Post by Alpha Dragon on Feb 7, 2007 4:46:56 GMT -5
Eternal thanks must go out to Lyric, Icsis of Exuma and Belthazor for theit hand in proof reading this peice of work for me. My human is so sloppy... Please enjoy "The Exodus of a Carpathian Soul Drinker".
Alpha pulled on his second glove, flexing his prehensile fingers to bury them into the very depths of the soft black leather, and then curling them into a fist as he fastened the strap tightly round his wrist.
He appraised himself in the full length mirror that stood by the doorway. He was clad in good quality cotton trousers, of a slightly shiny black, clasped with a plain leather belt. Italian shoes polished and buckled across his feet. A pure white silk shirt that gleamed like ice in the bright light of the chandelier, under a tight, black leather waistcoat that hugged his slim torso and pleasantly accentuated his lean, athletic torso, giving his sleeves a certain billowy look.
The whole macabrely noir effect was finished by the almost porcelain paleness of his skin, the deep, shadowy dark of his brown eyes, and his chestnut hair pulled back sleekly across his skull in a tight pony tail. Alpha had considered a bow ribbon but dismissed the idea as a tad too much.
He had wanted to look good for his short journey, the imperative on well groomed confidence rather than rough and ready ability. In times gone by, whenever the next phase in his long unlife demanded relocation from one haven to the next, he’d have abandoned any sense of style of class for his journey in favour of loose fitting britches, knee high boots and a long, body encompassing coat and hood, taking only his sword, a small pouch that contained two handfuls of the soil of his homeland, and enough coinage to procure suitable attire once he reached his destination. Hardy, practical clothes that would survive the elements faced between cities. And he’d have been content, eager even to walk the distance, favouring the wilderness, forcing himself to hunt and kill to survive, live as a predator in the wilds and hone his skills. In recent centuries, when the need to move on suggested itself, there had been wagons, stage coaches, and then eventually steam driven trains and automobiles at his disposal, but he had always proffered the lone walk across country, dropping all pretences of civilised, rational behaviour to truly let loose the bestial instincts within.
Today however he was content to take a hired Limo.
As he turned from side to side, appraising his presentation in the mirror, he wondered idly whether his choice of white shirt and black vest contained some subconscious symbology; the pure white to represent the purity of a new beginning, yoked by the abyssal black of his dark ambition.
Alpha shook his head with a grin and chuckled, his dark, deep, resonantly malevolent laugh from the back of his throat, mocking his own egotistical inner monologue.
He turned from the mirror and wandered across the high, vaulted chamber of marble and cast open the glass doors that led to the hemispherical terrace that overlooked Ravenblack city. He stood at the marble balustrade and gazed out at the urban jungle. Skyscrapers towered monolithic around him, the gold lights from offices and apartments stacked like gold bars, and below them, squat and huddled the smaller apartment high rises and commercial towers. The roads stretched away in geomantic grid, the bitumen wet from the recent rains and gleamed with the smudged reflection of street lamps. His keen eyes made out the facial details of individual humans that walked along the concrete pathways, some fifty stories below. They were huddled in groups or alone, many clutching at umbrellas and holding heir coats tightly, their breath steaming in the cold night air. Alpha smiled to himself
Survival was so much easier in the cities. A ready supply of sustenance all around, and a thousand and one ways to bait, trap, ensnare and poach from it. And when it came time to gut and clean the kill, the friction between the various mortal demographics created a crime rate so prevailing it was enough to veil even the most brutal butchery.
Any wonder then that he relished the lone time in the wild places, where there the prey must be tracked, often for nights on end, and the only sure method of killing was violence. It was more of a challenge than the cities could provide.
Yes, survival in the city was easy. Alpha faced few dangers on his nightly stalks. He was intelligent enough to leave the more powerful of the cities Undead to their schemes and politicking, and far too sophisticated to be threatened by its population of newly arisen. He inhabited the nihilistic curve in between, free to satiate his lusts and work his manipulations over the weak. Other than the one or two Elders that ‘slummed’ it in the taverns, and the occasional mortal that turned out to be a Hunter, very little had ever stood between Alpha and an eternity of hedonism.
