The war was over.

For now.

It was so strange to think that we no longer had to hide in bomb shelters and pray that we weren’t going to be drowned in hellfire and lightning, and – if we happened to survive – have what remained of us picked over by hungry novus looking for easy prey.

But Campora and Victoria and decided to call a truce, which was a wild, wild thought. My entire lives they had been at each others throats, and just a year ago they were assassinating key members of each other’s leading clans.

The families in our church were trying to find a way to make sure my sisters were locked inside so they weren’t taken but also got good educations, the boys – myself included -were taught what horrible things would happen to us if we let the devilish novus seduce us, and now?

Now the two kingdoms were talking about reopening the railway that went between them. They were starting to allow their matchmakers to talk again. We had tourists against from the north.

Finally the last three seasons of my favorite Campora romantic comedy, Matchmaker Manor, were airing locally!

Some days I didn’t believe it. I think a lot of people were in shock, considering we were so used to conflicts and the sound of bomb sirens, but we were all moving on now and it was like an entirely new chapter in our lives.

But I guess, even if we were still at war, I’d be in a new chapter of my life.

I had spent most of my childhood and teenage years in the bunker the church my family was a part of, but I’d never see that again, even if the two clans decided to go at it once more. I wouldn’t be invited to the lunches, or the ceremonies...

Because I had decided to no longer be an active member.

I was still a member of the church, I couldn’t imagine not being one, but I had decided to take a step back and not be active, which meant I wasn’t actively developing my relationship with God as dictated by the church.

I was still doing it on my own terms but...not in the way they said was the right way. I prayed before bedtime, not seven times a day like the church did (before each three meals, when you first got up, when you went to bed, at sunrise and then sunset). I ate pretty much whatever I wanted instead of staying to a strict diet that was dictated by our geography, the time of year, and what sermon was given that day. I went to church, but I didn’t intend on going outside of the weekend instead of the four or so times the church required to be an active members.

I just wasn’t so sure all of that was right anymore.

It seemed...I don’t know.

There were just a lot of things I didn’t agree with that they had in their books of study, the required books of study.

I understood how intimidating novus were, and I understood that they were built differently, but I didn’t dislike novus, nor did I think they were automatically evil creatures, which was something my church preached.

I think that people should be judged based on their actions and capabilities, not just automatically damning them because they were different.

Like, a two year old novus shouldn’t be judged for biting someone because they were teething like a thirty year old novus should be judged for biting someone because they were acting out of anger. That made zero sense to me.

But in The Fellowship of the Sun, all children of the night were damned, regardless of their actions or intentions.

And that really didn’t float with me anymore.

I’m sorry, it just didn’t. When I was younger, I thought it was kind of weird, but the older I got, the more sure I was how ridiculous that was, especially when sapien children were told they were judged differently then sapien adults.

And boy, was that conversation with my parents rough.

I though my Dad was going to shoot me. He and my entire family had been very deeply involved in the church for not only my entire life, but my grandparents lives, and their parents lives. We had our black sheep, yeah, but most of them grew up to be elders of the church or important members.

And my Dad was both.

He was a church elder. He was a judge – like went through law school, had to go back to school every year for two months to prove he knew the new laws. He was a big part of our church community, and I basically told him that I didn’t like how he raised me and wasn’t going to carry on with it.

So YEAH.

He gave me a look like he was going to shoot me, and I legit thought he was going to.

But I guess I was just being dramatic, because really, only about a second or two passed between me telling my Dad that I was no longer going to be an active member of The Fellowship of the Sun and my Dad saying that I only had option unless I wanted to be completely shunned by the family.

And that was going to Liliport University and become a medical doctor (or engineer...or lawyer).

Which sucked, because I knew I wouldn’t do well in school.

I knew myself well enough to be positive that this was going to be a downhill battle, even if I knew that if and when I failed out of school, my parents – my family – might shun me because they couldn’t stand another embarrassed that I delivered them.

Because I already had a long list for them. I wasn’t smart, or friendly, or athletic, things all of my ten other siblings were. They were doctors, or lawyers or engineers. All of them. And the ones that weren’t were well on their way to being that. The church I was raised in, the one my Dad was an elder in, really drove home how it was our job as soldiers of Christ to not only populate the earth with daywalkers, but to fulfill our full potential so we could better civilization.

Daywalker civilization, of course.

The nightwalkers already had a leg up with their intelligence. I was twenty, and at my age, most novus were entering their doctorate programs or were well settled into whatever career they had – hell, if they were a type A novus and mated, they were probably staring their second doctorate program. The difference in basic intelligence between sapiens and novus was substantial.

But even for a sapien….

I wasn’t studious, lets just say that.

I was barely able to graduate secondary school.

What I was good at was doing church stuff – leading bible studies, and organizing activities, and – and I really loved helping kids that were kind of pushed out by society because they weren’t, you know, someone that was ‘strong’ or whatever.

Like...like there was a little blind novus boy that lived on our street, and I used to watch him while his parents were at work for some pocket change.

