disclaimer: don't own castlevania...
wow this thing has been around since winter...and i might just finish it! XD
totally off-topic but...is it my inability to fully understand epic poems or my scornful nature of the existence of hell or is Dante's Inferno really funny...
ovid is funny, yes...aaaaaaaaaand iunno why alucard's middle name measures temp. i'm a horrible speller and name remember-er...and regretfully, yes, I have had to change some events to make them fit my random babbling, so please forgive me.
----------------------
The humans were bound with dark magic to the altar. As the demons laughed like children with lighters and waited for Shaft to begin the resurrection, the humans squirmed, accidentally jabbing each other but not really noticing.
"So how'd they get you?" asked Alexis while getting knocked around by the furiously struggling John next to her.
"What? Oh they threw bones at me." answered John. "Can those bitches throw!"
"Not YOU. And quit squirming you're not getting anywhere!" she slapped him, knocking his head into the altar.
"THE DAMN THING THREW CURRY AT ME! CURRRRRYYYYYY! I CURSE IT!" Donda was hysterical. Not about being captured. Not about the fact that she was to be blood sacrificed to resurrect something. But about curry. Yes. Curry.
"Where the hell is Lena, then?" asked Ayden. "We paid her!"
"What if she's like...dead already..." Serena's eyes widened as if the thought had just ocurred to her. "Are we all going to die?"
Everyone else groaned.
"WILL ONE OF YOU UGLY DEMONS TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!!!!!" demanded Axe.
The demons all joined in some sort of mock-ritual dance, chanting, "Resurrect our master! Resurrect our master!" they threw their decaying arms into the air...some literally disjointed the bones and threw them...then stomped on the ground and danced around in elaborate entertwining circles. The 50-some humans stared with o.O eyes.
The blood was sticky and caking her skin. She left bloody shoeprints on the ground, which she supposed could serve as markers. She didn't want to pull out more skulls and get bloodfalls again...
It did not even matter much more where she was going. She only knew that she had to keep walking to keep her mind from completely thinking about the blood. If she would end up going in circles later, well...she'll worry about it then. "Adrian..." surely, with his preternatural hearing, he would be able to hear her last thoughts. Even if he would not respond, it did not matter...she was only doing it to keep from thinking about weeping dead things and pools of blood.
Resting in peace.
Perhaps he will wake again in a few centuries. He was already transformed into Arikado for the preparations.
Numbing sleep. Yes...make the pain...the guilt...go away.
"Adrian..."
Through the emptiness, the voice came clear and wrenching. It wasn't a dream...she was in the catacombs...looking for him?
"Damn you, Alucard!" it came again. Tired, pained, like a whisper. "Whatever happened to aristocracy, Adrian? You could have told me you were leaving!...But ha I will be the better. I will explain. You must know as well as I know what it is like to grow up with a diamond crown on your head. You are never alone. I would not consider the Lord of Darkness to be much of a father figure but your mother must have loved you. And all these demons...you must have always had them to talk to and boss around...maybe you had mortal friends. Perhaps my parents would have doted on me in ways your father would never have...but they never did.
"I have an older sister. You would not know the gravity of the situation. She would argue that I was the baby and our parents spoiled me...but she lies. I was very neglected...she was always the smarter one. The well-mannered one. The prettier one. The better one...my parents made sure to give her all the attention they could spare. But I was never alone...there were always the staff to follow around...although the chef did not especially like children...
"So I had the maids and the advisers and the secretaries...I was never alone. I couldn't stand to be alone. The hired help wasn't enough. That is why I have so many 'friends'...I don't even really like most of them...they're just there for the sake of being there. Even if I'm in the corner of a room and not talking to anyone, as long as there are other people in it, I'm fine. I'm a bit paranoid, no?
"Why did I move here, then? To be alone. I had to prove to myself that I did not have to depend on companionship...but I am a bit pathetic as well as paranoid. Each day has been torture for me. Your creatures mean nothing. I was alone. When my friends came to live here, I realized how much I needed them...people, that is.
