"Anna ni issho datta no ni."
- See-Saw, 2002
"Finally, it is time for the truth. Let us remove our masks. [Immediately puts on a mask]"
- Zobek, 2010
It was fitting that Felicia would meet her end in the nape of the Romanian coastline. Seawater was gently crashing against volcanic rocks forged in a forgotten time. The sky had lost its healthy blue hue and was poisoned with an eerie green overcast. In a secluded edge of the beach, a swarm of aquatic parasites were feasting on the remains of a deceased seagull.
It was no surprise Felicia found Carmilla in a foreboding place like this. Perhaps the Queen of Vampires thought of this as her summer retreat.
Carmilla had settled on appearing in her mortal form, still shrouded in the robes of the same Brotherhood she had turned her back on. Felicia saw it as an affront to the Order and almost lost her temper.
The beach began to tremble from the force of an undersea earthquake. A colossal creature sprayed out of the waves behind Carmilla and blocked out the mossy sky. The giant was covered in dark green scales with a pair of leathery wings unfurling on its back. Part elephant, part gargoyle, and pure sea monster, it had a row of quivering appendages growing from its beak, dangling all the way down its hulking body.
Carmilla gazed lovingly up to the beast, whispering a short command.
"Trim the runt."
The Malachi raised its arms above it head and slammed its clawed fists on the stretch of beach where Felicia was standing. She sprinted out of the exploding sandstorm and fired her retaliation back at the monster, causing it to howl as the arrow impaled the corner of its neck.
The Malachi spread out its claws and summoned a portal to a dead universe. A meteor as tall as the creature itself hurled out of the void and headed toward Felicia. For a screaming ball of agony formed in an alternate dimension, the spell was rather pathetic. It was so slow-moving and easily avoidable that even old baker could step out of the way, let alone a nimble-footed Brotherhood archer.
Felicia shot the monster's hand with another arrow to prevent any further spells. She ran out into sea and hopped like a sparrow up the Malachi's body. She leapt straight for its face, swinging the end of her bow as if it were a war hammer.
The Malachi jerked its head to dodge the lethal blow. Felicia gracefully soared in slow motion as she missed her attack. As she glided past the Malachi, the creature's beady marble eyes made an unexpected acquaintance with the soft lines of a smooth pink spinal ridge and two delicate shoulder blades. For that single instant, the backless seam of Felicia's armored gown was on full display.
The tentacles on the Malachi's mouth urgently changed direction.
Felicia felt three of the spiked tendrils stab her between the shoulders at once. The rest joined in as she froze in shock.
The Malachi used no patience or modesty in making sure Felicia became familiar with the feeling of having several sharpened tentacles lustfully pumping her flesh full of glowing lime-colored gel. There was no peaceful or forgiving way to imbue a mortal host in the middle of battle. From this moment forward, as long as she survived this first sudden joining, Felicia could expect to be put through this process rather often.
She cringed and gasped in rhythm with the Malachi's massive thumping heartbeat, becoming lost in a surreal range of sensations that were only mildly related to pain. In a matter of seconds, she could feel the early effects of intoxicating evil trickling through her body.
A weaker warrior would have collapsed from exhaustion after the first pint of demon blood had found its way inside of them. Felicia had already received three times that amount, but she still managed to jump down from her captor and struggled to grab one of the tendrils from her back as soon as she landed. Each tentacle was enchanted with the powers of lightning, sending a painful surge through her fingers and stopping her from tampering with the injectors.
Carmilla watched the aggressive bonding of human and demon with a curious quiver in her lips. A moment ago, she had thought of Felicia only as a worthless peon to be slaughtered. Now she was changing her mind and saw something promising in the girl.
"Oh, I didn't think Malachi was in the mood to infuse anyone with his knowledge," she smiled darkly toward Felicia. "I suspected he would feed you to the abyss, or maybe pluck those silly feathers out of your hair and flay your mind to shreds simply by gazing at you."
"I'll never become scum like you! You're a traitor to everything you used to stand for!" Felicia said in defiance.
"Aw, such strong words from a chittering little hummingbird who's already getting her fill of Malachi's strongest nectar." Carmilla chuckled through ruby lips. "We'll turn this angel into a tramp soon enough."
Felicia winced as another pint of emerald blood flowed steadily out of the Malachi's heart and slithered up the channels normally reserved for her spinal fluid. Her arms were already starting to shake in weakness as she lined up a shot for the center of Malachi's eyes. She missed her mark by several meters, allowing Malachi to easily swat the arrow straight out of the air.
