This plotbunny was a deceptive little jerk. Took me forever to catch it, even longer to type it all out. Note to self: Dream sequence is a biatch to write. Avoid at all costs in future chapters.

But no worries, I will roast this plotbunny for the troubles it has caused me, and eat it merrily on a stick all primitive-like. Moving on.

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Persistence
Chapter Eight

All around her was a thick, comfy white haze. It felt as if she was suspended in mid-air, or resting atop a thousand feathery pillows…everything was eerily quiet, but in her exhausted stupor she paid it no mind.

The mists seemed to embrace her body, lifting and swaying her, leading her somewhere, but she could have cared less.

She felt frustrated when a far-off sound broke through the deep fog, ruining this perfect feeling. Her mind began to swarm unexpectedly with incredibly vivid and un-dreamlike images: something blue inside of a small bottle, a dark form turning to her before vanishing, an elevated view of many lights flickering in a dark city, a person trapped and panicky in a white room, followed by an abrupt razor-sharp pain spreading to her side and her left hand.

Finally, she looked beneath where she stood in unbearably freezing pain, gazing down now at a snowy landscape. A rush of fiery chill struck her from behind, knocking the air from her lungs as she began to plummet hundreds of feet, the cold wind rushing past her ears, closer and closer towards the white ground…

But all of a sudden her body was still, as if she had never been falling at all. If felt like someone was cradling her, all of the previous pain going numb, as if she was back in the strange fog…

But there was no fog. She was standing in front of someone but could not tell who they were; her blurred vision only showing her a dark shape. But as she adjusted her eyes, she saw a very familiar face. They were frightened and calling out to her, about to be swallowed by a darkness creeping up from behind.

But just as Ceana reached out to help them, the pain in her hand was renewed along with the soreness in her side, and she was flung backwards as if being sucked into a tight whirlpool, landing again in the mists. But the mists this time did not bring the comfort from before, instead she grew anxious, eager to leave. The fog now seemed to be taunting her. Laughing at her.

And then she was again back in the white room with no windows, running around in a panic to find an exit, not fully aware of where she was or what she was doing. Someone might have called her name, but pain and the laughter of the mist was distracting her.

She spun around the room frantically and spotted the door, rushing forward to grab the cold handle. In her half-conscious rush she tripped over herself, her chin cracking against the floor…the pain was awful, but she hoisted herself up with her good hand and sprinted down the hall, dimly aware that a couple people behind her were shouting loudly. She reached the door at the end of the hall, the laughter still following persistently.

She flung open the next door which she felt was her only escape, but as she ran out onto the balcony and gripped the cold metal railing, the laughter only grew louder. In horror she looked down to see the ground covered in swirling mist. She would have screamed if she could.

As she gripped tighter to the rail expecting the worst, the swirling fog blew away in a gust of wind, revealing a person gazing up at her with a menacing smile, a smile she had seen before. He was holding Sedecire’s Angel wand.

Hatred boiled up and overflowed within Ceana; she wanted nothing more than to attack him with all the strength she had, she wanted to see all of her steelies stab his wicked, smiling face, tear out his hair, anything to make him shout in pain.

His smile got wider, as if he was enjoying her rage, and Ceana felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end with fury as she heard his voice, ‘go ahead, make things more interesting.’ Her anger was what he wanted.

Throwing all sense of reality into the wind, Ceana began to throw her body weight over the railing—if he wanted her wrath than she would damn well let him have it.

But two, four, six hands grabbed her from behind; one which had accidentally brushed her side snapped her mind back into a blinding reality, her long-suffocated screams finally leaving her.

All of a sudden she was fully conscious. There was no laughing mist, and the sun was gleaming brightly in the clear sky.

One of the three restraining her suddenly let go, racing down the balcony stairwell with unthinkable speed after the man below who was now hurrying into the woods with equivalent speed. She briefly wondered who the chaser was, he had seemed somehow familiar.

‘So it wasn’t my imagination,’ Ceana reflected. She now recalled the strange dream she had experienced which had led her out of the hospital, and the abnormal mist. It was almost as if she had been possessed by some outside force. In that time which she had been running from the laughter, she might as well have been in a state of absolute madness. She could only half remembered it all.

“Ceana, you have to tell me,” came the uneasy voice of Derik as him and Kenda lifted her up steadily, “What just happened?“

“I…I don’t–” She tried to explain that there was no way to explain it, but Kenda cut in quickly, “She’s still freaking out, kid, give her some time…”

“Sedecire! He did something to Sedecire, she’s…I don’t know!” Ceana knew that this sounded ridiculous, but it was all she could come up with.

“Ceana, you’ve been out of it for three days and Sedecire went missing after that! How could you know who it was?” Derek argued, which made Ceana angry with him for not understanding.

She still had the image of Sedecire about to be consumed by darkness plastered into her skull. She didn’t fully understand either. She just knew that she was right.

“Look, just wait until he gets back, and then we might know—” Kenda began, but was cut off by an angry Derek in mid-sentence.

“And what if he can’t catch up with him?”

Kenda smiled, “No one has ever outrun him.”

Ceana looked at the two, knowing that they were talking about the third person who had ran after the man with the weird smile.

“What if who can’t catch up with him?” She asked, but her question was answered sooner (and less gracefully) than she had expected, when a tall dark figure with bright emerald eyes had practically flown up the steps, coming to a jarring halt just before crashing into her. Her thief stranger stood before her, a true look of frustration set on his features.

“…lost him.”

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Another midget chapter, but this one took so long to write that if I had tried to extend it, you guys wouldn’t be reading until next week.

I’ve really taken a liking to ending a chapter as soon as the thief stranger appears.

Speaking of him, you find out his name next chapter…*legasp*