Chapter 16 / Firelight

December 31st, 15.003 La Paz Beach, Ashveil Desert, Umbra [Vampire Continent]

00hs.

The bonfires came in dozens that year—small, scattered rings of gold along the beach instead of the single fire they sat around a few years ago. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and sweet wine. Paper lanterns hung lower, closer to the sand, and laughter carried softer, as if the city was still learning how to celebrate.

Risha was thirteen now, old enough to have his own circle. He and his friends sat by a small fire near the dunes, sparks jumping between them like tiny shooting stars. They were loud, fearless, trading dares and stories as Cloud dozed behind them. Every so often Risha’s laugh cut through the night, bright and sharp enough that even the grown-ups turned to smile.

Near the bigger fire, the adults gathered in loose constellations. 

Eloise and Dominique sat shoulder to shoulder, half-lit by the fire. The air shimmered gold around them, the sea breathing slow in the dark. Eloise reached over and tugged lightly on a loose strand of Dominique’s pink hair.

“Walk with me?” she whispered.

Dominique arched a brow but grabbed Eloise’s hand in a second. 

They slipped away from the circle unnoticed, carrying their half-empty cups down toward the quieter line of water. The sand was cool now, packed hard where the tide had reached. A few lanterns bobbed in the distance, their light breaking on the water like scattered stars.

For a long while neither of them spoke. Their footsteps and the hush of waves filled the silence. Finally Eloise said, “Do you ever think about what comes next?”

Dominique laughed, automatically. “Always. That’s the curse of surviving too many things.”

“I don’t mean duty. Or work. I mean you and me.”

That stopped her. Dominique turned, the moon catching in her eyes. “What do you mean? I love you, Eloise”.

Eloise nodded, smiling without quite meaning to. “We’ve been orbiting each other for years. I just… I’m tired of pretending family is something we have to inherit.”

Dominique’s expression softened. The tide whispered around their ankles. “You’re saying you want to be my family now?”

“If you’ll have me,” Eloise said, voice low. “Not as a replacement. As something real.”

Dominique looked out toward the horizon, where the dark met the darker sea. For the first time in months she felt light.

“Now that they’re gone... I can stop trying so hard to prove I’m nothing like them. It feels…” Empty? Liberating? What’s left now? Who am I if I’m not their counterpart?

Eloise slipped her fingers through Dominique’s. “They were never going to define you.”

Dominique exhaled, the sound almost a laugh. “Tell that to the ghosts.”

They kept walking until the fire behind them was only a shimmer on the sand. Eloise stopped first, turned, and drew Dominique close. No fireworks, no words — just the quiet press of foreheads, the salt taste of air between them, and the sound of waves curling around their feet.

“So that’s settled,” Eloise murmured. “We’re a family now.”

“A million times ‘yes’,” Dominique said, smiling widely.

They stood there a long time, the sea washing away their footprints before they could decide what direction to take next.

♥︎

Farther down the beach, away from the laughter and the fireworks warming the horizon, Tech found Sami crouched struggling with her old glasses, the ones she used when being outside, minuscule cables snaking around her boots. Sparks flared in the sand like lazy fireflies

“You’re still doing that,” Tech said, his voice flat but quieter than usual. “You should give up on those old things. The technology is not great… to say the least”. 

“These were one of my first inventions. I had stolen a few wires from an old man across my street and built them myself just to stop seeing this much. Vampires call this a ‘gift’ and for me it's just…” She forgot what she was saying, still fighting the googles. 

Sami had always been able to see more than most — details, distance, the smallest flickers of movement others missed. In Velmore, that kind of precision meant survival. She’d learned early to use what she had: her hands, her brain, and a pair of homemade lenses patched together from scrap metal and stolen material. They blurred the excess, made the world manageable enough to focus on what mattered.

Years later, with access to every resource imaginable, she still used them. Not because they worked well, but because they reminded her who she’d been when she had nothing but willpower. Fixing them over and over was her way of not forgetting that small girl.

Sami didn’t look up. “Also… talking about rest. You should rest your brain, but we both know that’s not happening.”

Nobody had been talking about rest, but she tended to do that. She held conversations with herself and then, out of nowhere, decided to say them out loud. Tech was already used to jumping into her inner monologue halfway through.

He sighed, a small, human sound. “Stop calibrating at that frequency.” He took the glasses away from her hands. “Your retinas aren’t designed to absorb magic-spectrum frequencies. You’ll burn them out.”

“Okay, genius, fix them, then,” she said, tugging at a burned wire, but her tone carried none of her usual fire.

“No.” He put the old frames inside his pocket and knelt beside her, motion deliberate, and set a small silver case on the sand. The hum of the sea filled the silence between them. “Try these instead.”

She frowned. “What’s that?”

“Low-vision glasses. Tuned for people like you — ones who see too much.”

She turned, studied his face under the dim glow. “You made them.”

He nodded once. “Last night.”

Sami took the glasses from the case. The frames were silver, thin, and with small stars on the side. The kind of precision only he could build. She hesitated, amused. “You really built something for me… the night your parents were killed?”

Tech’s eyes flicked toward the moon, then back to her. “I couldn’t sleep.”

The line caught her off guard. She slipped the glasses on, the lenses syncing automatically to her biometrics with a faint click. The world dimmed — clearer, steadier. The sea lost its glare. The fire stopped blinding her.

She exhaled. “They work.”

“Of course they work,” he muttered, but his voice was softer than arrogance.

Sami leaned back on her hands, letting the sound of the waves settle between them. “You know… this is weirdly sweet.”

