…

YOU SAVED THE WITCH.

…

YOU FREED THE DEMON.

…

YOU WILL BE PUNISHED FOR THESE CRIMES.

…

YOU WILL SHARE THEIR FATE.

…

A NEW LIFE WILL BEGIN NOW.

…

…

…

Sword Witch

Juxtaposition of Another World

By

Ninmast Nunyabiz

 

(1)

 

The alarm was a frustratingly familiar sound, its voluminous bleating the harbinger of every undesirably premature day. She didn’t actually recall setting it the night before, but that wasn’t what was primarily on her mind.

Had it all been a dream? It had to have been, of course. Things like that just didn’t happen.

Sitting up was the wrong thing to do, then, as her senses were immediately assaulted with far too many things that contradicted her flawlessly logical conclusion of the impossible.

Directly across the room she didn’t recognize, a girl’s school uniform hung from a shelf stuffed with dolls and plush animals. It looked so small, the idea of wearing it seemed laughable, but she could read the school emblem on its breast as clear as day even though she’d not yet picked up any glasses.

She almost failed to notice the heavy weight of hair against her back as she turned to swing her legs out of the bed and looked down at her form, clad in lavender pajamas. She flipped her hands over and back again multiple times in her lap, then did it several more times with them raised up before her at different angles.

Yes, she could say with absolute certainty that she had never seen these tiny hands before in her life.

Fortunately, despite their foreign nature, they were more than adequate for reaching over and flipping off the alarm clock, whose blithe insistence in the face of her existential crisis could only be described as rude.

Her eyes returned once more to the uniform and she pushed herself to her feet to head over to it.

On the desk next to the bookshelf that held the uniform aloft was a purse and a small bundle of papers. A note was on top of the latter, the graceful loops of a girl’s writing energetically informing her, “Don’t forget!”

Something about the note was wrong, though. It took her a moment to realize she didn’t recognize the language she was reading, at least not before that morning. A cursory glance about the desk revealed the notepad the illogical message came from, and she picked up a pen to write the same message on the next piece of paper.

It came out in the same language, with the same ornate loop on the letters. So this was her handwriting now. Okay, probably the least bewildering thing the morning had delivered thus far, she could live with that.

She pulled the uniform off of the shelf and held it before her body in front of the full-length mirror nearby. It was hard to believe the thing that seemed from her old perspective to be so small covered her form so completely, the skirt even coming past her knees. For now, she laid it on the bed and peered again into the reflective surface, coming face to face with it this time.

She rubbed the unfamiliar contours of her chin and turned to examine each side of her face in turn. There was a faint echo of familiarity in the features that looked back at her, as if she were looking perhaps at a little sister she only shared one parent with, or maybe a distant cousin would be more accurate. No one would ever mistake them for the same person, or in all likelihood even assume relation, but having looked at her last face for so long, she could pick out subtle parallels. It wasn’t much, but at least looking in the mirror wouldn’t be completely incomprehensible.

The paperwork, then, needed to be examined. Opening the packet up revealed letterheads with the same emblem as the uniform, and included a letter of acceptance to their high school, a freshman schedule, a list of things to bring that she guessed, and confirmed with a quick check, to be in a nearby backpack, and a student identification card.

The purse, on the other hand, held basically what she expected. It was small enough to hold in the hand, but sported a shoulder strap long enough to have it rest against her hip. Within was a small wallet holding more identification, a train pass, a library card, a debit card and some loose currency, as well as a small assortment of cosmetics.

A smartphone nearby was still charging on a cable.

So that was it, then. School. First year. No wonder she was so small. She was just a kid, and quite excited for it all if the effort she'd put into it was any sign.

A kid, huh? she thought to herself as she rubbed her hand against the unfamiliar doppelganger's in the mirror. She scoffed, and the girl on the other side cracked a grin like they had shared a joke. Heh, I'd better be careful, or I'm liable to use that label on someone older than I am now. Yeah, that could go poorly.

Honestly, she thought she was taking all of this pretty well. She was pleased with how rational and calm she was being about everything. After all, how often does one find their entire identity rewritten? Surely not enough times to practice. Panic would be perfectly rational in a mind with less self-control.

Her eyes widened as a loud sound from beneath her reached her ears, alerting her to other, quieter sounds she’d been tuning out. Other people moving around, getting ready for the new day. Details she’d puzzled out flashed through her mind in rapid succession in sudden and terrible new contrast.

She was a kid.

It was the first day of school.

The house she was in was big enough for a second story.

… Oh no …

 

* * *

 

She had delayed her descent by taking her time getting ready, and tentatively made her way down the stairwell toward the noises. Sure enough, three complete strangers were conducting their morning in the open kitchen.

A Caucasian man read the morning news on his tablet over a cup of coffee.

An Asian woman was filling bowls from a steamer in between preparing toast.

A boy even younger than her fiddled with the neck of a different uniform as he got comfortable at the table.

