En Medias

by Half-Esper Laura
Based on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (and a little bit on Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse) by Konami

Part 3 of 6

***

I was sincere about not doing it again. I couldn't bring myself to, after that. Not that my life felt any less burdensome, but... On the one hand, I was terrified of death, and on the other, I was now terrified of survival should I attempt suicide again. After such a horrific experience as I had, I was always forced to ask myself, if I thought of climbing up to the top of a watchtower and throwing myself from its height, what if it didn't kill me? What if I hit the ground, and my body was broken, and I didn't die, but only lay there like that until I burned up in the sun or was killed by wild animals, or, worse yet, found by my father and brought back inside? No, I didn't try again.

And of course it didn't matter what I said to him, or even what I did. He wouldn't change his mind. I was to stay in the castle, humans were vermin to be destroyed.

He... I think he made some effort to be kind to me, but it was a rather pathetic effort. Even if he said he wanted to care for me and protect me, nothing would sway him from the path of his own interests and desires. He wanted to love me, but was unwilling to spare any true sign of affection. If he loved me at all, he did it in the way that a child loves a doll, taking it as a thing from which she wants to receive filial love and painting that love upon it in her mind. But I was not a blank doll to have emotions ascribed to me without my consent. Because of that, I don't think my father has ever known how to deal with me. I wonder if he has any idea at all how to be kind, or to care about another person. It is for this reason that I still cannot imagine my mother and her perfect love together with him.

But no, even as shocked as my father apparently was by that last great act of defiance, it didn't change a thing. Before long I recovered from the injuries I had done myself, and went back to spending my days in the library.

The Library of Castlevania, by the way, is such that the Librarian could concievably know everything in the world from there. There are certain books which, if so commanded, will transform themselves into any book ever written. You could tell it to be the Gospel of John or the notebook of Da Vinci or the complete works of Shakespeare. The Librarian is very jealous about those books; I could only use them with his direct supervision.

But more importantly, the Library of Castlevania is the best in the world for learning about the occult. Vampires, demons, monsters of all sorts. For practical reasons, I focussed my study in that area, wanting to know more about what I was dealing with in my father and his minions, as well as the cursed half of my own blood. I even held out some tiny glimmer of hope that I might learn of a way to put an end to Dracula and his evil. But I studied this very guardedly, lest this practical interest turn to temptation. There is an adage: "He who studies evil is studied by evil."*

I did indeed learn the nature and use of some of the powers that were my inheritance as the child of a vampire. I learned especially the disciplines of changing my shape, although I was not yet able to transform into a wolf or bat, as I can now.

But even in Castlevania's Library, information about my particular half-blooded species, the Dhampir, was scarce. What was there explained its own sparseness by saying that dhampir are exceedingly rare. I was able to find reference to the powers such creatures as myself are known to posess, and did my best to master them. I refined my ability to sense the presence of vampires, to resist their powers, and even studied the dhampir ability to kill vampires without the need for a stake or flame or such means. None of these skills, however, improved my courage. I still couldn't bring myself to oppose my father.

And whereas those knowledges should have been liberating, other discoveries that I made in my reading had very much the opposite effect. It was then that I discovered the ability of vampires to mentally enslave victims who drink the vampire's blood. It induces a sort of love for the vampire, false but insanely powerful. When I discovered this, I became consumed with fear that my father would turn to that as a way to deal with me, to literally force me to love him, as he wished that I would. As a result I became fanatically suspicious of what I ate and drank, refusing anything that might hide a taste of his blood. I totally gave up alcohol, abstained from meat, from anything reddish in color, from any food whose flavor or composition I judged could hide blood in any way. Before long I limited myself to milk and a certain small assortment of vegetables.

And in this I think you can see that I was truly beginning to lose my sanity. In a way it's impressive to me that I held onto it for so long. I had lived in Castlevania for nearly ten years before this.

But that was not the coup-de-grace. That was something else that I learned in my study of the nature of vampires. I have mentioned it freely until now, but for me at that time, it was a shock to learn the true nature of a vampire's inner being.