Until eight months ago. Until the night he had met her.
Survival was easy. Life, he was beginning to understand, was slightly more complicated.
Alpha turned from the window and crossed the chamber again. The vast room was a twenty foot octagonal chamber of inlaid marble, segmented by four massive stone pillars in its geomantic centre that supported the arched, vaulted roof and gave the room a pleasingly cloistered look. He had furnished it with half a dozen leather bound lounge suites, each one with an entourage of satin pillows and tray tables of dark mahogany. Three whole facets along the western walls had built in books shelves of dark oak dedicated to his collection of books. The facets of the eastern walls had been hung with a few favoured paintings between the doorways that lead to the three antechambers; his bedroom, bathroom and the room that opened up into a lime filled pit.
Now the room was empty, the furniture, the few fetishes and artefacts he had consented to have around, and the books had long been taken away and put into storage until such time as he had need of them again.
Save for one item.
Alpha stopped in the centre of his chamber, between the four great pillars and turned on his heel to face the east, his dark eyes locking on the painting. He had agonised over it when it come time to leave, for it had always been the last treasure to be carted of to the luggage caravan every time he made departure. Every new journey had begun with a silent contemplation of its depiction and somehow, in the last week, he had found neither the time nor the temperament to uphold the tradition.
The painting, framed in gilded filigree, depicted a burning city, the foreground dominated by the file of conquering soldiers, clad in surcoats of white with an emblazoned black cross making exodus from the breached gates, leading off a train of prisoners, mostly women and children, and leaving behind the crumbling towers and bastions of the city that dominated the back ground, from which the inferno raged towards the heavens, and cast a ragged glow over the one creation the victorious army had left amidst their ruthless devastation; a field of crucified foe that faced the burning city so that they may watch as they died from the heat.
The condition of the painting was wonderfully well maintained, save for four long slashes in the canvass that he had inflicted himself some few centuries back in fit of rage.
Since he had procured it in 1501, Alpha had made it the first item of possession to be put up in his havens, and the last to be taken down. The sacking of Schassburg had marked the end of the Basarab rule of his homeland at the hands of Hungarian and Saxon invaders, and the subsequent defeat of separatists Transylvania a war that had been waged through the mountains for two hundred years.
Alpha closed his eyes as the memories arose unbidden, ascending from the depths of his mind. He had picked up the sword and joined his brothers in battle at the age of twelve. He had watched his grandfather and father slain in a single battle, the crown passing to his eldest brother, who rallied the armies for another four years till his own death at the hands of Arpad knights. At seventeen, Alpha Dragon, then known as Mircea Drakor Drakulesti Basarab, had assumed the mantle of prince and Voivode of the Vlachish tribes. From its ranks he would forge the order of the Dragon, a knight hood, devout to the Orthodoxy and dedicated to the defence of the Land beyond the Mountains. His counter assault would cut a swath across the mountains, raise a dozen strongholds, leave close to ten thousand enemy dead, and hundreds of Saxon settlers slaughtered in merciless acts of atrocity. It would lead and eventually to the walls of Buda pest and a year long siege. A siege that would end with the intervention of Hungary’s ally, the Holy Roman Empire, and a host of Teutonic knights that would rout Mircea’s armies back across the mountain passes and raise Mircea’s capital of Schassburg to the ground.
Alpha opened his eyes with a start. His irises gleamed red as they darted across the canvass to focus on individual areas of detail, wild and wide with anguish.
He stood before the gruesome representation, hands clasped behind his back pensively, the soft leather gloves creaking as his fists clenched and unclenched.
