I stared profoundly at myself in the mirror, despairingly attempting to bring back that dream or illusion to my head so I could repeat the undisturbed nature of peacefulness. I hung onto everything to find that pathway again.

To abruptly disappear after saying I was the Original Inuitle made me an affiliate of absurdity.

My teeth went smooth like rubber as I ground them under my gums, thinking of any other solution. I tried searching for clues across the internet to no avail. Nothing mentioned a group of Inuitles, only the definition.

Masking my hands over my face as water sunk my face, I shook my head up from the sink and flushed the toilet as I headed downstairs. I placed on black trainers to fit my black wear, peering through the moon’s shining hour and stepped softly outside the house, closing the door behind me.

Encountering that thing or entity has made me overly cautious of what else secrets would be lurking through the streets of a rural, dying wisdom city. I caught on to where Elijah came from to enter and leave the city. It was an unfinished, disordered concrete pathway where some parts of the path didn’t have a concrete placement. The course slipped off the main dirt path that crossed the village behind Elijah’s and Glenda’s house into a flourishing forest.

I followed the precise path through the forest, listening to the vibrations of crickets around the trees and the snap of branches as I walked over them. Most of the walk was easy, nothing freaked me out, and the trail was flat like graphene.

As I continued walking, I crossed a rundown bridge absorbed in the forest made of bricks. It went over a flowing lake. The lake spanned through an abandoned town tangled into nature’s overruled plague. Rusty vehicles lay melting, and the structure of buildings started to collapse. Some buildings still have electricity, and I was using the flickering lights inside the buildings to guide myself in a post-apocalypse town.

It was almost a murky environment. I was entering the uninhabited territory. But that thought dwindled when I faced the opening to a lively but lifeless city. Buildings towered the sky in competitive style while civilians shuffled down the path, going home or coming from an overnight shift.

From the likes of it, I was in a much nicer area of Ancient London as the roads were not in a condition where the streets faced divided prehistoric, modern and futuristic districts. Everything, from doorknobs to skyscrapers, from pencils to lorries, from shoes to hats, was made of high-tech material. Vehicles hovered down the roads with tatty baby blue hex halo wheels.

Two fibres of white light rushed under the transparent path as I cluelessly strayed around, looking at what looked like a cyberpunk game envisioned in real life. The light was travelling to an ominous superstructure far into the city. The building was so tall that I couldn’t see the end of it as it skated in the clouds.

“Watch where you are going, mate!” A man yelled at me after we bumped into each other. I looked into his unfocused eyes, and scanned him up and down, seeing he was in ragged clothing, had a scruffy beard and messy strands of exploded light brown hair. Then, two rectangular lines dashed under the guy’s right eye caught my attention. The left one was a grey colour, and the right one was green. Both lines radiated strongly.

“What’s the two lines on your face? Do they not hurt?” I asked the guy who tracked back my words and stood puzzled.

“What are you saying? It’s like a tradition to have these marked lines on our faces- Wait, why don’t you have any on yours?” He asked suspiciously after squinting his eyes to check me out.

I forgot to put the hood of my hoodie over my head, damn it!

“Ah, you are a runaway, aye?” The guy snickered, watching me struggle to put on my hood.

“You could tell?”

“Yeah, yeah. A runaway can get noticed because the runaways don’t have the government’s markings on them. Not very smart, are you? haha.”

“I see. Thank you.” I had to cut the conversation short. I smiled shortly at the man and rushed away until I was far enough that I couldn’t see him. He looked like a druggie that would trade any information to have money to buy more drugs. He stunk of alcohol as well.

I stopped by a corner shop after running for a short while. The lights were still on, and a sign said it was open. I peeked through the window, seeing all the food and drinks and pushed into the building. The differences between the corner shop not following the high-technology trend in the city gob-smacked me as I walked down the aisles, looking for what I wanted to eat and drink.

I grabbed the cheese & onion crisp and a monster energy drink before walking over to the counter as I pulled out a card given by Elijah from my left side pocket when I wanted to go out into the city and buy certain things. I placed the items on the counter and crouched, looking at the sour sweets piled up behind a locked glass cage.

“So, you’re Elijah’s adopted son named Alvin,” An deep male voice with an Indian accent spooked me as my eyes broadened. My instincts kicked in as I felt my heart sluggishly beat as I looked over to the exit out onto the street, planning an escape. I met eyes with the Indian shopkeeper, seeing he grew out a luscious beard and had a white turban around his head.

“What do you mean?” I backed away, keeping calm.

“Well, the card here is Elijah’s card,” The shopkeeper replied, scanning the bar codes on the items as he revealed to me the card I was using in his hand, shaking it sideways back and forth.

“Do you know him?” I glanced over to the door, seeing people walk by.

“He comes here a lot. He also said when I meet you, I should bring you around to the back to sort out your identity,” The shopkeeper smiled, gesturing at the two lines under his left eye. This time, the lines were different colours. The right was blue while the left one was cyan. He placed the items in the bag, hid them behind the counter and started walking down a straight line to a door for staff only in the corner of the building.

The shopkeeper turned around and looked at me while unlocking the door with his collections of rattling keys, telling me to follow him with his hands. I kept on guard as I followed the shopkeeper into the backroom, finding it was a place where tables lolled around the walls with stacked files.

“My name is Raghav. Nice to meet you,” Raghav greeted me with a handshake. I was about to make a mistake and tell my name, but I caught on and bit my tongue to avoid the embarrassment.

While Raghav was finding something in one of the boxes, I had a chance to look around in the boiling room and be nosy as I glanced at some of the documents scattered across the conjoined tables. None of them said anything about Inuitles.

“You’re looking for something, I see,” Raghav approached me with a box in his arms. I glimpsed at him in response and observed more documents as I shimmered over pages.

“Do you have anything about Inutiles? I heard it from someone, and I’ve been interested ever since,” I asked for information after confirming the decision to see if Raghav could be of help.

“Uhm, I don’t think so. I’ll have a look around later, though,” Raghav said, pulling out two chairs. One for me as I sat down and one for him as he sat down. He shuffled around in the box until he pulled out two similar objects that Raghav flashed at me, “What is so important about this Inutile that it is making you escape Elijah’s reach unnoticed?”

“I feel like it’s a path for me to find out who I truly am,”

“Ah, so you’re a spiritual nutter,” Raghav teased with his hand an inch away from my eyes, stroking the two lines under my right eye in position.

“What?!-”

“Prepare for a bit of pain,” Raghav showed a sinister grin as pain struck around my right cheek. I felt the two lines snatch onto my cheek like a parasite as it frantically pricked my cheek in an attempt to be absorbed into my skin.

“Ow!” I bawled in agony, falling onto the floor as a massed strength inside me drained until nothing was left but ash. It felt like a cramp but a hundred times worse. My muscles tightened rampantly around the two lines as I suddenly saw the left line flash a red colour.

“Why is it red?!” Raghav gasped in shock, stumbling backwards. I crawled towards him, reaching for help, but all I saw was an empty-minded corpse. I flashed my eyes around the room, groaning as I found myself a broken piece of a mirror dusted under the table.

Instantly, I snatched the piece of mirror and turned it around to look at myself.

“,,,!” One line was shining brighter than an angel’s outburst of rage, a blinding light rivalling God’s existence. The right line under my eye chiselled into a deep crimson shade, the colour of pouring blood as the veins sparked out from the crimson line like a virus. All the veins hounding my face reddened instantaneously as the left line glowed white.

I watched both irises shift into a red bloom.

“You are one step closer, Alvin.”