Prologue
“Never lose your grip.”
My stepmother’s harsh voice repeating this sentence was a distant echo I often heard, then ignored in my childhood.
Well, I was the youngest one, a little “weak bunny,” as she called me, a weak lamb next to Louis, my brother. This sentence made sense. And I guess it stayed with me growing up.
Louis had always pushed me into the tall grass, hovering over me and holding me down, beating the shit out of me.
It was easy, funny even, to hold the most quiet and helpless, weak one down. He was taller than me, which was unusual compared to my frame, and his blonde dreads, which should have made him look angelic, next to my brown curls that I hated wearing in dreads back then, made him look like a bull instead.
His eyes pierced through my brain, but it never really reached the way he meant it to reach me or anyone. He tried, really. He tried so hard to find something in the other, to pick on it and laugh, hoping he would find and hit into your darkest insecurity, buried deep down in you.
But his words never really reached into the state of mind of mine. Or to others. Well, maybe he hurt my sister sometimes, who ended up crying in the corner, looking like a bunny, or like an angel as most people described her, with her blonde curls covering her face, until my Dad finally accepted her into his arms.
Louis was just a pretender his whole life. Everybody knew it, but ignored it by choice. They couldn’t say anything; when someone is like that, you could say anything, no matter how right you are, you will never be “right.” They will do anything to prove you wrong, even if they can’t.
Because the truth is, Louis was the biggest fool in this life that I have ever witnessed. But he couldn’t even be called a fool. There should be a word, which doesn’t exist yet, to call my late brother.
It is why, because fools learn from their mistakes, if not yet, then later, after the hundredth time, even if they burn before and have to go through hell to do it. A fool man can’t be fooled again, as the saying goes. Yet he never once learned, and little did he know that one day it would become his downfall.
Ever since I was 5, when I was lying on the tall grass, cutting through sharply my shirt, and my brother was on top of me, beating the shit out of me, he didn’t do it for jokes or just to embarrass me.
Every time he beat me, he took my powers from me. There is no better word to describe it: he sucked it out of me, like a vampire. His strength, muscles, ego, and voice all came from me. They were never originally his.
In Nyxar, every boy and girl is born with an innate power, but fully develops it on their 5th birthday. It’s easy, very easy to get a great power that’s like a gift to you. Almost every extraordinary person in the kingdom has a good one to shine with: electricity, water control, ice control, or fire control.
Since powers are not inherited, there are no rules to it, and there are powers stronger than the others, or different ones. They usually come in a variety, and no one can predict what power their children will get, or if they will get one.
Extraordinary people are the only ones with power: usually, these people are whose parents are related to the ruler’s family tree, or to important people, like some magicians who are important in the kingdom. It was random, like a talent.
A lot of people with ordinary parents are born with powers, which is totally valid and possible, and they get sent to the magic school. Extraordinary people’s only job is to train their powers, while the ordinary people are the working class, the average people.
My parents got a surprise in the hospital: I was born with no powers, no sign of anything, which should have been impossible, because when one of us happens to be born like this, they die at delivery, but I was perfectly fine.
However, my twin brother, Louis, was born strangely stronger, almost too strong, which made the doctors both curious and confused.
My brother must have got his god complex when he was born, as the doctors would call him a miracle. He almost made it into the news by being this amazing “wonder-kid,” until the doctors finally realized what happened: my powers were temporary, and not permanent like how they should be.
Louis’ excellence wasn’t an accident or a miracle: in the womb, he somehow sucked the powers out of me, but no one knew how it was possible. The doctors thought it was a mistake or it just happened once.
They started to make endless theories about how it happened and why, until they realized: my powers were really temporary, because my powers were too weak and they were different than others’.
So ever since I was born, others had the capacity to suck my powers out of me. Eventually, it would come back, but I wasn’t able to do anything with it due to its weakness, and because it didn’t work well, like it wasn’t a real power at all.
The closest thing I could call it was telekinesis, but since it barely worked, it was completely useless. The only thing I could use it for was to do basic tasks like closing a door after me.
My parents were also able to take my powers away, and they acted like it made them superior in some weird way. I often spent my nights without my so-called powers, after they took them away to punish me when I burst out crying on the bathroom wall after Louis took all my power away.
My pain tolerance was always high, which is why my arms are covered in ink and my skin is pierced in many places, but I, in fact, couldn’t handle the pain of losing my powers.
Not that one.
The feeling of my powers being taken away was something I learned to handle. After a while, we all learn how to handle pain in some way, but this wasn’t like pain. The feeling that followed after the power left my body wasn’t like anything. There is nothing I could describe it with.
