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By way of the prophecy of Shambhala, in the year 2424, the barbarians and evils of the world will unite under one banner and pledge war on the Hidden Kingdom. It is also said at this time that the 25th Kalki king, Raudra Cakrin, will amass his own army, throw back the mists of Shambhala, and defeat the evil of the world and bring about a new, pure one.But what if the line of kings never got to Raudra Cakrin, and the barbarians and evils of the world amassed much earlier than 2424? Unfortunately, that possibility became reality.

Being the 21st king, the world in the time of Aniruddha’s rule was already dark, and to make matters worse, the world had taken a nose dive straight into a Christian Hell: Crime lords, the Mafia and more corruption came with Prohibition in the US in the 20s; the beginnings of the Nazi Regime and Hitler’s massacres in Europe in the 30s; WWII in the 40s where, in all, over 60 million people were killed, and where two nuclear bombs were dropped. To say the world was grim would be an understatement, and to Aniruddha’s horror, the evils of the world were in a very advanced state of mobilization to storm Shambhala, and the beliefs of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism and the Kalachakra – the soul of Vajrayana and the highest tantra in Buddhism – were dying fast.

In the year 1951, the pin fell on the balloon of evil when China took Tibet by force, and the Barbarian Army flowed into the Himalayas on dark, acid clouds. Aniruddha lead his own army to the edges of Shambhala, but no amount of clairvoyant skill could have prepared him for the sight he saw: a dark mass of shadow stretched from one side of the horizon to the other and came towards them like a wall of black. The Barbarian Army had swelled beyond all belief from the mass corruption and evil of the world.

Knowing that he could never defeat the army with what he had, Aniruddha returned to Shambhala’s capital of Kalapa. There, in the middle of the great crystal palace, sat a lotus flower with a golden center that was said to never wither and die. But as Aniruddha plucked the flower from its pillow, he saw that it had but only one rosy petal left, for this was the physical vessel of the Kalachakra, the same one that Buddha himself had created after enlightening all the occupants of Shambhala. So when Vajrayana Buddhism had started to wither, so did the Lotus of Kalachakra.

Desperate, Aniruddha swallowed the Lotus of Kalachkra in hopes that power of Buddha still remained in it, and that there was enough of the Kalachakra, to give a final burst of Enlightenment to sooth the Barbarian Army.

….But it was not so. There was no power of Buddha, and not enough Kalachakra, left in the one petal. The Barbarian Army stormed through Aniruddha’s forces at the border and continued into Shambhala where they killed its inhabitants with thundering blows, destroyed its libraries and technology with fire, and scarred its body with acid. When they finally left, an entire civilization lay dead. The ring of peaks that guarded the kingdom was gone, and the eight sectors were burned to dust. All that stood were the scorched ruins around the crystal tower of Kalapa, all the gems and corals and gold from its surface stolen.

However, Aniruddha survived the onslaught, but was on the brink of death. With his last remaining strength, he pulled from his body his soul, and pushed into the ground at his side. Through this action, he gave Shambhala a new soul and the ability to be reborn. And before Aniruddha died, he willed the soul of Shambhala to be reborn in the form a living being -- a woman, so that it still had the ability to reach enlightenment and receive the empowerment of Kalachakra (and then be reborn again as the kingdom of Shambhala) but would take longer in doing so in the hopes that by the time it did reach enlightenment, the world would have renewed its belief in Vajrayana Buddhism and the Kalachakra.
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In the early years of Airi, while her powers were still lacking in finesse, the Dream child grabbed hold of the wandering spirit of Shambhala, and it landed on a small planet called Abruna as a Fa’e child in the form of a baby girl. Situated under the boughs of a giant fir, amidst snow and cold, she was stumbled upon by an older woman named Uri in the worst of times.

Surrounded by gunfire, a planet at war, Uri was in the middle of fleeing to a small craft that would take her to one of the planet’s small moons. A hardened woman by nature and nurture, the Sven – the race that occupied the planet – considered leaving the ice-bodied-looking babe, but more gun shots from behind made her change her mind, and she literally shoved the child in her half-empty pack and ran. The child was foreign and not of them, and foreign things were no longer accepted in the world and its 650 year old civil war.

On the moon of Nabir, a desert moon, Uri kept the child hidden in their small home, for even on Nabir, friendly faces were hard to come by and almost all would have turned in a “freak.” Together they lived for a few years, until Shiloh, as she had been finally named as a child, grew into a teen. It was then that an already messed-up world became even more skewed when men rammed their ways into the home. Uri had told Shiloh to get away if a thing like that ever happened, but when Uri was taken, Shiloh did not run and let herself be taken as well.

