Rising Shards

The vision seemed to crumble before my eyes. It looked like they were absorbed by a massive thunderstorm, and I could only hear voices swirling around us.

“You’re not even an Atrian, there are no Atrians anymore! All that’s left of them is all the garbage that lasted past all of them dying…”

“You’re jealous. So you lash out at my dreams.”

“Ohhh, sorry I’m making fun of your 'dreams,' to sit around in some boring temple pretending to do magic with a bunch of other losers who’ve been doing it longer who conned you into thinking you could do it!”

“Shut up!”

“Don’t start, Tik.”

“Come on! Show me how stupid my Atrian training is! At least I’m not scared to leave!”

I heard shouts. Then a horrible, violent sound.

“Tik?”

“It’s gonna be OK, you’ll be alright.”

“River…”

“Who is that?”

“Trust me…”

“I can’t hear you.”

“You must…”

“The only way to save her…”

Then there was just darkness and rumbling thunder.

I looked to the Tik Moonheart of the present,

“What was that?” I asked. “I mean, your past, I think. Like how we saw mine.”

“The same day…” Tik said.

“Huh?” I asked.

Tik gripped her cane tightly. “That’s where I was while…” She shook her head. “I’ll explain later. We should be calibrated now.”

We looked ahead to see pouring rain washed away the nothingness left after Tik’s vision, replacing it with a dreary looking place. The architecture was similar to Tik’s vision, but it looked so twisted in the storm, I couldn’t tell if it was the same place. A crowd screamed with rage as a girl pushed through them, darting into an alley.

“That’s…Mom…” I said.

My mother looked to be just a bit older than me; she was being chased. She ran to a building, but I wasn’t able to see inside. Moments later she burst out, now with a full looking backpack. She stumbled into a muddy patch on her lawn, nearly losing a shoe as she continued on.

A lightning bolt struck, and the mob approaching had grown greatly in numbers.

Mom froze, looking like she was about to faint. Someone screamed for her to run, snapping her out of her moment of panic. She joined three others, and they all ran through the crisscrossing streets of their city.

“Stop thinking, it slows you down.”

I could tell, this was the one who told her to run. I knew his voice. It was Dad. He was young here too, but I recognized his younger self due to the retention sprite my parents had sent to find me, which for some reason was of his teenage self. Maybe to seem more trustworthy? Just to sneak into the school? It was probably a waste of time to dwell too much on my parents’ machinations, but I couldn’t help it once I started.

The crowd advanced on them like an acidic wave. Dad grabbed Mom’s hand, and the group continued to run, escaping town and reaching a grassy hill, cast in a grayish storm. They bounded over the hill and onto a similarly dreary beach.

I gasped when a rock thrown from the mob missed Mom’s head by an inch. Dad’s grip on Mom’s hand tightened and my mother forced her entire will into running, nothing but running. Her items in her backpack clanged loudly as she ran. A lonely boat waited for the group, but Mom wouldn’t get into it.

“Why isn’t she getting in?” I asked. I obviously had major issues with my mother, but I didn’t want to watch her get brutalized by an angry mob.

“She’s distracted by something…” Tik said.

An emerald sparkle in the wet sand caught her eye. The rain seemed to stop just as she saw it. She pulled a glass can out of the ground and stared at it intently, trying to see what was inside despite it being caked in sand. Tik seemed to find this interesting, as she wrote something down in a small notepad.

My mother held the canister under the water for a few seconds, letting the waves wash away the obscuring earth, and now could see.

“The mob’s still coming for her…what’s she doing?” I asked. Tik didn’t answer me.

Mom twisted the lid off and pulled out a green hued gem. She held it up in front of the deep crimson moon that reminded me of the one in the sky back home during Fang Moon Web.

She placed the crystal back inside, moving onto the more interesting part, a folded note. To her surprise, writing covered one side. While it would be expected for lettering to be on paper, she didn’t expect that it was in a language she’d never seen before.

“Are you coming or not?”

I was surprised they didn’t leave her behind. This was the first thing about my mom that ever felt familiar to me; I probably would be more focused on some weird treasure on the beach and forget about an angry mob.

“They’ll be here any second.” One of the others on the boat said. “Can you even hear me?”

My mother finally noticed, and threw her backpack into the boat and climbed in.

“Sorry.” Octa said while the boat drifted away. The others started rowing, and after a few seconds she did as well, frequently looking at the skyline of her city, while the island it lay on slowly faded out of sight as pinpoints of torchlights appeared to search for them.

“Have you gotten anything out of this?” I asked. “My parents told me they got cast out of their city for some crime…I guess I should have said that earlier, sorry.”

“No, this part I knew,” Tik said. “But actually seeing it is…”

Tik stared in amazement at the vision of the past before us, which made me want to muscle through a bit longer, even if seeing my parents again was starting to make me feel ill.