The Rebel Faction

The warm sea air was fiercely salty. Seagulls squawked in tired cacophony, ignoring the foetid stench of their feathery wings. They flew in haste, as if chattering about the toil left for them that day, and the current of the air was just not strong enough to hold their soft arms for that long. The waves knifed into the grainy sand, disregarding their attempts to dwell in their cushion of friends. Some were even taken by the spiteful waves, to a foreign land, never to return again.

Her fingers drew various shapes into the sand. Spirals, lines, flowers and doves. The water was so serene, from what she could see at least. Ignorant to the brutality of its own waves, ignorant to the exhausted fish in its endless waters. Even ignorant to the wails of a small child, sniffling at her abducted doll. The sea was evil. It stole the happiness of the young children. Withdrew the lives of many under its blanket of fluid self. Maybe it felt it was kind, coveting a whole world under the murky waves. Yet unmoved to everything that went on underneath. What went on underneath anyway?

She wouldn’t know. It didn’t take her existence. Will never either. Never hers. She loved the sea. She even loved the reek of the hair curling sodium chloride. She loved putting her aching feet into its warm waters, enjoying the gush of the lush, white foam under her toes. She wriggled them about a bit.

It was the same place. The exact same place she left to her foreign land here. Kidnapped or out of will, she wasn’t sure. But what she did remember was that she went. And she stayed. For some time that is. Lexia. Yes, that’s where she went.

She got up and made her way to the vicious sea water, stepped in and laughed. A looker-on would call her crazy, a young woman in a white dress twirling around in the merciless waves. Almost phantom-like. The clouds closed in and the sky was grayer than gray. It seemed that she was even in the middle of the storm. She didn’t care. Aretsuya was quite fond of what went on there. Ruthless it may be, but it was docile to whoever could tame it. Flummery, all this rubbish about the hazardous waters. The sea invited her in for a splash, and she gladly accepted.

The girl tumbled over, and giggled with childish mirth as a jet of salty liquid washed over her. Her dress was translucent now, but who was there to see? Just her marine friends and the winds. It howled, to show its appreciation. She grinned. She tilted her head back and uttered a strange, treacherous shriek of laughter.

The lucid white dress she wore clung to her pale skin, wrinkling and creasing here and there, but remaining still elegant after all the salt water it had been forced to wade through. One would not be able to tell it had been a hand-down stolen from an innocent child. It was after all, fresh and pretty with a hint of childlike behavior beneath its hems and laces. But still innocent. Who would’ve thought.

The girl did not even know how long she sat there afterwards. She was too absorbed with the waves to even care. Funny, that when you fall into the comforting liquid, all else means nothing. Almost like a cleansing moment, born again once you emerge from the waves. Until something takes away that moment from you. Until she had caught sight of that little doll again. She picked it up. It was tattered, but still pretty. Still plastered with a freakish smile on its ragged, artless face. Still fresh. Wasn’t it supposed to melt away beneath the sheet of brackish water, like the former entrants to the expanse?

It scared her. It wasn’t supposed to come back. It was supposed to disappear forever, just like a certain man had. She wept over him sometimes, still. Not because she felt any fondness for him, but because she was afraid. Afraid of what was becoming to her. And he was the end. He would destroy her, even in death. Well, at least the thoughts of him would.

Aretsuya took to the sand once more, crushing the dainty little marionette between her fingers and grimacing at the sharp plastic arms, impaling her clammy palms. She dropped down, hugged her knees, and whimpered, along with the lonesome child in the back, unaware of the fact that her little plastic friend had come back, only to be broken into pieces once more. Her head whirred. Her body shook. She fell onto the gritty sand, and lay there. No. Not again…

”It’ll be alright, sister. Just do whatever I tell you to do, and you’ll be just fine.”

The woman touched her forehead. Immediately, her body seized up. She stopped breathing.

She plummeted.

Down, down, down, where to, she did not know.

What was going on ?

Aeons later, her eyes opened, her body ached. Where was she? She closed her eyes, hoping everything would change. It did.

