By Amanda A. Hilliard ‘Shadowstar’
This takes place before any of the Shadowstar stories. This is a short look at a past event in Shadowstar’s life that not even the character knows to exist until the very end of my stories.
“Time is never time at all
“Son of a bitch, Xavier!” Her fist cracked off of one of the ebony tables. Her eyes were narrow slits that barely showed her iris. Her green hair fell to the table in a remarkable way that only reflected the anger of his leader.
Xavier jumped back by her fury, “We are trying everything, Iara! If you think we are doing such a poor job, why don’t you go and find her!” His voice rumbled as much as her own.
Iara sat down in a huff. The authority she had over the Kindred was being questioned, and that wasn’t appreciated. There had to be order, even if the realm above all realms.
The Kindred have existed since the beginning of time. Nobody knows how they got there or why. The only reason to each of their existence has to deal with realities. Iara, Xavier, and the rest of them have very few counterparts in the realities they protect. Iara only knows of one other than herself, but she was lucky and took all of the power in her birth. Xavier has several counterparts, and his took the intelligence.
“She is the only one of us with no counterparts… we need her and we need her back now!” Iara’s voice was final on the matter.
“Shadowstar has been gone for over a year. She is hidden away from us pretty well by now,” Xavier’s brown eyes turned into ones of venom disliking the way he was being spoken to.
“Well, it is your fault that she regained her memories. So you will go and find her. She is the only creature we can use as a conduit for power. And god only knows what she is going to do now that she understands the truth. That girl went from feeling 16 to 42… She has the mind of an adult now and the arrogance of a Kindred. So you better find her… She better not have done anything stupid.” Iara’s words were clear on it.
Xavier left the room in an angered pace. Iara sat back and threw her glass across the room. It shattered into thousands of tiny pieces. She watched them all ripple off of the dim light in the room. “She will come back to us.”
A roar of pain echoed through the corridors of the castle, Rosell. At that moment, one of the pale-faced men stood at their feet but was pushed down by an older woman. They were both pale faced and light eyed, that of the vampire mystic folk.
“It only sounds terrible because she is partly a gargoyle. They over exaggerate every ounce of pain,” The older woman said with a creak of years in her voice.
The door slowly opened and a happy midwife walked out of the room, “It’s the strangest birth that I have ever seen, but be happy Jeremy Nathaniel, your daughter doesn’t look one ounce like a gargoyle.”
He stood up as a joyful parent and rushed into the room. It had only been a year ago that he ran into the troubled gargoyle. And now, they shared a child.
* * *
“It only took you till now to realize that they would be after you?” Remy looked away from her with a pain in his own heart. The rain was beating down on his head while the baby cried in his arms.
Shadowstar put her talon on his shoulder, “I was hoping that the mystics about this place would hide me. But it won’t for much longer… If they find me, they’ll take the baby, and I’m afraid of what they’ll do to you.”
“So you’ll leave just like that,” His eyes were filled with tears as hers were as well.
Shadowstar lowered her head to try and figure out what brought her to that moment. It had been a road of pain and heartache that did it. Shadowstar for a thousand years had only remembered herself to be one of the Kindred, a student. She was told that she was the only one of her entity to exist anywhere… and this fact gave her great omnipotent power. Her teachers created her to be arrogant and ready to kill with a thought. And all the while, they had locked away her memories of her past so she would never leave them.
The Kindred didn’t do a good job of it, however. Over a year ago, she was sent into a grueling battle with a leader of their rivals, the Watchers. He was a big man, not just in stature… but also in a dominating power. During this fight to the bone, a telepathic backlash hit her so severe that it fractured the Kindred’s mental walls… and Shadowstar started to remember who she was.
She remembered them kidnapping her from her father, Midnight… She remembers only being a gargoyle. A gargoyle with a faery mother. And that mother had challenged the gods in a battle and lost, and this made her lost to Shadowstar forever. And during that wave of memory, Shadowstar realized that she was only a good conduit for Kindred power… allowing them to control her and allowing her to control them. And she didn’t want this. So Shadowstar fled to the only reality she knew to call home, the one she was born to.
The lines of time were etched into her face. She seemed ancient, wise… she felt it. There was no arrogance left in her anymore. That was a part of youth. In this reality (one the Kindred designated as the XX2 reality), Shadowstar was taken in by Jeremy Nathaniel and his people… the vampires. They believed that the mystics of this castle would help her hide. And it did for a while… but the Kindred wanted her back beyond anybody’s belief.
Knowing how ruthless the Kindred was, Shadowstar didn’t want anybody to be hurt by them. Especially the people of Rosell, who had taken her in when she needed it most. Above all, she didn’t want her daughter to fall into the life that she had to live.
“She is destined by both of our bloods to be one of the greatest… as either a vampire or a faery. Whichever path she lives. I cannot bear to think of them getting to her, Remy. Please give her to a human family. And when she is old enough show her the path. It will kill both of us to have her in such pain,” Shadowstar pleaded with him, tears and humid rain running down her face under the Normandy sky.