There are those who think that when a person is Embraced---made into a vampire---that they themselves are turned into a hellish monster. This is ridiculous. Vampires are powerful creatures, to be sure, but a vampire does not have the power to snatch your soul from the path to Heaven. No, when a person is made into a vampire, their human soul departs to its eternal reward, and a demon enters the body to take its place. It has the mind and memories of the person who was Embraced, but at the core of its being, it is not the same person, but a demon of Hell.

On the face of it, this may not seem so disturbing. From the perspective of someone who has killed vampires, it in fact alleviates a certain amount of guilt.

But when I read this, the thought that was eventually my undoing was, "What about me?" Yes, I am "demonspawn" in the true sense of it. As the child of such a creature, could I, without knowing, be a demon infesting the earth? Perhaps if I had been more rational at the time I could have assured myself about this. Surely I would have accepted and become a part of Castlevania long before that, if I had to worry about being truly evil.

But as it was, there was no assurance, and the implications of it were so great that I was consumed utterly by the question. I could neither eat nor sleep. Every day in the library I searched desperately for an answer, but this was something that the tiny smattering of books about dhampir did not say.

***

"Back, you! Back!"

Alucard woke to find himself sitting in a corner of the library, the all-too-thin book about Dhampir still held in his lap. The librarian was standing over him, chasing off some of the books with a torch as they closed in predatorily, walking on the edges of their hard covers.

"Young Master, you shouldn't fall asleep here," the old man said.

Alucard rubbed his eyes and forced himself to stand. His legs ached with weariness. "I know..." he yawned.

The advancing books were primarily scavengers, and began to wander off as he started moving again.

Already he was opening the book again, his exhausted brain struggling to comprehend the words, as a climber might struggle to find purchase on the face of a cliff. There had to be some clue, somewhere. He had to find it...

"You must get some rest!" the Librarian insisted, taking him by the shoulders and leading him away. "You've been in here day and night without without sleep for almost a week! Young Master, you'll kill yourself this way."

"I can't sleep." His own voice sounded fuzzy and distant. "When I close my eyes my mind just keeps turning. I can't stop it."

"The nature of your soul, yes?"

Alucard nodded.

"Young Master, it is better not to ask such things," the Librarian said. He led Alucard into his own firelit chambers and eased him down into a large padded chair. "The nature of our souls is something that we determine ourselves by our work to refine it, and I suppose that no one really knows the answer. Tell me, if a demon were to love, to be generous and kind, how would you then distinguish it from a human soul?"

"A demon cannot do such things."

"But you do, do you not?"

"I think I do, but how do I know? How do I know that what I have come to think of as love is really love? If someone were born seeing blue as the same color that I call "yellow," and vice versa, how would they ever know? I would point to a blue object and they would say "yes," because they always heard it called "blue," and neither of us would ever know we saw it differently..."

"Take it from an old scholar," the Librarian said, retreating into a back room. "There are questions that you are wiser for leaving alone, and that is one of them. Put your mind at ease about this." He emerged with a blanket and Alucard was too fatigued to resist as the Librarian gently pried the book from his hands and draped the blanket over him. "The nature of your soul isn't something you have no control in. Make it the best that you can make it, and leave it at that, as you were meant to do. In the end, only Death can tell you the answer."

Alucard wanted to protest. Surely the name "demon" wouldn't exist if it didn't mean something. He thought about his father's pathetic, painful attempts at paternal affection. Could he be behaving the same way without even realizing it? But his thoughts were an indissoluble tangle, and he was unable to extract an intelligent response out of them as the warmth from the blanket dulled his mind back into exhausted slumber.

***

I should have listened, but no. Nothing could put my mind at ease about that question, and I, unfortunately, clung to the Librarian's assertion that "Only Death can tell you the answer." Of course, there was my father's friend. It isn't that I didn't know what the Librarian meant. I knew he meant the act of dying, not the person of Death, but even so, perhaps that person would be in a position to tell me the answer. Or else, if I had to die to know... I was so consumed with the question that I would even have done that.

