SEVEN: OMARR

Amalya wakes up the next day with an uneasy feeling. At some point she is lost in thoughts and when Jared sees her standing and calls her name to bring her down to earth, she realizes she cannot even recall what she was thinking about.

The abnormal headache just kept coming. During lunch, she excuses herself and leaves the main room getting the continuous feeling that a particular person is watching her.

Weakness hits her as soon as she steps into her room and a voice goes into her head filling up her space and suddenly she feels the voice is all around her.

The voice is not the same as the one that spoke to her in her dream. This one is cruel and harsh and definitely evil.

The headaches come faster. Amalya loses her eye sight and holds in of the wooden poles for the bunk bed to stop herself from falling.

"You will die like everyone else, my love," comes the voice.

She grips the pole harder. "Hey, Darling, do you want to see your mother?"

Her fingers slip off the pole as soon as a memory flows her mind.

A not skinny but slim woman is seating on a wooden chair that seems like it could collapse soon. The woman screams at the man walking round her chair.

The man touches her black hair with blood stained fingers and – the exact colour of Amalya's – The woman glares at the man with piercing green eyes – also Amalya's – The man laughs and kicks the chair hard.

The woman knows every attempt to fight for her freedom is futile as her hands a tightly bound to the chair so she settles for tears. It is best to settle for tears that to hold it in for too long. The tears make lines in her blood – streaked face.

This doesn't induce any pity in the man behind her. He looks like a pence in his black Armani suit, eyeliner and tattoos on his neck.

"Where is my little darling?" this question comes out in a low whisper.

"You rejected when she was just four months old" this comes from the woman.

The man's cocky grin drops to a grown. "See Keri, I don't have time for this nonsense. Give me my child!" He orders and gives her hair a hard tug from behind. The woman lets out a low cry.

A small sweet voice comes from the dark background. "Mommy"

They both turn to see a little girl on the stairs with piercing green eyes and shiny black hair like her mother's.

"Even your child doesn't want to be hidden", the woman says to Keri and twins to face the little girl.

"Come to me my sweet angel."

The little girl takes a step forward but she is looking at her mother.

"Mommy"

Keri's voice comes frightened. "Yes love. Amalya come this way. I'm here".

The man watches the little girl walk over to her mother with a sleepy glower on his face.

Little seven years old Amalya sees the blood on her mother's face and a tear drop from her eyes land on her mom loose silk gown. "Don't cry Amalya." Their feet touch. Amalya looks at her mother "Do not be afraid for the Lord your God has not given you the spirit of fear," Keri tells Amalya as she has a million time before.

"Reach into my breast pocket, Amalya." Amalya does and emerges with a dark purple flower. She wraps her fingers around it. The man makes a disgusted sound behind Keri which ignores.

Amalya listens for mother's next words. "That is a flower I plucked from the garden beside the church during the Matins. It will help you remember me and remember to pray. I'll continue to pray for you, my love," Keri says, her eyes glistening with tears.

"Enough already Keri!." The man appears beside the little girl. "All this your so called God nonsense is making my headache."

Keri almost jumps of the chair. "You shall not speak of the Lord my God in that manner. If you're not a believer, I'll advice you to keep your thoughts to yourself or I'll be forced to curse you".

"You keep blabbing the same sh*t all the time but where has your petty talk gotten you?" he laughs and takes hold of Amalya's hand, tightening his grips. "Let's go".

The man pulls Amalya towards the door. "Mommy!" screams the little girl as she cries. Her mother cries too. "I will never forget you, Amalya! I love you!" Keri screams back.

Amalya's screams become more piercing. "I love you, Mommy!"

"Where are they taking me to?" Just as the door to the house slams shut leaving Keri inside the house, the real 16 years old Amalya slams into the hard wall of her bedroom and falls to the ground with a heavy thump.

Amalya can hear Jael's concerned voice in her head. The footsteps all around her. The headache is too much, she prays to black out. And at the peak of her pain, she does.

She opens her eyes to a blinding view of the room she is in, she shifts her eyes. Her thick lashes touching her soft check. She opens her eyes again to a better view.

