Solflare: The Painter's Secret-Chapter 41: You Are the Creator
Leon was drenched in cold sweat, the thin medical tunic plastered to his skin like a second layer of flesh. But that wasn’t what stole his breath.
He saw himself not in the small room Hayes took him to, but in a white room, larger, circular, and also crowded with people.
Men and women whose faces were obscured by clear visors and surgical masks stood in a silent ring around the bed the boy had just jolted awake on, wearing crisp white lab coats.
They watched him in a motionless manner, gloves covering their raised hands.
Leon’s skin crawled, then prickled. He tilted his head toward his own arms, his chest, and his legs. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎
Thin, glistening needles, hundreds of them, protruded from his skin like metallic hairs, making his mouth forget how to close.
With shock filling him like water, Leon blinked, then traced the spiderweb of fine, colorful wires that were connected to the needles.
He paused, swallowed hard, as he saw how the wires snaked back to the banks of silent, blinking machines surrounding the bed.
With a guttural sound, Leon began plucking the needles out. His bones creaked, with a tiny, sharp pain accompanying each one he pulled out.
Beads of blood snaked from his body and slammed on the white bedsheet he lay on.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
A flurry of hushed exclamations filled the faces behind the scientists’ masks as they moved hastily. Feet shuffled on the polished floor, followed by the rustle of lab coats.
They didn’t move toward the boy; they drove away. Like startled birds, they backed toward the room’s single large white door that first seemed not to exist.
Their visored eyes remained wide with terror. When the last person’s right foot moved to the other side of the door, his datapad dropped, but he didn’t turn to grab it.
Inside the room abandoned by the scientists, Leon’s movement grew more frantic as he kept pulling the needles.
Despite the pain and blood, he plucked all, leaving one.
The door hissed open just as he wrapped his fingers around the last needle and yanked it from the crook of his elbow.
A black boot shoved into the room, stamping on the datapad. The screen screamed and cracked as the four corners of the pad moved upward.
A blast sound echoed from the datapad, causing the screen to go off.
On top of the datapad, Lieutenant Hayes swung his left hand and wiped the smoke off his face.
He didn’t look surprised; he simply smiled as satisfaction bathed him like cloth.
Hayes’s boot clicked on the floor as he strode to the foot of the bed. The smile on his face widened when he saw the blood on the bedsheet.
He looked at Leon, at the discarded wires, and the countless syringes filled with black liquid scattered across the floor.
The smile on his face vanished after he gave a single, slow nod.
His face shifted with an authoritative stare. "Stop," he commanded, his voice ramping through the empty cylinder left for purchase.
Leon’s hands, moving toward a sensor pad still stuck to his temple, froze.
Hayes’s face changed again, but not into a smile, but to something unusually real.
"Congratulations, Leon Storm. You passed." His dark-blue eyes glowed like fire in his eye sockets.
"You are now an official Grade E Awakened student of Alchemania."
"Your trial placement is reinstated, effective immediately."
The words, which should have been a victory, a ticket taken back, or a chance, landed hollow.
All Leon could hear was the echo of another voice, synthesized and full of cosmic dread, that had been layered over Hayes’s dry pronouncement.
"Grade B before twenty-five... or the world will collapse by your hands."
"You are the Creator."
"Congratulations, you are now an official Grade E Awakened student."
Hayes turned and gestured for Leon to follow.
"Get cleaned up. We return to the academy now."
He tilted his head and locked eyes with the boy. "Your real work begins."
Within ten minutes, Leon rushed to the washroom just at the exit of the white room and cleaned himself.
When he exited the washroom, he picked up the black outfit and the hoodie he saw hanging on the door and wore them.
Exiting through the same hallway he saw monstrous creatures in on his first visit, his face tensed as he noticed the hallway was actually empty.
In the large parking lot, Leon’s eyes flickered past a Rolls-Royce parked at the far side as he climbed into the MRAP.
Their ride back in the MRAP was a silent, rolling tomb. Hayes kept his eyes on the road that unspooled under a blanket of true night, dotted with real stars, as he drove.
Leon, on the other hand, sat in the passenger seat instead of the bench at the back. He kept his eyes locked on his own reflection in the dark window.
The boy who looked back at him had harder and darker brown eyes, unlike the ones he knew he had.
Inside his mind, the lizard-lady’s pleading face superimposed itself over his reflection. Her desperate request for a form he couldn’t begin to comprehend how to grant.
The impossible deadline: twenty-five.
With eight years ahead, he had to climb from the bottom of a ladder he couldn’t even see to prevent an apocalypse he was apparently destined to cause.
Amidst it all, the final, haunting clue clung to his skull like thousands of Naegleria fowleri: "Find the truth of the crash."
The secret he was already hunting wasn’t just personal grief anymore. It was a key. And if the lady in the illusion knew it, that meant someone, or something, else knew it too.
The MRAP rumbled over the high-arching bridge. Below, the glittering spires of the city center and the dark, weeping scar of Dusthollow spread out like a map of the world’s brutal inequalities.
Thunder cracks filled the sky as the truck drove off the bridge and moved onto a long, straight road that led into a dark fog.
