Born of Gods

Chapter 1—No Birthday Party???

“We should have had soup,” Phil said feigning a frown while sticking a chocolate candy bar in his mouth and fondling his hair with his other hand. “At least we could have taken some spoons and we would be no later than we already are. But no, classic Mike had to be so ‘soap opera-dramatic.”

Mike was few feet ahead of Phil, who was trailing behind, talking non-stop. Mike and Phil were cousins, though they regarded themselves as brothers and many confused them to be so as mysteriously, they were lookalikes. Not just that they were like identical twins but they had the same genotype, blood group, dentition and what was so weird that it completely bewildered Joyce Patterway (Joyce Patterway) was that they had the same fingerprints, she learnt that as Mike had often helped her open Phil's phone to see what he was up to...it was always one dirty message or the other.

No. Mike and Phil were the same. Good thing they had very different fashion s

lenses—that was the only way anyone could identify either of them. Even Carter Patterway, Mike's Dad, would take Phil as Mike if he was in a long-sleeved shirt and plain( no design whatsoever) jean trousers. In exception of Joyce—she could tell who was who if she had no eyes. She loved both her son and nephew a lot and treated them as equals. She had the responsibility of being a mother to Phil too, whose mother—Joy—her twin sister, was always travelling from one place to another and always working on different jobs. That had simply meant Phil was a part of the Patterway family, not as an extended part but seen integrally as family.

“Seriously, you are lucky I don't know. . .I mean I don't find it all that easy to navigate in the woods at night, which is relatively normal by the way.” Phil rambled on.

“Genius, why am I so lucky?"

“Don't you see why? If I could find my way to the cave, I won't need to follow you like a candy-hungry kid who could jump a beggar, you know"

Mike chuckled briefly. “You sure say a lot of stupid things"

“Yes, if I say stupid. . .well, I'm not the amateur who's taking us round and around the forest. We've spent like thirty-five minutes ‘moroning’ ourselves in this forest. The others must have gotten there at the least, hours. . . ."

“...you have yourself to blame for that. And yes, I'm passing a longer route so we could familiarise ourselves with this path," he shrugged and made a teasing cough. “Not like you could find your way there if I wasn't here and you had a map, though you've been there like a thousand times.”

“Ok, whatever. Whatever, whatever, whatsoever, whatever, whatever, what—”

“—can you like, um—not really asking for much, like shut the hell up." Mike blurted. “High time. Look over, see the cave? We are here, not like we walked too long.”

Phil puckered his lip and exhaled noisily. “No, we didn't walk long, only a mile or two in the forest, and at night! No sweat broken.”

The cave had become their hangout joint, their daily-go-to-spot, their little secret. They had discovered it by accident, and coincidentally, they had found out about the cave randomly. Mike was the very one responsible for the discovery. While Mike and Phil were very different they both enjoyed one thing: celebrating their birthdays together. And they had never failed to have fun on their birthday and having a jolly party with their friends. It was just their thing and they had made it into a don't of annual ritual...

something they had never failed to look forward to.

It had started since they were very little and Mrs Patterway had always taken the boys’ birthdays very importantly and the celebration of it had always been so much fun. As expected, the boys’ definition of ‘fun’ had changed as they grew. And little by little, the boys had—well—started by not really, really enjoying their parents organizing their birthday parties to, well, really, really hating it. They had decided that their birthdays would be theirs to organise and theirs alone, and have been doing a pretty nice job since they were eleven. And that meant their birthday parties didn't always feature a lot of Mr Patterway and Mrs Patterway.

And the boys were sixteen—had just clocked sixteen this very day—and it meant the world to them( or had meant the world) because they had previously planned how they would celebrate it and all they would do. How their sixteenth birthday would be so much fun, filled with friends and drinks—what else could be better, how else could a birthday be celebrated? One thing Mike and Phil had in common was their love for beer. The boys had been sneaking drinks in their rooms since they were twelve and had been hiding it under their beds since then too. Till date.

“You know what I just read? Eh, do you want to know?” Cynthia asked as the boys approached one of the entrances of the cave.

“How would we know wh—”

“—you don't need to know. I was just reading that eight out of every ten boys are stupid. Sometimes nine, though I think it's mostly ten out of ten.”

“Cynthia, what are you getting at? I'm sure you know you shouldn't always believe every blog post you read. I'm sure the blog writer is a sixteen-year-old girl who just got her heartbroken.” Phil was trying to make a joke but Cynthia wasn't having any of it.

