It has been 220 years, 11 months, 11 days, 11 hours since the Burning One was struck down by blackened blade. Even now, the throne of his father scorches the skies in vengeance. I can feel it beyond these walls, withering my blood. But El’Sabayoth cannot see where sunlight does not fall. That is why he could not save his son-- his enemies conspired in darkness--and so must I cleave to the shadow… for all of the days that are left to me. After I awoke from death, I fled the city that I failed.
My lifeless body took me south, to the ruins of a village razed by Deadhaus. What happened there… I cannot write of it, though not for lack of will. There was a child. I knelt beside her. I called out to El’Sabayoth, and then… I was walking under the stars. Before me lay the ruins of an old fishing village, abandoned decades ago at the end of the War of the Yoke. Beller, the place of my birth… but it lay miles to the east, and the stars still hung as they did when I found the child.
The blood has moved me at tremendous speeds once before, but this time I had no memory of it, not even the faintest flicker, and this is not what the blood wanted. I walked soundlessly through mangled remains of dead houses, jutting from the ground like the bones of beached whales under the light of the stars. And mere starlight was as morning to my eyes, though cast in shades of silver. Even as I stepped across the ancient wharves, their rotted planks did not groan or shudder underfoot.
It was as if I was without weight, not really bound to Malorum any more, a mere shadow passing over its surface. I stopped at the edge of the platform, gazing out at a sea that would never be blue to my eyes again. To me it was a vast and caustic pool of black, and as the waves lapped at the wooden beams below, the blood within me receded, matching their tidal rhythm. It took every fiber of my will to stand as I did by the sea. No matter how hard I tried, I could go no further.
I turned to wander once more in the skeletal ruin of Beller. One of these empty husks had been my home once. It did not take me long to find it… what was left of it. The weathered stones of an old hearth squatted silently amid a moldering framework, strangled with vines. I knelt and placed the hand that remained to me on the stone, each as cold as the other. Father would let me cook whatever I caught at this hearth. His ashes were scattered to the wind.
All those that died here were burned so that they would not rise again. The Ustilians too burned their dead, though not in fire of this world. At the heart of every Lucent Temple, a brazier kindled flames of gold. The All-Fire, it was named, though commoners knew it as the Gold. It was said to be a fragment of El’Sabayoth’s will. Visions from the Gold would guide the Lucent Priests, and the dead were laid as kindling upon it.
The color of the ashes left behind was a mark of El’Sabayoth’s judgement upon the lives of those who were burned. White ash, they believed, came from those who were true. It was scattered as a blessing over crops, or mixed with the building materials for new temples. Gray ash came from the common man, he who was true and false. It was used in the making of ink, that the voice of the people should echo with those that had come before them. But black ash… that the Ustilians did not speak of.
They struck the names of those that burned to black from their records and buried their ashes beneath Malorum, out of the sight of El’Sabayoth. After the fall of Ustilia, the temples in the Southern Provinces were consumed by the dead, their All-Fires corrupted by foul necromancy. And in the north, Thacea rejected the Lucent temple when it declared independence from the Ustilian Empire. Worship of El’Sabayoth was outlawed, his temples torn down, the All-Fires starved without a supply of bodies.
Mankind turned its back on their god because he turned his back on them. That is what they believed, what they were told by the Order of the Ashen Ring, those who rose up to protect the living from the dead where the Lucent Temple failed. And for a time they succeeded. The advance of Deadhaus was halted, at least, but they could not drive them back, could not reclaim the Southern Provinces. In the end, it was all for nothing.
The Ashen Ring failed Thacea as much as the Inquisitors, and yet I cannot help but wonder… what if we had not turned from the old faith? Could the All-Fire have revealed the corruption that festered beneath our streets? For thousands of years, Ustilia crushed every conspiracy, every uprising, and in a mere 220, Thacea was undone. Perhaps the Awakened were only partly to blame… perhaps it was man’s own pride, thinking themselves as gods, that brought their ruin.
