Creatures of the Light

Nineteenth Light

Nineteenth Light

Creatures of the Light

© All Rights Reserved

##### Nineteenth Light #####

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Read my dark and find my light.

Sensual music is blasting from the speakers, echoing through the party zone. The teenage humans are dancing, some in an erotic manner with their dance partners, driven by the rush of lust. Some might be able to keep the movements decent enough, but some are just too horny to even keep it decorous. I do not like being in the middle of all that already. I can just wait until our long lost relatives are away from the crowds. But I am here with Artro right now, which means that I have to cooperate with his rules as well.

The four of them are standing near a bonfire. They are chatting with a few other humans and seem to be getting quite along with them. I can never put myself in that kind of situation, though. Socializing is not really my forte, especially when it comes to pretending to be one of them. For the sake for confronting our cousins though, I have to put this through and act civilly.

“They appear to be awfully close to those humans,” Artro comments. “Shall we take a closer look, then?”

“You first,” I gesture to him, who immediately steps ahead towards them. I follow a few paces behind. One of them sees us coming and tells the others. Suddenly they stop engaging the conversation they are having with their human friends. The four boys all turn towards us when they notice that we are walking to their direction, not any other way.

“Hi, my name is Artro. And this lady here is Arsene, my cousin. We are sorry to suddenly just come without informing you, but we would like to know if you four by any chance happen to be the grandchildren of Salizar Noirmelns?” Artro offers them his hand to shake. They seem to be hesitant at first, but one of them softens and smiles friendly at us.

“My name is Gorge,” the smile one says. He has Noirmelns traits with the dark hair and eye color. But other than that, his does not have pale skin color. Instead, he has a tan skin. I check the others and soon find that not all of them have our traits. One of them even does not look anything like us. He has dirty blonde hair and green eyes with olive skin, characteristics that are way from the blood. This makes me wonder....

“This is Mike,” Gorge points at the boy beside him, who looks more of a Noirmelns than him. His skin tone is lighter. “Aaron,” he gestures to the one with dark brown hair. “And Forwin,” he points at the blonde, who set his eyes on me and gives me a wink. I fix my gaze back on Gorge.

“We don’t know anything about a Salizar Noirmelns, but our grandfather’s first name is Salizar. Salizar Patron, to be exact,” he grins.

“Sorry for asking, but what does that have to do with anything?” Aaron asks.

Artro is about to answer his question, but the uncomfortable tension in this place is just too much that I beat him to it. “We believe that you are our long-lost distant relatives,” I blurt out. I can finally get a reaction of surprise from them ─ a tense shock. I stare carefully at each of their eyes, calculating their next action.

“I-I think we should talk somewhere else,” Mike suggests, taking us away from the festivities.

They come here driving cars, so they offer us to come to their place as passengers. Artro does not find the need to mind their offering, so we climb into their backseat and Gorge drive. Forwin comes with us on the passenger seat, while the other two drive with their other car.

The cars were parked inside the woods. In finding the structure of the trees rather similar to the ones inside the border lines of the Noirmelns Castle, oddly. The drive out of the woods is quite long, about fifteen minutes or so. When we can finally see a clearing, Gorge stirs the car through a meadow. About five minutes later, my eyes eventually spot a mansion on the top of a hill. That is where we are being hosted.

“Home sweet home,” Forwin climbs out of the car and opens the door for me.

The way he stares at me is rather bothersome, I believe. Adoration is twinkling in those lively orbs, it seems. Something that reminds me so much of how boys used to throw that love-crushing looks when I was younger. But after everything is being settled, I almost never get that kind of look anymore, until now. So when he offers me his hand to take with a smile as I climb off the car, I accept and tell him, “I’m married,” before rushing into the door that Gorge has already held open. Artro follows suit, his body shaking to cover his silent laughter from the corner of my eyes. The smile on Forwin’s face is gone instantly when he follows us into the mansion. The moment he shows up at the drawing room, he sinks himself on a couch farther from us.

“Don’t you think you’re a little too harsh on him?” Artro leans in a little bit closer from my side to whisper to my ear.

“No. He has to know that I will never be interested before he gets his hopes too high,” I reply just as low. “Besides, we are a family. I do not wish to make this awkward between us.”

After hearing my reply, he closes his mouth for this topic and gets on the much more important reason of why we are here.

“How can you be sure that we are related?” Gorge is facing the turned-on fireplace when he asks us this question.

“Arsene found out that a group of assassins were hired to kill you while she was away,” Artro explains to him. “She made sure that they told her everything they knew about the four of you, before we got here. At some point, it also helped when our grandfather, Barton Noirmelns, your grandfather’s older brother, finally spilled some of his story. That was how we were able to put the leads piece by piece.”

“So you just found out about this recently?”

“Yes.”

“How come they never looked for us before? Your grandfather.... he knew, didn’t he?” Mike asks bitterly, sitting on the couch across from the one we are sitting on. Aaron occupies the sit next to him, taking this all in calmer than his other relatives.

“Yes, but he and his other brother, Salomo, decided to keep Salizar’s detachment a secret in order to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future. And they succeeded to do so up until now.”

“Well then you shouldn’t have─ Wait, did you say detachment? What was that supposed to mean?”

“Granduncle Salizar wanted to remove himself from the family, leading him to somehow being able to die out his candle on our sacred altar. That was how the other family members from the new generation were not able to detect any of his new descendants, assuming that he was dead in the first place.”