"Of course, that made me hate myself even worse. Now you know why I refused to leave this place. Leaving meant stepping out of isolation. Leaving meant losing. Leaving meant failure.
"Maybe it would have worked if I chose a better location...maybe not. Whatever...it does not matter. At least I will die alone...I will win...in some ironic way..."
Shaft appeared with the ceremonial sword. The demons's demeanors became more solemn as they stopped dancing in circles.
"Blood sacrifice..." Katie thought for a few seconds about all the myths she stored in her head. "Resurrection of the master...oh, god..."
"What?" asked Michael. "It can't get worse than this...right?"
"But from what I read, the Master's soul was sealed in the catacombs...you can't resurrect him from here!"
"...Yes well we had a little problem with that...see, the Master's son, who does not know anything about this yet, has returned to sleep in the catacombs to guard the seal in case anyone goes there and tries to open it...but according to Death, the Master has been able to use the seal to combine his soul with the catacomb walls, which makes things much easier...for we have trapped someone down there for his soul to possess and using that vessel, he will come here and become completely resurrected..." explained the priest.
"...So wouldn't his son notice?"
"Possession is not very noticeable at all, especially if you hide behind the vessel's soul."
"...ok...so we're all gonna die...AND I NEVER SAW THE ALIENS! I NEVER WENT TO STONEHENGE!" Donda was hysterical once again.
"Of course, none of this will be of any use to you, so let us begin..."
"Aren't you proud of me, Adrian? I learned my lesson. I see what your twisted home can do. I learned two lessons, actually..."
Stop talking to me... Her voice seemed to grow louder, clinging to his mind...
Think about something else.
Painting...art was of course not new to him. He could recite the biographies and works of all the major artists, but he had never picked up a brush or swirled any color of paint until the day he was to paint something for her...Ella.
As he sat in a tower that night, staring at the blank canvas, panic rose. She expected something brilliant from him. Beyond brilliant. It had to be spectacularly beautiful. It had to be able to throw anyone back upon first sight of it.
He could think of nothing. Only the uncreative, usual thoughts of his mother, his father, and his guilt. Acting on these thoughts, he dipped the brush in the thick, red paint and flung it at the canvas without letting go. Splotches of red paint spread across the canvas, concentrated at the center, then scattering outward and slowly dripping down the sheet of white.
Looking back, he does not understand why or what made him continue. It must have made sense at the time. He must have seen something. Shapes, pictures to fill with color, pictures that weren't there.
Green, blue, black, purple. One after another, he threw colors onto the canvas, yet the more he added, the more empty it looked. The wet colors mixed together sometimes into more beautiful colors but mostly into dull browns.
By the time he was done, his starched white shirt was spotted with paint. He stared at the colors intertwining and separating for hours, perhaps, and could still figure out nothing. He could not understand his own creation...this thing that had stemmed from his thoughts, memories, nightmares. This thing that was not there. Shapeless, meaningless...
She would hate it...but he had no time to make another one. When the painting had dried, he took it to the river to wait for her.
He was furious. His "painting" was horrible. It looked like nothing...or something that was ruined before it dried. Would she cry? He hated it when humans cried. Their tears were innocent...crystalline and clear. Without any remnant of blood. Not like his or his father's. He could not even cry without sin.
He did not see her coming. He was so disappointed in himself that he even did not hear her thoughts when she arrived.
He took one look at her and sensed wave after wave of hurt, anger, fear. She stared at him warily, her mouth saying nothing but her mind saying all.
Why didn't you tell me? How could you deceive me like this? You were my best friend...
He stared at the ground, his vision slightly distorted by the films of red tears over his eyes. I did not mean to...it was you. You made me your friend... blaming others was not polite.
"Have you opened it yet?"
No he could see her in his mind, her eyes widening when she heard the message he had sent straight to her own thoughts.
