Such Exquisite Calamity

Prologue

Ana

I broke a law today but gained an ally in the unlikeliest of people. Her name is Spencer, and she’s one of The Lovers, or The Two.

Nearly thirteen years ago, two children were born just after the announcement of a prophecy. Still, their existence was kept a secret from the Caster community for quite some time before they were discovered.

The day they were born, all seven Elder Demigods, representing the seven continents of the world did a simultaneous Tarot reading, as they do every two-hundred years, with freshly made cards, and the first card they all drew was The Lovers. The other cards are a mystery, even today.

Every single one of the Demigods, at the same time, drew that same first card. It was fate. Nothing like that had ever happened before, so they restarted the reading; all while it was being broadcast via television and radio to the masses. They shut off the cameras and microphones of today and went back to the Old Ways. Something like that had never been done before; restarting a Tarot reading is unheard of. But, if they restarted the reading using the Old Ways, they thought they might get different results.

Stopping the broadcasting to the people was even more unheard of because it was such a big deal to the people. The last one had been done two-hundred years earlier and circulated via oracle. This was supposed to have been broadcast on live tv.

The other cards they drew in secret after that are a mystery, but no matter how many times they re-did it to confirm, it’s said that the reading was the same; The Lovers, followed by eight unidentified cards.

The seven Elders said The Old Ones were trying to tell them

something about the Caster world's state, but they didn’t know what. They told everybody to be calm. Not to fear, for the Old Ones always knew what they were doing. There was a plan for everything in life; the Old Ones knew it all before it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.

And then, months later, The Two were found, and people had various reactions. Some wanted the children to be terminated. Some wanted their parents locked away for breaking such a taboo. Many people in power honestly didn’t want the children to live, but the Council decreed that they would indeed be allowed to survive.

Of course, I was only a newborn baby when this happened, so this information has been easily accessible to me since, like, forever, and now that I’m thirteen, I feel like I’m some expert on The Two. But, on the other hand, I’ve grown up surrounded by people talking about them for so long that before I met them, it felt like I already knew them; Spencer and Cayden.

Born at precisely the same time down to the second, they’re two impossible combinations of Caster and Familiar, something that shouldn’t be possible. Casters and humans can’t mix. Both were brought before the Council when discovered just weeks apart after their birthdays' thanks to their respective families having kept them hidden; it was determined on national tv that they were not a threat. They were just babies. But they had to be watched for any signs that might make them harmful to our community. I remember being four-years-old, wondering why the two kids on tv were such big deals. But, of course, they were just kids like me, weren’t they?

Not quite. It was decided that they were better off not knowing what they were, so at age four, their memories were suppressed, and they started anew, living with one foot in the human world and one foot in mine. They were allowed in Caster and Familiar establishments, but people were kept from making a fuss about them or explaining to them what these establishments were.

Of course, everybody was in an uproar about the children even existing. Soon tales of what their existence meant for our world were spun. Everybody waited with bated breath as the children were raised as humans, sheltered from the knowledge of what they were or where they came from, until being finally allowed to integrate into Caster society when they turned twelve.

The kids were too bright and knew that they were different, even from their parents, and the memory suppression of their youth couldn’t last forever. So, they started asking questions that nobody was allowed to answer. It had become a law; do not give them any information about the world that they haven’t already gleaned for themselves, and what they knew was the basics:

“We’re not like normal humans, we’re not like our parents, we’re not like anybody, and we’re the same species, but also different from each other. Everybody who is like our parents knows who we are. We are not allowed to tell the humans we interact with anything because to them, we are also human.”

Everybody was told to keep their distance from the children, even though they were labelled entirely harmless. Still, many ignored that decree out of sheer curiosity, often walking right up to the children and asking questions the kids couldn’t answer, basically breaking the law put in place to keep them from learning about their true natures. As long as they betrayed no information about our world to them, all was fine, but it seemed people didn’t always like to follow the rules. The children were to figure out their places in the world for themselves, and these people didn’t make it much easier for them.

It was decreed that they were to have no friends. They were to remain alone, together. Growing up, I always wanted to befriend them out of spite. Having nobody isn’t fair.