Invisibility: Shiloh has the ability to become invisible, to put it simply She can completely disappear and reappear whenever she likes and can stay that was for quite some time (a couple hours or so), primarily using it as an action of defense more than anything else. This is her absolute strongest ability, she acquires it for the most part early on in the child stage, and fully masters it soon after becoming a teen. In a positive view, this is a pretty good defense – hey, she can turn invisible, who doesn’t want that sometimes? – and, as stated earlier, she can stay this way for a solid two hours, or she can flicker in and out of visibility. However, a negative point to that is two hours equals two hours, no matter if it’s a solid two hours or a collected two hours invisible time of “flickering” about. When these two hours are used up, Shiloh must wait another two hours before she can becoming invisible again – think of it as a charge-up time. Whether this in-between waiting time will become shorter as Shiloh grows older is unknown; at least for now, two is a magic number and a cursed number.

In the myth of Shambhala, it is said that its people have the ability to disappear and reappear at will. It doesn’t say whether this is teleportation or invisibility, but since I read somewhere in the guild that enough Fa’e have teleportation, Shiloh has invisibility. It actually matches more with the concept, especially since Shambhala itself seems to be rather invisible to all those who try to find it, but occasionally pops up.

Clairvoyance: Clairvoyance is “the ability to discern images not readily detected by the five senses.” So, essentially, it means Shiloh has a “sixth sense” about things and [only] while fully conscious, she has the potential to see extremely fragmented images from the past or present, or of two different events happening in the present but in two different locations. She cannot control this ability, though, and currently in her life, visions are small, short, and scattered far and between. There is never any sound attached to these visions, and as stated, they are extremely fragmented and often don’t make sense. She acquired the beginnings of the ability also early in the child stage, but at that time it wasn’t much: just a sensation, like the copper taste of a penny on the side of one’s tongue or the twitch of an eye or finger. Her first vision came much later in her child stage, and since then has happened only one other time. It is possible that as she gets older, visions may come more frequently and then may be larger, but she will never be able to call upon this power at will/the snap of a hat.

This ability stems from the fact that the people who inhabited Shambhala also had this power, it being granted to them after enlightenment.

Psychometry: Psychometry is the ability to determine the history of an object or its owner by handling it. This ability is directly related to Shiloh’s clairvoyance abilities, and it is ever more spazzy and less controllable than the former. This ability only has the hopes of working on objects that have been used and handled very often by its owner, and the older the object is, the more powerful its ‘feeling’ is. But even if an object fits this criteria, there’s only a slim chance that Shiloh will be able to sense anything useful at all from it. If she does get lucky, she may see broke flickers of the owner’s face or broken flickers of where the object originally came from, but that’s all.

This ability is a related ability of clairvoyance. In Shambhala, while the people were clairvoyant, it is never said if they ever possessed the ability of psychometry. But the people of Shambhala did know a lot of information on other cultures and their histories, so this ability seemed justifiable enough to be a clairvoyance-related ability for Shiloh.
Physical traits:
-- Her skin: Shiloh is not solid ice, but more that it acts like an exoskeleton. She’s cold to the touch and makes quite the convenient AC for her Guardian, but in hot or warm weather, she does start to “melt.” She can’t completely melt her exoskeleton, but it thins until a certain degree and she becomes fragile, slick, wet and makes puddles (yes, get her thinned enough and you can vaguely see her insides. HOW COOL IS THAT?) If she’s in a cold climate, she obviously doesn’t melt, and her skin gets a thin frost and is at its thickest, hardest state. This melting or freezing means that her mass changes to certain degrees, and being ice means that she’s heavy and doesn’t bleed unless chipped/cut deep enough. she’s not indestructible and can essentially die like a beetle can, or if you chop her into bits (you get what I’m getting at), and because she’s a coward, she’s not going to fight with her ICEPOWERPUNCH. You could probably throw her at someone, though. She’s susceptible to swallowed poisons, but not contact poisons, and venomous bites have nothing on her unless they can get past over an inch and a half of solid ice.

--- The lotus flower: The flower, wherever the artist puts it, can never die nor be moved from its location. It’s impossible unless Shiloh is killed. The flower opens a little more each time she grows, having started as a bud when she was a baby and being totally, fully open by the time she’s an adult. If she ever becomes an Ancient, the flower will obtain a gold center, but will not open anymore. Since the flower can’t die, it is not a weak spot for her, meaning if one kills the flower she dies. Doesn’t work that way.

---Her hair: white to symbolize the snow of the Himalayas, by the time she is an adult, she will have 108 braids in her hair. 108 is a sacred number in Buddhism in general, as well as in other religions, and women will sometimes put 108 braids in their hair because of this.

Abruna is the name of a planet in a distant glaxay. Compared to Earth, it is very small, about the size of Russia if it were rolled up in a ball, and it kinda looks like Russia too. The entire planet, save for a small nib of tundra grassland at its south pole, is basically taiga forest and Himalaya-esque mountains, covered in snow more than half the year. It’s surprisingly more inhabited than its two little moons, and is the base of the government and rebel forces, as well as the source of the civil war and where most fighting occurs. But since Shiloh lived on Abruna for literally an hour before being taken to Nabbir, we’ll talk about Nabbir.

