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“No, you’re not,” I said. “I’ve been a monster too. I know how it feels. Irreversible... Constant... But it is not you. The monster is outside you; it is not a part of you. If you can see...”
Then, I realized. Telling Gethin that he wasn’t really a monster was not the answer. He had to remember.
“How long did you stay here looking for her?” I asked.
The change of direction took him off guard. His brows raised. Then, as though he had given up, he opened his mouth to speak.
“A day,” he replied. “By then, it was too late to try and win the competition. I... I still tried. I almost made it to the mountain.”
“Show me,” I said.
“I don’t know how—“
But before Gethin could finish his sentence, his subconscious started working. The view around us shifted. Gethin stood beside me as we found ourselves in a thicker forest. The bushes here were of a darker green.
“We are there,” Gethin mumbled. “I don’t know how it happened.”
“You remembered,” I told him. “Now it is time to remember what happened.”
He nodded.
“This is not what I was doing,” he said after a while. “I was thirsty. I was looking for water.”
“There is a river nearby,” I told him. “I can hear it.”
“I could, too,” he said. “I went that way.”
He started walking in the direction he pointed. I let him discover the memory himself. Even as he did, I could feel the memory taking shape around us. It was foggy, clouded with thirst, tiredness, and time.
The sun had disappeared over the horizon.
The queen’s call would come soon.
Gethin started moving with purpose, and I knew he was caught up in the memory. He found the river and drank some water as I caught up to him and watched. He was doing the things he had done before, playing his part in the memory.
But he also knew I was there and knew this wasn’t the present.
“I must have fallen asleep,” he said, taking a seat under a big tree and closing his eyes. His chest started moving up and down slowly. He seemed asleep as he spoke. “I heard the call in the middle of a dream.”
Just then, the queen’s voice echoed around us. In the past, it had been inside his head, but now that we were in his mind, we could hear her silky voice calling all the survivors to the druid place.
Gethin opened his eyes and got up. His face was expressionless as it had been back then, but his lips were his now.
“She didn’t give us a choice,” Gethin said as he started walking toward the mountain. “I don’t remember how long it took me to reach where I was going.”
The forest was blurred. As he said, he did not know where he was or how quickly time passed. The light shifted as time moved.
I remembered the night when the others had received the call. I had followed them for hours before finally reaching our destination. It did not surprise me to find out that they had no sense of the passing of time.
Finally, we reached the bridge. The others hadn’t arrived at the druid place yet. Gethin walked to the middle and stood for a second before everyone else appeared beside us.
I did not recognize the faces. Fiona was not here. Time moved faster now.
The pain struck them quickly.
Gethin’s body twisted as the others started screaming and shouting. The breaking of bones and the groans echoed in the air as every surviving candidate twisted and turned.
But this was only a memory.