"Can you feel the temptations of darkness yet, dear?" Carmilla smirked. "You must be feeling something at the rate he's working on you. I could teach you such wonderful things if you simply give in and accept the gift."
Felicia spun around to curse at Carmilla. She recklessly loaded another arrow into her bow and fired away on blind impulse. The shot was so off that it would have whizzed harmlessly over Carmilla's shoulder, but the vampire queen still showed her superiority by catching the arrow with a single hand and holding it out in front of her.
"How commendable," Carmilla said amusingly. "But you're ours, now. This is what will happen to you no matter how much you resist. It's simply a matter of how quickly would you like to get it over with."
She snapped the elegant but frail wooden twig in half and let the broken splinters drop into the moist sand at her feet.
Felicia frantically pointed her bow back and forth between Carmilla and the Malachi. Her time was running short. She was struggling to decide where to launch her next precious arrow, and then struggling to launch it at all.
Every time another wave of Malachi essence forced its way through her back, she could feel herself losing more of her aim. The distant throbbing deep in her ears became so distinct that she could no longer tell if it was coming from the Malachi's heart, or her own.
Her legs became weaker and weaker until they felt almost like they had split into eight boneless appendages spreading in every direction, making her lose her footing and collapse face-first toward the water. Her vision changed to solid midnight green.
There wasn't a single soul to be found on the beach. Gabriel was completely alone except for the sounds rising and falling waves and the singing of ocean birds in the far distance. The only landmark he could see was an island of tall black crags half a mile or so out in the sea, looming against the pale yellow-green horizon.
After hours of searching every inch of the terrain and somehow always winding up in front of the same formation of ocean crags, Gabriel finally found evidence that he wasn't the first one to stand on this beach within the past few days. Etched into the sand and half-erased by the tide, he found the remains of footprints.
One set belonged to a medium-sized figure. The placement of the footsteps suggested a strong feminine stride in the hips, while the patterns had the distinct shape of pointed soles and slightly elevated heels. The steady vertical lines covering each of these print meant the figure would have had a cloak trailing behind her as she walked.
Carmilla, Gabriel said in his mind. His teeth grit inside his sealed square jaw.
The second set wasn't even remotely human. The prints looked like a cross between starfish and massive bat feet stamped into the sand. Countless tubular-shaped tracings surrounded the footprints and moved in senseless patterns. This was where the figure had been dragging its extra limbs.
Malachi daemon. Slight arthritis in the fourth and sixth tentacles. Older than usual.
The third set of footprints belonged to another female, judging by the narrow spacing and distribution of weight. They ran the entire length of the beach, weaving between the other two figures. But then the third figure's footprints became tangled in the second figure's tentacle tracings. Locked in an intense struggle, both sets of prints began to trail toward the water. The human footprints reached the very edge of ocean, and then abruptly ceased to exist. The patterns in the sand matched the treads of leather hunting boots, while the light footwork suggested the movements of a more agile person, possibly a Brotherhood ranger.
No...
A terrible feeling drew Gabriel's eyes toward the sky. He had to squint to be sure he wasn't seeing a simple optical illusion.
The upper peaks of the volcanic mountain sitting in the distance were slowly writhing.
In sudden shock, Gabriel realized the stony formation in the distance wasn't made of stone of all. It was a living creature perched on top of the tiny black island in perfect camouflage. The crust of the mountain split open and stretched into massive scaled wings. The pulsating tendrils growing from its snout dangled all the way down its body and ended somewhere deep under the black waves.
The Malachi lifted its head and let out a horrific cry that sounded like a towering tsunami crashing into a thundercloud. The noise was loud enough to pierce the depths and awaken an entire army of its kind. But today, it would only awaken one particular creature.
The shallows just in front of Gabriel began to bubble. He saw the tentacles rise to the surface first, followed by the outline of smooth skin on Felicia's back. Her body was floating face-down and motionless in the water, with the tentacles still firmly plunged into her bare skin and binding her to the Malachi on the island behind her.
Ripples formed around her as her body began to twitch. She lifted herself on her hands and knees in the frothing tide before cautiously rising to her feet. The way the pulsing tentacles spread apart as she stood created the appearance of green skeletal wings emerging from her back.
