Cthulhu Dawn

Note: Yes…if you haven't read the first story you better do so now, otherwise you're going to be lost.

I am keeping on with D's rather Harry Potter inspired adventure to destroy Dracula. Perhaps I seem lame to blatantly take an idea like that, and then to use Lovecraft monsters as well…but hell all fiction borrows from other fiction. I have no idea if it's intentional or not, or who came first but D's world seems A LOT like Stephen Kings: Dark Tower. So hell…no original ideas. And hey…this IS fan fiction. ;)

Chapter Two: Eternal

"And if I never hear your voice my little turtledove, my dear , I still have reason to rejoice, the way ahead is clear." – Johanna, Sweeney Todd.

"Such strong words for a dunpeal, but you seem to forget our spirits are eternal."

"No Carmella, nothing lasts forever." – Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

D felt his feet touching down upon uneven ground, smelled the air change from perfumed and stifling to bitter and briny as he lunged forward and plunged his dagger into the heart of Dracula. There was a slight twinge of agony upon his face, a brilliant flash of light and then nothing at all. Everything faded from view, the Sacred Ancestor, the once familiar dining hall that D had feasted gluttonously from in his callow youth. Only D himself and the dagger within his hand remained existent in the white haze of nothingness.

D forced his eyes shut against the oblivion and when he dared open them again he found that he was somewhere else entirely. He was kneeling upon the sandy floor of a creaking and rotting cabin by the Primal Sea. The sea has almost reclaimed the pitiful structure, crabs scuttled hurriedly about and a vast away of shells dotted the sand. Awareness slowly crept to D's consciousness as he found that his knife had pierced a large, pink conch shell rather than Dracula and shattered it to miniscule shards.

D was uncertain what the importance of this simple ocean side cabin had once been to the Sacred Ancestor, but the importance of this conch was undeniable. At last, after five years of searching he'd destroyed his first vessel.

"Well…only 18 more to go.", sighed a strange voice, "Still…you did pretty damn good there. I would have thought Dracs would have chosen to make his vessels objects of importance, rather than common things like a shell. He's clearly got the advantage there, but you did amazing with that illusion. Even I didn't know what the hell was going on, I couldn't see where I fit in it, but I didn't dare show myself either. It would have taken me weeks to suspect that none of that was real."

D's face showed only a faintest touch of sadness that lingered from the attack as he rose and ground the shell to powder beneath his heel. "What exactly was that vision? How was it so vivid?"

The symboite paused for a moment, thinking, "Well….the theory I am coming up with is that any object that contains a bit of Dracs soul is going to contain all his malice and power as well. I wouldn't put it past him to find away to form a collective consciousness between each of these vessels so that he knows when you've got one. He must still be able to manipulate these soul fragments. A fragment of an ethereal body cannot physically harm, but it sure as hell can confuse you. He was trying to launch a final attack on you. Pretty sorry business this is…it seems every time you destroy a vessel alarms are going to go off in his head. Might as well be firing a flare for him."

D said nothing, and only tightened his fingers around the warped hilt of his blade.

"Now….how about I ask YOU something?" the symboite kept on, "How did you know to use that dagger, the rusty one you've been carrying with you ever since….we'll you know what I am talking about. That seemed to do the trick with this vessel."

D looked down at the simple, aged dagger he'd seen in his dream. The blade was slightly rusted, and had a strange blue tint to it, while the handle was warped as though it had suffered a caustic acid or extreme heat. He'd wielded this dagger 42 years ago in a vain attempt to slay Dracula, had used it to slice a venom filled bullet right in half. Had the bullet struck him it would have meant his death, as it did Luna's. Ever since that day the dagger had taken on this strange appearance. "I don't know." D said, "All I knew was I had to use it….I saw in the dream. It was like it was put there for me."

"Hang on…" the hand moved and touched the blade to its palm, or rather its face and seemed to lick the steel with a miniature red tongue. It paused for a moment, thinking hard and then cried out, "Well well! We are just damned lucky sometimes!"

"What?" D pressed in cold impatience.

