The Fifth Element
Chapter Twenty

For a while, the man with the raven black hair and I stared at each other. He was wearing a pair of worn looking brown boots, a shirt that may or may not have been light green at one point in time, a pair of tan pants, and a black cloak. In the meanwhile, the woman with the curly blonde hair and green eyes had wrapped me up in a tight hug, but I couldn’t have cared less. She didn’t matter at the moment. Like the rest of the people surrounding me, I had no clue who she was, but she also appeared to know me very well by the way she was acting.

My wondering thoughts went back to the man. I had never seen anyone with my unique color of eyes before. My dark purple eyes that I had received an endless stream of compliments on but had never seen repeated before now peered into my own. I knew right then and there that this man and I shared blood.

“You’re just like me, aren’t you?” I said to him. I began trying to pry the women’s arms off of me. She reluctantly let me go, and I took a baby step towards the violet-eyed stranger.

The man remained expressionless, unmoving. I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.

“Well, aren’t you?” I said anxiously, my heart tightening in my chest. I wished he would say something, anything, I didn’t even care if what he said wasn’t what I wanted to hear. He remained silent, though, as he began walking towards me.

He approached me like I was a deer, ready to flee back into the trees and disappear forever. He took slow, deliberate steps towards me, and never broke eye contact until he was only mere inches away. He reached out gingerly and took one of my black curls in between his fingers, and tucked it behind my ear. He then reached out to touch my cheek.

The moment his fingers grazed my skin a jolt of electricity zapped through my body. I jumped back instinctively. The man met my look of surprise with a troubled frown. He muttered something angrily under his breath and closed the distance I had accidentally created between us with one giant stride. He pressed his palm into the center of my forehead before I could have protested.

His hand was oddly warm, I noted. The strange man closed his eyes and then began chanting something under his breath. His face scrunched up into a grimace, like whatever he was doing was hurting him or was taking a lot of effort. Again a strong electric current ran through my entire body, and then I was no longer standing in the middle of an unfamiliar forest, surrounded by a group of strangely familiar kidnappers.

The scent of pancakes wafted through the air. I was sitting at my kitchen table in an old sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants, my usual sleeping attire. In front of me was a big plate, smeared with maple syrup with a couple of bites of pancakes left on it, sat on my wooden kitchen table. Pancakes on a Sunday morning made for what I thought of as being a perfect morning. I ran my pointer finger across the plate’s sticky surface and then licked the syrup off of my finger.

Across the kitchen, hunched over a four burner cherry red stove, wearing a dark blue silk robe with pink roses, Greta stood over a pan flipping pancakes onto a white china plate. Her back was to me, and her silver hair was pulled up into a loose bun.

“Mom, I don’t think we need any more pancakes.” I shoveled another maple syrup soaked bite into my mouth. That final bite broke the balance between full and grossly full. I let my fork drop from my hand and onto the table with a soft clang. “We are a family of two not a family of six.

Greta turned to face me, and when she did her straight gray hair dissolved into blond curls. Her stony gray eyes faded into blue until Greta was no longer standing there. It was the woman from the forest, who had hugged me so tightly that I had thought I would break in two.

“But I just like making them so much!” she pouted, before a grin broke out across her face. She turned back to the stove.

Mom. The single word came to me, and suddenly everything made horrible sense.

The beautiful woman with curly blonde hair dissolved into the clouds, and so did the rest of the kitchen. I then understood that those strangers, I mean my friends and family, had been telling the truth back there. The school board and big four had indeed messed with my head. They had made me forget my own mother and then had replaced her in my memories with an uptight witch. They had reached new depths of going too far.

“And you will show the wrath of a being like us,” a voice whispered, and I frowned. I wondered where that came from? But the thought was soon far from my mind.

I watched as all my memories were fixed one by one. They had kept them close to how they originally were, I noticed. They just mainly changed the people in them. They had also taken some away too, like that night of Danny’s accident and when he had suddenly appeared in my dorm room. They had nearly erased his existence altogether.

“Now I’ll show you the truth of me,” a man’s voice said inside my head.

I found myself surrounded by a charred field. I recognized it almost immediately, and I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Do I have to see this?” I pleaded into the emptiness. I got no reply, but I already knew the answer to that question.

From somewhere not in my range of sight came the sound of voices, and whoever they belonged to they sounded like they were arguing with each other. My eyes roamed the barren landscape until they landed on a group of about forty, all clad in armor. They were all gathered around one man wearing a black cloak. That man was a slightly younger version of the man with raven black hair and violet eyes. I began approaching them, and as I did, I started to make out their words.