He had stared at the painting enough times to call up the image in his mind, and he wondered why indeed he still kept it at all. For centuries the image had brought nothing but rage or melancholia, and he had cursed both its contextual precision and the skill in which the artiste had captured the day of Alpha’s personal horror, committing unwarranted resurrection on an event that had every right to rest in the grave. So many times he had felt the desire to sell it, throw it away or burn it; and yet it was precious to him in a way he could not elucidate. Only once had he ever raised his hand in anger to harm it, drawing the lacerations in the canvass with his own talons. Despite his rage, art was not something to be destroyed, not for one person’s callous frustrations. It remained a graphic reminder of the one element of his human existence he could never put behind him, the death of his noble right. Each time the painting reminded him of his greatest shame, but each time he desired nothing less than to abandon it the need to hold onto the past was always greater.
So he had kept the painting, and nurtured it like a grudge.
Though the picture had been painted more than four hundred years after the events it depicted, Alpha had seen straight away that it had been painted from memory, from a first hand observation. It was one of the first things that had drawn his attention so much. No mortal could conjure that much detail from their imagination alone. A Vampiric artiste then, present on that day of defeat, had committed this testament to exalt their hand in the victorious decimation of Alphas people.
In lieu of vandalising the painting, Alpha had tracked the artiste down and exsanguinated him.
A noise finally broke his attention away from the miserable memories. His travelling bag, long enough to contain its rattling contents quivered beside the door.
Alpha strode away from the painting and leaned down to draw the long parcel from amongst his few essentials, regally unwinding the silk binding at one end, revealing the hilt and cross guard of his broad sword that quivered excitedly in sympathy to his master’s mood. Alpha gripped the leather bound handle and drew Nemjetz-Ura from its scabbard. Secure in his gloved hand the sword relented its petulant quivering. The blade was beaded with drops of blood that seemed to sweat out of the iron itself and Alpha leaned in to murmur soft reassurances in old Vlachish.
"Calm your petulant desperation, old friend. Now is not the time for bloodletting. We go now to seek wisdom, not war. Our campaign is to become strong, not through force of arms, but through skill and ability of both mind and spirit. And out victory is not vengeance, nor territory, nor dominion. It is Her, Nemjetz-Ura. It is love, it is companionship, and it is respite. It is a homecoming. The days of vengeance are over, long gone, missed by the spiteful passing of the years. Our enemies are dead and rot in their graves, their spirits confined to hell for the prejudicial sins. We remain, but our war is stale, and we must abandon it, lest it prevent us from achieving what we must achieve to make her ours. Her, whose skin you have bitten and whose blood you have tasted."
The blade rattled violently, demanding in its own language what their goals where. Alpha grinned humorously, ‘We will abandon this place and take up residence in the Scholam Lamia, and devote ourselves to the study of our intrinsic, vampiric abilities. Once we have achieved sufficient status, only then will I find myself worthy of taking her hand in marriage.’
Nemjetz-Ura quivered slightly, suggesting a remark something like ‘Great, what’s in it for me?’ but then went silent.
Alpha sighed, the humbling nature of his course of action finally dawning on him. All his unlife he had wandered. Each resurrection from the ‘Long Sleep’ had revealed a new chapter of the world’s history for him to plunder and rape. His vast fortunes, looked away in various accounts around Europe would be fat from the interest accrued after decades of compounding, and at the disposal to his every sybaritic desire. He had bought and inhabited a sleuth of manse’s, castles, palaces and penthouses, selling up and moving on whenever desired or demanded, leaving an unheeded trail of abused corpses in his wake.
And now he was to sell up possibly his most luxurious residence in favour of the life of a student. Despite his noble intentions, the idea grated across his arrogant, aristocratic soul.