Nevertheless, Thacea would be avenged. For so long as my unholy form endured, I would pursue the destruction of the Awakened. I would hunt them, study them, learn their weaknesses. I would kill them all… but where to begin? I no longer had the resources of the empire at my command--no tools, no network of informants, no laboratory, only the nascent power of a vampire, of which I knew little, and the weaknesses that came with it.
The next lesson in those weaknesses, I would soon find, was fast approaching from the east. A sudden dread surged through my veins, rippling, urging me to move. I stood abruptly, and the blood surged again, lurching my legs so that I stumbled forward, clasping with my one hand at the moldering framework. “What? What is it?” I spoke to the blood, but its communications were wordless impulse.
The rippling strengthened within, like the surface of a pond struck by rainstorm, a hundred thousand pinpricks of sickening sensation, and then upon the horizon, I saw it… the light of dawn. How can I describe it to mortal eyes? The firmament of the heavens was as a tapestry set above a seed of molten gold. From the east, the constellations were devoured as the tapestry was set alight, and shadows were blasted into being, fleeing westward in terror before an apocalypse of gold.
I fell to my knees, awestruck, and then, before I could see more, to my face. “Forgive me!” I cried out to the molten skies, though I know not why, and then the blood surged into my arms, and I began clawing at the dirt. With one hand and one stump, I tore into Malorum with maddening speed. I soon realized that I was burying myself, but as much as this thought terrified me, I could do nothing to prevent it.
Face first into the dirt, thrashing desperately to cover myself completely, and then I was still. Then there was silence. I could not breathe. Any attempt to bring air into my lungs brought dirt instead. I could not see, and dared not move, lest some part of me become exposed to the burning sky. Fear gripped me in the quiet darkness of my shallow grave. You do not need to breathe, I thought to myself. You are dead already. But the fear only grew, as if pressing me deeper into Malorum.
Dead and buried. A nightmare… an existence of pure nightmare. “The sun cannot destroy you… not alone,” a voice issued from the darkness, from nowhere, and from everywhere. My thoughts froze. I waited in silence, then opened my mouth to reply, only to choke on soil. “You need only think… and I will hear.” “Who are you?” the thought rose from me by reflex. “You know who I am. I’ve been watching you.” My blood pulsed in disgust at this answer. “What do you want from me?” “I want what you want.”
The conversation was much like thinking only half of the thoughts, not my own. “I very much doubt that.” “Doubt is wise, Grand Inquisitor, but haste is wiser, for the hour is nigh.” “What hour is this?” “The hour of the Awakened.” At the mention of my sworn enemy, my blood spasmed, twitching my limbs. “What do you know of them?” “I know how to destroy them.” “How?” “Come to me, and I will show you.” “That sounds like a trap.”
“It would have been no great effort to kill you in the Sunken Woods, if that is what I wanted. Or I could have let the ghoul eat your head--it pleaded with me for that. But I have ever been your benefactor, young Alaric.” “Benefactor? You laid foul magick upon me!” “That foul magick has protected you from things you cannot guess." “You haunted my dreams with visions of horrors!” “In your dreams, you have haunted me as well.” “I have!?
You… you cannot expect me to believe you have acted in my interest--you are an abomination that feeds on the souls of the living!” “Souls are the currency of lichcraft, just as blood is to your kind.” “I have not fed upon the blood of the living!” “Oh? What is it you think happened in that cellar?” “I… I don’t know.” “Your mind could not endure the truth, that you have become as I am… an abomination. But this lingering frailty, this delusion of conscience, will fade.
In time, you will be one of us.” “Us… I have barely less hatred for Deadhaus than I do the Awakened.” “Deadhaus, however, did not destroy your precious Thacea.” “You crushed the Ustilian Empire! You slaughtered Thaceans for 200 years!” “Thacea played no small part in the fall of the Ustilian Empire. They could have come to the aid of their kin, but they chose independence… they chose power.” “I know my enemies, liche; you will not confound me!” “Is that so?
