Chatterbox: Inkwell

Chapter One

If I could change one thing about the past, it would be the choice I made when I was eleven, to take what my mother had given me. But then again, if I hadn’t, we all would probably be dead. Is death even worse, though? No, it’s worse. But only a little.

My name is Grey Mendoza. I’m 14 years old, and I have a question for you. Have you ever wished that people had magical powers? Have you ever had a dream in which you could fly, and woken to the grim reality of gravity? Have you ever read Greek mythology and wished you were Aphrodite or Hades or Athena? I haven’t. In fact, there have been thousands of times I’ve wished the exact opposite.

There are five main powers, or Elements. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Darkness. There are a few people who have abilities related to those elements. You could call it magic. You could call it being special. Or you could call it a curse.

Most people have really basic abilities. Someone with basic water-based power would be able to manipulate water with their mind and hands. Someone with basic air-based power would be able to create a small wind or blow some hot air when they're really mad.

A very few of us have rarer abilities. A really rare light-based power is transmitting positive emotions by touch. An earth-based power so rare it’s practically non-existent is metal manipulation. And a super rare one for water is healing.

Each Element has one person, called a Guardian, who holds most of the power of that element. They basically watch over their element, make sure nothing explodes without permission, and keep the non-elemental humans from finding out about the elements. Each Guardian has a Stone, understandably named a Guardian Stone. It’s essentially a symbol of their power, a sign that they're the Guardian. The stone is actually their source of power. It’s passed down, generation to generation. When you become a Guardian, the stone attaches itself to your skin, about two inches higher than your heart. It’s unremovable until you say these words:

I (Insert name here) Guardian of (Inset Element), remove myself from the position of Guardian and pass down my Stone to (Insert name of whoever you’re passing it down to).

All the Guardians are descended from the original Guardians, who gave some of their power to a select few. It spread and spread, and now about one-eighth of the world’s population is Elemental.

When a Guardian is about to die, they have to pass on the Stone to their oldest child. Somehow, no one has run into the problem of people dying without children yet. They have run into the problem of a Guardian dying while their oldest child is still pretty young.

When I was eleven years old, my Mom died and I became a Guardian. Guardian of Darkness.

Darkness is a complicated Element. Each Element has little branches. You could compare it to a family tree. Coming off of Earth is sand-manipulation, coming off of Water is snow-manipulation, coming off of Light is memory-transmission. Coming off of Darkness is death.

No Element is evil. They are all good and they keep the world in balance. But if one of them could be evil, Darkness would.

There are very few with darkness-based power. And the few that do exist aren’t very powerful. All they can do is fill the light with shadows and transmit negative emotions accidentally. Except for me. I had always been more powerful. But I kept it under control. Light and Darkness are emotional Elements, and they’re triggered by strong emotions. I never really had very strong negative emotions before my Mom died, so I didn’t even know how powerful I was.

Now I do know, and I wish I didn’t.

I want to go back. It’s gotten worse. When my Mom died and I became Guardian, I was scared. My Dad wasn’t there for me, because he had divorced my Mom five years ago and done his best to forget the mistake that was me. I was alone. When they finally got my Dad to come and take me, I had to go live with him and his new wife and kid, who both knew nothing about Elementals.

I didn’t talk to anyone. My Dad left me alone and never discussed my Mom. And as I turned 12, things started to change.

Part of becoming a Guardian was that my already strong powers were amplified by… a lot. When I moved into my Dad’s house, I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My feelings built up inside of me, balling and massing. Then something would happen that would remind me of my Mom, of my life before, and it would burst out in the form of pure Darkness.

Once I almost killed my half-sister, Sasha, on accident. My step-Mom found out about Elementals then, and she hated me. She labeled me as ‘freak’ and ‘dangerous’ and avoided me. Sasha… doesn’t hate me. When I almost killed her, my hand had brushed her shoulder. Like I said before, Darkness is an emotional element. Like with Light, one of the darkness-based abilities is to transmit memories and emotions. But you can only do this by touch.

When I touched Sasha, I transmitted my memories and emotions to her. Sasha started to understand. She could see I’m not a dangerous killing machine, but a person who's just been alone for too long. But she couldn’t do anything about it because of how much her Mom hated me.

I began to hide my emotions. I stuffed them down and kept it under control, and it worked. I didn’t accidentally blow anything up and all my family members stayed alive. But it was incredibly hard. I felt so alone, because I was.

Things got worse. I started to... see things. Not like I was going crazy or anything. I saw ghosts. The dead. They were everywhere, and they were trying to talk to me. They whispered in my head. I found out that I could communicate with them, unlike my Mom ever could.

But I was scared of them. Because I knew that somewhere, in their numbers… was my Mom’s ghost. And I was afraid to see her, dead. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stuff down my emotions with her around. I’d explode with everything, and someone would get hurt. So I hid from the ghosts, I ignored everything they said.

When I was 13 years old, there was an accident. I was hiking with my best friend and her Dad, both of them not elemental and without any knowledge of elementals. We stopped for a break and to eat lunch, and my friend, Mae, and I wandered off. We went off the trail and followed a creek up into the hills. We climbed a slippery, moss-covered rock. We sat on top and talked. And talked. I don’t know how long. The subject went from school, to friends, to family. And there it stopped because Mae had asked me the question, “Do you feel close to your family?”

After that, in my memory, everything is fuzzy. I hardly remember any details. But I know that I lost control. Darkness exploded from me once again, pure shadows and pure sadness and pure hate. I knocked Mae from the rock. When I calmed down, I found her. She had been hit on the head. She was bleeding. I screamed for her father, who had already been looking for us. He found us, running in on the scene. His daughter, on the forest floor, eyes closed. Blood on the ground by her ear.

There was no reception and his phone was dead anyway. We drove as fast as we could, but we couldn’t get there fast enough. Mae died with her head in my lap in the car, with her father holding her hand.

And so another ghost joined the millions already whispering in my ears. Another ghost to be scared of seeing. I started to hear the ghosts every night as I fell asleep. They spoke quietly in my ears, whispering. I tried to block them out, but every time my eyes closed and darkness enveloped me their voices grew louder. One night, she found me. Mae’s ghost.

I didn’t see her, but I heard her.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” Her voice came to me through the hundreds of others.

“But it is.” I had whispered into the night. It was my fault. I should have remembered that we shouldn’t go off the trail. I should have been more careful.

I cried all that night.

Somehow, my father got the story of Mae’s death wrong. He thought… I don’t know what he thought. But he decided that enough was enough.

He sent me away. I went to a boarding school somewhere in the countryside. It’s called Willow Creek Boarding School for Girls and Boys. It’s there, at that school, that everything went wrong. Or maybe it went right. But let me tell you, it was not pleasant.

Feel free to continue posting your story in chunks––your original post was too big for me to check, and it's easier for friends to read it in smaller pieces as well! --Admin