A Darkness With No Name // Book 1: The Warriors of Light

1: Being Different

~ Song for this chapter: Different by April Lockhart.  It's really nice y'all 

Ian always knew he was a little different.  As he looked at himself  in the bathroom mirror every morning, staring at his wavy brown hair and hazel eyes, framed by his pale skin with the light dusting of freckles on his nose, he thought he could, if he glanced reaaaaaaaaallly deep into his eyes (consequently hitting his nose on the mirror), just make out an older layer to his eyes.  The same eyes that had seen things no seventeen-year-old should have ever seen.  His  father would then walk in on him, staring, nose splayed on the mirror's cold surface, and he would straighten up, clear his throat and stride out of the bathroom, bashing his face in the half-open door.  His father would be waiting for the crash, followed by "SHIT!", and he'd sigh and shake his head. Every.  Damn.  Morning.

If you're confused by now, I understand.  I mean, I'm confused, and I'm the damn narrator.  Let's start from the beginning...

Ian Lane was seventeen years old.  He lived in England, in York, where he and his father Nathaniel had a small cottage.  There were only a couple of cottages spread in that area, balanced precariously in between soggy marshland.  This location was extremely hard to come by, making it the ideal location for Ian to live.  You see, Ian was gifted.  In his point of view, he saw this as a curse.  He could see visions of possible futures that more often or not happened, and were almost all horrifying.

He had been only five when he'd discovered that he had this gift/curse.  He'd been alone, drawing, when suddenly, his sight was obstructed by a sudden blanket  of darkness, immediately broken by a star-burst of white light that blinded him temporarily.  As the black patches faded from his sight, a haphazard series of images tumbled in front of his eyes, and suddenly, it stopped.  He came to his senses only when his head banged on the table, the first of many vision-related injuries, and found the paper he was drawing on splattered with tears, and on the white sheet of paper, he'd written one word: Lucas.  He was confused.  His five-year old brain, if it could talk, would've said, "Huuuuuuuuuuhhh?" Then, he shrugged it off, only to be scared to death by the sound of his bedroom door slamming open, and his mother, who'd been alive then, charged in, eyes wide, asking him what happened.

Alison Lane's blonde hair was pushed back in a messy ponytail, and her son could almost smell the fear flowing out of her.  She ran towards her son and grabbed his shoulders, demanding an explanation as to why he had screamed.  Ian didn't remember that, but he just shrugged with those little five-year-old shoulders of his that apparently liked shrugging and told his mother everything.  From his baby-talk, Alison gathered all the information she needed, and that she'd dreaded.  

She was not the only gifted in the family...

Well shit.

She blocked out her son's rambling and panicked.  Her life was full of constant danger, and she could not imagine her son suffering without anyone to be there for him.  So she contacted her friend Marcy, and a few months later she, her husband and her five-year-old son Lucas, along with Marcy's elderly mother, moved into one of the vacant cottages in the village.

Ian had, unfortunately, forgotten the vision by now.  Five-year-olds are quite unreliable...

Ian and Lucas became fast friends, and a certain incident bonded them in an inseparable tie of friendship.

The loss of a parent, or, in Lucas's case, parents.

The part that Lucas didn't know was that Ian had witnessed his mother's death.

He'd been ten.  He was walking home from school, which was actually a retired teacher in one of the nearby cottages giving lessons to the youngsters.  Lucas usually walked back with him, but he'd been, coincidentally, sick that day.  You know how they say karma is a bitch?  Yeah, coincidence is karma's aunt.