Chapter 3
Chapter Three
I hear a crow cawing loudly right next to my ear. My head is splitting. I know I have some ibuprofen around here somewhere.
When I open my eyes, I realize four things are true.
One: I am not in my house anymore. I’m not in my bed. I am in a giant ass moss patch.
Two: Instead of wearing my baggy, paint-stained T-shirt that declares that “my tummy hurts and I’m mad at the government”, I am wearing a long, white cotton nightgown-type dress and some broken-in brown leather ankle boots.
Three: What a wild dream. I’ve read about lucid dreaming on chat boards before, but I’ve never done it.
And four? The weird old lady who sold me the mirror is standing above me, poking the end of her cane into my rib cage.
“Jesus, what the fuck?” I demand, trying to sit up.
A deeper voice comes from across the way. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I grunt and turn my head to the side. I can’t see whoever is talking, but there’s definitely another person in the woods with us. I sneer at the body-less phantom in the trees, telling me what to do.
“Is that her?”
The voice is closer now, and definitely masculine.
I have stubbornly been trying to fight the pain, but I stop and take a moment to lie here.
His voice feels familiar, warm, and I’m basking in it until the croaky voice of the shopkeeper ruins it, like a cloud moving in front of the sun at the beach.
She stands over me and stares silently for a brief moment.
“It’s her, alright,” she confirms.
“How do you know?” The man’s voice is closer, and I can see the soft glow of a lantern swinging as its carrier comes near.
“Right, Your Highness,” the shopkeeper responds in a saccharine-sweet voice, dripping with sarcasm. “I forgot that plenty of women have fallen into the forest from the mirrored world, the very night my cloaked shop is revealed to them.”
Whoever she is talking to chuckles. “Point made, Veyra.” The sound of crunching leaves stops, and I’m forced to squint briefly as the glint of a steel sword against a hip blinds me.
The man crouches down next to me, and when my eyes focus, every muscle in my body stiffens.
“Hello, Echo,” he says, and his greeting is a warm blanket being draped over me, cocooning me in the safety of his voice.
He’s not someone I’ve actually met before, but I know him.
My paintbrushes have shaped every angle of his jawline, my pencils have sketched every tendril of hair that’s fallen messily around his face, my heart has beat in sync with his in every stroke I make when I paint or draw him.
This man has been haunting my art for the past year or so.
I keep my works of him off of social media.
It feels too intimate, too emotional to share with the world.
I feel possessive over him, as if one glance from someone else and he’d be taken from me.
In my world, he’s fiction, and I dream of spending the rest of my days locked inside with him in our own little universe.
“Am I dreaming or dead?” My voice sounds like I’ve been sleeping for days. I can only assume it’s one or the other because this man doesn’t exist except in my brain. The logical explanation would be that I finished my wine, and before I fell asleep, I saw one of the pieces I’ve done of him.
A smile stretches across his face, and my heart beats faster at the familiarity of the dimples in his cheeks. “Must you be one or the other? You can’t simply be awake and alive?”
I shake my head slowly and take his hand when he offers it, pulling me up slowly. “Easy, Echo,” he coos. He holds onto my shoulders and waits for me to steady myself. “There we are. Good girl.”
“I’m going to go past the tree line out to the west,” the old lady interrupts after clearing her throat.
I glance over at her briefly, and I’m caught between shock and nausea as I watch her bones twisting and contorting under her skin, which is rippling as if I’ve just tossed a pebble into water.
As I stare in horror, the shopkeeper’s appearance morphs from wrinkly, hunched over a cane, and slow to a younger, smooth-skinned woman with legs for days.
She rolls her head from shoulder to shoulder, stretching.
“I’ll circle back if I see anything, but hopefully we can just get the fated back to the castle before they notice she’s arrived. No news is good news.”
“Thank you, Veyra. Safe travels,” he replies, and his well-wishes sound genuine.
She winks at me before disappearing into the dark, gone in a flash. She is unnervingly quick.
I swear my brain is short-circuiting, because when he gently puts his hand under my chin to tilt my head up and searches my eyes, I can feel everything.
There’s the warmth of my blood pumping through my veins, and when the pad of his thumb rests on my bottom lip and he searches my eyes, I know that if I am, in fact, dead… I’m okay with my afterlife.
“Forgive my manners,” he rasps as his gaze drops to where my lips meet his thumb.
“I am Finnick.” When he says his name, my heart goes up in flames.
Something inside of me is burning, but not in a bad way.
It’s screaming that this is where I belong, that this is what I’ve needed, why all the houses I grew up in never felt like home. It’s because of him. He is my home.
“Finnick,” I repeat in a whisper. A noise comes from deep within him, and his eyes close for a brief moment.
The name feels like a prayer on my lips, and am I fucking crazy?
I’ve known this guy for half a second, and I feel like if I ever get separated from him again, my soul will be split in half.
My heart physically aches at the idea. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, though, really, because I’m just dreaming. Or dead. Still undetermined.
“I’m Claudia,” I say after a too-long pause.
“Claudia. My Echo. I’ve been waiting on you.”
The words that should have me on edge do the opposite. I know that I’ve been waiting on him, too.