Notes: Written for a challenge to Stephanie, who claimed Aro/Carlisle could never have realistically existed even for seconds. She should have known better than to thrown down such a gauntlet. This will end up being a collection of Volterra drabbles, related and not. Still in the works.
Chapter 1:
ebony beauty, passed this shade
Carlisle's name preceded him.
Announced through thick ornate, double doors as though to Phillip or William's court. Presented in name from one side and then directed to walk with his presenter, down a causeway lined by a crowd of immaculately attired people he would have assumed belonged in such a place, were it not for the endless row of gleaming embered eyes.
The room was marble, floor to ceiling, with wide columns, intricate architecture and inlay on every available surface, heralding in itself every era from Grecian to Spanish. At the end of the walk was a raised dais set forty feet off from where he was stopped. A set of three throne chairs with the golden accents of the hegemonic Mother waited atop it.
In them a trinity of black robed men sat watching him, beyond them guards to each side.
Abandoned in the center of the room, the sole focus of the silent audience and its masters, Carlisle swallowed and licked his lips. Before he could frame any words to open his mouth, the man in the center chair, black hair and finger tips pressed together, had crossed the space between and appeared right before him. Wide burgundy eyes, whose intense focus lost nothing by their clouds, stared at and in and through him unblinking.
"Delightful."
The word slithered out of the older vampire enraptured, as one of his hands stroked the flawlessly white cravat which seemed cheap and dingy in comparison to the skin it encircled. The breathless room seemed to sigh and shift even in the soundlessness as he then held out his hand, smiling.
Carlisle placed his hand in the man's, confused and confusion only intensified as the man's pristine stone face dipped into subtle disappointment and he shook his head. His hand was drawn upward and toward the man, whose black robe split to display golden finery hidden beneath. The touch refined and claiming, spiderlike fingers in smooth onion skin coiling around him.
"You should never have been left alone so long. Such an egregious error to be rectified." He continued on unwaiting for response from the man who's hand he held, the same space of speaking breath containing "Caius. Marcus." as though the names were summons. The men rising in graceful unison as he continued on. "It is as I said it would be."
They moved in a slower gait than their first, dutiful and beautiful, as though they floated instead of walked. The gold of their under outfits flashing from the slits of black robes as they strode toward the two in the middle of the floor at such an even, perfectly matched, footing.
"Are you certain, Aro?" The question came from the one of two who had long jet hair same as the first, but his expression was deep set when Carlisle looked up to find the second voice to break the silence held by dozens. A removed inconstancy and carelessness set into his features which seemed to say he cared nothing at all for anything he looked at.
The second, with his long white hair, paler even that than the pallor of his skin, said nothing but watched with astute focus between the three. Eyes never more than the breath of a millisecond resting on the man in question.
Aro turned first, with a flourish, to hold his hand out to his compatriots. His smile only greater for the questioning as though even that only cemented whatever unknown proclamation they discussed before him – of him.
"How could it be anything less than-" The milky burgundy eyes of Aro once turned toward his peers now shifted back to Carlisle again. Circumnavigated the expanse from the shoulders of his ragged traveling clothes, to his eyes, to the top of his blonde head with supernatural speed. "-golden?"