Chapter 360: The land of the dead_Part 3
Belle pushed herself up from the ground of the land of the dead, with the stillness of the land settling inside her. She didn’t know how she had ended up here when she hadn’t been here for many months now.
Everything around her was covered with fog, but as her eyes settled on her surroundings, she belatedly realized she had not woken up anywhere close to the castle, or even a mirror of Aragonia in this world, but in a place she knew from experience she shouldn’t be, the cemetery.
Kuhn’s warning about cemeteries in the land of the dead was still clear as day in her mind, and the fact that she had experienced it firsthand when taking Rohan’s heart back made her wary. Spirits and lost souls resided in cemeteries, where they searched for things to latch onto and live on, especially a living body.
Through the rising fog, Belle could see the tombstones of the graves and the dead, dried bushes scattered across the ground. Even as she stood, she realized she was standing on someone’s grave and quickly stepped back, away from the stone. But her hurried movement made her stumble and fall over the grave behind her.
Belle hissed in pain as her hand hit the tombstone, where a name was written that caught her attention. She turned to rub her aching hand but stopped short, staring at the name. The huge moon was as bright as any lamp, illuminating everything, and it revealed the fading name on the stone that made a shiver crawl down her spine.
"Isabelle Dawson..." Belle read the name aloud. This graveyard must be a mirror of a cemetery from the land of the living, and she had ended up waking up on it.
It couldn’t have been a coincidence; everything happened for a reason. The fact that she had lived Isabelle’s life in her sleep and then woken up right next to her grave in the land of the dead meant something. But as much as she was curious about what it all meant and why she was here again after so many months, Belle did not want to be here, not knowing what lurked in the stillness.
The reapers must not sense her, nor could she allow herself to be chased again by dark spirits, like the last time, who had wanted her body. She needed to leave this place and wake up so she could tell Rohan about what she had dreamed.
With that thought in mind, Belle pushed herself away from the grave and stretched her hand along the ground, searching for a stone or anything sharp enough to hurt her and jolt her awake. But she stopped when the fog suddenly began to move, clearing away slowly like smoke.
Belle’s eyes narrowed at the shifting mist, and just as she wondered what could cause it to drift away from her direction, she began to hear whispers rising from somewhere around the graveyard. The sound made all the hairs on her body stand on end, and a cold shiver ran down her back.
The words were unlike anything she could understand, but the whispering grew clearer, disembodied voices she could not see. They belonged to spirits, and she felt them closing in on her with every passing second.
Without wasting time, she wrapped her fingers around a small stone lying next to the grave she sat on and, without hesitation, brought it down hard against her hand. Pain shot through her, but she didn’t wake up, no matter how hard she tried to hurt herself.
"Come on, wake up," she muttered urgently to herself as she slapped her own cheek hard, but still, she didn’t wake. Belatedly, she realized, just as it had happened the last time she came here, that she was unable to wake herself even when she hurt or cut herself. It hadn’t worked then; she had fallen into the river of souls and only miraculously woken up afterward.
Hearing the whispering draw closer, she realized she couldn’t waste another second. She needed to leave the cemetery before finding another way to wake herself. Perhaps throwing herself into the river of souls would do the trick again.
She got up and began to run, not daring to look back at the voices following her. Her bare feet landed on sharp sticks and stones, but even that discomfort wasn’t enough to slow her down. She couldn’t let herself get stuck here, not now, not ever.
Belle ran with all her might, her plain white dress catching on dried thorns. But the more she ran, the faster the unseen sprites chased her, their whispering now rising into full-blown wails and loud screams. The still air of the atmosphere picked up, swirling and stirring the ground into motion.
"Take body! Want body!" came their sing-song voices, and Belle ran harder, not knowing where she was going or what direction she would end up in. She plunged into the forest at the side of the cemetery, where the trees were nothing but dried, lifeless wood without leaves. To escape the cemetery, she fled into the woods, running blindly.
Her heart pounded so loudly she could hear it in her ears and feel it in her throat. She didn’t know whether to be grateful she hadn’t woken up on the side where the reapers would sense her immediately, or to feel miserable that she had instead landed on the side where unseen entities wanted to take her body and soul for themselves.
Belle kept running with a desperation that nothing could have stopped, but as she was barefoot, it wasn’t long before she stepped on a sharp thorn that drove straight into her heel. She tumbled forward and fell, losing her balance completely.
Belle cried out in pain, quickly grabbing her foot where she had been injured. Her hands shook as she saw how deeply the sharp dried stick had pierced into the sole of her foot. It was then she noticed the spirits had stopped chasing. Their wails had fallen back, left behind after she had crossed out of the cemetery.
She took a deep sigh of relief, but the pain under her foot tensed her up again. If such pain couldn’t wake her up, what else could? That cemetery she had just left behind, she realized, must not have been the same as the one she had once been in, because she couldn’t see the river of souls anywhere. Or perhaps it was there, but she had lost her way...