Chapter Text
Charles Imperial University City is the place every child, adult and elder with thirst for knowledge in whole American continent dreams to go. It is an icon of wisdom, prestige, selectivity and power. It holds the highest standard of commitment with the development and progress of science and art. The leading force of research and innovation in the empire and possibly the world.
Is heaven for all nerds, bohemians, hard-partyers, students and teachers under the soon. Is where the royalty, and every rich family that wants to forge a name for themselves and put it with the noble households of the continent sends their kids. It’s the common people utopia.
Is one of the oldest and most beautiful urban spaces of America. Surrounded by never wilting forests and lakes full of marvelous, practically extinct creatures, some of the few remaining strongholds of pure unaltered magic in the planet. Its squares and gardens are otherworldly, there are literal magical auroras flowing through the cobblestone paths and trees. Whispered whimsical sounds of an always warm and welcoming nature. Every building is an architectural masterpiece, a planning singularity, the volumetric manifestation of a dreamed fantasy. Always classical, imposing and sober, titans of ancient times still guarding the future.
It is the validating seal of geniality, and it requires a special kind of bravery to even apply to it. Because like all good things, comes with a price, and that is a fact, like the sky is blue, the vampires have silver-blond hair or the president lies.
This is where Nikolas new, shining, and very hard-earned Professor golden plate is proudly fixed; at the upper half of the wooden dark brown door of his personal office, in a long corridor on the east side of the main research building.
Right now, this very almost surreal moment: is a dream come true. Correction, this is a dream made true. There is nothing he has fought more desperately or hopefully for since his childhood; and it was all worth it. Because he is a fucking Professor of THE Charles Imperial now, dam it. So he does the rational, dignified thing and opens the door, he has an image to uphold now: the happy crying needs to be done inside.
He enters the key, turns it, closes the door, all in a frantic movement and promptly crumbles against the polished wood, knees to chest, hands scratching and grabbing painfully at his hair and arms. He is happy, so incredibly happy, anxious, relieved and proud.
It’s kind of too much.
He did it. He fucking did it.
He is twenty-seven and he fucking did the impossible.
He reached utopia.
This bit of vanity he can allow himself to feel right? Just for this little while, because it was hard. Goddess it was so hard and lonely, and cruel.
He starts remembering everything that brought him here. Because, what else can he do, really? He came a week early just so he could properly freak out and interiorize the new reality of what his life has become. He went from some dilapidated, ages old orphanage in the outskirts of civilization, to the shining jewel of the empires educational system: that’s a mean road to travel.
That’s an understatement.
All the memories before the orphanage are very turbid and give him bad headaches. Just a little bit of mother and father, that they loved them, that they were pretty, and that they gave them away to the ugly lady.
She was the one that took them to a foul smelling place with foul smelling people and then, she brought them there, to the orphanage.
To hell.
Fate was sealed.
He doesn’t remember much of the orphanage actually, and tries not to with fervent passion, training, and therapy. Indecent amounts of training, and therapy. It helps, some days.
Mostly the fear, bone deep and all-encompassing. Not even the cold or the hunger or the grieving were as consuming, as devastating.
It was an ancient rural construction that used to be a hunting lodge for the novice nobility. It also used to be beautiful, with sloped roofs and rose gardens. He looked it up when he came to study at the university.
It was near a magic evergreen and utterly horrific forest.
Nightmarish things those two.
He used to think for years that buildings were all that terrible monsters, old and dilapidated. Filled with ghostly rags and wrecked furniture. Shattered window panels, moldy brick walls, leaky tiles and big enough to host every single one of your deepest fears.
All plagued with the starving shadows of the Cannibal Queen, that never fatten no matter how many children they eat.
There is a legend very child is told in their wicked years, of how the haunting shadows came to the lands of America. It says, they weren’t always here; that the Cannibal Queen made them with forbidden sorcery. It’s a rather dark and gory tale of how she killed thousands of brave man who stud against her reign to free Americans of her oppression and cruelty. Their deaths, that were supposed to be honorable and valiant were used instead, to create the infernal monsters that still haunt the continent. She used dark spells that liquidated their bodies and in that viscous bloody substance forged their souls for a hundred days. She condemned the most heroic and selfless of men to an eternity of wandering inhospitable places, insatiable bloodthirst and total submission.
It was supposed to be a fairytale, a little scare for misbehaving kids. Nikola heard of it when he was seven, but didn’t gave it much thought, it was not real, and there were other, more interesting, less scary things to play with and explore. He liked learning new and beautiful things better. Thus he never knew exactly what the shadows were before going to the orphanage, just a vague understanding of their general existence and evil intentions; but from that day onwards, he knew, they were the deliverers of hellish punishment.
