Dusk settled like a diaphanous grey mourning veil over the tufted hillocks
and tepid waters of the Termagant swamp. The malodorous air, a bane on the
lungs of the breather, resounded with the incessant calls of all manner of
slithering, crawling bog-dwellers. Although visibility was reduced with
the onset of the evening mist, the swirling vapours were kinder on the eye
than the true unsightliness of the primordial mire. It was through this
nebulous haze that the three travellers passed, the slight form of a female
deceptively diminutive between the twin forms of the Dark Gods that flanked
her. One of the males shortly detached himself from the group, himself
distinguishable from his cohorts by the sable, feathered vanes that spouted
from his back, and laid his hand upon the door that marked the entrance to
an ancient and singular device.
As the three circled the mechanical offspring of Moebius' labours, Raziel, restored once more to the form with which Janos had persuaded him to play out his role, confirmed his plans with his companions.
"There is much yet to be done in Nosgoth's irredeemable past before our 'present' can be brought to its salvation. Before this mission can begin, however, we must return to our ruinous future to plan, prepare and muster our remaining forces."
When he had obtained a nodded agreement from both Isca and Freya, Raziel activated the Time-Streaming device, setting the controls for the very moment that the pair had departed the future in search of him. As the dust began to settle once again into the depressions the footprints of the three had left, a swish of purple robes heralded the belated arrival of a most displeased Oracle.
*
As the days wore on, Freya began to suspect that there was something amiss within the Clan Razielim (such as it was). Isca and Raziel seemed at times to be locked in secretive conversation which would stop short whenever she approached. Freya also noted that she had been excluded from planning meetings on several occasions, only finding out about them when a throwaway comment came to her ears. On the other hand, the rest of the preparations were going well. One of the Elite who had some skill in metalworking had forged new armour for Raziel. In addition to new bronze greaves, he had created a pair of cleverly-wrought, plated shoulder guards, which sat close to the skin at both front and back without running the risk of interfering with the action of the wings. Swords, shields and other weapons of hacking and maiming were being repaired and restored, and it was not long before a veritable armoury was established in the Clan forge.
Freya was of the opinion that she would now, as in the past, be able to offer insight and help if she had an inkling of the vampires' plans, but whenever the opportunity arose to engage either Isca or Raziel in conversation about her proposition, there would be urgent matters demanding attention. The woman, in an attempt to stave off paranoia, was trying hard to convince herself that they were not Whispering to one another in her company. However, unless the Dark Lord and her own mate had recently become bedfellows (and she was reasonably sure of the ridiculousness of that option), there was no other rational explanation for the loaded glances that were constantly passing between them in her presence.
On the third day after their return to the Razielim Clanlands, Freya reached the end of her tether. Returning from an evening's hunting in the Human City, she found the entire Clan gathered around a map of Nosgoth in one of the still-standing chambers, which had recently been designated as conference room. Heartily vexed by her continued exclusion, she marched straight in and demanded to be told what was going on.
Raziel let out a deep sigh that proved how slim was his grasp on his temper and replied, keeping his attention focused on the map.
"This does not concern you, fledgling."
Freya's indignation, fuelled by the elation of a recent feed, erased common sense, and incited her to loose a torrent of criticism against the glowing- eyed Lord to inform him just how wrong he was: Fledgling she might be, but he seemed to be forgetting that she had -on occasion successfully - led the Sarafan armies against him, and just because one of his progeny had seen fit to indoctrinate her into their ways (here she cast a placatory glance at Isca to show she harboured him no ill-will), did not mean that she intended to start at the bottom of the ladder again.
Raziel growled in an aside to his second-in-command, "If you will not keep your fledgling under control. . ."
"Why am I being excluded from this discussion?" interjected the woman.
Raziel finally raised his burning gaze to hers and opened his mouth to speak. Before his answer was uttered, however, his eyes darted across to Isca, and a moment later he sighed as though in acceptance of some new advice.
"We need you to focus on the translation of the Sarafan texts." He cut across her consequent argument, adding, "We will be travelling to a time that not even I remember. Any information you can glean from those documents about that particular time will be invaluable."
"But," began the woman, determined to find out the rest of the plan.
