The dying light of day bled through the blinds, little motes of dust dancing in the stilted beams that strobed down the room. Orion grimaced as on lance of light lined up with his closed eye, penetrating the serenity of his ebon dream. Orion blinked. He took in a deep breath. His chest felt tight. Sitting up he blinked in the haze. He must have fallen asleep. He had been looking for...something. Right? 

Orion pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His head hurt, the blood felt sluggish in the veins around his skull. He was in the library. He had been looking for a book. That made the most sense. That was what people came to the library for. Well, that and to make out between periods. He was alone so making out would be a little more difficult to manage. A book seemed more likely. But what book? Why couldn't he remember that.

Orion got up from one of the green, hard plastic chair near the windows. His back ached. How long had he been sleeping in the chair? He looked around the common area between the shelves. Empty tables. Silence. What time was it? Was the school closed? Did the angry, little, librarian troll miss him sleeping?

Orion scratched his head, long fingers working into the frizzy mass of hair. He hoped the doors would open from the inside. He looked around at the beige bookshelves. He should probably get what he came for in any case. Be a waste of whatever trouble it would be to get out of here if he didn't. Walking along the shelves he idly scanned the book spines, hoping to job his memory.

Fiction. No. He wasn't looking for Steven King or Stephenie Meyer...why the hell did the school alphabetize authors by their first name? Somewhere around here he knew some of the stoners hid their pot. Behind the shelf filled with the inexplicable number of Hardy Boys copies?

Orion paused. Something was under his foot. It felt flat and warm under the sole of his shoe...like lights embedded in the floor of the gym pool. But he could feel it pulse. Like a heartbeat. Orion looked down at his feet. He slid one large shoe back and looked at what was underneath it.

There was a symbol in the carpet. No. That wasn't quite right. There was a hole in the carpet. A symbol shaped hole. The carpet around it was blackened and burned. The hole was perfectly cut in the symbol it made. The symbol of...of...Orion began to sweat. Had the room always been this cold. The hole went straight through the floor. There should be a classroom under this spot, right? Then why did the hole go so much deeper than that. There was nothing in the hole. Orion could tell that. It was so dark in the hole, blindingly dark, but he could tell that. There was nothing at all. 

Orion bent down onto his hands and knees over the hole. The symbol shaped hole in the floor. His breath came in shuttering gasps. His pupils tightened. Something worse than fear coiled around his heart. No. There was something in the hole. He could hear a sound coming out of it. He put his ear against the hole to listen. He heard it. It was so quiet it was deafening. Orion reeled. His hands shot up, clutching at his ears. His teeth clenched. His eyes closed. His head split. He felt something wet and warm running through his fingers and down his cheeks. Sweat poured off of him. It was so cold. A copy of [i]A Brief History of Time[/i] on the shelf next to him burst into flame. Orion tried to stand, his legs slide out from under him and he collapsed hard against the shelf. The floor was quaking with stillness. Orion tried to crawl away, half supported by the bookshelf. The cheap paint on it boiled away, the metal beneath bubbled and burned. Orion's hands were slick with blood. More dripped from his ears. The temperature in the library plunged. The books burned. Orion fell forward on his stomach, the unmoving carpet shredding the skin on his cheek, stomach, and hands. He stretched out his arms to grab the edge of the shelf and pull himself further, freezing, molten metal dribbled down his grasping fingers mixing with his blood. Orion tried to scream, gagging on his own breath.

He opened his eyes. The darkness from the burning books had engulfed the room. He could make out every detail in the perfect darkness. There was something in that perfect darkness from the hole. The symbol shaped hole. The hole in the world. there was something in the hole. It was Orion.

Orion stopped struggling. His body frenzied with inaction. His calmed into fever. He hadn't been looking for a book. He knew what the symbol the hole made was.

It was the symbol for-

*****

Orion looked around the empty playground. No one was here. He was late. A consequence of his perennial procrastination. He dropped his backpack into the little rubber chips.

Orion sniffed at the cold evening air. This kind of sucked. He sat on the end of the slide, elbow on knee, chin in palm. Maybe it was better. He had hoped the invitation would give him some clue to his 'condition'. What he had heard was a cavalcade of supernatural nonsense that meant almost nothing to him. Everyone had some disparate condition. Some supernal connection. Most of them had some nifty superpowers out of the deal. None of it called to Orion's circumstances. Near death experiences, lose, witchcraft. Terrible. Terrific. But Orion could feel at his core, the same core that he could feel being gnawed away from the inside, that none of it was like him. Maybe it was just the prerogative of his youth but not one of them knew just what he was going through. So he hadn't said anything. He listened. He wondered. He faded to the background as they had filed out of the club room. 

Maybe he should have spoken up. Opened up. Coulda shoulda woulda. But the more they spoke the worse he could feel the throbbing in that space between his head and heart. He could feel the yawning abyss gap wider with their words. Maybe he should have just abandoned it entirely. Maybe he ought not to have come at all. Maybe he subconsciously knew that and showed up late with a purpose. Maybe he could just let it go, returned to his normal, mundane life. The symbols would stop, the light would cease. The cool, comforting banality of existence could cover his raw and ragged spirit and all of this would have just been a matter of fancy.

Orion stood up and sighed. He looked off towards the treeline. Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.

*****

"Welcome to the club, Danny boy," words like melted chocolate lapped at the shoreline of Daniel's introduction. Orion slide around to the side of Herne, slipping one long arm over the sheriff kid's shoulders, the other sliding his pack strap higher on his shoulder. He turned a languid eye and a soft smile towards the rest of the group. "So what terrible decisions did ya'll make without me?"