Chapters:

The Middle

She wakes from the dream with the visceral sensation of warm blood pooling in the palms of her hands, fear tingling down her spine like slow drips of melting ice. Only a dream, she thinks at herself, trying to calm the thunderous beating of her heart. Only a dream, it was not real.

-

Miles away, at the exact same time her eyes open, a young man wakes up. He slides his feet from the warmth of the covers and feels the coolness of his bedroom floor rise up through his soles. It wakes him gently, like an old friend, and he shivers.

“She’s here,” he sighs.

It begins.

Sera Spring’s first day of college is not off to an easy start. First there was the nightmare (which refuses to depart from the back of her mind), now her car won’t start. She walks half a mile to the closest bus stop, with all her new textbooks weighing down her every step from her overloaded backpack. On top of that, she’s wearing her favorite dress to boost her confidence and it is now raining.

Figures, she grumbles to herself. Every time I wear this dress, it ends up raining. Once on the bus, she has to wring out the hem so as not to attract all the dirt she’ll probably have to walk through.

Luckily, the bus ride is short enough that she’s not terribly late to her first class...or she would be if this darn map made any sense.

“Building Seven?” She’s stalled in front of Buildings Six and Eight, under a tree, frantically zooming at the campus map she’d saved to her phone. “Is it like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters? Shall I run through a hedge?”

“Building Seven?” A voice interrupts her musing. She looks up to find a Generic College Girl (™) smiling pleasantly in her direction. “Were you looking for Seven?”

“Yes. English Lecture Hall?” Sera awkwardly tucks her phone in her pocket.

“Yeah. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s totally next to Ten. Just go past Eight, turn left at the Library, and it’s down a bit on the right.”

“Oh! That’s...weird. Thanks!” Should I introduce myself? Do I have time?

“No problem. This campus is kind of crazy. Good luck!” Saving Sera from social indecision, the girl walks away.

When Sera passes the library on her (now rushed) way to Seven, she makes a mental note to return. When in doubt, find a library, she smiles. You can tell a lot about a place by its library, she’s found.

When she finds her specific room in Building Seven (which was right where the girl said it was, oddly enough, squashed between the library and Building Ten), a familiar nervous fear grips her by the gut. She’s late. What if she walks in, and every single eye turns to her? What if her teacher says something about her tardiness and everyone laughs? Why didn’t she take online courses?

So she tentatively pushes the door open as quietly as possible and slips inside, and gasps a little. It’s a big room.

Bigger than any classroom she’d ever been in. Stadium seating, the floor down at the bottom like a movie theater. The seats aren’t that filled in, so she spots an empty one close to the door and moves towards it, holding her breath.

The teacher (wait...professor?) turns to the room from where he had been writing on the board, and sees her. But he says nothing, only meets her eyes and nods in acknowledgement.

She sits quickly and lets out her breath. The fear is gone, replaced with an insane level of elation that college truly is a different, safer environment from High School, and she has a chance to start over new.

The rest of the class passes like a dream: she takes notes, learns that she can leave all her textbooks at home in the future, gets her assignment, and before she knows it, class is dismissed and she’s out the door with the rest of her classmates.

Or she would be, if a rather brash young man with dark hair and RBF didn’t barrel past her and knock her notebook from her arms.

“Oof!” She stumbles, but he doesn’t even apologize or stop moving, and is gone before she could say anything (like she even would, though). She bends down and starts picking up her papers.

“What a dick,” a male voice from above her comments. “You need help?”

She looks up into the kind face of a boy with sandy-blonde hair and quite a fair number of facial piercings. Before she can shrug off his help, he’s kneeled down and started scooping up papers and pencils (apparently her pencil pouch had lost its zip as well in the hullabaloo).

“Oh, uh, thanks.” She reaches for one of her sketches, which he’s nearly stomped on with his black boot, but he yanks it free before she can grasp it.

“Oh, this is super cool,” he says, admiring the hastily-scribbled sketch she had done this morning between taking notes. A remnant of her dream. “You’ve got skills!”

Sera blushes and yanks the page from his hand, tucking it back into her notebook. “It’s nothing. Thanks for the help.” She holds out her hands for the rest of her papers and pencils and stands.

He stands up too (he’s taller than her, of course, everyone is) and starts to hand them out to her, but pulls them back just out of her reach. “Trade you for a name? I’m Evan.”

Sera, her humiliation deepening, wants nothing more than to grab her papers and scamper away. “Sera,” she mumbles, and stretches her hand out insistently.

Evan hands her the pages and stares at her while she shoves them unceremoniously into her binder and stands up.

“You’re a timid little thing, aren’t you?” He muses, quietly, but Sera hears him and anger fills her body.