Cynthia frowned and had both her hands on her hips, and shifted her stare from Mike to Phil in a dramatic manner. “Well, just for clarity, it wasn't a goddamn blog post, it was just a random post on my feed on Fayseboooke and I think the OP couldn't be more right.”

“Girls are girls and girls would always be girls. So what, Cynthia we are barely thirty minutes late and it's our goddamn self-cause-uncelebrated-birthday, you would do well by cutting us some slack,” Phil said pulling Mike and Cynthia as they all switched on their flashlights and got into the cave.

“Thirty minutes? You guys are more than two damn hours late. Two hours, and guess what, that's too late. Even for regular dumb boys like you both,” Cynthia yelled as they walked deeper into the cave.

“Blame Phil, he just can't resist soup."

The teens had spent a lot of money in decorating the cave, the cave wasn't big and was hidden in a very conspicuous part of the forest. It was truly a mystery that the cave even existed, Mike had always done a lot of bird watching and that meant he spent a lot of time in the woods...he could swear that the cave wasn't there three days before he found It but that would make crazy and cynical. The cave was real and he decided to convince himself that maybe he hadn't noticed it before. He and everyone else.

The cave was very small and very beautiful—if not, why would five teenagers sneak out at night to hang out in the very heart of the woods, lying to their parents that they were having sleepovers. The brownish-gold colour of the cave was so attractive and looked magical and they all had fun taking photos in the cave, though for some unexplained reasons, they had all agreed to never reveal the photos taken in the cave. Or even tell anyone of the cave.

It had been just a day after one of their midterm exams before the summer holiday. They had all been hanging out in Sarah's backyard and were all having fun until Garrett's dog had gone missing and Garrett being Garett, had been on full freaking-out mode. He had always said that Ranta—his little brown Corgi—was his emotional support animal. After searching the whole neighbourhood, the dog had still been nowhere to be found. Mike had then suggested that perhaps Ranta had wandered a little more than usual and had gotten lost in the forest. While Garret was clearly a weird kid, he was loved in a way that felt more like pity everywhere he went. Everyone loved the chubby kid who cried very often and never did anything—wrong or right.

After shedding a lot of tears, he got four adults and six kids his age—excluding Mike, Phil, Cynthia and Sarah who were also part of the search party—to help in finding little Ranta. The search in the woods had lasted for about two hours before little Ranta was found stuck in a loose rope and grass which he had somehow manage to tangle himself into. Garrett had been so happy though he had been outrageously terrified, Ranta was as safe as ever. The dog was found and Garrett and his parents thanked everyone for their efforts and concern. The dog was safe and everyone had helped in finding the lost dog.

But that wasn't all that happened. Little adorable Ranta was all that was found either.

Mike had had some findings of his own that sunny day, he had found the cave on that very day. That had been the mysterious day he found out about the cave. And for reasons still quite a mystery to him, the cave had excited him to the extreme. It had hit him different from anything he ever saw, more than just the glamour, the feeling he got from it—the connection he had with it was abnormal but different. First, it had given him the creeps though he knew the moment he saw it that he would spend more hours than he could count in the unexplainable magnificent cave. And that made him feel scared because mystery was a sort of foe to Mike. That same day Mike had told Phil, and two days later, Sarah, Garrett, and Cynthia had also become lovers of the cave. It almost felt like the cave was magical and anyone who spent time in it was bound to love it sooner or later. The sixteen-year-olds all never paused to wonder why a cave as big as that had never been discovered in Cottingham before.

“There's no need playing any game with Phil, he's always going to cheat. He's no fun to play games with,” Sarah said as she flung the cards in her hands at Phil.

“Oh really. That's the problem with 93.5% of the world's population, refusing to accept reality. I'm better at doing—well—everything than you and well, playing games is just one of the countless things I do better than you. And that includes living, I lead a better life too.”

“I won't even address the leading a better life crap, you who I won't be surprised if you ended in a rehabilitation centre. Or behind bars. That apart, you would cheat a baby in a stare contest,” Mike said supporting the annoyed Sarah who believed Phil sat on some cards, claiming he won her in a card game.

“What’s a stare contest?” Phil asked

“What should I call it, Phil? That game people play when they are bored and idle and then they look at each other in the eyes and wait for the queasy one to blink.”

“Moron. So you couldn't have called it eye blinker.”

“Eye blinker? Nobody calls it eye blinker, it's called a stare contest. I wonder where you heard eye blinker from. That's so damn weird, nobody names a game eye blinker unless if his name is Philemon and has a very weird smile. And weird everything.”

