PART II

ADULTHOOD

The days passed, then the weeks, the months, and finally the years. All the same, all monotonous, all spent inside the manor, with no company outside of Darrell and Miss Ward. Years passed uniquely training, hating (or rather, disdaining) and doing little else, hardly ever leaving the area around my home. Had I died, only the two adults who took care of me would have realized it.

The death of my parents, after a while, ceased to be a constant thought, becoming some passive knowledge that had no more role in my everyday life; just a drop in that immense ocean of dog pee that was the world, albeit certainly one of the biggest ones. I couldn’t bask myself too much into sad memories, if I couldn’t turn them into mental energy to evoke my fireballs.

As Darrell had announced, I stopped attending public school, something that I lived as a relief. Instead, Miss Ward took responsibility of what remained of my mandatory education, through private lessons at home. However, as she and Darrell reminded me constantly, I had to study only the essential, to not distract myself too much from my duties as a member of the Order. There was still one subject they deepened in particular, though: history. Miss Ward loved to describe with accurate details all the most horrible and violent details of every war, massacre, pestilence and genocide: her eyes almost shone while doing so, and her lips’ angles contracted into a half-smile, when for the rest of the time she would maintain the same look of indifference. Even if I was being trained to dislike everything around me, sometimes my mind collapsed after hearing all that suffer. When I was around thirteen, at one point, after one entire hour of her talking about Nazi concentration camps, I couldn’t hold myself. Her descriptions of tortures, mass killings, survivors’ testimonials and the tons of photos, including one of a guard walking in the middle of a pit full of corpses, made me interrupt her and shout, furious:

“Then why do we have to protect humanity, if they do things like this!”

Miss Ward, unemotional like always, raised her eyes from the book she was reading and lay it on the table. Her lips returned horizontal.

“Once Darrell, when he was your age, had a similar reaction. Then he announced he did not want to be a Darkfire anymore. Can you imagine what happened later?”

“No,” I answered.

“He abandoned this house, and then, when night came, the Apollonids attacked him in the middle of a road. His training had made him look at them without any effort, but he was still too young to fight them: he would have died, hadn’t his mentor been around, looking for him. When he went back here, he said that he would never give up his task again. He cried so much I had to wash the floor twice,” she concluded, scornful.

The Apollonids. I hadn’t encountered them after that first day in the dungeon: Darrell didn’t still judge me ready to fight them directly.

“We have been condemned to living this world, Hayden, and we can’t find any other one. As humans, and not mere animals, we have the ability, and the duty, to make the best out of it. As Darkfires, making the best out of it means guaranteeing the rest of mankind can live in peace, for what the circumstances permit.” She paused one moment. “I suppose you remember our lesson about Schopenhauer.”

I did remember it. He was a German philosopher who claimed all the things in the world are born to suffer, and suffer is the main truth of the world. The way they chose to deepen topics that dealt specifically with death and suffering was almost comical.

“Yes.”

“What does he say about suicide, Hayden?”

I tried to recall that particular topic inside my mind, but I wasn’t even sure we actually talked about that. “I don’t remember.”

“Suicide is useless,” she explained, “it does not destroy a man’s will to life; on the contrary, it is the greatest expression of desire of better conditions, and as you know, for him, desire leads to suffer.”

I was confused. “What does this have to do with Nazis?”

“It has to do with your desire of giving up your destiny as a Darkfire. You want to end everything, to stop having to protect a species capable of such great evil. Your desire, however, is futile: only those like us can stop the Apollonids, and you know it. The only way to get over with this battle you can’t win is leaving behind any desire of something better. This is the world you live in, and this is your life. All we can do is avoid making it worse. And this is what we, in the Darkfire Order, do.”

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“But wouldn’t letting everything burn up cease our suffer? Isn’t feeling nothing at all better than feeling bad?”

She answered mechanically, like if she had been forced to give that explanation a million times. “Unfortunately, nature always finds a way to reflourish again and continue the suffer.”

After these happy lessons, we had lunch, rigorously with the television turned on BBC News. Politicians working for their own benefit instead of the nation. Foreign, underdeveloped countries killing their own people. People from those underdeveloped countries coming here and attempting to destroy ours. Murderers slaughtering their own families. And after all of this, baloney about some useless celebrities and their love relationships, which sounded surreal and insulting, coming after all the horrors of the world. “Thousands of people dying, and still the most important thing is the flirts of some woman who’s famous only for having big breasts,” Darrell often said.