She didn’t recognize a single one of them. But why would she? She was literally walking in on the breakfast of a family she didn’t know from Adam.

That didn’t keep the woman from smiling when she turned around with the bowls and saw her at the base of the stairs. “Good morning, dear! Your uniform looks lovely on you! Oh, hard to believe you’re in high school already! Why, it seems like only yesterday I was sending you off to grade school--”

“Saki,” the man interrupted her as he lowered the tablet, “you’re talking with your hands.”

“Oh!” At the reminder that she was holding two bowls she was beginning to swing about, she eased them onto the table. “Come and eat, the toast will be finished soon!”

It was too much. She couldn’t take it. These complete strangers treating her like they knew her overwhelmed her in a way everything isolated to her room couldn’t. Unlike the separate details of the room, these refused to be taken individually.

The small motions of the man manipulating the tablet screen, the woman’s bright smile and vivid personality, the boy’s constant fidgeting.

She couldn’t tune them out, couldn’t separate them into bite-sized pieces without the rest intruding. She felt nauseous, as if she’d been stricken with motion sickness and the merry-go-round refused to stop spinning.

Her feet were moving toward the door and away from the scene almost before she fully processed that she had to get out of there, and her back was to the room before the sound of the man’s tablet clicking against the table reached her ears.

“Riko? Where are you going, honey?”

Her feet stopped. Nariko was the name on the identification card. Trying to distract itself, her mind tried to puzzle away whether or not Saki had also been a nickname rather than the woman’s full name. But that wasn’t going to give them an answer.

“Oh, I was going to leave early.”

She could practically picture him looking at the clock on the wall. “This early?”

“I wanted to make sure I could find it. If I have trouble and didn’t have enough time, I could end up late on my first day.”

Shut up, she told herself. Shut up and stop talking so much. They don’t need a dissertation on your lie.

“But what about your breakfast?” It was the woman who spoke up this time.

“Sorry,” she apologized, only feeling a little guilty for the work the stranger had gone to for her sake. “I’ll pick something up on my way.”

The bewildered family said nothing else in their confusion and she didn’t remain around for them to come up with any other questions. In another minute, she was out the door into the cool morning air, past the front gate and her back pressed against the stonework as she took one deep breath after another.

By all that was holy, how could she even think of coming back into that disaster voluntarily in a mere handful of hours? It was too much to ask!

 

* * *

 

An hour later, a different girl came up to the house to ring the doorbell, and when the woman opened it up, she smiled. “Haru, good morning!”

“Good morning, Mrs. Kelly,” the blonde girl greeted. “Is Nariko ready?”

What had been an easy smile faltered. “She’s already left, Haru. Nearly an hour ago, I think, said she was worried about finding her way. She didn’t text you?”

“Not a peep,” the girl frowned, too. “Was she mad about something?”

“I don’t really know,” the woman provided, shaking her head. “She would have left without saying a word if Marcus hadn’t spoken up about it. It wasn’t like her.” A moment of thought passed across her face. “She looked a bit pale, perhaps she’s not feeling well?”

 

* * *

 

For being the day that her entire existence was erased and rewritten, it had really been remarkably uneventful.

Apparently, she normally would have had Homeroom as her first class, except for the morning assembly. That didn’t really surprise her, she’d never seen a first day of school that hadn’t had one. They’d remained standing the whole time, which revealed a pleasant surprise to her that she no longer possessed flat feet. Yet another plus, she supposed.

There had even been a physical education class about halfway through the day, and it seemed she was pretty fit physically, at least relative to all of the fifteen-year-olds she had to compare herself against.

Of course, she didn’t join in with the cries of indignation the first time they received homework. She didn’t really understand where the sense of entitlement came from. She certainly remembered she used to be just as indignant, but she also couldn’t recall a single year it didn’t happen anyway.

She still hadn’t decided how she was going to handle friendships, though. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t help but see them all as kids, and their interests seemed just as banal. What was she supposed to talk with them about?

Girls that weren’t talking about private matters with close friends only seemed to spend their time either being catty about other girls or talking about boys. She had no interest in insulting others for social points, and there was absolutely no way she was going to entertain whether or not children were attractive.

As a result, she had spent most of the day’s social opportunities largely keeping to herself. Maybe she could find a club or something to have a commonality with some of her fellow students worth chatting about.

She had only two prominent interactions with her fellow students the entire day, one when the girl in front of her asked to borrow a pencil, which she obliged, and one where a male student came to her. He had been trying to make small talk, but she didn’t like the way he did it while trying to swagger, and was obviously looking for an in. Rather than risk encouraging him, she had ignored him, and eventually, he moved on.

On the plus side, the school had a very nicely appointed library, with personal tables near the exterior windows that caught the sunset and painted the room in increasing shades of soothing orange.

She hadn’t been in any particular rush to head straight back home when she thought of the nauseous panic attack she’d had that morning, and the homework she'd received was an ideal excuse to take advantage of the place for the couple extra hours they stayed open. She wasn’t the only one to avail herself of the facilities, though there were fewer now that the time was nearly over than there had been to start with.

