"What kind of miracle is this?"
I thought that I was dreaming at this point, but could not shake off the authenticity of each minor detail that I observed. It was as if centuries had not passed and my castle was still in its peak condition. I saw that each tower, each ward, each gatehouse, spire and gate was fully restored before me just like the day I first mustered up the courage to infiltrate the accursed location that would later be my home. Completely enchanted by the magnificent display before me, I began to question the gaps in my memory the first time I awoke in the city. What had caused my castle to remain in ruins in the real world? My home had always been linked to my very being. With each resurrection I would always find myself rising up along with it and yet this time not only did I find myself austerely lacking in power but my home had not yet risen up from its state of ruin. Had another seized control of my power while I slept? The thought was inconceivable but I kept these questions in the back of my mind as I paced forward, looking for some clues as to what was going on. It all felt so real. So much so that I could not tell if the past few hours had been just a sick nightmare or if the events prior to my crossing the gate had truly taken place. There was something in the deepest recesses of my memory that did not make sense. I didn't even remember how I was put to sleep centuries ago. I scanned and recalled the events of my life while exploring the vast emptiness of my castle. I found that although most of my early memories were very much intact, I could only recall shadows and vague fragments of the centuries leading up to my awakening in a vastly different world.
I remembered squeezing the very life out of Lucifer's throat as I held it, unleashed all my holy energies and incinerated him, hurdling him back into the pits of hell. I remembered the events of my life before Carmilla's orphaned "daughter" Laura begged for me to free her from her immortality, transforming me into a creature of the night in the process. I remembered spilling the Forgotten One's life force, ending the belligerent creature's suffering after I stole its limitless reserves of power. I remembered it all. Yet everything afterwards seemed like a blur. If only I could find a clue. If only I could find a single lead to answer why the rest of my memories have been so fragmented after I woke up.
I traced my way past the chandeliers and torch-lit watchtowers until I reached the central keep of the Bernhardt Wing in the northern reaches of my fortress. Waiting for me at the gates was the same young boy who greeted me in the city streets. His sudden and unexpected appearance drew my attention to the absurd dream-like quality of my experience and convinced me that if not for the past few hours, I was certainly asleep right now. I decided to follow him anyway. Perhaps he held some significance in the rather entertaining phenomenon I found myself caught in.
"Who are you?"
"Follow me if you wish to recover your sword."
I did so, slowly retracing his steps as he ran ahead of me. Eventually I lost track of him but as I chased, something came back to me. I was not sure what it was, but it was this overwhelming feeling of deep regret. Even though I could not tell where the emotion came from, I felt its pain rivalling that of losing Marie. Whatever it was, I was now desperate to find out.
After crossing a few more gaps, I found the boy waiting for me right across a long chasm in between two ruined balconies. There were three great chandeliers in the way. These seemed sturdy enough for a person to stand, and were held together by thick metallic chains. I jumped on top of them, using them as short platforms until I reached the other side where the boy was waiting for me. Once I landed on the balcony, the boy took one stern look at me and angrily stated,
"You'll pay for what you did to me and my mother!"
Suddenly, I felt a small light illuminating the deep depths of my lost memory. I remembered what it was that caused that paralyzing feeling of regret. A year before my battle against the Lords of Shadow, while I fought against the forces of darkness in the name of God, my dear wife Marie was with child. I never knew of its existence, for the Brotherhood compelled her to hide my own son from me, fully knowing of the prophecy that foretold my turn to darkness. They knew that in my quest to defeat the Lords of Shadow, I would turn into a creature worse than all three combined, yet they thought this to be a worthy trade. If one of their best warriors was to become the greatest Lord of Darkness, then it would give them all the tools to manipulate him since they held the safety of his family and the history of his character. Or so they thought. No matter how much they would deny it, I was their vile creation, and I stood as the greatest testament to their failure. In their arrogance they thought they could triumph against evil by sacrificing one of their own to become that which he hunted his whole life. How wrong they were. They would spend centuries trying to hunt me down, not just because of the evil I represented, but because of the great shame that it was they who created me and they who led me down this path.
