Burning Fate.

[ℛeesa ℒuna]

The cellar he sat in had once been full to the brim. Once all of them had been here, the original seven, plus four more on top of that. Eleven people in one tiny space. It had seemed so cramped back then but he would give anything to get that back. He wanted it back so badly. Because now there were only two down there in that dank dark space.

One by one, the others had disappeared. Where? They didn’t know. It didn’t really matter much because all they knew was that the others never came back again. The two figured that it was simply…because they were gone.

He couldn’t get over the feeling that it was his fault this had happened, no matter how many times his companion here in the dark told him otherwise, it just seemed like the most logical explaination for it. If he had been more careful…hadn’t tripped that one time and set off that trap…they wouldn’t have been down here. She always argued that the plan had been her idea in the first place, so if it was anyone’s fault it was hers and he should hush. But that was the way she always was. Nothing new there and he had to take the fact that she hadn’t changed as a small comfort in the dark.

At the very least, he wished he could hold her right then, as she had her head on his shoulder, trying to rest because of the time. But after a bunch of them had rushed the people who had kept them here, they had made use of the metal chains and shackles that hung from the ceiling. It made his arms useless, and pissed off the usually calm boy.

It was only a matter of time until they came again, it had been too long since they had took someone. And hadn’t brought her back. It happened each time. They would come down and haul one of them off. And they wouldn’t come back. He had been betting on them not being able to handle the last one they had taken, their tiny friend was a demon child after all, not literally…but close enough. But after two days, the two in the basement had given up hope that their friend would be clomping down the stairs in her heels to get them the hell outta here.

He hadn’t thought they would be coming for her. He thought it would be him next. It had made more sense in his head this way. Why would they take her next? They had had a pattern about how they took them, so if they stuck to this pattern it should have been him next, not her. Or maybe that was just his wishful thinking that they wouldn’t touch her. That she’d get out of this without a mark on her. So when he heard their boots…the heavy thudding of their boots coming down the creaking wooden stairs he hadn’t been worried for her. But he should have been, he knew that. He should have been. He knew what all of their kind knew instinctively to help them survive.

That the sun was about to rise in a moment.

It wasn’t until two of them came down and their eyes locked on her that he realized it wasn’t him that was next, it was her. They were after her. He snarled at them and stood in front of her, tried to fend them off as they pushed and pulled and tugged. And normally he would have fended them off. But not now, not after they had been down there for weeks. He cried out, yelling for them to bring her back, calling them bastards and weaklings for hurting a woman, but they paid him no mind. They still tugged her up the stairs. Out into the outside world because that’s where that particular set of stairs led to… An irrational part of him wanted to yell just because they were pulling her…and he knew she hated that.

It was mostly to help himself not think about the fact that the sun was about to rise…and they were tugging her outside.

He still watched as they tugged her up the basement stairs and stopped there, turning her around back towards the door they had just tugged her through and forcing her to look back in his direction. She was outside…and the sun was about to rise. He saw the panic, the pure fear pull across her face and in that moment went to leap up to get her, needed to save her. But strong metal around his wrists kept him back. They had never done this before, never made them watch while this happened and he knew this was more his punishment than hers in that moment. Punishment for what though? He still didn’t even know why this was happening! It shouldn’t have happened.

He’d do anything to go back and make it never have happened.

He could see it, almost like a switch in her, when the panic dropped away and her ice walls pulled over her features, filling her with a fake calm. He knew it was a fake calm…he also knew she needed him to be with her right in this moment, even if not physically, so he forced himself to look back into those fakely calm eyes.

But he almost lost it when she mouthed I love you to him.

He fought so hard not to let the tears staining his vision fall. She was being strong, he would be strong. He had to be. He couldn’t falter, not when she needed him right then. Instead, he mouthed it back to her. I love you too. And he saw a shudder go through her then, the girl that usually hated anything sappy…had decided that was all she needed in that moment.

It was like time slowed down when that first ray of sun peaked over the house behind where she was being forced to stand. He could practically see it hit her, see the way she bit her lip to fight the need to cry out. Her head fell down, no longer proudly upright, her hair covering her features.

He wished he could stop time.

But it didn’t even slow down. The sun slowly rose…and her resolve slowly crumbled.

He tried to move forward, into the patch of light that streamed down from the open door, so he could at least go with her, he wasn’t going to just stand here and watch her be in pain…but the metal around his wrists kept him just outside of that.

