Chapter 1
The beginning

"What's your name girl." Bach asked conversationally. "I regret to say I don't think I ever learned it." Bach smiled his toothy grin, which was to say, he had more and sharper teeth then most vampires, his common trait was his shark like maw.

The girl frowned up at him and looked out the window to the rising sun. The sky was an orange gloom and the sun was about to make one of it's rare appearances in Nosgoths blotted sky. The girl seemed to look for it's coming eagerly and clenched the chair she sat in. A suicide wisher, Bach thought grudgingly. Fledglings had a terribly annoying habit sometimes of wishing for their own death.

"Your name girl." He said again and half walked, half glided across his quarters, and upstairs belfry to the Abbey that he had had cleared out so that it might be his own. She looked to him again, her eyes upturned and furious, he held a cup and as he approached her he set it down on the round card table next to her. It was filled with blood, as the girl recognized it, Bach saw that intense hunger in her eyes which only fledglings seemed to only be able to posess. Her face appeared both horrified and gleeful at the same time. A sound came out of her mouth that sounded between a hiss and a helpless squawk. Like the kind a human might make when you laced it's food with a little opium cocktail and then denied it after about a week (Which come to think of, Bach hadn't pulled that prank for a decade and the last time it had set him laughing right well, perhaps he might try it again.) The girl looked away violently and the glee in her voice turned to frustration as she spoke.

"I don't want it, take it away vampire and let me die, or kill me thyself. Whichever you would do, do it quickly or slowly as you wish, as long as you may get it done." Bach chuckled and mockingly shook his head at her lack of inthusiasem. "Such nonsense from such beauty," He chided "Such nonsense and such a terrible attitude for one who finds herself newly staring down the halls of eternity." Cynthia looked to him and to Bachs own alarm, he nearly stepped back, the girl's eyes burned with a hatred that he more associated with Kain then a new-born fledgling. He was beginning to doubt his desciseion to let this one live. "Eternal hell, you dead bastard!" She screamed. " Your lost in your eternal hell and you think it eternal life! How much longer can you mock yourself vampire! How much longer can you hold that heavy wo.. wool over you eyes…. Oh god! God No!!"

The girl was burning, the sun had come out almost fully, it's top quarter already disappearing back into the clouds but it shined all the same and the girls fledgling flesh was sizzling, some of it seemingly evaporated into smoke, yet she did not burst into flames as was normal for fledglings who have there first taste of sunlight. Bach sneared, suddenly not likeing this girls unusually strong mettle and strong will. He briefly considered tearing her head and limbs off right before she exuded any more unpleasant strengths and decided not to. She still might be useful to him.

For a moment her hands flew off the chair as if she were prepared to leap out of it. But then they clamped back down. The sun was almost completely gone again and her pain past. Slowly she opened her eyes and this time when she caught sight of the cup, her mouth opened reflexively and the blood shot onto her face. She screamed despite her eagerness but even it was buried in the flow of blood as it dripped down her face into her mouth and rolled up her chin and on down her throat. When all the blood was gone, she made a few sobbing sounds and then shut her mouth up. Her gaze, now a dull hate that looked past Bach into some far away space.

Bach Smiled, and with a laughing cry, opened wide his mouth and gazed up at his high ceiling. From which half dead humans hung. Blood arched down from fresh wounds and arched bowl like into Bach's mouth. Bach laughed as it came down, knowing that The girl was no doubt in shear misery by now, such as that always made him smile. But though Cynthia's hunger did flare up unbaringly again, she did not look up even when her head turned upward, her gaze remained indifferent and hollow.

When Bach had his fill, he let the blood fall around him in a lined circle, a few of the retched human creatures above moaned while others mercifully died with happy hearts. Cynthia smiled her first true smile since her death, though pain still resided in it, she did smile.

"fledglings" Bach said exasporatedly, feeling exalted from the blood. He let out a triumphant cackling laugh that Cynthia didn't share, but understood.And with that understanding she knew that a part of her was corrupting.

"My name…" She said under Bach's laugh, he went silent as she spoke a look of curiosity on his face. "My Name is Cynthia, that is my name and whatever passed as my former heritage is gone." She smiled again and hitched in a chuckle, still seeming far away.

"Well, Cynthia" Bach said, taking her chin in his clawed fist and lifting her eyes to his "if that is what you wish, so be it I suppose. It would not matter anyway, What does matter however, is this." He smiled, suddenly feeling old primal human lusts bubble within him. Cynthia was fair despite his memory of her humble beginnings, he could not look past that.

" What matters is that you are a direct brood of I, Bach, the warrior vampire and First Sargeant in Kain's Army. The eleventh of Raziel's first twelve brood and one of the four last remaining of those twelve." He cocked his head to the side, looking at her almost blank reation. He tried to delve into her mind and felt an immediate reaction, at first only a single thoughtMy god, he's in side ME!> Then a complete mental wall over her thoughts. Bach was beginning to find her strength unnerving. But his smile did not falter. "You know what that makes you, girl."

