Sgagach

[Charlie]

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Backdated — Winter 2018

On January 10th, 2016, Charlotte Taylor stepped into the then-unfinished Serpentine looking for a job.
Then she blinked, and two years had passed.

As the allurist stared down from the window of her barren kitchen, watching the snowfall, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass. The features of her corpse were only partially visible and very familiar, but tonight it gave her pause. It wasn’t just the changes she herself had undergone during the last two years, but everything around her which had been altered. The world as she knew it had ended, on two occasions, and only now was she realising how different things truly were.

Charlie Fforde had found a new family, and a new name to match. A smile crossed her lips as she glanced down. The bangle Jesse had given her on Christmas Eve was significant. Beyond the artisan craftsmanship that made it so uniquely beautiful, it had been personalised and imbued with meaning. Running her thumb across the snake’s jewelled eyes, Charlie furrowed her brow.

Looking back was no habit of hers. Her past was something she had keenly turned her back on time and time again. Don’t look back, you’re not going that way. It was a quote she lived by. Yet, the distance spanned between where she’d been and where she now was, was extensive. Charlie had been so focused on seizing the day and working towards something – anything – that she’d denied herself the opportunity to make peace with so many moments that had shaken her to her very core. The woman she was today was not who she’d expected herself to become.

Sliding the bangle off her wrist and fidgeting with it, the allurist turned her back to the window and glanced about the room. Sharp eyes noticed the thin coat of dust gathered atop the marble countertops. Her gaze flitted about the kitchen before settling back onto the bangle. Holding it up at eye level for a brief moment, she read the inscription along the inside and smiled once more.

It was strange to think of Jesse outside of any particular context. He had taken on so many roles in her life that she struggled to cast him as an individual. Boss, friend, saviour, mentor, family. He was also a pain in the ***, but she couldn’t fault him for it given their similar temperaments. There was love there too, but an unfamiliar strain of it. Family and long-term friendships featured limitedly in her life up until Harper Rock, and he represented both. The realisation that this connection they shared was practically eternal triggered mild discomfort, too. Sire.

Charlie slipped the bangle back onto her wrist and pushed off the window. It was so easy for her to rely on him when confusion arose, but this wasn’t the kind of confusion someone else could abate. This medley of unfamiliar feelings was unprecedented and too peculiar even for herself to grasp, let alone be capable of describing it to another.

Reaching for her phone, the allurist sought out another confidant. It occurred to her as she scrolled through their latest exchange however, that if she couldn’t explain herself to Jesse, then she couldn’t begin to explain herself to Marisol. As close as the two women had gotten since her turning, there was still a lot the they hadn’t shared. Whatever it was that Charlie sought—answer, question, or advice, it required a bird’s eye view of her life, which neither Jesse nor Marisol had.

Whatever this was, it would pass, as all things did, and she decided to leave it at that. There was far too much to keep her busy what with rumours of a cure and Serpentine business. True to her nature, Charlie resisted the pull of the past and threw herself full-throttle into the present, unaware of the growing beast at the back of her mind.

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[Charlie]

Restlessness that had burrowed beneath her skin and was near-impossible to dispel. The itch became more noticeable following her encounter with Berlion. Charlie struggled with the wraith’s ravings, and only came to understand their meaning after their lesson. To make an omelette, you must crack a few eggs. If she followed down this path her mind would be forever altered. There was no turning back however, no way to undo the cerebral fissuring already in progress and required to accomplish the feats Berlion set out to teach her.

Her experience with Klae had been different, but nowhere near as discomfiting. The shifter path required acknowledging her physical self for what it was: a manifestation of the rift. It’d bent her mind and forced a perspective she struggled to grasp at first, but which was tangible enough. The lessons Klae taught came with evidence she could physically feel. It’d cost her many lunches, but in the end, she’d walked away with a better understanding of herself.

Berlion’s lessons required fragmentation of the mind. As she left the wraith, imbued with new information to revise over the course of her training, Charlie felt as though a piece of her was not set back into its proper place. Discomforted by the forced shift in perception, she avoided the meditation he’d encouraged and filled her silences with background noise. In spite of this, curiosity lured her back. It led to moments of complete isolation and mental transmutation as she sought to achieve what Berlion had claimed she now could, if only she applied his lessons correctly. Frustration followed her like a shadow in the weeks that followed, her inability to accomplish anything slowly chipping away at her confidence.