With a sullen look in his eyes, Alpha looked around his chambers one last time and sighed, realising he felt a deep sense of loss at abandoning this most excellent residence. Much of his fortune had gone into its assemblage, buying with money the kind of prestige his relatively weak powers could not afford in might. His eyes came to rest staring at the accursed painting again, and he scowled as he felt its irritating pull on him. Infuriated he turned, still holding Nemjetz-Ura by its scabbard and walked back across the room to stand in front of it again. He glared at it idly for a moment, eyes scanning the canvass and frame for the source of this exasperating obsession. Absently he glanced to the right, to the bare wall between the painting and corner of the south eastern facet, and felt his intuition tug him towards this patch of stone.
His eyes scanned the marble for the source of his fascination.
There, at a height just below his waist, two gashes had been ground into the marble about two feet apart, each surrounded by a smudged corona of brown blood, long dry.
He blinked as his memories swam and reached out to slip his thumbs into the two holes. The digits fit perfectly.
He remembered... she had been pressed against the wall, the talons of his thumbs had driven through her wrists to gouge into the stone as he had tasted her blood for the first time. And she had shivered with excitement and clawed into his back...
Here, he realised with elation, he had made love with her the first time!
Alpha’s lips moved, forming her name in an almost silent whisper, ‘Lyric...’
He leaned forward, pressing his free hand, and the scabbard of Nemjetz-Ura against the wall, his back arched slightly as he inhaled deeply. He gasped, his nostrils filling with the vague cent of her body that still clung to the stone, even after so many months. His eyes opened wide and full of licentious hunger as the lingering scent triggered a surge of pleasurable memories across his mind.
His eyes darted about, unfocussed, seeing nothing beyond his mind eyes cavalcade of debauched intimacies,
Alpha hissed, a grin striking his face as he envisioned they way she would bite her lower lip as she verged on the cusp of submitting to another of his seductions. Impulsively he bit down himself, his fangs piercing through his lip into his mouth. Blood trickled down his chin and into is mouth, pooling under his tongue and he swallowed back with relish.
He felt elation run through his body, and he stared at the bare wall lustfully. In his minds eye he watched as she seemed to appear, like glimmering snail trailed Turin shroud, as if at the height of her passion her soul had burnt its imprint into the very stone itself.
Alpha stared spell bound, as the apparition demurely opened its luminous eyes, its petite mouth curling back, smiling alluringly, invitingly.
Entranced, he leaned in towards the wall; head tilted slightly, bloody lips parted, eyes closing over slowly, seemingly to kiss the ghostly lips before him. But his face passed though the spectral outline, tongue darting out to leave a trail of saliva cross the marble.
His pallet exploded with the distilled taste of her soul’s rapture.
Alpha reared back, fingers instinctively closing over his swords scabbard as his mind was lost in a whirl of euphoria. He swayed for a moment, clutching at the burning in his throat with his free hand, eyes running with blood tears from the overwhelming sensations now coursing through his arteries, his ragged throat rasping incoherent cries of ecstasy.
Gradually, Alpha felt the control of his faculties ebb back from the oblivion of carnal lust. He wiped the gore from his eyes and stared one more time the area of stone wall, now void of any trace of his beloved, save for the thumbed gouged holes that would remain as testament.
He grinned and nodded a silent farewell to the memory spirit forever trapped there and turned to leave for good.
His eyes fell across the painting one last time.
Irrational rage coursed through him and in an instant his heart compared the burgeoning delight of his present against his contemptible, ignoble past. Without thought or care his right hand curled around his swords hilt and unleashed Nemjetz-Ura from its bed. Alpha shrieked a war cry and charged his miserable history with vengeance.
Alpha slid Nemjetz-Ura back into his carry back and zipped it close. He reached for his leather jacket that hung from its hook by the door and pulled it over is silken clad arms, rolling his shoulders to settle it against his body.
Alpha checked his pocket one last time, pulling out the scroll of parchment entitled ‘Scholam Lamia: Offer of Scholarship" and perused the print one last time before tucking it away.
He reached down and grasped the bag by its two straps and lifted it of the ground. Without a backward glance he stepped through the double oak doors that closed of their own accord after him; leaving the painting of the Sacking of Schassburg behind, its canvass in shredded tatters that clung to the wreckage of its frame, shattered and splintered and good for nothing save expensive fire wood.
