*AUTHOR'S INSERT*
I love you review people. Absolutely love you. Hence this chapter, which is long for me. I meant to respond to your reviews, but I'm a little rushed right now. Next chapter, I promise. Enjoy!
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*
5- A World of Fear
Katalina quickly untied a glyph globe from the latticework built over her crops, her fingers grasping the chain in a grip that left her fingernails white. High above her head, the walls of the human city crawled with humans running back and forth, and the vampires they fought against. She looked up almost regretfully; there had been a time when she would fight with the best of them. The time had passed. If it came to that, she would fend off the leeches with a pitchfork. But for now, the false sunlight was her greatest weapon.
Katalina flinched as an explosion rocked the wall ahead of her. There was chaos everywhere. Still holding the glyph globe, she ran toward the tiny shed collapsing into itself at the edge of her lands. First thought: get the pitchfork. Second thought: gods, she was too old for this.
The door closed with comforting firmness and she leaned against it, recovering her breath. The shed was completely dark except for the glyph globe and the line of light under the door. For a moment, she held up her light and stared at the rows of tools she had lined along the sagging walls. Some of them were older than she was and unusable, and these were a rich red-brown from rust and years of working the soil. Others she had made only a year ago and they kept a faint metallic tinge. Here, where Katalina had spent so much of her time, she could almost block out the sounds of invasion.
It had started so suddenly, Katalina mused, an hour or two past noon. Mornis had run through the streets shouting the news: "The northeast wall has been breached!" Katalina had been worried, but not panicked. After all, it had been daylight, and the vampiric adults did not travel in large groups.
Except this one time.
The news poured in hour by hour: the vampires had taken over St. Ager's Temple, the fountain, the market square. It was not all bleak- as news of the invasion spread, those who could joined the small but growing army against the vampires. Street by street, the battle went back and forth.
The vampires always gained more ground, though. They were the strange new breed that looked like the clan in the north, only mutated and quite insane, every last one. The stories of their power sounded like children's tales; they told of men being ripped apart from the inside out, or impaled by roots that sprang suddenly from the ground, or turned mysteriously into puddles of water. From the panicked news that flooded from the battle, the stories were not only true, but understated.
And how the people around her had glared at her with every batch of bad news. Katalina saw their thoughts in their eyes: the vampires, gathering in such unprecedented numbers, had come from the north. The very direction to which her decaying blue friend had gone, and from which he had not returned. No, they still did not trust their messiah.
Perhaps they had good reason. Raziel had told her that Kain was dead, and the next day an army of vampires appeared at the gates. If she had not known the hatred he held against his own kind, she would have cursed him with the rest.
If he would only come and help them before it was too late...
Katalina snapped back to herself and grabbed one of the newer pitchforks, which still had all its tines intact. She knew that her land, her city, would be little more than piles of stones surrounded by broken walls by the next morning. Perhaps not even that- she heard that some had resorted to lighting their fields on fire to destroy the vampires lurking through them. The depraved creatures had not reached this far but the only deciding factor was time.
She opened the door and her eyes immediately met the rows of plants she had spent her life raising. Freshly weeded as of yesterday, in fact. The leaves were green as they could get under the glyph globes, the dirt between them was rich and black. Stems rose boldly to the sky in defiance of the thinning smoke from the north.
Katalina hefted the pitchfork over her shoulder as she had so many times before and let out a dignified huff. Hell take her if she burned her own crops!
On the walls, it seemed, the vampire-creatures had lost ground. Katalina watched as one of the guards on the walls sprayed his flamethrower, focing his opponent to back off. Back off, that is, and into the ready pike of another guard who had just come up the stairs. She allowed herself a tired smile before turning to close the shed door.
Instead, she came face to face with a man she had not heard approaching.
"Oh," Katalina said in surprise.
He smiled and inclined his head graciously. "Madam," he said.
She looked him over. He dressed like a peasant, much like herself, but he could not have lived nearby; she had never seen him before. Must be a refugee from the other side of the city. He was younger than her, but by no more than a decade... his pale brown eyes, nearly golden-brown in color, had a worldly look to them.
"I..." Katalina shook her head. "I apologize, I did not hear you come."
"Oh, tis no offense, madam," he replied with a smile. "I am rather famous for appearing out of nowhere."
