Sometimes when I sleep I feel like I’m drowning and then when I wake it’s still there. The feeling of pressure on my chest, my heart racing in a panic, I wake in a sweat like I’m emerging from a pool of water. It’s the marks, the intricate marks on my body that make me who I am, they cause this. The intertwining detail that spans from my forehead across my eye and then down the right side of my body to my toes. I am special, but with that comes its share of nightmares. Ever since I was a child I knew I was different, I was smarter than the other children, I understood things that others didn’t. And on the flip side there were things in my life that came naturally for others but were like pulling teeth for me and I never understood why.

Then when I was 12 my marks showed up. I woke up one day to find myself greeted by someone with one of my eyes and half of my face. The entire right side of my face was detailed with twining lines extending down onto my neck. When I followed the trail down onto my chest I found that it stretched down my entire right side, they were extensive and dark. I was terrified. Three days later my iris disappeared leaving my right eye blank and shortly after I gained “the sight”. I’d always been an empathetic person but this was a special gift, very uncommon with those with marks. I could see auras, not in some weird, psychic kind of way, though I’m sure people who could see those existed. I could see the life force of each person emanating off of them like a tidal wave of light mixed with bits and pieces of other senses in a way that I couldn’t explain. But just because I could see them, didn’t always mean I knew what they meant; and just my luck, my version of the sight was so rare that there hadn’t been another person who had it like I did for several centuries. The day I saw myself in the mirror for the first time, with my green, wispy aura emanating from my body, that I knew what my life was going to be.

I stretched and rolled to my stomach, my hair tumbled down over my shoulders and I examined my hand, the marks still glowed from my night terror and pulsated with my heartbeat. I focused my breathing and tried to slow my heart. My eyes closed and I held my head in my hands; it had been 15 years since that day when I first saw my new reflection and never got much easier. As I got older and gained more gifts the nightmares became worse and began extending their reach into my every day. Sometimes I’d get flashes of people’s thoughts and snippets of events that had happened in the past as I walked down the street. This was not something that was uncommon among those who were like me, and I’d grown up seeing the effects that the brilliant ones in our society had to live with but that had never really made me feel better about it.

Shaking my head, I rolled over to the edge of the bed and planted my feet on the floor. The sun was streaming in from the window and trickled across the hardwood floor. When this space was set up for me mirrors had been placed on almost every wall, I’d covered some of them with tapestries and had some others surrounded by plants. Flowers and greenery helped control some of the side effects of the marks, they weren’t a cure all but they made me happy and calmed me, which was half the battle after all. I plodded across the room and over to the water basin; splashing water over my face I stopped to observe myself in the mirror. The marks had almost completely returned to their shade of deep blue and had stopped giving off light, at this point they were more iridescent than anything else, which was something I could deal with. As they shimmered in the mirror, I felt the crackles of static make their way through my skin.

I glanced over to my closet and thought briefly about what I should wear today; I had a meeting with the elders later this morning, so it would have to be something appropriate and nicer. I wasn’t sure why they’d called me in today but about a week ago I had been sitting on my porch reading a book when an enchanted letter arrived for me in the likeness of a butterfly and landed on my knee. It read that the elders requested my presence a week from that very day to discuss a proposal with me. My marks started to glow thinking about what they could possibly want from me and I had to focus back on my breathing. I resolved not to worry about it, after all even if it was something unpleasant, it wasn’t like I just could just skip it. 

I finished draping my wrap over me and started tying it off. It covered my left arm and torso and tied off at the right side of my ribcage, revealing the marks on my lower abdomen, my hip, and down my leg. The marks were to be shown off, celebrated, and never hidden. That was all fine and well, but for people like me who had marks stretching a large part of my body, wearing nothing but a hanging cloth could sometimes get uncomfortable, and cold. The only ones marks that I did not actively show off were the few on my right breast. All my clothes were designed specifically to drape in a way that showed off as much of the marks as possible. 

Opening my door and walking down the hallway I saw several of my neighbors, the other marked citizens, we all lived in a multi-story building that used to house the collection of books that now lived in the main library. There became too many of them and the council opted to construct a new, larger building that was better fortified to house the collection in and this building had been converted to housing for us. The elders decided that it would be best for us to all live together since we all went to the same school from the ages our marks showed up and all worked for the city in some way once we got older. Across the hall from me lived Asher; he had marks extending out from his jawline that trickled down to his hip bones becoming more scarce the further down they went. He wore a hood and a mask that revealed the bottom of his face and spanned across his torso to just where the marks met the waist of his pants. His marks were significantly less than mine, as were his powers. But nevertheless, he worked for the council of mages on the defensive spells that fortified our city he spent a majority of his time tinkering in his apartment with various spell components and using his breath to blow the final products out his window, several miles to the edge of the city walls. I’d been in the same class as Asher in school, he’d turned up slightly after I had. At the time he was probably 12 or 13 like I had been and I believe that at the time I had been about 15, making him somewhere between 2 and 3 years younger than me. We’d known each other for 11 years now, but not really; we never spoke. He was too shy and I was too much of an anxious, socially challenged mess so most of our interactions were brief and consisted of an
“Excuse me.” here and a shuffle to the side in the hallway there. Though once, I had been feeling sick and I guess he’d noticed the day before because the next morning when I’d woken up, I opened my door to find a potion with a note pinned under it that read;

“Take twice a day until gone. – A”

That was nice.

As I turned to go down the stairs I passed Eliden and gave her a warm smile. She smiled back at me but she looked grey, her aura was usually some sort of dark, dull shade. She tried to keep a brave face but she could never really hide the truth from me and I think a part of her knew that.  Her marks extended up both legs, her spine, and out both arms; then in addition to this she was missing both of her irises. She had it worse than most of us here and had almost taken her own life several times; the burden of extensive marks like that are too much sometimes. As she closed her door I heard the floating sounds of her haunting melody muffled by the walls and I smiled to myself; Eliden was the most talented musician I’d ever met and was responsible for some of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever created. With the burden of the marks comes great grace.

Crossing the street, I took a deep breath of the crisp air, it was starting to get colder out and the leaves were starting to change color. Though, despite the chill that had befallen the city, I was quite warm. Another side effect of the marks, nobody knew why this was exactly but there was one theory that it was an extra layer of protection for the special ones. As I walked down the street I passed some more of the marked ones making conversation in a shop, we exchanged a solemn nod as I continued on my way. Briskly I made my way to the center of town where I would meet the elders.