Chapter 2

I drift in and out of consciousness like a shell left behind by its owner on the ever-moving shore. The movement reminds me plainly of the ocean shores of a past light, the place they called Le Femme. I remember the smell of salt soaking the sand and the sounds of water rippling, crinkling like the pages of an old book.

After what feels like years of this, I finally grab hold of a conscious moment and cling to it for dear life. I have to blink away sparkles as my body attempts to pull me back under, I reach up to wipe my eyes thinking that it might help to wake me up. Bright white fabric is secured firmly around my hand. My pulses pound in the wound just beneath, and with each thump, the details of how a sustained the injury comes inching back.

I sit up way too fast and feel a strong hand on my shoulder, urging me back down. Breathing heavily I crane my neck to see the face attached to it. It is only when we make eye contact that I realize he is talking to me.

"Calm down. You're okay. Just relax. It's okay, just breathe."

His shockingly blue eyes mesmerize me. As he speaks, he pushes me back down onto a maroon-colored bed. He shifts from above my head, and settles next to the shoulder he has his hand pressing firmly against. I am too weak to push back, too weak to fight the urge to lay down and do absolutely nothing. This terrifies me.

I am not naive. Believe me, 332 lights will make you everything but that. Just because it seems like this man has helped me doesn't mean I can trust him. I look urgently around the room, searching for evidence to support my lack of trust, but nothing stands out. Everything about the dark wood and neutral tones beg me to let down my guard, but as much as I wish I could, I know better. Afterall, I have seen wolves in sheeps clothing before. My mind does a violent sommersault inward grapsing at the all too real images of my family members with blacked out eyes. They whisper in a chorus that reminds me of snakes hunting their ignorant prey, the words which they mumble distorted just enough to make them incomprehensible. I gasp, screaming at them to leave me alone. I push hard against whatever invisible force is restraining me and only open my eyes when I hear shouting.

"CALM DOWN! I AM NOT GOING TO HURT YOU!"

In an instant I am back in the wooden room with the stranger. His large form looms over the top of me, blurry from the sudden gush of light that has replaced the images of my family. I struggle against him for a few more moments as the whispers die down, seeing mixtures of my memories and wooden reality flash before my eyes. The shouting continues, "RELAX! I PROMISE YOU ARE OKAY. YOU'RE SAFE!" I realize now that it is the man yelling, it is not part of the nightmare I just narrowly escaped. I focus hard on his voice, seeing one last frightening image of my mom and dad standing hand in hand, both have black eyes, and whisper at me to come. Where they want me to go I have no idea. But the darkness of their eyes reminds me of where I am, or rather, where I hope I am not. That is in the clutches of a lightless. I scan the man frantically, looking for his eyes.

My heart sinks. His eyes are not black, but stunningly, impossibly blue. We stare at eachother in silence, time frozen with our eyes locked on one another. His reminds me of something, sort of like a memory you have from a dream. The kind that is foggy on its edges, barely even there. I search myself, my past, trying to remember where I have seen those eyes, but come up short.

We realize at the same time that he is still holding me down, though I have been laying still for several minutes. He clears his throat, breaking the eye contact and my soul searching.

"Are you okay?" he sounds like someone I know as well, I stare in silence for a few more seconds, trying to pin him down in my memory. I nod, not certain how to proceed. He moves himself off the top of me and sits in a chair on the other side of the room.

He laughs, "you scared the shit out of me." I nod again, trying to muster a smile, but accomplish little more than a grimace. I take the rest of him in now that he is at a distance. He is definitely older than me, gray hair speckled like pepper is enough evidence of that. His hands look tired, overworked, and yet they move meticulously as he wipes them on his brown pants. A feeling of knowing floods through me, yet I am certain I have never met him before. I justify this feeling, perhaps he reminds me of someone I have met before. An image of my dad rises to the surface, I picture his hands, tired from working, and his eyes. Though not piercingly blue like the men in front of me, they had the same quality of intuition behind them, they were loving eyes, gentle eyes, eyes that I instinctually trust. For a moment I am lost in thought, but I force myself out of my own head the minute the image of my dad's soft green eyes goes black. I search the man's face one more time, just to make sure I didn't miss it. But his blue eyes are still glowing, and I watch as they go from panicked to concerned.

I take a deep breath and finally feel the severe pain in my head, focused right around my left eye. Instinctually, I reach toward the pain. The fingertips of my good hand connect with what I conclude to be stitches, 3 or 4 right in between my temple and left eyebrow. I wince, the whole area must be bruised.

The man blinks away his concern and speaks nonchalantly, "Yeah. You must've hit your head on something when you fell. I'm guessing you did fall right? Passed out?" I glance around as he speaks, taking stock of the room we are in. Everything in the room and the room itself is made of the same wood that is in abundance in the forest I wandered in when I first got here. Except it's all shiny, glossy, almost like an inch of water froze perfectly over the top of the wood. Sketches litter the walls, after a closer look I notice they are all of sticks and plants, "ironic" I think. Each drawing has weird words written next to it, I try to focus on some of them but remember the man, he asked me a question.

