Chapter Two

Zephyr Starkiller

Cold.

My first sensation is of cold.

Cold light, bright, blinding light.

The second is of white.

Everything is a brilliant, stunning white.

The wall in front of me, and everywhere else, as far as I can see.

There's a wall in front, a wall to the left, a wall to the right, and another one behind me. No windows. No doors.

I am alone.

Complete and utter loneliness is my third sensation. It hits me like a rock: solid, gray, heavy. I sit up, leaning up against the fourth wall, the one behind me. There's no bed frame. I squint against the bright lights and try to tell if the room has any other features. There's a small side table by the right wall, barely wider than a dinner plate, three feet tall. White. The blankets and sheets, the clothes that I am wearing, the stool by the table, all white. I haven't seen this little color since...

I get up, the floor even colder than the air, and realize that there's a floor to ceiling mirror against the left wall. I look at it and finally see a color besides white in the reflection. It's skin, my skin. Medium brown, the color of milk chocolate, or coffee with creamer, peers out at me from underneath the high white collar of the shirt. I take a closer look and find deep, dark brown eyes staring curiously back at me. I reach up to my head and find a hat, which I pull off, only to reveal more brown skin and close-cropped dark brown hair, the same color as my eyes. I pull my socks off, only to find more of the rich brown skin that coats the rest of my body. I down and gasp, the first sound I hear.

Jutting from the reflection's backside is a long, black, scaly tail. I back up a few paces, confused. I turn around and look at myself, not in the mirror, but the tail is still there. I reach out to grab it, but I can’t reach it. I take a couple more steps and end up going around in circles. I stop and am immediately dizzy. I take a few steps and stumble into the bed. Deciding to try another method, I focus and try to move it, and I do, almost knocking over the table in the process. I move my tail closer to me and reach out, stroking my fingers down the length of it. The scales are smooth but hard, each tiny round disk overlapping the next. I walk over to the mirror and stare at the tail again, turning this way and that, trying to see it from every angle. The name “Inland Taipan, Oxyuranus microlepidotus” pops into my head, along with a black snake curled around my forearm, first only a foot, then growing larger and larger, until it wraps around both arms and across my back. Venomscale. The name is familiar... Is it that snake’s name?

With an almost-silent whoosh sound, part of the left wall slides open, disappearing into invisible recesses, interrupting my line of thought and banishing all of what had come into my mind. If I hadn’t seen it before, I would’ve sworn that that opening had always been in the wall. I peek my head out of the opening, looking for something, anything, that isn’t white furniture or walls, besides myself. Nothing. The only things I can see are more white.

I take a hallway at random and walk through the passages, basing my choices on pure instinct. I click my tongue, listening to the echoes, really more for entertainment than anything else. I close my eyes and try to navigate via echolocation, which works, surprisingly. What else is surprising, but not at the same time, is when I run right into someone. I fall over backward, then look up.

A reeeaaally tall guy, who looks like he’s almost seven feet tall, with the darkest skin I can imagine, is standing over me, expressionless. He wears the same white uniform that I do. I scramble to my feet and stand up as tall as I can, but I’m still at least six or seven inches shorter than him. He has black hair and irises, in the same pattern as my brown eyes and hair. His hair is an ungelled mohawk down the center of his head. On his skin (what little of it that is showing) has curious white tiger-looking stripes, like a reverse white tiger. My tail curls around my leg. I look down in surprise. I had forgotten that I had a tail! I look up, and the reverse tiger guy is still standing there, arms crossed, looking down at me, a little irritated.

“I- I’m Zephyr,” I say, my name springing out of nowhere, my voice higher than I would’ve liked. I search my mind for anything else but come up empty.

“Drazon,” he says, his voice low and gravely.

“How are you?” a polite phrase, apparently. I have no idea where these things are coming from.

Drazon squints at me. “I have no idea where I am, or anything else. How am I supposed to know that?”

“Erm...” I have no idea how to respond. “Valid point.”

He rolls his eyes. “How about we get out of here?”

I follow him down the halls, as he chooses seemingly random directions, pretty much like how I wandered around until we found each other. I’m spacing out and following Drazon when he stops suddenly, and I run right into him. Again. He turns and glares at me for a full three seconds before continuing on, this time much more decisively. He must’ve heard something that I didn’t.

After a few more turns, we see a girl, about five and a half feet tall, with black hair so curly and shiny it looks like a ton of tiny slinkies hanging off of her head. Her skin is a pale white, and she has black tiger stripes, the opposite of Drazon. She’s muttering in a foreign language, eyes closed and her left hand on the wall, guiding her as she practically stumbles down the hallway. She looks as if she’s either drunk or hungover, from the way she’s moving.

We stand there, dumbstruck, and watch as she comes towards us. She walks right into Drazon. He rolls his eyes to heaven, muttering something about everyone always running into him all of the time. She bounces off of him, much like I did, but he catches her, so she ends up in his arms instead of on the floor. I narrow my eyes at him a little. I wouldn’t’ve minded not ending up on the floor.

She tilts her head up, her hair tumbling to the sides of her face, and opens her eyes, revealing strangely white irises, which doesn’t follow the pattern that my and Drazon’s hair and eyes follow. I wonder why. She tilts her head as she studies his face, ringlets falling into her eyes, devastatingly beautiful.

“Hi, I’m Zephyr!” I pipe, my voice still annoyingly high. I hope that it’s not like this all the time. The tiger lady turns her head towards me and I melt a little, smiling. After a second, she turns her head back to Drazon and looks at him again.

“Drazon,” he says.

“Nika,” she replies. Her voice is whiny and nasally and sexy, all at the same time.

“Zephyr,” I repeat, hoping for a response. Nika doesn’t even look at me this time.

“We should escape,” Drazon says, and Nika agrees. We wander through the halls until I’m pretty sure that we’ve been walking in circles.

“Alright, let’s blow this joint,” Nika says, placing her pale hand on the right wall. The wall somehow glows a brighter white than it already was and growing larger by the second. Cracks start forming, and when the glowing circle is large enough for all three of us to fit through, it explodes, making us stumble back a couple steps. Surprisingly, I’m not hurt, and there’s no debris from the hole in the wall. The breach is ringed with explosion marks, though. We peek our heads through, finding three people inside.

One of them, male, has silver-gray eyes and long spiky hair, another male has impossibly bright blue hair and eyes, and the other one, a female, has a reddish-orange pixie cut spiked off to the right side, with matching reddish-orange eyes. We’re ogling each other when Nika speaks.

“Who the **** are you guys?”

Author's Note

Introduction time!!
Zephyr- zef-er
Drazon- dray-zin
Nika- neek-uh

Reviews

[A.Tarek]

now.. that's amazing.. just brilliant, the idea of narrating the same scene from more than one speculation.. its intriguing my mind, its just amazing, makes me wanna try myself with this type of writing one day.. I enjoyed it

[Locke Redwyne (night sys)]

Thanks :)
I got the idea from a book called the Candymakers, which told the whole story from each characters point of view (there was four characters) and you got to really know each character, which is why I used it here