“I won’t do it. This is too much to have asked of me!” he shouted at the men surrounding him. He appeared to be visibly upset with the topic of their argument.

One of the men stepped forward. He was tall with golden blonde hair the color of the sun, and blue eyes the color of the ocean. He looked grim but determined. “Neeva,” he soothed, “when we all agreed to stay behind we agreed to our inevitable deaths. All of us are proud to die for our home,” he held his fist up to his chest and grinned. “With your help, our deaths be meaningful?”

Neeva shook his head and gritted his teeth. “You are asking me to take your lives, the lives of my own comrades, and then use your deaths to cast the spell to raise the dead!” He pointed at the blonde hair man. “The magic of the dead is forbidden, forbidden magic that I’ve had the misfortune of being cursed with the ability to use. Did you know they killed my mother in front of me when I was just a small child, by setting hellhounds on her because of what she was?” His voice was choked with raw pain. His hands were balled into tight fists at his sides. “I promised from that night forward, that I wasn’t ever going to think about using this cursed magic! It brings nothing but misery, misfortune, and death. Don’t you see? It’s unnatural to disturb the dead’s slumber, and whoever does so will be punished severely.”

The golden hair man’s smile dropped from his face. “I know that but,” he placed a massive hand on Neeva’s shoulder, “desperate times call for desperate measures my friend.

Neeva closed his eyes and nodded his head reluctantly. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right.” He turned to the rest of the men around him. “I’ll do it, but please know this will kill me too. It’ll kill the man I was!” He shouted at them. All the men nodded, they had already resigned themselves to their fates.

Neeva squeezed his eyes shut, raised his hands to the sky, and began chanting loudly. A purple glow began surrounding all the men. One by one they dropped to the ground motionless. Their bodies began flaking away almost as soon as they hit the ground until they became nothing more than a pile of dust.

Neeva lowered his hands when the last of the bodies had disintegrated. His face was absolutely expressionless. His eyes looked to where I was standing; they were devoid of emotion. For a moment, I could have sworn he could see me, but then his eyes shifted to the horizon where a cloud of dust was gathering and growing larger by the minute.

Henry’s narration began playing in my head again, it was just like the first time I saw this scene, but this time, there was no Henry to stop what I was about to see.

Neeva pulled the hood of his cloak over his head and faced the cloud of dust, the approaching army. I knew what was going to happen already, because Henry had shown me this part already back at the school, after my first encounter with Greta. Sure enough, the earth opened up, and thousands of the dead poured out onto the charred plain and then ran at the enemy soldiers.

When the two armies met, one dead and one living, it was gruesome. It was a very one-sided fight in the end. The dead army possessed unnatural strength, and I saw very few of them go down. I turned my face away, unable to look at the slaughter anymore.

I only looked back at the battlefield when several horns sounded, and all sounds of fighting ceased. Cries of retreat rang in the air, and the other army turned and fled in the direction they had come. The dead army didn’t pursue them instead they just stood there. Their dead eyes were tracking the retreating soldiers with their empty gazes until the enemy was nothing more than a small, rapidly shrinking black specks on the horizon.

When the army of the still alive had disappeared completely from sight, the dead turned back to their master, who had been standing on the small hill watching them the entire time. They waited silently for their next command. With all dead eyes on him, Neeva made a single downward motion with his hand.

One by one the dead things sank back into the ground where they belonged until none of them remained. The only evidence of their existence was the carnage they had left behind.

Dead men mixed in with dead or dying animals littered the ground. Blood stained the ground, and guts were strewn all over the place. It was enough to defeat even the strongest of stomachs, so I was surprised that I didn’t have any urge to throw up. This frightened me a little. A little, because I had been through so much in the past two and a half weeks, that it was tough to scare me now.

"Plus, you kind of like it,” the voice whispered and I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I didn’t like this new little voice inside my head.

Neeva threw his head in the air and began laughing. It was the laugh of the insane, and then that laughter turned into heart-wrenching sobs. He fell to his knees and started ripping tufts of dead grass out of the ground.

The man’s voice came back into my head, Neeva’s voice. “I can not allow an event like this to happen to you, daughter, that’s why I came back.”

The vision of Neeva turned into clouds. I found myself once again standing in the forest surrounded by my best friend, the boy tied to me forever, my mom, and my father.

I looked at all of them and smiled despite what I had just seen. I was finally home.