Next, the training in the dungeon. I was fast in getting used to the gloomy atmosphere: after four or five times there, my uneasiness had completely gone. Although Darrell had announced it on my very first visit there, for me it was still a shock to have an Apollonid in front of myself the first time; it happened when I was fifteen, five years after the Order had entered into my life, when Darrell decided I had acquired the necessary level of precision and cold disdain. Still, now that a caged Apollonid was standing in front of me, fear, and not disdain, was all I could feel inside of me.

“In case something goes wrong, I’ll intervene immediately,” Darrell said, his hand already on the padlock. I strived to concentrate on all the things I had learned to hate – the news, the shabby suburbs of Plymouth Darrell forced me to visit every weekend, my life – but nothing helped me. In front of me was a demon made of fire, ready to incinerate everything it would find, including me; my brain was activating a primordial instinct I still hadn’t learned to suppress, which made me actually care about my life.

“I’m going to free it,” he announced.

He did. He unblocked the chains, and the demon was free. I immediately evoked the fireballs, but I missed it every time. The Apollonid was getting closer, his fury made of pure, uncontrolled hatred, already attacking. A fireball was coming directly towards my body: I desperately tried to concentrate to use the technique to turn it off, but in those eternal instants I realized what was happening to me: I wasn’t able to do it. I was too petrified with fear. Immediately, Darrell ran in front of me and blocked the demon’s attack.

“Stay behind!”

He faced the Apollonid with his own fireballs, managing to extinguish him. I was leaning to the cold, stony wall on the opposite side, panting and sweating copious amounts of liquid. Still, I was no more a kid: despite the fear, I was bursting with (negative) energy.

“Let me try again! I won’t fail you!”

“Not now, Hayden. It’s going to take some time to regain full control of your emotions,” he said, impassable. “You’re crossing an age in which your mind is learning to deal with them. With this new phase of your training, you’re going to learn to do it much earlier compared to a normal teenager, but it’s still a long way. Besides, you hadn’t seen an Apollonid for a long time. So I’m going to let you rest before I am sure you can resume your training.”

“Yes, Darrell.”

“Yes, master.”

“Master?”

“You’re growing, now. I should have ordered you to call me master long ago.”

I swallowed. There was no more pace inside me for discouragement; only resignation. “Yes, master.”

Starting from that day, I have seen at least one Apollonid almost every day of my life, apart from short periods when major forces like sicknesses made me stay home at night. It took me another three years to manage to win over one of them. By that time, I was almost an adult; whenever I looked in a mirror, I saw a boy with a pale skin, caused by the lack of enough sunlight, and a permanent look of disillusion in his eyes. Two heavy dark circles under them completed my look. I knew nobody except for my master and Miss Ward. I didn’t feel any carnal desire: I felt nothing when a female was shown on TV, and by that time I felt no more the urge of sexually relieving myself, something that had been explicitly forbidden to me. Instead, it was replaced by a constant sensation of having been deprived of something that I couldn’t figure out, which I now could easily convert into even more hate for the world.

The day I took down my first Apollonid in the dungeon, I finally was no more scared. I was determined to end it. I didn’t need to focus on something particular by now: the fireballs came out instantly. Emotionless, I threw them against it with perfect precision, and the demon disappeared.

I didn’t feel happy or ecstatic for my first kill: I had lost the ability to produce those emotions long time ago. Neither did my master, who just nodded in approvation. I looked at the dark, stony point that was previously illuminated by its infernal fire.

“Very well, Hayden. Starting from tomorrow, you’ll make practice in the field. I’ll take you with me starting from tomorrow evening.”

I nodded, like he had just done. This was quite an improvement: until then, my evening consisted of just having dinner and then remaining alone in my room, without turning on any light, letting the thoughts slide through my head. The only moment when I would go out of the manor were those rare trips to the worst parts of Plymouth, making me look at the waste left in the streets, pointing to houses where a crime had been committed, and things like that. Now, however, I knew I would go there as a soldier, to take action, not just for mere observation.

“Today’s training is over. You may go to your room.”

I obeyed, feeling no happiness at all, but still full of satisfaction towards myself.