Nabbir is one of two little moons that circle Abruna (the other being called Kabesh). It’s a mostly arid moon, rocky and dry, it doesn’t actually have much by way of sand, and has some little green spots and oasis’s here and there. It has plateaus and rock formations, and the majority of its inhabitants live in grottoes carved from stone in the rock face, similar to the Xumishan grottoes of our China. These grottoes are either large to hold multiple families, like a warren, or small to hold just one family, such as Uri’s.

While Nabbir is completely different climate-wise to Abruna, it and Kabesh both follow Abruna’s government. Their connection with Abruna is that Abruna acts as a country, and Nabbir and Kabesh are like orbiting districts of that country that somehow had been broken off. They’re inhabited by the same race, share the same customs and culture and essentially the same past.

The race that inhabits these three floating pieces of rock are called Sven, a race that’s primarily human in looks but with lapin and deer-like qualities (yes, tall hare-like ears, rabbit-y feet but with gumby pads like little antelope, furred feet and calves, and some have antlers). The race itself is originally from Abruna, but when their technology grew, and the moons became inhabited, over time the generations changed primarily in color to suit their environment. It’s always Darwin. So, Sven originally from Abruna are pale-skinned with blue or green eyes, Sven originally from Nabbir are darker skinned with amber or golden eyes, and Sven originally from Kabesh are dark-dark skinned with brown or amber eyes. Essentially the exact same race, they differ only in skin and eye color, as well as fur density, but every Sven, regardless from where it’s from, if you stick it on Abruna during winter, its hair will change to white and its fur will thicken after a short amount of time. Neither variation of Sven is held higher over the other, and each area is inhabited by all three kinds, but populations are dominated with their “originators.”

They are a relatively old, long-lived race and once had a very rich history and culture, but despite their intelligence, they allowed war and greed to destroy what they once were.

What remains of their heritage is akin to a mix of today’s Indian, Middle Eastern, Russian and other eastern European cultures. This is seen in their architecture more than anything else, as well as their food. They speak English, and most have South African or Eastern European accents, a quirk that would probably be able to be explained if knowledge of their ancient language existed. Religion of any kind is not practiced by them. They did have one once, but it was forgotten a long, long time ago. Some, like Uri, still know a few things, such as meditation, but that’s the extent. There is evidence of Old Testament Christianity having actually come to the area, but all that remains of anything Biblical is in the numerous Hebrew words that are used solely as names for individuals and nothing else.

The Sven do not hold one sex over the other and men and women are considered equal, each one having strengths and weaknesses. While they are brutal in their warring tactics, and are not above using children as soldiers, murdering in cold blood, or the extreme torture of captives, they don’t rape. Comforting, right? Most of this brutality and war happens on Abruna, but it’s still present on both moons and growing more and more.

Girl, close your eyes…

It had been the last thing that Shiloh had heard after lying down onto her side on the floor, and the woman’s voice echoed lightly in her inner ear as her mind stirred and awoke after what felt like only a few seconds. But when she opened her eyes… the blackness around her and the blackness common with sleep seemed to be one and the same. Was she still asleep? Was she dreaming?

Shiloh blinked rapidly, but the black never wavered. While she remained calm, she could feel a definite tingle of fear run up her back. Without lifting her head, she slowly lifted her right arm and moved it towards her back, but all she touched was air.

Uri. Where was Uri?

She pushed herself up with her arms, and immediately a floor was illuminated in a scraggly patch underneath her. It seemed to almost glow when next to the black, and she could finally see her body and her hand as she slid it over the tiles. They were old tiles…orangey tiles and dirty. Covered thinly in sand and grit. She grabbed up some of the dirt and looked at it, most of it sticking to her wet, blue palm, and then she looked down at the tiles again.

The tiles from Nabbir? From home – Uri’s house?

As soon as the realization flicked into Shiloh’s brain, shreds of wall started to appear a couple feet in front of her, like someone had taken a large brush and just painted it up there but didn’t care to paint the entire thing. But while she also recognized the swatches of wall, Shiloh’s brain skipped and she remembered that Uri was not with her –

Shiloh, stop peeking….

Shiloh whipped her eyes to their corners and then followed with her head. She had heard Uri’s voice whiz by her ears, and the sound still buzzed deep in her ear. She moved her body to balance on her knees and balls of her bare feet. “Uri?” she called softly, but right after the words left her mouth, she was once more surrounded by nothing but black. Somewhere she could see a faint glow, and it looked far away, but it was so small and weak, she couldn’t tell.

“Uri? Uri where are you… please come back….” Her voice sounded younger than she was, a little desperate but not panicky. Shiloh blinked and began to sink back down again, but something rang in her ears again.