She, too, was running out of excuses for going home.

Her smartphone was on the table beside her papers, where she had been using it as a calculator after turning off the ringer in accordance with the library’s rules. Timely, it began to vibrate just as she was reaching for it to resume work.

The screen helpfully informed her that the call was coming from “Home.” Perhaps she had less time than she thought.

She took a moment to gather herself before picking it up and flipping the green prompt on the screen.

“Hello?” she opened simply, but she wasn’t ready for the gush that came from the other side.

“Riko, honey, where are you?!”

It was the woman of the house, it took her a moment to recall her name was Saki, or at least her nickname was. Not that it would do her well to use it.

“School ended more than an hour ago. When you didn’t come home, and after how you were this morning, I was worried sick! I called Haru’s house, I called the fountain shop, and nobody had seen you! You aren’t at the hospital, are you?!”

She genuinely did not see this coming, though the moment that thought struck her, she realized she really should have. She had no emotional ties to the family outside of their very existence freaking her out, so she hadn’t even considered it from the other side.

They were strangers to her, but from their perspective, their daughter had gone AWOL without so much as calling to let them know. For a moment, sympathy and remorse filled her.

“I’m actually still at school. They have a wonderful library and I thought I’d do my homework here. I must have lost all track of time. I’m so sorry, I should have called, but my head’s been full of air all day.”

She meant very few of those words, but she knew the white lies would be necessary to calm the woman down, and indeed, it seemed to work. She heard Saki take several deep breaths as the news of such a benign explanation soothed all of the panic that must have been flooding her nerves.

“You really should have,” she still managed. “I’ve been terrified. I’m so glad nothing’s wrong. But don’t you think it’s time to come home?”

“If it’s alright, I still have a little math homework left, and the library is only open for about another half hour,” she provided back. “I’d like to finish it up before I head back.”

“That would be fine,” Saki permitted, “but you must be hungry. You forgot your lunch.”

She cringed as her stomach growled before she could stifle the thought. “Ehehe,” she gave a sickly chuckle, sure the sound was going to get her a scolding from the librarian, but as her gaze went over, it seemed her stomach was only so loud in her own ears, as the woman was still bent over her own desk. “Yeah, I noticed that right about lunchtime …”

Not that she knew there was a lunch to bring, of course, but she hadn’t even actually stopped for any breakfast on the way to the school, either.

When other students had started bringing out lunchboxes, she had followed those that didn’t out the door, hoping to find the cafeteria. Instead, it seemed they were all heading to a food vendor that didn’t have nearly enough of what everyone wanted, and the whole scene had been impenetrable chaos.

In the end, she’d returned to her classroom with nothing to show for it but a stop by the water fountains and the bathroom. By this late in the day, her stomach had largely resigned itself to its unsatisfying fate, but the reminder had roused its temper once more, even more miserable than before.

Her words amused Saki, who chuckled over the line. “Head full of air, indeed. Finish your work and come home, sweetie. It sounds like you wouldn’t want to be late for dinner.”

They exchanged a few conversation-ending pleasantries and she hung up, returning the display to a calculator once more.

Saki seemed like such a nice, caring woman, she concluded as she put her pencil to the algebra once more. How was she supposed to sit down at a table and carry on a face-to-face conversation with her as if her daughter was the one sitting there?

How could she do anything else that wouldn’t just sound like crazy talk?

She pushed these things from her mind with the weight of the homework in front of her. If she let herself worry about it, she’d never finish, and probably make herself too sick to sit at the table in the first place.

Her stomach grumbled sourly in agreement that such would be an utterly untenable solution.

* * *

The route to the campus and back had fortunately turned out to be quite simple, and well within walking distance. Even having only walked it once, she recognized it well enough in the growing twilight to retrace her steps.

This was particularly fortunate since she had no idea what the neighborhood was like. If it hadn’t been something she’d passed on the way to school, she couldn’t have located so much as a convenience store even if it were down the street from her house.

Not that she had been able to find her way to the school, either. That had required the address from the letterhead and her phone’s navigation app.

She had passed an empty side street into the light of a street lamp that picked that moment to flicker on, and then she stopped.

Yes, she was completely positive that the street had been empty, yet she didn’t have to look back to tell it wasn’t empty now. She could almost place it, right around the corner of the brick privacy fence. Yet if she looked, she knew instinctively it was going to mean trouble.

How far was she from her house? A block and a half? The figure must have been a grown man. Could she outrun a grown man for a block and a half?

Her gut told her that this, too, was a bad choice.

All she could really do was start walking again, act normal, walk normally. Hope the figure backed out, or erred on caution to delay acting long enough for her to get a more sizable lead.

He did neither, and his voice was inhumanly deep, as if someone was speaking through a voice changer at the back of a cavern. It made her stop in her tracks again, if only to prevent herself from bolting like a gazelle.

“And what has suddenly given you the belief that you can just walk away, witch?”