He couldn’t watch anymore when she started to scream. He couldn’t see it, didn’t want to watch while she burnt. How could he? How could he watch the one he loved slowly burn in agony.

He could turn away from the sight.

But the memory of her screams would haunt his nightmares for a very long time to come.

[Crissatha Pandora]

-A Week Later-

His band was starting to piss him off. And he didn’t mean that meanly, it was just a statement of a fact. No one ever bothered to listen and they were always off when it came to their riffs and nothing was coming together right. They were simply pissing him off. And that was a hard thing to do, because the musician was usually a very laid back dude. His long black hair was tied back in a clip cause he was thinking, and he always did that when he was thinking, he just couldn’t help it. What was he thinking about? Well mostly how to fucking kick his band into shape.

It was dark, nice and dark just the way that he liked it. He wasn’t a night dweller like others, but it was still calming to all of his kind either way, they all preferred the moon to the sun really, besides for the golden ones, but those guys were just boring. Always so fricken happy and jolly, I mean really? Way to be boring as shit. He snorted when that thought came to mind. He preferred his kind personally.

It was because of his position, and nothing more, that he sensed another one of his kind near him. He paused with a frown and turned towards the feeling. What was that? It was another one, but it was so weak it was almost like whoever it was wasn’t really there.

His turning turned him towards the mouth of an alleyway, the creepy dark kind you usually only see in scary movies. He paused, debating whether or not to go down, but no one could ever call him a coward. He just debated the sanity of it.

With a sigh and a shake of his head, he pulled the clip from his dark hair so that it swung down to his hips and carefully walked into the alley, wrinkling his nose when the scent of garbage and just…death hit him.

And burnt flesh.

He winced when he saw what was giving off the weak signature of being one of his kind. He wasn’t sure how it was still giving off a signature, because the girl had to be dead. A small, soft prayer to the goddess his kind believed in left his lips as he knelt down by her, intending to at least pick her up to bury her proper. And avenge whoever had been doing this. This was the fifth burnt nightdweller he had come across.

It wasn’t until he was extraordinarily close and about to lift her that he heard it.

Soft wheezing breath ghosting pas burnt lips.

She was alive?

He had to hand it to her. Whoever this girl was, she was lucky. She was nearly burnt black and it would take her time to regrow back the ability to use her limbs, and chances were she’d have burns here or there on her for the rest of her life. He had never seen anyone burn this bad and still live. And if the way her breath was sounding, she didn’t have long left. If untreated that is.

”This is gonna hurt” he warned the unconscious girl softly, and then he put his arms under her knees and supported her back as gently as he could manage, before lifting her and holding her close. A soft whine past her lips, almost inaudible and he sympathized with her, but there wasn’t much else he could do to make this hurt less. She’d die if he left her, probably only had a few more hours left to her register of life.

He wished he could tell who she was, but swelling and bruising went along with her burns, making it impossible to tell.

Shifting a spell of unseeing around him to hide them from prying eyes, he headed back to his apartment, a dying bundle in his arms.

---

He had waited until he had managed to somehow get the tattered clothes off her causing the least amount of pain he could and into one of his shirts before he called a friend of his. She was an extraordinary healer, even if…well he was a bit worried about her. Not that she was really what you’d call a friend, friend. It was more like…well it was more like she was his annoying sister that he couldn’t get to go away or stop being a brat. But he trusted her skills over any others.

When it came to healing anyway.

She blew into his room like a hurricane. And looked way too much like him but he never really commented, that was a thing that happened a long time ago afterall, and he wasn’t here to drudge of the past. He was here to take care of his people.

”Seriously Lux, what the hell did you pull me all the way out here for?” she grumbled, slinging her coat onto a chair where it fell and she spazzed, only to put it back on the chair proper. OCD child. He shook his head and she met her own sapphire eyes with his, hers snapping and annoyed about…well who knew what really when it came to her.

He shook his head and just walked up the stairs, expecting her to follow, until he got to the guest bedroom…and once there he just pointed to the bed.

He heard her gasp and brush past him to go into the room, tying up her long black hair as she did. ”Another burning….she’s still alive?” Sephora, his best healer and true warrior girl said as she studied over her.

”She is…I found her in an alley. She hasn’t woken up, not that I expect her to any time soon” he answered, leaning on the doorway.

”I’ll tell you after I check” Sephora said, before pulling what looked like silver threads from her fingers and beginning to sew the poor burnt girl back together.