Those damn bastards thought it wise to train my son in secret, crafting him into the perfect warrior that would one day fight against his father, even if it was in vain. I never even had the chance to hold my son, until the fateful day when I would meet him in combat and deal a fatal blow, never knowing his name until it was far too late. As he lay dying he pointed to the prophetic Mirror of Fate in the chamber where I fought him. It was here that I found out of the boy's true significance, and why he fought with such ferocity and with such fervor against me. I was a personification of his shame. He was a reflection of the damnation that would haunt me for the rest of my days. While I spent my early days pillaging distant lands with the united forces of Cornell's lycans and Carmilla's vampires, my son spent his life fighting against my own evil, neither of us knowing of the other until the day he forcefully burst through my castle gates, skilfully slew a good portion of my castle guard, and challenged me face to face. Had I known who he was at the time, I never would have fought against him. Now, with my thoughts made slightly clearer, I was I able to call upon his name with absolute certainty.
"Trevor!"
He may not have been the young man of twenty-seven that I fought and unwittingly murdered, but I knew it was him. Perhaps this was a way for me to make up for my past sins…to finally raise and protect the son that meant as much to me as my treasured wife. The boy, in the prepubescent appearance of my late son beckoned for me to follow him further into the chamber, where I could detect a large supply of freezing void energy. He ran towards another dark corner, and I lost sight of him once more.
I proceeded to scale past a few collapsed stairways and broken walls in the chamber until I reached a long hallway leading up to a pedestal displaying an old favoured weapon of mine
"The Void Sword…"
I examined the pristine condition of the sword, remembering its long service to me. After consuming the Forgotten One's immense power, I gained the creature's ability to manifest my thoughts into physical form. After years of pain and emptiness, my powers eventually gave rise to this blue spectral blade whose size and shape I could alter at will. The elaborate runes on the sides of the blade emitted a ghastly glow that seeped through the symbols, freezing everything that it touched. Anything unfortunate enough to cross blades with me as I wielded this weapon would meet an agonizing end starting with their limbs gradually freezing as I meticulously parried their strikes with my blade and ending with them losing their life force as the blade sucked it dry with every slice. I felt a nostalgic sense of excitement welling within me as I approached the blade. It would seem, however, that the castle had something else in mind.
Manifesting themselves into formless rivers of blood, the disembodied souls of the lives absorbed by the castle begged for my return.
"Don't leave us, my Prince…don't go…"
Twisted by the dark influence of my power and bloodlust, these souls which festered for hundreds of years eventually gained the capacity to fuse together into a singular demonic presence that possessed the entirety of the castle.
"…Your place is here…This is your home…We are your children…"
Much like I had been in my early years as a vampire, the castle's blood craved nothing more than the addition of more souls to its repertoire.
"We are your true family…"
It hungered for the essence of more powerful souls, until one day its master met an untimely slumber and it was starved for longer than it could endure.
"You can't leave us alone. We can't exist without you!"
Now the castle lusted for the soul of its former master, and would stop at nothing to be complete.
"Please, stay with us!"
The castle's walls quivered as they steadily cracked, collapsing into pressurized geysers of blood.
"Look at what you're making us do!"
It meant to swallow me inside the hallway before I could get to the Void Sword, thus preventing me from regaining more of my power. Not wanting this to take place, I swiftly ran with inhuman speed, scaling the collapsing floors and walls of the hallway until I reached its end. Before I could reach the sword, the castle swallowed it in a fountain of blood before it reformed its pieces into a gigantic stone golem. The gruesome creature made out of blood and stone was empowered by the castle's corrupted essence and the Void Sword that it captured. One of the golem's "eyes" glowed with the intense energies of the Void Sword, sending beams of freezing energy in my direction.
I summoned my heinous red gauntlet for this occasion, and crafted a long sinuous whip crafted out of my blood. Despite the many options I gained during my dramatic rise to power, I could never abandon the training that I underwent as a human. My dexterity and speed at using a whip was unparalleled against other warriors in the Brotherhood, and was only somewhat rivalled by Trevor's inherited aptitude for the type of weapon. I nimbly dodged the bulky creature's slow blows, striking at its pressure points to tip it off balance. In doing so, I crackled the whip with such strength that it disintegrated the golem's stone limbs into pebbles and dust. I continued in my furious assault until the monster's blue eyes glowed even more intensely and sent a beam of energy too quick for me to react to. Within that same moment I was encased in ice, unable to move while the golem reformed whatever it could recover into its body. It stole more pieces from the surrounding towers and transformed into an even larger creature dripping with the blood that comprised most of its new form. Its asymmetrical limbs lumbered clumsily but with such force that each step it took would shake the chamber and weaken the support beams of the castle wing. I was but an insect compared to this gigantic creature, but it is not like I have never faced creatures of this magnitude before.