"I am Cynthia" She shot back, "Address me as such" And with a deaft motion that not even Cynthia could react you, H gripped her skull and squeezed, feeling bone give way under his hold, he flung her back into the wall, where she made a small yelp.

"As I was saying" Bach Continued "That makes you… nothing" He quickly approached her, intending on further proving his point to her through example, when he saw a blur to his right and a clawed delicate hand swipe at his face. Grunted a bit, then turned to see the girl standing defiantly even as her mangled face continued it's painful healing. (My god, she's strong.) Bach thought (I should have this one done with quickly before Raziel gets news of her, he'll want her to train. I should kill her right now.)

Yet as he turned to face her and she bared her teeth in a hissing rage, he felt something that had been completely gone from his existence for years. Challenge, after all these years of crushing simple enemies, dealing with annoying traiters and groveling before horridly stuic eldergods. He found something that he could take in his hands like an acid clay and see what he might be able to make without burning himself too harshly. He had tried to do such before which other such as his brood, but alone in single hand combat they had simply been pathetic without a single shred of potential.

So the idea that for the first time in his brood he had actually encountered a true warrior made him prickle with excitement, almost giddeness.

"Good" He mumbled, feeling the almost healed scars on his face. "Very good."

Bach walked slowly toward the girl, feeling her rage only when he attempted to probe her mind. She did not back down. Her back to the window, the suns fading rays shining through her hair, which was crisping slightly so that it looked like smoke came forth from her face in her rage. Bach would make her bow, he would brake her like a twig over his thumb before he made her ready for war. such was the way of the dead.