“Hold on a minute! Candle? Altar? How can that suppose to be a clue to our existence?”

Artro licks his dry lips before continuing. “Under the basement of our castle is an altar sacred to our family. Each candle on it represents the life of each and every family member of the Noirmelns clan. Yet somehow yours were never appeared, as they were supposed to be there the moment you were born.” He then rises from the couch. “Now, I would like to ask all of you a very crucial question: Do you know what we are?”

He eyes each and every one of them carefully through his glasses. They all turn to look at him glaringly on cue. One of them, Forwin, rises from his seat as well and walks towards Artro. He stands right in front of them, before he makes a gesture from his right hand and causes a spark of orange fire to appear from his palm in a second.

“So I take it that you do are aware and possess them as well,” Artro smiles by that, “through I am rather concerned with the color you prefer.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Forwin asks, his tone sounding rather harsh and irritated.

“Because,” Artro lifts his own palm to spark dark electricity through the air, before a small black flame burns intensely on his palm, producing his own fire, “black is kind of the representation of our clan, so you kind of have to learn how to change the color.”

Not only Forwin, but the four of them are staring at the black fire on Artro’s palm in complete awe.

“Wow, man! You’ve got to teach us how to do that!” Mike exclaims excitedly.

“Gladly,” he smirks, “but first we still have some things to discuss. Where is the rest of the family?”

The smiles instantly died down upon hearing that inquiry. Gorge steps towards a row of bottles on the side table from the fireplace, intending to open one of the alcohols in human way. He grabs the top, but using too much strength in it, causing the bottle to break. He cringes when a piece of broken glass cut his hand, allowing blood to be drawn.

I can feel Artro’s eyes widen as mine are. His lips are trembling to say something, but once again I beat him to it by rising from the couch and approach the boy. I take his bleeding hand when he lets me grab it in mine. The red stain is obviously showing that he is different from us. Not just from appearance, but also from what is running through his veins.

“A-are all you have the same red blood as his is?” Artro finally finds his voice back as he watches me inspect Gorge’s hand.

“What do you mean? Of course we do. We all are,” it is Aaron who eventually opens his mouth to answer him, obviousness in his tone.

So they do not know.

Touching the tip of the cut, I chant a simple healing charm for Gorge. He looks in amazement as the wound immediately disappears, as if it were never there. Then I bend down to the carpet below to pick up on of the broken glass, just to prove a point. Holding it firmly, I run the glass across my palm as well.

“What are you doing?” He gasps in surprise.

Instead of answering his question verbally, I reply to him by showing him my injured hand. He heaves in shock once he sees the color of the blood on my palm. Cold sweat starts to form on his forehead, before to show what he is seeing to the rest of the curious eyes. They too, just like Gorge, does not expect finding what they are looking at.

“Y-your blood....” Mike mutters shakily.

“No, the answer is no. Not all of ‘us’ has red blood,” I state─

“....It’s black.”

Before the first roll of my drawn blood is able to drop to the carpet and stain it, the wound heals instantly with the blood sewing the tissues of the skin one by one by itself.

“That is so out of the world,” Mike comments, his face stuck in horrid and rhapsodic at the same time.

“Welcome to the real world,” Artro announces out loud in full delight. “By the way, you still have not told us about your family, from Granduncle Salizar’s bloodline. Where are your parents? Do you know where Granduncle Salizar is no?”

There are grim hints on their faces when Gorge replies to him, “Salizar died ten years ago.”

“But that is impossible. The harmful poison for Noirmelns was not yet discovered until last year.”

“That is the truth. For all we know, he was already dead from some sort of a disease.”

“Were you there when he died?”

“No, but I heard it from my mother.”

“Is your mother Granduncle Salizar’s child, then?”

Gorge shakes his head. “My father is.”

“And where is he now?”

“Also dead. Or at least, that is how we told everyone else. You know, the normal people in this town.”

“Don’t talk as if you are not normal, Gorge. You know you are as normal as those humans are, deep down. Each of you are perfectly normal warlocks.”

“Warlock. Is that how you call yourself?” Artro nods.

“Where is your mother, then?” I ask.

“At this hour? Probably asleep upstairs. I can call her if you want.”

“Don’t. Let’s just bother her once she wakes up. In the meantime, why don’t you tell us more about your side of the family? We would like to hear more about it,” I tell him.

We all take a seat on the couch again, this time engaging ourselves in a more solemn conversation. I sit back beside Artro while Gorge and Forwin sits on the third cough in the drawing room ─ the one that faces the fireplace.

“Aaron, Mike, Forwin and I ─ we are all cousins. Our fathers are the sons of Salizar. It is supposed that your family can only bear one male child from each descendant. That is why none of us have any other siblings. The reason why it happens so is strongly related to our powers.”

“Our magic causes to rely on it too much that at the point when our bodies can not take it anymore that they start to age very fast. That is why as far as the town is concerned, my father is already dead. He aged so fast that he almost looks like in his nineties, when in fact he is still no older than thirty five years old.”

“His blood, it is red as well?” Artro asks, gaining a nodding Gorge. “But that still does not always ensure the reason of why the body age so quick.” He then turns to me for explanation.

“I have to check on him to know for sure,” I tell him, then to the others, “How about your fathers? Are they still alive?”

Judging from their wistful looks, I do not think they still do. Gorge’s father is surely a lucky one, then, because these young warlocks will have to face the same fate soon if I do not hurry.