"Why won’t it open?" Ahara hissed, hitting the basent door with her shoulder.
"Ugh!"
BAM!
She kicked it with her boots, but only bits of dust escaped through the door from the inside.
"Let try," Damien offered, tapping Ahara’s back and she moved away from the black door.
He placed down the box he was holding and walked towards the large black door. It had strange marks that looked like diamonds with wings, and when he brushed his fingers on them, he backed away.
They had aura in them.
"Are you sure it’s not locked by so kind of spell?" The boy asked his sister, but she only shrugged.
"I don’t know, maybe it’s locked. But I don’t see why Mom and Dad would lock the door. It’s full of old stuff that they wanted to throw away but couldn’t because they were attached."
Delighted that his sister had finally stopped calling their parents uncle and aunt, Damien slowly backed away from the door, gently pushing her aside.
"I’m gonna try and use force on it," he explained, closing his eyes.
"What do you—"
Before Ahara finished speaking, another loud bang ca from the door when Damien kicked it, this ti, letting through a vast amount of dust that made the two siblings cough.
"What the fuck? Did you just use flow state on a door?"
Damien sneezed loudly. "Yeah, I thought it’d open with a little aura and force."
"Are you stupid? Didn’t I tell you that you aren’t supposed to use your flow state on stupid things like this? Do you want to exhaust yourself over nothing?"
Damien shook his head, making Ahara sigh as she rubbed her nose bridge in frustration, glaring at the large door.
"You know what? Wait here, I’ll go call Charles and have him explain what’s going on," she said, already turning on her heel and heading upstairs, leaving poor Damien to sigh.
Ever since coming to Gibbous, it seed like every day he had sothing new to learn about himself, this magical world, and its people.
The royal family and his sister had done a lot to make him keep up with at least the basics of Gibbous. For starters, he now knew that each tribe had different ways of using aura—although they mostly told him about vampires since he had beco one now, leaving the rest for him to learn at school. As for how Gibbous worked, well, they gave him a tour every day. Fangpeak as Damien now knew, was rather vast. According to Lord Clent, it occupied the entire southern lands on the world map.
"My wife chose the Southern African region as the capital because we moved here," Clent told him after he had explained how he and his family were of Egyptian lineage.
For reasons unknown to Damien, the King refused to dwell on the topic of why his family moved and insisted on showing Damien around the capital city—Vespera.
Damien soon learned that even though Gibbous had no technology, they improvised. Oblongs were used not just for communication, but for entertainnt as well. They ca in various sizes, with the largest being 85 inches and shaped just like a plasma TV. Apparently, the Gibbits used them to see the news, watch gas—the most famous being barreling—and even watch shows.
Damien had asked how it worked and everyone said he’d have to learn that at school, even Ahara.
As for the architecture in the city, it was no different from the hospital—modern and clean, just like in the human world.
They had renting complexes, shopping centers with doors that opened the mont they felt a Gibbits aura, schools for those who wanted a normal life away from heroic violence, parks, beaches, business centers, hospitals, orphanages, you na it.
If it wasn’t for the paranormal activities happening around the city as they walked, Damien would have thought he was still in the human world. Portal points dotted every street corner, Gibbits zipping to and from their hos in a flash. Shifters strolled down the sidewalks, changing form in the middle of the road and proudly showing off half their features—horns, scales, and tails. Wizards levitated around, the rich ignoring the portals and choosing secluded corners to use, sprinkling ash around themselves and bursting away with a flick of their wrists.
And then, of course, there were the vampires. Dominating most of Vespera’s territory, they walked in the most elegant of ways, their fangs glistening every ti they opened their mouths to talk or laugh.
Paralleling the palace that stood majestically on one end of the city was a large empty ground on the outskirts of Vespera, surrounded by arches as large as the mountain walls peak. It was a good distance away from the city, a secluded land Damien had been told was ant for Gibforge once it moved into Fangpeak.
Being the only place they hadn’t shown him, it made sense that every night before sleeping, the boy would look at the empty land through his window from their house secluded in the mountains. It was after he won the bet with Lord Clent that he figured out how the lanterns lit at night in the city’s hos ford a fang whose tip pointed at the space ant for Gibforge.
A beautiful sight to see indeed.
Now was that ti of the night when everyone had their lanterns on, but because Damien was stuck waiting for Ahara to bring their butler Charles to the basent door, he couldn’t peek through his window.
’When’s she gonna co back?’
The mont the thought crossed Damien’s mind, the sound of boots thudding down the stairs ca from above, and soon, Ahara appeared with old man Charles behind her.