"It was a necklace. A very pretty one...my mother noticed it was missing because it is part of what she calls my 'dowry', which I suppose is very important. She was very angry with me. She demanded to know what I had done with it. Of course, she knew it was me. I am always looking through the room at all the pretty things." her voice choked up. Crystalline tears shimmered, spilling over her cheeks. How pathetic she looked...how hurt, how breakable... "I told her I gave it to my friend for Christmas. She was so angry...she demanded to know who. I hate it when she is angry with me. I had to tell. I said your name."
Don't tell me anymore I don't want to know...
"You probably know already. You've probably had this happen plenty of times...who knows how old you are. Now I understand why you never seem to age. You look like you could be my little brother...but that, you could never be."
I could never hurt you...that would not be fair...
"You are evil." she pronounced the last word with venom that he had never known her to go anywhere near to. In front of the human, he began to wail and weep, streaks of dark red flowing out of his eyes, down his white cheeks, falling and splattering onto his white shirt.
"QUIT SNIFFLING, TRYING TO TRICK ME! I HATE YOU!"
She never saw that awful painting.
He saw her only once after that. In her twenty-fourth year of life, when she was wife to some rich lord far away. She was there to visit her sick and dying mother. The mother who had told her the truth...
It had been some fifteen years at least, yet her face still carried an unease at being back in the setting of her childhood nightmare. Did she look for him? It would not have been hard to recognize him. He was still nothing more than a little boy in appearance, frozen in the despairing image of the last day...
It was sometime before the evening. He remembered that the sun was setting. He followed her for a while when she wandered through the main market in the town, heading for her mother's house. But when she got to the end of the market, one road away from the road where the house was, she took a turn onto the neglected road that led to the river.
He stood on a branch of one of the many trees by the river, hidden by their bright green leaves. Beneath the branches, Ella stood close enough to the water that small ripples were absorbed into the hem of her dress.
"Do you still hang around here?" she asked nothing in particular. She didn't think that he was really there. "I'm Ella, probably not the most recent one you have befriended...I gave you a necklace, remember? And you were supposed to give me a painting...I do not want it even now. And I do not want my necklace back. I wonder if you still look the same. How does your growing rate work, I wonder?"
Her voice was soft, filled with fear and slightly hinted with hatred. The same as that last day...but from a woman...and without the hurt of betrayal.
"Ironic...that I have never had another friend as good or as close to me as you were...Adrian." when she said his name her voice was a tired whisper...as if she was drifting off into pleasant dreams. "You must have known that someone would tell me, eventually. Why did you not tell me off? Kill me? Send The Impaler or his minions after me?" she stepped into the middle of the stream, the water up to her knees. "You could have let me die by myself that first day. Do you remember it? I was a silly child, and the water was high...and you bade me not to walk in. I remember the day. I remember everything. You torture me, Adrian. I scream your name in my sleep!"
You are mad...you are mad. he could not stand to hear anymore. He took one last look at her...she seemed so healthy...and her face was serene. Alas, it had to be like this...
Good evening, Lena...
It was a deep, powerful, ancient voice...and it was coming from the bones...
"The stakes are ready?"
"They are, Shaft."
"Who are you? What do you want from me?"
Who is she talking to?
The coffin lid opens.
I believe you have heard of me, darling...Prince of Darkness? Ruler of this castle? Your dear Adrian's father? Dracula?
"You're..."
"Yes, Lena."
"Impalement? Heh...no curry, right, Donda?"
"That is not funny."
"This is all Lena's fault."
"LENA!!!!!"
The deviant chorus of screaming is no longer missed.
------------------------------
The last part reminds me of a manga called Demon Diary. In one of the volumes, when it's getting to the climax, every frame is like a close-up on a character, and each frame is numbered, so it's all a countdown tied together to the climax. Like how in this chapter, everything ends in someone saying something about Lena and then there's the screaming in each frame...screams of pain from the impaled, scream of being possessed from Lena...and obviously, Alucard is screaming...yay for screaming. and GO PSYCHO PANDAS!
