My heart began to hammer inside my chest.
"How can I believe you?" I asked.
Greta moved a couple of feet away from me and turned so she was facing me, "You don't have to believe me. You can see your own truth, "she said, and her steely gray eyes shifted to the ground where a vicious, silverly liquid had begun bubbling up from the cracks in the sidewalks between us. The liquid formed in a silver pool, with a surface like a mirror. But this mirror did not hold an ordinary reflection.
Instead of my own face, I saw a field of tall grass being flattened by rain. And within its beaten blades, the same rain rinsed the bloodied body of a blue dragon and the boy who lay beside her. A figure with flaming orange hair towered over the boy, a jagged hunting knife in her hand. Her soaked hair fell away from her face, revealing where the boy that she now stood over had burned her.
She looked away from Henry and towards us. "Can I kill him now?" Shirley asked, her voice so muffled that I could barely hear her.
"What is this?" I asked, by breaths coming out in panicked gasps.
"We are looking through the eyes of one of my soldiers whose body I am borrowing for the time being."
Shirley narrowed her eyes at us. "I already know that, Greta. Don't have to keep showing off your fancy powers."
"I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to my Violet here. Ask her, should you kill Henry now?"
"NO, GET AWAY FROM HIM!" I screamed.
"You want him to live? Violet, if that's what you wanted, that's all you had to say. No need to start screaming and getting unnecessarily upset."
She turned towards Shirley. "Leave him alone for the time being."
"So you agree to work with me?" Greta asked.
"Yes, I agree to balance the souls, so please just save him!" I said the words tumbling out of my mouth before I had time to process them in my panic. The whole time, my eyes didn't leave Henry's image on the strange liquid's surface.
Greta raised her hand, and the women collapsed onto the ground, and then the silver puddle began to evaporate, "He's safe...for now."
I exhaled in relief.
"You'd better act fast, though. Henry isn't out of the woods yet. He needs immediate medical attention, or he will bleed out and die," Greta pointed to space behind me. I turned away from the puddle to find that a door had suddenly materialized behind me. The door was simple and black in color with a shiny gold doorknob. "And all I need you to do is open that door for me, and he will be safe."
"What will happen if I walk through this door?" I asked, turning back around to face Greta. I didn't like the feeling of having my back turned away from her.
"My power will be linked to yours, and I can use you to balance the souls while I send my men over."
"What I want to know is what will happen to the people, my friends and family, fighting this war? What will you do to them?"
"Now that I have my grandchildren at my side, with theirs and my combined powers, along with the Halflings, I will implement an automatic peace. No one else will have to die today."
"You mean there'll be brainwashed peace? I ask you to please reconsider your decision. The people of this world are fighting you because they don't want to invade the other world. They don't want the future that you are trying to force upon them."
Gretta shook her head, "They just don't know what is best for them yet? Although I can't understand why my future is really that unsavory to you. The city around us became complete again. "Combined with our magic powers and the other world's ingenuity, greater cities can exist not only here in Tamilia but all across the world. Medicine will advance way beyond are current capabilities, we can grow food better, and life will be so much easier for us. And we will enjoy this world under utter peace."
"And what about the people in the other world? Will their lives get so much better after we conquer them?"
"They will be subservient to us, but we will not treat them cruelly but they will no longer be the rulers of their world."
I swallowed hard, "Okay, that was not an ideal thing ever," I thought to myself. I thought of my foster family that I had lived with for a year, of Jemma and Jeff, and how this would affect their lives. Maybe I could negotiate something to help them?
"Who's to say that you won't go back on your word and let him die even if I do open this door?" I said finally.
"You're going to just have to trust me, I guess," Greta answered.
With one final glance in Greta's direction, I began to reach for the golden doorknob with a shaky hand. The whole time, I repeated to myself that if Greta got her way, it wouldn't be so bad. So what if she was a perfectionist freak that wanted to make our world into what she saw as perfect, no matter what the cost? Would it be so bad to live in a slightly more advanced and convenient world?
Okay, I wasn't helping myself feel any better about this. If I wait any longer, I'm not going to be able to do this and allow Henry to die. I couldn't have his death on my hands, too.
"I wouldn't trust her at all, even now she's influencing you to see things her way," a female voice echoed in the air around us, and suddenly Santana was standing beside the door.
"Santana!?" I asked, both somewhat relieved and confused that she had materialized seemingly out of nowhere.
Santana raised her hand and pointed at Greta, but did not take her eyes off me, "It appears that my granny here is playing a little trick on you." She let her hand fall to her side, "That image she showed you isn't real. I have no idea where Henry is right now, but he is not about to be stabbed through the heart by that red-headed chick with only half a face. I saw what she is thinking, and I know what she is planning. And this unselfish future that she appears to want for this world, it's false, and I'm not just saying that to protect my world."
The modern city suddenly faded into one of gloom and misery. The tall white buildings were still there, but they now had moving appendages, which, after a second, I realized were surveillance cameras, something that existed only in the other world. They stared down at the people walking on the sidewalk with blank looks on their faces, like they weren't all there. Instead of flying cars zooming through the air above them, a flying war machine hummed menacingly in the space above our heads,
"This is what she wants. It's not a better world, it's a world completely under her control and looks waits to see what she plans for my world!" Santana said, her voice rising with anger.
