Q had found the old bomb
shelter back when he was a kid. In his
youth it had been his fort, and as he grew older it became his secret
hideaway. It was an escape from his
mother, and the stares of the other islanders.
As he grew up he had turned it into a second control room, one cut off
from the outside world. The computers
inside were connected to no phone lines, and there was no Internet.
He had turned it into his
and Aria’s private nest.
As he walked down the
familiar path, Ashtyn and the other girl behind him, he almost felt like he was
defiling the place by bringing someone else there, and they were women no
less. He knew that Aria wouldn’t
mind. She didn’t have a bit of jealousy
in her, but Q minded. It was one more
thing he could blame his mother for.
“So, that old woman we
saw, that was your…” Ashtyn’s voice drifted through the shadows.
“Yes.” Q didn’t
turn. He knew that taking his eyes off
the path could mean taking a headfirst tumble into a ditch, or worse, off a
cliff. “Well, what my mother became.”
As they walked, he
explained the whole story. His mother
hadn’t always been a dark witch, but as he grew up, and grew away, her jealousy
began to taint her heart. The magic had
drained his mother’s beauty, her life force, and before long she had turned
into the withered old hag they had seen on the screen.
When he had met Aria,
they had fallen quickly in love, and that put her in his mother’s sites. The night that he and Aria had planned to
leave for the mainland, where they were planning to run away and get married, his
mother had struck. She had murdered
Aria, trapping her soul in the crystal.
Q had only managed to
escape by sheer luck, and his mother’s inability to truly harm him. He had taken the crystal and fled, but not
before getting his revenge.
“What did you do?” It was
the other girl’s voice that cut through the darkness this time.
“Late one night, while
she was in her temple, her mind completely lost in some trance, I knocked her
out.” He hugged the crystal tighter to his chest. “Part of me wanted to kill her, but she was
still my mother. Deep inside she was
still the woman who had raised me. It
was the magic that had tainted her. She
needed to be stopped, though. So I
sealed her in her temple.” He glanced
over his shoulder. “I had just assumed
she died down there.”
“I think she did.” Ashtyn
was right behind him now. “When Liz and
I fell through the floor earlier today, the room we landed in, that was the
temple, right?”
Q nodded, not sure if
Ashtyn could see him.
“After she had died, I
think her spirit remained trapped in that room, and when we fell into it, the
spirit escaped.”
It made sense to Q. He wanted to blame Ashtyn and the crew for
what they had done, but he knew it would only have been a matter of time before
that room had been found. If it hadn’t
been the film crew, then it would have been some dumb kids on a dare, or a
curious tourist.
The path they were
walking on opened to a clearing, and a few feet in front of them was the
bunker, its heavy steel and cement doorway jutting out of a small hill.
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