"Hold your horses…okay…I think I understand. It seems to me that this blade reacted with the manticore poison when you sliced that bullet. Hardly surprising…that shit will eat at almost anything it touches only this case it didn't destroy it. I'll chalk this to your fancy way with swords, but it seems here that rather the being destroyed, the molecular structure of the steel changed and bonded with the poison. I am sure that Dracs has made these vessels harder than hell to destroy, able to stand just about anything you can throw at them but you cut into that shell without any resistance at all. Manicore poison will eat through just about anything, and now it's a part of blade! HA! Daddy-O just supplied you with the best weapon possible!"

D nodded briefly, ever unspoken as he slipped the blade back into his frayed coat. "I still don't understand how I knew to use it."

For a moment Lefty bit back his words, but in the end decided it was best to speak, "Can you think of nobody who would want to help you? You know when you die your soul doesn't just fade into nothingness. Shouldn't you know that? Didn't you spend 38 years dreaming of the world beyond this one? You know damn well that death doesn't destroy the soul, in fact it frees it. It's more than possible that she can manipulate his illusions to….she put it there for you as an emergency escape…"

"Quite." D growled out clinching his hand tightly, "Don't speak to me about something utterly impossible. Don't remind me of her."

The hand twisted about and amazingly seemed to pry the tightly clinched fingers open. The shocked wizened face glared at D from his palm, "Damn it…now what the HELL is wrong with you! Why do you have to be such a huge hemorrhoid on my nonexistent ass? I know a shit load more about the world beyond than you D and I know damn well that the spirit is eternal!"

'No. Nothing lasts forever." He answered calmly.

"Says you! But I am quite a bit older than you, and I've seen true love again and again…"

"I thought I told you not to talk to me about this!" D began a slightly rise pitching his steely tone. "I thought I told you I never wanted to speak of her again."

"Well fuck it, I am! And you know something D…she loved you a hundred times more than you ever loved her. Frankly I am getting damned sick of this heartbroken act when you never even gave her gifts and rarely said you loved her. It took her death for you to even appreciate her…'

Suddenly there was dark flash across the ruins that groaned as the blackness whipped past the structure. The black blur that was D stopped at the face of a tall, lichen covered rock and with a scream of almost rage he slammed his left hand ruthlessly into the rock face. There was a pained squeal from the hand, which was muffled as D pounded the hand again. The whole boulder shuttered, and cracks riddled its surface.

"Shut up!" D gasped his voice now gripped with a passionate fury, "You don't know ANYTHING about me!" he slammed his opened palm deep into stone ignoring the wild shrieks of pain and the crunch of his own bones. "I didn't know! I didn't know how to love her more….don't…" another brutal slam, "remind me!"

In the next moment calm again presided over the dhampir even as he sank down to his knees in the sand, cradling his mutilated hand. Was the splatter of blood across his face the work of his rage against the symboite, or could it have been tears that were tainted the color of his curse? Never the less his face remained utterly impassive as he started down at his twisted hand.

With a sob like gasp the symboite spoke, "I am sorry! Your right I did promise not to speak of it…"

"Remember it well."

The hand twitched almost convulsively, as though trying to see something just beyond the horizon. It seemed to him that the horizon seemed to be moving closer to where the dhampir sat. "D…." Lefty groaned, garbled with agony. "…look to the west."

D lifted his icy eyes to the horizon, momentarily shocked to hear those words from the symboite, the very same his dead wife had used in his dream. Shock passed into apprehension when he saw that indeed the horizon seemed to rising from the ground level and racing toward him. It took even the dhampir a moment to realize that it was not the sky itself roaring toward the shore but rather an immense, growing wall of sapphire blue water with jagged peaks of white scattered here and there across its massive form. A second later a thunderous rushing roar tore through the air, the water level had rose already to D's knees as the oceanic monster raced closer and closer.

"Run! FUCK D RUN!" the symboite shrieked out. Indeed even in rising water the Hunter could have raced from the scene and outrun the blunt of the tsunami. But he did not turn. The sun was blotted out by the immense crest before it began to curl downward, arcing for the land. D remained utterly still, the strange words rooting his feet to the ground. "What the hell!" the pained voice cried, "Even I don't know what the hell will happen to you in that. RUN!!"