She smiled tersely and shifted the weight of the pitchfork on her shoulder. "What is it, then?"
"The matter of the vampires. I have just come from the thick of the fighting with ill news."
"More?"
"A bit, I'm afraid. The odds are... very much against us."
"Ohh, if you've come to ask me to fight..." Katalina chuckled.
"No," he said. "To leave."
"Leave?"
"The citadel."
She looked at him in disbelief. "But... that's madness. There is no place to go, except the vampires' lands. This city is the only safe place-"
"WAS... the only safe place. If you remain in the naive belief that the walls will protect you, you will die here."
Katalina's eyebrows furrowed. This man was quite arrogant for a peasant.
He must have guessed her thoughts, for his voice softened. "You do not have to go, and it is only for your sake that we are now asking it. If you will not... then ask it of those you know. It is the only way we will survive."
She paused and considered. "Where would we go?" she said at last.
"To the east lies the territory of the vampiric clan that was conquered centuries ago. It is empty now, and the most defensible position within miles. It is your best hope. Take what you can and who you can. After the battle..." He trailed off.
Katalina nodded in understanding and planted the pitchfork in the ground butt-end down like a walking stick. "Very well, sir."
He gave her a smile that looked rather smug. "Thank you," he said. "May the gods protect you."
"And you," she said. With that, she set off at a steady pace for Mornis's land. The man was right; news from the battle had not been encouraging. With nightfall on the way, it could not improve. The citadel, for the only time in its history, would fall to the vampires.
At least, Katalina thought bleakly, the humans themselves would live on.
The man watched her go, smirking contentedly to himself. So, he had managed to keep the tomato woman alive. Perhaps that would have value for him later. But he would need evidence.
Almost lazily, he looked up and removed one of her glyph globes from its place. Marvelous contraptions, really. Doubly so for humans.
He walked into the shed, humming to himself. Moments later, he was gone.
********************************************************
The ruins of the smokestack stank of flames reaching desperately for their last bit of fuel, but Raziel did not smell them. For the first time since his resurrection, he was dreaming.
He dreamt he stood in the middle of a forest glade at night. Moonlight shone down, pure as mountain water, upon the smooth surfaces of nine massive pillars that reached into the sky. They bored the designs of the Pillars of Nosgoth, but they stood unbroken and infinite, and his eyes could not find where they ended. In front of each pillar stood a human in black robes and, at their feet, a token of their position. Only the center pillar had no such token... only the Pillar of Balance.
Something was wrong. He watched as each pillar bent and collapsed, each Guardian vanished so only their black robes were left. But the Balance Guardian remained. From this figure, black tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves around the pillars like mistletoe around oak. And like that plant, the tentacles suffocated all life.
The Balance Guardian approached dream-Raziel slowly. Behind the Guardian, holes opened in the pillars like screaming mouths. Raziel saw their surfaces rippling as if some massive creature was trapped inside each pillar and strangled by the Balance Guardian's grip.
The black robe fell away from the ninth figure and it was Kain's voice that said, "My boy," but it was not Kain. There was nothing beneath the robe but shadow.
Then the moonlight shone more brightly and the shadow was gone, and its tendrils vanished. The pillars straightened and soared up to the sky. Stumbling backwards, Raziel saw the nine pillars lean toward each other and braid themselves into a gleaming white rope.
The glade vanished, and he was floating in space. The rope formed a circle surrounding him, and it spun faster and faster, bright and brilliant, before exploding into glowing white sparks. Where the rope had been was a blue snake- two blue snakes, each with the other's tail in its mouth, forming a ring. He watched as one snake devoured the other, until its own tail was in its mouth. It stopped eating and hung there, whole, complete.
It released its hold on its tail and its glowing blue eyes turned to him. Raziel shivered.
"You promised," it said.
Raziel opened his eyes and saw the last smoke of his brother's pyre curling up the smokestack. He still saw the snake, its accusing eyes, the broken pillars that had birthed it. But they faded beneath the rising clarity of the stench of burnt wood.
He sat up, blinking at his surroundings, and remembered. He had removed his cowl long enough to devour Turel's soul, and it had slammed into him as had the souls of his father and younger brothers. Turel had been gifted with true telekinesis; no wonder it took him so little effort to gather and throw logs with one arm. Raziel had watched the corpse disintegrate, and then he had watched the flames. With no one else to hunt and his brother's last words to contemplate, he allowed himself a bit of rest for the first time and had willed himself to sleep.
