Shadow Worlds and Chaos Lights

THE CLOCK on the wall in the abandoned factory showed 10:03 A.M. Outside, the sun was shining and the birds were singing with joy over the fact that spring was finally here, but the people that had met up this particular morning didn't care much about the sunlight. On the contrary, heavy drapes made of what looked like thick wool were covering the windows, not letting in a single ray of sunshine, and on hangers on the wall hung a number of long, hooded cloaks, scarves and gloves in the same material as the drapes.

Tables were placed in a horseshoe shape around the room and at them sat the members of the group that called themselves 'The Recruiters'; some of them were talking softly to each other and others were idly looking in the pamphlets that'd been laid out in front of them or yawning slightly, which was more of a reflex than a necessity since none of them actually needed to breathe.

A young man with messy hair in an indescribable colour between blond and brown, and eyes grey as the sky on a rainy day, was busy doodling on his pamphlet while he waited for the meeting to start. Ornaments of flowers and stars were spread around the letters as his mind went further and further into his memories.

His name was Sebastian Cooper, and it had been almost a year since he had had his first contact with the Recruiters. Back then, his life had been a total mess. He had been more or less a street kid, skipping school, hanging around with the wrong crowd, and getting in constant trouble with the law.

He had lost track of how many times the police had picked him up and driven him home to his parents. Not that his dear mom and dad actually cared; no, Sebastian knew better than to think that. Of course, they seemed very grateful to have their troublemaking son safely home again, and they would smile sadly as they did make a half-hearted promise to punish him for his disobedience and look after him better in the future, but as soon as the police had left, they simply told him to go to his room and went back to their usual habits, getting as drunk and as high as they possibly could. Nothing ever changed. His parents never understood that he got himself into all that trouble to get a reaction from them.

It wasn't hard to guess how his life would have turned out if he hadn't seen that ad in the newspaper. He could still remember every single word.


Are you lonely?
Feeling unwanted?
Do you need someone to talk to?
Come to our meeting!
Get to know new, interesting people!
Take part in exciting activities!


There hadn't been any closer description of what the whole thing was about or even something about who had arranged it; there was just a logo of one of those French lilies and under that, it listed the place, which was a local café, and the time and date for the so-called meeting.

To this day, he still didn't know why exactly he had gone to the so-called meeting; he was really not a social person, and going to a gathering like that wasn't his style at all. Maybe it had been the proverbial fate, maybe it had been a mere coincidence, or maybe, and most likely, it had been his last hope before the final rash act of taking his own life, but no matter the reason, Sebastian could say, without a doubt, that he'd never regretted going there.

It had, in fact, been a very pleasant experience. Approximately fifty people had come to the café that evening after seeing the ads in the paper or one of the advertising posters the arrangers, whoever they were, had put up all over town. And all of those alone and unwanted people had been sitting around the café's cosy, round tables eating cake and talking to each other while a house band was playing softly in the background.

And then he had met her – Nadine. She had been the prettiest girl Sebastian had ever seen. That night, she had been wearing a blue baby-doll dress that matched the colour of her eyes, and her golden hair had been floating like a halo around her head. He had wondered why on earth she had been at a meeting for those who felt alone and unwanted; As far as he was concerned, such a pretty girl shouldn't have had trouble finding a whole bunch of friends that wanted nothing else in the world rather than to be by her side. He had fallen in love with her before he even knew her name, and had spent at least an hour just watching her before he finally gathered the courage to start a conversation.

And it had turned out a lot better than he'd expected. Nadine had been great to talk to; she had had a good sense of humour, similar interests as Sebastian and, as Sebastian later found out, she wasn't a she at all, but a male in his early twenties that was called Nathanael when he wasn't dressed as a woman. During that first evening, they had become really good friends, and they had continued to go to the follow-up meetings together.

Sebastian had never told Nadine that he had fallen in love with her before he discovered she was male, or how much those feelings actually confused him since he never thought that he was anything else but straight, but somehow he had a feeling he didn't have to. It was as if the pretty cross-dresser could see straight into his heart.

And the weeks had passed by; Sebastian was ashamed to admit it, but the truth was that neither he nor Nadine had ever suspected that it was something else behind the friendly meetings besides getting lonely people in their little town to get less lonely. He had seen it as a way to get away from all the troubles at home and to meet up with new friends and most of all, to see Nadine.