"Invaluable." Raziel stressed with an air of finality, eyeing her coldly. His displeasure, although not as injuring to her as Isca's, still scathed her. He was her sire's sire and though every human instinct that was left in her screamed that she did not owe any loyalty to this being, some newly impressed impulse that had nothing to do with conscious thought and decision-making was convincing her that the best thing she could do would be to walk back to her chamber and start deciphering the texts. With one final incensed glare at Isca, she stamped off in the direction of her room, leaving the men to their discussion.
The night ticked its finite minutes away in silence as Freya, feeling left out and dejected, continued in her persevering quest to wrest information from the long-winded Sarafan documents. Just as her fledgling body-clock told her that the sun would shortly be on the rise, the door to the chamber opened with a muffled creak. Her senses told her the identity of her visitor without the need for visual confirmation, and, still piqued from the humiliating events of the evening, she ignored him, keeping her attention centred on the riveting contents of the Sarafan tome. When his immediate proximity ensured that she could no longer realistically claim to be unaware of his presence, she spoke brusquely without looking up from her reading.
"I'm busy."
A clawed hand reached out and closed the book. Freya's shoulders slumped as, with a resigned sigh, she turned to regard her sire. The look on his face was unfathomable. It lay somewhere in the murky divide between desire and regret, guilt and need. Despite her disgruntlement over recent happenings, she found her desire for him as strong as ever, and she rose willingly to embrace him. As dawn wore on into morning, her lover's affections became urgent, needy, almost fatalistic, and when she awoke at evenfall, he was gone, as in fact were the rest of the Clan.
*
Freya arose to find the vast confines of the Razielim fortress completely deserted. The newly repaired armour, the recently scavenged weapons - everything had been taken. As she strode, first in steadily rising alarm then later in a mood of mounting fury from room to room, she found that the devious swine had left her with nothing.
The walls echoed briefly with the infuriated scream of a deserted fledge.
As the reverberation subsided, a new sound came to Freya's keen ears: a shuffling, clanking noise followed by the steady patter that signalled the approach of several bipedal creatures - her vampire-enhanced senses informing her that they were barefoot. Scaling a nearby wall that was half tumbling into ruin, Freya espied the source of the sound. An advance scouting party of some pale-skinned, blue-garbed monstrosities had breached the main gate and was now making its way towards her position. With the main exit inaccessible, Freya lunged back into the main hall, metres in front of the scuttling bipeds and made a dash for the door that led to the warp gate. The appearance of two of the leading creatures' more ferocious pets forced her to pick up a nearby scimitar, evidently discarded for its notched blade. The injuries she sustained in dispatching the beasts would undoubtedly have ended her human life, but were fortunately of little consequence to her new vampiric constitution. Freya now began to back towards the rear of the dais, keeping close to the symbol-decked portal. Then, as more of the pallid, leprous creatures began to pour into the Hall, and seeing that the odds were more than slightly stacked against her, Freya decided that -for today- cowardice was the better part of survival, and flung herself through the door.
Without full recognition of her reasons, the fledgling found herself heading for the Chronoplast. Working on the assumption that Raziel and Isca had gone back in time to try to save the Pillars as per the Vampire Messiah's original plan, but having absolutely no idea when, she decided, with a combination of bitterness and reckless rage ruling her thoughts, to set the dials at random. There was no point in staying in this future alone where these deadly, misshapen beasts roamed free, and even less in trying to calculate to which time-period her sire might have gone; with that depressing truth foremost in her mind, Freya activated the machine.
*
A few nights' exploration of her new, well-populated surroundings brought the fledgling unerringly to the familiar environs of Meridian, which, thanks to some eldritch barriers across the main gates, she was forced to enter through the sewers. Finding that much of the town was unchanged from the days when she had walked its cluttered streets, but that the same mysterious energy barriers that had prevented her entry into the main city had left large areas of the town inaccessible, Freya confined herself to the sewers. The self-imposed burden was light, however, as she soon found Meridian's underground tunnels to be as overrun with mercenary scum as the perilous streets above, and consequently the fledge did not go hungry.
