AN: This is the first fanfiction I've published in a very long time. Let me first say that the idea for this fic was originally Idiot Anonymous', special thank you to them for giving me permission to work around their idea. Make sure to take a peek at their stories for more Vlad/Ezreal goodness. Their story "Opened the Wrong Tomb" inspired me, and I wanted to expand on the some of the ideas they had. This story will, of course, deviate from their original concept, though I'll try to follow some of the guidelines of their story and may occasionally quote the dialogue they wrote. It'll definitely take a turn for the dark, but I'm keeping it at a T rating until further notice. Feel free to point out mistakes and typos- my writing is sometimes done while super tired.
I know that each city-state doesn't have it's own Institute of War canonically, but it made more sense to me to write it that way. At absolute risk of being repetitive, I think it makes sense for Noxian champions ought to be judged by Noxian summoners trained in Noxia to ensure that their values line up with the Noxian way, Demacians by Demacians, and so on. Having only a handful of emissaries in each city-state doesn't suggest as much power as the League having an embassy (or, rather, Institute of War) in each location, especially if the League is in place to manage conflicts that could potentially turn into all out war. That's all I have to say for myself about that.
This chapter is a ton of backstory. If you don't care about how Vlad ended up trapped in a catacomb and just want to get to the part where Ezreal meets him, you'll want to move on to chapter 1. Otherwise, happy reading!
Every twist and turn of the catacombs was familiar. The echoes of rats, bats, and spiders had been his music for many years. The beat of their tiny hearts was never distracting. The skitter and flap of clawed feet and membranous wings suggested the cautious shuffles of housemates who respected each other too much to disturb one another.
It was a place Vladimir could gladly call home. The trappings of comfort existed even in this place, he had staked his claim on it by adding something which no one would ever expect to find in a house of death: comfort. The cobbled floors were swept clean, the recesses in the walls cleared of dust. The underground mausoleums housed the belongings of a living creature. Seclusion wasn't so terrible, but unlike his master, Vladimir was never content to live in gruesome squalor. He loved beauty too much, Dmitri had always said. That was one of few faults Vlad was willing to accept in himself.
As profane as it was to make a place of death inviting, Vlad tried. Perhaps it was foolish to care so much about the appearance of a crumbling temple in the mountains, but every inch of it from the antechamber to the depths of the catacombs held a faded splendor that Vlad had tried to restore over time. It was a place where he had power, and Vlad once freely welcomed travelers into it. He couldn't rely on the disguise of an aging monk to lull his victims into a false sense of security like Dmitri did. The fascination with their surroundings was all that held them. Out of necessity they died fast, obscenely fast.
Killing travelers had never been enough for him. Possessed with an adventurous kind of bloodthirst, Vladimir had gone to Noxus to demand entry to the League of Legends from the local Institute of War. The Emissary of the League had permitted him into the Chamber of Reflection. What the summoners witnessed there disturbed them. Within even the most remorseless people there was often a spark of sympathy, an old wound or a hardship that had turned them into what they were. The vision granted to Vladimir revealed no such thing. The extravagant creature that had passed through the doors to the chamber was not a man, he was a monster wearing a beautiful skin. Vladimir had long ago passed from humanity to monstrosity with the same speed and tumult that had characterized his transition from youth to adulthood.
When the doors to the Chamber of Reflection flew open to bathe him in light at last, Vladimir could only stand in the center of the vaulted room, sickened and stunned at his solitude. The spectre of Dmitri left him feeling exposed, the way Dmitri always had in life. Dmitri always saw through him, those ancient eyes picked apart every pretense to find the dark core of his soul. Now the summoners had seen it too, and for the first time in many long years, Vladimir was afraid. Exposing his mind was not liberating, as he had claimed belligerently before the vision of Dmitri. When he stood all alone in that clammy room before the eyes of the summoners, it was daunting.
Before he could think about what he was doing, Vlad's feet were carrying him out of the Institute of War, past the beautiful sculptures he had admired calmly on his way in, through marble halls and into the dark streets of Noxus with the shouts of summoners and guards on his heels. They knew what a danger he was. Monsters were not admitted to the League. They were enslaved to it. Vladimir made a mad dash out of the city, leaving his pursuers behind at a speed greater than any normal human's pace. Animal terror propelled him towards the only place that had ever given him even a tentative feeling of safety, his former master's domain. There, he could be alone with his ghosts.
The makeshift beauty he had surrounded himself with was his refuge. The pilfered pieces of a world he could never be a part of gave him comfort. Once again, Vlad began admitting travelers to his dwelling. Although he quickly learned that he was not safe from summoners anymore, it invigorated him to fight and kill them. They gave him the resistance his more unsuspecting victims never could, travelers and wandering merchants never had quite so much fire in them. The summoners' incursions made him content. Putting down their attempts to capture him gave him the death and violence his black heart longed for.
