So I was told a third sequel would be favorable. I haven't really planned out the entirety of this plot, but hopefully it will lead me to something magical. I want to incorporate other characters (OC and canon) other than Almira and Kaname in this, so bear with me.
If you have not already read "Refugee" or "Eden" on my page, not a lick of this fanfic will make sense I'm afraid.
Disclaimer: I solemnly swear I don't own VK.
Enjoy a new beginning.
Chapter 1: A Query
As the night tore at the window bars with an approaching gale, the rattling of chains blended into the cold and dark interiors of the hollow underground. The torch fires flickered restlessly as the wind swept in like a cloaked stranger, drumming against the walls, sweeping small clusters along its helm, and whistling that tune no one in those dingy prison cells wanted to hear. Their fate had been decided then and there. Death, for what it was for them, had no other escape than to infinite blindness.
But the one to seal their end had descended there for a different purpose that night. The robed woman walked past the victims of their indirect crimes, chained in their cells with only their piercing gold eyes swimming under the firelight. They stared at her as if almost expecting a miracle, but life, it seemed, had already been sucked out of them. It was a feeling the woman knew too well. A curse she had not foreseen when they had given up their mortality long ago.
The object of her quest came immediately in site—the very last cell of the underground where the prisoner hung upside down on a protruding bar facing the wall. He was stripped of his clothes, like everyone else there, bearing only a loincloth around his waist. His muscular olive-toned skin glistened with sweat, dirt, and most of all, deep claw marks of red and blue that outlined his back. The woman did not have to make a sound for him to realize she had wanted him desperately.
"Tired of sitting on your throne all day I see." The prisoner broke the silence. "Or is it that your men are not pleasing you enough?"
The woman bared her teeth in a grin. "Your mockery intrigues always." She approached the bars and put her ageless face against the cold iron. "But you're right. I get nothing but pain when I have to do my deed with them. Bearing our immortal offspring is not a small thing, as you know."
"How funny that you call it a deed. A necessity, a stunt…un actuacion no? It's as if everything you do is ordered to you. And yet with me…" He turned his head to the side, and watched her from the corner of his eye. "You can command your own desires."
She looked at the piles of bones and meat on the floor, ravaged and barbarically mauled by the beast that erupted uncontrollably within him. Within everyone in that prison. They were there to die, not to be reborn but to fade into the emptiness forever. After all, it was her job more than any of the rulers to swing the final axe. For breaking a taboo and risking her kind's existence, she had that power above all else.
But this was different. He was different.
"Crees que soy un tonto?" she whispered bitterly.
He grinned at her impatience. "Nunca."
"Then must I always come across bearing some ill-intention? I do have a speck of humanity in me, you know." She continued. "This has been done for your protection, and for the world outside."
"I was given only half a life. And that, my dear, is a great taboo isn't it?"
"That…" She paused. "…is what we're reared to believe."
Suddenly, the man dropped to the ground, catlike and vicious, his slit-like pupils turning to hers with interest. He approached the bars and stood up on his legs, curling his warm fingers around hers like iron cuffs.
"And what do you believe?" His hot breath tickled her face, and she leaned towards his lips, letting her rich aura envelop his.
"Tonight, I believe something different."
He smiled. "Then set me free." He gave out a seductive growl. "Set me free, Katra Magdalena, and I will give you the greatest pleasure of your life."
"Hello, now what'd we have here?" Eden McDellan leapt towards a display of a skeleton sprawled deformed against the brick wall. "Now this, this is brilliant. Do you think this is what Caleb looks like when he's whining for food?"
"Oh Eden, mind your manners." Iselda looked wearily around the cold narrow walls of the deserted medieval prison converted to a tourist spot in the Spanish town. "And show some respect to the dead too."
Eden looked down the hall to see some people walk around viewing the displays in awe and posing with them for pictures. "Yeah, that's some great show of respect right there."
"It's not their fault. Who would ever suspect the cruelty that went down in these halls? Not just to the humans during the middle ages but much before that…" Iselda spoke once the humans were out of earshot. "…to the half-bloods that were imprisoned here. Those poor wretched souls." Her fingers trailed across the cracked crevices. "I don't remember much of those times, but it was one of the grizzliest moments in our history. The period right after we stopped aging after years of rebirth."
"And I suspect these half-bloods were eventually killed?" Eden swept her eyes through the abandoned cells, detecting a faint reek of flesh and blood, and centuries worth of nature's elements and manmade chemicals that erased any evidence of inhabitance in its wake. "So the taboo has been in effect far longer than I thought." She frowned. "And yet, nothing has changed. Only the way their deaths are carried out—in secret from our own eyes."
"Eden…" Iselda turned to her daughter, a strain of discomfort picking at her forehead. This had become an everyday routine, ever since graduation and Richard's great keenness to take Eden under his wing as a diplomat. According to him, she was a natural charmer and well suited to the role of a negotiator for their race. But even when another year had come and gone, even when their lives had, as promised, returned to normal, it was hard to forget what had happened in Katra's chamber.
And lately, Iselda noticed, Eden had become more insightful, if not somewhat critical, to her surroundings, as if an air of shrewdness had awakened from her newfound ability to access various keeps of the Bastet family.