Despite the abundance of well-fed prey, Freya found herself growing uneasy. As time wore on, she began to realise that her disaffection stemmed from her inability to deal with the unfamiliar power, the alien feelings and the unexpected lusts that were threatening to overwhelm her newborn fledgling system. With no-one to whom to turn for advice, her own vampiric instincts began to turn on her, sending the woman into the inevitable spiral that could culminate in nothing other than a masochistic killing spree. The only peace she now felt came from the kill, from the indescribable ecstasy of a victim's lifeblood splattering against her cold skin: but the 'peace' brought its own consequences, and when she became aware that the satiety conveyed by the violence marked her only relief from the burning of Isca's betrayal, the woman found she could not stop. Nor did she want to, and days passed in a blinding succession of tormented screams and streams of blood as she continued to cut a wanton trail of destruction through Meridian's underground.
Her vampiric senses soared with each kill - more so because of her location. She loved the irony: she had once protected this very city, and in a moment of idle curiosity she had even wandered past the Sarafan keep where Antaris would try to kill her - in who knew how many hundreds of years' time - and fail. She also realised that her current actions were probably affecting the timeline, but her sense of judgement was impaired in proportion to her growing bloodthirst, and she no longer cared.
As the fledge wandered recklessly along one of the more widely-used tunnels, she encountered a lone Sarafan, his silver armour gleaming dull orange in the meagre sewer light. After a brief skirmish, during which she lured the youth into a false sense of security by feigning weakness, the woman caught the knight around the back of the neck and in a moment of unparalleled perversity, kissed him full on the lips as she drove her blade through his chest. With a shudder of pleasure, she licked the blood from the well-used scimitar and turned to continue, eyes still fixed in raw delight on the fallen Sarafan. Abruptly, she found her progress impeded as though by a solid wall of bone and muscle as she walked straight into someone's chest.
Freya backed off a couple of paces in complete surprise - she had not sensed the presence of any other humans in this part of the sewer. Her stomach tightened into knots and her mouth dropped open as she recognised the immortal who confronted her. She viewed her new challenger from head to toe - the rainment and armature of jet black leather, the ash-white skin, the powerful chest - still bearing the scar it had sustained in that fabled battle - and last but probably most significantly, the silvered hair - all left her in no doubt as to the identity of this blood-drinking leech. The cat-yellow eyes and ever-present scowl only served to reinforce her suspicions. Freya took another involuntary step back as the vampire's previously sequestered presence burst full-force onto her fledgling senses.
"Kain!"
*
Review Responses:
Arch Enemy/Ebony - Eek! Sorry! I could send you the antidote, but I think I've fallen victim to my mean streak today . . . : )
MikotoTribal: Don't worry about it, it's just profanity (of which there is plenty in Spain - at least there was when I lived there.) : P
As the three circled the mechanical offspring of Moebius' labours, Raziel, restored once more to the form with which Janos had persuaded him to play out his role, confirmed his plans with his companions.
"There is much yet to be done in Nosgoth's irredeemable past before our 'present' can be brought to its salvation. Before this mission can begin, however, we must return to our ruinous future to plan, prepare and muster our remaining forces."
When he had obtained a nodded agreement from both Isca and Freya, Raziel activated the Time-Streaming device, setting the controls for the very moment that the pair had departed the future in search of him. As the dust began to settle once again into the depressions the footprints of the three had left, a swish of purple robes heralded the belated arrival of a most displeased Oracle.
*
As the days wore on, Freya began to suspect that there was something amiss within the Clan Razielim (such as it was). Isca and Raziel seemed at times to be locked in secretive conversation which would stop short whenever she approached. Freya also noted that she had been excluded from planning meetings on several occasions, only finding out about them when a throwaway comment came to her ears. On the other hand, the rest of the preparations were going well. One of the Elite who had some skill in metalworking had forged new armour for Raziel. In addition to new bronze greaves, he had created a pair of cleverly-wrought, plated shoulder guards, which sat close to the skin at both front and back without running the risk of interfering with the action of the wings. Swords, shields and other weapons of hacking and maiming were being repaired and restored, and it was not long before a veritable armoury was established in the Clan forge.
Freya was of the opinion that she would now, as in the past, be able to offer insight and help if she had an inkling of the vampires' plans, but whenever the opportunity arose to engage either Isca or Raziel in conversation about her proposition, there would be urgent matters demanding attention. The woman, in an attempt to stave off paranoia, was trying hard to convince herself that they were not Whispering to one another in her company. However, unless the Dark Lord and her own mate had recently become bedfellows (and she was reasonably sure of the ridiculousness of that option), there was no other rational explanation for the loaded glances that were constantly passing between them in her presence.
