Selene's Unraveling
Selene woke in bed drenched in sweat, her breath caught in her throat like a scream trapped too long.
Her hands trembled against the sheets. Not from the cold—but from the knowing.
She turned her head.
Outside the window, shadows slithered across the sill—long, thin, smoke-like tendrils that moved like they had purpose. Like they were watching her.
No.
Not again.
Her skin felt too tight. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears like war drums.
She rose, barefoot, half-asleep, half-somewhere else and walked into the hallway.
The wooden floor groaned beneath her weight.
Her name floated through the silence, tender and terrible:
"Selene…"
"Come back to me…"
The voice coiled around her spine. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to breathe. Trying to ground herself. Trying to remember what was real.
When she opened them again, a tall shadow slipped into the kitchen—gone before her gaze could land fully on it.
Later that day, the bakery smelled of comfort: warm bread, sugar, cinnamon, butter. The children giggled behind the counter as they kneaded play-dough. Customers chattered, hungry and cheerful.
Everything was normal.
But Selene's hands shook as she arranged tarts on the display. Her mind wasn't here—it hovered between then and now, between memory and nightmare.
And then he walked in.
She turned casually at first—but the moment her eyes met his, the world tilted.
Him.
Adrian?
No.
No, it couldn't be.
But the eyes. The voice ordering tea. The curve of his jaw, the way he stood there, so familiar.
So wrong.
Her breath caught. Her chest tightened. Everything slowed.
He's back.
She breathed to hard. So hard it felt as though her heart begged to escape her chest.
He promised he would return for
them.
He promised…
Her knees buckled, but she didn't fall.
She screamed instead—loud, raw, cracked like a spell shattering through her throat:
"GET AWAY FROM ME! YOU! DEVIL!"
She grabbed the nearest tray and hurled it. Glass exploded across the floor. Pastries rained down like ash.
People shouted. Chairs scraped. Someone gasped.
Selene clawed at the air as if tearing through invisible chains, her sobs rising into panicked wails. Her hair stuck to her face, soaked in sweat and salted tears.
Gen burst in from the back, her apron stained with flour. She froze for a second, seeing the man, the broken glass, Selene screaming.
Then she moved.
Grabbing Selene's shoulders, she began chanting—her lips were quick and low. Her breath smelled of sage, as she whispered into Selene's ear.
But Selene thrashed, wild as a hunted animal, crying like a child lost in the woods.
The customers fled. The children stared wide-eyed, unmoving. The twins—Xena and Xavier stood frozen, hands gripping the counter, their hearts drumming in sync with their mother's madness.
---
Gen got her home.
She brewed a cup of enchanted tea—dark as ink, steaming with the scent of lavender and rosemary. Selene drank it in broken sips before collapsing on the couch, her body curling into itself like a dying flame.
She slept.
For four days.
And while her body lay still, her mind unravelled thread by thread.
Some days, her eyes fluttered open, calm, distant. She sang lullabies in a voice soft and sweet as honey while braiding Xena's hair.
She smiled at Xavier, tracing words in the margins of his books as if they were secret messages only he could decode.
Other days, she shrieked at corners, cursed shadows that weren't there. She scratched names—Adrian, Adrian, Adrian—into the floorboards with her nails until they bled.
The twins began sleeping in the same room again, whispering their fears in the dark.
They heard her speak in tongues they didn't know. Chant names that no one had taught them. Words that felt older than the house itself.
And always, the echo of that whisper…
"Come back to me…"
The Twins' Quiet Storms
Xena's POV (age 5–13):
She remembers the carnival.
The red necklace.
The wind whispering.
Since then, something feels off—like a thread pulled from the edge of her world, unraveling everything she once trusted.
She begins journaling at seven. By ten, her pages speak of dreams with red rivers and burning trees.
One night, she wakes to find Xavier standing outside their mother's door, too afraid to go in. Inside, Selene wails like something ancient. Gen kneels at the foot of the bed, chanting, candlelight trembling with each word.
Xena watches through the crack.
That night, she stops sleeping with her door fully closed.
She writes:
"If Grandma Gen is magic… maybe I am too."
At school, they call their house "the ghost house." Kids whisper about the crying at night, the lights that flicker.
Xena's best friends, Mia and Rue, are the only ones she tells about the things she sees—the hands under her bed, the shadow of a man without a face she feels watching her from a distance.
By thirteen, she begins to wear black clothes.
Her fears and insecurities, hidden behind the shade of her dark phase. Her eyes are quiet now—always watching, always listening.
She begins pulling away from Xavier after the fire dream.
She doesn't talk about it—not even to her journal. But she can't look at her brother the same. His presence feels like a memory of something too fragile to hold.
She avoids him more, not because she hates him, but because something about his softness makes her heart ache.
And ache makes her angry.
Xavier's POV (age 13–15):
Xavier sees everything.
His mother's fading health.
His sister's growing silence.
Her sharp glances and sudden absence.
The nights are the worst. Selene wakes screaming and carves a name into the floorboards:
"Adrian… Adrian…"
Sometimes, she hums lullabies that start sweet, like something from when he was small, but turn sharp, discordant, wild.
He doesn't write like Xena. But at five, he made a friend—Dannie.
She was bright-eyed, curious, and kind. Someone to whom he could whisper his strangest truths—without flinching.
And he told her everything.
The whispers.
The fear.
The dreams he never wanted to remember but couldn't forget.
But the more he shared, the more he began to worry that he was too strange.
Too haunted.
Sometimes it made him go quiet, terrified of being seen the wrong way.
Terrified of being seen at all.