And that dream...
Raziel rose to a standing position and glanced about. Overhead, the sky was navy blue. It was nearly night.
...he had had that dream before. It had been slightly different and it had asked something of him, he couldn't remember what. But that had been centuries ago, mere decades, in fact, before his execution. Surely it was no longer relevant.
He idly paced to the smokestack's entrance, scratching at the back of his neck through the cowl. What now? Truly, what now? He could not imagine. All who had wronged him were dead. He had never thought what purpose he would have from this moment. The Elder, his guide and mentor since his awakening, had been curiously silent since Kain's death. There was no one to suggest his next move.
Raziel's steps carried him out of the smokestack and almost into the Turelim waiting just outside.
He sprang back and the Soul Reaver raced down his arm expectantly. A quick glance told him that this one was especially bizarre. There were none like it. He reached back, ready to swing, but two things occurred to him at once. First, it looked nothing like a Turelim. Second, it was not acting hostile at all.
Raziel lowered the Soul Reaver and studied the creature warily. It had a more human form than the vampires he had seen, though its skin was a strangely gleaming ebony. Imposing black wings stretched out to its sides, enormous enough to carry it in flight. A dark blue, almost black mane, ran from its head down its spine to the tip of a thin, rat-like tail. Its body shape was vaguely reminiscient of a woman due to the shape of her waist and hips, but her flat chest looked more like the underbelly of a snake. Her face revealed her vampiric origins, sporting pointed ears and (albeit unusually long) fangs, but at the same time the features were more... demonic, the cheekbones stretched grotesquely. There was no telling what her eyes would have looked like, for they had been gouged out what must have been centuries ago.
"What are you, creature?" he said at last.
She turned her blind face toward his voice, eyelids blinking over absent eyes. Even so, he thought he saw a dawning spark of recognition in her inhuman face.
"Raziel," she breathed. He took a step back. There had been a tiny shred of hope in him, even after seeing his clan territory, even after his meeting with Kain. Raziel felt it, impossibly growing, as the creature bowed to him, black wings gracefully bobbing on her back.
It could not be.
"Father."
I love you review people. Absolutely love you. Hence this chapter, which is long for me. I meant to respond to your reviews, but I'm a little rushed right now. Next chapter, I promise. Enjoy!
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*
5- A World of Fear
Katalina quickly untied a glyph globe from the latticework built over her crops, her fingers grasping the chain in a grip that left her fingernails white. High above her head, the walls of the human city crawled with humans running back and forth, and the vampires they fought against. She looked up almost regretfully; there had been a time when she would fight with the best of them. The time had passed. If it came to that, she would fend off the leeches with a pitchfork. But for now, the false sunlight was her greatest weapon.
Katalina flinched as an explosion rocked the wall ahead of her. There was chaos everywhere. Still holding the glyph globe, she ran toward the tiny shed collapsing into itself at the edge of her lands. First thought: get the pitchfork. Second thought: gods, she was too old for this.
The door closed with comforting firmness and she leaned against it, recovering her breath. The shed was completely dark except for the glyph globe and the line of light under the door. For a moment, she held up her light and stared at the rows of tools she had lined along the sagging walls. Some of them were older than she was and unusable, and these were a rich red-brown from rust and years of working the soil. Others she had made only a year ago and they kept a faint metallic tinge. Here, where Katalina had spent so much of her time, she could almost block out the sounds of invasion.
It had started so suddenly, Katalina mused, an hour or two past noon. Mornis had run through the streets shouting the news: "The northeast wall has been breached!" Katalina had been worried, but not panicked. After all, it had been daylight, and the vampiric adults did not travel in large groups.
Except this one time.
The news poured in hour by hour: the vampires had taken over St. Ager's Temple, the fountain, the market square. It was not all bleak- as news of the invasion spread, those who could joined the small but growing army against the vampires. Street by street, the battle went back and forth.
The vampires always gained more ground, though. They were the strange new breed that looked like the clan in the north, only mutated and quite insane, every last one. The stories of their power sounded like children's tales; they told of men being ripped apart from the inside out, or impaled by roots that sprang suddenly from the ground, or turned mysteriously into puddles of water. From the panicked news that flooded from the battle, the stories were not only true, but understated.