On the third day after their return to the Razielim Clanlands, Freya reached the end of her tether. Returning from an evening's hunting in the Human City, she found the entire Clan gathered around a map of Nosgoth in one of the still-standing chambers, which had recently been designated as conference room. Heartily vexed by her continued exclusion, she marched straight in and demanded to be told what was going on.
Raziel let out a deep sigh that proved how slim was his grasp on his temper and replied, keeping his attention focused on the map.
"This does not concern you, fledgling."
Freya's indignation, fuelled by the elation of a recent feed, erased common sense, and incited her to loose a torrent of criticism against the glowing- eyed Lord to inform him just how wrong he was: Fledgling she might be, but he seemed to be forgetting that she had -on occasion successfully - led the Sarafan armies against him, and just because one of his progeny had seen fit to indoctrinate her into their ways (here she cast a placatory glance at Isca to show she harboured him no ill-will), did not mean that she intended to start at the bottom of the ladder again.
Raziel growled in an aside to his second-in-command, "If you will not keep your fledgling under control. . ."
"Why am I being excluded from this discussion?" interjected the woman.
Raziel finally raised his burning gaze to hers and opened his mouth to speak. Before his answer was uttered, however, his eyes darted across to Isca, and a moment later he sighed as though in acceptance of some new advice.
"We need you to focus on the translation of the Sarafan texts." He cut across her consequent argument, adding, "We will be travelling to a time that not even I remember. Any information you can glean from those documents about that particular time will be invaluable."
"But," began the woman, determined to find out the rest of the plan.
"Invaluable." Raziel stressed with an air of finality, eyeing her coldly. His displeasure, although not as injuring to her as Isca's, still scathed her. He was her sire's sire and though every human instinct that was left in her screamed that she did not owe any loyalty to this being, some newly impressed impulse that had nothing to do with conscious thought and decision-making was convincing her that the best thing she could do would be to walk back to her chamber and start deciphering the texts. With one final incensed glare at Isca, she stamped off in the direction of her room, leaving the men to their discussion.
The night ticked its finite minutes away in silence as Freya, feeling left out and dejected, continued in her persevering quest to wrest information from the long-winded Sarafan documents. Just as her fledgling body-clock told her that the sun would shortly be on the rise, the door to the chamber opened with a muffled creak. Her senses told her the identity of her visitor without the need for visual confirmation, and, still piqued from the humiliating events of the evening, she ignored him, keeping her attention centred on the riveting contents of the Sarafan tome. When his immediate proximity ensured that she could no longer realistically claim to be unaware of his presence, she spoke brusquely without looking up from her reading.
"I'm busy."
A clawed hand reached out and closed the book. Freya's shoulders slumped as, with a resigned sigh, she turned to regard her sire. The look on his face was unfathomable. It lay somewhere in the murky divide between desire and regret, guilt and need. Despite her disgruntlement over recent happenings, she found her desire for him as strong as ever, and she rose willingly to embrace him. As dawn wore on into morning, her lover's affections became urgent, needy, almost fatalistic, and when she awoke at evenfall, he was gone, as in fact were the rest of the Clan.
*
Freya arose to find the vast confines of the Razielim fortress completely deserted. The newly repaired armour, the recently scavenged weapons - everything had been taken. As she strode, first in steadily rising alarm then later in a mood of mounting fury from room to room, she found that the devious swine had left her with nothing.
The walls echoed briefly with the infuriated scream of a deserted fledge.
As the reverberation subsided, a new sound came to Freya's keen ears: a shuffling, clanking noise followed by the steady patter that signalled the approach of several bipedal creatures - her vampire-enhanced senses informing her that they were barefoot. Scaling a nearby wall that was half tumbling into ruin, Freya espied the source of the sound. An advance scouting party of some pale-skinned, blue-garbed monstrosities had breached the main gate and was now making its way towards her position. With the main exit inaccessible, Freya lunged back into the main hall, metres in front of the scuttling bipeds and made a dash for the door that led to the warp gate. The appearance of two of the leading creatures' more ferocious pets forced her to pick up a nearby scimitar, evidently discarded for its notched blade. The injuries she sustained in dispatching the beasts would undoubtedly have ended her human life, but were fortunately of little consequence to her new vampiric constitution. Freya now began to back towards the rear of the dais, keeping close to the symbol-decked portal. Then, as more of the pallid, leprous creatures began to pour into the Hall, and seeing that the odds were more than slightly stacked against her, Freya decided that -for today- cowardice was the better part of survival, and flung herself through the door.