One by one, the tentacles released their hold on Felicia's flesh. She shrugged the limp tendrils away like a serpent shedding her skin, or like the ending scene to the first episode of Gundam SEED when Murrue force-ejects the charging cables from Strike Gundam's back binders as its silhouette slowly rises out of the flames of the Heliopolis colony's destruction in what was probably the most vivid and memorable Gundam sequence of all time before Fukuda screwed up the soundtrack in the remastered version.
The acid-dripping puncture wounds dotting Felicia's back healed in seconds without leaving the tiniest scar, revealing a fragment of her unnatural healing power. Her body was undergoing drastic changes, but the one thing that would always be left alone was her combat attire. Her steel breastplate with the fashionable leather lacing cut around her upper back gave her the perfect amount of protection while keeping her cool, comfortable, and constantly at risk of having another tentacle barb slipped between her shoulders in case she ever needed an extra injection on the go. Embarrassing for Felicia, but ideal for any demon seeking a tender spot to transfer its ancient, diabolical influence.
She stood with the calm seawater reaching up to her ankles, gazing at Gabriel with bewitching jade eyes. Apart from her damp armor, a thin layer of silt in her hair, and a few inflamed green veins reaching up her cheeks, she looked like the same simple Felicia she had always been. But something was different about her, surrounding her with an atmosphere that was more wyvern than woman.
Silently, she knelt down and pulled her bow from the seaweed in the shallows. She lifted a single arrow from the quiver on her back, strung it through the handles, and pointed it straight at Gabriel.
"Hello, Gabriel," she chuckled through a playful smirk, holding the arrow perfectly still. "I'd like to submit a formal complaint on the battle garments provided for reconnaissance sisters. It is quite elegant and gives me plenty of room for winding my shots, but you could say certain oversights in the armor have left quite a nasty kink in my back."
"Felicia, get a hold of yourself!" said Gabriel. "We still have time to remove your cur-!…"
Felicia let the arrow loose. It made a vibrating wet thunk as it instantly became stuck in Gabriel's left ankle.
"Heavens, me," she said with false surprise in her voice while the demon hunter screamed in pain. "That one slipped right from my fingers. It seems my arms aren't as patient as they used to be now that I have this terrible itch behind my neck. Perhaps I should try to stretch them more."
Felicia calmly loaded another arrow from her quiver, spread her shoulders apart until the bow began to squeak, and took aim at Gabriel again.
Grimacing in anger and regret, Gabriel pulled the Combat Cross from his belt and put all of his weight on his good leg as he lunged forward. Felicia dodged the retractable chain-whip and sent Gabriel back with a strong high kick. She re-aligned the bow for a rapid shot and let the arrow loose.
It struck Gabriel in the forearm.
Gabriel tried a second charge, only to wind up with a mouthful of gilded steel as Felicia struck him in the face with the edge of her bow. As he staggered, another arrow wound up in his side.
Gabriel collapsed to his knees in the shallow salt water. Felicia loaded her bow for another shot. Just before she was ready to fire, the Malachi's tentacles lunged up behind her in unison and resumed their invasion on her unshielded spine. She moaned in a sudden bout of ecstasy as she was given another rapid infusion of immortal blood, almost dropping her weapon as her reflexes went haywire and she threw herself backward. It took her a second to finish her panting and regain her instincts.
Felicia's graceful archery and Malachi's ruthless epidural violation came together in deadly harmony. As Felicia pulled the arrow through its string, her infected arms harnessed Malachi's magic and summoned a small portal around arrowhead. The tip of the arrow transformed into a ghostly white comet. The incantation was a more compact version of the meteor attack Malachi conjured by himself, only now it was aided by Felicia's infinitely better aim and firing speed.
Gabriel shouted for mercy. Felicia released the bowstring and sent the fireball soaring straight for his head.
The sensitive muscles between Felicia's shoulder blades never grew accustomed to the intruding touches of Carmilla's fingertips. Carmilla began, as usual, by gently dabbing the spot with a sponge soaked in a mixture of lavender oil and nightshade, to cleanse the skin of any dirt or sweat while leaving it mildly numb. She dipped her index finger into a tiny bowl of lamb's blood and used her nail to trace upside-down crosses along the twitching contours of Felicia's back, marking the intended marriage sites. She finished by leaning down, puckering her lips, and blowing a long, ice cold breath through the valley of Felicia's spine. Felicia winced quietly as the skin on her back grew tense and each of the tiny blonde hairs prickled up.