And how the people around her had glared at her with every batch of bad news. Katalina saw their thoughts in their eyes: the vampires, gathering in such unprecedented numbers, had come from the north. The very direction to which her decaying blue friend had gone, and from which he had not returned. No, they still did not trust their messiah.
Perhaps they had good reason. Raziel had told her that Kain was dead, and the next day an army of vampires appeared at the gates. If she had not known the hatred he held against his own kind, she would have cursed him with the rest.
If he would only come and help them before it was too late...
Katalina snapped back to herself and grabbed one of the newer pitchforks, which still had all its tines intact. She knew that her land, her city, would be little more than piles of stones surrounded by broken walls by the next morning. Perhaps not even that- she heard that some had resorted to lighting their fields on fire to destroy the vampires lurking through them. The depraved creatures had not reached this far but the only deciding factor was time.
She opened the door and her eyes immediately met the rows of plants she had spent her life raising. Freshly weeded as of yesterday, in fact. The leaves were green as they could get under the glyph globes, the dirt between them was rich and black. Stems rose boldly to the sky in defiance of the thinning smoke from the north.
Katalina hefted the pitchfork over her shoulder as she had so many times before and let out a dignified huff. Hell take her if she burned her own crops!
On the walls, it seemed, the vampire-creatures had lost ground. Katalina watched as one of the guards on the walls sprayed his flamethrower, focing his opponent to back off. Back off, that is, and into the ready pike of another guard who had just come up the stairs. She allowed herself a tired smile before turning to close the shed door.
Instead, she came face to face with a man she had not heard approaching.
"Oh," Katalina said in surprise.
He smiled and inclined his head graciously. "Madam," he said.
She looked him over. He dressed like a peasant, much like herself, but he could not have lived nearby; she had never seen him before. Must be a refugee from the other side of the city. He was younger than her, but by no more than a decade... his pale brown eyes, nearly golden-brown in color, had a worldly look to them.
"I..." Katalina shook her head. "I apologize, I did not hear you come."
"Oh, tis no offense, madam," he replied with a smile. "I am rather famous for appearing out of nowhere."
She smiled tersely and shifted the weight of the pitchfork on her shoulder. "What is it, then?"
"The matter of the vampires. I have just come from the thick of the fighting with ill news."
"More?"
"A bit, I'm afraid. The odds are... very much against us."
"Ohh, if you've come to ask me to fight..." Katalina chuckled.
"No," he said. "To leave."
"Leave?"
"The citadel."
She looked at him in disbelief. "But... that's madness. There is no place to go, except the vampires' lands. This city is the only safe place-"
"WAS... the only safe place. If you remain in the naive belief that the walls will protect you, you will die here."
Katalina's eyebrows furrowed. This man was quite arrogant for a peasant.
He must have guessed her thoughts, for his voice softened. "You do not have to go, and it is only for your sake that we are now asking it. If you will not... then ask it of those you know. It is the only way we will survive."
She paused and considered. "Where would we go?" she said at last.
"To the east lies the territory of the vampiric clan that was conquered centuries ago. It is empty now, and the most defensible position within miles. It is your best hope. Take what you can and who you can. After the battle..." He trailed off.
Katalina nodded in understanding and planted the pitchfork in the ground butt-end down like a walking stick. "Very well, sir."
He gave her a smile that looked rather smug. "Thank you," he said. "May the gods protect you."
"And you," she said. With that, she set off at a steady pace for Mornis's land. The man was right; news from the battle had not been encouraging. With nightfall on the way, it could not improve. The citadel, for the only time in its history, would fall to the vampires.
At least, Katalina thought bleakly, the humans themselves would live on.
The man watched her go, smirking contentedly to himself. So, he had managed to keep the tomato woman alive. Perhaps that would have value for him later. But he would need evidence.
Almost lazily, he looked up and removed one of her glyph globes from its place. Marvelous contraptions, really. Doubly so for humans.
He walked into the shed, humming to himself. Moments later, he was gone.
********************************************************
The ruins of the smokestack stank of flames reaching desperately for their last bit of fuel, but Raziel did not smell them. For the first time since his resurrection, he was dreaming.
