A Dormant Darkness

As a child, I would often lose time thinking about death and what I wanted my last rites to be. I could never explain why my mind lingered on the topic, and whenever I brought the topic up with my parents, they would immediately ask me to stop. “You shouldn’t talk about such things,” they’d say; “We’ll be long gone before, and you have a long life ahead of you.” I replied with “You never know what’s in store for you,” and left the topic there.

I understood where my parents were coming from, but it was just a topic my mind would often circle back to, though I didn’t know why. My two elder sisters were more open to hearing me out, but even they grew tired of the topic as my mind delved deeper into questions on death: what it would be like in those final moments, or just after? What lay in wait once our bodies were nothing but a memory? The young me had so many questions on her mind…

When I was in middle school, one of my friends introduced me to a fantasy game that had me hooked from the start due to its exploration of dark themes, and in it was a phrase that stuck with me: “Death is not the end.” The message, which would appear on the screen whenever our characters died, stirred something within me. I could not say where the words came from, but I wrote down my own phrase in a foreign tongue that read the same message. I asked my sisters to have the phrase carved into my tombstone if I were to ever pass away before them.

A few years later, my life came to a close… I was sixteen when I was knocked down by a car, and not an hour later, I was saying to my family, “See… You never know…” before taking my last breath. However, death, it seemed, was truly not the end for me. Just a day after my burial, I broke through the ground and shocked my family, who were crying before my grave. My two sisters screamed and backed away, while Dad attempted to calm them down. Mom smiled through her tears, a bittersweet expression shadowing her face.

“I knew this would happen,” she said. “We should’ve told you the truth.”

I was confused, frozen while trying to assess how or why I was alive again. What secrets were my parents keeping all these years? “What… What am I?” I asked.

“Let’s get you home first,” Dad said.

My sisters had questions as well, but our parents asked us to be patient until we got home. Once there, the truth unfolded before us. Our family had a dark and tragic past. Generations ago, one of my Dad’s ancestors was a witch who fell in love with a demon. The result was a demonic gene that would pass down through generations, dormant in most but rising to the surface once every few generations. My Mom was from an old line of demon hunters, so she was no stranger to the tales of the dormant demon gene. The gene was dormant in my sisters, but it was active in me. My parents said that long ago, they had made preparations for all of us to move to another country and start over. We left immediately.