And now that I know... At times I feel that I would give almost anything to forget what I learned.

***

"You realize what you're asking, of course," Death said, with his lipless, tongueless mouth.

Alucard nodded.

Death considered it for a moment, floating a bit lower. His bone-fingers stroking his bone-chin made a tiny, dry, scraping sound. "I could do what you ask, but you may not survive."

"I accept that," Alucard replied.

"Very well, then. If you want to do this, we must wait until dark, when your Father is awake. And we must draw it up as an agreement, and you must sign it in your own blood, so that he won't blame me for your stubbornness."

"All right." Thankfully, it was already twilight. Alucard didn't know how long he could bear the nervous anticipation, or the dread at what he was doing.

Death summoned a skeletal servant to bring him a piece of parchment, and with a burning touch he wrote out the terms of the agreement, and the risks. When he had finished, he handed it over to Alucard, who read it over, shaking inside at the terms. "...And even should my soul fall into nothingness or damnation, I accept this risk as part of this agreement, and hold Death unaccountable..."

"You can always change your mind," Death said.

"...Thus shall I know the nature of my soul, accepting all risks of this knowledge and its revelation as my own responsibility..."

"No. I haven't changed my mind." Alucard drew his sword and, squeezing his eyes shut, sliced across his palm, so that the blood pooled in his hand.

Death offered him a quill. "If you're truly certain, then sign it. Sign it with your true name."

Strangely, that condition made him pause. He had been intending to sign it "Alucard." Somehow it seemed a far more terrible thing to be doing now... No, I can't stop now. I have to know... He dipped the pen in his hand, which was now cupped full of blood, and set the tip of it to the bottom of the contract. Unable to afford a pause, lest the blood should dry on the quill, he took one deep breath, shut his eyes, and wrote.

Adrian Fahrenheights Tepes**

"Very well then, it is done."

Alucard opened his eyes as Death took the contract. He felt strangely surprised and relieved. He had almost expected the act of signing the contract in itself to strike him dead.

"And it seems darkness has fallen while we were making the arrangements," Death continued, then paused. "You can still change your mind. I have no vested interest in this matter." He held up the contract. "Only say the word. I can still tear it up."

Alucard knew that he was going against all reason and judgement, but it couldn't change his response. "No. I want to go through with it."

"Then don't blame me if you come to regret those words."

Death began to move toward him, and he closed his eyes. The seconds dragged past slowly, almost hesitantly, and then he felt Death's skeleton hand rest on his chest. But the hand didn't stop there. It passed through his clothes as if they didn't exist. It sank into his chest as if his flesh and bone were water. Death's hand did not find a solid mass to act upon until it reached Alucard's heart, on which it rested with a heavy, chilling touch.

Suddenly, there was an explosion of pain in his chest and spreading outward, or rather, an implosion. It was as if his heart had turned into a gaping hole that his body was falling into, even as the now-denied need for blood shot a wave of starving pain through to every inch of his being. Paralyzed with that pain, he was unable to stop himself from falling into that black hole and being swallowed up in darkness...

And then there was a light.

The sun! It's been so long...

No, not the fire... Not the fire, not again!

His heart---it seemed he had found it again---suddenly polarized, came in two. The joy! The liberating, transcendent joy of the sunlight on his face, and the warmth of its touch... But then, the mockery of that warmth, the burning kiss of a nothingness so profound it had its own kind of glow. One heart toward the sun, one heart toward the fire, and then, a stop, as if hitting the end of a tether, pulling forth dread and disappointment on the lighter end, and relief and desperation at the darker one.

I won't let you leave me here! I won't let you send me back! I WON'T LET YOU KILL ME!

Half of him turned to see whose grip it was, holding him back from the glorious sunlight, and there was the one framed against the flame of nothing, holding to him like an anchor, seemingly determined that if he should fall, they should fall together.

Let me go! How can you hold me back? But even as he realized his strength, even as he realized that no one could keep him from the sun, that strength began to fade. Let me go! Get away from me, Demon! LET ME GO!

No, I won't go back! Please don't leave me! Please don't make me go back!

