"They're coming. We have very little time," Commodore XD said, taking his wife's hands in his own.
"No! I will not abandon my beloved children."
"We have no choice. It's their only chance to survive."
I knew your father was right, but I was never good with human words and chose to remain silent. Your mother let out a dreadful scream when I took you in my arms. You were so small you could have fit inside a shoebox. They say it's often like that with twins, who tend to come out a little earlier than other children. It's certainly due to the lack of space.
I looked at your mother one last time. Her long hair, as blond as golden threads, was braided. As for her eyes, I could not tell you their colour, because I had never seen them. When one looked at her, two discs were missing where the pupils should have been. How can one tell the difference between a black object that reflects no light and a part of the visual field that is simply absent? It's a bit like thinking about what lies behind one's head. It's not black; it's just not visible, out of reach.
It was much the same with your mother's eyes. They were beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, and even of ordinary immortals. Your father used to say she had the most beautiful eyes in the world, a colour that does not exist in the rainbow. It's hard to picture, isn't it? But how would you explain colour to someone who is blind, and how would you describe it?
I took you in my arms and carried you down to the cellar without looking back. Your parents' suffering was unbearable. They had feared this moment more than anything in the world. Being separated from one's children is by far the most atrocious thing one can experience. That is why they were ready to welcome death without faltering, with unwavering determination and strength multiplied tenfold.
As for you, no one, absolutely no one, was ever to know that you existed, and that secret has been kept until this very day. If you had to wait until you were thirteen, it is because that age marks the entry into early adulthood. It is the moment when parents and children take two different paths and are legally dissociated. Adults are no longer responsible for the actions of their offspring, and young adolescents have two choices: either to inherit everything their parents left them, or to renounce it.
Adherence and dissociation are complete and absolute. This means accepting fortune as well as debt, the good and the bad. Sentences are transmitted as well. In your case, you would be burned alive after being tortured, which is not a particularly appealing prospect.
If you renounce your inheritance, you must also renounce all the material goods you possess, namely this house and the gold coins in the chest. Even if this may seem disappointing, I am rather inclined to recommend this option. It would break my heart to have invested so much energy in your upbringing only to see it all go up in smoke, figuratively and literally.
It was I who protected this place with a magical barrier. The forest is the best guardian in the world, but I fear it will not be enough once the soldiers learn of your existence and demand your decision. They would be capable of burning the entire forest to reach you, even of destroying the planet.
It was also magic that shielded you from the sounds of the battle that raged while we hid underground. I wish I could have covered my ears, but my powers of perception forced me to follow the events against my will.
"My augmented vision no longer works. I'm completely blind!" your father cried out.
"Take off your mask," your mother replied. "And get rid of your external modules immediately."
Commodore XD had no time to respond, for the Celestial hackers had already taken control of his operating system. They reversed the laser beam of his mask to burn out his eyes, and his auditory prostheses emitted ultrasounds so powerful they attacked his brain. He would have liked to scream in pain, but his vocal cords had been disabled, leaving him no way to express what it feels like when one's head explodes from the inside.
He collapsed to the ground, all two metres and one hundred and twenty kilos of him, but he was not dead. I wish I could tell you it was because he had somehow managed to withstand the attacks of the Celestial army, but the only reason he was spared was so he could suffer longer.
Completely paralysed and blind, your father was left with only one vital function still active: pain. His tormentors, more than a thousand kilometres away, did not even have to dirty their hands to torture him. All it took was the press of a button to make him believe the soles of his feet were burning and his fingernails were being torn out.
Your mother naturally threw herself upon him to try to comfort him, but he could not even feel the contact of her hand around his own. What? I haven't told you her name yet? Marguerite. Your mother was Princess Marguerite, daughter of a goddess and a demon. She possessed immense magical power, so vast that even she sometimes struggled to grasp its full extent.
They say that if her mother bequeathed her beauty, it was from her father that she inherited her impenetrable eyes, whose colour was that of hell. Yet although her father was a malevolent and cruel creature, I believe his heart always remained perfectly pure. Some things are hard to explain, such as a demon whose daughter is an angel and whom he loves above all else.
Unfortunately, these magical powers earned her a lifetime of persecution, until your father, commander of the Celestial Force sent to kill her, fell in love with her and turned against those who had built him. He was one of the most successful models ever produced, thanks to the most advanced techniques, of course, but also to physical and mental strength beyond the norm. Enhancement systems are nothing without a solid foundation and a naturally powerful body.
As your father prepared to imprison her in a Timagic cage, things did not go as planned. At the moment their eyes met and your mother was about to turn the colossus before her into stone, he discovered the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen and fell instantly, madly in love.
It seems the feeling was mutual, for Princess Marguerite took advantage of that infinitesimal moment when soul and body are dissociated, when the mind completely loses control over the body, to deactivate Commodore XD's control chip. She then hurried to extract it from his spinal cord and destroyed it forever. For the first time in his life, your father was free to think for himself.
Having regained his free will, he understood that he was about to commit an act whose sole purpose was to help the Celestial Authority tighten its grip on the world by repressing all forms of dissonant thought. I say dissonant, not rebellious, because your mother asked for nothing more than to live peacefully in this world. Her natural magic was perceived as a threat, and only artificial forms, which the Celestial Forces could control through enhancement systems, were permitted.
Less than a hundredth of a second later, Commodore XD killed the soldiers with a neutron beam. He made sure they died instantly and without suffering, for although he had no intention of harming them, he could not let them bear witness to what had happened. He had to act very quickly, destroying their communication module before a single image could reach the Celestial surveillance centre, which collected every image of the population at every moment, without their knowledge. No one could escape the permanent control of the global security system.
Thanks to your father's perfect knowledge of computer systems and your mother's magic, they managed to evade the soldiers of the Celestial Order sent after them and took refuge deep within the Cajoux Forest, several thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited place. This is where we are now. This is where they lived a passionate love, where they conceived you, and where you were born.
Far from abandoning the hunt or losing their trail, the Celestial Forces launched their attack shortly after your birth. After reducing your father to a vegetative state, they turned on your mother. But those cowards knew they could not confront her directly and remained safely hidden behind their screens.
They unleashed swarms of combat drones over the clearing. These accursed machines fell in wave after wave, which your mother bravely repelled, striking them down with cosmic rays. How many were there? Hard to say. Several hundred thousand, perhaps millions.
As the battle wore on, the princess began to feel her resources dwindle. The cosmic power was slowly leaving her, without her understanding why. What she did not know was that the drones had been built entirely from Timagic. The Celestial Forces had moved mountains to harvest phenomenal quantities of the precious ore and had spent an entire year constructing both their machines and their plan of attack.
Their goal was precisely that your mother would pulverise them and cause them to crash to the ground all around her, thereby building her own Timagic cage. There had never been any intention of harming her with the laser beams they fired, which were nothing more than crude decoys. The greater the quantity of Timagic, the more her magical power and strength diminished. Thus, their plan worked perfectly.
When she had been reduced to a mere human, mortal like any other, they sent a saber-drone to cut off her head. They did not even have the courage or decency to dispatch one of their warriors. The device was equipped with two giant pincers, which she did not try to evade. Her time had come.
It took me years to clear away all the wreckage. At first it was unbearably difficult, since I had lost almost all my powers. Then, little by little, as I managed to move the masses of Timagic away from this place, my strength slowly returned. I recovered the full extent of my power today, after unearthing the last drone and sending it into space.