After a moment had passed between them in silence, Liara slowly hauled herself back on her feet, her hands easily latching on to the small crevices on the rough cave wall beside to aid her ascension.
“We should move further in,” she said meekly, anxiously glancing at Kal from the corner of one eye, too ashamed to face him directly. Her mind had alerted her to the ever-looming presence of the approaching golden malevolence as a familiar sensation washed over her body.
It was a feeling of your body getting progressively heavier. It was like being at the bottom of an ever-deepening ocean or being encased in an invisible armor that steadily grew heavier, the severity of which was determined by the proximity of a vampire to direct sunlight.
Even though vampires could safely hide in the shadows during the day and survive the almost instant incineration, they could never truly escape the sun’s oppressive presence. It was always there, even in the blackest of nights.
Liara waited patiently for Kal to respond, and accept her request but concluded that he was ignoring her when she saw him continue to intently stare at the forest outside.
“Look, I am sorry, Ok?! But it is dangerous here, we should go in,” she warned. She was now directly looking at Kal with a concerned expression, her growing anxiety a direct result of the increasing proximity between them and the golden light blanketing the world and slowly creeping towards the cave from the eastern mountains.
She had hoped an apology might elicit a response from the man but Kal just ignored her warning once again, standing utterly motionless.
What was he gazing at that was so important to make it worth enduring this torturous pressure? Was he some kind of a masochist? She wondered before she followed his gaze to ascertain the source of interest occupying Kal’s attention, but discovered nothing of import after searching for a few moments with her eyes.
In the end, the pressure from the approaching sun became so oppressive that her body dragged itself deeper into the shadows of the cave to avoid the escalating torment. When she was at a more comfortable distance from the entrance she looked back to check on Kal and found him still locked in place, dangerously close to death's door.
“Kal!” She called in distress, her eyes almost pleading, but the ebony warrior kept ignoring her.
She wasn’t sure how far the sunlight would advance beyond the entrance, but it wasn’t worth dying over to find out.
She called him again several times, each call more forceful than the last, her gaze alternating between the man and the approaching sunlight, but like the rest, they all went unanswered. She had stopped only after she saw that the advance of the golden light halted mere inches from Kal’s position. She sighed in relief as the mounting tension in her body subsided, but then it shot back up again when she saw him slowly extend his left hand towards the light.
What was he trying to do? Turn his hand into ash? Was his amnesia so profound for him to forget about the dangers of the sun? Her questions were answered when she saw Kal’s left hand going past the curtain of light and remaining unaffected. Her eyes shot wide and her jaw dropped as she stared at the impossible. She blinked her eyes a few times to remind herself that this wasn’t just a dream.
‘Could it be possible? A vampire, who can defy the sun,’ She thought in awe, but then quickly buried that insane conclusion. ‘No! Ofcourse not. That is just crazy. This has to be an illusion,’ she surmised. She knew that a person with sufficient power and proficiency in the dark arts could just about produce any kind of an illusion. But there was a huge gaping hole in that particular deduction of hers, male vampires were unable to use dark magic, but then she remembered something.
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Could the legends about those illusive male vampires that inherited the mother’s gift be true?
She had thought them to be nothing but fantasy stories manufactured by despondent men of the clans to bolster their self-esteem, but maybe there was some truth to it after all. Her mind had just refused to accept the simple truth of the matter in front of her, and sought ways to prove it to be nothing but an elaborate deception as the truth was beyond anything she could ever begin to comprehend.
Then her mind went blank as she watched Kal slowly walk beyond the cave’s mouth and fully exposed his body to the lethal radiance. He stood with his arms wide for a short while, soaking up the moment, and then he was gone to a place no vampire could ever follow, the day world.
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Kal ran through the woods using all his might while the sun beamed above, a joyous smile on his face and his eyes glowing brighter, as he left a dirt storm in his wake. His speed was getting progressively faster as he went about, his body expending a large amount of energy in the process, but he barely felt that loss.
After exposing himself to the light, his body had started absorbing the sun’s energy at an alarming rate, filling him with massive amounts of raw power, replenishing any loss of energy almost instantly and storing the excess in his muscles, making them stronger in the process. He felt his body grow stronger the more he exerted himself under the sun’s restoring embrace. It was beyond exhilarating. He felt invincible under the sun.
Memories of him playing under the desert sun as a human, flashed through his mind as he remembered those peaceful moments. Those memories had always felt like a hazy dream to him, too distant to be of any relevance before this moment in time. Now that he could walk in the sun once more he felt like that human kid he once used to be.
Contrary to Liara’s assumptions about Kal’s state of mind, he had been keenly aware of her warnings about the dangers of the impending sun. From the moment he had woken up he had felt different, more unrestricted. Like being free from a mental prison he never knew his mind was in. At first, he wrote it off as a side-effect of a weakened and recovering body, but when the feeling persisted he became determined to investigate further in search of answers.
It did not take him long to figure out what was causing this condition, his inability at feeling the tyrannical presence of the sun. The indomitable presence that had haunted him all through his ascended existence was notably absent. The constricting pressure it had exerted was no more. He concluded that some significant changes had occurred to his body in the time he had been stagnant.
He had become more cognizant about the profound nature of his changes when he felt absolutely no aggravation standing inches away from the sunlight. A feeling arose in his guts that he now had the ability to walk into the light without turning to ash, but he wasn’t completely sure he should trust it, but all those doubts were washed away when he tested this feeling by placing a hand into the light without it getting instantly incinerated to dust.
He had begun to suspect or was quite sure that this new found power had something to do with him consuming the avatar of light. The damnable thing had almost killed him with its poisonous blade before he even got close enough. But it looked like after all this time in hibernation, the black crystal had managed to cure him.
Kal finally stopped his rampage through the forest and stood at the edge of a small body of water, gazing below at his reflecting form, which was now barely recognizable to him. He looked nothing like the scrawny little boy he once used to be. He had grown taller and bulkier in his time away from the world and his hair had changed color from black to a silver-white.
A sly grin developed on his face in appreciation of the visage reflected by the water. He raised his head to look at the sky, arching his back slightly so his head was almost parallel to the blue ceiling above. He just silently stared at it for a brief moment before he suddenly roared a cry of triumph. “Father!” He bellowed intensely. “I have done it, Father! I have achieved your ultimate dream! I have conquered the sun!”