VAN HELSING WAS A HILARIOUS MOVIE XD but it was a total rip-off of cv and vampire hunter D...peh they tried...
wow this thing has been around since winter...and i might just finish it! XD
totally off-topic but...is it my inability to fully understand epic poems or my scornful nature of the existence of hell or is Dante's Inferno really funny...
ovid is funny, yes...aaaaaaaaaand iunno why alucard's middle name measures temp. i'm a horrible speller and name remember-er...and regretfully, yes, I have had to change some events to make them fit my random babbling, so please forgive me.
----------------------
The humans were bound with dark magic to the altar. As the demons laughed like children with lighters and waited for Shaft to begin the resurrection, the humans squirmed, accidentally jabbing each other but not really noticing.
"So how'd they get you?" asked Alexis while getting knocked around by the furiously struggling John next to her.
"What? Oh they threw bones at me." answered John. "Can those bitches throw!"
"Not YOU. And quit squirming you're not getting anywhere!" she slapped him, knocking his head into the altar.
"THE DAMN THING THREW CURRY AT ME! CURRRRRYYYYYY! I CURSE IT!" Donda was hysterical. Not about being captured. Not about the fact that she was to be blood sacrificed to resurrect something. But about curry. Yes. Curry.
"Where the hell is Lena, then?" asked Ayden. "We paid her!"
"What if she's like...dead already..." Serena's eyes widened as if the thought had just ocurred to her. "Are we all going to die?"
Everyone else groaned.
"WILL ONE OF YOU UGLY DEMONS TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!!!!!" demanded Axe.
The demons all joined in some sort of mock-ritual dance, chanting, "Resurrect our master! Resurrect our master!" they threw their decaying arms into the air...some literally disjointed the bones and threw them...then stomped on the ground and danced around in elaborate entertwining circles. The 50-some humans stared with o.O eyes.
The blood was sticky and caking her skin. She left bloody shoeprints on the ground, which she supposed could serve as markers. She didn't want to pull out more skulls and get bloodfalls again...
It did not even matter much more where she was going. She only knew that she had to keep walking to keep her mind from completely thinking about the blood. If she would end up going in circles later, well...she'll worry about it then. "Adrian..." surely, with his preternatural hearing, he would be able to hear her last thoughts. Even if he would not respond, it did not matter...she was only doing it to keep from thinking about weeping dead things and pools of blood.
Resting in peace.
Perhaps he will wake again in a few centuries. He was already transformed into Arikado for the preparations.
Numbing sleep. Yes...make the pain...the guilt...go away.
"Adrian..."
Through the emptiness, the voice came clear and wrenching. It wasn't a dream...she was in the catacombs...looking for him?
"Damn you, Alucard!" it came again. Tired, pained, like a whisper. "Whatever happened to aristocracy, Adrian? You could have told me you were leaving!...But ha I will be the better. I will explain. You must know as well as I know what it is like to grow up with a diamond crown on your head. You are never alone. I would not consider the Lord of Darkness to be much of a father figure but your mother must have loved you. And all these demons...you must have always had them to talk to and boss around...maybe you had mortal friends. Perhaps my parents would have doted on me in ways your father would never have...but they never did.
"I have an older sister. You would not know the gravity of the situation. She would argue that I was the baby and our parents spoiled me...but she lies. I was very neglected...she was always the smarter one. The well-mannered one. The prettier one. The better one...my parents made sure to give her all the attention they could spare. But I was never alone...there were always the staff to follow around...although the chef did not especially like children...
"So I had the maids and the advisers and the secretaries...I was never alone. I couldn't stand to be alone. The hired help wasn't enough. That is why I have so many 'friends'...I don't even really like most of them...they're just there for the sake of being there. Even if I'm in the corner of a room and not talking to anyone, as long as there are other people in it, I'm fine. I'm a bit paranoid, no?
"Why did I move here, then? To be alone. I had to prove to myself that I did not have to depend on companionship...but I am a bit pathetic as well as paranoid. Each day has been torture for me. Your creatures mean nothing. I was alone. When my friends came to live here, I realized how much I needed them...people, that is.