I’m not a thing, Sera thinks, hotly. She bites her lip and turns to walk away, but he skitters in front of her.

“Whoa! Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. I’d hate for you to think all college boys are douchebags.”

Sera calms down. A little. “I’ve got to go to class. I’m going to be late. Again.” She steps around him, and this time he stays where he is.

“Okay, gotcha. Maybe I’ll see you around?”

She waves at him over her shoulder but doesn’t turn, and walks away a little faster until she’s able to push through the building’s doors and back out into the cool shade cast by the adjacent Library.

She lied, of course. She doesn’t have class for another hour or so, but she felt...suffocated by his presence. In an unexplainable way.

She has just enough time to visit her new Home Away From Home: the Library. She hurries up the stone steps and past the granite pillars and with one hand on the cool metal bar of the dark glass door and the other on her frantically-reassembled notebook, she feels, for the first time this morning, like everything’s going to be okay.

----

He watches Sera exit Building Seven in a hurry. She stalls, temporarily, just beyond the building, as if to catch her breath. He sees her eyes light up as she spots the Library ahead of her, and her arms grip her notebook closer to her heart.

She doesn’t notice one of her papers falling out of the book as she rushes towards the building. It falls to the ground like an autumn leaf. After she’s out of sight and inside the building, he retrieves it.

A pencil sketch, rough but familiar. It’s smudged from handling, giving the edges a distorted dream-like quality that might be intentional, but he feels the knowledge resound deep inside him, like a mirror shattering on the floor of an empty cave.

It’s a wolf, and he isn’t surprised.

----

The Library is exactly what Sera needs. It’s slightly larger than her community library, with dark oak study tables on the bottom floor, and shelves upon shelves of undiscovered treasures on the upper floor. She pauses on the threshold and just...inhales. The smell of parchment and old leather and glue, as familiar to her heart as breathing. Books surrounding her like trees in a forest. Home.

She practically skips to the Fiction section, then to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section, just letting her fingers trail over the spines of the books there. Where to start? She thinks of her bookcase at home, at the gaps she’d like to one day fill, and starts to walk towards the section of the alphabet holding her favorite writers’ works, and...stops.

She remembers the sketch Evan had called cool. The wolf mid-leap. Just thinking of it brings the nightmare back to her memories in a violent rush, the images flickering in her mind like a projector reel skipping.

Maybe it’s like a catchy song, and the moment I learn the lyrics it leaves my ears? She looks around until she spots the Research Desk, and heads in that direction.

The woman behind the desk looks like every librarian she’s ever met: older, laugh lines, hair messily pulled back in a bun. Her blouse is bright and unusual, with a faint pattern of birds of paradise on a pale orange background. She smiles at Sera and raises her brows.

“Yes, m’dear? May I assist you in some way?”

“Um,” Sera starts, “Where would I find the section on dreams? And, uh, how do I check books out? Do I need a library card, or…?”

“Are you a student here?”

“Yes, ma’am. First day.”
“Oh! Well, welcome to Anderson College. Have you had a good first day so far?” She smiles, and it’s so bright and welcoming a smile that Sera immediately wants to burst out crying and tell this lady her terrible morning woes. But she stops herself and nods again.

The Librarian cocks her head a little bit, like a curious bird, but says nothing. Maybe she caught what Sera wasn’t saying, as much as she tried to hide it.

“Well, let’s see. Dreams, dreams, dreams.” She’s typing into the computer. “Well, there’s psychology, but that’s Freud or Jung, and probably not what you’re after, am I correct?” She looks up at Sera and winks.

Sera smiles and shakes her head, looking down at the floor.

“Well, there’s The Dreaming Place, aboriginal mythology. That might be a good option if you’re open to it. More psychology. Some fiction books. American Dream, yadda yadda yadda. Let’s include ‘Interpretation’ and maybe that’ll lead us to the right door? And...BINGO!”

(Sera jumps, just a little)

“We have a Dream Dictionary. We even have a book on the meaning of dreams in various world cultures, that sounds absolutely delightful. What’ll it be, missy?”

Sera, a little dazed by the roundabout words of this very energetic person, mumbles, “Um, the Dictionary to start. And maybe that one on the Dreaming Place?”

“Got it!” She exits the desk and dashes off in a random direction, ridiculously fast for someone who looks like she’s pushing eighty. “This way, little miss!”

Sera follows her (loses her, for a moment, in the Psychology section), and when she catches up, she’s got both books in her hands, amazingly. Did they go to both sections without realizing?

“Here we go, dearie. Or did you want to just check these out quick-as-you-like?”

Sera looks at her phone clock, and her class (on the other side of campus) is starting in less than thirty minutes. “Um, to go please.”

