Page 127 of The Amber Sunburst

“Not quite,” a voice answers, reverberating around the room, and Ophelia snaps her head to the source.

In the center of the circular room stands the most gorgeous woman Ophelia has ever seen in her life.

But her beauty does nothing to disguise the purely sinister energy that she’s emitting. Ophelia instinctively turns to run, but when she does, she finds that the door she came through is no longer there.

“Hello, Ophelia,” the woman says, her voice both tinkling bells and nails on a chalkboard. It’s an ancient kind of sound, despite the woman looking no older than thirty in a timeless white dress. Her hair is so red it almost looks like fire and her doe eyes are deep brown. Something in them is so familiar that Ophelia’s heart aches, though she doesn’t know why.

A semicircular scar adorns her forehead, around where a brand might be, sliced with mechanical precision. Inside the scar sits a smaller, blue, circular tattoo.

Seconds go by in silence before Ophelia finally responds.

“Hello.”

The woman smiles, and it’s nothing but teeth.

“You’ve come a long way from home, haven’t you? It almost makes us wonder⁠—”

Us?

“—what wouldn’t you do to leave this place?”

“What do you mean ‘leave’?”

“Leave the Republic with those sweet little friends of yours.”

“How do you know our plan?” Ophelia blurts, then realizes she just confirmed everything like a fool.

The woman ignores her interruption. “You’re bored, aren’t you, Ophelia? Of all of the ignorance and routine. It strangles you. But the thing about strangling, darling, is that it doesn’t stop until you’ve escaped the strangler. And you can never escape yourself.”

“You’re wrong,” she says, but is she? Ophelia is the only one this restless, this unsatisfied. Has it been her own hand around her neck this whole time?

“Right and wrong. One would think that humans might have escaped the illusion of dichotomy by now,” the woman muses, stalking closer. There’s an evil here Ophelia can’t explain.

“You are wrong,” she repeats.

The woman smiles at her with the pity of someone who thinks they’re above it all. “Alright.”

Eerie silence settles over the room again, so quiet it’s deafening.

“Are you going to kill me?” Ophelia asks, just to make the room less stifling.

“We should,” she says, the soft perpetual smile on her lips not faltering. “You and your friends are a danger to the delicate balance of the Republic. But my sisters and I have grown soft in our old age⁠—”

“Old?” she asks.

“—We will allow you to attempt your little plan. But hear me, Ophelia,” the woman says quietly, but even from a distance Ophelia can feel the words as if they were whispered in her ear, “mercy will not be granted in the face of failure. You will either sail into the sea or die at the bottom of it.”

“Who are you?” Ophelia asks, even though she’s not sure she wants to know.

“Oh, dear, I thought you were smarter than that,” she sighs. Her placid smile doesn’t fall even when she puts her palms to her face and pulls her skin down until the reds of her eyes are showing.

Ophelia wants to ask what she’s talking about—why she’s staring at Ophelia like that, waiting for something to click. But before she can, recognition flashes like lightning.

Those eyes. Those brown, doe eyes. They do not belong to this woman.

“Aika?” she asks, quiet enough that she hardly hears it herself.

A too-wide smile spreads on the woman’s face. She’s still clinging to her skin, dragging it down like she wants to rip it off.