Spencer is mostly Familiar in appearance, and Cayden is mostly Caster in appearance, but their energies are unique. Nobody knows how to classify them. Their energies feel like those of a natural-born Demigod, even.

Different, even from each other. Alone, even together, as I said. Today at school, they weren’t allowed to take part in classes about our world like Affinity education, Tarot 101, and the History of the Caster and Familiar companionship, only being allowed to take the general education courses required by the human government for every student. Needless to say, they have a lot of free time to roam the halls of the fine Walker High, which appears as a local community college and high school, but is actually a school for my kind. Familiar and Caster-kind.

Why allow them into our schooling system if they’re not allowed to participate in classes about The Old Ways? It makes little sense to me.

I broke a law today by befriending Spencer, having coincidentally moved into her apartment complex. I mean, what are the odds? So I used it as a chance to talk to her. To see what she’s like.

And she’s lovely.

Like, really, truly, nice. She’s just a twelve-year-old kid that wants to fit in. I mean, she tried out for the cheer squad. Grown men are terrified and threatened by her existence, and she’s a girly girl. Spencer’s shorter than a grade-schooler, has skin the colour of eggshells with faint freckles covering her cheeks and nose, and her hair is white with light natural streaks of red that she seems unaware of. When I looked at her in person, she looked half-broken, which bothered me. It made me feel funny inside like I had to befriend her.

Spencer told me she’s never had female friends before, which I already figured out but said nothing about. She’s never been treated like she belonged in our community, and as soon as she smiled at me that first time, I knew that getting to know her as more than just a casual school acquaintance would be the first of many laws I’d willingly break to help her find her place. Something in her drew me to her, despite myself. My parents, of course, support my decision, she is, after all, half Familiar, and we take care of our kind, but they worry that it’ll mark me as an outcast. I told them I’d rather be kind, and an outcast than willingly ignore somebody who needs a friend, and Spencer needs a friend.

I’ve always been an outcast anyway. Having a mental illness in the Familiar community isn’t uncommon; we are technically human, after all. But having a mental illness has its own sort of stigma in my world; a weak Familiar is a useless Familiar. And I am only half Familiar, anyway.

Most of my peers have always viewed me as pathetic for having a mental illness, even more so because I’m a Familiar who is untethered,

and we are supposed to be the strongest type of Familiar there is, and yet I can’t seem to be able to do jack shit in the way of Energy summoning. I can see Energy, sure, and sense it too, but that’s about all I’ve been able

to master. Familiars are supposed to be able to move Energy into a Caster or, in an emergency, another human being. By age thirteen, I should be able to at least move Energy around on my own. I should be able to direct it into one place by will alone.

I can’t.

So you see, I know what it’s like to be an outcast.

However, I believe that in the coming years, Spencer and Cayden will come into themselves and that when that happens, I might be the only person willing to answer their questions if the friendships we make in high

school don’t count for much and we end up only having each other. I’m hoping we amass at least a small group of outcasts like ourselves. Wild cards. Kids everybody else underestimates.

Nobody deserves to be in the dark when there’s a chance that they can see the sun, and I want Spencer and Cayden to see the sun. I hope we make lasting friendships that help us.

I hope nobody tries to hurt them.

Chapter One

Spencer

I have never been entirely sure how I became a part of my group of friends, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I think I’ve figured it out; it’s because I had no choice in the matter, having been dragged into the group like debris into a black hole.

It was inevitable. I like to think it was sheer luck, but something about it has always felt very universally orchestrated to me.

In my first couple of high school days, it became clear that I was already part of a specific crowd, and I never really didn't know what to think. It’s not like I chose these people; they chose me. Not to say that they don’t mean anything to me, but I didn't exactly see the appeal in me back then. I had low self-esteem from years of bullying.

I walked into the halls of Walker High years ago with absolutely no confidence. I feared being judged by my peers for my appearance, which I’ve been told can come off as either terrifying or cute. I guess being incredibly pale and having eerily clear eyes can really cause people to categorize one as different. I told myself it shouldn’t matter at this new school, but it did matter; everywhere I go, it comes up.

