The sun was at zenith by the time the girl was up again. How she woke up, still, was a bit bizarre. He had been lying down on the ground with stomach up, watching her, just watching her breathe as he lay still. He wouldn’t move due to the fact that her head lay on his chest, and her eyes were lightly closed in slumber.  However, once she realized what she was doing, she nearly squealed – her cheeks had turned red and she turned away from him, embarrassed to have been sleeping like that.

It was then that she remembered crying, and not just crying, crying in front of him. She had lost it completely. But who wouldn’t have? She had lost a major aspect of her life – her town, the people in it, her cousin. Everything. Her life would just fall down from here, and it was all because of him. He was the reason that she was stuck out here, without a clue where she was or who he really was.

Not realizing what he’d done wrong at first, he looked to her with concern – then he realized what had happened, and he nearly laughed. However, he contained himself and looked to her with a small smile.

She lost all thought of this being his fault.

“You’re alive,” she said, still looking away. Her eyes were half lidded from the lethargy that had engulfed her during the night, and she was still intoxicated from even the small taste of moonshine she’d taken – she didn’t notice, at first, how lightheaded she felt, as if she were about to just fall through the ground or even into the sky.  When he gave her a smile in his eyes as well, she continued, “How did you live?”

Naricith opened his mouth to speak, and then paused – that was a good question. He could answer it, of course, but it would be hard. He looked toward the sun in its prime and then to her. Her eyes were on him expectantly; he never paused. He was always perfect with his words, never stuttering or stammering and always precise with timing. This time, however, he was at a loss. This would be harder to tell her than he’d thought.

“Shall I tell you from the beginning?” he asked, looking her dead in the eye. Roxanne’s face was a little pale, seeing the slight dread that came through his gaze. However, those eyes entranced her, the deep vermilion of one and the serious gleam of the violet tinted. She was coming back into this world again, not so lost in the massive hangover she was feeling from all the action last night. Still, she was absorbed into those eyes, as if they told a story. She could almost feel something rushing around her, like an ominous wind – she couldn’t quite place this feeling, familiar as it was. The two never blinked as they looked to each other, and finally, she remembered – he was casting an image.

This time, he was casting it onto her. As much as she wanted to escape the feeling of being bounded by memories, all of them flooding into her mind at once, she couldn’t blink nor look away. She was under his spell, too much too late.

His blood trickled down her leg. She saw the lifeless Naricith’s eyes placed somewhere over her head, and she looked back in the direction. There was a light glistening in the atmosphere far off in the distance. The luminous effects of its rays were enchanting, and the whole while, she could only stare – she wasn’t sure what it was. Surely it wasn’t another helicopter – there were enough gunmen on the ground, and the aircrafts had retreated so as not to poison the citizens below in the city.

It came toward them, drawing closer and closer. With a sudden jolt, her body went still – all but her eyes paralyzed – and she looked toward the direction from which the light had come.

She had been hallucinating.

Something in her was changing. It was deep within her, within the cells of her body, and she could feel every strand of DNA as it untwisted and came apart. She heard herself scream out in horror, but in an out of body experience – she wasn’t the one making all that noise. It was that brunette. Yet, she could feel every bit of the intense pain that came with the tearing of veins and arteries, and she felt them replaced with something burning hot.

The memory kept going, however. She couldn’t move, still, and her lungs were like stone – it took heaving after heaving of breath to make her actually draw in oxygen, and she could hardly bear the pain. Needles in her legs, nails in her arms, and finally, she felt the worst excruciating ache of all. It was like having a tourniquet preformed while fully awake, a hole drilled into your head. Her spine was on fire, now –

“Stop it!” she cried at last.

Naricith stopped the images, blinking quickly and looking away. His brows were furrowed with anger at himself, and he could hardly keep from a complete rage. When he looked back to her, she was breathing heavily, having just started respiration for the first time in some time. Her blood had become cold inside of her, and when it began to warm back up once more, she looked down to her skin – paler than normal, she noticed. Then, looking to her wrists, she noticed that every vein inside was protruding and burning her pelt from the inside out.

“Do we have any mirrors?” she asked at last.

The male shook his head. She should have known. Who would carry a mirror with them while they were trying to escape from their deaths? Finally, standing up, she looked around – to the West, she found water, a large, snaking brook that curved toward the east abruptly. Looking back toward the south where they had come from – it was the south, wasn’t it? – She saw nothing. Nothing but an endless plane of green. Roxanne’s eyes were growing weary, and she slowly lowered herself to the ground once more. This time, she noticed that the ground was soft, not hard like it was in the city – there were strands of emerald plant-life beneath her. She picked a piece, taking it into her hand and feeling it with her fingers.
“Grass,” he said, coming up behind her. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any before?”

She merely blinked. So this is what grass was. She sighed, coming to the conclusion that there was much more than she expected out of such a tiny thing. The texture, for example, was only smooth was only on one side, while coarse and rough on the other. Her eyes were full of fascination, and she glanced away from the plant to look toward the water. She’d never seen so much water at once before.

She crawled over toward the water, sitting on her knees and looking in – it was like glass, very smooth looking. However, it was distorted as it rippled over the rocks and over the sand of the shore. While looking down, she saw her reflection; she nearly jumped back in horror.

At first, Roxanne didn’t even recognize herself in the water. It was a total stranger staring back at her. The femme had two eyes, of course, but rather than both brown, one was a bright, pale blue while the other shone a lime green. They were wide with fear. This was only the first out of many more surprises to come.

Her eyes traveled down to her lips, and almost immediately she noticed that they were fuller than the thin lips she possessed before. Her hair, which was pulled up in a bun before they’d left town, was now down, and with more volume – not so much to look large, but enough to look astonishingly beautiful. Her teeth were perfectly aligned and ivory.

Finally, among the facial features, her eyelashes were longer; so long, in fact that it looked as if they weren’t real. They were so enchanting and bounteous nonetheless that they could catch anyone’s attention – especially the silver on the tips of the lashes.

“What in the world is going on?” she asked herself. Then, turning to face Naricith, her eyes pleaded him to give her answers. His own mismatched stare was placed away from her and on something far off in the distance. “Well? What’s happened to me?”

Simply enough, he replied, “Look at your leg.”

She looked to her leg.

There, on her thigh, through the material of her clothing, there was a burn, larger than the palm of her hand. It was ebony in the center, then spread into an ugly brown-red. Hesitantly, she asked, “What’s wrong with me?”

He opened his mouth to answer, and stopped. No, it would have to wait.