Alpha pulled on his second glove, flexing his prehensile fingers to bury them into the very depths of the soft black leather, and then curling them into a fist as he fastened the strap tightly round his wrist.
He appraised himself in the full length mirror that stood by the doorway. He was clad in good quality cotton trousers, of a slightly shiny black, clasped with a plain leather belt. Italian shoes polished and buckled across his feet. A pure white silk shirt that gleamed like ice in the bright light of the chandelier, under a tight, black leather waistcoat that hugged his slim torso and pleasantly accentuated his lean, athletic torso, giving his sleeves a certain billowy look.
The whole macabrely noir effect was finished by the almost porcelain paleness of his skin, the deep, shadowy dark of his brown eyes, and his chestnut hair pulled back sleekly across his skull in a tight pony tail. Alpha had considered a bow ribbon but dismissed the idea as a tad too much.
He had wanted to look good for his short journey, the imperative on well groomed confidence rather than rough and ready ability. In times gone by, whenever the next phase in his long unlife demanded relocation from one haven to the next, he’d have abandoned any sense of style of class for his journey in favour of loose fitting britches, knee high boots and a long, body encompassing coat and hood, taking only his sword, a small pouch that contained two handfuls of the soil of his homeland, and enough coinage to procure suitable attire once he reached his destination. Hardy, practical clothes that would survive the elements faced between cities. And he’d have been content, eager even to walk the distance, favouring the wilderness, forcing himself to hunt and kill to survive, live as a predator in the wilds and hone his skills. In recent centuries, when the need to move on suggested itself, there had been wagons, stage coaches, and then eventually steam driven trains and automobiles at his disposal, but he had always proffered the lone walk across country, dropping all pretences of civilised, rational behaviour to truly let loose the bestial instincts within.
Today however he was content to take a hired Limo.
As he turned from side to side, appraising his presentation in the mirror, he wondered idly whether his choice of white shirt and black vest contained some subconscious symbology; the pure white to represent the purity of a new beginning, yoked by the abyssal black of his dark ambition.
Alpha shook his head with a grin and chuckled, his dark, deep, resonantly malevolent laugh from the back of his throat, mocking his own egotistical inner monologue.
He turned from the mirror and wandered across the high, vaulted chamber of marble and cast open the glass doors that led to the hemispherical terrace that overlooked Ravenblack city. He stood at the marble balustrade and gazed out at the urban jungle. Skyscrapers towered monolithic around him, the gold lights from offices and apartments stacked like gold bars, and below them, squat and huddled the smaller apartment high rises and commercial towers. The roads stretched away in geomantic grid, the bitumen wet from the recent rains and gleamed with the smudged reflection of street lamps. His keen eyes made out the facial details of individual humans that walked along the concrete pathways, some fifty stories below. They were huddled in groups or alone, many clutching at umbrellas and holding heir coats tightly, their breath steaming in the cold night air. Alpha smiled to himself
Survival was so much easier in the cities. A ready supply of sustenance all around, and a thousand and one ways to bait, trap, ensnare and poach from it. And when it came time to gut and clean the kill, the friction between the various mortal demographics created a crime rate so prevailing it was enough to veil even the most brutal butchery.
Any wonder then that he relished the lone time in the wild places, where there the prey must be tracked, often for nights on end, and the only sure method of killing was violence. It was more of a challenge than the cities could provide.
Yes, survival in the city was easy. Alpha faced few dangers on his nightly stalks. He was intelligent enough to leave the more powerful of the cities Undead to their schemes and politicking, and far too sophisticated to be threatened by its population of newly arisen. He inhabited the nihilistic curve in between, free to satiate his lusts and work his manipulations over the weak. Other than the one or two Elders that ‘slummed’ it in the taverns, and the occasional mortal that turned out to be a Hunter, very little had ever stood between Alpha and an eternity of hedonism.
