Dark Book Chapter 1

The Dark Book
Chapter 1

Blackness is all that fills the cold, empty stone room. Two obsidian thrones sit stoically in the darkness, only visible when a shift in the black clouds shows a glint in their shiny surface from a crack of soft, tentative light that penetrates the clouds, if only minutely. The room is abruptly no longer empty. A figure as equally dark as the room has appeared without explanation, as if coming from the darkness itself. He glides silently towards the thrones and seats himself in the largest one. From beneath his cloak he procures a staff, engraved as a snake.
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I awake to the complete normalcy that I’m forced to endure.
A crack of golden sunlight falls over my eyes through a slit in the heavy black velvet drapes. The morning’s chill penetrates through my thin blanket. I’ve kicked my quilt of in my sleep, a routine occurrence.
This morning, I get up to the smell of pancakes. Again. We always have pancakes, French or German, depending on Gaetane’s mood. If it’s a good mood, it’s French. If it’s a bad mood, it’s German. Not that I mind. I adore pancakes!
I walk down the crooked, cramped, hallway that is the standard in our ancient wood house. It has secret passages, optical illusions, and coolest of all, it looks small on the outside, but that’s only the above ground! Down below, there’s not a basement, but instead hundreds of rooms! They stretch out for a long time, since the Wood House is in the middle of the woods that stretches out for even longer. We call the undermost part The Labyrinth.
There are actually windows down there that let in actual light! It’s because all around the house is a bowl shape that has a layer of hard concrete then three layers of dirt on top except in some secret places that are holes and let in light to the windows (or something scientific of the sort that Gaetane tried in vain to explain)! Of course, only a little light, so it always looks like dusk down there, but, somehow, we have electricity, but never pay any of the bills. That’s Misty’s job. So, we can see down there.
Anyway, I come downstairs, and see everyone is already there. Well, except me, I’m the late sleeper. Jezz usually is. She likes her sleep. But I stayed up late last night playing with my- ‘talents’. You’ll see what those are later. I looked at the plates and.....French pancakes. Phew!
“Any left, Gaetane?”, Jezz asks.
“Always, mon ami.”, Gaetane answers, flipping four pancakes gracefully onto Jezz’s plate. Her extremely curly brown-blonde, short hair with bangs in front don’t move with the movement, proving the gracefulness of it (Flipping pancakes is one of the few things she’s graceful with).
“How do you do that?”, Larisa says in awe. Larisa, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, hardly said anything loudly. She wasn’t a quiet or shy person, just had a quiet voice. If you think she’s shy, you should see her ‘gremlin face’.
“It’s all in the wrist.”, Gaetane replies with a wink of her blue eyes behind her glasses.
“My pancakes are burnt!” Cendrillon (means little ashes), Gaetane’s ten year old sister whines about her barely browned pancakes. She had been just an infant when we were leaving our families.
“Why are you all up so early?”I moan, dragging myself down the steps to the kitchen, a trail of grass growing behind me.
Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that we have powers? Well, we do. I have elemental powers (you know, fire, water, earth, and air), Gaetane has the power to slip into the shadows and disappear, while also being able to cut or bend anything except animals and humans with a motion of her hand. Well, she can cut animals and humans, but it requires an extreme amount of energy, as animals and humans have willpower to resist it. Larisa is the only one who can see Gaetane when she goes into the shadows, can fly, and create light, Talita can retrieve stones, metal, and gems from the earth, Antonella can move things with her mind and talk with her mind and read your mind, and Jezz can control the temperature, which also affects the water current and air currents, plus, she can talk to animals. All but Gaetane and Talita can fly because of these powers-but Gaetane can shadowport-she can teleport from one shadow to another-and Talita can kind of fly if she switches her magnet powers to repel the metal in the ground so she rises.
Jezz sighs. “Oh, stop trailing grass behind you! It’s making mud seep in!” I look behind me in surprise.
“Sorry, folks, you k-” But I don’t finish, because right on cue, Cendrillon leaps at me, screaming, “Gemma!”, knocking me over in her hug. I carefully pry Cendrillon from me.
“Hi, Cendy,” I say, ruffling Cendrillon’s curly hair. It’s the color of Gaetane’s, but longer and slightly less curly. She has blue eyes and glasses, which were terribly crooked now, so I adjust them. “You should go eat your pancakes for energy.” When I say energy, I puff out my chest and make my voice go deep.
“Energy,” Cendrillon repeated doing the same thing. Then she let out her air, “But, But, Gemma, my pancakes are burnt!”, she says, pouting.
I peer at them suspiciously. I sniff the air. I look at them with one eye. Finally I stand up.
“These aren’t burnt! They are cooked to perfection! Savor every bite!” I exclaim.
“See, guys, I told you!”, Cendrillon said. Gaetane rolled her eyes. I am done with my pancakes in 5 seconds. What? I was hungry!
