The Promise

Once again, the boy with the midnight arms opened his eyes.

The boy gasped, shooting up from his slumber with adrenaline rushing through his veins. Almost immediately, arms snatched him up from the dark and ripped him back to the ground. The boy, panicking, tried to escape, yet the more he struggled, the tighter the grip became, until eventually, he relented. The panicking stopped, his heart slowed, and Dario regained himself.

The first thing he felt was how cold it was. The air was ice, and the chill reminded him of the day before. He and the rest of his siblings had run from the Empowered hunters for hours, only escaping due to sheer luck. Now, they were sleeping inside of the artificial pocket of space created by his sister Zoe's power, her Room. She was only able to create the doors and a basic warehouse interior before collapsing from exhaustion, and without her keeping the Room warm, the fifteen brothers and sisters were required to huddle up close, creating a tangled, snoring mess of bodies.

Dario looked to his left, and as he suspected, his alleged kidnapper was none other than his eldest sister, Cass. Cass seemed to take a special enjoyment from squeezing the life out of him, and Dario was sure that he had put at least three bodies between each other before bed. Yet, by some miracle, there she was, clinging to him like a child to their teddy bear. He could bear it when he was younger, but Dario, being the ripe old age of 9, was definitely way too old to still be sleeping with his big sister.

Luckily, Dario had planned ahead, as earlier, he had called dibs on one of the few pillows they had. After positioning himself for a quick move, he leapt out of Cass's grasp, and before she caught him again, threw the pillow into the maw of her venus fly trap. His sister took the bait happily, turning over while murmuring incoherently. Dario admired his success, feeling as if he had perfected some kind of art.

After a quick 360, Dario gathered that he was in the exact middle of the pile, with all of his siblings present except for one. Satisfied with his scouting, he began weaving his way through his sleeping siblings, a skill he was now quite experienced in. Once the doors to the outside world were within reach, Dario excitedly quickened his pace, moving briskly towards his goal. But suddenly, something large and unseen entered his footpath, tripping him. Thinking quickly, Dario threw out his midnight arms, which stretched past their normal length to meet the ground and stop his fall. Normally, they maintained the shape of basic human arms, but they were a hue that was blacker than black itself. They made no sound on collision with the earth, their nature anomalous and off-putting even among other Empowered. Dario hated using them; when his arms changed form, it felt like millions of spiders were crawling and twisting their way underneath his skin. But it was better to suffer for a moment than to risk getting caught in Cass's grip again.

Once his arms compressed back to their idle form, Dario looked back and realized that he had tripped over the hair of the stranger, who earlier that day had saved them from the hunters with her power. She was one of the strangest people Dario had ever seen; tall, dark, and slender, her ears and nose pierced with colorful garnets, and a long, pale snake tattoo coiling down her right arm. She appeared no older than 30, but Dario's impression was that she was ancient, almost impossibly so. He had never seen hair like hers before either; his older brother Benji was laughing to him about how it was like she was wearing a giant bush on her head, but Cass had overheard them, and she swiftly and forcefully put an end to their joke. There was something frightening about the stranger that Dario couldn't place; he didn't like adults anyways, but with her, there was a primal instinct in his gut, telling him to steer clear. That voice was now screaming at him ten times louder, but luckily, she must've been a deep sleeper, as she didn't even flinch from having her hair trampled on.

Confident that he was out of the woods, Dario approached the two doors. At the moment, they were just graffiti, and wouldn't become an actual entryway without the password. Zoe forgot to tell them what it was before she fainted, but knowing his big sister, Dario assumed it was food, usually whatever her insatiable appetite was craving at the time. The left door led to the back alley where the Room was first created; probably the last place Dario wanted to be alone during the dead of night. So, he stepped to the right door, and remembering a remark Zoe had made that morning, whispered, "Apple pie." The door dimly shined light-blue, and when the light dissipated, a physical door remained. Carefully turning the handle, Dario stepped through, and ventured into the outside world.