Author's Notes: Has anyone here ever listened to the soundtrack to Lagaan? I keep playing it over and over and it's still pretty. It wasn't a significant part in the making of this chapter, but perhaps the next two I am already drafting? Either that or I'll be late in my own mental posting schedule because I'm busy dancing like an idiot…
Either way, I know I'm going to enjoy myself.
Chapter 11: Nightmares and The Wolves
Dark Ages
Romania
Year 1262 A.D.
He had such rough skin, he thought vainly as he ran a hand down the outside of his forearms, a naked thigh. The water dripped from his form and pooled at his feet, chilly between the stone and the soles of his calloused feet. He sighed and pulled his tunic over his head, ignoring the ties at the frilled sleeves and neckline. The fabric spilled over his chest and exposing his shoulder as he leaned down to pick up his breeches and tug them over his hips, lacing the thin cord that served as a belt. He pulled the neck of the shirt back into place and strode to the door, his wet feet slapping on the floor as he moved with the rustle and snap of excess cloth. He moved too fast, his walk was too swift, and he didn't know where he was going.
He glanced out of windows. Into courtyards, gardens, guard posts along the outer wall that should've been impassable, the very wall he had shoved his way through in his hurry to get here and kill the king. Too swift in his movements, too swift in his thoughts. He never thought things through; he hadn't had the time, the patience. The witch woman that lived a time with his clan said it was a sign of a weak will, that he could never grown into anything worthy of his family's noble legacy and he had snorted at her, kicking dirt and spitting.
A weak will.
Maybe she was right then, this woman who knew him only from sighting the soul beneath his eyes, but she didn't know him and his draw to power, from power. Creatures flowed to him like the Christians to their martyrs, ripping pieces off of him and leaving his tattered skeleton for the crows, but not without giving him something in return. The life around him, the earth, his spiritual mother, had given him faith and life and power and continued to draw his will through her spindle, stretching the coarse wool of his mind until it resembled something sane, something strong. He was not the impressionable boy he had been before, where the water of other's personalities seeped through his fibers and warped him. Now he swallowed them, soaked them up and held them, but his form was unchanged, fat with knowledge until they were of no more use and he wrung his mind free of them.
He would do it to this vampire as he had done to all the others, wreck the hollow husk of this monster who thought it held him captive, prisoner. Resolve filled him like poison, thick on his tongue, dyeing his eyes a foreign, sickened orange, the color of the angry sky, calm before pelting rain. He could withstand this attempt to unravel his mind, could whip with the power his earth gave to him and sear the flesh and bone of the monster until it shrank away and fell apart, like dust in the sunshine. And what a beautiful sight it would be.
"You think you can kill me," a chuckle echoed down the halls. Rothen did not turn to see it, quite sure it wasn't necessary and deciding it didn't matter if it was. A smile itched at one side of his mouth, imperfect and totally his own, grounding for the lightning he felt resonating from his standing fur, spouting out of his mouth like a god's.
"I can kill you. I can rip you to pieces like ashes on parchment with the barest thought," he replied, his voice even, reviling in his inner strength, the fabric framework of his being. Strong as oak wood, pliant as a willow's bow.
"I believe that's quite impossible," the prince's voice countered, still amused.
"It is impossible to catch smoke and rain with one's hands, but use a pot and stopper and a man can possess as much as he needs." Rothen thought of his home, the hut-cave his mother slept in during the winter, when it was too cool for resting and playing beneath the night's sky, laying in the bowels of the earth mother, rather than reveling in the hair of the star and moonlight. A baby in the womb to emerge again in Spring. He thought of the earthenware jars, rough and crude, yet thick and heavy and strong, filled with herbs and painted with symbols he was too young to know, sharp edged when shattered, created under his mother's smooth, frail hands.
The voice did not reply, thinking him unimportant. The vampire was unwary of his tactical change, unaware of the strength he unearthed, his unwillingness to conform. He was fluid, flexible, like the woven thread, strong with the fibers wound around his single core to strengthen it, to protect it.
Even the strongest of ropes started from the smallest of threads.
Rothen submitted to the vampire only physically, letting the monster drag him around the castle for fittings and to sit on the stair by his throne in court and watch as the prince corrected the issues presented to him. Besides that, his time was free for his own choosing, during which he plotted his escape with all the fervent, desperate, clinging hope of any other prisoner. He thought of many ideas, but none of them really worked when he either tested them out theoretically or made his sad attempts in reality.
He was not very strong, not since his entrapment. Whatever the vampire had done to him had left him with a constant nauseated feeling and migraines so bad that he could not emerge from his room until well past dark. The moon would soon fill, and he wasn't sure how the change might affect him while he was so weakened. He was, for the first time in his life, not looking forward to it.