Window!

That was Uri’s voice again, Shiloh knew it, and suddenly she remembered having been told that same reprimand sometime while at home. Oh she wished she hadn’t even peeked out that window…. Never held secret, fun little conversations out that window with that child….

She tilted her head back and stared up at the black, and then said window popped up where the wall swatches had been minutes before. Shiloh looked at it, and the orangey wall of Uri’s house soon seemed to be leaking and branching out from the window-frame. The dirty, dusty tile floor reappeared beneath her knees, but this time at its scraggly edges there was puffy white stuff – little ice crystals. Snow. Petals of a pink flower, like the one that was a part of her, blew by on an unfelt breeze.

Blinking, she looked from the petals back to the spider-webbing of the wall and it had grown two times as big, bigger than how it was on Nabbir, and it seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger, like a palace wall. Confused and now slightly alarmed, Shiloh shook her head as if to clear it, but the wall went higher and higher, and then suddenly small quips and clips and bytes of sound seemed to echo everywhere around her. Some she recognized as being common sounds from home, others were foreign to her in every sense – different language, panicked voices, screaming, yelling.

It was becoming too much for the young teen, even for her usually calm mind, and she closed her eyes and covered her ears. When she reopened them, the sounds stopped, but then FIRE sprung up against the monstrous wall, and Shiloh fell back onto her bottom.

“Stop!” she yelled, and immediately, completely to her surprise, the fire disappeared. The wall started to shrink. Things started to suddenly look…. Normal enough, and Shiloh took a deep breath. She glanced over at the snow piles near the tile edges, and then something caught her eye. A long trail of something green seemed to be coming in her direction. When it reached her snow, both white and greet things blurred and swirled, dancing to and fro until the green trail (which was actually grass, though Shiloh couldn’t realize it), ran right through her tile and kept on going.

Shiloh didn’t know what to think, and she stared almost dumbfounded at the green, natural line. She picked up dirt from her tile floor and rubbed it on the grass, and the patch soon turned back to tile. So she applied more dirt, and then snow. As she worked at this mundane task, she glanced up and noticed another trek of green coming her way, and when it met the snow, it tussled yet again.

“M-more snow! More snow!” she urged, and after a couple attempts, more snow appeared and the green trail seemed to fade. Could she control what popped up in this blackness? Could she will things…?

While still giving a calculating look between the snow and the grass, she stood up and stared into the distance where the grass seemed to have come from. And for the first time…. She noticed others beings moving about. They were far off, but she could see someone. Somebody, and they had things swirling about them as well. Were these…. Were these the others that her captors had spoken about? Could they help, or would they hinder…?

Shiloh had made the mistake of giving trust, and she was unsure about the others who now seemed to be around her. And what if she left her tile floor and orangey wall? She was stuck in a conundrum: wanting to get out and find Uri, learn what was going on, but she was scared… too scared to move away from her familiarity. And too scared and unsure to trust…

“Urriii…..”



c***k… c***k… c***k…Jinglechink…

With all the yelling about, Shiloh stood oblivious to the jingling steps that were coming her way. When she did finally hear something light and tinkling, it was only for a second before its owner spoke up.
Turning around, she took an immediate step backwards upon seeing her addresser, and like before with the path of grass, her own dusty nook in this hellish, chaotic place started dancing at the edges with the other’s own world. But Shiloh didn’t notice what was happening around her, and focused more on what the boy (boy? He was a boy, right? She couldn’t tell) had asked of her. Lost? Was she actually lost? Lost… lost… lost. … What if she was?

As Shiloh pondered this silently, the tile from her home mixed with tile from his where-ever-place, and her snow kicked up and started to swirl into the black while her wall pushed back and forth with whatever his ‘wall’ was. Unbeknownst to her, her hands started to become slightly translucent, but she could feel herself get light-headed as she thought of an answer.

She knew she was in a place with others, where things changed and where those things could possibly be controlled by her. She also knew why she was there – she was One of the Others, whoever the others were, and also because she had told someone other than Uri about her dreams. So, those two things, along with the fact that she knew of nowhere she needed to go, there was no way that she was TECHNICALLY lost.

Simple and smart.

As Shiloh returned her attention back to the shorter boy, she readied herself to give an answer. Inside her mind, her conclusion that she was definitely not lost grew more concrete to her by the second, and in doing so, her snow-and-tile world seemed to grow a little, becoming less hectic and more stable.

“N-no, I am nnn—“

“You there, you look like me.”

Shiloh stopped mid-answer and blinked a couple times, unsure if what she heard was another echo, weird and unreal voice. She also wondered if everyone here and even in Nabbir always yelled “YOU THERE” or “HEY THERE”… because it was becoming a very common occurance and it was starting to baffle Shiloh and her reclusi-fied mind. So she turned her head to peek owlishly over her shoulder, and was suddenly dumbfounded by what she saw. Or kinda more like who she saw.