--Five years later—

Justin sat with his head in his hands. He felt like he was always here, always watching her and hoping she would wake up. At least that way he wouldn’t feel like such a total fail. At least that way he’d feel like he had done something right. He didn’t want five years of work, of tracking her down when he realized she wasn’t dead to have gone to waste. Something…he had to have done something right in the past five years. Something, anything.

He had gotten out of that basement, that place, alive somehow. He was still fuzzy on the details, but he knew it involved Squall breaking him out as payback for when they were kids and Justin did the same for him. His best bud had taken one look at the state he had been at and took the boy home, after convincing him that there was no…body…to be found outside.

It had been the next night. He knew because he hadn’t slept or moved, even after they had closed the door. Just kept staring at the door, willing her to be there, willing her to be okay. Willing her to come back down to him. It never happened.

The screams still echoed in his mind, still did to this day.

He sighed, he really didn’t want to think about this. Didn’t want to think about how revenge had taken over his mind for the past five years. Didn’t want to think about the people he had killed…looking for her. He at least wanted to find her body…she deserved to be buried.

And that had brought him here.

Here in this bland white hospital where everything was white, paling out the girl who laid in the bed. It had been a long hard road just to get here. He had had to kill, something unnatural for his kind. He was a sun dweller, not a night dweller, not like the girl he loved. It was natural for them to be dark, to have dark thoughts and behave this way. If it was possible for one to turn to the other side…he was doing it.

It was bad for his sanity. What was left of it.

He held a pale, fragile hand in his own and stared at her face, at her red hair and constantly sleeping face and shook his head. She’d probably never wake up according to the doctors here down below. She shouldn’t be down below, because his closest female friend wasn’t a night dweller.

Red, the girl in the coma, was a sun dweller like him.

It had taken him five years to find her, her and one other. And his journey still wasn’t over.

He still needed to find her

Justin sighed and cradled her hand in both of his. ”Red what do I do? I still haven’t found her…her body” he choked out the word. ”You’re supposed to be here to smack me and call me an idiot you know. He said with a small smile.

A noise alerted him to someone behind him and he whirled up and turned, instantly on alert.

A soft smile was the first thing he saw, slightly marred, but the prescense of the other girl was enough to make him heave a relieved sigh and slide back into his chair. He was wound too tight, way too tight. He was convinced the people who had did this to him…to all of them would be back. He had to protect them….protect them and find them. Because he still thought it was his fault it all happened.

The other girl shook her head with a little smile, taking the chair next to him. Her soft brown hair covered the left side of her face, shielding her face from his view. Once it was streaked with blue, but the girl who had done that…that was the girl he needed to find. Alive or dead. It didn’t matter, he simply…needed the closure. She had refused to let anyone else put the blue streaks back in. She was the one who was convinced the other girl was still out there.

”Thought you were sleeping, Raea” he said gently, not sure how to handle her lately. It was…you had to be delicate with Raea these days, even more delicate than before. They had…they had done bad things, but they had left her alive and intact.

Mostly.

Raea tucked her hair behind her ear, exposing a long scar that made her look like she was always smiling on one side at least, from the corner of her mouth all the way up to her temple to disappear into her hair. She usually wore her hair to cover it. She could cover it with her abilities if she tried…but for reasons she wouldn’t share, Raea had insisted on living as if she was human and not Star Born as she was.

It worried him.

She looked up and over at him, a gentle smile tugging up at the other half of her face. ”Get some sleep, Justin. I’ll watch her tonight.” that was all she said. But she said it firmly, giving him no room to argue.

He just shook his head and allowed a ghost of his old smile. There was no arguing with Raea. He would sleep…for now.

And get back to his search in the morning.

[ℛeesa ℒuna]

He didn’t dream anymore. And if he could have helped it, he wouldn’t have slept anymore. Being constantly tired and on edge would have been preferable to the nightmares that plagued him every night when he slept. He didn’t blame his subconscious for the nightmares. He used to, but after five years it was hard to blame his mind for the nightmares. After what he had been through, it was a miracle that all he got was nightmares.

He just felt like he had no right to the nightmares. After all, he had been through so much less than the rest of them.

He guessed that it had to have been because Raea was the last person he had seen before she had pushed him to go home and rest. Personally, he would have rather stayed there, watching Red and hoping she’d wake. It meant he didn’t sleep. It meant he could plan instead.

He had come to a dead end a while ago though.

