Inside the building, Daemon followed Vannesa as they made their way to the third floor and through a hallway lined with glass walls, through which Daemon relished the sight of different rooms lined with different hexes.
"What's that one?" he stopped asking Vannesa as he pointed at a room with his now free hands. An aide has taken all her things to her office.
"It's an emulation of your abilities. Your mother gave me a theory once during one of her visits, and I thought I should try it out," Vannesa replied, smiling.
Daemon's expression hardened, and he asked nervously, "To learn one's self is the beginning of learning what they are capable of?" he glanced up at her.
"Yup, do you want to try it?" Vannesa asked cheerfully oblivious to Daemon's pensive expression.
Raising his brows, his eyes widened, and he put his hands defensively in front of himself, "Wha- no, no, no, I mean with the pendant..." he laughed sheepishly, but Vannesa wasn't paying any attention to his words. She pulled his hand and dragged him towards the room, opening the door before he even realized it and they were in.
"Now all you have to do is take a deep breath and let yourself go" Vannesa faced Daemon within the room and guided him.
Covered his thick blue mist the only thing visible in the room was Vannesa beside him.
"How does it work exactly?" Daemon asked warily, memories of his mind being prodded swarming into his head and he felt his breath hitching.
"You take a deep breath and let the clouds take you"
"By that, you mean, breathe in this thing," Daemon squinted.
Vannesa stared at the boy for a moment. She didn't want to bring it up, not knowing if it was a sensitive subject for him but his mannerisms kept fluctuating. She noticed it when he walked into the waiting room back at the Orphanage. He seemed cold then, and later calculated then since the car he seemed queer.
"Yes, it's a mild sedative. Not quite enough to put you under but it'll help you relax. If you don't have too many deep-seated traumas, it can be quite enjoyable," She glanced around at the mist around them.
"You're not hooked on this thing are you?" Daemon squinted at her.
Letting out a startled cough, Vannesa shook her head at him.
"Any traumas or phobias I should know about?" she asked.
Considering for a moment, Daemon glanced around him and then looked into Vannesa's eyes. His pupils flashing a yellow-gold hue, he shook his head with a smile.
Squinting Vannesa nodded and then let go of his hands.
Finding himself alone, Daemon's features hardened, and he took in a long, deep breath, drawing in long tendrils of the blue mist.
Soon, he felt his body begin to float higher and higher till he hit the ceiling, and everything went white.
In a pristine European Castle, a young woman with long grey colored hair stood by a window on the topmost floor of the building, and beside her, a little boy looking no older than six years old listened as she spoke.
"Empaths feel the emotions of others. It takes time to learn to interpret emotions because humans have deeper and more complex feelings than our consciousness realizes. A good Empath knows the people around him better than they know themselves. But we are not Empaths Daemon."
The woman turned to look down at the boy lovingly and he looked up at her, his beautiful eyes staring into hers.
"You and I are something more. What you feel from me are not emotions but my thoughts."
Young Daemon frowned at his mother as he felt the noise of a large, innumerable crowd slam into his head without order, each louder than the next with infinite emotions expressed through incomprehensible words.
For a moment, he felt like he wasn't there like he was within that crowd, and they wanted to eat him alive. But somehow, a familiar feeling within each voice tugged at him, and he struggled to hold on to that familiarity when suddenly. . . the world went silent, and he was looking up at his mother again.
She squatted down to his height looking into his eyes as her fingers traced his slippery silver hair.
"You are very powerful Daemon, more than I will ever be and much more than your father. But you need to control what you feel and hear or this world will consume you. First, you must understand your mind and heart, know yourself, how you feel and think, why you feel and think." Seeing the understanding and confusion in her son's eyes, the young woman chuckled as she looked down and took his small hands in hers.
"Worry not about complex things. All you have to do, my dear boy. . . is listen." Suddenly, all he could see were her eyes, and her words continued to echo in the back of his head as he felt a suffocating feeling.
The air within him vanished, and he started to choke like he was underwater. But this discomfort didn't come from his body. He was breathing fine, and he knew it, but his mind felt like it was drowning, and all it needed was air.
"I need air," he tried to say to his mother, but her eyes were gone. And all around him was blue mist.
"I need..." he tried to speak, but his words choked him, feeling himself sinking deeper into the blue mist as it grabbed him by the throat, and yet it felt like his mind was grabbed.
"I need..." he tried to call again and suddenly.
"To listen" words echoed everywhere around him like the world was speaking and the weight of those words sent him tumbling down. In the next moment, he was back in the lab, but all the blue mist was gone.
In front of his eyes was a panicked Vannesa staring down at him with tears in the corner of her eyes.
"Oh my God"
"Oh my... oh my God. Are you...are you okay? " she asked frantically breathing as she held his face in her arms.
"Daemon!" she called, and he felt the world return to him, and he could think and 'breathe' again.
"I'm okay. I'm okay!" he replied quickly.
It took a while for Vannesa to calm down.
"What the hell was that?" she asked Daemon fiercely.
"You said no traumas, that wasn't even a trauma or phobia, that... that was diabolical, what was that?" she asked and Daemon could tell she was starting to get frantic again.
"That was my mother," he replied, trying to smile.
Vannesa paused, staring at him. They were now seated alone on the ground of the hallway as people shuffled back and forth.
"Your mother?" she asked looking at him with a concerned expression.
"I'm not crazy alright. People die; my Mom is dead. I know that, but the human brain doesn't quite understand that logic. When a person dies, logically, we know they are gone, but as the memories of them are fresh in our minds, somehow they exist to us. Some people never get past this, only when a person gets past it can they begin to grieve and recover. The more impact they've had in your lives and the better you know them, the more alive they are to you.
"For Empaths or... Mind Readers, let's just say that when you have any memory of a mind reader in your brain, thinking about them can cause feedback from the actual person. My Mom is dead but her memory in me is so powerful that"
"She's alive?" Vannesa's eyes widened in shock as she stared at Daemon.
"In a way, yes" he replied.
"Like a hallucination?" Vannesa squinted again.
"Did you not hear what I just explained? She has a mind of her own, like a person. She can tell me things my mother knew but I didn't. It's worse for me because my mother was a powerful empath and mind reader and..."
"You happen to be one too," Vannesa muttered, and Daemon deflated like a ball.
They were both silent for a while before Daemon spoke up.
"It won't always be like that. With time, my memory of her will fade, and she'll go from losing sentience to being just a memory and then a faded memory."
"In a few hundred years" he added as if in afterthought.
"Daemon, your mother didn't seal your abilities, did she?" Vannesa asked softly as she took Daemon's pendant in her hands.
"You did." She looked up into his eyes, and he stared back at her, his expression pained.