"Of course, that made me hate myself even worse. Now you know why I refused to leave this place. Leaving meant stepping out of isolation. Leaving meant losing. Leaving meant failure.
"Maybe it would have worked if I chose a better location...maybe not. Whatever...it does not matter. At least I will die alone...I will win...in some ironic way..."
Shaft appeared with the ceremonial sword. The demons's demeanors became more solemn as they stopped dancing in circles.
"Blood sacrifice..." Katie thought for a few seconds about all the myths she stored in her head. "Resurrection of the master...oh, god..."
"What?" asked Michael. "It can't get worse than this...right?"
"But from what I read, the Master's soul was sealed in the catacombs...you can't resurrect him from here!"
"...Yes well we had a little problem with that...see, the Master's son, who does not know anything about this yet, has returned to sleep in the catacombs to guard the seal in case anyone goes there and tries to open it...but according to Death, the Master has been able to use the seal to combine his soul with the catacomb walls, which makes things much easier...for we have trapped someone down there for his soul to possess and using that vessel, he will come here and become completely resurrected..." explained the priest.
"...So wouldn't his son notice?"
"Possession is not very noticeable at all, especially if you hide behind the vessel's soul."
"...ok...so we're all gonna die...AND I NEVER SAW THE ALIENS! I NEVER WENT TO STONEHENGE!" Donda was hysterical once again.
"Of course, none of this will be of any use to you, so let us begin..."
"Aren't you proud of me, Adrian? I learned my lesson. I see what your twisted home can do. I learned two lessons, actually..."
Stop talking to me... Her voice seemed to grow louder, clinging to his mind...
Think about something else.
Painting...art was of course not new to him. He could recite the biographies and works of all the major artists, but he had never picked up a brush or swirled any color of paint until the day he was to paint something for her...Ella.
As he sat in a tower that night, staring at the blank canvas, panic rose. She expected something brilliant from him. Beyond brilliant. It had to be spectacularly beautiful. It had to be able to throw anyone back upon first sight of it.
He could think of nothing. Only the uncreative, usual thoughts of his mother, his father, and his guilt. Acting on these thoughts, he dipped the brush in the thick, red paint and flung it at the canvas without letting go. Splotches of red paint spread across the canvas, concentrated at the center, then scattering outward and slowly dripping down the sheet of white.
Looking back, he does not understand why or what made him continue. It must have made sense at the time. He must have seen something. Shapes, pictures to fill with color, pictures that weren't there.
Green, blue, black, purple. One after another, he threw colors onto the canvas, yet the more he added, the more empty it looked. The wet colors mixed together sometimes into more beautiful colors but mostly into dull browns.
By the time he was done, his starched white shirt was spotted with paint. He stared at the colors intertwining and separating for hours, perhaps, and could still figure out nothing. He could not understand his own creation...this thing that had stemmed from his thoughts, memories, nightmares. This thing that was not there. Shapeless, meaningless...
She would hate it...but he had no time to make another one. When the painting had dried, he took it to the river to wait for her.
He was furious. His "painting" was horrible. It looked like nothing...or something that was ruined before it dried. Would she cry? He hated it when humans cried. Their tears were innocent...crystalline and clear. Without any remnant of blood. Not like his or his father's. He could not even cry without sin.
He did not see her coming. He was so disappointed in himself that he even did not hear her thoughts when she arrived.
He took one look at her and sensed wave after wave of hurt, anger, fear. She stared at him warily, her mouth saying nothing but her mind saying all.
Why didn't you tell me? How could you deceive me like this? You were my best friend...
He stared at the ground, his vision slightly distorted by the films of red tears over his eyes. I did not mean to...it was you. You made me your friend... blaming others was not polite.
"Have you opened it yet?"
No he could see her in his mind, her eyes widening when she heard the message he had sent straight to her own thoughts.