After a while, he even stopped questioning why there never were any signs of the arrangers at the meetings. Of course, now he knew that they had been there the whole time, watching the attendants from the shadows, but back then Sebastian had just thought that maybe there was no organisation in the meetings at all; maybe it was some kind of open house or youth recreation centre financed by the church or the police or maybe a private beneficiary, to keep troublemaking youths like himself out of the streets. God knows that the community needed a place like that. At the same time, things had happened in his home. Some neighbour had called the cops when his parents had been a little bit too loud in their drunkenness, and a social-worker had been informed about the 17-year-old boy that lived there. It had started a whole circus of bureaucracy, and finally it was decided that Sebastian would be sent to a Juvenile Home in another town to give him some change of scenery. But Sebastian didn't want change of scenery; for the first time in his life he had actually been happy where he was. But of course, no one listened to him.

And then the day had come, the day for the last meeting, and Sebastian had been heartbroken over the fact that it had to end. It would have been the end of the only joy and the only stability he had had in his life, and even though Nadine had held him closely and promised him that she would keep in contact even after the meetings had stopped, even if he had to move to another town, Sebastian had been crying from despair because he had known that she would never be able to keep that promise.

His story could in fact have ended right there; there was no doubt that he would have ended his own life, probably that very same night, if it hadn't been for the almost unbelievable things that had happened on that last meeting.

While Sebastian had been crying silently against his friend's shoulder, the doors had opened, and a whole new bunch of people had entered the café. Of course this wasn't something new; every week new people had come to the meetings, but this time it was something different; there had been something in their eyes that didn't exactly matched the look of the 'real' outcasts on the meetings, something serious, something calculating, like soldiers focused on a mission.

And one of them had come straight up to him. Through the blurriness of his tears, she had looked like an elf from one of Tolkien's books; her hair had been long and silver-grey like an old woman's yet her slender body and beautiful face and brown eyes so bright that they looked almost yellow, hadn't looked a day older than twenty-five.

Her voice had been warm and welcoming. "Sebastian Cooper?" she had asked in such way that, even until this day, he still suspected that it hadn't been a question at all. "My name is Dwendelyn Blakeney, and I want to talk to you..."

Somehow, Sebastian hadn't been the least surprised over the fact that the woman, Dwendelyn, or simply Dwen, as he had been asked to call her, had known his name; it had felt like she was an old friend that had known him for a long time, and that he'd just forgotten all about her until that evening. The thought that she may be some kind of social worker, there to pick him up and take him away to the new place, entered his mind, but then he noticed that others were being approached in the same way, and his feelings had turned from dread to curiosity in a matter of seconds.

They had sat down at a small table, and Sebastian had seen how Nadine had left with an old man that had to have been one of Dwen's companions. He had assumed that the man had wanted to talk with her about the same thing that the woman had wanted to talk about with him.

Dwen had smiled a nervous smile. "Sebastian, I won't blame you if you don't believe a word that I tell you right now, but I must ask you to let me finish before you judge what I have to say..." and then she had started to tell him her story.

She had told him about 'Lilii Negri,' the Black Lilies, which was the vampire society she was a part of, though they almost never called themselves vampires. It was a word the mortals used, and misused, as a term for almost anything that drank blood, sucked life-force or acted as a parasite in any way, until the lilies couldn't identify themselves with it anymore.

She told him about Cain, who had been the firstborn son of Adam and Eve and who had received the dark gift, or maybe it was more like a curse, from the succubus queen Lilith at the beginning of time.

She told him about the two major clans: 'Lilii Nocis,' the Night Lilies, who lived like families in the cities, trying to blend in as much as they could, creating secret alliances with chosen mortals to secure their surviving and to keep them safe from people who wanted to harm them, and 'Lilii Mortis,' the Death Lilies, who lived individually away from the society and made no attempt to hide what they were from the few mortals around them, instead keeping them in line by giving gentleness and prosperity to those loyal to them, and torture and death to the ones that betrayed them.

She told him about the two kings, one for each clan, Varnakan and Siramis, who ruled the clans with an iron fist, and about the special group of 'Lilii Nocis' called 'The Recruiters' that once a year held some kind of happening for the mortals, a happening that actually was nothing else but a cover for the Recruiters' one and only purpose: to find people that were suitable to become lilies.

If the mortal agreed, then members of the Recruiters would become Blood-fathers and Blood-mothers to them, rebirth them and take care of them in their new life as creatures of the night. And if they didn't agree, there were ways to simply erase the mortal's memory of the whole thing and let him or her go back to their old life with no recollection of the offer they had rejected.

And then finally, Dwen had gotten to the reason why she was there. She had asked him if he wanted to join them, to become a member of her undead family. And Sebastian had said yes.

He had died in her arms that night and had awoken reborn, a lily of the clan 'Lilii Nocis.'