Here is what he knew…three of them were dead. Their once leader girl had put up too much of a fight…he didn’t even want to think back to the state he had found her in…he was just sad Raea had been with him because he knew it disturbed her to have seen in. Another boy was dead, the love of the tiny one who they had thought would have gotten them out.

Which was why he was so scared that he hadn’t found her yet. Not when Night Dwellers had a bad habit of snapping and going insane when their stability factors, their rocks, were taken away.

And one other boy was dead…one he had considered a good friend. He closed his eyes tight and willed himself not to think about it. It was too painful. All of this was too painful.

Red was in a coma, Raea was scarred…mentally and physically.

Her body was missing. He had started to give up hope that he would ever find it. And he had given up hope a long time ago that she was alive. He had seen her burn with his own eyes.

And many…many others of them were missing. Eleven had been in that basement. He liked to pretend he was fine. Two others. Three dead. And Five missing. Two of which presumed dead, one presumed crazy.

Funny how their merry band had come to this. From laughter to tears.

He shut off the light in the room he rented Down Below. He would have to go up above again soon, considering how much his body ached for the sun. It was making him weak and he couldn’t afford that, not anymore. Not anymore. But for now, as much as he hated to admit it, his body ached for the sleep he often deprived it of.

And as soon as he closed his eyes, the nightmares started. With poor Raea being the subject this time.

They had taken her just before they had taken the tiny one. The blonde boy, the tiny girl’s boy, he had been long gone, so she was snapping as it was…so when they tried to touch Raea…it hadn’t been pretty. Shackles or no shackles, she had snapped and kicked and fought as best as she could. And had gotten a boot to the face for her efforts. He could see in perfect detail how she had gone to her best friend as she passed out after being kicked in just the right spot. How she had glared at the men, practically hissing. That was her twin though, her best friend. He wasn’t overly surprised.

But then the once great warrior of the Light Court fought. Called once great, called has been often, but his skills were still honed. He was called once great because he had left the Court for her, for his Raea. And he fought, which was odd coming from the normally calm Sun Dweller. But considering Raea was his love…his reason for living, that wasn’t surprising then.

Justin could look at this all so critically now, he had seen it replay over and over that many times.

So they had taken the once great warrior too, sedating him first which no one had suspected. They hadn’t had to do that to the blonde boy, because he had been given a choice. It was either him, or his Yuuie. So he had gone semi-peacefully. The Once Great, he had no reason to be calm. And they obviously knew it.

That was the last time they saw the pair of them.

Days later, it had taken days later for Squall to find him and set him free before anything could happen. At that point, the men had fled…he didn’t know why, but he would find out, he would. Had they just intended to leave Justin locked up down there to starve? It didn’t seem like their style. They seemed to prefer pain. And…had they taken the bodies with them? They had left behind some, but others were missing.

The all important question was why had they been taken in the first place.

He had come back first thing the next morning. Looking for clues, looking for his friends or their remains, he wished to find them alive, he was so hopeful to find them alive back then. He missed that hope in a way, but there was no hope in what he did anymore, just determination and revenge. And in some ways, he thought that was better. Better for what he did.

He found her first, Raea.

Sitting in a corner in a locked room, hugging herself, her knees to her chest and tears running through the blood on her face. She was broken and unspeaking. She wouldn’t speak for a long time. She was rocking slightly and he rushed over to her. She recoiled from him until she had realized who he was. And then she had latched on and started crying harder.

He had sat with her like that for a long, long time. He didn’t know what happened, to this day he didn’t know because she claimed not to remember. But there was such a haunted look in her tired blue eyes…he knew that wasn’t true. He just never pushed. He knew what it was like to be haunted.

It wasn’t until her tears had slowed that he thought to check her over, to pull away her blood matted hair and look at her face to see a cut far too deep on her face…like someone had been preparing to pull the skin right off to the bone, and had slid that cut into her skin as a preparation to do it. She hadn’t told him, hadn’t shown any sign of pain beyond the emotional.

He panicked.

They needed to get her to a hospital, it needed stitches, they needed to check and see that it wasn’t infected…all these words babbled from his mouth like a waterfall. He stood, holding her.

And it was then that he noticed.

That he noticed that her warrior wasn’t with her.

He frowned and looked at her, asking. But no recognition lit her face. No panic at him not being there, no hint of knowing the name he spoke. And that worried him. He shook his head and said never mind. If he wasn’t here…perhaps it was better that she not remember? Wasn’t ignorance bliss? He didn’t want to pain her with the knowledge, not until he found her warrior.