It was only when she learned to relinquish control over her thoughts, that she welcomed the silence and resign herself to the current of her thoughts as the wraith had encouraged her to do, that she begun to acquire new powers. The more frequent her successes, the more she threw herself into it, nurturing the fissures into deeper chasms that would never mend.

Whatever rest Charlie got was fitful, her waking moments growingly unpleasant. It became harder to focus. She continued on with life as she always had: forward facing and never stopping, but it wasn’t the same. Every choice she made left her uneasy. Every so often she distrusted the thoughts she had. It became harder to simply be, for moments alone sucked her away into a mental minefield she could no longer escape. Every time she deepened the rift in her mind, the beast—remnants of that bygone realisation—crept closer to the surface.

Alcohol helped, a realisation she came upon on Valentine’s Day.
It was a Band-Aid on a wound she continued to pick at, and in time, it’d fester.

[Charlie]

Eidetic memory had its drawbacks. The mind could retain all manner of details, engaging the senses as it recalled them. But how tangible an image did the mind need to recreate of a memory before it became a hallucination? How thin was the line between gift and curse, and at what point did one realise they’d crossed it? Charlie didn’t dwell on the matter, but as the weeks passed she caught shadows out the corner of her eyes which, upon turning around, were never there. Rubbing her temples and pinching her nose bridge became the norm, a not-quite-headache lurking during all waking hours.

She’d been travelling through Harper Rock’s virtual backdoors for years now. There was something ritualistic about logging onto encrypted servers and ruffling through other people’s feathers. It was as much entertainment as it was a viable, if illegal, way to sustain her lifestyle. At times she’d find jewels, titbits of information that though meaningless to her were highly prized by the shopkeepers she sought to sell them to. She never asked who was after the files, but she reckoned her curiosity would be met with silence or a lie at best. There was something to be said about the shopkeepers’ reverence for secrecy, as if the entire black-market would crumble if one of them ever shared too much. In all fairness, it probably would. It certainly would do Charlie no favours if they told on her.

Lately however, every time the allurist faced a screen, the headache would worsen. It’d go from a persistent and low vibration at the forefront of her skull to a deep-seated clang across the entirety of her cranium. The pain was never sharp enough to keep her away completely, but it cut into her time, leaving her with too much to spare and nothing do to. It was why she’d begun to study the fae in earnest. Out of all the interests she was determined to pursue, rituals were something she could venture into without a guiding hand. And it presented her with a challenge, one she could use to prove herself still in complete control of her faculties.

Things worsened when Jesse called them out to the abandoned construction site across town. Charlie came equipped eager to help, if a bit apprehensive about the whole ordeal. As they ventured into the winding tunnels, discomfort reigned. Whether it was the proximity to the rift or the damp darkness that surrounded them, the allurist couldn’t help but to feel out of sorts. The whole ordeal was far too short-lived for anything of great importance to come from it, but it left her altered. In the days that followed, the shadows out the corner of her eyes remained, even as she turned her head to spot nothing physically there.

Unable to find solace at the bottom of a bottle, Charlie was confronted with another truth: she was lost and exhausted. Two years of working without break – the trip to bury her father aside – and all the events that had transpired throughout, including her own death, were… too much. And something had changed. There had been a shift in the air.

The cause of the change eluded her, but it was impossible not to notice. Zombies walked the streets and what died didn’t stay dead. The military was descending on Harper Rock, and the allurist didn’t have it in her to deal with it. She felt too disjointed to confront this new reality. What she needed was space, as much of it between herself and this city. She needed to break routine and re-evaluate her condition away from the chaos that unbalanced her. Perhaps the beast rattling in the depths of her brain would calm down if she parted with the rift. In doing so she risked her life, but she had reason to believe that that would be true even if she remained.

Charlie vested sufficient effort in her departure to secure relationships and ensure her belongings remained safe. She trusted Bernard with her apartment and the family tome, as well as her collection of weapons and gadgets left under lock beneath the floorboards. Leaving was bittersweet, but there was no denying that as soon as the plane touched off, she felt as though a weight was being lifted from her shoulders. She had always enjoyed travelling; leaving a place was energising, representing an endless array of possibilities. Perhaps all she needed was a change of scenery, if only for a while, just like she’d told Jesse, to get back in touch with herself.

Perhaps.