He turned to her and kissed her briefly, “When they get you back, they are going to strip you of your memories of me and of this child… but know this, I will never forget you…”
As his image turned from her quickly, a roar of anguish let loose through the rolling hills. The moon beat down on her face and then she screamed when a binding bolt of energy whipped around her body. Ten Kindred stood around her. Using the power that she had within her to use, the orb around Shadowstar’s neck began to glow furiously. She released a massive attack of telekinetic energy around her that knocked all ten of them away from her.
“Iara! You have to do better than these ten to get me back!” She screamed into the darkness, and with the current of the wind, Shadowstar was gone into the darkness.
The Tide pool of Infinite Possibilities, as usual, was showing Iara things she didn’t want to see. This pool was their connection to every one of the infinite universes. Their enemies had to go into reality blindly, not seeing where they were going. But the Kindred, they had this… and they could see and watch and protect. But today, Iara was not a watching leader. She was an angry elder.
“Damn bitch,” Iara muttered as Shadowstar got past the ten Kindred that Xavier sent to fetch her, “She went back to her home reality. Why didn’t you search there first?”
“We did search Avalon, but it was practically deserted… we searched Midnight’s castle and everybody was long gone.” Xavier justified his actions.
“I’m sick of excuses,” She put up her hand to silence him, “Send me to her.”
Xavier was speechless; he knew that sending Iara to Shadowstar could mean injury or death to either one of them. Their position with Shadowstar was on fragile grounds, “Iara, don’t hurt her.”
“Why would I do that? Shadowstar is the only queen we have on our entire board. If we lose her, we lose any position we have against the Watchers. For thousands of years we hunted her out… and now we have her. And I am going to get her back and we are going to wipe her of all of her memories… and she will go back to the mind of a child. And then our people will be able to protect the realities again,” Iara gave him one glare and he opened one of the tide pool vortexes to send Iara to Shadowstar’s location.
Her cape whipped downward with her falling motion as a thin telekinetic layer formed around her to protect from the airlessness of space. True, Iara had less power than Shadowstar… but her skill was much higher. And Shadowstar meant everything to her people.
In a few short moments, Iara caught sight of Shadowstar winding her way through an asteroid belt. Two plasmic hands stretched in front of Iara and whipped the asteroids out of her way. As she moved at a steady pace through the opening field, she looked like an enraged god seeking that to be punished. Shadowstar turned around immediately sensing Iara’s presence.
“I knew it was only a matter of time,” Her voice was booming as her wings spread high and wide. Green energy rippled from her snowy, white talons. Raven hair rippled in the movement and her deep cobalt eyes narrowed in disgust.
Iara stood motionless as small space rocks drifted between the two of them. It was a scene from the war of the Titans. Their bodies looked so godly and so large, and yet, they were not gods at all.
“Shadowstar, you are one of us now. The Kindred need you, and these realities need you to protect them,” Her voice lost it’s anger and was that of reason.
Shadowstar’s eyes lost their edge, as she stood up, unprepared to fight, “So you can steal my memories again? So you can have total control over me? I don’t want that, Iara. I want my freedom.”
“The only way to do this is our way, and you will so learn that!” Iara sent a rippling wave of amethyst energy to swarm around Shadowstar.
The quartz orb that tinkered from Shadowstar’s neck started to glow with a mad emerald energy. Two giant balls of greenish energy were released from her hands and they slammed into Iara and her self made shield. The force threw her back across the asteroid field and into a heavily crowded area.
“I am not going to fight you about this again, Shadowstar. Once was enough!” Iara screamed out pushing all of the debris away from her. She stood motionless but a giant mental claw latched onto Shadowstar’s mind. Fought as she tried, Shadowstar’s inexperience could not overpower the ageless Iara. Wall after wall was plunged into Shadowstar’s mind to bury and destroy memories that could never be allowed to surface again. On the mental plane, the faery part of Shadowstar was torn from her essence and buried away. And when Iara’s work was done, Shadowstar was limp along the asteroids and in a total blackness.
Iara grabbed her by the waist and had Xavier transport them back to the Kindred realm, “You are ours forever, Shadowstar… you will never leave the only family you know.”
In a few hours Shadowstar woke up in one of the rooms of the Kindred castle. Her head throbbed and she felt sick. Her eyes searched Xavier, her teacher, for answers to what happened.
He noticed that her face was younger, somehow, “We were in training and you had an unexpected backlash. You’ll be okay.”
Shadowstar nodded, “I feel so weird, Xavier… thank you for taking care of me though. It’s really nice to know I have such good teachers and friends.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” He nodded, “You rest some more, Star. The Watchers are on the move again and we may need you.”
“To protect the realities which bore us,” She repeated like a student repeating a lesson taught days earlier. He nodded and exited the room. Shadowstar fell back into bed with her wings curled around her. Something in her heart made her sad that she only knew of her life as a Kindred, and yet, she found it comforting to have it as a home.
Xavier walked down the hallway to Iara, “She remembers nothing. She is ours again.”
“And that is how it’s always going to stay.” Iara hissed and walked down the hallway into the shadows of the Kindred castle.
~Fin~
This story chronologically falls before all of the fan
fictions on this page. The next one
written will be ‘Xavier’s Student’ to do a brief reflection on why Shadowstar
is so arrogant.