Silas of Highrose | Over 100 | Celestial Guardian

~ ☆ ~
There is a way to protect the young from the rogue, and so we do.
When you are born, we lower our open arms unto you.
With our right hand we receive your freedom.
With our left, we grant our guardianship.

There is method to the madness.

We protect you as best as we can, for as long as as we can.
And when you come of age, we lift our arms.
With our left hand we recall our guardianship.
With our right, we return your freedom.
~ ☆ ~

Silas stirred in his light slumber. With a brief moment of freedom in the evening he resigned to a chamber nap in which the words of his oath floated in and out of his dreams. When you come of age, he thought again as his light kyanite eyes opened to the thin sliver of gold light that shone in from the hallway through his cracked door. When you come of age...

A shadow passed over the light in an instant. Then suddenly again. Silas sat up and leaned forward toward the footsteps. They were loud, running. He could sense commotion in the hallway. Silas pushed himself to dress sufficiently and make his way into the hallway, after which he heard the voice of a residential administrator of the Highrose clan.

"Silas," she sternly began. "It's the shinigami."

Silas's eyes widened, his brain frozen and unable to process the waking moment.

"Lots of reports," she continued. "In your district, too. I came to wake you but I see you're already up.Anders is on his way now, so go join him and see what you can do."

"Understood," Silas responded immediately. He spun on his heels and reached for his door. There were only a few things in his room that he needed but if he were to interact with mortals he wanted at least identification...

"―And don't let there be any casualties. They're like sharks, you know. With the potential for so many shinigami to concentrate in a single area... A single death could lead to a bloodbath. Remember your oath."

In just as little time, Silas was on the public flight deck with several other guardians, each from different residences and each appointed to different jurisdictions. As the loud breeze and vast nighttime horizon greeted them from thousands of feet below, Silas descended with them from their hidden city in the sky. Although the wind tore way a feather every so often, it couldn't chip away his concern. Shinigami incidents had quickly grown common in recent times, yet Silas had so little information on why. And it didn't help that there were less guardians than usual. They could only spread themselves so thin to keep the Fated Age as high as it was. Even with rigid order as strict as in the Highrose clan. A Highrose guardian could barely protect into a person's teenage years before they were sent to a guard another little one for even less time. It burned him to think that he could face casualties and be forced to choose among lives to save based on the Fated Age. When you come of age...

Silas often hung on this line. It was bold enough to intervene at all on a person's freedom in the name of guardianship. To suddenly abandon that same person at an arbitrary age, he wondered. Who was he to decide that? How many times had he parted ways with someone who deserved freedom earlier? How many times had he left too soon? What was in store for his district on this suddenly dangerous night?