The sunlight was growing further away. Now even the closer part of him to it began to feel the black fire licking at him, and realized the full terror of what he was facing, but the more desperately, the more fiercely he tried to shake the demon off of him, the more it held him fast, the more it dragged him down with it.

No! Please, let me go!

Please! Don't kill me!

The sun-warmed ground was slipping away beneath their feet. Oh, God! Oh, God, help me! His two voices echoed together. Someone save me! Someone let me see the sun...!

The roar of damnation grew softer, but at the same time, the air around both of them grew cold and solid. The intensity of sensation died away, and despite themselves, they both clung together as the only warm and living thing in reach as both fell, or were dragged, not up into the light or down into the darkness, but sideways, into some labyrinth of dead matter. It surrounded them, not truly dead at all, but cold and heavy. Tangible. Material. Dragging them out of the cosmos of existence into a tiny chamber of material touch, material sound; his eyes sprang open to images of material light.

To him, the scream he uttered as sensation fell away, that too was a material thing. But anyone hearing it could percieve the soul inside it all too well.

***

It was all such a blur. It was all so... So alien. No, not alien at all, but so familiar that it seemed alien. It was so far beyond words. It took me some time to make sense of it. It took me some time to make sense of anything at all, after that.

But when I made sense of it, at least as best I have been able to, the gist of it is this. I have two souls. One of the human kind, the other of the vampire kind; one divine and one demonic. Can you imagine what this means? Good and evil, divided that way... I don't think about it very much. It would drive me insane if I tried to decide which of my thoughts come from one or the other, or both, or how much of each, and how do I know if the thoughts I think are human are actually demon... And it makes me sick inside, that I almost lost my soul, my human soul, discovering this thing that I was never meant to know. God save me, demanding an answer to such a question might be a mortal sin in itself...

This is a part of my point, you understand. As long as I walk the earth, a demon walks the earth. Am I supposed to accept that? Am I to be so arrogant as to say my presence is worth that?

By the way, that is also when I came to have this particular hair color. In my youth, my hair was black as soot, but in that moment I experienced such terror as to turn my hair white. It didn't all change at once. The black hair I already had stayed as it was, and only began to grow white, as it has ever since. When I think of it, a bit in front may have turned white after... after my previous suicide attempt, but if so it was only a bit. And now no one can tell.

But no, I don't want to dwell on this... It would drive me mad to think too much on it. It did then, when it happened. As I said, nothing made any sense anymore. I don't remember things very clearly because they were so nebulous, so incomprehensible. It was as if I was open to all sensations, and they flooded in on me until it drowned all meaning and understanding. I don't know how long this went on... Later when I tried to account for it, I imagined that it must have been a period of weeks.

The first things I remember after that are nonsensical things. They are enough to tell me, as the Librarian told me, that after that experience I was utterly mad. I remember dropping objects. Not losing my grip on them, but intentionally, even carefully, picking them up, holding them over the floor, and letting them fall. Teacups, butter-knives, candles, I discarded anything in this fashion. I would tear pages out of books and drop them one by one. This is the first thing that I remember. That and sitting still and quiet. I was totally passive. If someone placed me in bed, or in a chair, I stayed there. The Librarian said also that one of my particular symptoms of madness was the absence of any sort of vocalization. Even if struck, I made no sound at all.

And my father did this in frustration at one time or another. My madness drove him somewhat frantic.

***

"What is it that you want!?" Dracula demanded.

Adrian only stayed as he had for hours, sitting very still and quiet, with his feet drawn up in the large, cushioned chair, gazing with rapt interest at anything except his father.

Dracula walked over to him and took his head in both hands, forcibly turning his son's face toward himself. "Listen to me! What's wrong with you?? What do you want!? Tell me!"

For a moment, Adrian regarded him with empty, innocent eyes, then rose from the chair and walked over to his window. He pushed his face against the window-bars, looking out into the night sky.

Dracula pushed him aside and wrapped his fingers through the window-bars. With a savage roar of effort and a groan from the distressed metal, he ripped the entire iron lattice out of the windowframe and threw it across the floor as Adrian shrank back from it in fear.