All of a sudden, we were standing in a wasteland where only large stone structures stood. Greta was gone, and we were alone. At the top of these structures, large tubes towered upwards, and from them, black smoke poured into a gray sky.
Santana grabbed my hand, and we walked across dead grass that crunched dryly under my feet until we reached one of the buildings. Santana grabbed the handle of a rusty metal door and pried it open, having to let go of my hand and using both hers to yank it open. The rusty hinges screamed in protest at her efforts until finally they opened, and we stepped into a dim, dusty, noisy room. It was lit poorly by a handful of exposed light bulbs that hung from its vaulted ceilings and the weak rays of gray sunlight that streamed in from dirty windows, also high above the ground.
"Slave labor, she wants everyone from where I'm from to build everything she has for her new world, but does so with barely keeping them alive."
If I thought the people in Greta's true version of my world were gone, these people, as they belonged in the army I had raised from the dead. Rags clung to their thin, almost skeletal bodies, and although I couldn't see their faces well due to the poor lighting and the fact that they were hunched over a moving conveyor belt, I did not doubt that they would be gaunt with sunken eyes full of hopelessness.
From somewhere I couldn't quite pinpoint, I heard the echoes of Greta's laugh, "Oh, I'm going to have to train you well, aren't I? The same way I trained your sister," her voice became lower, more menacing "But don't worry, I won't stop until all my little dragons learn how to heel and sit and follow all their other teacher's commands."
"Miss Silver," Greta said, addressing me now, "Ignore my granddaughter. How could she possibly know the future that I want? We have only just now met."
"She linked my mind with hers to join our powers together," Santana quickly said. "But what she doesn't know is she wouldn't keep me out of her thoughts, the inner workings of her mind. This is how I know all this,"
Blackness began to creep in on the vision of the factory and its defeated workers, and everything it touched was designated. I watched one of the workers decay into a pile of ashes upon being touched it and it kept advancing, advancing towards us. But Santana ignored it and kept talking.
"The only ones who were able to keep me out almost completely were you and your father. Both of your minds are so complex because of your age; I can't navigate either. At least not in a way that can control or influence you at all. It's like being asked to row across the entire ocean in a simple rowboat. It is almost impossible unless there is help, and that help is letting her directly into her mind through that door. She will gain complete control of you and not just your powers."
"If that's the case," I yelled at the approaching darkness that was eating the world around us, "Take your stupid door and your future cities and shove it up there where the sun doesn't shine!"
The darkness stopped growing." I didn't want it to come to this," Greta's voice echoed again from an indistinguishable position. There's more than one way to open that door to your center, actually, there are only two; I was just trying to do the more pleasant one. Even though your mother wasn't my child, I still had some sentiment towards her, and I wasn't planning on doing this to her."
"Doing what?"
"This," she said
I instantly found myself on the ground among a tangle of vines that sprouted from the orange glowing ball of glass. I heard the faint breath of others nearby, and I knew instantly that they were other students brought here ball their efuel Greta's power to open up portals not just in time and space, but between the two worlds, and now she was planning to try to tear into the land of the dead too. I knew this because I had been here once before. In this secret room behind Greta's office. A long time ago for me, but not that long ago in the world of the living's timeline.
I looked to see my mother standing in front of Greta. In her hand, she held a large, pointy knife, which my mom's sky blue eyes were focused on. Well, I guess knives were everyone's weapon of choice today.
"Now you can still walk through that door willingly," Greta said, and slowly glided the tip of that knife across the smooth, soft skin of my mom's neck, and I felt cold waves of fear crash against my heart, "Or I can push you through it."
"Go ahead and try!" I growled, "Knowing that there's no way I could agree to partner up with Greta, no matter what or who it cost me, after what Santana had shown me.
I watched while she took the knife and slid it across my mother's throat. Blood boomed from the scarlet necklace she knew she wore around her neck. Her eyes went wide, and only then did she look at me while I let out a scream, and suddenly, I was standing on top of the black door. The door groaned loudly, and its darkly painted wood cracked under my weight, and I fell through the dark opening underneath it and into blackness, but I didn't lose consciousness, while my mind switched ownership.
The gray world materialized all around me. I felt people passing over to the other world and their souls separating from their bodies, as our world refused to let them go.
I extended myself against my will, tendrils of my power reaching out and feeling until I found other souls from the other side, and the ripped fresh souls just parted from their bodies and dragged them over to the overworlds, and the souls equaled out.
The next wave of people had begun to pass over when I felt something wrap itself around me and yank me upwards. Suddenly, I was on the back in the tangle of pulsating vines, and Santana was beside me, breathing hard and clutching onto my hand.
"What happened?" I mumbled.
"I pulled your mind from Greta's control, you're welcome," she said, rolling slowly onto her back, sweat soaking her forehead.
I sat up, now fully aware of the gravity of the situation. I turned toward Santana. "I-I wasn't done balancing the souls!"
Santana frowned, her forehead creasing in the middle, "Meaning...?" she asked.
"Currently, there are likely forty soulless monsters wreaking havoc in your world as we speak!"