The Projector exploded in a confusion of visions a cliff, a choked shout, a man falling from a height, the emptiness. At that, I felt nauseating anger and revulsion at the sheer antisocial nastiness.
“He believed it was over,” The Architect continued in a whispering tone. It was probably meant to suggest that now the last hindrance had been cleared out of his way, he was free to go ahead with his scheme of retribution. However, in the multiverse, Dear Brianne has a knack for throwing a spanner at the works, even for the most obsessive of schedulers.
I raised my eyes at the sound of my name being spoken, a slowly coming realization making me dizzy. “What… what happened next?” I demanded an answer, although subconsciously I already suspected the response.
I locked eyes with The Architect as he completed the last portion of the story. The boy was first stunned-and afraid-to see the girl he had shoved earlier wake up. But not like herself. No, she came back in the body of the very person he had uttered he would annihilate on the Earth. Two people who become one, in a bond that produces a being incredibly strong and capable.
The Projector laid itself out in bursts of colors and movements, of personalities, of worlds coming together only to merge, collapse. In the middle of all these landmarks, yet unknown to many, was my very own face.
“Since then,” The Architect answered, “the boy has been frantically trying to find the means to finish his job.” In order to accomplish this, he had to look for a way to eliminate this combined entity without the potential disassembly of the fabric of the multiverse. This is nice, well said. He’s almost had some of them but missed the perfect moment every time.
When the story was over, the Projector was switched off, lights were turned back on, and I could see everything clearly. I remained mouth agape and paralyzed as my brain overworked trying to decipher what I had been told-and what that entailed.
This boy,” I finally said, my voice so soft that I wasn’t even sure the man in front of me could hear me. He’s someone I know.”
The Architect nodded slowly. “He is very real, Brianne. And he has been closer to you than you can ever imagine.
A thousand thoughts went through my head. It’s a time when every encounter, every friendship becomes suspect, every person who I believed was on the right side of the fence is suddenly Asmodeus’ new recruit. “Who?” I demanded. “Who is he?”
But The Architect just simply shook his head. “That’s not for me to reveal. That is something that you must figure out yourself, Brianne. But know this-the boy has grown up and so has his hunger for vengeance, and he never abandoned it. If anything, it is unlike this and has become stronger, more refined. He will continue on until he can find a way to kill this girl, to undo the joining of two souls and obliterate the one that exists in his sight as an enemy.
In my case, the feeling of suffocating came over me as if I was submerged in water and could not come to the surface as I read those words. If what the Architect said was true, then the whole world as I built it in my mind was nothing but falsehoods. I was not only Brianne, or even Brianne with all her power and abilities, I was both of us: one of me had been killed by someone I knew and trusted.
Again, I tilted my head to the side and, after a moment’s processing, I whispered, “Lucy.” “That girl who was pushed… wasn’t that Lucy?” And this is how, having died, she became a part of me?
The Architect was very sad when he said the following statement. Finally, Brianne, you are starting to see the light. The shattered recollections, the feeling of homelessness – everything comes from here, from this merging. Two same as two minds or two recollections create one spirit of incredible strength and influence.
I shook my head in disbelief as I attempted to close my mind to the truth despite its weighing heavily on my heart. No, this can’t… it can’t be real. I would remember something like that. I would know if…..
Died?” The Architect closed softly. “Merged with another soul? Brianne, your mind has been guarding you from these truths, you’ve been saying them aloud in your life so that it doesn’t lose its mind. Initially, you had these childish walls, but as your strength increases and your personality develops, these barriers start fading away.
I remember the feeling that came upon me when I was struggling, trying so hard to find a way. If that is what Lucy broke through like, then? Or is it a completely different phenomenon that two hearts at last open together acknowledge their essence?
“What do I do?” I said, and my voice was weak, ruined with defeated exhaustion, afraid, and helpless. “How do I, how do we…?”
The Architect looked at the Witness intently and his old eyes were both sad and worried at the same time. ‘Firstly, a human being wakes up and becomes aware of who and what they are, and that is a Brianne,’ Not just Brianne. Brianne + Lucy = You, the person who is supposed to exist as a whole, but is made of two warring halves. There will only be enough energy and power to start solving the challenges coming your way.”
I just nodded my head, thinking that a large abyss had been opened before me which I could not look down on. To step forward was to step into the unknown, and into an environment where all that I had believed about myself was up for discussion. But to get out of it… that direction meant only a single thing: death, for both myself and for the multiverse that seemed to rely on me.
“I’m scared,” I whispered softly, but I was perfectly clear that the words had come out of my mouth.
The Architect smiled kindly at him, in a way of sympathy. “Fear is natural, Brianne, but remember-that you are not going through it alone. Lucy is with you now, her strength is with your strength. And you will find others who will have your back once you start to understand who your friends really are.
That’s when something started awakening inside of me as if in reaction to his words. He was there, striking, somehow, like any southern man belonging to a town where one has lived for a while and then has left. Lucy? Was this the first time two spirits in our hearts began to awaken and begin to acknowledge the existence of the other?
I inhaled slowly, standing tall, before I looked at The Architect. “Very well,” I replied, finding renewed strength in my returning words, definite in the timbre of my voice, as though in me there was not only solely my will and volition but that of another. “Tell me what I need to do. Find out how to figure out….. everything.”
The Architect grinned and the look of hope returned to the features of the very old man. “You are right, Brianne; that, right there, is where our work begins.”
Next to me, I braced myself for more. The future was dark; there would be disasters and difficult home truths in store for America. But that was the first sensation of having a real goal on this impossible mission for the first time since we started.
I was Brianne . I was Lucy. At the same time, I was both, and neither, and something else.
I was prepared, ready to stand against anything that existed in the multiverse.