"Eden, I know it's hard to accept, but the taboo is there for a reason. Half-bloods become beasts that cannot be controlled. And if it were not for Almira…" Iselda swallowed hard before continuing. "We would not have known that other ways to control such beasts could exist. But at various costs…if you remember."
Eden cracked a wry smile. "Yeah, I remember. All the way from my damned birth."
"You must not speak that way." Iselda gritted her teeth. "You never used to speak this way."
"I'm sorry." Eden said. "I just wonder if…nevermind."
Iselda was about to speak, but they were soon met by a young tour guide, who walked over to them in quick strides.
"Excuse me ladies, are you two from one of the tour groups?" He asked in a Spanish accent. "I wasn't sure if you were lost or separated from the others."
"No, we're perfectly fine. I'm an old friend of the curator, here for business with my daughter." Iselda responded in Spanish. "But thank you for your concern."
The tour guide continued to stare at her, and with a smile, he bent towards her lips. "Just doing my job as your lovable husband." He took off his cap, revealing a streak of smoothly combed dark hair over calm blue eyes so accustomed to Richard McDellan, and kissed her softly.
"Papa, I don't know what hurts more. Your perfect Spanish or your dramatic entrance." Eden made a face at her parents' flirtatious exchanges. "Is it time to go already?"
"Sorry Eddy, but duty calls." Richard poked her nose. "And as my assistant, I'm allowed to whisk you away any time I want."
"It was fun while it lasted, if this had to be the way we spent our mother-daughter moment." Iselda sighed. "I'll ask to see if they have any information on your inquiry, Eden."
"Thanks, mum. And give my love to lady catnip."
Iselda giggled. "Roza would be happy to know you paid a visit."
The mid evening clouds hovered lowly overhead as Eden and Richard walked towards the waiting limousine that would take them to a governmental building near central Madrid. Despite the chilly October season, people still bustled about heavily in the streets, most being young couples who acknowledged the weather by walking in pairs. Eden blew a sigh as she brushed her growing bangs out of her face. The prison tower lied incongruous to the modern edifices, but Eden felt more separated from the young men and women who walked the sidewalks aimlessly.
Whether it was because she had chosen to give up love entirely or occupy her mind with more puzzling matters, she did not know. But it hurt to think that being an advocate of some sort, of something that she could not explain or knew how to approach, would mean to tread the path alone.
"So Eddy dear, do tell me about this secret excavation of yours." Richard broke the silence next to her. "You use your break to explore an old tower, you bring your mother over from Zurich to inquire about some information. What, may I ask, are you up to?"
"Nothing, just snooping around our history books," Eden continued, "or at least what never made it into them. Particularly about half-bloods."
Richard paused to look at her with concern. "Eden, does this have to do with-"
"Almira? And that incident in Katra's chamber?" She turned her face towards the window. "It's got everything to do with that."
"And you're well aware of your consequences, if any should befall?"
"Of course, but you don't have to worry about that. I'm not doing anything drastic." Eden smiled innocently. "I asked mum to find out more about the half-blood prisoners here. She said this place used to house the majority of those who tried to escape their punishment a long time ago. I just wanted to know if any…survived. If any came over their curse."
"It would be a miracle if that were true." Richard continued. "Other than Almira, I don't think anyone has lived long enough to tell the tale. And if the royal heads did not kill them, then their beasts within did."
The roads started to become narrower, and the old part of the city attracted the attention of citadels, row flats, and European architecture. Night was slowly starting to fall over the grand landscape, but Eden knew their work had just begun.
"I find that hard to believe."
"What?" Richard looked at her solemnly.
She lowered her voice to a murmur. "That in all these years, in all of millenia, not a single half-blood escaped from his fate. That before Almira, not a single one ever managed to bypass the law, or the so-called forbidden charter. Impossible."
She picked at her teeth as the council building known as the Plaza de la Villa came into view.
"It all seems so impossible to me."
In the bright moonlit night streaming through his window, Aido Hanabusa sat among piles of books in his family library. It had been awhile since he had picked an old text off the shelf, and like any time when he wanted to quench his curiosity, he took to the covert pages of the vampire bloodline. For the first time in awhile, he felt the need to understand the actions happening around him. The actions that brought him back to a convoluted state of mind once again.
Why was Kaname Kuran killing purebloods?
And why was he, Aido thought bitterly, in charge of looking after Yuuki Kuran? Not that he complained with this responsibility, but even she, a pureblood, could not console the grief that spurred from his father's death. The death that Kaname had administered.
"Purebloods…" He whispered as he brushed his thoughts away and pulled out an unabridged copy of the origins of vampires. With another hand, he reached into his pocket and brought out a rolled slip of paper, the one that brought him to this pursuit.
He flattened the paper under the light, and began to read the coded message that he had managed to decipher every time.
Jack Frost.
Tell me a tale of the first man. The one that parched the soil before the sun parched him. Leave nothing out. You know how to spin it well.
Notre Dame.
Aido smiled at the alias to his name, or rather his power. This was his only way to communicate with Eden McDellan. His Notre dame. But gossip had slowly turned to questioning, and now the young vampire found himself fixing for answers. Answers to something he did not know, nor understood why the werecat would suddenly be so interested. But for her amusement, and his, he would do anything.
"If she wants to know about the vampire ancestors. Everything about them…" Aido thought to himself. "I have to look hard. And I have to look fast."
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