Title: Breathe Your Last

Author: TheLadyLepida

Rating: M for Mature. This story contains explicit and dark content, so detailed warnings will be given before the start of each chapter due to potential triggers. Please heed the warnings before you read.

Full Summary: Latharna, a Celtic woman living in eleventh-century Scotland, is a social outcast, reviled as a witch. Fully prepared to live out her life alone, Latharna is content with tending to her herb garden and nurturing her budding talent in magic until a mysterious and dangerous creature begins to stalk her during the night. [Godric/OFC] [Pre-series]

Chapter: 1/1 – Prologue

A/N: I'm new to True Blood, and am currently on season four. I breezed through the first three seasons in two weeks, and was itching write something almost immediately. I've always been fascinated with history (thus the reason I enjoyed Eric's flashback) and the current country I'm interested in is Scotland, so that's where much of this story will take place. I have another modern-day Godric story in mind that will be an AU, so this one will be shorter and stick firmly to canon. I'm publishing this story first since the prologue came so quickly to me, but I might publish the first chapter of my other Godric story when I finish it before I start on the next chapter for this story. Enjoy, and don't be afraid to point out any historical inaccuracies I might have made. :)

Warning(s) for this chapter: Mild language, some graphic imagery, and vaguely implied sexual abuse.

Disclaimer: True Blood/The Sookie Stackhouse series belong to HBO and Charlaine Harris.

Breathe Your Last

-TheLadyLepida-

"O little one,

My little one,

Come with me,

Your life is done.

.

Forget the future,

Forget your past,

Life is over:

Breathe your last."

- Clive Barker, Abarat

Prologue:

-Anathema-

"The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable."

- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929 – 1931

"Listen to them – children of the night. What music they make."

- Bram Stoker, Dracula

ROME:

-44 B.C.-

ALL was silent in the house of Gaius Flavius Corvinus when the young slave, in the darkest time of the night, slipped from the slave quarters and slunk through the house like a ghost, plucking up small, but valuable trinkets like grapes and putting them in the sack she carried, with the intentions to sell them to make way for her and her lover back home, away from the filth and debauchery of Rome. Home… Leda could barely remember home, could barely remember her mother, the name she was given at birth, taken away by the Romans. They had taken more as well, ripping her from her mother's arms and thrusting her into those of another, her master Gaius, who took her to his bed as soon as she was old enough (in his mind), losing her virginity and innocence all at once in one night of terror on a sea of pain and sobs. Leda was amazed that she hadn't yet drowned herself with all the tears she cried over the years. No matter; she was leaving all those memories behind, and no one would be able to stop her. It would be easy to slip out unnoticed: Gaius often disappeared at the latest hours of the night, and the men who guarded the house vigorously with him, so sure that the slaves would be soundly asleep with no thoughts of escape. Fools.

Determined to steal at least one more trinket, Leda made her way over to the lararium, tucked away in a dark corner of the atrium, the shrine that housed the Lare, the household gods that watched over the family Flavia. Smiling spitefully, Leda seized one of the two bronze statues and put it in her sack. She decided, at that moment, not to sell it but keep it as a trophy, as a remainder of her triumph over her years of suffering. She did not fear sacrilege. Why should she? She had adhered to the Roman way, much reluctantly, as her very life had depended on it, but she did not, and would not bend the knee to Roman gods. They held no sway over her. Leda was just turning away when the moonlight that spilled through the compluvium, the square opening in the ceiling of the atrium, slanted just so that Leda was able to make out the lararium's wall-painting. She was immediately terrified by what she saw.

The image was a far cry from the usual paintings of the Lare that were composed: the gods flanking an important or accomplished ancestor, clutching important symbols that represented prosperity for the family. Instead, the painting depicted the gods fleeing from the ancestor, fear apparent on their faces, a monstrous man covered in blood, staining his white toga and dripping from-O Gods!-the fangs that peeked out from the corners of his mouth. He clutched the symbols of prosperity, as if he had wrenched them straight from the gods' hands. At his feet, lay another man with his throat torn open, blood spilling copious streams that seemed to drip off the painting and onto the shelf of the shrine, but Leda was sure that it was just the moonlight playing tricks on her. She couldn't, however, help imaging that she could see the blood pooling and seeping beneath the plinth of the lone bronze statue and she had to force herself to turn away, shuddering. Romans. What savages they were. Leda was thankful that she had finally found the opportunity and the courage to leave. Who knew what other horrors lurked beneath the cold, marble-hard face of Rome?

The moonlight shifted again, illuminating the impluvium in pale, eerie light, giving the wine-dark water a sleek sheen. Leda barely noticed as she made her way towards the entrance of the house, the vestibule. She suddenly stopped, finally aware of the disgusting and rank smell that permeated the atrium. She didn't want to turn and explore the reasoning behind the smell, but she did so anyway, chills running up her spine like the nauseating caress of her master's cold, ringed fingers. Leda took a step towards the lit impluvium, where the smell originated, and nearly fell as she slid on slick, wet liquid beneath her feet. Looking down, beneath the moonlight, she saw that it was blood. Involuntarily, her eyes followed the trail that led into a dark corner. As if the Roman gods saw it a fit moment to punish her for her sacrilege, the moonlight slanted and revealed the source of the blood.

It was a wonder she didn't scream.