Until eight months ago. Until the night he had met her.
Survival was easy. Life, he was beginning to understand, was slightly more complicated.
Alpha turned from the window and crossed the chamber again. The vast room was a twenty foot octagonal chamber of inlaid marble, segmented by four massive stone pillars in its geomantic centre that supported the arched, vaulted roof and gave the room a pleasingly cloistered look. He had furnished it with half a dozen leather bound lounge suites, each one with an entourage of satin pillows and tray tables of dark mahogany. Three whole facets along the western walls had built in books shelves of dark oak dedicated to his collection of books. The facets of the eastern walls had been hung with a few favoured paintings between the doorways that lead to the three antechambers; his bedroom, bathroom and the room that opened up into a lime filled pit.
Now the room was empty, the furniture, the few fetishes and artefacts he had consented to have around, and the books had long been taken away and put into storage until such time as he had need of them again.
Save for one item.
Alpha stopped in the centre of his chamber, between the four great pillars and turned on his heel to face the east, his dark eyes locking on the painting. He had agonised over it when it come time to leave, for it had always been the last treasure to be carted of to the luggage caravan every time he made departure. Every new journey had begun with a silent contemplation of its depiction and somehow, in the last week, he had found neither the time nor the temperament to uphold the tradition.
The painting, framed in gilded filigree, depicted a burning city, the foreground dominated by the file of conquering soldiers, clad in surcoats of white with an emblazoned black cross making exodus from the breached gates, leading off a train of prisoners, mostly women and children, and leaving behind the crumbling towers and bastions of the city that dominated the back ground, from which the inferno raged towards the heavens, and cast a ragged glow over the one creation the victorious army had left amidst their ruthless devastation; a field of crucified foe that faced the burning city so that they may watch as they died from the heat.
The condition of the painting was wonderfully well maintained, save for four long slashes in the canvass that he had inflicted himself some few centuries back in fit of rage.
Since he had procured it in 1501, Alpha had made it the first item of possession to be put up in his havens, and the last to be taken down. The sacking of Schassburg had marked the end of the Basarab rule of his homeland at the hands of Hungarian and Saxon invaders, and the subsequent defeat of separatists Transylvania a war that had been waged through the mountains for two hundred years.
Alpha closed his eyes as the memories arose unbidden, ascending from the depths of his mind. He had picked up the sword and joined his brothers in battle at the age of twelve. He had watched his grandfather and father slain in a single battle, the crown passing to his eldest brother, who rallied the armies for another four years till his own death at the hands of Arpad knights. At seventeen, Alpha Dragon, then known as Mircea Drakor Drakulesti Basarab, had assumed the mantle of prince and Voivode of the Vlachish tribes. From its ranks he would forge the order of the Dragon, a knight hood, devout to the Orthodoxy and dedicated to the defence of the Land beyond the Mountains. His counter assault would cut a swath across the mountains, raise a dozen strongholds, leave close to ten thousand enemy dead, and hundreds of Saxon settlers slaughtered in merciless acts of atrocity. It would lead and eventually to the walls of Buda pest and a year long siege. A siege that would end with the intervention of Hungary’s ally, the Holy Roman Empire, and a host of Teutonic knights that would rout Mircea’s armies back across the mountain passes and raise Mircea’s capital of Schassburg to the ground.
Alpha opened his eyes with a start. His irises gleamed red as they darted across the canvass to focus on individual areas of detail, wild and wide with anguish.
He stood before the gruesome representation, hands clasped behind his back pensively, the soft leather gloves creaking as his fists clenched and unclenched.
