"To whichever deity gave me this powerset with all the drawbacks: fuck you"

"Solitaires are the strangest and most dangerous of all the Aeldari Harlequins. Called Arebennian in the Aeldari Lexicon, they are doom incarnate, for they play the part of She Who Thirsts in the Dance Without End, and once their path is chosen no one can stay their hand."

-Warhammer 40K Fandom Wiki, "Solitaire"

Romania

In the wilderness of Romania, untouched by man, a single mammoth castle stood. Its walls of tall stones were slick instead of rough, smoothed over by the gallons of blood dripped over it throughout the centuries. These walls were cursed as they ringed off a graveyard that held an almost uncountable number of lost souls.

The moonlight gleamed upon the castle's courtyard, reflecting off the pooled liquid as though it were a mirror. There, a ripple echoed out through this 'mirror'.

A single step.

"Blood." A voice belonging to a shambling figure called out. "BLOOD! FRESH BLOOD!"

Dhampirs.

Large, lumbering dhampirs dressed in ragged clothes that are best described as 'strips' sprinted forth from all across the courtyard like dogs catching a whiff of peanut butter. Their large muscles bulged as they made desperate noises when hundreds of dhampirs jumped on the puddles, uncaring of splashing the mud underneath the liquid.

Like dogs, those dhampirs lowered their heads and started lapping up the blood. They tried as best as they could to try and drink up as much blood as possible even if they had to swallow chunks of mud, for at least the mud was soaked in blood and thus offered a temporary break from the endless hunger. Some chose to use their large hands to focus solely on the mud.

With hundreds around, it soon became a pile as they surrounded the large puddle of blood seeping forth.

High above the feasting dhampirs, atop the balcony of the castle keep, Marius Tepes looked on with a mixture of disgust and joy. In his hand was a glass of blood.

"Look at zem. Look at zem go zose useless wastes of space. So desperate for zimple blood." Marius jeered in a Romanian accent, "Right vere zey belong. At least, zhis vay zey can serve a much greater purpose. As ze vanguard of my army."

Marius then turned around to look at the vampire behind him. His most trusted subordinate: Lucius.

"You are right, my lord." His voice contained a tiny hint of Romanian accent.

Just like Marius, Lucius also possessed a beautiful doll-like face, with a set of sharp fangs in his mouth and a pair of crimson eyes. Just like Marius, Lucius wore an expensive three-piece suit made from the finest tailors of the vampire aristocracy.

Then, Marius' eyes peered beyond Lucius and gazed upon the room.

There, beyond balcony doors lies a dining room flooded with light from multiple chandeliers. Rolls upon rolls of tables filled the space.

Any normal person inside here would instantly feel their past meals regurgitate up from their stomach at the sight of what lies on those tables, what was being served: humans.

Upon those tables, inside gigantic metal plates, lay humans. Most were dead, their limbs reduced to white bones and their inners spilling forth and dying the table and ground with their sanguine liquid while those that were still alive found themselves wishing they weren't, for slowly, carefully, various vampire nobles cut out thin slices that kept the individual alive for as long as possible.

They couldn't scream, not with the fact that their voice boxes were carefully removed during the meal preparation. They couldn't leave, for their tendons had been carefully cut and their bones carefully broken with supernatural precision. They couldn't even move about with their boneless limbs, for they were tightly bound.

The humans on those plates were more like octopuses with how few bones remained after the preparation.

Throughout the centuries, the chefs perfected their work. They learned exactly where and how to break the bones without causing major blood loss or structural damage to the meat. They learned where to nick to cut tendons and avoid arteries. They learned that using magic to subdue a human stains the meat with a terrible aftertaste

Vampires prefer their meals fresh, for fresh meat and blood taste the best. Thus, for vampire chefs, it became an artwork to keep a human alive and immobile until the last moment, and for vampires that would consider themselves food connoisseurs, it became a challenge to learn how to keep the human alive for as long as possible even as you are eating them.

Members of Marius' fellow nobility used their knives to cut out thin slices among the thigh and other extremities, before slowly working toward the more delicious organs and finally; the heart. Those who start with the heart are seen by fellow vampires as lacking table manners.