"Quit thinking silly nonsense thoughts and come at me! Vampire bastard!" The girl shouted, Bach mouth and all his teeth gaped, so she could read his thoughts to then. What made this one of his broad so much stronger then.
The girl apparently lost interest in waiting and charged Bach, but the girl, no matter how powerful for her freshness, only gained a small advantage on Bach, causing him to back almost to the opposite wall of the room, then he clamped her face with his hand once more and simply indured as her teeth sank viciously into his palm. "By all the elders that ever were, girl." He retorted casually as her arms clamped around his forearm. "If it must be this way as always during our new relationship, I just might end it all here and be done with you without any trouble. For surely you would fall to even a lesser vampire with a charge such as that." Yet Bach doubted his hollow words as he squeezed on the girls skull, to the point where it broke. but yet he did not push it's shards into her brain. The girls arms began to flail and Bach's bravado returned, just another silly worm for him to play with. He dropped her laughing at it all, spreading his arms across the room and really the world.
"Yes young girl" He said laughing, "Oh, pardon my impertenance 'Cynthia, newly of the clan of Bach' but in any case, welcome to Nosgoth!." He walked over to the now dark window and stretched his arms even wider, seeming really to stretch them out longer "If the vampire hunters and demons do not kill you, the boredom will" He mockingly sighed, then snapped his fingers dramatically and two of his own guards walked into the room, good ol' Raziel strain as Kain liked to call it when he felt in the mood to irritate the other lutenants. " take her away," He said barely glancing away from the window. "Give her a quest, something mundane yet useful." A lantern seemed to go off in his head and bach turned around almost completely for all its importance. "assign her with Morsley, he's still dallying around his task to infilltrate that damned human camp a mile way Southsburg. Maybe I ought to just push up the deadline a little, so our little mistress may wet her beak with a little rebel blood" He turned back, impassively to his window. "Yes that't what she can do.
"No such thing," Cynthia gasped from her crushed skull "'GUH!' I shall do no suthch thing aak!" Bach looked down to see that her face was not healing so good the second time around and calmly qouted a simple phrase to the guards as one slung her over her shoulder. "Blood bath, let her lay for the night and awaken her upon the next night if she is not so already, now begone." Bach said no more, as the the guards walked away and he looked upon his dying house, he wondered if he could have picked a worse time to devide his attention between business and sport.
She slept, and dreamed, dreamed of hours passed, that had seemed to go by in an instant. The birth of her damnation, the loss of her soul through the death of the girl, the exilaration as she over-powered her vampire captors and the humiliation as Bach made to humble her. She dreamed of that and she dreamed of her father, her father, crying over her corpse in a flower field, tears leaking between his fingers and dripping onto her body, only Cynthia felt much was not right, for her body seemed largely whole and her father must surely have died in the burning woods after her flight, surely.
She dreamt that she walked forward toward him, in another body, her new fledgling vampire body, in a bright sunny field while the dafadyls whilted and bloomed in the eternal harsh wind.
"Father, Why do you cry so? She heard herself asking. Instantly the sobbing stopped and so did the tears, then one thick stream of blood ran down her fathers hand and he recite through his cold hands, for they seemed to go pale.
"Crying, who's crying, why should I cry when I have to and yet don't have to cry, isn't it funny, dear daughter thast as I cry and you die the world contiues to lie..."
He spoke in a jerky puntual manner that was mimed by the movements of his face and head and as he took his hands down, Cynnthia beheld a wide painful smiling grin and a pair of too large eyes which were a blood filmy red and he keep speaking, "Tell me daughter of your betrayal and your promise never to hurt man woman or child not of the vampire flesh and how you've died not in my arms but in shit and how you left me...".
Cynthia awoke harshly from the dream, but not as fast as she might have wished from such a dream. Her body arching and whipping around in the blood pools deep in the cellar basements of the church, the servant girls almost screamed as the new vampire in the court roared within the pool and splashed out the 'globins' that they had worked so hard to fill up as her body absorbed it. The servant boys nervously looked on at the feroscious naked beauty continued to wryth within the tub. Then her head darted foward and her eyes flew open and the little boys and girls running the bath began again to go about their business, leaving the poor vampire princess, as they had liked to call her, to herself. None yet knew that the title would doggidly hound her in her journeys.
Cynthia arose from the pool, reflexively covering herself, for a moment, the blood continued to stain her body like a satin bed sheet, then it seemingly sank into her flesh, she looked around the narrow dark stone halls that she saw surround her and the pools like this one that seemed to have been dropped in any space large enough to hold them. She moaned when she looked down at what she bathed in and the content feeling inside her, that of the blood which had filled her. "Oh god, why?" She asked, stepping out of the tub and feeling the dingy stone floor against her toes, she looked over her surroundings again and spied a silver robe for which to cover herself hanging from a rusty nail. She touched it and longed to feel it's softness over her body, but as she ran her fingers through the thin guaze, she saw that it was almost completely translucent, which would not do for her. She looked upon some loose rags that were laying on the floor under the robe and snatched them up, smiling to herself. Initially she expected to find that the rags had been eaten through by rats, but they were still strong and sturdy. No rats here, she thought with a dark chuckle, I'm afraid the rats have probably felt the fledgling wrath long since before I came to be here.> She wrapped the cloth around her and looked to the pool as she bound the rag over her chest, feeling disgust at the almost immediate need that rose within her at its sight. Was the hunger really this strong, It was no wonder vampires often went insane after their fledgling life began. No wonder.
She looked to and throw through the halls that stretched in every direction, her bearings were still instantly known to her but there seemed no end to the black hallways besides darkness, to the end, not even her increased vision could see through it.She began to go north when a voice from behind her echoed into the still dungeon.
"Your going the wrong way, child." The voice said coyly "The exit to the baths lay in this direction." Cynthia turned to see a figure standing where nothing had been moments ago.Dressed in what seemed to be battle armor made of leather and thick wooden bands that covered the shoulders and chest, the figure smiled gamely at the fledgling girl and laughed, making the insignia cloth draped across his chest fall off his shoulder (What her father had liked to call, the Raziel Rag 'Beware the mark of Raziel girl' He had said, 'His kind are the worst of the dreaded scourge), the stranger absent-mindidly corrected it. "What's wrong girl, talk! Are you the one that fought so like twenty demons in Bach's courtyard hall. The two stepped casually closer and Cynthia held on to her rags like a Queen's cloak, ready to throw it in this ones face and pummel him if he wished to treat her so as Bach had.
"I am Cynthia.." She said, then added "Of my own clan, a clan of one which will hold no others and will one day dominate, before it destroys it's self" She smiled and the figure laughed louder and hardier this time. "Clever girl!" He bellowed into the halls "Clever girl! Stupid maybe, but I haven't seen such as you for a long time, It will be a laugh to have to watch you fight, with such words as that on your lips." His smiled flickered away for a moment as they came within a foot of each other, Cynthia saw again to her annoyance that she only came up to this ones chest in height as she had with Bach. Were all old vampires such giants now? She had heard that vampires did change and evolve over time, but like as of this?
He put his fist to his chest in salute and stated tersely. "I am Morsley, first warrior of the clan of Bach and loyal soldier in Lord master Kain's army. I am to walk you into battle in three days time." He took his fist down.
"Must I go to battle so soon even if I were to go? For surely I have not been back in this world for yet but a few days. Can I not roam free for a night more or so to look upon the land and see what has happend in my absence." Cynthia relished the smile Morsley gave as he replied. "We will travel much land before we go into battle, if we go into battle, and you will see what is of the land. I must forewarn you though that as much that you will see, you will greive if it is the land that you love."
She nodded solemly, almost smileing"I did, but I have lost much so that I think that I may cope."