The Northern Lights

Prologue

Silence. A complete and utter silence filled the night air, suffocating those that were unfortunate enough to be trapped within its lonely grasp. Darkness crept up the firm trunks of the trees as the thin crescent moon was obscured by a passing cloud, creating a largely noticeable contrast between the darkness of the shadows and the pure white hue of the snow.

Though the darkness was frightening at most, it could do no more harm other than striking pitiful fear into the hearts of others, but that was it. Darkness was just simply a bluff meant to scare, nothing more, and nothing less. And apart from the darkness, all was serene; the sky was painted an inky blue, dappled by dozens of brightly lit stars that seemed to gleam with a proud radiance in the nighttime sky. It was like a veil of glass was placed carefully around the entire area, not allowing even the slightest of sounds to enter the location that lay beyond the silence.

But then in one brief moment, the glass was shattered nonchalantly as a blood-curdling wail pierced the serene silence.

The crumpled form that resembled a feline was crouched beside a lifeless body, her slightly elongated muzzle pressed into the fluffy gray fur of the corpse that lay in front of her, and often lifted her shaking head to the inky sky to let out yet another scream of agony.

“I-I didn’t mean to do it! It was an accident; I never meant to kill you!” the heart-broken she-cat sobbed, her salty tears soaking the dull gray fur of her beloved. Though then it stopped. The heart-breaking crying was no more, and everything was quiet.

The female was standing now, her dirty, tear-stained body frozen completely, and a glaze began to form in her sad eyes; the Transformation, one of the most challenging parts of receiving the ‘aura’. To achieve the aura, one must pass a test. The test was simple, but nonetheless complicated.

It went like this: To gain the aura and all of its powers, you must give up something in return. You must give up the most precious thing to you; whether that is love, family, beauty, or other vain qualities, you must give them up. But there was a cache. You must be pure to gain the qualities of the aura, and this she-cat, though previously good, had tainted her innocent purity in her hungered rage for survival.

So, this was the aftereffect: death.

The female couldn’t even move as her body just simply shut down, and her legs buckled until she was a broken mess on the snowy ground. And in her last moments before meeting death, something changed. A searing pain started in her eyes, the pain spreading to her throat, and then it plagued her entire body.

The aura took its place in the female’s eyes, and only for one split-second did she actually have the power. In that one dying moment, she had the power of a God, or possibly even more power than an unearthly being.

Even after years and years of the same legend being passed through the generations, there were no known records of anybody obtaining the aura, and that also meant that nobody knew its powers.

Or its limits.

The she-cat’s eyes glowed with a fierce intensity of incandescent golden light, and once that light faded, only one thing was left to tell others of what had become of the lonesome she-cat. Her eyes, though previously a deep shade of blue, were now displaying thousands of different forms of color.

It only lasted for a split second though.

Then it all ended; the light faded slowly from her eyes, the final result of color being a lifeless, colorless hue of black.