“Right-o!” And the Librarian is off at a trot again. Sera has to skip to keep up.

Back at the desk, Sera hands over her student ID, and the Librarian peers at it as if it were a Drivers License and Sera were trying to buy vodka.

“Sera H Springs. What a pleasant name! I hope you enjoy the rest of your first day here, Miss Springs, and I do hope you’ll come back to the Library again!” She hands Sera her books with her check-out receipt wedged in the first one, and waves.

Sera waves awkwardly back and smiles, heading for the doors.

What an unusual person, she thinks. I rather like her!

---

Sera arrives at her next class slightly too early, in a complete reversal of her earlier schedule. She has to wait outside the door for the previous class to finish, but she gets to overhear a bit of the Professor’s lecture.

Which is on Classical Mythology.

“...Let’s take a final look at Medusa. Yes, yes,” he sighs, as the class giggles, “Pun unintended. Now, who can tell me how Medusa became a Gorgon?”

Silence. Presumedly while the class raises their hands. Do students still do that in college? Sera hadn’t really noticed in the last class, as she was constantly either taking notes or sketching things from her dream.

“Yes...er, Mr. Hemmings.”

“She was cursed by the gods,” a deep voice calls out. “For being a bit of a slut.”

Laughter. From the boys, of course.

“Yes, Miss McLoughlin? You have something to add?”

“Yeah I do. She wasn’t cursed for being a slut, thanks Kay, for your slut shaming in Classics. She was sexually assaulted by a God and then cursed for doing nothing to stop it. It was a classic example of the toxic patriarchy in Ancient Rome.”

Applause from the girls.

“Yeah, suck it, Kay!” A different girl calls out.

“Okay, okay, settle down. You know, some might argue that she wasn’t cursed into being a Gorgon. That it wasn’t technically a curse at all.

Imagine, if you will, for a moment. There’s an exceedingly pretty woman who’s had to fight off men all her life. She can’t change the fact that she’s caught the attention of the Gods. She can do nothing to fight it, either. Would could she do? She’s a mortal woman. She’s powerless both in her mundane-ness and in her gender.

A God, the God, actually, forces himself on her when she’s doing nothing else but minding her business, praying to her personal goddess. And her Goddess responds: by doing what Medusa probably wished for all her life. She changes her face.

She takes away her beauty. She takes this thing that Medusa has carried with her since birth, this weight, and she weaponizes it. Now, Medusa’s the one with the Power. If you look at her, she’ll kill you.

So the question I’m going to ask you now will guide your assignment over the weekend. Which was the real curse, Medusa’s transformation? Or her mortal beauty? I want a well-written double-spaced single page response. I don’t want sources, I don’t want Wikipedia jargon. Give me your thoughts.”

The frenzied rustle of papers and shuffling of clothes as the classroom rises to leave has Sera straighten up from where she was slouched against the doorframe.

If that’s the Professor for her next class, she can’t wait. Norwegian Folklore is going to be epic.

-----

Norwegian Folklore was not as epic as Sera thought. It was a lot of Norse History and creation mythos, which is...fine. Any culture that believes the world was born out of a sweaty man’s armpit is just...fine. She wishes she could have had the Greek Mythology course instead, but that would mean shifting her schedule around and rushing from first class to this building in less than five minutes.

Maybe if she had the Librarian’s energy, it would be possible.

Like an airport, Sera had booked extra cushions of time into her schedule to allow for a wild layout of campus, so she’d never have to feel rushed. It seems to be working. She has a whole hour to get…(she consults her map)...next door.

Yep, sure enough, Building C23 is literally next door.

She looks around and discovers that there’s a few well-shaded benches in the area, picks one, and sits her backpack down. She takes out the Dream Dictionary and a notebook first, and stares at the page.

“Okay,” she whispers aloud, “Think of the wolf.”

Wolf. She writes it at the top of the page. Adds, white wolf.

Next line? She closes her eyes, but the dream is harder to pull from her subconscious this time. It’s snagged in there somehow, caught on something unseen.

There was a white wolf. She can see it. Around it, the ground is two-toned, like a black-and-white movie. If she just...focuses. Her dream was in color. Wasn’t it?

Not black-and-white. No. It was..white and...red.

Red with blood.

Whose blood?

Mine, a voice whispers, in Sera’s head. My blood. Sera’s voice?

White as snow, red as blood, the voice sing-songs, Skin as pale as ice, lips as red as blood!

Sera feels a pain at her throat, she touches her neck, her fingertips are wet.

Sera opens her eyes with a gasp.

Her notebook has fallen from her lap, her pencil rolled away. She looks down, shaking, at her hand, afraid of what she’ll find.

