Curses and Will Chapter 6: Chapter 6 - Who Was She

Read chapter 6 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The last thing I held onto before the dark took me whole was the yokai's voice, repeating itself somewhere far behind my own thoughts. So who decides who is cursed and who isn't? Is the majority always right? Tell me. Is living and dead two horrors really so different, in the end? The smell of rain stayed with me even after everything else stopped. Cold clung to my skin like something that had decided to move in permanently. Then, somewhere in the pitch black, a single point of light appeared. A door, burning with a warmth so steady it looked like it had been carved out of dawn itself. The light reached me before I reached it, pushing back the cold a little at a time. I walked toward it. When I finally stood in front of it, I reached out and pressed one finger against the surface. The next thing I knew, I was lying on something soft, a silk blanket pulled up over me, a ceiling painted white and pale blue stretching overhead. The bed beneath me was carved from oak, polished smooth. The air smelled faintly of roses. My head throbbed. Nothing about where I was made sense, and worse, nothing about who I'd been before this moment came with it. I sat up and pushed the blanket aside. The moment my bare foot touched the floor, a sharp cold ran straight up through my leg. The wood underneath me was freezing. I found a pair of shoes left beside the bed, put them on, and made my way out into the corridor. It was quiet out there. The walls carried faint discolorations, the kind that come from time passing slowly over the same surface for years. A sudden pain split through my skull. For half a second, an image flashed behind my eyes. A gray, dull room. A cracked window. The same kind of stains on the walls, somehow familiar even though I couldn't place why. The pain forced me to stop and lean my shoulder against the wall until it passed. I tried to chase the memory further. Nothing else came. I kept walking, found a staircase, followed it down until I reached a garden. Snow was falling outside. A single cherry tree stood in the center of the garden, pink petals drifting down slowly alongside the white. I stepped out into the cold and looked up at a sky thick with cloud. The snow felt familiar in some way I couldn't explain, like it was standing in for something else, something that wasn't snow at all. My breath came out heavier than it should have, fogging in front of my face with every exhale. The cold turned the edges of my ears red. Another flash of pain hit, sharper this time. A field opened up behind my eyes. White, low to the ground, stretching out further than it should have been able to. A girl stood somewhere in the middle of it, her back to me, hair the color of something between dusk and dawn. I couldn't see her face. I couldn't remember a single thing about her beyond the shape of her back and the color of her hair. A second image followed close behind the first. The same field, except at night this time, lit by fireflies drifting beneath an enormous moon. The girl turned around in this one. Her face stayed blurred no matter how hard I tried to focus on it. I couldn't place a single feature. But her voice came through clear, soft as silk and somehow stronger than iron underneath that softness. Live for me. The vision shattered as fast as it had come. I went down onto my knees in the snow without deciding to. My legs simply stopped holding me up. Tears started falling, and I had no idea why. I didn't know who she was. I couldn't have picked her out of a crowd if my life depended on it. And still the tears wouldn't stop, coming faster than I could account for. My chest felt heavy and weightless at the same time, both feelings sitting on top of each other without canceling out. One question kept circling, surfacing again and again until it finally made its way out of my mouth in a whisper too thin to carry far in the cold. "Who was she?"