I can barely remember anything up to the point where I woke up from my possession and Alex was dead on the floor. This has me worried about what I did while I was under Stephan’s control. What if I’m not remembering more evil things I did? What if I hurt more people?

I glance down at my arm where he branded me with the mark, now gone, my skin back to it’s smooth, paleness. I remember how Stephan told me that I had evil in my blood and that’s why he was able to put the mark on me. What if that was true? What if do have evil in me? What if this showed terribly when I was possessed? Even if I do manage to reset time and erase it, it can’t necessarily erase what’s inside me.

“Everything okay?” my father asks, sensing my distant thoughts.

I nod, unsure how to ask if somehow I have evil blood in me. And what if it came from him? “I’m fine… just thinking about Alex… and how he was…”

“I understand,” he says. “Losing someone can be difficult, especially if you’re not used to death.”

I want to say that I am used to death, though. Hell, I grew up thinking both of my parents were dead. But now I’ve met them both, fully alive and breathing so it’s not really relevant. And besides, during most of the time I thought they were dead, I couldn’t feel emotions so there was nothing inside me gnawing away like it is now.

“Hopefully, I won’t have to get used to it yet,” I say with a forced smile.

“Hopefully,” he agrees, coming to a stop in front of the mausoleum door. He reaches for the brass handle and the hinges creak as he opens it, as if it had been sealed shut for ages. Then he ducks his head and steps inside the dark and hesitantly I follow.

It takes my eyes a moment or two to adjust to the lack of light and my skin and lungs take even longer to get used to the damp air. “It feels like death in here,” I whisper, hugging my arms around myself.

“That it does,” my father replies, giving me no hope that this building isn’t a final resting place for the dead. He hunches over even more as he begins to descend farther into the dark. The low ceiling drips murky water on our heads and the cold tile floor is cracked and stained. The pillared walls are deteriorating, chipped and flawed, but in a hauntingly beautiful way. Decorated with red lanterns, the whole place has a soft glow which flows around the room and lights the way down a narrow tunnel.

“This way,” my father instructs with a nod of his head, reaching up to unhinge a lantern from the wall and carry it with him.

I trail after him, the air growing heavier the further we go and the floor feeling more like ice than tile. I start noticing little details the more my eyes adjust to the dark. The way vines flourish from the ceiling, the sound of a river flowing from somewhere nearby, how on each pillar there is an eye carved in the center, the pupil an S wrapped by a circle—the Foreseers’ mark. Is this a place for the Foreseers? Is it linked to the City of Crystal? That idea makes me nervous, especially if Nicholas has access to it.

“What is this place?” I trace my fingers along one of the eyes. “Does it have something to do with the Foreseers?”

My father shakes his head, the lantern swinging from his hand. “This is a place where no one wants to be.”

I’m about to ask him to explain more, but we reach the end of the tunnel where there’s a large midnight blue trunk, trimmed with gold, perched on top of a Victorian table. My father sets the lantern down beside the legs, then raises the lid of the trunk and sticks his hand inside, retrieving a crystal ball orbed with soft light.

He extends his hand out toward me, his violet eyes more dark lavender. “This is how you’re going to reset time and hopefully create a better future for the world.”

I eye the crystal ball warily. “With just a crystal ball?” I look up at him. “How?”

He takes my hand, his skin alarmingly chilled, and he carefully places the crystal ball my palm. “No, with this and your power.”

It isn’t like any of the other crystal ball I’ve seen. The outer glass is crystal clear, allowing me to see inside to the center where a star-shaped center bursts with light.

“I don’t understand….” I’m transfixed by the crystal ball, unable to take my eyes off it, as though it’s beckoning me to use it. “I thought my power was what ended the world?” I lift the crystal ball to eye-level. “This crystal has a lot of power…”

“That it does.” He shuts the lid on the trunk. “And when I say power, I’m talking about your Foreseer power, not the star’s power.” He stands silently for a moment, struggling to tell me something important. “I’ve done some things in my life that have led me to this place. Things that are unforgivable—things which you’ll understand soon. But I need you to put the future back and fix some of those mistakes.”

I wonder if the evil in my blood came from him. “Unforgivable things?”

“I can’t answer that right now,” he says. “Nor can I tell you how to use the crystal ball.”

It fills like I’ve been stuck in some sort of riddle world, where I have to figure out the answers from a bunch of stuff that doesn’t seemed to be linked to anything. “Why can’t you tell me anything?”

“Because you have to figure it out on your own.” He tries to offer me an encouraging smile. “You and I are unique cases. We can both travel into visions without the assistance of a crystal. With enough strength, you should be able to change the vision I erased and recreated.”

I’m dumbstruck, my fingers tightening around the crystal. “You changed a vision? I thought you weren’t allowed to do that?”

“You’re not.” Regret seizes his expression. “The vision I changed was so the world would end… And to this day, I regret it.”

Evil. Evil. Evil. The word echoes in my head. “You made it so the world would end? How…why would you do that?” I step back. Maybe he’s still evil and he’s getting me to do his evil work.

“Relax, Gemma. I assure you there are good reasons for why I did the things. Granted, it’s not an excuse, but at the time it seemed like it was the only option.”

I back away until my back brushes the wall. “There are no such things as good reasons for doing something evil.” I shake my head, feeling the ache of another hidden wound.

“You’ve never done anything bad that felt like it was the only option at the time?” he questions with accusation.

I open my mouth to say no, but deep down I know it’s a lie. “Yes, but…”

“No buts. This isn’t important right now.” His voice is startlingly sharp, his hands balling into fists, anger controlling him. “What’s important is that you fix it—change everything back to how it was originally supposed to be. You need to make sure the world doesn’t end up like it did in the vision you saw.”

I shiver as the images surface, the one’s I’ve seen of the world in its icy demise. “The one where the world ends in ice—the one where Stephan and Demetrius and the Death Walkers win?”

He relaxes a little. “Yes, that’s what you need to stop from happening.”

I want to argue with him more, but there’s a voice in the back of my mind reminding me that if this works correctly, I’ll have Alex back. I see the bigger picture of what my father was talking about and it makes him seem less evil, or me slightly more—I’m not sure.

“Alright, but you need to tell me what to do, because I have no clue,” I say, moving back toward him.

He taps the crystal ball I’m holding with his finger. “Everything you need to know is in here.” He places his finger to my temple. “And in here.” Then he turns his back on me and starts to walk away. “It’s time for you to go back. Good-bye, Gemma. I have great confidence that you’ll be able to fix my mistakes.”

I start to chase after him, desperate to know more, but the walls around me bow in and out and the entire room starts to spin and becomes distorted like funhouse. My knees lock up on me and I can’t move. My father walks further away from me and the tunnel begins flickering in and out of focus. I attempt to run after him again, wiggling my legs and arms and putting all my strength in it, but he just keeps getting further and further out of reach.

“But I don’t understand any of it!” I shout, clutching onto the crystal ball. “How am I supposed to change visions if what I’ve been taught is that they’re not changeable? And how do I know which ones to change?” I stop fighting, my feet like heavy like bricks, and I’m submerged by darkness. “Dad, I don’t understand!”

“Don’t worry.” His voice seems to come from everywhere. “You will.”

Before I can say anything else, I’m being flipped upward and tossed into the darkness.