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A peaceful, wise, yet highly elitist species through whose veins – according to the legends – pure light flowed, primarily granting them the ability to heal living beings.

They were said to be the direct descendants of Celestia, just as we were the direct descendants of the four elemental gods.

The Lucillians were said to live well over a thousand years, to be tall, and to have hair – in the few mosaics where they weren’t wearing masks, ranging from light brown to gold to white – that grew brighter with each passing year because their bodies produced light. On their backs, so it was said, white markings grew that resembled star patterns, and their eyes, according to the scriptures, were completely white.

A single bite was enough to completely heal a wounded person’s body. Whatever that meant...

According to the legends, millennia ago the Lucillians had retreated into the heavens among the stars, where – far away from all the shadows of this world – they waited for us, the Quatura, to pave the way for them so that they could reclaim their promised land, where they would live in harmony with the Quatura under the Union of Light Species.

The Councils even claimed that the Lucillians had turned their backs on the Quatura because we had tolerated the darkness of this world and neglected our own traditions out of fear and cowardice toward the other species and humans.

They saw the Lucillians as the Lightbringers who, as soon as they returned, would destroy all darkness in this world and restore Quatura society to its former glory.

We followed the Lucillian scriptures so strictly that we even lived according to the Lucillian Star Calendar and used it to try to date prophecies from other texts. And yet, people hardly spoke of them, because they feared provoking their wrath with the wrong words or impatience and thereby further delaying their return.

Jesus Christ, as well as other holy figures from sacred scriptures who had fallen into the hands of human and been misinterpreted, are said to have belonged to this species.

And some Quatura even went so far as to claim that the child from the prophecy would herald the return of the Lucillians.

I was among those quiet skeptics who were convinced that this was a massive misinterpretation, because the Quatura worshipped just about everything written in the sacred texts. Things that no longer existed. It was like a melancholy over something whose existence one would never experience, and which one romanticized precisely because one didn’t know its dark sides.

My gaze drifted down the three Lucillians, and the thin silver chains hanging around the waists of the two Lucillians in the back, with a moonstone in front of their reproductive area, revealed that they were female priestesses.

“Julie”

Alan Wake

Petri Alanko

My head snapped around.

Amara.

She stood there in her black Domini robe, also accompanied by two Custodes.

“Follow me to my study.”

Automatically, I nodded because there had never been any reason to disobey Amara. She had raised me and never treated me like Gloria had, even though she had barely had any time for Grace and me because her position as mayor and her role as Domini took up all her time.

Grace had therefore been raised mostly by Quatura nannies, and I had managed just fine on my own, even though I had also had nannies, whom I could no longer remember. Just like most things that had happened back then…

Amara turned away, toward the spiral staircase she had come down from, and the two Custodes followed her back up.

My gaze lingered on the two-meter-tall statue of a Lucillian priestess in the center of the corridor hall dressed in a white robe, wearing a honeycomb mask, holding a star in her lowered hand and pointing with the other toward the mosaic on the wall.

I found my attention increasingly drawn to her moonstone, an unfamiliar feeling taking hold of me, but when the Custodes’ staring gaze behind me made it impossible for me to concentrate on the statue any longer, I turned and followed Amara up the grand spiral staircase.

Only after the Custodes had closed the double doors to Amara’s venerable underground study did she step around her desk and sit down, her eyes fixed on the table as if she were searching for something, before reaching for a document and pulling out a thin gray folder bearing the Councils’ silver R.

Something was bothering her. Opening that folder usually caused her to completely lose her warm, composed demeanor.

“Julie. You’re not going to like this, but the Councils just informed me of the mandatory rituals you’ll have to undergo.”

Something in my stomach sank heavily, and it felt as if I were losing control over my limbs.

What rituals?

It was already enough for me that the Consignat was now allowed to touch my stomach every week, and that I was summoned to the Council Hall every month to listen as bitter women, dissatisfied with cross-species politics, decided my fate.