Corneille de Locke - Tradition of Darkness

[Louvaine]

Droplets of autumn rain drizzling down against the exterior glass of a dirty window illuminated by jumping candlelight. A small table situated just beneath it and two individuals enjoying each other's company. Furniture was worn out and stained, the candleholders rusty and wobbly. Wine glasses weren't a matching set, and the room around was unkept and cold.

Cornellius wasn't a part of this scene, he was a mere observer. His first memory was of his family apartment in Arabel. As he recalled, it was a night to celebrate profit of some kind. By that point in the evening, he should've been fast asleep. And he would've been, were it not for a rogue thunder splitting the sky loud enough to wake him up. He must have sought comfort in the company of his parents, and that is when he found them.

Sirius de Locke was a trader. His education was that of a tailor, but he never worked with textiles, he just passed them on for profit. He had dark, brown hair and an ever-present stubble, adorning his crooked smile. He always smiled. Yet it was the kind of smile that felt reserved or afraid to fully blossom.

Virgo Cohle, his mother, was a different breed entirely. She had long black hair and skin as pale as marble. Her blue eyes always reflected the world as if she had mirrors put behind them. When she smiled, she did so with all her features. She'd brand her teeth and laugh in a way that reminded Cornellius of autumn storm. Like the one from his first memory.

[Louvaine]

He ran on the cobblestone as fast as his feet were able to carry his weight. Some wooden wagon creaked past him, bells chiming on its roof and hushed conversation had inside the carriage. He heard shouts behind him, calling his name, beckoning him to stop. The metallic taste of cracked lip still lingered in his mouth, alongside what remained of the sweet the honeyed apple brought. He jumped into one of the alleys, splattering a puddle on wooden planks stacked against the wall.

More than anything, Cornellius liked the challenge of theft. The reward was meagre at best. He dared not to steal anything important or valuable. He wasn't very good at the chase. That, however, didn't stop him from running when he was caught. When he reached a side entrance to what seemed like a tavern, he jumped over the curb and blended in the crowd. Not long after, he heard his peers calling his name amongst the patrons. "What would mother do?", he wondered. Virgo Cohle had a way with words and rarely the need to use them due to her charming smile and demeanour demanding likeability. But he wasn't Virgo. He was a boy. Perhaps with slightly longer hair than most boys, but they were straight, not curly. He had her eyes. Coloured blue of evening sky. His nose was slightly shorter than hers and on top of his head, two small horns were an unmistakable sign of his ancestry. His mother, as she told him, was also a tiefling. She had no horns, and no tail.

He encircled the crowd and stepped out of the establishment, hoping to gain on his pursuers. Someone was waiting by the door. He barely slipped out, but tripped and fell into the puddle. Looking down into the water, he saw no horns, a longer nose and sharp, girly features. His unchanged eyes almost fell out of his sockets, he opened them so wide. He heard an apology. The boy who tripped him was now helping get up what he thought was a girl. She smiled and carried on running.

Before this, Cornellius had never cast a spell. Illusion, as it turned out, was his second nature.

[Louvaine]

It lied there, motionless, on the dusty brick. Its once lively eyes now void of whatever spark was there in life. Before this, Cornellius Cohle didn't know death. Not up close, not this personally. Perhaps he thought that once he gets familiar with the concept, the act will evoke horrid emotions, so often conjoined with the act itself. Grief, sadness, anger, denial. And yet, here he was. Looking down on a dead rat in his mother's basement. Feeling not a single thing. In years to come, starting from this very moment, Virgo would speak of peace and calm brought to one's innermost sensibility by one's passing. She would compare the finality of death to the very lack of conception to begin with. What is not, might as well never truly have been. She would go on to compare the often feared nothingness brought by death of senses as a blissful oblivion of a cold, black lake or embrace of an equally cold matron, the inability to define one's individuality in face of the eternal embrace of death. Death, she said, was a natural part of life. Neither had any meaning without something greater. Something capable of seeing past both. And just like a mother is with her child when it is brought to the world, she would speak with a loving smile spreading from her cracked lip to the wrinkled corner of her eye, she will be there, waiting, for her child in the oblivion. And that, she would have her dearest boy know, was the Tradition of Darkness.