"It was a necklace. A very pretty one...my mother noticed it was missing because it is part of what she calls my 'dowry', which I suppose is very important. She was very angry with me. She demanded to know what I had done with it. Of course, she knew it was me. I am always looking through the room at all the pretty things." her voice choked up. Crystalline tears shimmered, spilling over her cheeks. How pathetic she looked...how hurt, how breakable... "I told her I gave it to my friend for Christmas. She was so angry...she demanded to know who. I hate it when she is angry with me. I had to tell. I said your name."
Don't tell me anymore I don't want to know...
"You probably know already. You've probably had this happen plenty of times...who knows how old you are. Now I understand why you never seem to age. You look like you could be my little brother...but that, you could never be."
I could never hurt you...that would not be fair...
"You are evil." she pronounced the last word with venom that he had never known her to go anywhere near to. In front of the human, he began to wail and weep, streaks of dark red flowing out of his eyes, down his white cheeks, falling and splattering onto his white shirt.
"QUIT SNIFFLING, TRYING TO TRICK ME! I HATE YOU!"
She never saw that awful painting.
He saw her only once after that. In her twenty-fourth year of life, when she was wife to some rich lord far away. She was there to visit her sick and dying mother. The mother who had told her the truth...
It had been some fifteen years at least, yet her face still carried an unease at being back in the setting of her childhood nightmare. Did she look for him? It would not have been hard to recognize him. He was still nothing more than a little boy in appearance, frozen in the despairing image of the last day...
It was sometime before the evening. He remembered that the sun was setting. He followed her for a while when she wandered through the main market in the town, heading for her mother's house. But when she got to the end of the market, one road away from the road where the house was, she took a turn onto the neglected road that led to the river.
He stood on a branch of one of the many trees by the river, hidden by their bright green leaves. Beneath the branches, Ella stood close enough to the water that small ripples were absorbed into the hem of her dress.
"Do you still hang around here?" she asked nothing in particular. She didn't think that he was really there. "I'm Ella, probably not the most recent one you have befriended...I gave you a necklace, remember? And you were supposed to give me a painting...I do not want it even now. And I do not want my necklace back. I wonder if you still look the same. How does your growing rate work, I wonder?"
Her voice was soft, filled with fear and slightly hinted with hatred. The same as that last day...but from a woman...and without the hurt of betrayal.
"Ironic...that I have never had another friend as good or as close to me as you were...Adrian." when she said his name her voice was a tired whisper...as if she was drifting off into pleasant dreams. "You must have known that someone would tell me, eventually. Why did you not tell me off? Kill me? Send The Impaler or his minions after me?" she stepped into the middle of the stream, the water up to her knees. "You could have let me die by myself that first day. Do you remember it? I was a silly child, and the water was high...and you bade me not to walk in. I remember the day. I remember everything. You torture me, Adrian. I scream your name in my sleep!"
You are mad...you are mad. he could not stand to hear anymore. He took one last look at her...she seemed so healthy...and her face was serene. Alas, it had to be like this...
Good evening, Lena...
It was a deep, powerful, ancient voice...and it was coming from the bones...
"The stakes are ready?"
"They are, Shaft."
"Who are you? What do you want from me?"
Who is she talking to?
The coffin lid opens.
I believe you have heard of me, darling...Prince of Darkness? Ruler of this castle? Your dear Adrian's father? Dracula?
"You're..."
"Yes, Lena."
"Impalement? Heh...no curry, right, Donda?"
"That is not funny."
"This is all Lena's fault."
"LENA!!!!!"
The deviant chorus of screaming is no longer missed.
------------------------------
The last part reminds me of a manga called Demon Diary. In one of the volumes, when it's getting to the climax, every frame is like a close-up on a character, and each frame is numbered, so it's all a countdown tied together to the climax. Like how in this chapter, everything ends in someone saying something about Lena and then there's the screaming in each frame...screams of pain from the impaled, scream of being possessed from Lena...and obviously, Alucard is screaming...yay for screaming. and GO PSYCHO PANDAS!
VAN HELSING WAS A HILARIOUS MOVIE XD but it was a total rip-off of cv and vampire hunter D...peh they tried...