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Seeing each other after two millennia is a breath of fresh air more rewarding than anything else that could fill their ancient lungs. It’s hard to say what their minds have done throughout the time they’ve spent in stone—there was both so much and also nothing at all during their stint within the rock. At least, they think, peering with narrowed eyes and lips curled into smiles both sinister and relieved at the slab of stone that has been their prison, they had lain near each other for all those years.
They were not, however, completely asleep during their time sealed away. Always listening and always learning from their surroundings, they absorbed information with an incredible finesse, neurons firing and brains molding and developing closer each day to those of the omniscient gods while their bodies lay still.
At least, during the passing of so many years, not one heart had beat for another which could not return its affection.
While the comrades entrapped in rock weren’t exactly conscious of their hibernating interactions, Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars remember all at once everything that happened since their slumber began. In seconds, they recall simultaneously their silent conversations and the emotions they’ve shared through a power transcending even telepathy.
Do today’s humans have such abilities? They aren’t sure. Perhaps the wriggling worms that call themselves Earth’s dominant race have advanced that far—they have certainly had long enough. It’s evident immediately, though, that such things are not the case.
“Perhaps they have regressed, then,” Esidisi muses, and he wants to laugh.
It seems wrong to speak aloud to one another when lesser beings are present. It’s not private enough, too impersonal; Kars and Wamuu don’t have to verbalize their response for Esidisi to understand that the three are in agreement.
When the brats approach them (just as ridiculously brash and confident as the Hamon tribe of two thousand years ago), the trio remembers their will to live, a will inexplicably strong—but for what? Their motivations are far from the same as Santana’s or Straits’—their motivations are for each other. Something deep within their subconscience dictates it, just as it dictated everything else about their fate and their power as the future’s Ultimate Beings. Nothing can stop them now that they are free, not even this rambunctious brunette with such idiotic whims. It is only a matter of time before the world is theirs and theirs alone to share. In it, they can love one another, exist together, rule together over the peasants who crawl like insects across the Earth that will belong only to them.
And yet, everything is all business until they are alone. That’s how it’s always been. Feelings for each other remain behind closed doors, the same way that burgeoning attraction lay hidden in dusty alleyways before the three were Mighty.
Once the ludicrous child has been dealt with and the rules to his silly game agreed upon, Kars, Esidisi, and Wamuu set off on a pilgrimage all their own. They begin their explorations within the city of Rome and the Italian countryside until they settle within an abandoned bungalow that can perhaps fit their needs.
Around them, as they remained frozen within an older time beneath the Coliseum, the world had changed. If the three had not been all-powerful, better than human, the shock might have concerned them. As it is, they find only amusement in the way that humanity has become even more pathetic during their time asleep.
It pushes them to appreciate themselves (and each other) even more. They are each deserving of worship, and they provide that exact attention to one another in long, unfaltering gazes and caresses that remind them of the sensation of skin and muscle and bone—to remind them what gods in the bodies of men feel like against their fingertips.
When Wamuu touches their cheeks, it’s the first time they’ve felt anything at all in how many thousands of years? The word “Master” buzzes on his tongue and echoes against their ears, and all at once they’re reminded with a communal feeling that the word has many meanings.
It is still night, so they have time to enjoy one another.
They lounge on couches torn and untouched, but it isn’t long before their eyes glimmer with the need to hunt. “Do you remember our first travels to Italy?” Wamuu muses with his lips turned up into a vicious smile. Day and night they had hunted together, for one another, gifted each other with the most delicious of prey and drained the life from each sentient being they touched. They reveled together in the stolen energy, tasted blood from one another’s lips, and shared the visceral, gory experiences as if they were the most intimate explorations.
“You were new to us, then, Wamuu. Still a child.” Esidisi chuckles when he ruffles at blonde hair. “And yet we learned all we needed to know about you from those hunts.”
“Yes,” Kars adds. “Too impulsive. Needlessly violent.” Even his criticism is cupped in a tone of affection.
They need only an hour of searching for the choicest of prey to learn that Wamuu’s characteristics have not changed. There are other things about him, too, which have remained the same.
Wamuu hates anyone in his shadow (Kars doesn’t make the same mistake twice), but that’s all right, since there are only two people who matter—one on each flank, or behind him, or in front of him, wherever his shadow isn’t. They are careful of it, and they have been for so long that Wamuu no longer feels the need to thank them. His friends and partners, his fellow Rulers have never questioned what motivates this very particular fear. There is no need, because Kars and Esidisi already know. They know that it is only because Wamuu himself desires to be the one enveloped within flickering shadows cast on walls by candles lit late into the night and by Kars standing powerful and confident with arms crossed above him.