As you hide in this soil now, a young boy hid in a cabinet just above you, half a century ago. He thought he knew his enemies.” “No…” “He had spent his short life thinking that Thacea was his enemy.” “No… no.” “But in time the truth was revealed to him. He threw off his old hatred and saw Thacea as his savior.” “You are my enemy!” “Even if that were true, I am still the enemy of your enemy. Why not use my knowledge to destroy your greater foe,
then settle your grudge with Deadhaus.” “Destroy the Awakened… and then destroy Deadhaus…” “You are welcome to try.” For a long time I lay in silence, reflecting on the words that echoed from within. “Where are you?” “To the south, beyond what you call the Deadhaus Gate. I can guide you.” “No… if you want my help, if you want me to trust you, as far as such a thing is even possible, then you must leave my mind.” “I bound our eyes with a touch in the Sunken Woods, and so must touch unbind them.”
“If I come to you… you will release me from this magick?” “You have my word.” “Then so be it.” As I thought this, the liche fell silent, receding into the depths of my mind, where I could only faintly sense its presence, an interloper, a faint pressure on the nape of my neck, like being watched. I knew that the sun still shone above, yet though the liche claimed that it could not destroy me, I had no wish to see it again, preferring even the choking darkness of burial to its hideous glare.
Now and then, the sounds of animals came from above, but they would not pass near to where I was buried. A cat came close once, sniffed the dirt, hissed, and moved on. Worms, however, had no such reluctance. They slid over my body, their naked flesh writhing against me, but where they tapped to taste me, my blood drew nearer to the skin, and they were repelled, digging deeper and away. Other insects came and went.
Some investigated, burrowing close to me and tickling with so many feelers, so many scuttling legs. But each was repelled as the blood responded, ever vigilant from within. As the hours passed, I found that the greater whole of my blood was slowly shifting. At first, it pressed down, but also to the west. But gradually this western pressing abated, and the blood pulled only downward. Then again, in time it began to pull to down and the east.
I realized this movement of the blood was a counterbalance of the sun’s position above, straining away so that I knew always and without sight from where daylight came, until at last it strained no longer, and the sounds of night came. I began to rise from the soil, tentatively at first, but then, finding the sky full of stars, I broke free from my shallow grave and stood anew. With conscious effort, I coughed the dirt up from my lungs and knocked what I could loose from my coat.
The liche had demanded that I head south. Was it telling the truth, that Deadhaus were enemies to the Awakened? The ghoul did kill several of their cultists. But why? What would monsters care to fight among themselves? It could be a trick, a plan to lure me for... for what? But if it was the truth, then it was my best chance at vengeance, not just against the Awakened, but eventually against Deadhaus itself. I stopped at this thought. Was the liche listening in?
I would wait to plan my vengeance until after it “unbound our eyes,” as it called it. For now, I began to head south. The Deadhaus Gate was days away, and so my first thought was to acquire a horse. I followed roads where I could to the outskirts of towns, but what I found filled me with dread. Most of them were burning. The sounds of slaughter carried on the wind, as well as the inhuman voices I had come to know all too well. Had anyone survived in meaningful numbers against this madness?
Was all of the empire being overturned from within? I would think any temple of the Ashen Ring could still resist, and god knows what could bring Fort Serenus down… but had the Awakened taken everything else? Eventually, I found a village that was mostly unburned and saw a stables there. I crept quietly out of habit, but of course this was no longer necessary. I’m not sure my feet are even capable of making sound anymore. Some voices clamored elsewhere in the village. An argument? A distraction.
I stole into the stables, saw the horses sleeping there. As I drew closer, I could smell a sweet heat rising from their sleeping bodies. It was nowhere near as powerful as... as before… but I knew it to be their blood. I spoke softly, knowing that if they should see me so close without sound, they could startle and draw the Awakened. “Who wants to get away from here, hmm?” I spoke quietly, and the horses gently stirred, though their eyes remained closed.
I placed my one hand along one of their necks, and its breath shuddered. Its eyes were darting back and forth rapidly. “A dream?” I whispered, and the eyes slid open, swarming with so many burst blood vessels, red as the ones that sat above slanted smiles in the city.