The full moon, while forcibly changing the were-clans into their respective animals, was a time of worship rather than terror. It was a time that they might completely shed their human personalities as well as their shells and truly feel the connection to the world around them that they craved. It was a time to run like mad, frantic coupling and bloodletting through hunting and sacrifice. It was a time without rules but the rules of the forest and sometimes a time for murder when the chains around their wolfish hearts were let down and old scores were traded for scars and death.
To Rothen, it was a time to spiritually find his home in the dense thickets that littered the craggy mountainside of this wretched country. He hated Transylvania and all it implied like he hated the wash of jet hair that fell over his face when the vampire prince saw fit to visit him, to entice or to rage at him, according to his mood. Like he hated the long nose, pale and flaring with breath as the vampire hissed when Rothen ignored his advances and shoved him away. Sometimes Rothen didn't even acknowledge him.
He was feeling weaker today, his bones melting like wet plaster under him whenever he tried to slip out of bed to piss, his head smarting with feverish delusions of monsters far worse than he had seen, his mother's voice soothing or swearing in accordance to the visions. Her murder washed over him again and again and he screamed and thrashed every time her blood streamed from the open crevice that was, just moments ago, her chest.
"Don't cry, pup, don't cry," she cooed, her lustrous eyes watching him with a kindness he hadn't known since his youth. She reached out to pat his head, take his hand but he shrank away, shuttering in disgust and terror. "Mother wants you to be strong, so be strong, pup. You'll not cry for me."
He shivered and trembled and sobbed at each gentle touch, at each soft whisper, sinking in and out of blackness and dream and not discerning one from the other. Like the drugs he had taken once as payment from a human village, he was trapped only within his own mind, projecting everything from the real world as something else entirely, something terrible because his imagination could conceive nothing else.
"Don't cry, pet," the vampire's voice cooed as he stroked his forehead with a damp cloth. The dark velvet of that voice enclosing and suffocating him. He was hyperventilating, his eyes were wide and blind, addressing only the wine red above him, thatched in dark fur and smelling of feral dog.
Dogs within humanoids. He could understand them, he was one himself.
Was it so wrong to submit to one's own kind? He was practically a clan member with longer teeth and poor digestion and a too-long nose and strange southern hair. He was not German, but he was something else acceptable, his skin flaxen instead of his hair and his eyes red like the were-chief father's eyes he knew only as an infant. Rothen reached up and stroked the long hair, soft as just-groomed fur, that tumbled over the vampire's broad-but-stooped shoulders like the madness that dripped from his eyes and voice. Lightning and madness…a combination like that could conquer the world.
"I understand," Rothen whispered, his voice hoarse and rough from fits of screaming and the burn of sickened vomit. He was only pretentious in his hideousness, but not repelling.
The vampire seemed surprised, wondering if he was lucid. Rothen wondered himself, his eyes sinking softly closed again for the first restful slumber he'd had in a week. Vladimir's eyes were saying 'what?'
He wasn't submitting at all. Two males, two mates, two equals in their separate kingdoms. Their combination was perfect in joining the two, in perhaps ending the great war that had been carried on since the beginning of their individual existences. It was not an unworthy joining, for he was of royal blood himself.
Fin Chapter 11
Please Review
Author's Notes: While rereading and editing this chapter, I found myself a little confused. I'm wondering if anyone feels that way and if it's a constant in my writing this way?
Anyway, I'm a bit disappointed with myself by taking the easy route in developing Rothen's character this way. While it does reveal a little more about the elusive werewolf, but not too much, I'm almost ashamed that I played him out as the typical suffering uke. But then, all my popular characters are significantly damaged somehow.
Oh yes, about the uke thing…it isn't true at all. Rothen will in no way submit to Alucard, it isn't in his personality. I'll get into it later…maybe. Also, I'm taking my poetic license and remodeling the werewolf legends for my own means. Some thing might remain the same, as they do for vampires in the manga, but I plan to change and expand the race and perhaps make it a bit more believable. Like Alucard's vampiric world, which I haven't really stepped into, I want the Lycans to have some depth.
Otherwise, what fun would it be to write this fanfiction?
To My Readers: Let's not annoy the authoress…
Chinese Dragon KeeperThe next chapter will arrive when it arrives. We wouldn't want anything premature, now would we?
kikonishaYes, having free time is a good thing when used properly. You could use it to read more lovely fanfiction, for exmple.
Zoe: You spelled 'loving' incorrectly. What have I told you about spell check, Zo? And I don't much mind you bugging me unless I'm editing, you should know that by now. I could always use the enthusiasm when I get sick of writing. Oh, and thank you for the Lagaan soundtrack, it brings this aspiring authoress much joy and inspiration.
P.S.: My birthday is next Saturday, the 25th of the month. (Hint, hint, send in nice reviews…)