Dracula threw the window open and looked out, but saw nothing but the moon and stars, and the forest below, touched by their pale light. "What is it??"

Hesitantly, Adrian got up and looked out, leaning so far out the window that his father grasped the back of his night-dress to keep him from falling. At last he stood back up with an air of disappointment.

Then, seized by a sudden idea, he crossed the room to his bed and retrieved a crumpled sheet of paper, a page torn from a book, from his pillowcase. As he returned to the windowsill, Dracula only just had time to see that the page was devoted to an illuminated-manuscript image of the sun before Adrian threw it out the window at the night sky.

Together they watched it flutter downward, carried away by the gentle night-breeze. When Dracula turned to him, Adrian was wearing a hurt look, one of uncomprehending disappointment.

With a heated sigh of exasperation, Dracula seized his son's arm and half-led, half-dragged him out of the room as the wind picked up, and the open window-panes began to rattle.

***

I was moved to another room after that, until the damage could be repaired.

As days passed, I grew more and more accustomed to my old mode of existing, more and more able to comprehend it. I was still far from rational for some time. For example, I remember the Librarian trying to cure me by classical methods, believing the madness to be some internal fever not evident on the surface. He sat me by the fire and had me drink chilled wine, believing that the heat would force the coldness of the wine to the inside where it would cool this madness-inducing fever.

Yes, isn't it? But recall that this was still only the fifteenth century. It was forward-thinking at that time not to attribute madness to demonic posession, although in my case that might have been closer to the truth.

But at any rate, during these treatments he left me unattended, and I, having grown a bit less passive, had what I can best explain to you as a philosophical discussion with the fire. I couldn't speak to fires anymore, but this one was rather... ill-tempered, but witty and wise. By the time the Librarian returned, I had been burned a bit, much to his distress, but the fire and I had come to an understanding of sorts. It's something I still carry with me, but don't ask me to explain it to you. I couldn't, even if my life depended on it. But I have been able to conjure small amounts of flame ever since. Like so.

I would not reccommend learning this by the method I used.

Over the course of weeks, I continued to become more and more rational. I began to make sounds and eventually to speak again. I did not converse with another fireplace.

But as I once again understood my surroundings, I grew once again to understand their horrors. And now, now I had almost seen my soul---both of them!---thrown into the fires of Hell! Now I knew that truly Castlevania and its evil were devouring me. That long-ago forsaken notion of escape returned to the foremost of my mind. I resolved that I would get out of the castle, whatever the cost, but now, I was even more confined than before. My madness and my previous attempt at suicide had made my father more watchful of me, and my movements were effectively restricted to my own room and the Library.

So the one portal to the outside to which I had access was the window in my room. I knew that taking this escape route might well kill me, and it was a risk and a price that I accepted. It was better than being trapped in Castlevania forever. I want to stress here, however, that it was escape, not death, that was my primary intent.

The window bars had been repaired, and I set about trying to find some way to defeat them. I tried at them all day, but to no avail. But that evening, as night fell, I knew that my father would be coming for me. I didn't want to see him even one more time. I'd done some visible damage to the window-bars, and I feared that he would see it and put a stop to my efforts. In the end, I acted out of desperation.

***

Alucard dared to come away from the window for a moment, and pushed and pulled at the wardrobe with desperate haste until he finally shoved it up against the door. Hopefully that could buy a little bit of time. Probably he wasn't going to get another chance at this, so buying time was all he could do. He ran back to the window and began prying again at the bolts holding the lattice of window-bars. He'd gotten a couple of them out, and another was loosening, but he knew it was hopeless. Even if he could get this one out, he'd counted twenty-eight more of them...

In frustration, he laced his fingers into the bars and pulled at them, but they wouldn't even rattle. "Come out, damn you! Let me out!!"

There was a small latching sound from the door, and then a tap, as it tried to open against the wardrobe. Alucard could feel his father standing on the other side. No! No, let me out! He yanked at the window bars again. Still nothing. But he remembered seeing Dracula do it...