They had to leave though. She needed a hospital, preferably one of their own where they wouldn’t question a wound like this. Humans were too nosy. It had to be one of theirs. But he knew he had to sweep the place first, just in case.

It was then that he found their leader girl, or rather the remains of her, in the next room. He hadn’t realized Raea had followed until he heard her startled shriek. And moments later she ran for a bathroom, only to end up emptying the contents of her, mostly empty, stomach in the hall. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t a pretty sight…and he’d come back later to give her a proper Night Dweller burial. But now he needed to get the deeply disturbed Raea to a hospital.

That was most important.

Because, the rest of the house was empty.

Justin was startled awake by a bleeping.

---

He rubbed his eyes and blinked a few times in the sudden dark of the room. He didn’t have night vision like some of his other friends, being a Sun Dweller as he was. She had often teased him about it, calling him Blind Boy because she could see so easily in the night. He pushed the memory down. He usually could keep them at bay, but just waking up tended to make his defenses weak from that sort of thing.

The beeping was his phone. And the sudden brightness of the phone didn’t startle his eyes as it would startle a human. Bright lights were part of his specialty, which meant he had been able to tease her right back when the bright lights of a room bothered her sensitive eyes. It had been mostly an even trade. He missed it.

The message was from Squall, telling him there was a band he had to come check out with his best bud that night. Justin shook his head. He didn’t have time for this stuff. Once he would have happily hit the clubs with his bud. Not anymore, he had work to do that didn’t involve living it up. He replied telling his friend he was busy.

To which he got a: “U R Not Idiot. Come out.”

He shook his head once more, laying back in the lumpy bed even though he had no intentions of going back to sleep any time soon. He told his friend he couldn’t. He didn’t want to see any bands, not anymore.

“You’re gonna wanna see this one. Trust me.”

[ℛeesa ℒuna]

There were two things that people usually said about vengeance. That it was a dish best served cold. And that it was a bitch. So it was safe to say that the Ice Bitch would be an expert on the subject. Which was probably why no one really lasted long after pissing her off. Not that Crissatha Pandora usually did the act herself. She was a lover, not a fighter. Actually, she was both. She just preferred the love part.

Actually, to be fair, she fucking loved the love part. It amused the hell out of her. Not that she attached any emotional value to the act, it was more for her own amusement rather than anything else. Not that her partners tended to mind all that much, if the way they kept coming back to her was any indication.

Lazily, Cris looked over to her right and grinned at her most frequent partner. Lux, as she oh so fondly called him, just rolled his eyes at her, but he was grinning. She rolled her eyes right back. He was her closest friend, especially considering she lived at his house. If you could call it a house.

Lets just say, she had had an interesting past 5 years, not that she had much to compare it to. All of her memories from before waking up on a guest bed five years ago were a mystery to her. The last thing she remembered was crawling to an alleyway, to try and escape the pain, and passing out more then once on her way to said alley. Next thing she knew she was still in way more pain than she thought she could handle, and in a bed. And that was saying a lot, because Shadow Born had high pain tolerance.

She still wasn’t sure how she had burnt. Shadow Born didn’t burn in the sun.

Pain yes, but not death.

Lux had said when she had first been brought in he had thought that she was a Night Dweller. He had asked what she was too, when she figured out how to speak again…she didn’t remember. And a bit more probing revealed she remembered nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but her name. Well, her first name. Her last name eventually she just made up.

Cris may not know who she used to be, but she knew who she was now. It had taken two years to learn how to use her arms and legs, another to walk, another to be efficient at using her own body…mostly by learning how to play the guitar.

She had spent the last year of her life enjoying the life that had almost been ripped away from her. So it meant she got a bad rep as the King’s mistress, so what if it meant Lux’s old guitarist hated her for taking his spot in the band, Cris didn’t care. And Lux usually protected her from any of the shit people wanted to throw at her.

Being the king of the Dark Court gave a person that type of power apparently.

She always teased him that he didn’t act like much of a King, mostly because he didn’t, but he still managed to keep the Dark Court in working order, so she guessed it was all good. That and, people always knew they could come to the house if they needed him…the same house Cris could always be found in cause she didn’t feel like leaving and, though he threatened to kick her out, he never made her leave.