He had stared at the painting enough times to call up the image in his mind, and he wondered why indeed he still kept it at all. For centuries the image had brought nothing but rage or melancholia, and he had cursed both its contextual precision and the skill in which the artiste had captured the day of Alpha’s personal horror, committing unwarranted resurrection on an event that had every right to rest in the grave. So many times he had felt the desire to sell it, throw it away or burn it; and yet it was precious to him in a way he could not elucidate. Only once had he ever raised his hand in anger to harm it, drawing the lacerations in the canvass with his own talons. Despite his rage, art was not something to be destroyed, not for one person’s callous frustrations. It remained a graphic reminder of the one element of his human existence he could never put behind him, the death of his noble right. Each time the painting reminded him of his greatest shame, but each time he desired nothing less than to abandon it the need to hold onto the past was always greater.
So he had kept the painting, and nurtured it like a grudge.
Though the picture had been painted more than four hundred years after the events it depicted, Alpha had seen straight away that it had been painted from memory, from a first hand observation. It was one of the first things that had drawn his attention so much. No mortal could conjure that much detail from their imagination alone. A Vampiric artiste then, present on that day of defeat, had committed this testament to exalt their hand in the victorious decimation of Alphas people.
In lieu of vandalising the painting, Alpha had tracked the artiste down and exsanguinated him.
A noise finally broke his attention away from the miserable memories. His travelling bag, long enough to contain its rattling contents quivered beside the door.
Alpha strode away from the painting and leaned down to draw the long parcel from amongst his few essentials, regally unwinding the silk binding at one end, revealing the hilt and cross guard of his broad sword that quivered excitedly in sympathy to his master’s mood. Alpha gripped the leather bound handle and drew Nemjetz-Ura from its scabbard. Secure in his gloved hand the sword relented its petulant quivering. The blade was beaded with drops of blood that seemed to sweat out of the iron itself and Alpha leaned in to murmur soft reassurances in old Vlachish.
"Calm your petulant desperation, old friend. Now is not the time for bloodletting. We go now to seek wisdom, not war. Our campaign is to become strong, not through force of arms, but through skill and ability of both mind and spirit. And out victory is not vengeance, nor territory, nor dominion. It is Her, Nemjetz-Ura. It is love, it is companionship, and it is respite. It is a homecoming. The days of vengeance are over, long gone, missed by the spiteful passing of the years. Our enemies are dead and rot in their graves, their spirits confined to hell for the prejudicial sins. We remain, but our war is stale, and we must abandon it, lest it prevent us from achieving what we must achieve to make her ours. Her, whose skin you have bitten and whose blood you have tasted."
The blade rattled violently, demanding in its own language what their goals where. Alpha grinned humorously, ‘We will abandon this place and take up residence in the Scholam Lamia, and devote ourselves to the study of our intrinsic, vampiric abilities. Once we have achieved sufficient status, only then will I find myself worthy of taking her hand in marriage.’
Nemjetz-Ura quivered slightly, suggesting a remark something like ‘Great, what’s in it for me?’ but then went silent.
Alpha sighed, the humbling nature of his course of action finally dawning on him. All his unlife he had wandered. Each resurrection from the ‘Long Sleep’ had revealed a new chapter of the world’s history for him to plunder and rape. His vast fortunes, looked away in various accounts around Europe would be fat from the interest accrued after decades of compounding, and at the disposal to his every sybaritic desire. He had bought and inhabited a sleuth of manse’s, castles, palaces and penthouses, selling up and moving on whenever desired or demanded, leaving an unheeded trail of abused corpses in his wake.
And now he was to sell up possibly his most luxurious residence in favour of the life of a student. Despite his noble intentions, the idea grated across his arrogant, aristocratic soul.
With a sullen look in his eyes, Alpha looked around his chambers one last time and sighed, realising he felt a deep sense of loss at abandoning this most excellent residence. Much of his fortune had gone into its assemblage, buying with money the kind of prestige his relatively weak powers could not afford in might. His eyes came to rest staring at the accursed painting again, and he scowled as he felt its irritating pull on him. Infuriated he turned, still holding Nemjetz-Ura by its scabbard and walked back across the room to stand in front of it again. He glared at it idly for a moment, eyes scanning the canvass and frame for the source of this exasperating obsession. Absently he glanced to the right, to the bare wall between the painting and corner of the south eastern facet, and felt his intuition tug him towards this patch of stone.