That girl… she did look like her. Blinking wildly now, Shiloh’s attention flipped completely from the short boy to the icy girl with the white hair.

This. THIS GIRL. This girl had to be an OTHER. There was no way around it. Her capturers had said that she was like the Others, and this girl was like her. Shiloh had an idea that all the other beings milling around were also Others, but she was still uncertain and didn’t feel that she could give and possible amount of trust in them. But this girl. … she was something different.

“You…” Shiloh began and ended lamely, unable to get a coherent comment or word out.

This entire time of meeting others, Shiloh had kept incredibly calm, but then the icy girl took a step towards the boy and seemed to almost snarl, a facial expression that Shiloh had seen before and had been explained to about, even though she had never personally performed it. She had also learned that such expressions were usually defensive or offensive…. And Shiloh definitely didn’t want a fist fight.

“Please don’t fight,” she quipped smoothly, passively, to the other girl. She moved to touch her arm, maybe snap out some sense, but then ANOTHER voice was heard in the party and Shiloh glanced over at a chicken-legged boy.

Dispute. Yes, that was definitely what this whole thing could turn into, and that would not be good!

“Please don’t fight,” she repeated. Though this time a little less smooth, a little more quiet. She was feeling light-headed again—two new ‘worlds’ of changing images joining the mix was doing nothing to help her own world, which was now starting to battle and swish and become over-run by the others.

“Don’t fight, don’t fight. Stop… stop, stop please.”



Shiloh felt only partially soothed towards the other Ice Girl’s agreement to not fight, as there was still a nagging bite about how sincere the other had been, and that nicked at a part in the back of her brain. But for now, she stepped away from her icy twin and let a quiet uneasiness about it all roll inside of her. In fact, an uneasiness about the boys in their misfit group was rolling about as well, especially with the green-haired boy who had told her to “just stay there and be quiet.”

At such words – though Shiloh was not the one to defend herself, or whip out from individual or female-based EQUAL TREATMENT thing on him or anyone else – she took a step back in her almost taken-over splotch of world. …Only to take one step forward again when she suddenly heard ANOTHER new voice from behind.

Shiloh looked at the blonde girl for a moment, eyebrows rising at their inner points in a sincere expression. “We’re One of the Others, that’s why we’re here,” she said softly, unsure and unconcerned if she had been heard or not over the other voices in the vicinity, for something more grave had captured her attention: the blonde girl’s waves. Or whatever they were. Shiloh had never seen water act that way, or be that dark and foreboding. She didn’t quite like it, and she also didn’t like it encroaching onto her tile and world.

“Stop, water,” she mumbled, concentrating on its lapping edges. As few seconds later, the snow that had been mixing so nicely with the Ice Girl’s blew towards the edges of Shiloh’s tile and a pushed back against the waters before four small peaks of ice grew up, each one clear and shaped like a lotus petal. The sudden barrier seemed to stop the water, and the rest of her little world, that had been fighting and fading from the other three surrounding worlds, grew surer and more sound once more. But Shiloh stared at the petal peaks for a few moments, recognizing them only as things she had glanced in her dreams – the same dreams that had gotten her into this mess.

Was any of this ever going to stop? Shiloh sighed, and eventually turned away from the barrier as it seemed to be doing its job well enough.

When she turned her attention back on the mismatched group, the chicken-boy was stuck to the Ice Girl’s face by way of his tongue. Keeping surprisingly calm, despite this going on right next to her, Shiloh took a step backwards away from the conjoined pair and just blinked for a moment, stunned.

What was going on? Was this some sort of …common greeting that she had never learned about, again like how everyone seemed to greet with a loud “HEY YOU” or a “HEY THERE”? She didn’t know, but judging by the chicken-boy’s own confused tone and the Ice Girl’s apparent dislike of the whole situation, it probably wasn’t a good greeting…. Or at least hadn’t gone like it should.


“Did som – “

Everyone get the Hell over here!

That call finally got Shiloh’s attention on the orange-winged man way over yonder, and she cringed a little at his tone. She gave up on whatever words she was going to say just seconds before, she turned to stare more intently at the hollering man, and then looked to the Ice Girl when she proposed going over there.

Go over to him? But he didn’t seen good at all. What if he was the bad – yes, like the chicken-boy had said, what if he was the bad guy? She stared at the Ice Girl, who had seemed to have already made up her mind, and questioned whether or not she was good or not after all. Shiloh had never intended to give her much of her trust to any of the people in their small little group – she had never been very trustful to begin with in life, and after being betrayed by one whom she thought she COULD trust, the one who she had told her dreams to, her loyalties were now even more closely guarded.