Cris pulled on her fingerless gloves up, tugging them tight so they met the seams of her long sleeves, covering the skin of her arms entirely. Heavy chocker around the neck, long shirt, torn up jeans with bright red tights underneath, her hair down so it covered the back of her neck…all necessary. If she wasn’t going out she wouldn’t bother. But on stage…she would rather people pay attention to the music the band was playing.

Not the still red and angry looking burns that covered eighty percent of her skin. Seph, her closest friend besides Lux, was good at fixing things. But she wasn’t a miracle worker. She had managed to save Cris’s face mostly because apparently her face hadn’t been too bad, Seph guessed that Cris must have shielded herself with her hair or something.

But tonight, she was playing. Crimson, her black and red guitar, was in her hands and ready to go, the lights were about to go up, the curtain—metaphorically of course—was about to go up.

Time to play.

-----

He couldn’t stop staring. He hadn’t meant to, he had thought that nothing could have surprised him anymore. He had seen it all, been through it all. But he was downright shocked right now.

Because she was alive.

Alive and grinning. A million thoughts had raced through Justin’s mind from the moment he had walked in here, unwilling and surly, with Squall by his side, until now when they were on their last encore. Most wondering why, if her last words the last time she had seen him was that she loved him, why she was here. And he had thought she was dead.

Trauma victims had a bad habit of falling into a state of amnesia. Maybe that was it? He figured it had to be. Unless she just didn’t want to see him anymore. Shouldn’t he just be grateful she was alive? That was the normal response, right? That was the response he had had when he first had seen her. But now, among the thoughts of wondering why she had never decided to tell him she was alive, he was wondering what to do with this knowledge. Just go see her and see what happened?

How did he find her?

Then there was the little matter of the fact that the person she was standing up on stage with was the king of the Dark Court. That scared him a little. As far as he had known, Cris had run from the courts when she was still young and barely able to fend for herself, and that was when she had met Ki. And the two of them, as far as he knew, had gathered up the rest of them slowly, to form their little band. So what was she doing with the Court? The place she had run from?

He didn’t know what to do about this.

He thanked Squall for showing him this existed, but his friend didn’t let him go. ”What is it, buddy?” he asked, entirely confused. He wasn’t going to try and make Justin stay, right? Justin wasn’t sure he could deal just yet.

“Glad you actually left your cave. But here” he said with a little grin, he wrote down a name on his best friend’s palm, but he wouldn’t say more about it other than that.

He let his friend leave, and Justin did, shaking his head, before anyone could notice he had even been there. Or so he thought.

The issue was, as he was leaving, going down the dark streets and looking for an entrance to Down Below…he felt the cold press of metal against his back.

----

Cris had been playing quite happily. It was so easy for her to lose control in the music, so easy to just let go and play for once. It was all she wanted to do with her life these days, feel good. What was so wrong with that? Nothing, that’s what. Of course and she knew it. The crowd had such a good energy tonight and she simply ate it up. Loving the way it made her feel, loving that energy.

It made her feel less useless, because she often felt that way. Like pieces of her self were missing, like she’d never be whole.

Like something, or someone, very important was missing.

And she could never fill the void, she tried but it didn’t work! Every time she tried…it worked for a little while but then it stopped.

She had happened to look up the moment that someone was leaving, a boy. No, a Sun Dweller. She had been getting good at telling her kind from the humans they walked among over this past year of interacting with them. Mostly Shadow Born and Night Dwellers, but it wasn’t hard to tell Sun Dwellers and Star Born also. He looked back at the stage before he left, just for a moment.

They’re eyes didn’t lock. That would be a cliché, and it didn’t happen.

But she saw his face.

And she felt something, that missing piece…she felt it leap for a moment. And then she felt a stabbing pain in her heart.

In a moment of chaos, Crissatha Pandora passed out on stage.

[ℛeesa ℒuna]

 
Once upon a time, Astraea Greene had been working on the histories. History of the world as they knew it, the history of the Down Below, the history of their kind. It was actually quite interesting in truth, the myths that surrounded how they came to be numbered so many and it was hard to figure out exactly which ones could possibly be true and which were just babblings. It was impossible to know which exactly were true of course, they had lost their history when they had moved to the Down Below a few centuries ago.