"She wanted me to see this…" he whispered to his own disbelieving self before one of the smaller waves had crashed up against the shore, robbing even the steadfast Hunter of his footing. It was not weakness, but sheer dread that paralyzed D as he fell victim to the assault of wave after wave that crashed over him. He tried desperately to grab hold of something, but already the entire coast line was changing, whole boulders floated past him like mere grains of sand. The Hunter was out of his element in water, and could just barely fight off the vampire curse to drown even in shallow pool. It took intense concentration for him to swim. Never before had he been cast into such a wild maelstrom of water…not since the night he'd lost his mother.

Indeed the very thought of the raging river that had claimed Mina the Fair seemed to freeze D's limbs completely. He could only force himself to take small convulsive gasps when the waves permitted him to, and could only watch as the monstrous tidal wave edged ever closer, then slammed directly into him, easily dwarfing the Hunter in its grasp.

First there was only the brutal force of the water slamming into him; he felt bone snapping even in his resistant body. Then there was the darkness, and the thunderous rushing growl of the water all about him. D was battered with impact after impact; his vision improved enough to see a few of the culprits. A massive reef of jagged coral, the remains of a decaying ship, rotted boats and rusty anchors, but he was powerless to twist away from any of them. Sand blasted past his skin with the force of a million tiny daggers. Try as he could to kick toward the surface, his limbs remained unwilling, his lungs where aching with need for air already. There was no surface at all. Only walls after walls of water. Still the Hunter refused to stop trying until something struck him brutally upside the head, with force that would have reduced the skull of mortal into fragments and his world once again fell black.

"Is he breathin'?"

"Yup, defiantly alive…how could anyone survive that? "

"Shit…fella didn't even lose his hat!"

"…no….no he can't be…" a harsh elderly voice said above the others.

D's eyes opened. The four that had gathered around him all withdrew almost fearfully at the sight of seeing those unworldly black orbs set within his pallid, perfect face. The woman amongst the three developed a bright blush to her cheeks, two other men adverted their eyes enviously. However the eyes of as elderly man with a grizzled face and grey beard remained fixated disbelievingly on the dhampir.

D rose easily on the damp sand, showing no ache within his body, pausing only momentarily to cough out the water and sand trapped with his lungs but then he pulled himself to his feet, and gazed almost disinterestedly at his unfamiliar surroundings. Indeed there seemed to be no damage at all to his body, not even to his left hand.

"Where I am I?" his questioned softly.

"Yeh've washed up on the beaches just outside the town of Runh." said the flustered woman. "Heavens knows how long you where tossed around in that tsunami. You ought to come over to my place, I've got a son about your age his clothes ought to fit you nicely…"

"Now dear, I thought we agreed he's to stay with Uther if he was alive." said a man, obviously the woman's wife judging by the jealousy in his face.

The grizzled old man nodded to D, regarding him strangely, rather like a friend than an outsider. D's eyes shifted to his face, vaguely he recognized the shape of his eyes…yes….he knew that name.

"What do yeh say young man, I'd be more than happy to set yeh up for the night. Let yeh rest up."

Slowly D nodded his approval.

It wasn't a long walk from the shore to the sprawling, and well off town of Runh. Even flooded and decimated as it was it was apparent that the town was far more prosperous that its dead neighbor had ever been. Most of the town had been built on a high cliff and its walls where solid enough to hold through the blunt of the tsunami. The citizens seemed to carry themselves though the decimation with more annoyance than loss. Many of them still paused to glance spellbound at D as he passed.

The old man lived just on the outskirts of town, in a small cottage that overlooked the still turbulent ocean. It had for most part been spared the blunt of damage. Once inside D removed his waterlogged cape and his hat and sat silently down beside the window, clutching his long sword in his hand.

"It's not much of place, yes, but it reminds me of home n' awful lot, doesn't it now Mayor Underhill?" the old man said with a smile on his lips.

D did not turn to face Uther, one of only 25 survivors from the massacre of Cthulhu. Indeed his face showed no sentiment as usual as he gazed out the window.

"I really thought you were dead you know…we thought you'd just had enough and broke under the heartache. I guess I should have known better than to think that something like that could destroy the Vampire Hunter D. When tales began to arise that you'd clawed your way out of your own grave…I was just beside myself with joy. The world needs a hero, Mr. Underhill. The world needs you."