But the Ice Girl. …She was so similar to herself…. That warranted SOME level of trust, no matter how small, right? Shiloh didn’t know any more, and she let the other girl walk on ahead of her. She hung back even longer when the grass-headed, short boy beckoned her, for she didn’t trust him AT ALL.

….However, when faced with facing a potentially dangerous problem, it Shiloh eventually came to the conclusion that it was better to do with others than alone, especially when those others were stronger. Where else was she to go if not with them? The other groups around them looked more scary and hostile that theirs, and beyond them was just more black. She couldn’t run anywhere, so she might as well follow a few paces behind. Besides, it’s not like she was being expected to save one of them from falling off a cliff – a task that would put herself in much danger also.

So Shiloh gingerly took her first steps to follow, pausing once to look back at the blonde girl she had interacted with earlier, before continuing on, her world changing shape so much now since she was moving that it almost made her dizzy. …She hoped the unknown man knew what to do, and wasn’t actually a bad person.


At the choked garbling yell, Shiloh stopped dead in her swirling tracks and looked in the direction she thought the noise had come from. The figure she saw startled her, but what scared her more was that literally two seconds later, he was gone. Completely, totally, utterly GONE.

Eyes wide, she looked back ahead to the members of her little party, and then poof! The grass-headed boy disappeared as well.

“Oh no… no no no….” Shiloh muttered, a hand covering her mouth. Why had he disappeared? Did he die? She hadn’t trusted him, but certainly she had NEVER consciously or subconsciously wished him dead and gone! No longer feeling that it was safe to be separated from her now even smaller group, she took a half-step forward.

And that’s when everything changed, this time more severe than her little illusion world ever had before.

In what felt like the blink of an eye, Shiloh was again inside her home – her full, complete, every-thing-in-its-place, itty-bitty one room home. Uri’s home. …. But… Uri wasn’t there. It was only herself standing in front of the wooden door, all alone.

She glanced around. The window was open, but she heard none of the usual sounds coming from outside that were normally associated and common with the time of day and light shining through. In fact, all that rang in Shiloh’s ears were the words she had heard just before she was placed here.

“Only one of the Fa'e children is calling for help. But pushing such a plea across such a distance has swept along so many, and in this realm, overwhelmed their own minds! There are some of you, I know, who are real. Some are bystanders who think they are in danger. And some of you are not real at all, only my imagination! But only one of you truly has come to seek help. There is not enough time - forgive me, I must sort out which....”

The voice had been female, of that she was certain, but whom it belonged to, Shiloh didn’t know, but the words were more interesting than the voice they belonged to.

Fa’e children. Who was a Fa’e? Was she one – was that what her captors had meant when they called her One of the Others? The Others were Fa’e? It made some sense, but what did the female voice mean when she said that only ONE was calling for help, and that not all were real? Shiloh blinked rapidly at that particular question. She was certainly real! She breathed, she could feel things physically and emotionally, she bled…if cut deep enough. Those were all characteristics of living things, real things! She was definitely real. And she must be a Fa’e.

But was she the ONE – the one who was calling for help? She had asked Uri once if there was ever going to be a stop to the war on Abruna and Kibesh and Nabbir, and Uri had said it’d take a miracle. She then asked if they could ever leave, go someplace else, be away from the war and fighting that, while she hadn’t encountered it personally, she knew was bad and that she hated it – not the people of it, just IT itself. And to that, Uri had said they’d need a lot of help. A TON of help.

Was that it? Shiloh had wished for help, thought about somehow getting help, but because she had only talk to one other person besides Uri, and she had never said the word “help” to that other person, how could she had asked for help? Had she called for help subconsciously, like how she subconsciously seemed to call forth her home when in the Dark?


Oh she didn’t know.


With a sigh, Shiloh took a step away from the door and looked around the house… room …once more. All she knew was that she was REAL, and that she had to be a Fa’e. That meant that her winter sister was also a Fa’e, and maybe that other boy was one too… whatever a Fa’e WAS, that is.

But then a realization suddenly, and finally, occurred to her. Where WERE the other two? She hadn’t seen them disappear like the grass-headed boy, but they were certainly not with her now. And…. No, Shiloh still couldn’t hear any sound coming from outside.

Now curious more than alarmed, she walked over to the small window in the home and peeked out. She didn’t see anyone outside, and that was highly rare and almost impossible; Nabbir as an entire whole was crowded. Uri had taught her that, so there was no way that this was really home. Besides, she found out, it didn’t smell the same, and it didn’t feel the same temperature wise either. It smelled… cleaner, more fresh, and she had stopped melting and her ice-skin that was usually slick was starting to become dryer and frostier looking.

She took her face away from the window and moved to the door, taking the handle in her hand. For an entire minute she stood there motionless, unsure as to whether or not she should peek outside. This wasn’t home. This wasn’t home. There wasn’t anyone outside to see her or hurt her.

The door clicked open and Shiloh peeked out through a two inch crack, then promptly slammed it shut again. Nope, definitely not home.

