Chapter 9

Being marked by death, probably for death! There’s probably some irony in there, but I was too scared out of my mind to find it. All I could do was stare at the scythe embellishing my tattoo and think of the impact it represented. Did I resent the consequences of my actions? Wholeheartedly! Would I do it again to save Samuel? You can bet your bottom dollar I would!

I finally let my shirt fall back down again and looked up to see the council members still looking at me, although now their gazes had morphed from one of dismay to a look that one gets when studying a goldfish who has lived way beyond its expected lifespan. Spoiler alert: your parents are probably replacing the goldfish every so often.

“So how do I get out of this?”, I asked them, eager to find a remedy to my problem.

The old man, I really needed to get his name, was the one who took the initiative to answer my question yet again.

“There is no getting out of this, boy. It’s like being branded by a force of nature. The only way you get out of this, as you so eloquently put it, is becoming a force of nature yourself. And when that happens, boy, I will be questioning you regarding the solutions to my problems.”

His words didn’t set my mind at ease at all. He was talking as if I told him his milk had expired, not that I had been marked by the reaper.

One of the other council members decided to chime in at this point. He looked like a young boy, younger than me in fact. I hadn’t seen until now but now that I did, I was shocked beyond measure.

He said, addressing me directly, “Hello, David. You can call me Light. There are many things that you have to know, now that you are finally here. Many things that you aren’t aware of, many things that most Untethered never learn in their lifetime. But we in the council think that you have the potential to be great and will learn the things we are going to tell you in due course anyway. So, we are going to give you a head start so that you can keep these things in mind in the future.”

The other council members nodded when Frost decided to help me out a bit, as he could see I was getting overwhelmed. He called out loudly to the other members of the council, “Why don’t we do this in a question-answer form, council members? He can ask questions he feels most curious about and then we can address the topics not covered by his questions. We cannot overwhelm a guy with just a month as an Untethered under his belt with too much information, can we?”

I smiled warmly at Frost, glad to have a familiar face I trusted in this group of strangers. Light nodded and told me to ask any questions I might feel curious about. And before I could control myself, I asked him the one question that had been bugging me since I saw him.

“You must be really strong to be on this council at such a young age, right?”

Most of the council gained an amused look on their face when they heard my question. I swear that even the old man was smiling under his beard.

“Young age? David, I am more than a millennia-old.”, he replied, seeming to have fun at my expense.

My mind froze at that revelation. “What? How could that be? You look barely older than sixteen years old.”

Light replied, the amused smile still on his face, “David, I am going to give you a bit of advice that I give most Untethered who I see vast potential in. “If you ever achieve immortality or stop ageing, wait until you are 30.”

“Immortality?” That was all I could get out, in a high pitched voice that would have sounded better coming from a pre-adolescent rather than an eighteen-year-old.

Frost was quick to intervene, “Not true immortality, per se. We just stop ageing at a certain age, when our abilities and control over miasma achieve a certain level. We can still be killed though.”

‘That does not make it any better, Frost.’ That was something I was screaming in my head.

That was when a woman chimed in, “I think we have broken him. And here I thought we were going easy on him.” The women seemed to be of Indian origin, her accent and appearance giving her away.

When she saw me looking at her, she introduced herself, much to my relief, “Oh, my name is Saaya. Which means ‘Shadow’, which is what I am referred to as in this council.”

I couldn’t help but ask, “Why does everyone have names like Shadow and Frost and Light? I mean, this surely can’t be a coincidence.”

It was the old man who replied this time, “Oh, it isn’t, boy. Many of us are so old that our original names have been lost in the corridors of time. I can’t even remember the name I was born with. So, it was decided that anyone who sits on this council has to give up their old name and adopt a new one, which reflects their abilities and personality. That is why I go by Nova.”

I nodded to myself, that made sense in a weird sort of way, I suppose. Although the fact that some of these members were so old that they had forgotten their names really hit home the fact these guys were living, breathing parts of history.

But there were most pertinent questions to ask rather than having them recount history. And so, I did. I addressed the council at large when I asked, “What is the purpose of this council? Why have the strongest Untethered in the world gather into a single council?”

To my utter bewilderment, Nova scoffed, before saying, “The strongest Untethered in the world? Boy, you seemed to have confused the world with just our planet. The world is much bigger than that. We are but a tiny and, frankly, insignificant speck of dust in the wide world that is the cosmos.”

Before I could even recover from the shock of that reveal, Nova continued, “The reason this council was formed was to form a line of defence for our planet so that external forces couldn’t direct their nefarious intentions at us. We aren’t the original members of the council so we aren’t really aware of all the details. Our leader is the only Untethered who was a member of the original twenty-one.”

This leader that Nova talked about seemed to be held in great reverence by the council. I was especially surprised to hear the admiration towards the leader in Nova’s voice.

Nova continued, “What we are aware of is that there was a war against another race belonging to other planet or planets. A war that our planet lost decisively, crippling the Untethered of this planet and leaving our number in the hundreds. It was our leader who picked up these fragments and strived towards providing this planet protection against any such aggression in the future. The leader gathered the strongest Untethered survivors of the war and formed the council of twenty-one, named so after the original twenty-one members of the first meeting of the council.”

The whole council seemed to hold a moment of sombre silence at the end of this recollection of the history of the twenty-one. I could see that the words of Nova held great meaning to them and that they held this council and the sacrifices it represented in the highest of regards.

Shadow took over the next part of the explanation. “The twenty-one then proceeded to reach out to the various parts of the world, establishing their bases in different parts of the world, according to the occurrence of the red Luna. They searched for other Untethered, either born from the union of two Untethered parents or human beings who had transcended the mortal plane.”