The floors of the dining room were specially designed to drain away any excess blood like they were the floor of a shower. Those drains then lead to the outside and into the courtyard where they are lapped up by dhampirs.

A cold-hearted person might call it efficient even, for the vampires make use of every single part of a human. Not even the bones are spared as some vampires find the marrow to be a sweet dessert. Breaking a femur in two and sucking out the content like they were the long legs of a King crab.

As the nobles feasted inside their castle, as the dhampirs feasted on the blood-soaked mud for the sanguine liquid did not come fast enough, no one noticed a single flicker of prismatic light atop the battlements of a tower.

And that's when the killing in the courtyard began.

For the first three dhampirs that fell, the others didn't even notice. It was only when one half of a dhampir fell upon and disturbed the attempts of another digging up chunks of blood-soaked mud did someone finally realized that something was up.

But by then, it was far too late.

Moving with a fluid grace far beyond the likes of even wind spirits, something weaved between a group of 30 other lumbering dhampirs on a ground of tilted mud in the span of less than half a second. Its hands are too fast for the eye to see.

It stopped.

It stopped in a field of exploding bodies. Those dhampirs that are around the figure burst like water balloons thrown against a wall, explosions of gore as the moonlight gleamed upon the tiniest hint of something that connected all the dead dhampirs.

Everyone could finally see their attacker as the figure stopped to look at them all with a curious tilt of their head.

The dhampirs do not fear anything except for their masters. They regarded those who were dead with the same passivity an old wildlife photographer might with the prey of lions.

Even with the dhampirs' minds almost gone from the procedure Marius had forced them to go through to become these lumbering monstrosities, they could still recognize how strange the person dressed.

The person wore an austere hooded cloak and colorful domino suits, their face covered by a mask that reflected a demon with two horns. It was a jester, like one from the books about medieval kings and princesses.

Before any dhampirs could launch into an attack, the figure disappeared, and the killing began in earnest.

Nearly too fast for any dhampirs to track, the colorful figure reached the closest dhampir and, with its left hand sheathed in a hazy field of blueness, simply casually swiped as though it were a sword.

Just like a sword, the figure's hand cut right through the nearest dhampir as though the latter was made of air. There wasn't even any resistance as the dhampir was cut in two.

There, before the bottom half of the slain dhampir could fall the figure used it as a platform and launched itself toward another one.

It was only after the fifth body did a dhampir raised a war cry.

"RRAAAAAARRRRRR—"

The war cry was silenced, but it went on for long enough to rally the other dhampirs and cause them to charge towards the unknown jester.

The horde threw themselves at the new enemy. Their minds knew naught of strategy or tactics, for they needed none. For the dhampirs transformed by Marius, all they knew of was brute force for if brute force weren't working, then there simply wasn't enough of it.

With an almost impossible grace, the figure weaved between the grabbing hands of the towering dhampirs that closed in. Each is almost twice as tall as a normal man.

It moved with purpose as it slithered through the tiniest crevasses between the horde of dhampirs. Akin to a world-class ballerina dancer, every step the figure took was with purpose; death.

Every move brought death. The jester moved from victim to victim with such speeds it was almost untrackable.

In less than ten seconds, the group of hundreds of dhampirs Marius had carefully cultivated to serve as the vanguard of his army, was slaughtered down to dozens, before dwindling to zero by the 12th second.

Standing in the middle of this terrain full of gory details and chunks of dhampir flesh, the solitary figure took a bow as the blueness that wrapped around their left hand ceased to exist.

There, the solitary figure turned towards the keep of the castle. From down here in the courtyard, amidst the deathly silence of hundreds of fresh bodies twisted by Marius, the faint sound of nobles eating, drinking, and dining can be heard.

Then, the individual's outline blurs into their surroundings, almost as though they were merging into it.

The jester blended into the night as it scaled the keep's sheer walls, ignoring the concept of gravity entirely.

AN: Crossposted from Questionable Questing under the same name.