I look back to him, "umm. Yeah. Passed out… I think so… wait how would you know?" Suspicion rises up in me, why would he know that I passed out? I curl my fists and feel my muscles tense. Maybe I am strong enough to fight. He doesn't miss a beat. "Terror Root." He says the word so quickly and with such self-assurance that at first, I think he may have just made noise, coughed maybe. My face must echo the "what?" inside my mind because the man turns in his chair and points to one of the sketches hanging on the wall. As he explains I start to relax, "The cut on your hand, is it from something that looked like that?" I nod. I hadn't noticed before but the sketch he is pointing at looks identical to the stick that sliced my hand when I was walking aimlessly and thinking of stupid stuff like time.. Next to the sketch, the word Terror Root is written. "I call it Terror Root. Although it is more of a stick, not a root… Obviously." The more this man talks the more I begin to realize, he reminds me of a dad, definitely not mine though. He is kind of awkward, shy maybe. Similar to my dad, but presents it all differently. He smiles and continues, "I have charted it. Or attempted to at least. From what I can tell, when the plant penetrates the skin or enters the system, it causes uncontrollable fear, anxiousness."

He stops and stares at me for a second, his eyes focused on the gold necklace locked around my neck, I sit up a little straighter, my necklace is the only thing that has stuck with me from my origin, I will protect it with my life. He looks away and continues talking when he realizes I noticed what he was looking at. "I believe the toxins produced by the plant forces the fears of our subconscious into the limelight. This means that fears or worries that you may not have even been thinking about, become your prominent concern. But the toxins do more than that, they embellish those fears, and attack the serotonin levels in the brain resulting in unprecedented anxiety. Added all together it really is a perfect crime, a suspect masquerading behind reason. Ingenious. Terrifying. Hence the name I gave it." I look from the drawing back to him, then back to the drawing. Dissecting what he is saying, what I named it? The thought that he might be here alone skips across my mind holding hands with the deep-seated fear that would come with that. I brush that irrationality away, blaming these nervous feelings on the Terrorroot attack. I look up to him from the bed, "So you've experienced it?" It is his turn to nod, he does so as he responds, "3 separate times."

"Oh. Wow. That's surprising.." I laugh and note the confused look on his face. "I just mean that now that I know how that feels I will never get close to that stupid stick again."

He smiles. And replies enthusiastically, "Well, I am a scientist at heart. I crave answers. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to get those answers." We both fall silent. My heart pounds as the looming fear inside me grows a little deeper. I try hard to ignore it, I speak instead of focusing on it.

"So… where in the hell are we?"

He looks at me, something in his demeanor changes as he does. Almost like a helium balloon 4 days after the party. But that is not even the worst part, what he says next destroys the balloon altogether. "I honestly don't know. I call it Stix, but with an X because it sounds cooler." He. He calls it Stix. I don't even smile at his attempt to lessen the blow. I look at him, suspecting the worst, the worst that 332 lights have trained me to sense.

"How many?" the question doesn't even phase him, proving my theory before he even gives me the answer. "This is my 246th." So he has existed in 245 other lights, other places, and he has no idea what this place is. Not particularly odd in and of itself. I have been in lots of places with people who don't really know anything about them. I've even been in places that don't have names. But his demeanor is a crushing weight. His blue eyes are shockingly true, and they give him away. Too pure, too beautiful to lie. This coupled with the fact that not a single soul has entered the room since I woke up, saddles up the stifled panic in my stomach and rides it straight to my heart.

My next question pummels out, "How long?" Words seem too hard to navigate right now. I just need the information, the cold hard facts. No extra fluff or articulation. He gets that, despite his awkwardness. "Around 73 origin years would be my guess." I want to cry. In sympathy for him sure, but more so for me. I repeat the information in my head in an attempt to make more sense of it, This guy, whoever he is, has had 245 cycles. Existed in 245 other places, other lights. Some time ago, what he believes to be about 73 origin years, he woke up after yet another transfer in this woody place. With plants that could make him feel scared, and he decided to call it Stix but with an X because that sounds so much cooler… He is silent as he watches me. Maybe he isn't that awkward after all, maybe he gets it so much that he just comes across that way. Right now, his silence is all I need.. He can sense that. After a few minutes, I ask the obvious question and I can tell by the way he responds before I can even finish the question that he saw it coming from 2 billion miles away, "are there any oth---?"

"No. None."

This final fact storms into my mind and seals my fate the same way that iceberg sealed the Titanics. We are all alone here. Just me, a guy with the most immaculate blue eyes, and a million sticks. A voice in my mind says in the most I-told-you-so way "332 cycles has also taught you that rules can be broken. That sometimes there are no rules at all." I closed my eyes, wishing I was still lying in the forest panicking over water.