With round glasses, a pointy beard right above his mouth, and a tall slender fra, anyone could guess his occupation even if they saw him in town wearing sweatpants. Damien never dared to cross the man. He was strict, and he looked the part too.
"Oh, that one’s indeed locked by a spell," Charles blurted out once he noticed where they were headed, pushing his glasses up and glancing disapprovingly at the dust on Damien’s shoes. "Master Henry said it could only be unlocked once the boy turns twenty."
"What? That’s five years from now," Damien protested.
"Four. You’re turning sixteen soon rember," Ahara soothed him, smiling at Charles who mirrored her expression.
For so reason, Damien felt Charles liked Ahara more than him, although he had never said that to him, yet.
"Where can we store these then? I don’t want to throw them away," Ahara asked.
"How about the second basent next to the greenhouse outside?" Charles proposed.
Ahara’s face imdiately lit up and she hurriedly picked up her box, sending a whiff of dust in Charles’s direction. The man backed away as if he was being threatened by a snake, and for the first ti since he started living in the mansion, Damien saw him scrunch his face at Ahara.
"Sorry, the dust ca from inside there once we tried to kick it open," the young woman smiled sheepishly at the butler, pointing at the door when Charles slightly nodded and took the dusty box from her, gesturing with a scrunched face for them to follow him out.
Damien glanced at the door curiously.
’Whatever’s inside must be super important,’ he thought to himself, sneezing one more ti before following the others to the other basent.
*****
By the ti he was bathed and ready to peek through his window, most of the lanterns had already vanished from the houses in the city. It now looked distorted.
"Stupid thorough cleaning," Damien clicked his eyes, squinting his eyes to look at the edge of the fang that pointed at Gibforge’s empty land.
But even that too was now jumbled.
Deciding to give up and sleep, Damien was about to head over to his bed when the ground shook slightly. He turned around to look outside his window and was right in ti to see all the lanterns in the city light up again.
"What’s going on?" He mumbled as the fang glimred in the darkness, this ti, brighter than he had seen before, even the ones in his room.
"Damien!" Ahara’s voice and the sound of her feet slapping on the tiled floor in the corridor could be heard outside the boy’s room.
Before he could turn around and rush in his sister’s direction, a wave similar to that of a yellow fla shot from Gibforge’s space and spread around the city, all the way into the mountains. Then everything paused. Even Damien couldn’t move any of his muscles, except the ones on his face.
"Don’t panic. It’s just Gibforge arriving."
True to Ahara’s words, a loud explosive noise ca from the distance as a dust cloud ford, large enough to cover the corner tip of the fang even though Damien had been told Vespera was many kiloters away from the school.
Everything was silent. Nothing moved, not even Damien. It was just his heartbeat and breath that filled the air with anticipation.
Then the shaking stopped. Damien’s body was still rooted in the window, unable to move, but when the dust cloud subsided, he was set free.
BANG!
His door imdiately flung open and Ahara rushed inside and hugged him.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Damien answered, accepting her affection. "But I couldn’t move."
"That’s the spell. Whenever Gibforge arrives in a city, it casts a spell that makes everything stop moving to reduce damage from the earthquake."
"Oh."
Damien looked outside his window at the castle that had erged in the far distance. It was larger than he had imagined, enough to even cover the mountain wall behind it.
"So does this an we’re getting enrolled tomorrow?" He asked Ahara who was stroking his back and looking outside with him.
"No. Tomorrow is when the scouting begins. Enrollnt might happen in a day or two."
"Huh?" Damien scrunched his brows at her, tipping his chin down slightly so he could look her in the eyes. "You guys never told that."
Ahara chuckled, slapping his back lightly. "Because you didn’t need to know that. Your chances of getting accepted are higher than the average kids."
More confusion hit Damien.
"You’ll understand everything soon. For now, you need to sleep and get ready for the enrollnt. It’s going to happen anyti soon, and trust , you don’t want to look like you stayed up all night on that day."
Allowing Ahara to lead him to his bed, Damien let her perform her daily routine of kissing him on the head and saying goodnight. However, he couldn’t sleep earlier thanks to the excitent bubbling in him. And when he did manage to finally sleep, it wasn’t exactly a good night.
He had a rather strange dream.
The purple fla from the endless blackness in battle two weeks ago kept telling him to go back to the basent and open it, and when he told it he wasn’t yet of age, it started burning his body—then there was Kaos standing at a distance, throwing spells at him and cackling—then he morphed into Ambrose the blonde haired girl who imdiately rushed to help Damien whilst mouthing expletives, and when she touched him, the two of them were burned to ash by the purple fla.
Damien was able to sleep throughout the bitter experience, but when he woke up later in the night to pee, he couldn’t rember the dream at all.
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