I helplessly remained encased in my thick cage of ice until my instincts activated yet another favored past ability. Leaving nothing but a crimson cloud of smoke in my wake, I magically transported myself a short distance away. Now having regained the ability to teleport, I made short work of the small titan made out of blood and stone. I dashed forward, alternating between my blinding speed and my teleportation to confuse the monster. This allowed me to control the tide of battle as I disintegrated larger and thicker pieces of the titan with my Shadow Whip until I got to a prominent area in its chest where the Void Sword had been stored. I grabbed onto the blade's handle and forcefully tore it from the monster's torso, leaving behind a gigantic man-sized hole.
This did not prevent it from reforming however, and I knew that in order to finish the creature off, I would have to weaken it by draining its life force. Now holding the Void Sword in my hand, I had the exact tool that I needed. I twirled the blade, feeling the familiar coldness of its embroidered handle. Drawing on the blade once more, I altered its size from being a sizeable long sword on its own to a gigantic blade large enough to slice off the titan's limbs in one blow. First I struck its heels, knocking it out of balance before I used its own weight against it to make its torso land on the blade's edge, further exposing its core. I restored the blade to its regular slice in order to make more precise cuts onto its neck and arms before I finally stabbed it into the exposed core where the Void Sword was once contained. I felt the pressure as I jumped into this junction and poured more of my magic into the blade, enlarging it once more and destroying the core in the process. The resulting explosion split apart several pieces of the titan until only its head was left and I found a glowing blue jewel where its eye previously glowed. I took the jewel, feeling the strong void energies it emitted and fused it with the sword. With this primordial Void Gem, I would now be able to project void energy past the sword's edge.
Shaking my wrist slightly, I sheathed the Void Sword into its pocket dimension and carried forward. My short battle against the stone titan had ripped apart large portions of the castle wing which made several floors impossible to access on foot. Luckily I no longer had the need to cross distances on foot and could now reunite with the wandering image of my son. I found him just in time to stop him from being attacked by a group of twelve wingless vampires that were in my former employ. The vampires recognized my authority and each bowed with reverence. Before I could gain some much needed information out of them, I felt the castle's malevolent presence once again making its move. Large puddles of blood appeared beneath the vampiric warriors, slowly swallowing them as I covered Trevor's eyes from the gruesome spectacle. They tried to resist, but were dragged down further into the puddles by abominable tentacles crafted from hardened blood. They reappeared from the blood portals a few seconds later.
"You are not our lord, anymore…"
"So be it."
Until I could find the source of the evil infestation corrupting my castle, fighting would be pointless. The castle would only gather more troops until either I or it surrendered. Regardless of if this was a dream or not, I had neither the time nor the patience for that to happen. I quickly dispatched the vampire warriors while Trevor huddled in a corner a short distance from where I was. After impaling the last of the group with my sword, I pulled it out and turned to Trevor, who seemed none too surprised of the entire ordeal.
I gazed into his hazel eyes and remembered more of his story. In my desperation, I fed Trevor some of my corrupted blood, hoping that it would heal his wounds and revive him. It did not work, and so dressed him in a shadowy armored cloak and boots anxiously anticipating his return. I buried him in a tomb in the same chamber that he died in and waited. It was during that time period that my fury would reach its peak, and I enslaved every man, woman, and child, slaughtering as much of God's children in the name of the child that the Brotherhood had taken from me. It would take another thirty years for Trevor to awaken. With my immortality running through his veins, and with a deep-seated anger at what he had become, Trevor renounced his former identity altogether and came to be known as a white-haired vampire knight deeply opposed to his father's wishes. In his anger Trevor would adopt the name Alucard, the name I Christened him with as he lay entombed, not yet knowing of his true name. He vehemently refused to feed on humans, and instead chosen to devour the life-giving essence of the monsters he would slay in his search for meaning beyond death. He hated me in life for what I had done to him and the world, and hated me even more in death for what I was forced to turn him into.
"Son…I had no choice."
"Yes. You did."
Those words carried a special meaning, making me remember Alucard's speech on the night he and I would inevitably face each other in combat yet again.
"Look at me. You've made me a monster! Father, you've made me a creature like you—a creature that thirsts for blood, filled with hatred. You should have let me die that night…"