He dreamt he stood in the middle of a forest glade at night. Moonlight shone down, pure as mountain water, upon the smooth surfaces of nine massive pillars that reached into the sky. They bored the designs of the Pillars of Nosgoth, but they stood unbroken and infinite, and his eyes could not find where they ended. In front of each pillar stood a human in black robes and, at their feet, a token of their position. Only the center pillar had no such token... only the Pillar of Balance.
Something was wrong. He watched as each pillar bent and collapsed, each Guardian vanished so only their black robes were left. But the Balance Guardian remained. From this figure, black tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves around the pillars like mistletoe around oak. And like that plant, the tentacles suffocated all life.
The Balance Guardian approached dream-Raziel slowly. Behind the Guardian, holes opened in the pillars like screaming mouths. Raziel saw their surfaces rippling as if some massive creature was trapped inside each pillar and strangled by the Balance Guardian's grip.
The black robe fell away from the ninth figure and it was Kain's voice that said, "My boy," but it was not Kain. There was nothing beneath the robe but shadow.
Then the moonlight shone more brightly and the shadow was gone, and its tendrils vanished. The pillars straightened and soared up to the sky. Stumbling backwards, Raziel saw the nine pillars lean toward each other and braid themselves into a gleaming white rope.
The glade vanished, and he was floating in space. The rope formed a circle surrounding him, and it spun faster and faster, bright and brilliant, before exploding into glowing white sparks. Where the rope had been was a blue snake- two blue snakes, each with the other's tail in its mouth, forming a ring. He watched as one snake devoured the other, until its own tail was in its mouth. It stopped eating and hung there, whole, complete.
It released its hold on its tail and its glowing blue eyes turned to him. Raziel shivered.
"You promised," it said.
Raziel opened his eyes and saw the last smoke of his brother's pyre curling up the smokestack. He still saw the snake, its accusing eyes, the broken pillars that had birthed it. But they faded beneath the rising clarity of the stench of burnt wood.
He sat up, blinking at his surroundings, and remembered. He had removed his cowl long enough to devour Turel's soul, and it had slammed into him as had the souls of his father and younger brothers. Turel had been gifted with true telekinesis; no wonder it took him so little effort to gather and throw logs with one arm. Raziel had watched the corpse disintegrate, and then he had watched the flames. With no one else to hunt and his brother's last words to contemplate, he allowed himself a bit of rest for the first time and had willed himself to sleep.
And that dream...
Raziel rose to a standing position and glanced about. Overhead, the sky was navy blue. It was nearly night.
...he had had that dream before. It had been slightly different and it had asked something of him, he couldn't remember what. But that had been centuries ago, mere decades, in fact, before his execution. Surely it was no longer relevant.
He idly paced to the smokestack's entrance, scratching at the back of his neck through the cowl. What now? Truly, what now? He could not imagine. All who had wronged him were dead. He had never thought what purpose he would have from this moment. The Elder, his guide and mentor since his awakening, had been curiously silent since Kain's death. There was no one to suggest his next move.
Raziel's steps carried him out of the smokestack and almost into the Turelim waiting just outside.
He sprang back and the Soul Reaver raced down his arm expectantly. A quick glance told him that this one was especially bizarre. There were none like it. He reached back, ready to swing, but two things occurred to him at once. First, it looked nothing like a Turelim. Second, it was not acting hostile at all.
Raziel lowered the Soul Reaver and studied the creature warily. It had a more human form than the vampires he had seen, though its skin was a strangely gleaming ebony. Imposing black wings stretched out to its sides, enormous enough to carry it in flight. A dark blue, almost black mane, ran from its head down its spine to the tip of a thin, rat-like tail. Its body shape was vaguely reminiscient of a woman due to the shape of her waist and hips, but her flat chest looked more like the underbelly of a snake. Her face revealed her vampiric origins, sporting pointed ears and (albeit unusually long) fangs, but at the same time the features were more... demonic, the cheekbones stretched grotesquely. There was no telling what her eyes would have looked like, for they had been gouged out what must have been centuries ago.
"What are you, creature?" he said at last.
She turned her blind face toward his voice, eyelids blinking over absent eyes. Even so, he thought he saw a dawning spark of recognition in her inhuman face.
"Raziel," she breathed. He took a step back. There had been a tiny shred of hope in him, even after seeing his clan territory, even after his meeting with Kain. Raziel felt it, impossibly growing, as the creature bowed to him, black wings gracefully bobbing on her back.
It could not be.
"Father."