Nothing.

No blood. Her fingers glisten, though, with water of some sort.

“Am I...crying?!” Sera says aloud, perhaps louder than she intended.

“Are you?” Evan. Again. Great.

Sera looks up at him, shocked from her own body’s reaction to her dream-memory. She feels the air cool on her cheeks. Yep. Definitely crying.

“No!” She wipes her cheeks and reaches down for her notebook. When she can’t find her pencil, Evan offers it.

“I feel like I keep picking up things for you.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” she takes it back and looks back at her notebook. Evan stays where he is. She looks back up at him, “Is there something you need?”

“What, oh, me? I need to know why this girl I met this morning is crying in her sleep in the middle of the day at school.”
“I wasn’t- I’m not sleeping. I’m trying to remember something.”
“A dream?”

Sera looks back at him sharply. “How did you know?”

He gestures at the book next to her. “Dream Dictionary?” He sits down next to her uninvited. “And your dream...made you cry?”

“Look, I don’t know. I didn’t know I was crying. Can you just-” she shoves the book and open notebook into her backpack and stands abruptly. “I’ve got to run. To my next class.”

“Do I make you nervous, Sera? You’ve always got to run to your next class when I see you. Sounds like someone’s not great at planning her day.”

Sera, tight-lipped, turns and storms off, not dignifying that with a response. She hears him say, behind her, “Touchy touchy!”

Even though her next class is still at least half an hour from starting and literally next to her, she pretends to turn the corner and just circles the building.

She peeks around the corner, but Evan is no longer sitting on the bench. Relieved, she sits down where she is, back braced against the cold brick, and takes the book and her notebook back out of her backpack. And writes:

Snow

Blood

Neck/Throat

And opens her dictionary to find what those words mean.

But something that voice said sounded familiar. “Skin as pale as ice, lips as red as blood.” She looks it up on her phone and the first search result has her heart pounding in excitement.

Snow White & Rose Red.

A Fairy Tale. Sisters. Rose Red always gets erased from Snow White’s tale in the retellings. Did Sera read this story somewhere? Is that why she heard that rhyme?

The dictionary tells her that “wolf” means: she’s a loner (no surprise), and that dreaming a wolf is attacking you means represents an uncontrollable situation in your life. Well. That’s college. So perhaps her fears are what’s eating away at her dreams.

But then the entry goes on to describe a “white wolf” as a representation of victory and the ability to see the light even in darkest times. So maybe her dream is telling her to hold onto hope?

Blood is not as terrible a symbol as she thought. It represents “life, love, passion, and disappointments,” and to dream of losing blood means to be exhausted and drained of life. Again, college. She’s definitely been worried about doing well in classes.

Neck: to dream that your neck is injured means a disconnect between your heart and mind.

Okay. So her dreams, if the dictionary is to believed, mean that she is overworked, exhausted, stressed, but still able to find hope and see a way out. Good.

Though the vivid unreal-but-somehow-weighty-and-warm feeling of holding her own blood in her hands felt like a lot worse problem than the translation would have it...Sera feels a weight lifted from her chest.

It was only one dream. One terrible nightmare. Before the first day of college.

And now it’s time for her third and final class of the day before she starts day two tomorrow. She checks that the coast is clear (no Evan lurking) before she heads into the last building.

Someone’s exiting at the same time she’s going in, though, and she steps aside to let him pass.

When she does, she meets his eyes. And they change.

His eyes...they were green when she looked at them, and...this is weird, but she could have sworn they went black right before he looked away. Like a cloud passing over the sun. Like…

“Like magic,” Sera breathes, turning to watch him walk away. And it hits her like a bolt of lightning: that’s the guy who pushed past her abruptly this morning as she was leaving her first class.

As the tall man with dark hair and weird magical eyes walks away until she can’t see him anymore, another pair of eyes watch Sera with the same fierce intensity.

A bitter cold wind pushes through the buildings around Sera, and she shivers. That’s weird, she thinks, It’s summer? The wind carries with it the smell of smoke and paper, and thinking nothing more of it, Sera goes into the building to get away from the chill.

---

“She’s remembering,” he says on the phone. “I can feel it.”

On the other line, a woman’s voice, all sharp edges and sharp words, responds.

“Yes, I understand. Yes, ma’am. Yes-”

She says something else, and his words falter.

“I--I don’t think I can. That’s too-”

Two words, sharp as glass.

“Fine.”

He ends the call.

The burnt-paper wind catches him under his jacket but he doesn’t shiver. He lets it drag its cold fingers across his skin as he breathes in the scent.

“We’ll get her. This time, she’s ours.”
The wind takes his words the moment he says them and spirits them away.