What?

No doors. No windows. Just walls of mirrors at every angle of the room. She looks at the wooden chair she is on. It looks newly made.

Amalya stands up from the chair.  And sees herself in the mirror. She is expecting something to happen but nothing happens.

She walks to the mirror in front of her and stops so close that she is only an inch away. She leans in to touch her reflection. Her lovely shaped green eyes. The small and pointed nose. The baby rosy pink lips that looks painfully swollen. The shiny black hair that looks tousled and stops at her lower back. Her skinny body that highlights her hips and collarbone. Her injured feet. She lifts her hands and so does her mirror self.

Everything she does, it does. She lets out a shocked gasp she looks an angle of the room and sees the body of flowers sitting at the side of mirror.

"Read the church flowers," a commanding voice in her head says.

Amalya open the top that reads:

        Discover the Unknown

She does not remember seeing a note in the bag.

She opens each flower and memorizes their words in its scattered sequence.

She arranges the words to how they should have come. The first words are ones she can recall from her dream but the rest are new discovery.

She reads aloud.  "He just wouldn't die! Till ….. you discover the games of the soul. Till you realize that everything you've ever believed existed is just an ILLUSION, your heart will tell you but your body might disagree to accepting the truth but until then, he wouldn't die till…"

Fifty-two words of fifty-two flowers but something is still missing.

The voice comes again. Demanding, commanding, Ordering. "Till…..Till What? You should know Amalya!"

Something starts a fire in her heart and the rage, the pain of lies, deceit and mirages of years past and present settle in for the night. Amalya rises from the tiled floor where she had been all along. Her first word come out in a wicked whisper "What have you ever achieved to be able to tell me what to do? Nothing!" she walks to the center of the room and barks out a laugh.

"Till…Till I realized what my mom was trying to teach me all those seven years she had me before you people stole me from her!. The power of the mind, my love. She wanted me to know that anything – ANYTHING could be reality because as long as I think it, I can reach and then feel it and now, only I should be the person controlling my thoughts and my mind! Don't be shocked when I steal back my place."

The mirrors fall to the floor and shatter into a billion shields of glass. "What are you doing?" This time, the voice is not in her head. It is everywhere in the room.

Amalya shouts back "I'm making my thoughts a reality and bringing back my memories! You should know these things cannot be held in mirrors. How did I not know that all these things were illusions?"

"One more story, Amalya," the voice says. "One more story" Amalya looks behind her and there is one more mirror that hasn't fallen. She walks towards it.

"Look inside and experience what you see", The voice says, kind and soothing now.

Amalya reaches for the mirrors and just as her fingertips touch the mirror, she shuts her eyes. She sees it.

She is standing right in front of a house that looks ancient an deserted. Just fifteen years old and she is already quite tall for her age. She is here to tell her mother how she escaped from the man. The man, Castello that had taken her away from her mother.

Amalya twists the door kinds and the wooden in and surveys her surroundings. She touches the windows covered with dust and cobwebs.

In fact, the entire house is covered with dust and cobwebs. With every step she takes, the floor boards creak.

"Mom?"

She hears loud coughing coming from a room above. Amalya runs up the stairs. Just down the dusty wall way is sunlight coming from a room wide open. The coughing comes through the room again.

Amalya slowly walks to the room looking inside, she sees her every beautiful but now frail on the bed with a ratty blanket covering from feet to neck. Beside her mother is a little boy. His eyes are glistened with tears that refuse to be shed.

His grey shorts are too short for him. His top has multiple patches everywhere. His hair just like Amalya's is thick black but his is bit untidy and over grown.

It now falls in all around his face with the pointy slim small nose and shivering lips look like he could fall sick any minute from then.

Amalya watches him as he lifts the cup of steaming hot tea with shaky hand to her mother's lips. He is just as skinny and frail as her mother.

"Amalya? Save me and tell me it is you" the tiny voice almost brought Amalya to tears, is this what her mother has become? A sick, frail woman. Amalya refuses to express the pain in her. She holds it in tight.