Page 3 of Bright Blinding Ruin

“And after everything we’ve been through together,” he whispers, though it sounds like he’s mocking me. “I thought, surely, you’d put up more of a fight than this.” The man glances around us, and his handsome features twist into disgust. “This is the life you wished to return to? I don’t understand why. There is nothing remarkable about it.”

My response is on the tip of my tongue: “It’s my life.”

His icy blue stare is back on me, his neck bent at an angle since he’s so goddamned tall. “Is it?” he asks, venom in his accented voice. His hands hold onto my wrists tighter, enough to elicit a gasp of shock from me. “Or were you meant to find me, to make me whole? Perhaps you were always meant to undo what the empresses did to me.”

Empresses? What—

It’s like a light switch is flicked on in my brain, and everything comes flooding back. Finding that crystal. Breaking it. Waking up in a strange, magical land besieged by mystical forces. Being bonded with Rune, someone who turned out not to exist. Prim’s grave. Frederick’s hope…

And now here we are, face to face again, me and the monster the empresses tried to fight years ago.

The rage, the hurt, the absolute anger; it all comes rushing back, a tidal wave that might’ve knocked me down if he wasn’t holding me up. I narrow my eyes as I glare up at him and whisper, “Invictis.”

The smile he gives me chills me to the bone, and yet his hands on my wrists are a warm reminder of how tempting he can be. “There she is,” he hisses out the words, sounding almost excited that I now remember him and all the lies he fed me.

All the time we spent talking. All the time we roamed the countrysides of Acadia, Pylos, and Magnysia. The conversations I thought were shared between friends. Friends who got on each other’s nerves, sure, but friends all the same.

Someone, something like Invictis can have no friends.

I fight against his grip, but he’s too strong. I’m too weak. All I can say is, “Let me go.” The fight is renewed inside me. No more am I depressed over the state of my life. All I can think about is the being in front of me and how much I hate him.

“And why would I do that when I have you right where I want you?” Invictis flashes another smile my way, its sharp cruelty plain as day. “I told you I wanted to make it last, Rey, so let’s try this again.”

The blueness in his eyes flash a vivid, metallic gold, and a bright light shines from within him, engulfing me. Though I try to resist, the light swallows me, devours me, taking everything I am for itself.

Chapter Two

I blink, and even though my mind is fuzzy, I find myself in the financial aid office, talking to the officer assigned to my case. What am I doing here? It’s all a little hazy in my head. I reach for my head and rub my right temple.

“I—I didn’t know I had to redo the forms every year.” The words come out of me before I realize I’m saying them, and they sound rehearsed, like I’ve been here before.

Have I?

No, that’s silly. If I was here before I wouldn’t be having this conversation with the financial aid guy.

“For students with cases similar to yours—” As he explains why I should make a habit of visiting him more often, his face changes. His face and his voice morph right in front of my eyes. His hair gets a little bit longer, its brown color darkening, and a thick line of stubble grows from his jaw.

I must’ve been giving him a strange look—for good fucking reason, since his face literally changed right in front of me—because he stops what he’s saying and asks, “Rey? Rey, are you all right?” His voice is different, softer, gentler. Warmer. It brings me back to a time that I… I just can’t remember.

Right when I’m about to excuse myself because I think I’m going insane, I blink, and the man’s face returns to normal, his voice back to the way it was before.

What… what was that?

It’s all I can think about as we finish the depressing meeting about me losing my scholarship because I didn’t fill out the paperwork on time, and as I hurry from the building to get to my first afternoon class, the nagging feeling doesn’t go away.

That face. The second face, rather—it’s familiar to me, so familiar, and yet I just can’t place it.

Needless to say, it drives me nuts as I sit through the rest of the day’s classes, and it still bothers me even as I head to the campus library to fill out some job applications. I can’t get that face out of my head. I know it. I know I know it, but I just don’t know where.

Oh, God. Am I going insane? Is that what this is? Shit.

I try to focus on the applications, but doing the same thing over and over again—sometimes multiple times for a single job app—doesn’t help. I can’t get what happened out of my head. It’s driving me nuts.

The sound of small feet on the tiled floor alert me to someone else’s presence behind me, but I don’t look. I keep my nose to the computer screen… until I hear a small child’s laughter. That gets me to look around.

And when I do, I see I’m alone. Alone as in no one is around me on any of the other computers. No one walks through the stacks I see on the far side of the open-room. No one’s there at all, which wasn’t the case a few minutes ago.

Where did everyone go?

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