My hand shot back as the creature shuddered, its voice panicked and twisted, and then its face--its entire head--peeled open like fleshy petals, and so many spindly tendrils burst forth, choking the horse-like cries into something not of this world. “No!” I shouted, stumbling backward, and that is when I felt the teeth clamp down upon my shoulder. Another of the Awakened horses stood behind me gnawing with the teeth that lined the great petals that had become its head.
As I jerked away, a chunk of me was torn free, and then the world blurred into flowing streams of color and the wind struck me as a gale. When sight returned to me, I was so far from the village that I could no longer see it. I had crossed this distance in mere seconds. I sank to my knees, taking a deep, unneeded breath as the blood contorted in my gaping wound. From either side of the opening, steams of crimson arched, gripping the opposite end of the wound and pulling it closed.
I could feel the blood darting and knitting beneath the closed surface for a time, and then I was without wounds, save for a missing hand. “Even the horses!?” I shouted into the dark, and by my shouting realized a sudden weakness. The blood that impelled me from within seemed to possess less force. I knew what was happening inside my body from the experiments I performed two years ago.
Though I could not see it, I knew my blood was consuming itself, shrinking inward so that its volume was lesser by the hour. The result was a greater difficulty in moving my dead limbs, but also a gnawing sensation, not quite hunger, not quite thirst, not quite lust, but some terrible amalgam of primal needs, a soundless mantra coursing through my veins as it had through the veins of each who bore this curse before me, flowing from some wretched font in the dark night of prehistory.
At the same time, the sounds of the forest in which I found myself seemed sharpened. Something was moving in the dark, something my blood wanted me to notice. I rose silently and crept toward the noise, seeing by the light of the stars a doe. I was always more of a fisherman than a hunter, but what followed came from older instincts than my own. The doe, even with its sharp ears, could not hear my footsteps, and the blood flowed to my legs so that I approached from behind.
It cried out as I seized it in the dark. I tried to break its neck quickly, that it might not suffer, but the blood resisted this command. Instead, I pulled its neck to my face and bit it into it, finding that its flesh yielded to my teeth as easily as paper. As the first spurt of blood hit my lips, the blood within began to bubble. I was vaguely aware of the feeble thrashing of the forest creature, but this was but a whisper next to the sensation of slick heat that spilled into my mouth.
My eyes rolled back, my tongue undulated, writhing under what I cannot explain as taste alone. It was flame that flowed as liquid. It was the stream of life sprung from the fangs of death, an impossible union, pulsing in time with the doe’s heart, pouring down my throat, not by muscular contractions of my mouth, but some other force, as if it was simply commanded to. I felt my blood tremble as the doe’s struck it, devouring it from within, transmuting it so that it became more of my own.
And I saw visions that flickered in time with a fading heartbeat, of forest halls flowing past me in a rush of green, of dew glinting on grass as beads of lilac under twilight skies. Then the heartbeat stopped, my arms flung the doe from me in violent disgust, and I stood in a daze. For a fleeting moment, I was whole. This forest was safe; it was my home, and then the blood of the doe was no more--only a vampire’s remained, and the strange sensation left me. Once more, I was a dead thing,
a stranger among the darkened woods. I wandered then until I found my way again, back to the roads that led southwest, and the stars lit my path as numberless lanterns, wheeling overhead. I saw Laterum, gleaming alone as a star with many sides. I saw the horns of Haruspex clearer than ever I had in life, so that they seemed unlike horns at all, but almost like a ring or band. There was Coluber, an orb of ink athwart the skies through which no star could shine.
And blood red shone Vesania, brightest of all this night, an omen of terrible dreams. Its crimson light gazed upon me as I stood outside the battlements of Fort Zaestra. I would need to cross the fort if I was to reach the Deadhaus Gate. It was the only solid ground between myself and the Zaestran River. What I feared were those I had left guarding the fort when I was Alaric von Beller. I saw their misshapen bodies patrolling the battlements, visibly deformed even from a distance.