It brings them happiness to see Wamuu back in his place when they reach their shelter, once their needs for sustenance have been fulfilled. He returns promptly to his place, kneeling in the darkness of servitude that allows him comfort.
Darkness. Oh, how the three of them have learned to claim the depths of it as their own. How they thrive in it, now.
Kars relies on Wamuu as someone who is below him but mostly as someone who will support him. Esidisi is the same, in his own way. He remembers when the support was less, when it wasn’t present at all, and it brings him back to a time when the world was simpler and their souls remained on the Western Continents.
---
Life was less than easy for Kars before he rid himself of weakness and found the blessing of something greater. Born into slavery, an infant prisoner who suffered for a crime his damned grandfather had committed, Kars remembers fondly his adoration for birds. He would watch the sky as he grew up amongst the dry desert heat and learned to rise ahead of the merciless sun, and he would find excitement in the flocks soaring so peacefully above him within the watercolor dawn.
He wondered if, someday, he might be like them and find some semblance of freedom or of worth. The birds were his comfort, while he sat cross-legged in the scarce shade and wove baskets as his mother had taught him. They would hop to him on their legs like sticks, and sometimes, if he was quiet, would flutter up onto his palm.
“What do you feed them?” a voice asked Kars one day.
A dark eyebrow rose in question, lips pressed into a thin line while his hands worked mindlessly at his craft. “Feed them?”
“The birds. What do you feed the birds? They’re so fond of you.”
Kars narrowed his eyes as he peered up at his inquirer, then finally succumbed to the noon brightness and held a hand against his forehead. The boy was his age, perhaps a couple of years older. Wild white hair, coarse like straw, escaped from any attempt to hold it in place within a head wrap. Kars understood; his own hair was growing longer and thicker and curlier by the day.
“I don’t feed them. They simply recognize me as someone with a future like theirs. I’ll fly someday, far away from here, above the clouds and towards the dark pieces of the horizon where the stars live during the day.” Kars understood not his conceit, and nor did his questioner, if the boy’s thoughtful smile was any indication.
This was before the sky went dimmer, then black, before there was thick, sticky, coppery rain the likes of which their land had never seen. The next dawn, there was naught but massacre. Bodies changed, shriveled, and dissolved to a fine dust beneath the rays of the rising sun. Whatever order had once been was no more, and Kars fled for his life with his family and the others like him until they found their only safe haven—the caves, the darkness, and their newfound hunger for flesh.
While the rest of his tribe felt only fear at the inexplicable events and at their horrifying appetites, Kars reveled in his new abilities and the power budding within his bones. The mere idea of it was addicting, and he wanted more—needed more. Murmurs about the young man’s obsession grew to accusations, both based solely in fear, and no one understood him until that same frizzy white hair approached him for the second time.
---
Kars finds a rickety chair in the old building they’ve designated as their home, for the time being, then makes the piece of junk his throne. He crosses his legs, leans on one fist—“This will do,” he tells them. “Board the windows.”
His friends do as he says, and Kars finds himself again sieving through unwanted memories. The planks nailed across the windows with manipulated, sharpened pieces of Esidisi and Wamuu’s own bones eventually shut out the artificial light from outdoors. Its presence is inexplicable to them, but they agree that the scientists mentioned something of “electricity” during their stone’s brief stay in the laboratory.
That night, their first night together in two thousand years, Esidisi squats near the bedding they’ve gathered for Kars. “And what are we to do, now that we are here? Now that we are back?”
Kars takes his beloved’s chin atop his fingers and tilts it up, then glances to his other side where Wamuu lies beside Kars’ pallet. “We do what we are destined to do,” he says. His voice is a whisper that raises pleasant gooseflesh, not unlike the sound of a gentle rain on an otherwise silent day.
Thoughts of the red stone flicker through his mind, tease him and taunt him with what it might mean to be finally free like the birds—free to ascend towards the heavens and the blazing rays of the sun. Already, Kars and his comrades have demonstrated their superiority to the human race. The sun is the last thing they must conquer. Beyond it, there is nothing but luxury, power, satisfaction, and affection for one another.
“And we are destined to rule.”