A/N: Apologies for the delay; it seems as though many of my files got corrupted somehow and I ended up needing to rewrite the rest of this section.

ASTERISM: GROWING PAINS

noun:

1. neuralgic pains which occur in the limbs of some young children.

2. the difficulties experienced in the early stages of an enterprise.

(taken from the Oxford dictionary)

Date: XX-XX-89X CE.

After enough seasons pass, time feels immaterial. The seasons are all that we care about, and there are days when all that you notice is the sun rising and setting. Its passage in the sky is meaningless, and your body itself mocks its presence by shimmering under its light. These times were drowsily idyllic for the siblings- they were spent calmly searching within themselves to find the depth and vastness of their potential.

Our gifts are a strange and wonderful well. Many past generals have insisted on a distinctively mortal style of training: they choose to enforce tactics and insist on physical training. The body of someone who is Kindred is inherently perfected. Our muscles cannot be further built, our reflexes cannot be further tuned. What those kinds of generals are actually instilling is paranoia, fear, and doubt. Most do not know this. A select few do and still insist on it. Perhaps it creates a more loyal soldier; I personally believe that it is the hubris and ego of the general that benefits from this.

Our kings have recognized the foolishness of this level of training and instead devote our hours to having us meditate on our gifts, find the trigger within ourselves that allows us to hold them in the palm of our hands, and then learn to activate it whenever we wish. It is a lesser-known fact that all Kindred are gifted in some way, and it is only through those rigorous mental exercises that we fully unlock them. Our gifts define our skill in combat, not our base reflexes or strength.

Isabella and Jane unlocked their gifts almost immediately after awakening, but it took Alec a bit longer for his to manifest. What formed was a cloying cloud, an analgesic that reaches out and touches the mind and casts it in sickly shadow. Alec's gift is one that touches us often; it is so rare to see a group of our kind coexist as we do, and tempers rise as prides are injured. The mist that Alec lazily drizzles on us during meetings is little more than a buzzing at the back of the head, a finger that hushes that part of the mind that begs for retribution. I have been touched by Alec's true gift only once, and this is what I can say about it: it is not nothing, it is not an emptiness, but it is a separation. It is the feeling that your body exists within your skin, it presses you firmly into a ball that is suspended within the shell that is the body, unable to interact with anything in the world around you. It is isolating. It is cold. It is terrifying.

And he paints you with it with a beatific smile, always.

In this dappled twilight, this haze of years that settled upon the siblings three, two more Kindred sought out our Kings. What remained of the once powerful Brandenburg coven escaped an attack by the Romanian coven and beseeched the Grey King for asylum and a chance at vengeance. Chelsea was instructed to tie them to the Kings, and as Isabella watched a film of subservience wash over their eyes where they lay prostrate, she watched on impassively. To this day, Isabella does not view Corin or Santiago as particularly noteworthy figures. Her gaze passes over them as though they were merely works of art commissioned by our triumvirate.

She is not particularly loved by them, either, but really, she is not loved by many.

It is good, then, that the members of the elite guard are among those who came to love her, and the twins as well.

I would be loath to forget the other preexisting member of the Volturi guard. Chelsea and Afton had been with the brother-kings for centuries before our subjects of interests joined them, yes, but Felix too accompanied them. Felix predated the Kings' wars; he had always been a loyal man, and when Lord Caius chose him as a childe he gained a follower who was willing to use his full brutish strength for our Black King's cause. There are times during which I would view Felix's actions as foolish, had I not known of his strange chivalry.

As such, when Lord Caius instructed him to keep an eye on the newest guards, he followed his orders gravely, even when that meant following dear Jane as she hunted.

The hunt is perhaps the most sacred of our traditions. When we hunt, we lose all humanity. We become predator and anything with a pulse unfortunate enough to come across us becomes our prey. It is not uncommon for all control of a gift to slip away either, especially if we are younger. Eagerness can be tempered; instinct cannot.

You can probably imagine the scene that Jane caused when feeding. I had the fortune to be changed centuries after Jane was inducted into the guard, but Felix says that it was chilling to behold, all shrieks and sobs and begs for mercy and snarls that paint those all into utter silence. It is one of the reasons why our Grey King ushered her to fully master her gift as soon as she could.

On one of these routine hunts near the end of the ninth century, Felix was sent to shadow Jane and to instruct her to return to the kings afterwards.

Felix says it wasn't a hunt that he pulled Jane from. He came across her, lying in the middle of a forest clearing, staring into the sun. She remained perfectly still, a crystal-cut statue shimmering strangely in the half-light of the undergrowth.

Jane barely remembers that day. She thinks she was musing about who she used to be.

Our human memories are a strange phenomenon. We know them to be true and untrue all at once, for they are who we were and who we will never again be. They live in our shadows, in the backs of our minds, in the way that the trees sometimes sigh with a breeze as they always shall. Sometimes, they are fleeting. Transient. Nothing more than a thought that passes through the conscious, gone before one realizes it was there to begin with. More often than not, they cross our minds.

I can't speak for anyone else, but they are always unwelcomed in my head.

So when Felix came across Jane, lying on her back on the mosses and grasses and soil of the forest, he did not rouse her. He sat at the edge of the clearing, waiting for her to sit up and look to him. Jane's gaze, even without the flash that bursts through her eyes when she is using her gift, is penetrating, probing. I assume that Felix was used to it by that point, for I cannot imagine him flinching.