My mother's eyes were an intense violet in comparison to mine, but she said her eyes were only violet because I, who she named Spencer-Violet before I even came out of the womb, came into her life; she’d been so confident I’d have that eye-colour that she put it in my middle name. It makes me wonder if her eyes weren’t always that colour if harbouring my body in hers didn’t taint her or something.

If I’m being honest, I’ve always found myself to resemble an albino rat – not a cute one, but like one of the rats from that old cartoon, Pinky, and The Brain. I even have a gap between my two front teeth, like Pinky. Just a small one, but it's a gap nonetheless, one I’ve always wanted to get corrected.

In addition to my appearance, I was also teased because of my parentage. When I started grade school, having skipped kindergarten because I was ‘too smart,’ I realized that the other children didn't understand our family dynamic. It was when I realized that I wasn’t like them.

Human, or at least not entirely.

I mean, my mom was a nurse responsible for saving people's lives every day in the ER, and that was cool, sure, but people readily revered her or feared her before even finding any of that out. The other kids looked at my father as if he couldn't possibly be my biological dad, despite the obvious streak of white in his dark hair and my own near-white hair. I'd always been told that that was what tied us together as father and daughter, but when I explained that fact to my peers, they laughed at me. They told me I was making it up and called me a freak. One kid said that I must have been my mom's lovechild with some albino dude because I apparently didn't look like my dad at all.

It wasn’t like my parents hadn’t warned me that the kids at this school might be mean; they were lower in IQ than me by miles. But these kids saw me as some aberration, something my parents hadn’t the foresight to know would happen.

They’d tried to raise me like a normal human, but the differences became laughably noticeable.

When I asked my parents why we were so different and why they’d kept that fact from me, it was almost as if they’d never expected me to ask those kinds of questions.

I’d seen a lot of human media to know that we weren’t that.

And yet, my parents weren’t prepared to answer me. Even so, they told me the bare minimum: these kids didn't normally go to school with people like us, but I was there to learn how to live life as a normal kid, and I should be thankful for the opportunity.

I was told that I should ignore the other kids when they called me a witch and that I should just keep trying to find my place. I was told that I shouldn’t ask any more questions because they weren’t able to answer them and that they wished they could. That I should just accept that my parents knew what was best for me, that they were only restricting my information because they were keeping me safe.

I hadn’t understood that I was in danger or that I wasn’t a normal human until the bullying began; I was only six-years-old, and my access to other people had been extremely restricted, so the treatment was shocking.

It pissed me off.

My dad had been in charge of my education until I turned five, apparently (I couldn't remember anything before that age very well for some reason). Still, when he started working at the bar, my parents entrusted me to their friend Terry, who taught me how to read and write.

But all the same, I had access to books, television shows, and the internet. So, I’d created this idea in my head that we were a typical human family based on the stories I read and the shows I watched. So, it makes sense that I quickly realized, thanks to the taunting, that something was off about how I’d been raised. And still, I stood up for myself or tried to. I told them that I could prove that my dad was related to me. That my mom hadn't bewitched him into believing I was his child because I was his child. That race didn’t matter because I was a kid just like them.

At recess one day, I took three of the kids who’d been my biggest bullies off school grounds to prove my point. I brought them to my neighborhood, to the bar my dad works at.

Inside, many of the patrons looked like me, which I quickly pointed out.

“See?” I said, “I’m not a freak. Other people are like me, too. And look, see those people with the white in their hair? They’re the same. They’re like my dad. And the other people? They’re like my mom. So it’s cool, right?” I took those kids to that bar to prove a point to them so that they’d understand me better, maybe even accept me, but none of that mattered, though, because all those kids saw was a bar full of strange-looking people,

a few who were so very obviously not human, and, they panicked.

All they really did was peek their heads through the doorway to scan the room, but they'd made their decisions about what they'd seen, and they'd decided that they didn’t like it. I was different even among the “freaks” inside the bar.

They didn’t make a scene as we walked back to school, not right away. We walked back in silence. Nobody said anything to their parents or teachers about what they’d seen, but I got in trouble for taking them off of school property and suspended for a week, and those kids? They had their memories wiped, as far as I know. The next day, they’d forgotten about the incident and went back to teasing me like usual. I was horrified that their minds had been played with somehow but even more scared that mine had probably been erased at least once before. I told nobody that last part.