Dwen had showed him the world of the lilies and had introduced him to her companions from the meeting; almost all of them had had newly reborn lilies at their side. And the thing that had made Sebastian even happier and had made him start to cry again, but this time tears of joy, was that Nadine had been one of them. He had hugged his friend tightly, and they had promised each other that they would meet again soon. Then Nadine had left with Jeffrey, her Blood-father, and Sebastian and Dwen had continued to explore his new existence together.

Sebastian liked the title 'Blood-mother' because that was exactly what Dwen felt like to him, especially the mother-part; she had filled a void inside of him and had become the mother he wished his biological mother had been.

As for his real parents, Sebastian didn't think that they actually missed him. He had kept an eye on them for several weeks after his rebirth, just to see how they would react when he disappeared, and the reaction had been absolutely nothing; no worried phone calls to acquaintances or hospitals to try to find him, no putting up missing-persons posters in the neighbourhood and no reporting him missing to the police. In fact, they probably didn't even notice he was gone.

A loud yawn from a man with raven-black hair and purple eyes woke Sebastian from his stroll down memory lane.

"I'm sorry," the man said apologetically and turned to Dwen, who was sitting on a chair in front of all the others, going trough her notes a final time. "But I think I speak for all of us, Dwendelyn, when I ask why in Cain's name are we having a meeting in the middle of the day?"

Dwen smiled sadly. "That's a good question, Shaun, and the answer is not a very pleasant one. It isn't safe for us anymore to have our meetings during the night; those cursed hunters..." she swallowed the rest of the sentence in an angry mutter and looked down on her notes to collect herself again. "We will talk more about that later; now it's about time to start the meeting, don't you think?" She offered the man she'd called Shaun a small smile and rose from her seat. "I know we all are very tired, so let's try to make this as brief as we can."

"My friends, a year has passed since our last campaign. As you might remember, last year our main focus was with the outcasts and people that felt lost and lonely in general, and, if I may say it myself, it was a great success. Last year's campaign resulted in nothing less than 24 new lilies.”

Those last words made the assembled lilies burst into spontaneous applause, and Sebastian felt himself blush as some of the older lilies gave him and the other last-year's-campaign-newcomers a warm look.

"This year..." Dwen continued, after the applause had died down. "...The council has decided to do a campaign based on the increasing interest for the paranormal and the supernatural. According to our researchers, such subjects are really popular right now, both in literature and in the media, and we have seen a rising number of movies and TV shows that deal with the supernatural, both fiction about witches and vampires as well as documentaries about haunted houses and communications with the other side, so we're going to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak." She took a sip from a bottle filled with blood and continued.

"Most of you know how we work already, but I'll say it one more time for the newcomers. A campaign usually starts with the advertisement; that means putting ads in different newspapers and putting up posters at schools, clubs, malls and other public notice boards. We will do that for about two weeks, and then we come to the big event."

"As you can see in your pamphlets, the council has invited several talented lecturers to come and hold seminars on different subjects concerning the supernatural, and, once again, as usual, we Recruiters will be there undercover to keep an eye out for candidates."

"Jeffery," she nodded to the older man who was Nadine's Blood-father, and he smiled back at her. "And I will be in charge of the name-list this year, so if you see someone that you think is suitable to become one of us, give their name to us, and then when the campaign is over, we will assign names from the list to those of you that have a licence and follow standard procedure for the rebirth." She smiled warmly, but then the smile died on her lips.

"I know I said the same thing last year, but things have changed, so it's really important that you remember this; you must never, ever, ever even hint to the mortals about what we are, no matter how suitable or interested they seem to be. As I said in the beginning of the meeting, there are hunters out there, hunters that have no other wish in the world than to watch us being staked or burned in the sun."

"I know we don't live in the Middle Ages anymore, but the Inquisition has had and still has active groups all over the world, and we have all the reason to believe that one of those groups is here in this very town right now. During the last months, seven of us have been found dead and one is still missing, so I want all of you to be very careful out there, both during the campaign and in general. Promise me that!" Dwen looked very serious for a moment, but then her smile returned and she shook her head.

"However, hunters or not, we do have a campaign to think about, so I guess that's it for today; you can pick up posters on the way out, and I'll let you know about the time and place for our next meeting."

As the lilies started to move towards the door, picking up the posters they were assigned to put up, Sebastian folded the now illustrated pamphlet into a small square and put it in his pocket before he went to talk to Nadine. His friend wasn't dressed like a girl, for once. Instead, he was wearing a pair of tight-fitting jeans and a Spider-Man t-shirt, but he was still cute; too cute to be a guy, Sebastian thought with a lovelorn sigh.