Slowly but surely, he forgot the world outside of the very small one he occupied and cultivated. Vladimir grew so confident that he could utterly destroy anyone who wandered into his abode that he scarcely gave the kind of people who wandered into his territory any thought. He never noticed that travelers came less often to the temple because he didn't know about the frightful warnings and stories that hung around his home. He didn't care that most of his visitors were Noxian summoners intent on dragging him kicking and screaming into the League. When an attractive young woman came strutting into his dwelling with a crossbow on her arm, Vlad only roused himself for another meal.
Arrogance blinded him to the fact that Shauna Vayne had more than just the intent to kill him- she had the skills and the tools in abundance. The first silver bolt the night hunter put in his chest curdled his unholy blood, and the distraction of pain might have cost Vladimir his life had he been a more foolhardy man. Rather than fighting her, he evaded her and ultimately lost her, slipping away into the catacombs beneath the temple, tucked into the face of the mountain several feet down at the end an overgrown trail that only Vlad remembered.
From there he could not witness the flames Vayne committed his belongings to. Since she could not destroy him, she sought to destroy his sanctuary as thoroughly as she could, so that he might never be able to safely return to it. A beast with no den was easily picked off. At daybreak she left, ignorant of Vladimir's ability to function daytime hours, perhaps believing him dead in the daylight. He emerged to find only the burnt remains of his things smoking in the empty stone shell of the temple.
Vlad knew then that his life aboveground must end, and retreated into the catacombs after salvaging what he could from the charred remains of his possessions. For the very first time he discovered how alien the tunnels beneath the temple were to him. Dmitri had never bothered with them, Vlad had always assumed that this was because they were empty. He had never been more glad to find out that he was wrong, nor more intrigued. The temple, which had surely been beautiful once, had been effaced by years of harsh weather, but the catacombs were well-preserved.
This new environment surprised him at every turn. The crystals set in the walls could be illuminated by hemomancy, a fine misting of blood would keep them glowing for hours. Deeper in, even the chill of the mountain air lessened, and beyond wrought iron doors rusted shut he even found furniture. Vlad spent sleepless days and nights exploring the maze-like depths of his new home, and in time came to the vague understanding that the catacomb had once housed an entire cult of hemomancers. Vlad could only guess as to why they had left the safety of the underground- maybe they preferred the temple as their home. Vladimir certainly had. But where had they gone after that? The legacy of a hemomancer was in the blood that his or her apprentice absorbed, surely there ought to be students left. It was a mystery he knew he would never unravel with Dmitri so long gone. The knowledge of the magic was in his veins, but the history was lost.
Night after night he worked to restore the catacombs to a more welcoming state, uninterrupted by the usual attacks. Blood was hard to come by, though he could easily siphon from the wild creatures that roamed too near the catacomb. While vermin and low animals were his companions and minions, higher animals preferred to avoid him. To them he was a dangerous predator whose territory they didn't dare invade. A goat or a bear would constitute a lucky but unlikely catch; occasionally a brave fox or a starved lone wolf would come skulking after rats to eat only to wind up as meals themselves. There were even times when he had to suffer the indignity of eating. Moles and rabbits never produced enough blood to nourish him, so he would find himself disemboweling the little beasts, eating them raw to preserve the taste of blood in their flesh. Vlad hated eating. The meat would get lodged between his teeth, and the sensation of food in his belly made him feel uncomfortably full. The whole matter of it was something Vlad avoided whenever possible.
In time, and quite by accident, the summoners found him again. All it had taken was one curious adventurer noticing the path to the catacomb entrance. Vlad had killed the intruder without fanfare, so starved for human life essence that he abandoned all finesse. A steady trickle of humanity began to flow into his new domain, and Vladimir learned how to play with them, taking no chances. The search party that came to find the first fool he'd drained made good practice. He toyed with them for days, picking them off one by one without ever offering them hope of escape. Those humans that followed allowed him to perfect his technique.
Though he worried that the night hunter might return to finish what she started, she never did. Vlad didn't flaunt his presence, and so deep into the mountains a traveler might become lost, or freeze to death, or fall from a cliff. There was little to detail his existence, and he never left survivors. In place of the night hunter, more summoners came. With Vlad having killed enough of them, their invasions became more aggressive. The new wave of summoners was made up of competent mages who hexed him and had the potential to hurt him considerably, but always underestimated him for lack of understanding of his powers. Letting them think they'd bested him only to turn the tables on them was a favorite game of his.
Sometimes he let them run before killing them. The catacombs were his playground, and he watched the invaders for longer than they knew before descending upon them. Such was the case with the latest summoner, whom Vlad had already thoroughly tormented. The invading mage was nearly out of his wits with fear that Vladimir had been carefully cultivating with small scares for half an hour, leading his prey deep into the catacombs before showing himself. Now the chase was on, leading down twists and turns that Vladimir had been memorizing for years. He herded his victim to a dead end, where the rusted door of an underground mausoleum barred any further progress.