There was a long, heavy moment of silence before D spoke, "I'll be here only so long as he is. When he's dead then I have no purpose"

The old man nodded solemnly, knowing well of whom the Hunter was speaking. 'You haven't aged a day…it's just remarkable, how unkind the years have been to my face…"

D naturally did not reply. He had been eager to leave this shore as soon as he vanished the vessel…it was far too close to what had once been home. Only ten miles from where he'd found the vessel was the town of Runh where the citizens of Cthulhu had fled. About 30 miles past it would be the ruins of the town he'd been foolish enough to call his own.

And yet he'd looked to the west as he was told…and found himself here. Perhaps some things really where meant to be. Perhaps some things were eternal.

For the next hour D sat in contemplative silence, taking Uther's offer of tea but only holding in his hands as he gazed out at the sea. The old man could not bear to look at this gorgeous specter of the past with that haunted look marring his continence. What dark pasts was he reliving…did they have to do with her? With the man that had destroyed his life? Uther felt it sacrilegious to even contemplate such a thing.

"Someone is at the door." D began softly his voice shocking the old man so that he jumped. A minute later there was a loud knock. Uther was hardly surprised to see that the sheriff was standing at his door, "Good day Uther, glad to see you've kept relatively dry. I need to speak to your guest."

"Now yeh wait just a moment here! Don't yeh be jumpin to ridiculous conclusions! D here had nothing to do with the tsunami or any other misfortune, how could he..." the old man began irately.

"No, no it was fortunate that he's been washed here. We have need of a Vampire Hunter."

"I am listening." The cool voice replied from within the house.

The sheriff was a rather slender, yet towering man but his eyes were wide and face pale as he entered the house, his hand remained compulsively on the pistol at his hip even has extended his left to shake hands with the Hunter. " I am Sheriff Smith."

The Hunter made no motion to return the gesture, 'Call me D,"

Anxiously the Sheriff removed his hand, "As I've said Mr. D we are rather fortunate that you've washed up on our shores. Times have been getting truly strange, disappearances happening left and right all over towns across Primal Coastline. Naturally it didn't take long for us to realize that you were here….the town of Runh has been talking for years about you. When the Cthulhu survivors told us that there mayor was none other than Vampire Hunter D we naturally laughed at them even when they went as far as to fashion a gravestone for your resting place. Travelers swore up and down it was your sparkling ghost they saw in the moonlight, and indeed you had not been seen for year and years. Still we didn't really believe them until one day there was a hole in the ground where you had once laid. For the past five years I'd say there hasn't been a day your name wasn't whispered…"

"Get to the point." D cut him off harshly.

Convulsively the sheriff nodded. 'Alright then, should have known. Like I said in the past two weeks there has been a rash of disappearance across the coast. Maybe 50 have gone missing in all across our town, as well as Dary and Taylor. More and more are going missing with each night, and the attacks appear quite random. Women, men, children and elderly. About ten have been recovered, but all of them have already sprouted fangs, attacked their captors and left. It seems these newborn Nobles are even stronger than usual…it's just not like a newborn Nobel to fight their way out of a highly specialized asylum and kill every last guardian. "

D nodded slowly, "Its unusual yes. Most newborn vampires are relatively weak for their kind. But it is not unheard of. "

"There is one other thing…the ten victims we've found…all of them where found at the ruins of Cthulhu."

At this there was a stir of emotion in D's eyes, a momentary shock that sank quickly away in to his usual cool gaze.

"It seems the Nobel is using the ruins as a type of base to do whatever it is they are going to their victims…or else feasting there and casting them behind. That's your job to find out, and put a stop to it. What do you say Mr. D, will you take the job?"

"Your offer?"

"Five hundred thousand dalas. " the sheriff answered timidly. "One thousand as a down payment."

"Fair enough. I'll take it." D answered and rose to his feet, Sheriff Smith thrust a bag full of coins in the direction of the dhampir, nodded his thanks and quickly fled from the scene, eager to free himself from the Hunter unworldly presence. D pulled his cape back around his shoulders, adjusted his sword firmly across his back, and placed the hat back on his head. "I am leaving now. Thank you for your hospitality Uther." He murmured without casting a look to the old man.

"Not a chance Mr. Mayor, I am going with you! You saved our miserable lives back in Cthulhu; the least I can do is return the favor and defend you as best as these old bones can!" Uther said, pride beaming on his ancient face.

"Do as you like." D answered unruffled by the old man.