It’s like fainting, but more like the feeling when you know you’re gonna faint, but that feeling sticks in one place. It’s hollow, and leaves your body numb; all the energy drains from your body. Like strings are holding your body up, but you feel that it’s going to rip, and hangs you on a thread, like an unknown, weird feeling that takes over, crawling through your body.
It really was strange, but after a while, it’s like it simply turned euphoric for me. But I felt something. Something in my body vibrating, even if it hurt. At least I knew something altered my body, even if it was pain, something happened with my powers, that could be moved, sucked out of me. Unlike now, when it’s all numbness, not always, but most of the time.
Eventually, as much as Louis sucked my powers out of me, my power sucked the life out of him the same way.
We never got to know or understand how it exactly happened: one day, a day after my 18th birthday, we got into a fight and he pushed me to the ground. But this time, I fell hard onto the pavement and got a nosebleed as my nose hit the ground, probably the sharp edge of the pavement.
The next thing I knew was that I passed out and woke up in the hospital with my nose broken, a wound cut open through it, leaving a permanent scar, which my sister said looked like Harry Potter’s, but on my nose.
When my eyes opened, still a little blurry, my family was not next to me. Which wasn’t surprising, knowing them. But my sister, who never left my side, wasn’t there either.
Louis died.
I know that fact, as I remember I could hear it properly, as my stepmother’s frightened screams cut through the hospital wall from the next room, mixed with my Father’s cries, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.
Jocelyn didn’t cry, to my surprise, as she cries at a bird accidentally getting run over by the car.
Later, I saw her face, frightened, probably traumatized like all of us were, but I know what she must have felt when he died. Her body language told me, clear as day: she wasn’t like my stepmom or how my Father was, even if she tried to pretend how she felt in front of them. Deep down, I knew how she felt.
Louis’ body couldn’t take it all. All my power he tried to get out of me, which I don’t know what it was, or how much and how strong, went straight into his body, like electricity. Like an electricity shock, which he couldn’t handle, hit through his body, as the doctors told us.
However, the thing I wasn’t ready for, or knew was possible, is that all the power Louis stole from me could somehow slip back into my body.
On that exact, cold February day my brother died, I couldn’t move at all, but I told no one.
I lay in my hospital bed all day, with my parents not there, staring at the cold, grey ceiling because I couldn’t even move my neck.
I don’t know what happened, still to this day, or how it happened exactly, but all the power I missed out on before, before my 18th birthday, it suddenly all went back to my body.
A slight shock went through my body, and I must have passed out, because the only thing floating in front of my eyes was a galaxy. A purple, blueish, but mostly black, galaxy circled in front of my eyes, with bright, small stars shining in it. I have never felt higher in my life.
The picture in front of my eyes, or more like floating around me in space, must have been a memory of me and my sister painting a galaxy on our study desk, with sponges and dark blue, purple, and jet-black paint when we were 9.
As I woke up, I lost the sight of it instantly, falling back to reality. I don’t know where I was before, but I was back in the present, lying in my hospital bed.
The hospital room’s white walls, my eyes, everything turned blurry as I got up, and I didn’t know why I got up, but my limbs moved by instinct, with something electric that I hadn’t realized I had before.
I felt a surge need crawling through my body, unstoppable, like when something is itching and you desperately need to scratch it. A need to run, run so far away, out, pushing through the hospital walls and doors, but having absolutely no idea what I’m running from, or who.
As my hand reached and pushed my door, trying to open it, telekinesis shut it open instantly with a loud bang, doing the same thing with all the other hospital doors in the exact same second.
All the doctors ran to me in fear and shock, and my body hit the ground, pushed by something, like a strong electricity shock, the same one that killed Louis.
I don’t know what happened, but around hours later, I woke up in a room full of doctors, tied down, and I felt the smell of burnt flesh under my nose.
Without knowing, I tried to move my hand to scratch my eyes because of my blurry vision, but my hands, which felt like nothing and totally normal, couldn’t be moved.
Tied down, my right hand was burning with flames, like I set my whole hand on fire, and the other one was frozen with ice.
After this moment, I came to the realization that throughout my whole life, my powers have existed. It wasn’t just something small that could be stolen, because when it was finally mine, it was different and changed completely. It adapted to me, and maybe it was because I was the owner, but what my late brother had, it was nothing for him, compared to mine. He never was the owner of what he stole from me.
I became stronger than ever after regaining my powers, but just like everything, its side effects left me haunted, with the extreme numbness that never left my body.
