Damian blinked, then looked at Lilith with a raised eyebrow. She looked back at him with a cocked head. "I heard the same thing, big brother."
Slowly, he turned back to look at his sombre mother, his eyes full of shock. For some reason, this news hit Damian harder than finding out about his parentage. "What do you mean… we were created?" he muttered softly, his brows furrowed.
Turning on her side to look at her children, Lavinia sighed, her eyes complicated and compassionate. "You both know about the primogenitors of the Eldkin, right?"
"Of course!" Lilith immediately answered smugly, eager to demonstrate her knowledge. "About a thousand years ago, they elevated our once frail species by awakening us with their blood. At first, we lived as a divided species, as each Kin-type used the Astralgates to propagate themselves across the stars."
Her expression took on something more heroic, as she clearly admired the heroes of old. "But then, we started encountering the Xelthari and the Zhra'Karn, two warring alien races who wanted to draw us into their conflict! So, the primogenitors of old convinced their children to band together into the Eldkin cooperative for mutual protection."
Finished with her explanation, Lilith nodded with a self-satisfied smile. "And now, here we are!"
Wryly, Lavinia looked at her proud daughter and unwillingly shook her head. "Unfortunately, that's only partly true. The truth is… a little different, and a carefully hidden secret in the cooperative."
Lilith pouted unhappily. Her gaze was focused intently on Lavinia, waiting for her to explain exactly what was wrong with her knowledge. Damian, too, looked at Lavinia ponderously. His knowledge was no different from Lilith, whose head he started petting to soothe her.
Leaning on her elbow, Lavinia looked at her children seriously and started to explain: "Before we became the Eldkin, we were called humans, a frail species, as you said. The exact origin of humankind was and is lost to history, but… we know the Xelthari encountered their kind on several different planets, always in varying stages of technological and societal development."
Seeing she had her children's attention, she continued sombrely. "Unfortunately, their brutal war with the Zhra'Karn was real, and as a species with low birth rates, the Xelthari were in need of cannon fodder… so they set about turning the humans into a slave race."
"They didn't have an easy time of it, though," Lavinia snorted. "The humans were willful—but weak and technologically underdeveloped. None of the planets they encountered them on could provide any serious physical resistance, but they were always resisting the Xelthari's rule on a spiritual level, even after subjugation."
"That, in combination with their relative weakness, actually made them poor cannon fodder," she chuckled with a kind of mocking edge directed at the Xelthari. "But then they discovered the human genome was surprisingly… malleable. So, they set about genetically modifying their subjects, creating the Eldkin primogenitors."
Lavinia's brows furrowed with uncertainty. "I… don't know how the Xelthari kept their creations under control, but the primogenitors went around awakening regular humans into various kinds of Kin that resembled themselves, thus creating the Bloodkin, Moonkin, Amberkin, Sunkin, etc."
Damian chimed in as understanding dawned, his brows furrowed sombrely. "And since progenitors have influence over those they turned, I bet the primogenitors had influence over their entire sub-race, right…?"
"That's right," Lavinia nodded wryly. "After all the humans under the Xelthari had turned into Eldkin, they were subject to the will of their primogenitors, who told their kin to fight in the Xelthari armies."
"So… what happened?" Lilith asked, entranced by her mother's story, and desperately curious about how the Eldkin gained their freedom.
Unfortunately, Lavinia was forced to disappoint her adopted daughter. "I…'m not sure, Lili," she muttered, helplessly shaking her head, eyes turned up. "At one point, there was a rebellion, and the Eldkin cooperative broke free from the Xelthari."
Her brows furrowed as she sat up slightly. "From what I've been able to gather, it was somehow related to the catalysts, interference from the Zhra'Karn, and weakening influence from the primogenitors. But the specifics are unknown to me."
Lilith and Damian both simply nodded at her last reason. It was well known that the influence a progenitor could exert on their scion would wane over time, and it wasn't much of a stretch that it worked the same for primogenitors.
"Okay, I can see the weakening influence and the Zhra'Karn being involved, but what could catalysts have had to do with it?" Damian asked curiously, with a hint of concern.
To Damian's knowledge, catalysts were the only method Eldkin could use to interact with myst, the energy that permeated the universe, thereby empowering their bodies and Eldkin abilities.
Obviously, they were critically important, as the Eldkin would be almost defenceless against a dangerous universe without them, but they weren't particularly difficult to make. Even Damian could create a makeshift version of a catalyst.
Yet, they were obviously a prevalent part of Eldkin society. Eldkin children would usually bond with one in the first few years of their lives, and occasionally exchange it for something better later on, if they got the opportunity.
Of course, you'd need to be at least upper-lower class to afford one. They may be simple to make, but only if you had a catalyst of decent quality to begin with. The kind of simple catalyst Damian could make, for example, was not good enough to make a third catalyst with.
It may come as no surprise that this was one of the problems Luna wanted to address in order to improve the lives of the lower class.
Regardless, Damian had plenty of reasons to be concerned about the involvement of catalysts in his mother's story.
Lavinia frowned a little uncomfortably. "Well… this part is not exactly a secret, but the cooperative does try not to advertise it too much. The thing is, we Eldkin are the only ones who actually need a catalyst to channel the power of myst."
Suddenly, Lavinia conjured something akin to a glass orb filled with a dark, misty substance. This was the Midnight Crucible, Lavinia's catalyst. Since it wasn't a weapon-type catalyst, she usually kept it within her body until she needed to channel a particularly large amount of myst.
This time, however, she simply used it as a tool to underscore her point. Dark tendrils of myst began to coil around the orb before being absorbed through Lavinia's skin. She looked intently at the process, as if deep in thought.
"Our predecessors, the humans, didn't need a catalyst, and neither do the Xelthari, or the Zhra'karn," she continued, with a hint of bitterness. "But whether by design or accident, the Xelthari's gene-modding left us without the ability to do it naturally."
At this point, it was finally time to bring it back around to Damian's matter. With a clench of her fist, she reabsorbed the midnight crucible and turned to Damian with a hint of a guilty frown. "That's what Marcus wanted to solve… and what he wanted my help for. To create an Eldkin child who didn't need a catalyst anymore."
Extending her hand, she caressed a shocked Damian's cheek gently. "To create you, Dami…"