Without full recognition of her reasons, the fledgling found herself heading for the Chronoplast. Working on the assumption that Raziel and Isca had gone back in time to try to save the Pillars as per the Vampire Messiah's original plan, but having absolutely no idea when, she decided, with a combination of bitterness and reckless rage ruling her thoughts, to set the dials at random. There was no point in staying in this future alone where these deadly, misshapen beasts roamed free, and even less in trying to calculate to which time-period her sire might have gone; with that depressing truth foremost in her mind, Freya activated the machine.
*
A few nights' exploration of her new, well-populated surroundings brought the fledgling unerringly to the familiar environs of Meridian, which, thanks to some eldritch barriers across the main gates, she was forced to enter through the sewers. Finding that much of the town was unchanged from the days when she had walked its cluttered streets, but that the same mysterious energy barriers that had prevented her entry into the main city had left large areas of the town inaccessible, Freya confined herself to the sewers. The self-imposed burden was light, however, as she soon found Meridian's underground tunnels to be as overrun with mercenary scum as the perilous streets above, and consequently the fledge did not go hungry.
Despite the abundance of well-fed prey, Freya found herself growing uneasy. As time wore on, she began to realise that her disaffection stemmed from her inability to deal with the unfamiliar power, the alien feelings and the unexpected lusts that were threatening to overwhelm her newborn fledgling system. With no-one to whom to turn for advice, her own vampiric instincts began to turn on her, sending the woman into the inevitable spiral that could culminate in nothing other than a masochistic killing spree. The only peace she now felt came from the kill, from the indescribable ecstasy of a victim's lifeblood splattering against her cold skin: but the 'peace' brought its own consequences, and when she became aware that the satiety conveyed by the violence marked her only relief from the burning of Isca's betrayal, the woman found she could not stop. Nor did she want to, and days passed in a blinding succession of tormented screams and streams of blood as she continued to cut a wanton trail of destruction through Meridian's underground.
Her vampiric senses soared with each kill - more so because of her location. She loved the irony: she had once protected this very city, and in a moment of idle curiosity she had even wandered past the Sarafan keep where Antaris would try to kill her - in who knew how many hundreds of years' time - and fail. She also realised that her current actions were probably affecting the timeline, but her sense of judgement was impaired in proportion to her growing bloodthirst, and she no longer cared.
As the fledge wandered recklessly along one of the more widely-used tunnels, she encountered a lone Sarafan, his silver armour gleaming dull orange in the meagre sewer light. After a brief skirmish, during which she lured the youth into a false sense of security by feigning weakness, the woman caught the knight around the back of the neck and in a moment of unparalleled perversity, kissed him full on the lips as she drove her blade through his chest. With a shudder of pleasure, she licked the blood from the well-used scimitar and turned to continue, eyes still fixed in raw delight on the fallen Sarafan. Abruptly, she found her progress impeded as though by a solid wall of bone and muscle as she walked straight into someone's chest.
Freya backed off a couple of paces in complete surprise - she had not sensed the presence of any other humans in this part of the sewer. Her stomach tightened into knots and her mouth dropped open as she recognised the immortal who confronted her. She viewed her new challenger from head to toe - the rainment and armature of jet black leather, the ash-white skin, the powerful chest - still bearing the scar it had sustained in that fabled battle - and last but probably most significantly, the silvered hair - all left her in no doubt as to the identity of this blood-drinking leech. The cat-yellow eyes and ever-present scowl only served to reinforce her suspicions. Freya took another involuntary step back as the vampire's previously sequestered presence burst full-force onto her fledgling senses.
"Kain!"
*
Review Responses:
Arch Enemy/Ebony - Eek! Sorry! I could send you the antidote, but I think I've fallen victim to my mean streak today . . . : )
MikotoTribal: Don't worry about it, it's just profanity (of which there is plenty in Spain - at least there was when I lived there.) : P