The petite body leaned on a corroded lamp post, illuminated by the pallid glow of the full moon. She was taking short, shallow breaths, small drops of perspiration forming on her dank forehead. She raised her chin up, and let her eyes linger on the walls ahead of her.

She was tremendously exhausted. The night before, she had been sent to meet with several strange women, who not only enticed her, but terrorized her. They seemed… eerie, as if her presence was evanescent overall when next to such beings. She didn’t like them. Or maybe she just felt inferior. Especially after all the disapproving glares.

There was no sleep. Just wonder. Where was she? What was she to do here? And why was she here? She didn’t see any way in which they could help her. Except make her stronger, as they had said. Just how, she was about to find out. And she wasn’t sure if she was ready.

Walk right through the glass house. That’s exactly what Amara ordered her to do. Sounded easy enough, till she walked right in front of the door. Her body quivered, and her lungs inhaled a greater amount of oxygen. Her fingers couldn’t stay still. Opening the door itself was a hard enough task. She released the tight grasp of oxygen and pulled the door open.

There was no appearance of anything. This thought was quite comforting for a while. Walking through the corridor would’ve been easy then, if she hadn’t an uneasy squelch in the pit of her stomach. There was more here. She could sense it, and she wasn’t exactly sure how. She wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible, and made no stop to think.

She hastened her step every second; was it just the anxiety or were the walls really closing in around her? For one, the glass grew smokier by the minute, as if a mist had shaped itself on the surface and dominated the walls. She didn’t like it. She felt trapped.

She sped up. There was something here. The gut feeling, the instinct. The adrenaline pumped through her blood, her hands shook. She could barely think. Confinement did not suit Aretsuya.

She was being watched.

Running now, her primitive brain was the only part of her keeping her going, controlling her muscles to push forward, egging her on. No time for predators. Her body was going to run before it was too late. Her mind was just blank, from fear. She could hear it: the cackles, the scrapping of sharp material on glass. And the thump. Thump. Thump.

One. Two. Three. A few more steps to go. That is, if she hadn’t the feeling that the walls were sealing up around her. Claustrophobia now. Her throat was dry, she was going to choke, if she didn’t leave right there and then.

Aretsuya wasn’t sure how she reacted to them first. If she wasn’t too busy trying to bash against the glass and hurting in the process, she wouldn’t have tripped over the scaled little beings trailing behind her, and eventually, around her legs.

With flaccid, scaly skin and large, pale eyes, what they were was impossible to tell. Their jagged little claws were almost as transparent as the glass, almost as if they were a part of the shards themselves. In fact, Aretsuya wondered if the reason she couldn’t see them in the first place was because they WERE initially, a part of the glass. It sure did feel that way, when their razor sharp claws scrambled up her thigh, and she shrieked with fear at the prospect of being covered with these tiny little alien beings. She slammed her fists against the glass walls, cried out, pleaded for them to have mercy on her. She was going to be annihilated, as they crawled on top of her, in numbers. They were going to choke her to death. She fell, onto the many piles of sharp shards and claws.

“You have failed us, sister. If Force Blanket was harsh on you, how will you survive the other challenges that lie ahead?”

Aretsuya merely gasped for breath, her vacant eyes staring at the sky, the spherical orbs illuminating the crimson moon up above. She’d try harder, really. If only she knew how…

The tide was high, the waves crashed onto the many nooks and crannies of the rocks, pelting them with enough force to erode the thousands of particles away. The little creatures in between sought refuge, deeper into the cold caverns, in hopes of living a while longer. Little did they know that their home would eventually disappear. The waves would take them away, to never return, and they’d be suffocated by the force of the giant ocean tides bearing upon them.

Was that all that was really happening? Would they really remain alone for that long? Even graves are inhabited by the worms, devouring the carcass and enjoying the rotting flesh. No one is completely alone.

Aretsuya sank into the sand once more, apprehensive and a little jittery after the recollection. She remembered how she hated being the only one there, but how she hated having to run even more.

Besides, she wasn’t the only one watching the ocean tides anymore. Someone had come to witness its awesome power once more, but she didn’t want to share. There was someone there, she could feel it. And raw anxiety devoured her, yet again.