In four steps she reached the foot of her cot and sat down, arms across her chest as she held her shoulders. Outside looked normal save for the fact that half of it was covered in snow and literally right there in the close yonder there was a string of what looked like tall mountain peaks, each one with a rocky, snow-laden base tops with single HUGE chunk of ice shapes and polished like a lotus petal. They were similar to the ones that had appeared during her stay in that crazy darkness, and the same that she had seen in her dreams.

Taking a deep breath, Shiloh let it out slowly, the tilted her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do. She was utterly alo—

Her eyes snapped open and she looked over at the window on the other side of the home. Its open glass rattled on its hinges, and its tattered curtains twisted and blew. Outside, Shiloh could hear something, like the sounds of many feet running over dirt, crunching over ice and snow. She kept put and didn’t move, hoping that whatever it was would pass her by.

But the window rattled more and more until it was shaking so violently that it broke off its hinges and seemed to be ripped away. It was at that very second a putrid, acrid purple and black smoke poured into the room. Liquid dripped from it and burned through the tile as it started to form a large mass in front of the fireplace, and soon that large mass started dividing into taller, thinner masses, and before Shiloh could comprehend what was happening around her, there were five Sven men, dressed in military gear and holding what Uri had once described as machine guns. And more kept pouring in through the window….

Shiloh, usually tranquil and calm, gave a scream and tried to back further into the wall. But she couldn’t go anywhere, so she did the next best thing and turned invisible. The door was unblocked, and she half crawled half dove to it just milliseconds before bullets pummeled the wall where she had just been, and casings hit the floor.

Almost scared stiff, she managed to grapple with the door and swing it open, throwing herself outside and sliding on ice and then tumbling over dirt. She didn’t look back as she picked herself up and ran in the first direction she saw: towards the ice peaks.

She had never run before in her life, but the action came quite naturally to her and she sprinted with all she was worth – which hopefully was enough to get away. Behind her she could hear hundreds of feet pounding the ground, and she could hear bullets whizzing by her head and men, and also women now, shouting and yelling. She could still smell the acrid cloud and haze that traveled with her new enemy, and she finally remembered that she had smelled it before.

Her dreams.

Oh this day was going to super bad to absolutely indescribable bad. And she still ran on, her lungs starting to ache, but her limbs feeling stronger as they stiffed and became thicker thanks to the cold from the snow and peaks.

On and on she ran, not knowing how close they were to her, and not caring. She had one goal, and that was to reach the pass that she saw between two ice-petal peaks. She had to reach it. She had to. She had to live.

“The peaks, the peaks! Follow the hair – she’s going to those peaks!”

Heart pounding, legs now burning, feet thudding, Shiloh managed a whimper in response to the words she heard yelled behind her. So she hadn’t turned completely invisible as she had thought. Oh nooo… it didn’t make sense – she had done it before at this stage in life, why couldn’t she do it now?!

That question couldn’t be answered now, she had to keep going.

BOOOMSHHHHH!

The sound came up from behind and suddenly the ground shook as violently as the window in her home had. Frozen dirt and snow blew into the air like water from a fountain, and Shiloh flew through the air and landed in a heap. Her head throbbed, her shoulder ached and she could see shards of herself – of her icy skin – lying in the snow next to her face.

She could hardly hear a thing, but she felt the tremors of the battalion’s feet as they raced across the icy ground. Shakily, she picked her invisible body up off the ground and glanced over her shoulder. They were not as close as she had thought, but they were closing in incredibly fast, and…

No. No, she could still run – she wasn’t hurt bad enough and she could still see a possible way of escape. They didn’t know there was a pass; there was no reason to give up; no reason to stop running yet. So she didn’t.

The pass started to become closer and closer, and Shiloh wished with all her might that it could be closer, but when that didn’t seem to be working, she simply wished that she would get there. And she did.

Almost falling onto her side, she rounded the 90 degree angle into the wide mouth of the pass, and a split-second later bullets cut into the ice where her feet had just been.

“INTO THE PASS!” one of the shooters yelled, and Shiloh ran faster.

Not twenty paces in, the pass did a radical hour-glass bottle-neck, and the width of the pass went from over twenty bodies across to merely two for twenty feet before opening up again. Shiloh squeezed through without a hitch, her followers came to almost a stand-still for three seconds.

RUN. RUN. RUN.

That was all that went through her head as she pounded out again into the wider pass. Ahead she saw a sliver, something just off in the coloration at one point in the face of the pass. Some place to hide? It came up incredibly fast, and Shiloh had no idea if it was what she thought, but like a mouse to its hole, she went to it.

It was then, and only then, that she noticed another being running towards her from the opposite end of the pass. It… it was the Icy Girl!