Felicia was resting chest-down on the floor with Carmilla tending diligently to her prone back. It was the typical scene of a loyal slave girl massaging her mistress's aching bones, only with a dark twist where Carmilla was subtly asserting her dominance and Felicia was the one helplessly enslaved.
"Do we have to do this so often, Carmilla?" Felicia murmured in tickled discomfort. Half of her jaw was pressed into the black satin sheet spread out underneath them. The "surgical suite," as it were, was a pool of fabric darkness hastily thrown down on the moldy stone floor of a seaside mausoleum under the weak light of flickering candles. The operation to be performed? Reverse-leeching.
"Tsk, tsk," Carmilla clicked her tongue. "This is part of your discipline, my dear. Your blood samples, your card readings, and the other examinations I've given you all tell me that you're still suffering from a tiny shimmer of innocence clinging to your soul. I must eradicate that disgusting plague before you can be called one of us. We can't have a Dark Lord of the Deep Ones who's not completely comfortable with being one with her darkness and could break into a pointless attack of morality at any moment. But your symptoms are very minor and it won't be long before you're fully cured. I'd say only two or three more treatments at the most. Your heart will be so overwhelmed by these rigorous transfusions that it will have no choice but to accept the new nature we have planned for it and change you to a true greenblood, and not just a half-breed birthed from a pathetic whelp of the Light who had herself desanctified by force. The only time you'll have to worry about the stingers finding their way into your pretty little back is when you call out to your kind and ask them to lend you their magic. We Lords were created by ripping the darkness out of the Brotherhood founders and turning their shadows into flesh. You're the first to become one by having darkness thrust into her until it drowns the light in her soul completely."
Carmilla reached under Felicia's resting head and playfully tapped her on the cheek.
"Mmn. Having that much power sounds nice, even if all these acupuncture routines feel like they're driving me out of my mind." Felicia said against the floor. "Do your worst, vile witch," she added as a joke, pretending she still had the free will to rival Carmilla to the bitter end. Carmilla was more than delighted to accept the challenge.
Felicia stretched her shoulders until her leather cuirass creaked and the vulnerable space on the back of her battle gown was spread apart as far as the threading would allow. She tucked her hands under her face and sighed in relaxation.
Carmilla climbed away from Felicia's back and sat down on the sheet in front of her. Felicia crawled on her hands and situated herself in Carmilla's lap, stretching the front of her waist over Carmilla's knees and resting her head against the ample softness of Carmilla's bosom. Carmilla nodded her shrouded head in ominous approval.
"Oh, Malachi," the dark priestess purred toward the blackness surrounding them, gently petting the lines of Felicia's exposed scapula, goading the predator to its creamy, dimpled prey. "It's time to give your fledgling her medicine."
A mass of long, indescribable shapes quivered in the shadows beyond the candles. Fecilia glimpsed over her shoulder pauldron with an expression that was equal parts fright, annoyance, and seductive willingness. Amongst dim yellow candlelight and the deep red folds of two female Brotherhood of Light uniforms, the only things that shone bright in the Enthrallment Chamber were the lush, smiling lips underneath Carmilla's cleric hood, the soft profile of Felicia's turned head, and two elegant windows of bare skin: One formed by the gap between Carmilla's shawl and the low neckline of her bodice, and the other by the backless opening on Felicia's plated dress.
The shapes moved closer toward the women as a single indescribable mass. When it reached the edge of the candlelight, the one shadow split into many. Each towering silhouette formed a circle around the chamber.
The flames on the candles fluttered under a sharp wind. Tentacles lashed violently into the light and swiftly found their mark on Felicia's back. Carmilla held her close as she gasped in dull pain, both comforting her and ensuring she had no hope of escape. The tall silhouettes standing outside of the light shuddered in unison as their bright green essence was transfused into Felicia's back. She had only suffered from a single Malachi bonding with her on the day her fate was sealed. Now she was regularly mated with at least seven of the mysterious beasts every night the tide was at its highest. Carmilla played her part in the ceremony by coddling Felicia's head and running her fingers through her short, curled locks.
Dozens of throbbing tentacles poured the proof of their eons-old existence into the thirsty bones and muscles below Felicia's neck. The liquid wrath flooding through her spine and into every vein worked quickly to drown whatever mortal defenses her body hadn't already given up. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to fall into dreams of a surreal and bizarre green realm underneath the ocean. Soon she would forget she ever had any other place she called home.
Author's note: I hope you enjoyed my extended backstory for Felicia. Mwahahaha.