"Master Aro wishes to speak with all of us," he said. "Master Caius asked that I come and request that you return immediately." Felix has always been terse, to the point.

Jane has never been a hugely obedient person, and so when she narrowed her eyes and let out her breath in a single quick puff, Felix was not surprised. Perhaps if it wasn't Jane, he would even have allowed himself a wry thought at how the siblings seemed to merely put up with the Grey King, despite clearly feeling compelled to stay no matter what their outward sentiment indicated.

And yes, before you ask, their attitude towards him does shift. They are as loyal to all three of our Kings as I am now.

When Jane returned to the clearing where she awoke from the turning, she found that everyone else had already gathered. She darted to Isabella's side, flanking her with her twin.

"My dear children," the Grey King said. "You are all training exquisitely. These past few decades have proven to me your loyalty and dedication to our cause. Your progress has been seen, noted, and cherished within the coven. We thank you for your work.

"This is perhaps the first decree that we will carry out as a unified coven and guard. Word has reached me that our allies in Egypt have seen fit to abandon half of their own to fall in combat against our nemeses. We go now to see exactly why they fled, rather than standing with their own, and to see if they require help."

"Of course," the Black King drawled, "if they do require some sort of assistance, we will have to exact a certain price, depending on what they can offer."

"Of course," the Grey King echoed. "But first: some of our guards haven't received their silhouettes yet. Those who have completed their training to a satisfactory level will be given that honor now."

Corin and Santiago eyed the siblings with some envy as they stepped forward, but said nothing of injustice. They hadn't reached the level of proficiency that our Kings require of their guard. It does not matter for this story, anyhow; they received their own cloaks in due time.

Each King gave the sibling he sired a cloak that looked woven from thunderclouds.

Perhaps you have seen our cloaks. They appear bulky, they hang from our shoulders down, and they transform whoever is wearing one into a shadow. All semblance of their bodies is hidden behind a sheet of shimmering darkness. They serve one purpose: to turn their wearer into just one of many, a single silhouette among a crowd.

You understand why our Kings call them our silhouettes, now.

There is, of course, some sense of hierarchy in the shades of our silhouettes. Those of the basic guard aren't given the depth of darkness that the elite guard are, and only the coven wears a black that truly turns one into a being of night.

Isabella, Jane, and Alec did not seem to care for how high their starting rank; they simply donned the cloaks they were given, getting used to the weight of the fabric around their shoulders. They feel rather restrictive, despite being made of comparatively lightweight material, and no guard appreciates them outside of their symbolism until after their first century of duty.

I'd imagine that Jane was the first to voice displeasure at the constricting cloaks, perhaps with no more than a narrowed gaze or almost inaudible hiss. It's a typical response; I simply cannot imagine Isabella or Alec's typical mask cracking even from the discomfort forced upon them.

The ceremony ended with the three new guards bowing to the Kings in deference and walking to stand with their now-peers.

"We will leave for Egypt as soon as everyone is ready," the White King stated. "Be wary; we have not spoken with Amun in quite a few centuries. He may have acquired allies that we have not been informed of. Do not drop your guard, even before we formally meet with him. Many of us will stay on the outskirts of the city; Caius and Aro will take some of the guards when they speak with Amun. It will hopefully be a short visit." He looked over the gathered group. "Gather anything you wish to carry with you so we may go."

It took perhaps half of the day to get to Egypt. Alec says that he and his sisters did not like it at first. They had lived in Britannia for their entire mortal lives and for that first stint of eternity; to go from somewhere cloudy and relatively humid to somewhere bright and arid was a shock. I assume they adjusted quickly after those first few seconds in Egypt.

Despite the kings' apparent rule over all of the world's Kindred, they do typically allow regions to govern themselves, only stepping in when everything seems to be getting out of hand. The underside of Egypt was cast in a civil war between all of its factions, one that only ended after our kings' visit to now-Pharaoh Amun and assistance given. After the coven and guard left, it is said that Amun returned to the battlefield with an unknown ally and systematically decimated those other factions that attempted to fight against him and seized their loyalty through promises of violence that softened into leadership; even the Horus Faction he once led bowed to his new Osiris Faction's might. I cannot speak to the veracity of those claims, for I care as little for the Egyptians' infighting as they do my knowing about it.

I have only ever observed the Pharaoh Amun and his shadow of a mate when the Egyptian coven is summoned to our keep. He would dwarf any mortal with his presence and height alone, though our kings look at him as though he is merely a smudge painted on the ground. He shimmers when he walks, and when he entertains guests, he is said to wear a mask that covers his head and denotes him as eternal pharaoh.

Amusing, it is, that a god to mortal men bows to our kings.

I know little of the meeting that occurred back then. Our Grey and Black Kings took with them a guard that included Isabella, Alec, Jane, Chelsea, and Felix. I imagine that Pharaoh Amun hid behind his mask of gold and lapis and glass, and after the visit concluded, the kings emerged, one guard left behind and another in their wake. I do not know why Demetri chose to abandon his sire and follow the kings; I suspect it has something to do with Chelsea, but even after she relinquished her grip on many other guards, he stayed. Perhaps there is more to it than that; perhaps it has to do with the glimmer in Felix's gaze whenever he looks upon that newer of guards. I have asked Demetri; he merely smiled serenely and tapped his temple. Infuriating, quite frankly.