Darkness
There are monsters greater than the children of Corvinus who hide in the night. Shadows of power and rage, hidden away from both worlds. The awakening of just one could spell out either damnation, or salvation, for those secure in their false power.
Be aware that I do not own Underworld, the rights to Underworld, or the rights to the intellectual property of anything dreamed up outside my head.
--- Chapter 1 ---
Death, the Grim Reaper, Rider of the White Horse and Master of the Scythe. A walking skeleton covered in a black cloak, carrying a farm implement, who walks through armies as though they were but wheat in a field.
All legends have to start somewhere.
And the father of the Corvinus line is simply the most recent.
Vampires, in several different senses, existed before the fool man. So too did werewolves. Though it must be said that they were far less prolific before his tainted strain spread amongst the humans.
They were dark spirits who infected the corpses of the recently dead, in some parts of the world. In others, the ones who died in horrific deaths were those who risked returning as those who fed on the blood of the living. Across the whole world were stories of certain kinds of monsters. Dragons and vampires, in one form or another, were known in almost all cultures. Some details were all the same, and yet others were vastly different.
The monsters and beasts of the world, are more a part of the world than humans are, are more in tune with the world than the beasts born of humans are. The world itself is marked with lines, marking the boundaries of the darkest of monsters. The leylines, the lifelines of the planet, these are what keep the monsters from overwhelming the world. These are what kept the most inhuman monsters from taking apart the world.
But when those monsters are human...
The game changes.
And so do the rules.
But most importantly, so do the players.
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Buried underground, completely unable to move, you have a lot of time to think. How you lost, why you lost, who you lost to. When you get done going over the same realization that there's a lot you don't know, you go over what you do know. When you realize that what you do know isn't very much, you try to go over why. The fact of the matter is, it all gets very redundant within a century. Imagine attempting to last out thirteen, resting within the unforgiving soil beneath where you once reigned supreme.
For a time, he had been as a god. He was stronger than all around him. He was unkillable, unstoppable, he had thought. He'd been wrong.
Some toy from the east, some burning ash, it had changed the world around him. It brought the world down around him, it felt as though he were crushed beneath a mountain, yet he never knew true silence.
More than a millennium of freedom had not, could not, have prepared him for an even longer period of imprisonment.
What was that?
There was a tremor...
For the first time in fifty years, he tried to move his fingers.
There was some give... There wasn't much. He moved his fingers again. He'd waited longer than he could count, that little bit would be his freedom.
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Sunlight met empty eye sockets once again. How long he'd been sealed away from the world, he knew not. His clothing was gone, rotted away, leaving his yellowed bones exposed. All fifty-six inches of him.
He pulled his hips out of the Earth and sat back, his knees still buried. The world around him was lush and green. The damage from the fires and explosions had long healed. Except for one thing, all was as he remembered it should be. But out of place was a great rock some twenty feet to the side. It was raised only slightly from the soil it rested on, and stretched as far as he could see in either direction. He chose to follow the strange rock north, wondering if it, like the Roman creations, would lead to another settlement of humans.
As he moved onward, there was the muffled noise in his every step of exposed, rubbing bones.
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Three years is a long time to some. A short time to others. In the case of the Vampire Elders it's not even an amount of time worth noticing.
To the father of the legends of death incarnate, it was barely enough time to regenerate his flesh. Where once he could slaughter entire towns and hamlets to bathe (Quite literally) in the blood and decay, he now had to move much more slowly and carefully. While war weapons were uncommon in the land of his burial, they were none the less far more powerful than the sticks and swords and arrows of his memory. Those Pistolets were worrisome. They could not damage what was beneath his regrown flesh, but the amount of damage was far from worth the risk. One balle could destroy more than what one of his victims regrew.
What was worse was that the little research he'd done claimed that the leaders of these peasants had access to bigger and stronger weapons. All of his work could disappear in a brief flash of light, brighter than the sun.
Brown eyes focused down on the possessions of what would hopefully be his last victim. His body was complete now, his heart now beat within his chest.
The person had been something called an américain, a traveler of sorts. Most interesting of the fat humans possessions was a bright, colorful painting. A map of sorts, it looked. There were lines going over the strange picture, going through a spot near here and continuing east. It went on and stopped in what he recalled as Dacia before turning around and stopping again in this "England".
With his body now complete he had need of knowledge, but it was unsafe here. The peasants were growing weary, and those unarmored knights, those 'police' were becoming far more willing to fire their weapons on him. He may have no more need to hunt the humans, but he knew that soon they would be hunting him.
