I'd just like to say thank you all so much for all of the feedback on the last chapter, especially the new guy. The advice was much appreciated.
I'm out of uber-bitch mode, so thanks. You all have restored my faith that people are actually interested and that this isn't just a wasted effort.

I think I'm gonna wrap this up within the next few chapters. Thus I will need more response if I'm to post the third installment, which I am proud to say is set in the present world. Which may not make sense to those who haven't read the manuscript, but it is explained and set about 10,000 years after Nya's present as of Chapter one of Paradox... I really should post a timeline next, eh?
Also, as it's been a while, the names may be a bit jumbled, but still discernable. I'm definitely gonna repost this chapter later. And another thing, I noticed that I keep switching the position of Kyria's scar. It's supposed to be over her LEFT eye, so disregard the right... Uh...yeah.
There may be some minor fluff in this chapter, yknow, have to fill in the Romance portion...

Chapter 10

Prelude to Madness

Chronicle of Light

Luna and Solaris. The Twin Dragons. Night and Day, Moon and Sun, Good and Evil. And me. The conduit of all these powers that I cannot control nor even begin to comprehend. Fate has dealt me a winning hand. A Royal Flush. But I don't know how to play the game. I've been torn open and picked apart my whole life, by my mother, humans, other vampires, all to prepare me for the past. A past I don't even exist in yet.

Luna, Solaris, and the Soul Reaver are the axies on which this world turns. The decay caused by Kain's refusal can be reversed with my swords. No. Not mine. They own me. At least until I can control them. Use them. I realise now that the only thing that can salvage this plane of existance lay in the scabbards at my waist. I see now that I have been manipulated from the beginning, forced to sqaunder my metaphorical hand because no one will explain the rules of the game, though everyone cheats.

Solaris was the Birth, The Reaver was the Catalyst of Destruction, and Luna's story has yet to be sung. But unless I can warp it to my will, I fear it will be the blade of Death.

But I can't do it alone.

Harthos and I entered the village, two seemingly harmless travelers. I was deeply troubled by the words that had spilled from Moebius's lips. I could tell that he didn't even know the extent of the power of which he spoke. And I had the sinking feeling that no one else on this wretched world knew either.

That was the one time my instincts failed me. As we slunk through an alley, stalking an old woman, who looked old, blind, and possibly deaf, I was astounded when she turned to face us and looked straight at me.

My eyes locked with her washed out ones and I saw eternity. Unknowingly, I stepped toward her, close enough to see the purple veins in her face, which was covered partially by long hair that matched her eyes. I was competely enraptured in that void. The infinity I had slipped into to get here was indeed finite. Nothing else was important in the haze of those few precious seconds where I truly saw.

And I was torn out of it by Harthos. He grabbed my shoulder and hissed.

"Sarafan wench!" He threw the woman across the alley as I shook my head, coming down from my euphoria. Harthos went in for the kill. Finally snapping to my senses, I dove at her first, saving her from the enraged male. I looked at her once and knew that Harthos had acheived his end. She was dying. Those milky eyes, so like Luna's were for the first time, unseeing.

Harthos, puzzled by my behavior, rested a hand on my shoulder. I ignored this small gesture of compassion for me and hung my head, blood seeping silently from my tear ducts. I couldn't help but feel as if I had missed something vital. The old crone was somehow connected to all of this.

I jumped as I felt the woman grab my hands and breathe my name.

"Nya...Kill him..."

She placed my hands upon the sword hilts and forced me to look into her eyes once more. The surge from the Reaver was nothing compared to this. I saw Her. She had been the Seer, one of the people to help Kain on his way to power. She had misread his future, only to see it clearly as he brought the world to it's knees. However, she saw her last chance in me. She wanted the ruler of Nosgoth dead. By my hand. Seeing her death and me there she had hid among the humans, praying I would oblige her in correcting her fatal error.

All this took but a second as she exhaled for the last time, chilled hands still over mine. As I came to my senses, my vision proved to be black and white. Splashes of red showed on myself and Harthos. The Seer's coloring was fading as the heat fled her corpse. Looking at Harthos's face, I was puzzled by his expression.

"Harthos?" I was startled by my own voice. My hearing seemed to have become hypersensitive as I noticed the rest of my senses go into overdrive as well.

"Nya...?" He whispered, reaching out to touch my face the way a blind man would, as if to make sure I was real.

"Harthos, what's wrong?"

"Nya-" He was cut off as a group of Sarafan Warriors snuck up on us and cast us both into unconciousness.

I woke up bound and gagged, chained to a wall in what appeared to be a dungeon. All around me, figures moaned in agony, twisted by depraved warrior-priests into grotesque forms. A few skeletons lingered on the floor, having only escaped their chains when their flesh left them. Looking closer at the bones, I noticed the elongated canine teeth. These were vampires. In order to slip into the state the poor figures around me were in took years, decades, and to get to a skeletal state, centuries.

