Teaser for: The Day Nations Cried --A Novel

 

It’s one thing to draw faces for other people. You don’t know them, and you don’t know the face on the page. As far as you know, it’s just a stranger staring back at you. Two eyes, charcoal grey, a nose, a mouth, two ears, possibly obscured by hair, but maybe not. You remember the first sketch, and possibly the second one. My first was of a tall, thin, dark-haired boy. He had a twinkle in his eye, and I thought he was handsome. My second sketch was of a girl. She was blonde and very plain. I didn’t think much of her. But my third sketch remains clouded. The face is obscure. The same with the fourth and the fifth until they all ran together in my mind.

After a while, the magic was gone. Here I am, the last-known Soul Bearer, and the magic is gone. I’ve been told all my life by Nations, by Marjory, that I am special, that my gift is the closest thing to a real-live superhero that this world is ever going to get. And yet, it seems mundane to me. Or at least, it did, until one day when it became very, very real.

Unless you too are a Soul Bearer, you’ll never understand this feeling, but imagine waking up one night and feeling compelled to draw. You get out your pencils and your sketch book, and you just draw. You let whatever spirit guide your hand in a feverish motion, painful and wonderful at the same time, until you give birth to a face on a page. And there he is, staring back at you, tragic, beautiful, but yet, still just a face on a page, until you realize that he’s more than that.

He is a name. He is a haunting presence who follows you throughout your day. He never leaves your thoughts. He never leaves your side. He is your soul mate.

When you are out, you feel as if he is around the next alley way. When you sleep, he is your uninvited bedfellow. Yet, you did invite him. You may not think that you did, but when you put your hand to that paper and touched your pencil down against the parchment, letting that first thin, grey line form, you invited him in.

And then there is that moment, where you are out on an errand, just going about your day, and it happens. He’s there, waiting in line at a counter. The face. It’s the face that you’ve seen a thousand times before. He’s been in your mind, in your dreams, in your very soul. And here he is, seemingly in flesh and blood before you, and all you can think to do is hide.

Do you have any idea how horrifying that is? Some people might say that they wish they could bring a face to life like that, but I caution them. There is nothing thrilling about it. It’s terrifying. It’s the stuff of nightmares and demons. It’s enough to make you question your whole existence and this life. Is it even real? Is any of this real?

Do you want to know the most horrifying thing about it?

It. Is. Real.