Deteriorating eyesight was one of the plights of the novus, but with something like five percent of the novus population, they lost their eyesight a lot faster...and Victoria was never really good at taking care of them. Most blind Novus lived in the bigger cities where there were a lot of resources for them, especially Trinity, which was designed completely around blind novus adults from The Wilds, but in a small town of Victoria?

Yeah, there was really nothing to help them.

So I’d watch him most nights while I was studying. He was only six and he’d get so frustrated, but I looked up stuff for him to do and I really loved teaching him things like cooking, and organizing his room, and how to do stuff on his own. His family ended up moving to Greater Lakes because they had a lot of resources for blind novus and they were right next to Trinity, but it always stuck with me and doing that kind of work was what I really loved.

I broached the subject of going to school for childhood development for children with special needs, specifically for blind novus, but boy – I might not have been shot my by Dad, but that idea sure was.

That wasn’t something that would further daywalker society, so my parents said no and told me to stop trying to integrate into the society of rapist and murders, the world run by children of the devil, and focus on an education that would be helpful to Jesus.

So instead of going to Mount Marshall U, which specialized in teaching programs, they made me sign up for Liliport U as someone that was going to go into a medical program.

Which was scary, because, you know.

I really, really wasn’t a good student.

I begged my parents to let me study religion instead if I had to go to Liliport U, but they told me that wasn’t going to happen because they didn’t want my spongy brain absorbing the lies of other false Gods, but…

I don’t know.

I just wanted to be useful in my own way, and I thought maybe becoming a pastor would be nice. I really liked helping people, and while doctors did help others, I just didn’t think I had the skill or stomach to reach that level. I didn’t think I could be a pastor at our church, but maybe at a different church and, you know, help improve inter-religious relationships between The Fellowship of the Sun and other churches?

Plus there were so many novus that got their first doctorate in general medicine, I mean, I just -I just didn’t think I’d really be able to ever reach their skill, and it might just be better to apply myself to studying counseling.

Some sapiens were as smart as nightwalkers, don’t get me wrong, but I was not one of those sapiens.

But you didn’t just tell your Dad no, not where I came from, so I was now a student studying medicine. It was a six year program if I took it year round, eight if I didn’t, and I’d be staying at school the entire time in a sapien only dorm, where a few others from my church, including one of my brothers, were staying.

I had my own dorm that was just big enough for a small bed, a desk, and...that was it, yeah. There was a window that stretched across the entire wall above my bed and desk, the dorm full of windows, but it was a very lonely, tiny room, which only got smaller when I pulled the curtains closed.

And once the curtains were closed, yeah, I hated it.

All those years being stuck inside the church basement made me anxious in small spaces, and my dorm was nothing if not a small space.

After a while of studying at my desk, I would get antsy, so I tried to spend as little time in my room as possible.

Walking Liliport U thought did little to calm my nerves, though. No matter where I turned, I was just reminded of all the work I had to do.

I was a year into my program, and I hated it.

I had five classes I was taking all at once, my schedule tightly controlled by the counselor of the dorm house I was living in, and so I had exactly six hours between nine and two am where someone wasn’t constantly checking on me to ensure I was doing what my schedule dictated I do. Technically I was supposed to be sleeping, showering or eating, but literally everyone else in the dorm house was sleeping, since they lived on a strict daylight only schedule, and so I used this time to explore.

Normally, I stayed close to school.

There were lots of activities on campus at night, but I was scared of making to many friends here, since word might get back to my brothers or the others from the church that went here that I was out at night messing around. All it took was one new school friend coming up and being ‘to friendly’ and my Dad would likely send me to where my grandparents were in the desert landscapes of Claymoore, where the really hardcore Fellowship of the Sun members lived right next to New Haven.

He had threatened to do that whenever I pushed to much, and even though I was not longer an active member, I’m sure he would send me there if I was shunned until I ‘shaped up’ to be a better man.

And I couldn’t go there, out in the dessert.

It was horrible for my skin.

I burned very easily.

Also, I had zero idea what the other students on campus were talking about most of the time during the mixers.

I thought maybe there would be some fun conversations I could ease drop on, but it was all about...arguments about the periodic table, and the applications of some mew artificial tendons that were being developed over in Nippon on communities dependent on plastic manufacturing, and...why it’s not practical to use a mixture of blah, blah, blah.

I didn’t understand what anyone was talking about.

So I poked around the rest of the University sector of Liliport. There were shops and theaters and other things to amuse me, and once I discovered them all, I started venturing farther out.

Last night I went to the beach and splashed around by myself in the ocean, but when the lifeguard saw I was doggy paddling alone, she told me to get out of the water since I didn’t have a novus to protect me in the dark waters.

Which was stupid because I was a strong swimmer, but I wasn’t going to fuck around with authority. I was kind of terrified of the peacekeepers from the stories I had been told at my church, and I really didn’t want to risk crossing paths with Liliport’s MAN, Terry ‘Tosser’ Humblefellow.