/lit/ - Literature

>>6973934

It's hard to say when it became clear that Mathilda Sorenson wasn't quite like other girls, both to herself and for the people around her. Judging from her parents there was nothing to suggest such a fate. Her father was an engineer, her mother a librarian. They had both been veritably normal, living veritably normal lives. No special, unwritten rules about communication had ever adhered to either of them or anyone they had known. A careful, all-knowing historians could at best point out only three omens and they were all highly dubious. The first was Mathilda's great-grandfather somewhere on her mother's side. He had been the heir of a steel mill and some kind of rich eccentric, aristocratic to the degree someone could ever had been in such a small city. When he was young he had composed a very popular symphony whose more famous parts could be even be easily recognized by popular audiences, often misidentified as something by Beethoven or Mozart. He had followed this success by exclusively creating atonal music which he claimed was the crystallizations of the dreams of the ghosts at the graveyard located a few kilometers from his home, whatever that meant. Except for himself, no one had ever found anything interesting about these later works. This was the first highly dubious omen. The second one was something strange that happened to Mathilda's mother a rainy autumn day, shortly before she became pregnant. The administration at her university speedily required some important, personal documents and she had at once traveled home to her parents to get the papers. On her way, by herself in her carriage, the train had technical problems and was forced to stop for almost 45 minutes. After almost half an hour a Romanian woman who claimed she could tell the future had entered the carriage and seated herself across from Mathilda's mom. As Mathilda's parents were already planning children at the time, she had asked for her child's fate. The fortune teller had drawn three cards. The first card was The Endless Mist. It meant that the child would get lost. The second card was the inverted Doppelganger. It meant that the child at some point would be replaced by a stranger, but that no one would ever know. The third card, which displayed a man in a coat and hat with a wicked smile on an abandoned battlefield, scared the fortune teller so much she left the carriage, refusing to say anything more. This episode, which was the second dubious omen, left Mathilda's mom uncomfortable, but by the time she was back with her friends in her university town again, it had shortly come to seem like just some vague, strange dream.