His eyes scanned the marble for the source of his fascination.
There, at a height just below his waist, two gashes had been ground into the marble about two feet apart, each surrounded by a smudged corona of brown blood, long dry.
He blinked as his memories swam and reached out to slip his thumbs into the two holes. The digits fit perfectly.
He remembered... she had been pressed against the wall, the talons of his thumbs had driven through her wrists to gouge into the stone as he had tasted her blood for the first time. And she had shivered with excitement and clawed into his back...
Here, he realised with elation, he had made love with her the first time!
Alpha’s lips moved, forming her name in an almost silent whisper, ‘Lyric...’
He leaned forward, pressing his free hand, and the scabbard of Nemjetz-Ura against the wall, his back arched slightly as he inhaled deeply. He gasped, his nostrils filling with the vague cent of her body that still clung to the stone, even after so many months. His eyes opened wide and full of licentious hunger as the lingering scent triggered a surge of pleasurable memories across his mind.
His eyes darted about, unfocussed, seeing nothing beyond his mind eyes cavalcade of debauched intimacies,
Alpha hissed, a grin striking his face as he envisioned they way she would bite her lower lip as she verged on the cusp of submitting to another of his seductions. Impulsively he bit down himself, his fangs piercing through his lip into his mouth. Blood trickled down his chin and into is mouth, pooling under his tongue and he swallowed back with relish.
He felt elation run through his body, and he stared at the bare wall lustfully. In his minds eye he watched as she seemed to appear, like glimmering snail trailed Turin shroud, as if at the height of her passion her soul had burnt its imprint into the very stone itself.
Alpha stared spell bound, as the apparition demurely opened its luminous eyes, its petite mouth curling back, smiling alluringly, invitingly.
Entranced, he leaned in towards the wall; head tilted slightly, bloody lips parted, eyes closing over slowly, seemingly to kiss the ghostly lips before him. But his face passed though the spectral outline, tongue darting out to leave a trail of saliva cross the marble.
His pallet exploded with the distilled taste of her soul’s rapture.
Alpha reared back, fingers instinctively closing over his swords scabbard as his mind was lost in a whirl of euphoria. He swayed for a moment, clutching at the burning in his throat with his free hand, eyes running with blood tears from the overwhelming sensations now coursing through his arteries, his ragged throat rasping incoherent cries of ecstasy.
Gradually, Alpha felt the control of his faculties ebb back from the oblivion of carnal lust. He wiped the gore from his eyes and stared one more time the area of stone wall, now void of any trace of his beloved, save for the thumbed gouged holes that would remain as testament.
He grinned and nodded a silent farewell to the memory spirit forever trapped there and turned to leave for good.
His eyes fell across the painting one last time.
Irrational rage coursed through him and in an instant his heart compared the burgeoning delight of his present against his contemptible, ignoble past. Without thought or care his right hand curled around his swords hilt and unleashed Nemjetz-Ura from its bed. Alpha shrieked a war cry and charged his miserable history with vengeance.
Alpha slid Nemjetz-Ura back into his carry back and zipped it close. He reached for his leather jacket that hung from its hook by the door and pulled it over is silken clad arms, rolling his shoulders to settle it against his body.
Alpha checked his pocket one last time, pulling out the scroll of parchment entitled ‘Scholam Lamia: Offer of Scholarship" and perused the print one last time before tucking it away.
He reached down and grasped the bag by its two straps and lifted it of the ground. Without a backward glance he stepped through the double oak doors that closed of their own accord after him; leaving the painting of the Sacking of Schassburg behind, its canvass in shredded tatters that clung to the wreckage of its frame, shattered and splintered and good for nothing save expensive fire wood.