The Witch in the Bakery
One rainy morning, the bell above the bakery door jingled.
But no one saw her walk in.
Not Gen, not the children kneading play-dough behind the counter, not even Selene—who stood frozen by the window, watching the gray sky pour itself down the cobbled street like sorrow.
She was just there.
A tall woman, draped in tattered gray robes that dripped from her like dead leaves. Her hair was tangled, her skin papery, and her eyes—her eyes were the color of storm clouds before a hurricane.
She stepped to the counter. Her presence sucked warmth from the
room.
"Black tea," she said, voice brittle as cracked ice.
Xena and Xavier stopped playing. Their little hands stilled mid-roll. Something about her—the way the light didn't quite touch her, the faint scent of scorched herbs—made their small hearts race.
The woman looked at them.
Long.
Hard.
Knowing.
Then Gen came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a linen towel.
Her breath caught.
The woman leaned in close, breath cold as a crypt.
Her voice slithered across the air like a curse unraveling:
"The seals are breaking. Chaos will follow."
And then—
The lights flickered. The wind outside howled, not like weather, but like wolves circling an old house.
A tray clattered in the kitchen.
Xena blinked.
The woman was gone.
No footsteps. No sound. No fading shadow.
Only the teacup remained on the counter.
Empty.
Dry.
As if she'd never been.
But something lingered in the room, like the echo of a scream swallowed by time.
A silence too sharp.
Too unnatural.
The bakery was left steeped in something not even Gen had a name for. Not magic. Not omen.
Just a void.
Xavier reached for his sister's hand. They both looked up at Gen, eyes wide, throats tight with the kind of questions children don't yet know how to ask.
And Gen,
For once,
Had no answer.
---
The Eve of Sixteen
Days before their birthday, strange things begin:
Xena's phone burns hot when she picks it up.
Xavier's reflection moves when he doesn't.
Their bedroom glows faintly red at night.
Glass cracks when they argue.
Birds slam into their windows and are found dead beneath them.
Books fall without touch.
Dreams bleed into day.
Gen grows desperate. She crafts spells of protection, laces their food with calming herbs, mutters incantations under her breath while stirring soup.
She hides talismans in breadboxes.
The twins find them anyway.
Power seeps from them like light through cracks in a sealed door. It no longer asks for permission. It breathes.
And soon, so will everything else.
The Dreams Before/ Xena's Dream:
She walks through an enchanted forest—luminescent flowers, floating orbs of light guiding her steps like a curious ghost.
At the center stands a golden tree, tall and mighty.
She touches its bark—warm, humming, alive.
Then fire rises up from her feet.
Blue flames swallow her whole. She screams. Loud. Raw. The kind of scream that splits a soul in two.
Pain submerges her.
The tree catches fire. The forest turns red. Leaves fall—blood red, slow, and heavy like feathers soaked in grief.
She stands in a red gown.
Around her neck, the carnival necklace glows like a brand of destiny.
And then—snow begins to fall.
The pain vanishes.
But her body still remembered it. Still flinched.
And in the snow, she felt warm. Too warm.
From the crimson mist, a shadow without a face whispers:
"Come to me. Come!"
And she moves toward it, slowly, helplessly, as though sleepwalking through someone else's nightmare.
Xavier's Dream:
An endless ocean of white goo.
He floats—naked, lost, weightless as a breath held too long.
A hand breaks the surface—pale, faceless, elegant. It strokes his cheek. Then his chest.
He exhales cold air, trembling as the touch lingers, reverent and wrong.
The shadow hums, drawing him closer.
"You belong to me, frost-child."
The ocean freezes solid.
He stands now, barefoot, ice cracking beneath each step. A red coat clings to him, glowing faintly at the seams.
Behind him, laughter echoes like a broken music box.
Ahead, a mirror made of water.
In its shifting surface, he sees his mother bleeding.
His sister, burning.
Himself—crying without sound.
Even as the mirror showed him horror, his feet moved—drawn like gravity to something ancient and inevitable.
And the shadow waits.
The Awakening
Back in the real world, lightning cracks like a scream outside their home.
The twins jolt awake—at the exact same time.
A red glow pours in through their window, pulsing like a heartbeat.
They open their bedroom door.
Selene stands in the hallway—her nightgown torn, her eyes glowing white like twin moons. Her fingers are bloodied, nails ragged, lips barely moving as she repeats the name like a broken prayer:
"Adrian... Adrian... Adrian…"
Xena clutches the necklace at her throat.
Xavier takes a step back, his breath catching like frost in the air.
Then—they see the walls.
Crimson veins bloom across the wallpaper—pulsing, wet, alive. Not bleeding, but birthing something. Old. Hungry.
A deep rumble rolls through the floorboards, rising from beneath the house like a buried secret waking.
Then—
Boom.
The front door bursts open with wind, violent and unnatural.
Lights flicker, then vanish into black.
The twins are lifted from the ground—levitating as though pulled by invisible strings of fate.
Their eyes turn white as snow. Mouths silent.
Their breathing shallow. Shaky. Like newborn gods.
And then—
Xena erupts in silver-blue fire, flames licking up her arms like living serpents. Her aura burns hot, wild, flickering with whispers not her own.
Behind her eyes—power.
Control.
Fire that does not ask permission.
Xavier shimmers in pale blue light, frost creeping up the walls around him. His aura crackles with shards of ice, air snapping cold.
The ground beneath his feet splinters, and his pupils flash—a vision not of this world blinking behind them.
Their powers are no longer asleep.
They are awakening.
And with the awakening, chaos was bent on following.
And the house holds its breath.
As they inhaled altogether, sharply—
Before...