The humans had pushed them down there, down to their hidden city. They called it a Down Below because it looked like it belonged underground, and most of the portals there could be found lower down, but in all truth it was in its own pocket dimention, not down below anything. In fact, the dark appearance of the place was simply due to the fact that their sun wasn’t as bright as the sun on Earth. On the Mortal Plain. Which didn’t bode well for Sun Dwellers, it was why the Bright Court wasn’t as powerful as the Dark one. Once upon a time, the two courts had been equals, and opposed each other equally. But the dimished sun down below along with something else, made them not, made the Dark Court stronger.

The loss of the Star Born.

There were four different races in their kind. There were the more common races, which were the Sun Dwellers and the Night Dwellers. These two races populated most of the Bright Court and Dark court, respectively. They were the weaker two out of the four races, and more prone to…well certain traits. Such as the Night Dwellers burnt up and died in the sun and the Sun Dwellers could not see in the dark at all, they were blind without light, their eyes never adjusted. And they got weaker the longer they didn’t bask in the sun. The Night Dwellers were darker creatures, and it was rare for them to form bonds with other people, and when they did…well if they lost those bonds they tended to go insane. Sun Dwellers on the other hand were lighter creatures, perpetually happy and grinning, but when they lost their happiness, it was hard for them to keep their sanity as well.

The other two were the Royals. The Star Born and the Shadow Born. The nobles of the courts, decendants of the angels that brought their four races into existence. They were the strongest of the four races, and it showed in their abilities. Shadow Born could cloak their existence from any but other Shadow Born, Star Born could change their appearance so well that only other Star Born could see their true face. Star born could take in power from the stars as well as the sun, and the Shadow Born only burnt in the sun, rather than perishing. Their sanity was also much more stable.

Star Born could also walk in dreams. And so many had been lost because of this ability…it was a long story, but Raea had finally managed to gather the history of her own race as the very least.

Once they fought, being that they were so different. Also because, according to angels, they had been formed of the night, the shadows, the stars, and the sun to war. These two angels were fighting, and they had created this breed of creatures as their armies to fight each other.

The Courts warred so heavily, when they could walk the Earth, before they were forced to the Down Below. It was easy to tell the two courts apart by appearance alone, being one was bright and the other dark. They fought and almost wiped each other out, being that their abilities were so similar.

But then something happened…the Shadow Born learned a secret. They learned how to sever the tie between the Star Born’s souls and their bodies when they were dream walking. And so many Star Born died that way…forever locked in a coma. It was a sad state.

When the humans learned who they were, what they were…and learned what their blood could do…that was when the Shadow Born and Star Born learned as well. The blood of the royals could cure. It could cure even the worst of infections, could bring back a person from the brink of death. So now the slumbering, comatose Star Born became targets and so many died. Soon, people forgot about the Shadow Born’s blood having the same ability. They only sought out the sleeping Star Born because they were an easier target.

Star Blood became the hottest drug, the biggest Black Market item.

Idly Raea touched her face as she read over her notes. It was why they had scarred her cheek, why there were other needle marks Justin didn’t know about. They hadn’t been planning to kill her. They had been planning to keep her alive and make a profit. Off her blood. She had pissed them off, she didn’t remember how, so they had scarred her face.

And then left.

She remembered a commotion…and then suddenly the house was quiet until Justin had found her and then they had found… She put her hands over her face as if she could block out the image of what had come next. It still haunted her. She shook her head and went back to her notes.

Soon the Bright Court was obviously losing this war, with the loss of their royals. But then the humans changed this, they went after them all. They had to flee, and they realized they had to work together to do so. They opened the portal to the nearest dimention and made a life there. Though the Bright and Dark Courts still stood, they had put aside their differences because they wanted their kind to survive.

Now the courts had mingled, enough that the differences weren’t always so obvious at first glance. They had finally returned above ground from time to time, and the Dark King even had his main residence in the Mortal Plain. So it wasn’t like the differences were so blaring anymore…

Raea had decided to pour over her old research, 7 years old in fact, in hopes of figuring out why, why they had gone after them five years ago. Why what had happened to their group had happened. And again, like every other time she studied it, she came across no reasons as to why. It was frustrating. So frustrating…

She looked up when the door to the apartment she, Justin and Red’s stuff inhabited opened. She relaxed when she saw it was only Justin, and was going to ask him what the heck had happened, because he had been acting so weird when he had left.

But then she saw that he had someone with him.

She stood up so fast that the chair she had been sitting it toppled to the ground with a noise loud enough to make her wince. ”Ki…?” she asked softly, not believing it.

But that was her sister. There was no denying it.