He drew in his breath and braced his foot on the windowsill, then threw his weight back and dragged at the window-bars with all his strength, letting out a long roar of effort.

His heart pounded as the sounds from the doorway changed from the rattling of the door handle to the smashing of the wood. And with every pound, he could feel the blood coming forth, infusing his body with strength.

The iron bars began to groan and bend, and the bolts began to tear out, some with a sharp ping! as they were thrown from their sockets. He could hear the scraping of the wardrobe's legs on the floor as it was shoved aside, and in that moment, in that one last heave of determination and panic, the window-grating came loose in his hands, and he fell to the floor beneath the mis-shapen lattice of metal.

Alucard wasted no time. He rolled to his feet and looked at his father one last time, just a moment enough for the flash of recognition, then flung the twisted mass of iron at him. Dracula was unable to dodge in time and recieved the full impact of it, which knocked him back, and he spun around as half of his back hit the wall and the other half continued through the open doorway. Without a moment's hesitation, Alucard turned and flung the window open, braced his foot on the sill, and jumped, even in this one last motion trying to put as much distance between himself and the castle as possible.

He hardly saw anything at first, it was all a sudden blur of motion. Somehow he turned over to face up, and the moon and stars seemed to stand still even as the castle towers tore away from him at incredible speed. Seeing Castlevania fly away into the distance, even from this vantage point, was a sight that moved his heart with joy.

But still there was that voice of reason inside him. I'm going to hit the ground... I'm going to die...

I AM NOT GOING TO DIE!

He was past even the base of the castle now. The cliff on which it stood streaked past him, and it was then that somehow, through nothing that he knew, he put out his hands to catch himself, put them out into the empty air...

And caught himself. His hands had become membranous wings, so wide and light that they sat on top of the air rather than falling through it. He held himself up precariously; if he stayed still too long, his tiny, stretched-out body tried to slip sideways and fall, and he flapped his new-found wings to reassert his grip. And almost immediately he learned to slip forward and fall, but it was falling gradually, falling in a controlled way, and more importantly it was taking him forward into the forest, further and further away from Castlevania.

As he left those stone walls, his prison for ten years, behind him, he glided and flitted just above the treetops as if in a dream, and for the first time he could remember, his heart was filled with joy.

His heart was filled with freedom.

***

That was the moment when I first took the shape of a bat. Even now, when I want to make the transformation, I recall that night, that fall.

Eventually I grew tired and alighted, resuming my human shape. When morning came, I fell asleep in the shade of a tree. Although there was no pillow or blanket, I felt more comfortable and restful than I had in many years.

Again, I don't know exactly how long I slept, but I woke at night to thrashing sounds in the trees around me. My father had sent his undead minions to retrieve me, and it was only with some difficulty that I evaded them. I pressed on through the forest, staying ahead of them as much as possible, fighting them off when need be.

Until at last, I came to an open chasm in the ground. It was a very curious formation, because a stream emptied down into this chasm, and I think there must have been a cave at the bottom that emptied into the lake that Castlevania overlooks. The waterfall gave me pause---water is another weakness I inherited from my vampire side. But even more strange, opposite the waterfall there were stone stairs, and in general the architecture of a classical temple built into the side of the chasm.

I think that before now this entire structure has caved in. And after my experience with it, I say so much the better.***

***

Alucard had just decided that this chasm temple looked like an excellent place to become trapped in and decided to go around. Probably it was designed as a way to get up and down the cliff, with those stone stairs going down, but he had no use for such a thing. He felt certain that he could turn into a bat again if he had to, and simply fly down.

He had just decided this and begun walking around the edge of the chasm when a white shape streaked up out of it. It stopped and hung in the air for a moment, and the shape resolved itself into a long, snakelike skeleton of white-bleached bone, with clawed arms and legs, and a horned skull more like that of a bull than a snake, but still having sharp teeth and fangs befitting a serpent. An undead dragon. Alucard had seen them before, stationed as guardians throughout his father's castle, but he had never seen one so large, with long, curving horns.