The mage turned on him with wild eyes, his hands raising to cast. Vlad was entirely unconcerned by this show, and closed the gap between himself and the summoner with a few long strides to swipe at him with such force that it threw him against the wall. The robed figure groaned and crumpled, nauseated by pain, blood pouring hot down his wounded face. A pair of polished boots stepped into the mage's line of sight. "You damned summoners." The voice that came from the monster was more mocking than menacing. "I can't count how many scores of you I've butchered. Does the Institute of War send you? Or do you hear that there's a monster that escaped recruitment and come looking to capture it and bring it back to play with?"
Silence. Vladimir sneered at the heap of fabric and gasping humanity in front of him. None of his victims had the decency to respond on the rare occasions that he spoke to them. He despised such rudeness. There was no way the hemomancer could know that the summoner's silence was significant of the focus needed to cast a powerful spell. Rookie mages had stopped coming to find the supposed vampire long ago, but the Institute of War couldn't forbid summoners from seeking out dangerous champions like Vladimir. Confidence, cockiness, and sometimes even skill were the hallmarks of the summoners who came to capture the beast, who had become a legend in his own way among the summoners. Few anticipated dying the way they did.
This summoner, however, had not only known that his death was possible, but likely. Now that it had become an inevitability, he knew that it was the least he could do to seal the fiend's power so that a future summoner could perhaps do the work he'd failed to. The spell he now silently wove through his body with a mental incantation was forbidden. It was necromancy to exchange a life for the purpose of creating an anti-magic trap. Normally it was done by sacrificing another person. Performing the sacrifice on oneself was surely no crime, and there was no point in obeying rules moments from death.
The scream of the rusted door to the mausoleum being wrenched open echoed the mage's fear, but not a word was spoken as Vladimir dragged him over the threshold. The hemomancer planned to drain the intruder slowly, since there was no one else with him. There was no reason he shouldn't savor killing his newest meal. Never did he think that he might be giving his victim time to weave the spell that would mean his undoing.
For hours he calmly siphoned the life from the summoner via the wounds his claws had made until the bleeding grew sluggish and the pulse grew faint. In what Vladimir knew to be the final moments of the summoner's life, the man began making a sound no other victim had ever made before him. The mage started to laugh. Weak as it was, the hemomancer's sensitive ears caught it, and for all his typical confidence it dawned on him suddenly that he had made a mistake. But what mistake had he made? Did the mage have an ace up his sleeve? What could he have missed?
The summoner lifted a heavy head to fix Vladimir with a dim gaze. In a mix of rage and panic, Vlad drew the last of the blood from him in a hurry, but on the mage's final breath the spell was cast. The blood suspended in the air by Vladimir's power crystallized into a jagged red obelisk that tore itself from his grip to plant itself firmly in the chest of the exsanguinated summoner. The body turned to a mound of salt and dust beneath it, the robe falling empty.
A rushing noise filled the room, crescendoed, and tapered into silence. The immense stone sat inert for a few peaceful seconds, casting the room in a faint crimson glow. Cautiously, Vlad approached it only to be thrown off his feet by the magical blast it gave off. The wall he hit was veined with violet light that spread rapidly outward, the colour disappearing almost as soon as it made itself known. When the stars cleared from his eyes, Vlad cast a glance around the room.
Outwardly, nothing had changed, but the hemomancer knew better than to take things at face value. Rising to his feet, he gave himself a cursory physical. Nothing hurt, and he had no visible injuries, but he made a mental note to examine himself more thoroughly if he could find nothing else that had changed in his environment. Nothing stopped him from exiting the room, and a walk through most of the catacombs revealed no physical difference. All that show for nothing?
Peeling away the layers of his clothing, Vlad checked himself for any sort of magical injury as best he could, but this search, too, proved fruitless. He wandered back to the room where the stone stood, intent on solving it's mystery. After a while of staring at it, at a loss for reason, Vladimir brought himself to touch the thing. Under his palm it was warm, almost pulsating, but when he lingered on it too long it turned so cold that it nearly felt like it was burning him.
Surely if it was formed from crystallized blood he could lift it, take hold and shatter it. With hands outstretched he channeled his power... only to discover that the familiar surge was missing. The blood in his body always rushed to the surface at his calling, but now it barely stirred beyond it's steady pulse. No matter how intently he focused he couldn't call forth that rush of power. Lancing a finger, he tried again to no effect. Vlad tried to draw from a rat, but he couldn't call it to him as he was used to doing with vermin.
If there was a worst case scenario, Vladimir was sure he was living it. Desperation saw him moving further and further from the surpressing stone to try and coax his power until he stood at the doors to the catacomb. Although he pushed with his normal amount of force, it didn't budge. His skin prickled with panic, the bristling of an animal whose entrapment has only just dawned on it. Vlad threw himself against the doors to no effect, he couldn't even rattle them. There was no one to hear him when he screamed his fury.