He looked at her like the word offended him. “Sweet?”

“Yeah. You building something just so I can stand to look at the world again.”

His jaw tightened. “Don’t make it sound sentimental.”

“But it is sentimental.” She smiled, turning toward him. “You didn’t have to.”

He shrugged, eyes fixed on the sand. “I didn’t know what else to do with my spare time.”

The silence after that was long, but not empty. The sound of laughter drifted from the other fires — Eloise and Dominique somewhere up the beach, Jeda’s voice carrying through the wind, Axis laugh coming from time to time. 

When Tech finally spoke again, it was quieter. “You think this changes anything?”

Sami tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“The world. What she did.”

Sami’s expression darkened, but her voice stayed steady. “Everything changed last night. But maybe that’s the point.”

He studied her profile, the way the firelight broke across her jaw. “You’re not afraid of her, are you?”

“Of Sukira? Never.” She paused. “She didn’t need to kill all of them, that surprised even me… but I’m more afraid of what comes next.”

Tech almost smiled — tired, small. “You’re the only person I know who can say something honest and make it sound like a threat.”

She nudged his shoulder with hers. “You’re the only person I know who calls a gift a way of killing time”. 

He sighed like a child caught after getting into mischief. “I didn’t mean that.” His voice was way more honest than usual. “It was a gift. I’ve been working on them for a while now. I finished them yesterday. I don’t know why I lied. It is a gift. It is sentimental. I wanted to do something nice for you and this is everything I could manage”. 

She smiled, but didn’t press any further. She knew how hard that was for him. 

They sat in silence for a while, the glasses glinting faintly against the red of the fire. Then Tech spoke again, voice barely above a whisper.

“You should know… I didn’t build those glasses for you to stop seeing. I built them so you’d keep looking. I find myself very intrigued to continue understanding the world from your point of view. It's refreshing, alluring and highly educational–”, his tone was changing from sweet to instructional. 

Sami smiled and interrupted him. “Then you should stop pretending you don’t care.”

“I’m trying,” he said quietly. “That’s new for me.”

She reached out and brushed his wrist with her thumb — not comfort, not pity, just presence. “You’re doing fine, genius.”

The wind carried the voices from others from the next fire. He glanced toward it, then back at her.

“Happy New Year, Sami.”

“Happy New Year, Tech.”

♥︎ 

At the largest fire, Sukira stood facing the sea. The flames behind her hissed and snapped, their light cutting through the smoke that curled low over the sand. The wind tugged at her hair and carried the smell of salt and burning smoke.

She had changed clothes and put some makeup on, but not enough to hide the fact that she hadn’t slept. The firelight made her eyes look too bright, too awake.

Elon found her first. Jeda followed a few steps behind, bottle in hand, deciding almost immediately that he wouldn’t interrupt. 

Not yet.

Elon stopped a meter away. The words came out before he could soften them.

“You were in my bed last night.”

Sukira didn’t turn. “Good memory.”

“Telling me you wanted a middle point. That we should stop hurting each other.” He laughed once, a hollow sound. “And then you left. Straight into a massacre.”

“Did I?” she asked, still watching the waves.

“Don’t,” he warned. “Don’t pretend I don’t know. You think I can’t put it together? You left my room, and hours later sixty people were dead.”

75.

She turned, slowly. She finally looked at him, calm, expression unreadable, almost dead. “That’s a lot of assumptions for someone who only trusts his fake visions.” She was still hurt by how Elon trusted Vlad’s dirty trick that led him to leave her, and not her own words. 

Jeda whistled low under his breath and lay down on the sand behind them. “Oh, I’m not leaving,” he muttered.  “This sounds like it’s gonna be tragic as hell.”

Neither of them looked his way. They accepted his presence, but decided to ignore him completely. 

Elon stepped closer. “Joke about it, I don't care. But you came to me right before doing it. Why? To make me an accomplice?”

Sukira’s tone stayed even. “Maybe I just wanted to remember something human before going back to what I am.”

“You think that’s an answer?”

“It’s the only one you’ll get.”

He laughed once, sharp and miserable. “You’re unbelievable.”

She didn’t deny it.

“Was any of it real?” he asked. “Or was I just the last piece you needed to let go of before you finished becoming this?”

“I’ve been this before we even met, blondie. And I have been repeating it countless times.” Her head tilted slightly. “You simply won’t listen to me”. Her smile was cold, sharp, distant. 

Elon exhaled, shaking his head. “You told me you wanted to find a middle point, remember? How’s this a middle point?”

“Oh, but I found the middle point,” she said quietly but caring a tone too light for the words she was saying. “I just had to walk through it.”

He stared at her, trying to see the woman from that night—the one who had trembled when she said she didn’t need saving. She wasn’t here. This version was stone.

“You don’t even feel sorry, do you?”

Sukira’s eyes were shallow. “I feel a lot of things. Sorry isn’t one of them. I’m a monster, how many times do you need to listen until you accept it?”

Jeda tipped the bottle toward them without looking up. “You two should charge admission,” he said again. “This is the best drama spectacle I've seen in years.”

Elon looked back at her one last time, eyes glassy from the wind or something else. “You were supposed to come back different,” he said quietly. “Not empty.”

And then he walked off, the sand crunching under his boots until his figure disappeared among the smaller fires.

For a long while Sukira didn’t move. The fire snapped, sending a burst of sparks up into the night.

Jeda finally stood, stretching, and came closer. “You two done ruining each other for the evening?”

“We are done for good.” Sukira took Jeda’s vodka bottle from his hand and gave it a long gulp. 

♥︎