The dungeon was very narrow, Harthos's face, chained on the opposite wall, just inches from my own. Obviously this was just a containment area. Very clever planning on the Sarafan's part. If anyone escaped, the other vampires would see the movement and tear into it, not caring if it was alive or dead, just fulfilling the hunger shredding their minds. If one managed to get past its peers, the Sarafan guards would just shoot it with magic or a crossbow.

Harthos was knocked out in front of me, hair shadowing his features, body limp. I smacked my head backwards into the stone wall in frustration, only adding to my problems when my skull started throbbing. My growl of pain redoubled the chorus of the condemned around us. The guard showed up after about five minutes of their screams, putting a crossbow bolt into the vampire right next to me. He howled in torment one last time before slipping into Final Death.

It was then that Harthos stirred, groaning slightly as he came to. Surveying our location, his alabaster flesh lost what little color it had to begin with.

"Nya, where are we?" He whispered, voice trembling slightly. My body betrayed my fear as I began trembling, a single tear sliding down my cheek.

"I think we're in the Sarafan keep..." I replied, nodding to the insignia carved onto the bolt in the corpse next me. Harthos swore quietly, leaning back. I lowered myself into a sitting position, arms remaining bent at the elbow above me, restricted by my chains. "We're going to die here, aren't we?" I breathed.

"No..." Harthos murmured, voice betraying his doubt. He joined me on the floor, defeated. We remained that way for a few hours before I broke down, dissolving into tears. I was enraged by all of it. Being used and twisted for everyone's means but my own. Moebius for some reason not yet known, Kain for yet another X factor, and now the Sarafan for some depraved sadistic purpose. And no one knew my story. I was tired of keeping it all in, on the verge of madness. I was being shredded from within by my own thoughts and feelings. My mind was a maelstrom. There was no release. So many emotions pulling me in so many different directions. I only had one person I could confide in, one who obviously saw me as the kindred soul I found in him.

So when he asked what was wrong, I told him, holding nothing back. I was afraid to look at him afterward, fearing his reaction, assuming the emotion I found in those eyes would be rejection. We sat in silence for a few minutes, my body still wracked with sobs. He murmured my name once, a tone in it forcing me to look up at him. Not for the first time when it came to Harthos was I wrong. My tears slowed when I saw the compassion written so plainly in his face. When we had first met, I had assumed him just another conflict in my life, there only to betray me if I ever relied on him. Upon finding myself wrong then, I promised myself not to make that mistake again, only to break my vow. He leaned forward and nuzzled my cheek. That one gesture of kindness, the first one I'd recieved in centuries ((A/N: Nya's about half a millenium old, or 500 years. Not sure if I'd mentioned that in the beginning...)), was enough to shred the last of my self control and I broke down again, burying my face into Harthos's chest. He comforted me as best he could in the uncomfortable position we were in until I quieted.

Pulling away, leaned back into the wall.

"I'm sorry." I said in a low voice. Harthos looked dumbfounded.

"Why?"

"For that..." My head snapped back up as I heard him chuckle darkly. "And just what is so funny!" I demanded, thouroughly annoyed with him.

"The fact that you feel the need to apologize. I've been waiting for that explaination since I found out that you were clanless. "

"You should have just asked..."

Harthos eyed me incredulously. "Would you have told me if I had?" He asked, anticipating my answer as I realized that I wouldn't have told him. "That's what I thought."

"Well if you'd been a bit more open with me..." I trailed off.

"I told you my story. There wasn't much to it, if you recall."

"You are infuriating."

"You really should listen to yourself sometimes, Nya. A lot of what you think about me can be said about yourself as well."

"No one asked you."

"And when has that ever stopped me? Did you ask for help on the battlefield? Did you ask for me to kiss you? Did you ask for my blood? Did you ask for my support when Kain summoned you? You've never had to ask. I've just anticipated. And gotten nothing in return. Sometimes I think that if I died for you, you wouldn't give a damn!" Harthos's voice was steadily rising until he was shouting the last few words in my face.

I was shocked by this outburst to say the least. "You really think that?" I asked in a small voice.

"Sometimes..." I could tell that Harthos regretted some of his outburst.

"Kiss me."

Harthos looked up, flustered. "Don't toy with me, Nya..." he warned.

"I'm not. I'm asking." And so he did. The kiss was everything the body promised: exotic, gentle, agile, and so many other suble undertones I was taken in by it. Breaking from it, I looked at him, panting. "Much better."

Harthos grinned, remembering the first time he kissed me as I settled down to find a comfortable position to sleep in.

HA! How's THAT for a comeback! That is the first chapter of this I've been happy with... Now REVIEW!
Shadowrayne