• The Past

    Tory


    The doc insisted that both of us be checked out, for me it was again. Charlotte wasn’t too happy about waiting for us to get checked out after we had a pointless fight.
    I had a nasty bruise to my upper thigh but it was nothing that wouldn’t heal over night with a healer’s treatment. Amelia’s eye was slowly going back to normal but it would take a few hours to get back to its normal self. Bet it hurt like hell though, my hand hurt like a b***h from the punch.
    Charlotte was giving us glares that would have scared a grown man from her seat across from us. Sitting in a big library, chatting away to each other and ignoring her like she wasn’t even there was fun.
    “Okay, okay! Enough with the ignoring me already!” Charlotte had cracked; she couldn’t take the silent treatment anymore.
    This was as I thought; she couldn’t stand people not paying her any attention. In some cases that was all right, but with her being a possible Drake agent it wasn’t.
    I passed a look at her as if to say that we were punishing her, she closed her mouth and sat back in her chair with crossed arms. At least she could take a hint.
    Amelia had told me that Charlotte was her new student after me but she didn’t treat Charlotte like she had me. I guess she thought Charlotte wasn’t ready for an intense training session or maybe that she thought that the training I had was too hard or something stupid like that.
    “Oh, oh, Amelia, we should show Tory that book,” Charlotte piped in again. But this time, I finally paid attention to her.
    “What book?” I asked at the same time Amelia growled, “Charlotte.”
    That was something I wasn’t meant to know about considering Amelia’s reaction. As I thought, Charlotte wouldn’t make a very good Drakette. I don’t know why Amelia let her get away with half of it. I never could.
    “You may as well tell me now.” I shrugged like I didn’t care, but really, I did. I was a little interested.
    Amelia sighed, hating that her little secret was out. “What’s the point, no one can read it anyway.”
    I raised my eyebrow at her. “You make a habit of keeping books that you can’t read? Do you just like people to think you’re smart or something?”
    Charlotte giggled, letting the tension around us disappear. Amelia growled at me but it wasn’t a nasty growl, it was a playful one.
    “Oh, ha-ha. Very funny,” she said, trying not to let the smile that was tugging at her lips show. But I knew it was there.
    “But seriously, what’s with this book?” I asked, making everything serious as usual.
    Again, Amelia sighed but got up and went to the only desk that sat in the library. She pulled open the last draw in the desk with jerky motions and reached in. She pulled out a thick, red leather covered book. It looked old; the spine was worn and on the back cover one of the corners was torn.
    She brought it over in slow, steady motions. She still didn’t want me to see it and she was showing it with every pore of her body.
    I reached for it as she got closer. She handed it to me and backed away with a look that said she wasn’t happy. It was soft, almost like velvet but it didn’t feel old at all. I ran my hands along the cover; there was an indent of words and a symbol underneath it.
    I felt along the indented words, trying to make out what it said in my head. But it wasn’t working. Ex preteritus ut posterus.
    “What’s the indent mean?” I asked, repeating the words over and over in my head hoping that they would make some sense.
    Charlotte and Amelia looked at each other like they didn’t know what I was talking about. They probably didn’t, they probably just opened the book because they were excited with the find. I ran my hands over the words again.
    “The indents on the front… Get me a pen and pad,” I said, thinking that if I wrote it down, I could make more sense out of it.
    Charlotte handed me a small note pad from the side table that was next to her lounge seat while Amelia gave me a pen from behind her ear. I scribbled down the words that made no sense inside my head.
    Ex preteritus ut posterus. They still didn’t make any sense… The words suddenly shifted in front of my eyes. In my head the words moved to something that I could understand.
    “‘From the past to the future.’” I whispered out.
    “What?” Amelia asked, as stunned as I was at the words. But she was stunned because I had made sense of it, where I was stunned at the words themselves.
    “You can read that?” Charlotte asked, moving to the edge of her chair.
    “By reading, yes.” I felt the cover again; more writing was underneath the title.
    Scriptum per Alexander Hicks, written by Alexander Hicks. It was coming easier to me now.
    “It’s written by a guy called Alexander Hicks,” I told them. I didn’t know who he was but someone else should.
    “Who?” Charlotte asked with a confused look on her pretty, little face.
    “Alexander Hicks, he was a foreseer in the 1870s. He was one of the original ones to have powers in England. They were called WhiteStar. But why would he write a book?” Amelia explained and asked an important question.
    “Maybe to tell us something?” I suggested, my hands running over the symbol on the cover.
    It felt like a star, with a ribbon wrapping around it. I’d never seen anything like it before but I guessed it didn’t matter at the moment. It was probably the symbol of the group ‘WhiteStar.’
    “Read it, Tory, please,” Charlotte begged me.
    “Alright, I’ll read it.” I turned the page over. There was big, bold writing alongside pictures. Medieval pictures of war and people fighting.
    I started to read the words out loud for them. “‘In this world, darkness lives in the hearts of many. Countless people have tried to slay it, there were many victories and there were many defeats. But it has a way of coming back in another’s appearance. Throughout the centuries, they have always tried to steal the power that will grant them the chance to destroy the world.’”
    It was all gibberish to me. I really didn’t understand it and it wasn’t because of the old fashioned wording. Unless the darkness meant…
    “They mean NightDust, he’s talking about NightDust,” I exclaimed, looking up at Amelia and Charlotte’s horrified faces.
    This was becoming weird, maybe I had failed history but I don’t remember this every being mentioned. Half of this information was turning out to be true, not that Amelia and Charlotte new that.
    “Wow, so Drakes and NightDust have been around for centuries,” Charlotte said with amazement lighting her voice. She really was blonde.
    “Keep reading, Tory.” Amelia’s teeth were gritted and I didn’t have a clue why.
    I read more but this time in my headfirst. I turned to the next page, and the writing still looked like gibberish but I read it aloud. I was trying to figure out what language it was.
    “‘Along side them stands the light that can consume the darkness. They are the good ones; they may not seem like it at first. The light will shine the way to a safe future for everyone.’”
    “Is the ‘light’… Is the ‘light’ us? The Drakes, the WhiteStar and AAA?” Charlotte asked, when I looked at her I could see worry forming in her eyes.
    I nodded slowly, not liking where this was going either. Amelia seemed to be the only one not affected by this but then again, Amelia seemed that way about almost anything.
    I turned the page and continued before they could ask me again. “‘In our own lore, there are secrets that have been hidden to those even closest to them. They come in different forms, three women and three men. Each will have a unique power to control’.”
    I stopped reading altogether, to myself and to the others. That shocked me, six unique powers. These… These weren’t like mine, were they?
    “Tory!” Charlotte snapped at me. I realised that I had stopped reading and started again.
    “‘In our own lore, there are secrets that have been hidden to those even closest to them. They include fire, electricity, water, air, ice and earth…” I trailed off, not thinking about anything other than the first power to be mentioned.
    It was my power, my firepower, they had said. It… I was a legendary, that wasn’t meant to exist. I had to clamp my mouth shut to keep it from dropping in the shock that filled my body.

    - Everything made sense now. What I was. What I would become. Why I had this power. But the uncertain thing was, why were ND after me?