When I was younger, I would have done everything, like absolutely everything, to just make that feeling go away when my brother took advantage of my powers, and as I had that feeling, that extreme numbness that was calming, peaceful even, and everybody wished for, it started to take over me.
When I used my powers, I didn’t feel anything, which was nice, but the extreme numbness wasn’t okay, by what the doctors said. That numbness in the body and mind is not normal; it’s because something went wrong, or was already wrong, with the power, and it’s dangerous, but the last thing I wished for is to get tested by doctors like some rat.
However, the thing I didn’t know, or more like hadn’t realized, was that I would be the next one taking after my brother.
In everything.
Since Jocelyn was 16, and my little brother Alex was only 9, I became the oldest one after my twin brother’s death. Which, in general, would have been the nicest thing, being the oldest, the most powerful one in your family.
But the harsh truth that I always have seemed to ignore, mostly because of my dislike of my brother, was that he was trained all his life.
Obviously, I didn’t care about that. His whole life was about him being the weapon of our kingdom, since he was Nyxar’s ruler’s son, and apparently the most powerful one in here.
Since we were kids, he was trained the most harshly in our circle, more than any other kid here was.
My father’s goal was one and clear, since the beginning: to train Louis until failure, and then send him into Solara, which was the exact opposite of our kingdom, to spy on them for 6 months, blend in, and then turn against them and kill as many people as he can.
Including Josephine’s, Solara’s ruler’s son.
And my father’s one wish, which he never said but everyone knew, was to make Louis somehow kill Josephine too, along with her whole family tree.
As a child, I never cared, or realized how absurd that was, and honestly, maybe my brother became the way he was because of it.
Josephine, by what I heard, was one of an easy woman back in the day: dated my father’s brother, was known by my father too, a red, more like orange, haired woman, described to be feisty and flirty by my father.
Her hair looked fire-like, in every way that’s possible: her power was the first fire power in the kingdom. After she was born with fire, later others started to have it too. However, she was the absolute first one to have it, which made her different.
Josephine wasn’t as innocent as she tried to paint herself, as rumours had it: she flirted with every man that passed by, was known as someone who had hundreds of affairs, and secretly slept with men from Nyxar by the time she was already married to my father’s brother.
Rumours spread around fast, and after my uncle finally knew the truth, they got into a fight, based on my father’s words.
To this day, no one knows the full truth and whys of the story, but Josephine killed her husband. With a knife, which could have been self-defense, since she had handprints over her body and neck, but she said that she was willing to kill her husband because she does what she wants.
The death of my uncle started the great war between my father and Josephine. There were no Solara and Nyxar before that; their fight made the kingdom split into two: to the so-called “good” side, ruled by only Josephine, who has a husband, but she refuses to share the throne with him, and our side, the so-called “bad” side, Nyxar.
But before splitting, it was only my father who ruled the one and only kingdom, and before him, it was his parents. His brother was younger than him, so my father got the throne, until Josephine came.
At first, she earned my father’s parents’ trust, and with her plan of killing my uncle, she revealed her only true intention: to get to the throne.
After a fight where Josephine attacked my father with a knife, almost killing each other, they finally made an arrangement about the kingdom, then split into two.
The people of the kingdom had been left with the choice of deciding between the two sides, freely, based on who they want to see as their ruler.
Except for propaganda and ads, there was no force of putting people onto different sides, but the choice was theirs, which I think was the only right thing Josephine had ever agreed to.
After splitting, Josephine was so obsessed with calling their side the “good” side, which had fought so hard for the right things and for people, that my father got mad and started calling our side the bad side to the public, to show that Josephine’s propaganda was bullshit.
But I think it was mostly about how my father was treated all his life while being on the throne, as a black man.
After being called a bad ruler by people throughout his time on the throne, no wonder he stopped caring about calling the “bad” side, like the label wasn’t just two ends of a scale that Josephine created.
However, when choosing sides, Solara’s people most likely didn’t know what Josephine did, because she denied everything to the public.
She said her husband tried to hurt her and rape her, so she killed him for only self-defense, and somehow everyone believed it.
And as my powers were back, or we could say, they adapted, and as my trained brother wasn’t there anymore, I finally got to be the replacement.
The replacement, who was the stronger, new version of me, who was suddenly good enough to be sent to Solara.
So 4 months after my 18th birthday, with 4 months of training, with my new powers so strong I could barely control them, I came to the realization that I had no choice other than to adapt into a new school, keep it undercover, and train 6 months, getting ready to kill my family and my people, just to then turn on them and end with them instead, putting them onto the ground, when all my life I only knew how it feels being put down to the ground.
