Jeleva
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
Jeleva pays a social call to Geier Reach Sanitarium on Innistrad.
"She is cursed with visions of monsters and suffering…and all her visions come true. I am pessimistic there is anything we can do for her, other than keeping her in the room of the isolated wing. Alone, with as little contact, to ward the staff and other patients from guaranteed danger."
"You speak as if she is a tormented prophet possessing supernatural powers, doctor! The manic episodes you've described…Could they not be the result of devils listening in on your sittings with her? Playing tricks to make it seem she has such aberrant gifts?"
"It's more than devils she's conjured, that one. Evil flocks to her, there is no argument; however, the demonic and monstrous phantoms are indeed formulations of her shattered perception. Permutations of her neurosis, coaxed forth by her desperate ravings and parthenogenic energy."
"Her mind was quite gone when Bishop Jerren's warriors brought her to you from the Natterknolls, I hear. Knowing the bishop, why hasn't she faced execution?"
Knowing the bishop? What did Anselm know of the bishop? Had he not heard Jerren had been exposed as a member of the demon-worshipping Skirsdag prior to his demise?
"She was. It is my understanding the cathars raised the blade in Lambholt and she escaped. Despite a lengthy disappearance the simple folk failed to explain, on avowal she was spotted in Traublassen, they chased her into the valleys and re-apprehended her."
"The cathars did?"
"Yes."
"Then why isn't the sanitarium scheduling the death of this religious prisoner as with those before? I shall personally evaluate her and inform the inquisitors at once!"
"Execution isn't her destiny, Anselm."
"Are you an angel-fearing man, doctor?"
The doctor remarked the amulet with Avacyn's repaired insignia around his neck.
If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's a collar…
"I see you are. The Travails?"
"They were a martialing cry! We were too soft! We allowed sin to worm its way into our towns and our flesh, and Avacyn turned her spear on us in judgment!"
Yes, a martialing cry. And not horrors from beyond the moon!
"You believe Eruth deserves to die."
"I do, doctor. If what you say is true, the patient is a witch!"
Warlock was the politically correct term.
"Get a hold of yourself, man!" he dismissed the suggestion as madness. "You're in hysterics!"
"Hysterics? Bah! Only women fall to such a disorder! Exercise haste, doctor! Admit the Church to complete its strenuous work of purifying another damned sinner! It is our holy duty!"
"I forbid it! She is under protection!"
"Yours?"
"No!" a female voice boomed above the doctor's assistant. "Mine!"
"Who are –?"
"The mind is a terrible thing to waste. That unspent cognitive potential…I have better applications for it. Normally, I'd play with my food a little, but I'm in a rush, so I guess you're an unlucky exception."
"H-help!"
Levitating Anselm into the air with her, the vampire sucked the mental agony through his windpipe in a fine vapour.
Her mind was quite gone when Bishop Jerren's warriors brought her to you from the Natterknolls, the last memory trickled out.
"And now, yours is too."
After also devouring his blood, the vampire let him drop. His neck snapped gruesomely against the floor, and his killer floated down. There was the matter she left her mansion to address that bore addressing.
"Good riddance." She intentionally thumbed her nose at employing the Stromkirk expression "May the ocean take it."
"Jeleva…"
"Roderrick. Your new auxiliary is disappointing."
She didn't venture outside of Nephalia often, and Geier Reach stunk of werewolves, but the sanitarium still rested in Stensia and was therefore vampire territory. Jeleva didn't like to affiliate herself with other vampires, who preferred "wine of the vein" over harvested thoughts, yet geography was geography and the map lines were drawn.
"Where is Eruth, Roderrick?"
"I'll guide you to her. Through here, please."
The cloaked vampire followed the doctor to the isolated wing, Anselm's body ignored. He was not the first assistant hired and eaten, and he surely wouldn't be the last. That is, barring another near-apocalypse.
This was Innistrad. Something or someone would find a use for it.
The heavily locked door was unlocked, and Jeleva hovered in the entry.
"Eruth? You have a visitor," Roderrick announced.
In the corner, an unkempt, unwashed woman whose ankles (but not wrists) were fettered together was wringing her sheets, her eyes darting fearfully while devilish laughter pinged her from all sides and devil nails scratched her garments. In this case, devils pulled from her own fright, which flittered about her bed, surrounded by blue smoke.
Fate was cyclic.
The people of Traublassen needed her, she'd echoed the Dark Lady's foresight. Needed her, until the Dark Lady needed her elsewhere.
Upon recognizing the Dark Lady, Eruth's disquiet calmed a significant sum, and the devils faded until they stopped existing.
Was the Dark Lady just a name Jeleva went by, a title she co-opted, or a phantasmagoric figment? Was she even the same individual Eruth alleged saved her in the mountains, or just claiming so to manipulate her?
Whatever the truth, she was the Dark Lady to Eruth at that moment.
"Come in," Eruth invited. "I've been expecting you."
There was a single glassless window with bars Eruth shrieked at when not lucid. Behind it, Jeleva spied a screaming swarm of white gulls spying back at her, each with a cyclopic eye and tentacles emerging out of its beak.
"Those are cute."
"They aren't mine…" Eruth rubbed her knees.
"Their hers, then."
Hers meaning Emrakul's.
"How have you been?"
"It rained yesterday. It'll rain tomorrow."
"It will? I must open a parasol!" the daytime shut-in joked. Jeleva knew it'd rain. Eruth saw every vision Jeleva saw, not the reverse.
"Lord Runo paid an assassin to kill me. The man you murdered earlier, he was given the job."
"An uneducated appetizer! My despised ancestor finally gathered the gall, and he doesn't send a more qualified agent!"
"He worries we'll ravel his secret. He's aiming to be discrete."
"As he should. He made an error tapping into your ability and attempting to cover it up. Exploiting your magic to put the fear of his god in me. Instead, he should have groomed a fresh descendent to answer his beck and call. A fatal blunder on his part! As if a sane being of my character would ever seek reverence in the sea or the pathetic god of his vacuous octopus cult!"
Merely discussing the past, Jeleva suffered flashbacks to the attack and her self-exile. Of Krothuss' three-eyed purple glower, crustacean hull, and petrified grimace.
Runo couldn't control Jeleva, which brought shame on his house. Turns out when you recruit a psychic to enfeeble a psychic vampire, the shared connection and unwelcome headache make the black sheep of your family a bigger threat. The scourge of wizards' minds, including Runo's very disciples.
Disgusting, the briny stench of dated devotion and sodden wood unique to her disowned bloodline!
"Secrets are an effective weapon," Eruth declared.
"Like the secret I had you cleverly overlook the night Torens of Hanweir arrived to free you. The shadow deep down below wasn't the devils' master. They were borrowed."
"I got him where he needed to go."
"And you, where I needed you to be."
A grave exchange.
"Lord Runo won't relent."
"It's either here, in the safety of our private arrangement with Roderrick under the inquisitors' noses. Or out there, where the fish-fawners and the cathars can sink their hooks into you."
"It's a cold, dark journey either way."
"But a journey you have a companion for. If you'll excuse me, Eruth. I have been requested at a wedding. I'll come again. The old bat Olivia would hate it if I'm late!"
