Michael T. Hare

Christopher Paolini, author of The Inheritance Cycle, posted a story prompt on Facebook yesterday and urged us all to write something based on it. My brother and I were both participants, and I wrote a story called The Figures. The haunting tale is about Asha, a girl from a broken kingdom, trying to navigate a snowstorm.

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Asha took another step. Numb agony shattered across her body like a thousand arrows, but she kept her gaze ahead. A blur, just barely distant, lingered in the distance. Its edges were fuzzy and soft, distorted by the hectic blizzard whipping her dress back and forth.

Her vision pulsed at the sides. Her breath was quickening, fleeing her. Darkness threatened to swallow her whole. Asha couldn’t succumb to it. She had nothing left. Not a kingdom, not a father, not a mother, nobody to spare her if she collapsed. The figure in the distance was her only hope.

“Help!” she screamed, her throat raw from the cold. “Whoever you are, please help!”

The blurs around the shadow grew sharper. Was it coming near?

Despite the rushing wind, a sound crashed into Asha, echoing in her ears.

Her very own voice.

“Help! Whoever you are, please help!”

Her stomach flopped over, and Asha stopped dead in her tracks. She didn’t understand. That had been her voice, the exact plea she’d projected at the figure. Another voice came from the left—her voice again. Asha whipped her head around; sure enough, another blur stood in the distance. As Asha continued to rotate, she noticed that she was being closed in by two others, making four shadows.

Asha didn’t understand. Was it magic? Had the elves broken their pact?

Another wave of pain crashed into Asha, and she was forced to walk toward the figure. She didn’t know if they were benevolent or evil, but she could only pray dearly for the former. It was all Asha could do against the option of death. “Can you hear me!?” she cried.

The second she’d started walking, the figure had done the same, drawing closer and closer with each step. It refracted her voice as before, though it reached her ears much quicker this time. “Can you hear me!?” As the silhouette took shape, Asha noticed the whipping cloth at the feet of the figure. A dress not unlike her own. Her original perception of a terrifying monster began to wane.

A stab of pain made Asha double over.

No. She needed to keep walking.

Step after step, Asha labored in a hunched position until her head collided with something. It must’ve been the figure. Relief and terror flooded her, and she lifted her head to see who it was. Asha screamed, backpedaling in terror, hearing her own scream refracted back at her in four directions. All the figures had closed her in.

Breathing hard, Asha stared wide-eyed at the stranger… or what she supposed was a stranger. Asha was staring directly at herself. When she blinked, the figure blinked. When she screamed, it screamed. She turned her head to inspect the others, but they turned their heads away, gazing off in the same direction she was. They acted as her reflection would, except with flesh and bone.

“Who are you?” she asked.

They asked her the same.

“How do we escape this place?”

They asked her the same.

“Will we survive?”

They asked her the same.