In a flurry of spraying snow, Shiloh slipped and skidded, falling onto her back and rolling to her side, grappling at the ground with her hands before she was able to get up enough and throw herself in through the crack. She hadn’t had time to say something to her winter sister, all she cared about was getting inside. When she got into the crevice, ice slid on ice and she banged into a protrusion from a wall before coming to a stop.

Flipping from her back to her stomach, she hustled up at least onto her knees, and then gave another bolt or surprise to see the chicken-boy was already in there. With wide-eyes, not remembering that she was practically fully invisible and that only her hair showed, her head darted from J’dyr to the entrance of the cave and back again.

Outside, bullets shot at the place where they had seen the snow-spray, and then at the visible figure (that was Raina). But they missed, and the girl had already gone in. Still they ran towards the crevice. … and suddenly they and the hunter beasts – the two pursuers – met with a surprised clash of growls and yells, swipes and gun-fire.

“Sh…Shiloh,” she replied hesitantly. Relief at seeing Raina come through the cave entrance still floated within her, but the fighting and the shooting outside… that was not something to become calm about any time soon. If one of those Sven got through… they’d all be dead.

Having stood up a minute ago, Shiloh was already turned and had one foot partially lifted off the ground. Raina’s idea about leaving soon was a good one, and she was certainly on board and wanted the train to get moving.

“We must go. We have to go right now,” she quipped hurriedly, now taking a few steps down deeper in the cave before turning her head and looking over her shoulder at her wintery sister. The question on what was making the thunderous noises confused Shiloh for a moment, for certainly everyone knew what a gun was. … Right? Uri had taught her that most civilizations had them.

“They’re guns: metal devices – machines – that shoot bullets. They’re accurate and deadly, the …downfall to every civilization that creates them.” Like before in the darkness-illusion world, she sloped her eyebrows in honesty, and also now in fear. Guns were horrible. Fighting was horrible. When it all came down to it, her entire home – Nabbir, Kibesh, Abruna – were all rotten to the core. And the more she thought on it, the more she hated where she lived… Her and Uri would die there from that fighting if they didn’t get that help that they needed.

Giving a whimper, she turned her head away from Raina and started walking again. “Please, we must go. We must go now. Those men and women who wield those guns are military – they’re very good. We have to go, pleaaase!”

Shiloh had been glad to get the whole event going again, and she grew a little more happier with every step that she took away from the cave entrance. But being in a cave in general was not the best place to be in the world, and when Raina suddenly exclaimed that she may have found a way out, Shiloh bounced at the sound of it and moved the rubble to help.

But just as those beams of light from the outside world shone brighter, in came the sounds of people yelling and doing some sort of currently unseen battle with a new foe.


Shiloh sunk back behind Raina again, shaking her head and muttering “No, no nos.” There was no way she was going to go from being in the dangers of her world to being in the dangers of another world, one that she now knew nothing about.

“No, Raina, we should stay here! Raina, please – it’s not safe out there! T…tell them to come here, but don’t make us go out there.” They needed to survive, not get eaten by a new set of teeth!

Shiloh looked over her shoulder when a familiar voice suddenly echoed into her ears off the ice. J’dyr. … so he had followed. She looked at him for a moment, still untrusting, but glad that at least he hadn’t been shot.

However…. Perhaps any remnant, any fleeting feeling of Happy suddenly left her when he suggested that they would be safer OUT THERE. No! No… they were safer inside. If her shooters were still after her, they’d already be there now, shooting up the cave with bullets and … what was it that Uri said they also usually had? Grenades? Something like that – things that blew other things up. No, they were safer in the cave, and with that, still going by what Raina had said about her staying put and staying hidden, Shiloh went invisible once more, this time fully.

In her changed state, the Fa’e turned back to her winter sister, only to gasp as she saw her slip out into the other world. “Raina, no!” she squeaked before clapping a hand over her mouth. She had to stay hidden… but her Other – Raina was out there now, dealing with that monster that changed shapes and faces.

Faces. FACES.

Shiloh hated fighting, and had pleaded with Uri to not teach her things about it, but her guardian was stubborn and did so anyway. The face was a very delicate and weak spot on a living thing I general…one thing there and it… it usually died.

“Raina! Raina, hit its – RAINA?!” Shiloh yelled when the mist and snow took over and she could no longer see Raina or the monster. Oh that horrible monster! Shiloh never wished ill-will on anything or anyone, but …this monster was not a one or a thing. It was evil.

A moment later, the mists cleared, and her “sister” could be seen again, but she was down! Was she hurt? Shiloh looked away, unable to watch if her friend got killed.

And that’s when she saw something. A large piece of ice, long and pointed; an icicle that had broken and was laying on the ground.

Shiloh picked it up, and almost immediately dropped it because of its weapon-y feel and look about it, but she held on and thrust it into J’dyr’s hands.

“Throw it – throw it to Raina! Tell her to aim for the monster’s face!”

---end --