The shadows were always watching: with rounded eyes, always hearing: with ominous human understanding, always roaming the tree line of the forest. Always inviting.
Open eyes in the dark corners, four skinny limbs passing with unnatural nimbleness, yowling, and missing children.
Sometimes they would just take a leg, an arm, an eye or both; some other times, they would take a whole friend.
And in any of those times could the children utter the pitiful single sound. Because if they did, the shadows would take them next. They could use their voices to travel through the light and possess them, tur them into half dead monsters, and use them to walk in the sunlight.
Light was their weakness; they never came out to it. And the orphanage was supposed to have a magic barrier that kept them outside the building, but that was barely sufficient. It never stopped them. The chidren could see the eyes opening, in the dark corners, in the hallways, hear them through the upper floors and the walls, see the black misty substance slither trough the joins of the floor titles.
Nikola remembers.
They were out one morning, picking branches and dead leaves from de few trees that were near the building, for the fire and to store for the coming winter. It was a sunny, a clear sky with no clouds day, and he saw then.
At first it was just one, round open intelligent eyes peering at him from the tree line. But then there were more, and it didn’t look so scary anymore, they were like puppies, he liked puppies. Puppies were nice, and soft, and have big lovely eyes, so lovely. He was hearing something, but that was far, very faraway, very vague; and the puppies were so close, almost…
Annie saved him that day. It was not the last.
Somehow, the shadows could manipulate the clouds, they made a path for him. Annie cried himself to sleep hugging him afterwards.
They were children. Five, seven, the oldest was eleven years old. He was nine, Annie was four. And they were alone.
The adults would come in the mornings –and in early afternoon if it was a good day- through the portal to deliver food or water, and once in winter not nearly enough awfully thin sheets. They were also terrified, and they would whisper. They would say: don’t scream, don’t cry, don’t wander, don’t ever be alone, for they will come.
And don’t, ever, go to the forest.
They did all of that. Together for three and a half years. Once, he remembers, he held Annie’s hand for an entire week, dream, piss, and vomit, always. They were brothers.
The night everything ended: was equally the worst and the best night of his life. Hell gave him, like a glorious masterpiece production, the exquisite taste of foreboding doom and horror.
And then, the devils saved them.
Irony doesn’t come close to it more than ghouls are the worst, bloodthirsty, savage species to walk the Earth.
It was winter, it was beyond cold. It was deadly.
It was a waiting game.
The fire could turn off any fatal second during the night, like a dying butterfly, slowly, agonizingly. Because there were just so many branches they could pick, without coming too close to the trees, and then the snow would have wetted them. The adults kept forgetting to bring new sheets, the old ones were all dirty and smelly, and worn out. The winds came constantly through the broken windows, howling, freezing. The old building had grown exponentially sinister with every passing death, and the shadows stronger.
The shadows
were hunting.
Coming closer.
Their yellow, glowing eyes, opened in narrowed slits, waiting, stalking, passing hurriedly through the trees, stirring the fallen leaves and little wind currents. They tried not to look to the dark corners in the far side from the fire of the hall where they slept, because they were also there.
Every night, morning, noon, afternoon, down, dusk and twilight. They were terrified, so consumed of paralyzing dread, hunger, thirst, and sadness. Willing themselves to stay awake with nothing but pure fear and the desire to live until the next morning.
They were failing spectacularly.
He remembers waking up to the pull of his arm, the one he had tied by the hand to Annie’s with a dirty piece of cloth, ripped from an old sheet, he must have fallen asleep without noticing at some point. He hadn’t fully opened his eyes when he saw Annie’s half disappeared body through a shimmering mass of black mist; and in that exact instant, he lost it.
Completely.
The shadows had come for Annie.
He screamed, at the full capacity of his twelve-year-old lungs, like a struggling wild beast in his last frantic attempt against an apex predator.
He screamed and pulled Annie to himself, with all the strength his body could muster and then more. Because Annie was his brother, his only family, his whole world.
His reason to stay alive in hell.
He pulled, and whatever thing or that was that mass of darkness or beyond it, must have startled, because Annie and him went rolling straight to the other side of the room.
To the far end corner full of yellow glowing eyes.
And then.
He covered his brother in one last desperate protective hug, and closed his eyes so hard it hurt, because if they were going to die that night, they would die together, and he will go first.
But nothing happened.
When he opened his eyes, the shadows were jumping through the oval mases of darkness that had to be portals, like a coursing tide of black, light-devouring mist.
They were flowing like a colorless magical aurora, pulsing red, emitting killing intent, rage and joy. But none of that touched the children.
All them were perfectly intact, silent, looking fixatedly at him, Annie or the portals.
There was screaming coming through the portals, noises of things being broken and smashed and failing.
It was ever so confusing.