Chapter Text
Soothsayer
It started when Jon was only seven years old.
He lived with his grandmother. She had begrudgingly taken him in after her daughter’s unfortunate passing. Jon was an extremely difficult, quiet child. He often struggled to make connections with his peers due to his reluctance to speak. While his selective mutism was later attributed to undiagnosed autism, his inability to properly process his trauma exacerbated this behavior.
The world had become a lonely and strange place since his mother’s passing.
One particular day, he was in school, contented with flipping through the pages of a hardcover book in the corner of the room.
Across the classroom, a little girl looked up from her crayons and noticed him huddled next to the wall. She decided to abandon the picture she was doodling to introduce herself to him. When Jon heard her approaching, he initially ignored her. Then, her scuffed black slippers paused in his line of sight, and he was forced to look up. A child with a freckly face and curly blonde hair was standing in front of him.
Jon was instantly wary of the girl; he was already learning the hard truths of being an outcast. However, she did not hit or mock him. She simply reached out and offered her hand to him. He silently stared at her pudgy little fingers, splayed out and hovering in the open air between them.
He lifted his head and met her eyes.
That was when it happened.
His surroundings melted away like wet ink, until the room was consumed in darkness. The students vanished from existence, and the little girl was suddenly gone. Jon felt like he had been swallowed by a the maw of a great monster. Before he could panic, a blurry image began to piece itself together from the depths of the void. The vision wavered, then sharpened. He was standing in the middle of an unfamiliar room, within a home that he had never seen. There was a small bed in the corner decorated with a pastel pink duvet and several stuffed teddy bears. It was night, and the constant flash of blue and red lights coming from the open window cast the area in a haunting glow.
The little girl was lying face down on the floor. Her fair white skin was mottled with violet bruises, and her once lively eyes stared ahead, unseeing. The outline of a handprint was embedded into the tender flesh of her forearm. The air was stagnant; silent.
It was immediately apparent to Jon that the girl was dead.
Then, the vision was over as suddenly as it began.
The bedroom faded away. Jon blinked, and the classroom instantly came back into focus, accompanied by a wave of intense color and noise that was nearly overwhelming in its intensity. He was still sitting on the floor with a book in his lap. The little girl was staring at him expectantly, but her once open expression was now tinged with creeping confusion and uncertainty. Jon averted his eyes and mutely jerked his head side-to-side in rejection. The girl pouted and turned to go back to her drawing.
He tried to return to reading, he really did, but there were tears pressing against the backs of his eyes. The words on the page bled together in a black and white blur. All he could think about was the vision of the girl and her bedroom. He did not fully understand what he had seen, but he recognized what someone’s eyes looked like when they were dead. His mother had appeared the same when he found her body.
He pushed it to the back of his mind until two weeks later, when their grief-stricken teacher stood in front of the class to announce that the little girl would not be returning to school. She did not specify what happened to her, but Jon had a feeling that he Knew.