A disgusting pile of gore and blood, half-baked organs and scraps of flesh and hair and clothing, spattered the floor and the walls almost up to the ceiling. The sack slipped from her hand as Leda doubled over to vomit. She didn't notice the shadows on the wall shuddering as a dark figure uncoiled himself from the darkness. Urine made a trail down her legs, sharp and pungent like her fear, and Leda was readying herself to flee until the moonlight, another cruel trick of the gods it could be said, caught a gleam amidst the pile of gore. Curiosity overwhelming self-preservation, Leda slowly made her way over, trembling. She should have fled instead.

Gagging, Leda dug through the gore, and found a ring in the palm of her hand. Her master's favorite ring. Wiping away the blood on her woolen tunic, Leda saw that the ring was a solid gold band, heavy, with an intricate setting clutching a large stone in its grasp. The stone was of deepest blue, almost black, with no reflection, the color of a starless night. Thumbing the stone, Leda found her joy, her fortune, at the price of her master's brutal death. She smiled, trembling, frightened, but pleased. It would fetch a pretty price; perhaps pay both her and Castor's passage back to Britannia. The rest of the trinkets would be enough to get them started, pay for a nice house and an acre of land, perhaps. So lost in her thoughts, Leda did not notice the figure approaching her from behind. He stood directly behind her as she was lost another moment in her dreams, waiting.

Happily unaware of her doom, the hapless slave turned and stared Death in the face.

When he was done feeding, Godric let the slave girl's body fall to the marble floor with a careless thump, landing right next to the edge of the impluvium. With a nudge of his foot, the corpse rolled into the pool, her body sinking slighting before bobbing back up on the surface. Her serene face and the wet tendrils of her hair spreading out on the water made him think of the water spirits of his native land that he spent hours trying to spot by peering into every river and puddle, waiting. He pushed the thought away quickly. He could never return home. There was no home. His village had been put to the torch after the men, including his father, were slaughtered in battle, the women raped and the children bound in chains. Marched into Rome, Godric was, like the rest of his people, bought and sold like cattle. Godric was torn from his mother's grasp and hauled off to the highest bidder, Gaius Flavius Corvinus, his master and maker.

No. His maker was no more, dead by his hand. Godric smiled. He was free, free at last. Free and alive, unlike the stupid girl who should have just kept on walking out the door. Then again, perhaps it was better she hadn't walked outside. Rome during the nighttime was a completely different world from the Rome of the day, of the living. The living had no business outside their homes at night.

Godric picked up the ring that Leda had dropped, and flicked it into the impluvium with a snort. Humans and their fascination with pretty, glittering trinkets. Roman patricians were worse, content to drown in their finery. Godric's people, having been hardened, practical warriors, had no use or taste for such fripperies for anything other than trophies taken off their enemies in battle. But he was no longer one of them, no longer mortal. He was a creature of the night, born of death, and despised by the living. It was survival or death. And that's how it would always be. Even worse: now that he had killed one of his own, his own maker of all things, he would be hunted down, captured, and meet the true death. "To all the hells with that," he muttered in his native language, relishing the words on his tongue, no longer being required to speak the accursed Latin.

Godric's gaze roamed around the atrium thoughtfully as he was thinking of what his next course of action should be, landing on the sack of valuables that the slave girl had dropped. When he spilled them out onto the floor, Godric was surprised to find one of the bronze Lare statues amongst them. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, smiling.

"Your gods did not see fit to protect you," he told the pile of stinking gore and coagulating blood that had once been his maker. "What do the gods care for those such as us? We are creatures of death, no longer seen in their eyes because we are not among the living. They are deaf to us."

Godric carefully set the statue down on the floor and kicked it, sending it skidding in the trail of his maker's blood. "To all the hells with the gods. To all the hells with you. I am here, and you are nowhere. I am Death, and you are dead. I am your progeny, and you were my maker, and I won. There is survival, and there is death, and there were always be another me and another you."

Exhilarated, alive and yet not alive, the transformation occurred. No, it was not the turning. He had already turned. This was a different transformation, a voluntary transition from man to beast; yet better than both man and beast, and Godric accepted it fully. His fangs appeared with a click, flashing bone-white in the moonlight, and his impulses immediately set in, the thirst for blood almost always top priority, being the young vampire that he was.

Nobody heard the sound of air cutting as the young slave boy once known as Godric suddenly disappeared, the gust of dust that was kicked up with his departure outside the entrance of the house of the newly deceased Gaius Flavius Corvinus. The living were sleeping, treacherous Rome was alive with the dead, and Death was hungry.

Notes:

Anathema – a person or thing accursed or consigned to damnation or destruction.

Lararium – the small shrine in Roman houses dedicated to the household gods.

Atrium – the main room of a Roman house. It contains the compluvium and the impluvium.

Compluvium – the aperture in the ceiling of the main room that lets in the sunlight and rain.

Impluvium – the basin in the center of the main room that collects the rain water the compluvium lets in.

Vestibule – entrance to a Roman house.

Patrician – Roman nobility.

The Lare – the household gods. They were believed to protect, observe, and influence Roman families.

A/N: The timeline I chose for this prologue was the year of Julius Caesar's death, which makes Godric in his very early twenties', give or take, as the wiki indicates that he was captured in Caesar's conquest of Gaul (58 – 52 B.C.). I figured that Godric would kill his maker very early on in his life as a vampire to escape his cruelty and abuse. Just thought I should clarify that in case anybody asks. I hope that you readers found this chapter enjoyable, and hope that you stick around for the next one. Again, please don't be afraid to point out any inaccuracies/mistakes I made. :)