“About it being early,” Jezz says, “We get up this early every morning! 5 AM. So we can get to the school in time. We’ve been over this! Just because Talita, Gaetane and I can drive, that doesn’t mean we can get up any later!” I groan and trudge up the stairs to get ready.
After we’re all ready, we gather at the front door. Since it’s mid April, Talita wears her cream, red, and blue plaid sweatshirt, her curly dark, dark brown hair spilling over it, complimenting her melted chocolate eyes and tannish skin, with faded jeans and her brown boots. She’s wide shouldered and muscular.
Gaetane wears her usual plaid long sleeve button up over a plain white tee with jeans and black and white sneakers. Gaetane’s skinny as a pole, and pale like Larisa, Antonella, and I.
“It’s about sixty degrees out there,” Antonella says, “and we got $700 for this week.” Her straight, light brown hair is in a claw clip, as usual. Her brown eyes are hidden behind her glasses, as she runs off to put her contacts in. She’s wearing a purple long sleeve shirt, jeans, and her pink slip-on sneakers as she comes back inside from checking the temperature.
Larisa is in her cross country sweatshirt, jean shorts, and running shoes. I’m wearing skinny jeans, my dark turquoise sweatshirt, a light turquoise shirt, and old Etnies sneakers. Jezz is wearing her Pinckney Swim shirt, her pink sweatshirt, her pink sweatpants, and her boots.
Jezz smiles. “Good job Antonella,” she calls, “61 degrees, to be exact.” Gaetane rolls her eyes.
“No need to show off, Jezebel,” Gaetane delivers, “We are already well aware of your powers.”
Since we’re all ready, we start the walk to the garage where we keep the cars. The ‘garage’ is old, but it holds up. It’s huge! It’ll be enough to hold all of our cars when we all get some. Right now only Talita, Gaetane, Jezz and I have them. Larisa is almost ready to drive- her birthday is in a week. I have one only because I said it was all I wanted for Christmas, so everyone pooled their money and bought me one. We get our money from little odd jobs that we we do. For example, Gaetane mows lawns with her slicing power. Plus, we get money from Misty on the porch every month. We know it’s from Misty because she signs a slip of paper and puts it with the money.
As we walk, the overgrown foliage covers the tiny deer path, so I lead, keeping it out of the way (I occasionally let a branch snap back and hit Gaetane in the face though). The path is peaceful, with birds singing in the trees. We walk along the stream. It’s waters are clear and fresh, and we can see fish swimming in it. I wish that it could go on forever, sometimes. It’s just so beautiful.
When we arrive, Jezz immediately rushes over to her Pink Volkswagen Bug. It’s covered in stickers that she made herself. The stickers say the names of her favorite characters: Animal in red from the Muppets, Dr. Honeydew in lime green from the Muppets, Fozzie Bear in orange from the Muppets, The Tin Man in silver from The Wizard of Oz, Cyclops in red, Psylocke in purple, and Colossus in gray, all three from X-Men, and so on. Her back window is covered almost completely with stickers.
Jezz usually gives me a ride, since I can’t drive legally yet. Not that that stopped us from driving when we were ten. Okay, maybe more thirteen. Gaetane, Talita and I announced that, ‘To survive in a fast-paced, mobile world, we must become mobile ourselves’. In other words, we wanted to teach ourselves how to drive. Jezz told us we were idiots, but did we listen? No. We taught ourselves how to drive, and we taught Larisa, Antonella, and Jezz as well. What car did we drive? We called it The Rust Bucket. It was an old truck, a really old truck, but Talita does fairly well with car repair, so it worked.
But, when Talita turned 16 in December, we figured there was no reason to keep breaking the law when we didn’t have to. I moped for a while about it, but I knew it was the right thing to do. Talita drives The Rust Bucket now. We told her she could get a different car, but she said she had grown attached to it and was familiar with it, so she could work through the kinks. Talita should be in an easier to handle car, though. She’s a bad driver. Bad driver, but good with car repair. Huh.
Gaetane and Larisa ride together in Gaetane’s black VW, which we named Charlie (Gaetane thinks it’s ridiculous that we name cars, but we keep hearing her call it Charlie nonetheless), Talita and Antonella ride together in The Rust Bucket, and I ride with Jezz in her pink Bug, which we named Lady. I get in Lady, but I look back wistfully at the 1965 Mustang that belongs to me.
“The wheels would be just so happy if I could just take a little spin on them. The custom suede seats are just aching for me to sit in them, and the engine under the hood is just waiting to purr gently as I press the gas.”, I say wistfully. Jezz just looks at me.
“Been doing your research on your word choice, huh?” she says. I ‘humph’ and turn away. Jezz rolls her eyes. The message is clear enough. I can be dramatic if I want. She’s not letting me drive again till I’m sixteen.