Page 8 of Wraith

I needed to move, to get help, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Each attempt sent waves of dizziness through me, the world spinning faster until I had to close my eyes. The back of my head throbbed, warm liquid pooling beneath me.

“Help,” I whispered, my voice barely a breath in the empty theater. The word echoed back to me, mocking and hollow.

My thoughts drifted to my mom, to the birthday card she’d sent last week. I never wrote back. There were so many things I needed to tell her, so many apologies I needed to make. The regret hit harder than the pain.

The ceiling lights above me started to dim, or maybe it was my vision failing. I couldn’t tell anymore. My chest felt heavy, each breath more difficult than the last. The bond pulled at me, five different directions of emptiness, of rejection, of abandonment.

Tears slid down my temples, mixing with the blood. The irony didn’t escape me—dying alone in an abandoned theater, rejected by the very people fate had chosen for me. My body started to feel lighter, almost floating, as the cold crept up from my fingers and toes.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to no one, my words slurring. “I just wanted... wanted you to…”

The darkness at the edges of my vision grew deeper, heavier. My last conscious thought was of their faces—not cruel or mocking, but as they might have been in another life. Smiling. Caring. Mine.

Then everything faded to black.

They didn’t just kill me.

They destroyed me.

Five

Darkness.

It wasn’t just the absence of light; it was a void, heavy and endless, pressing down on me from every direction. My body felt weightless, yet every breath—if I was breathing at all—was an effort. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t feel. It was as though the world had folded in on itself, leaving me suspended in nothingness.

Then, a flicker.

Not light exactly, but something less suffocating. A thread of sensation crept back into my awareness—cold, damp, metallic. The theater. I remembered the jagged edge of the stage, the sharp pain at the back of my head, the warmth pooling beneath me. My chest tightened as the memory surged back.

The fall. Their laughter.

And then… nothing.

I gasped, or thought I did. My lungs didn’t burn the way they should have, but the instinct was there. Slowly, the darkness receded, and I opened my eyes—or perhaps I had never closedthem. The familiar, crumbling theater materialized around me, blurry and distorted, like looking through warped glass.

The silence was deafening. Not the quiet of a late night or an empty room, but the heavy, stifling absence of sound that made my ears ring. I pushed myself up—or tried to. My arms wavered as though the floor had turned to quicksand beneath me. My chest didn’t rise or fall, yet I wasn’t suffocating.

“Am I dead?” I whispered, my voice brittle and unfamiliar, like it didn’t belong to me anymore. “Is this… the afterlife?”

My knees scraped against the wooden floor as I crawled forward, the jagged edges of broken boards scratching at my hands. The lights above flickered weakly, casting the theater in shifting shadows. I reached for the edge of the stage, my fingers trembling as I pulled myself to stand.

And then I saw it.

Me.

My own body lay crumpled near the foot of the stage, half-hidden in the flickering shadows. The simple black dress I’d chosen with such care clung to my still figure, the fabric now torn and smeared with blood. My legs were bent at unnatural angles, and my head lolled to the side, exposing the gash at the back of my skull where the plank had split the skin.

A strangled noise escaped my throat, somewhere between a gasp and a sob. I stumbled backward, clutching the edge of the stage for support. My own lifeless eyes stared blankly into the void, their once-vivid spark extinguished.

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. “No, no, no…”

But the image didn’t waver. It wasn’t a trick of the light or a cruel hallucination. It was me—my body. Broken and abandoned, left to rot in this desolate place.

The air around me grew colder, the shadows pressing closer. I staggered forward, an involuntary urge to touch my bodyovertaking me. My hand hovered above my face—my face—but I couldn’t bring myself to make contact.

“I’m dead,” I said, the words tumbling out in a shaky breath. “This is real. I’m… dead.”

The theater seemed to groan in response, the creak of its old bones filling the silence. I stumbled back again, tripping over the hem of my dress—no, the dress my body wore. I glanced down at myself, only to realize that I was still dressed the same, the black fabric unmarred by blood or dirt. My skin looked pale, almost translucent, and the faint shimmer of something otherworldly danced along my fingertips.

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