The dragon-skull turned toward him, and regarded him with the unnatural perception of empty eye-sockets.

"You know me, don't you?" Alucard called out to it as it flew toward him, moving effortlessly through the air. "I won't let you take me back!"

Even as he said this, it circled around him, surrounding him with coils of bone, but he was not about to let himself be trapped again. He drew his sword in a wide, powerful arc, bringing the blade crashing through the serpent ribs and vertebrae.

The dragon-skull sailed away from him, dragging its neck and arms behind it and chattering its toothy jaw angrily, lacking a voice with which to scream at him. The rest of its body, those parts of it that Alucard had severed from the head, crashed and scattered on the ground as the dead matter that they rightfully were.

Almost immediately, it came back around for him, jaws opened wide enough to snap him in two with those razor-teeth. Alucard dodged to the side, pointing his sword into its open mouth, hoping such a blow would be as fatal to this creature as to a living one. When the skull struck his sword, it knocked the point away, but such that it now had the sword's edge across its mouth like a horse's bit. As it flew past, the sword tore off its lower jaw, and its arms as they streaked by a moment later.

But before Alucard could prepare himself for another attack, the skull impacted against his back, thankfully not impaling him with its horns as it could have done, but knocking him off into the chasm. He landed on the upper floor of the temple structure, and the fall knocked the breath out of him for a moment. As he began to pick himself up, he raised his head to a horrible realization. The roar of the waterfall was too loud. The spray coming up from it was too great... The water level was barely below the floor where he was standing, and if it had come this high it was only rising...

Unable to afford this pause, he scrambled to his feet just in time as the dragon-skull flew toward him again. Again he dodged aside and slashed at it, but his sword only grazed over the surface of the hard bone. Just past him it stopped and spun around, letting the curve of its horns catch him across the stomach and throw him back. He rolled with the blow and went skidding across the marble floor, then felt the edge of that floor fall away beneath him. He couldn't stop, and terror seized him in the moment before he tipped over the edge and the water closed over his head.

The touch of the water was excruciating, like a blow with a club over every inch of his body. Desperately he righted himself, the buoyancy of his body keeping the edge of the floor still within reach. But as he dragged his head above the surface, he was just in time to see the water wash across the floor, still rising.

And the dragon skull still danced in the air above him, turning to strike again, but not at him. As Alucard scrambled up from the water, he caught a glimpse of a spidery human figure dodging away from the skull. As it banked around to attack again, there was another figure. A man, standing directly in its path. Alucard tried to cry out a warning to him, but found no breath to shout with, and his ribs still throbbing from the water...

At just that moment, the man's arm shot out with the snaking line and characteristic CRACK of a whip. A whip? Against that thing?? But the moment the whip connected, the dragon skull shattered, and all that was left of the skeleton flew apart in pieces.

Alucard stumbled; the water had reached his knees, and his feet were crippled with pain, sending him crashing to the floor. He caught himself on his hands and managed a wordless cry of pain and distress as the water battered at more of his body. The man with the whip turned toward the sound of his voice and ran toward him, as quickly as he could with the water dragging at his legs.

"Trevor!" came a cry from above them.

"I'm not leaving him!" the man shouted, leaning down. For a moment their faces were close to each other, and Alucard could see his brown eyes and coarse brown hair before the man seized him and hoisted him across his shoulders, as a shepherd might carry a lamb. The last thing he felt as he lost consciousness was the jostling of the stone stairs.

***

And that is how I met Trevor Belmont.

Continued in Part 4

Footnotes:

*Okay, so that comes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is anachronisic as all heck. So sue me.

**Interesting fact: "Tepes" is pronounced "Tseh-pesh." I learned that in the course of writing this story and thought I'd pass it along.

***This part is based on what I remember from my childhood about the circumstances in which Alucard is encountered in Castlevania III. I think, the Temple of Sarnath, with the boss enemy Bone Dragon King. Admittedly, it was a long time ago, and I lack the skill to actually play through it myself. As I understand it, the temple is a very difficult stage, for obvious reasons.