“Have you been living under a rock, nobody calls that game “stare contest.” See stupid, that game's—in fact—ok, Cynthia what do you think the game is called.”

“You guys can argue on whose fart smells more—wait— have you guys argued on that before? s**t. Hilarious. On a more serious note, I don't think that game really has a name, you know. It's really not that popular among people older than age twelve.” Cynthia said breaking in a chuckle as she spoke, though not looking at anyone as her focus seemed to be more on her phone than what she said.

One very thing about Mike and Phil was that fire didn't hurt them, never had. They were always very terrified of snow, or anything cold. They had literally begged Darsh not to throw every snowball at them when they were little...it didn't hurt them either but fire was more friendly to them. Fire didn't hurt them, couldn't hurt them, not even a little. It was just strange and Joyce couldn't bring herself to believe fire couldn't burn her son and nephew.

Mike's mother was the very first to know that weird thing about the boys and they had been seven when she had found out. Although she had always found it weird that the boys had severally put a lit candle in their nostrils, and she had s*****d them for that. Well, she had thought the boys very weird for that until she walked into the kitchen one day when the boys were just seven and had seen the strangest image of her life. Something that had almost made her go crazy. Something that would drive even a shrink nuts.

She had walked into the kitchen that day and had seen the boys naked—because most of their clothes had gotten burnt—as they sat on a lit gas stove! Someone might think Joyce would have fainted or had a cardiac arrest or something. She had lost her breath as she stared at the boys and she had gotten too scared. Not because of what she saw but of the boys, she was scared of the boys. No one could blame her, imagine seeing her little boys sitting on a standard kitchen sized gas stove, arguing always as they sat on a “seat” each. She had redefined the word “weird” in her mind and had braced herself firmly for whatever she saw from the boys because they weren't just not normal; they were something else. Something she hadn't a chance in figuring.

She had just walked towards the boys who leapt off the gas stove terrified their mother wouldn't be glad that they sat on the gas cooker, and yes, she hadn't been too happy. Taking her unclad boys to the bathroom to bathe them, she buried a thought in the innermost chamber of her heart. ‘My boys are weird.’ She never spoke about that day to anyone, not ever.

She had battled the thought and

urge to tell her husband. But she just kept telling herself, “He would die if he ever heard this, he would just fall so hard and she would become widowed.”

“Thanks for the birthday songs, you guys are the best. Makes me regret not actually having a party, for f**k sake, we are sixteen and we should celebrate it.” Mike said as his friends had sung about four popular birthday songs, all holding hands as the song went on.

Phil added. “Thanks, guys, I have always thought birthdays songs were weird but the way you guys sang it actually made it a whole lot better. And yes, I don't know why we didn't celebrate our birthday, I mean it's so damn weird. We had been planning for months and one moment we were excited about having the wildest, sexiest and the most—"

“—I definitely didn't plan on sexy and wild—” Mike interjected.

“—fun birthday party ever. And the next moment, the idea of having a party seemed to put me off completely. And Mike said he felt the same way too. That was too damn weird."

Mike and Phil had never neglected the fact that they had friends they regarded as family. The five of them loved each other as much as friends could love themselves and had many fun times and fun memories with one another. Also, the five teenagers did almost everything together, apart from bookclub where only four of them read different books in every week, Sarah found all books boring and if it didn't have pictures of Jurstin Biebar or Zainn Maalik in it, just count Sarah out.

Phil felt so bad that his own mum couldn't make it for his birthday, at least to see him, it had been at least about four months since he had seen her. And he missed her and never failed to tell her just how much he loved her. The thing was he had always had this mindset that Mr Patterway was his Dad, that one lonely day—probably the same day Mike was launched into his mother's belly—his mum and Mike's Dad had taken one mistaken step and little Phil was brought into a world where he had no father and no clue whatsoever as to who was his real Dad.

He felt it wasn't all that difficult, he and Mike looked exactly the same, in fact, he was Mike and Mike was him. It felt so weird to know that someone was not just like you but was you. That feeling was something only Mike and Phil could have. Maybe identical twins, but then even twins can't have the same blood type, genotype, fingerprint, exact dentition, hair colour, eye colour and something only Mike and Phil knew, was that they could both hear each other's heartbeat—wheresoever they were. Now those were stuff that had made the boys know that though they had friends and all that, they weren't exactly ordinary. Not to mention being friends of fire as it was not only harmless to them but quite pleasurable. Though they had never been bullied, they were weird kids.

That was a fact even they themselves wouldn't try to deny.