The Nephilim Chronicles

Chapter One

Char sat up in her bed, let out a huge yawn, and stretched her arms wide. Today was the day, her eighteenth birthday. It would finally be revealed to her what type of Angelic magic she would be most proficient in.

Sure, most Nephilim children were capable of doing all kinds of magic their whole lives, but at eighteen, they were given a series of tests to help determine which they would be the most proficient in.

As she stood and stretched, her toes sank into the soft moss carpeting the floor of her bedroom. In some spots where the moss was worn down from frequent walking or standing, she could almost feel the planks of her wood floor or the bark of the tree's branches.

Silvery wings with small spurts of dark green streaked through them and jutted outwards as she stretched them out, and they filled most of her large room.

She turned to an ornate silver full-body mirror framed in Willow branches and tucked her wings against her back as she pulled her long red hair out of the braid, which she kept in while she slept.

The sounds of her family, as they, too, woke up for the day, filled the large house that expanded many floors below her inside the enormous tree house built around a large oak tree.

Her room was on the top floor, sitting among several branches that they had gently manipulated into an almost perfect square, save for the ones that made up parts of her floor. This resulted in all four of her walls having one to two oak tree limbs in them, but she didn't mind.

She never hung decorations on the tree's branches. All the people in her town firmly believed nature was living, so before they had built the treehouse for her family, there had, of course, been a ceremony. One involved offerings to the tree that decayed at unnatural rates, according to her family.

This treehouse was built by Char's parents and their family just after her parents got married, which was also a tradition in their town. Off to one side of her room was a big sliding glass door, which was where she was headed. She slid the door open and revealed a large balcony with a moss curtain hanging around it that she usually tied up to take in the view. Still, currently, she needed to shower under the constant stream of water off to the far-right side of the balcony, which was slightly sloped so it could run off and down to the balconies of the rest of the house.

Off to the left side of the balcony was the chair she used for sunbathing and a small shelf of books she read while doing so. She stripped off her pajamas and stood under the water. Usually, the temperature depended on the sunlight exposure from their two suns, but sometimes she would fly up and boil it with a bit of fire magic.

The water flowed from the bottom of a giant tub they had built a stand for on top of the tree down a slide that ended over the spot where it poured onto her balcony.

The tub had been enchanted to never stop flowing, and the splash zone was decently negated by the slope of the balcony. Today, Char was in too much of a hurry to care and let out a small yelp as she was met with icy water. After all, even with two suns, they had both just barely broken over the horizon and definitely hadn't had any time to warm the water.

She quickly used the soap on a shelf a foot away from the stream of water to wash her body and almost waist-length hair. She grabbed a towel from one of the three hooks, which she kept for bathing and sunbathing, and dried herself off. It wouldn't be long before Elders bombarded her room: several of her female cousins, her best friend, her three younger sisters, her two aunts, and her mom.

As was tradition, they would bring her a big breakfast that they would all share as they helped her get ready for the day. After she dried off and pulled on a robe in her room, she used two large ribbons to tie back the curtain of moss over one of the more oversized windows, allowing the light to stream into her room.