His eyes went back down to the map. He had no plans, no knowledge of this world anymore, and no reason to stay here any longer. He glanced down at the bare skull of his meal and decided. The plans of this "Josh Smith" he would follow, he would learn, and fall again, he would not.
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It was a strange world, outside of France. Each place had it's own stories, their own legends, and most annoyingly, most places had their own languages. He learned them easily enough, understanding what he was told by the people at least a little bit before he'd left, and then the whole process started again.
Along his travels he had seen some truly bizarre things. Towers that reached to the sky and towns that were brighter at night than at day. They were truly mystifying things, but they were not things that long confused him. The people of the age had trapped lighting! Trapped it and bent it to their will!
It was amazing, and until recently it was mystifying. Learning to read the characters in his stolen books had been much harder for him than learning the languages, as yet he could read only the books he had taken, and the things within were perhaps more confusing than the process of learning in the first place.
But that was simply the beginning of the wonders of this age. He'd found others like him. At first he'd thought them to be but very stupid prey, and they were. But their bodies had burned and turned to ash at the first rays of the sun. Worse still, their flesh was tasteless.
He encountered them more and more the closer he got to Romania. He killed them, of course, those fools who thought themselves greater than him. The ones who ran received a bit more mercy. They were not left to the sunlight, those he instead broke and questioned (Which was difficult at first. They didn't understand him, nor he them) before making their ears meet.
Vampires and werewolves had sprung themselves upon the world in numbers unseen in his day. Instead of one or two beasts that killed and fed, these spread their hunger to anything unfortunate enough to survive their wounds.
These creatures, these "Children of Corvinus" were like a gangrenous wound on his prey. Those naughty, naughty children were like him. They didn't age, they were stronger and faster than humans, just as predators should be where prey is concerned, but they kept growing. He considered himself a wound on the world, yes, but he was a wound that had scarred over, one that didn't simply grow and grow, unchecked and unrestrained.
If he had learned anything while buried within the Earth, it was to think. And as he thought on these children, he realized a few things. He was an easily satisfied and lazy monster, similar to those now-extinct turtle creatures on the Nippon islands. These children were not. He was rather limited to himself, and his endless capabilities of violence, those 'Children' had numbers and technology. In the time period he'd been sealed, he killed perhaps one human a month, and the current ones kept him satisfied a few weeks longer. These vampires, he'd found, had to feed at least once a week... Potentially doubling their numbers weekly if they weren't careful... The lycans, while satisfied with raw meat, continued even now to add to their numbers. Quite frankly, he was very well aware of the fact that they would eventually compete for prey.
That was simply unacceptable.
The weapons he'd found on these people had been strange, more so than the ones he'd encountered before. The bullets he removed from the guns were very different from the ones he'd pulled from himself. They were round and encased in copper tubes. What he'd removed from his flesh had been smashed and flat. It didn't make much sense to him, and none of his victims had carried swords or any other kind of respectable weapons.
But they did have money...
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Omake -Kind of-
"Welcome to CostCo, how may I help you?" The human wore a red vest and was fat. How so many peasants could afford to be so, it outright confounded him.
"I'm searching for the tools to perform... grounds-work? Where may I find them?" The heavyset target licked his lips and looked up at the aisle signs.
"Aisle eleven contains gardening tools, sir." He didn't spare the human another glance as he passed by. Too much fat, and too little lean, he'd just get sick.
But looking down the aisle, he had a problem. There were many different possibilities. Hatchets, axes, scythes, pitchforks and shovels. There were many options, and yet not. All of them looked so weak, and they were all so light. He hefted a scythe and ran his finger down the blade.
Dull. In the hands of a human, it would stop at bone. It would work for him, and it would do well enough, but he could only guess at what would snap first. The handle, or the head.
"Sir, can I help you?" It was another prey in one of those bright red vests. She didn't look as unhealthy, but her face was covered in boils.
"I believe you can. Which of these would cut through the human spinal chord best?" She paled tremendously, making those red boils on her face stand out even more.
"Uh s-sir?"
"I think the hatchet would probably be best, but it also doesn't offer the reach of scythe, or even the axe."
"S-s-ir?!"
"But the scythe has a lot more power, it can both pierce and slice if you can swing it right, or at least move fast enough." Honestly, the girl had been no help at all, and if she went any paler she could easily be mistaken for one of the many vampires he'd killed lately.
"..." The poor attendant was by now rendered speechless.
"Yes, I suppose the scythe would be best. With whom to I speak to make the trade of monies for goods?"
"Checkout is at the front of the store... sir." Finally, she answered a question. He looked her over a little closer, from head to toe, and dismissed her as he walked away.
Too greasy.