These wights had been ordered to protect the fort. They would not care that the empire had fallen, that their creator was dead. They would not care if 10,000 years passed by. They would walk these walls until their legs were ground to pulp by the weathering of steps beyond counting, and then they would crawl, pulling themselves back and forth along the stones until their flesh sloughed from their cores.
The irony that I now faced was that the wights had been ordered to protect the fort against the dead. Then again, I was the one who gave the order. How would they respond if I were to approach them? Would they recognize me as their master and creator, or that which they were commanded to destroy? I approached the edge of the moat before the drawbridge and called out, “It is I, Alaric von Beller,” I lied.
“I command you to grant me passage to the fort.” Two of the wights patrolling on the wall above stood still, turning to gaze down upon me. I could see the faintest glint of starlight on the cannons which had been fitted to them in place of arms. A moment later, the bridge began to lower, and the artillery wights resumed their patrol. So they knew my voice, which death had not changed, but what of my appearance? I did not know myself what I looked like, having seen no mirror since my death.
I gathered my hood closely about my head and stepped across the bridge. A wight stood motionless as I walked by, slowly turning the winch to raise the bridge after I had passed. Whether my distance and hood concealed my nature, or they still recognized me as their master, I know not. I fear I know less now about these creatures than I once thought I did. Once inside, I began to survey the fort. I found no sign of the few living guardsmen that were posted here along with the wights.
Had they withdrawn during the recent chaos that had erupted across the empire, been recalled perhaps? No… there would not have been time for this. It was not until I crossed into the central courtyard that I discovered what remained of them. Their bodies, mangled beyond recognition, had been arranged in a spiral pattern along the courtyard floor.
Some of the corpses had sprouted spindly tendrils, some showed no sign of mutation, from what I could discern at least, but all had been dead for some days. What in god’s name had happened here? The Awakened had infiltrated the fort… they must have transformed here at the same time as those in Thacea, perhaps in all the cities, all at once across the empire. But for these at Fort Zaestra, this would be the last mistake they ever made.
Yet the wights had no orders concerning the Awakened; they had no knowledge of them. Why had they slaughtered them? Why had they laid them out like this? As I stood staring down at the bizarre ritual, searching for some sign, some remnant of sanity, a light fell upon the bodies from above, and the blood within me seized in absolute panic. I whirled, utterly unprepared for the source of the light, a departure from all that which is sane. I can say for certain that it was not of this world.
Its form was not bound by any logical structure or function as the creatures of Malorum are. It was a winged thing of only wings, each as great as a windmill’s arm. How many there were, I cannot say, nor were they arranged in any structure that indicated they might be capable of flight, and yet the entity hung above the fort, glaring in all directions with so many massive lidless eyes upon its wings.
And each wing converged to a center that was itself the largest of the eyes, perpendicular to ground, gazing unguessably into my very soul. I opened my mouth to cry out, but no sound came. I urged the blood to take us away from there, but it no longer obeyed me. It obeyed the entity whose only wordless command was that I kneel. The wights rushed into the courtyard then, gathering about me with their twisted bodies, as if to shield me from the horror.
A pair of artillery wights raised their cannons. The last thing I recall was the blast of gunpowder, and then the world fled from me, And there was nothing. Not even darkness. And my senses returned. I was in the courtyard, still kneeling before an entity that was no longer present. My blood could move once more. And as I rose to my feet, I saw that the spiral pattern along the floor had been altered. At certain points along the fleshy arcs, white cores had been placed.
By their number I knew them to belong to every wight that was positioned at Zaestra. The cores were inert, utterly stripped of the crucible’s light, something they had been designed to resist for centuries of use. In horror, I looked to the sky, but the stars were unchanged. No centuries had passed, only perhaps an hour or so. I took a step forward, leaving the strange spiral, and a familiar voice sounded from within my thoughts. “I lost you there for a moment, Alaric.
What happened?” “I… I don’t know.” It paused, quietly calculating behind my eyes. “You seem a bit… shaken.” I thought nothing for a moment… had it not seen what I had seen somehow? Could it not extract the memory from me? Perhaps it was not as omniscient as it seemed, or at least not in this instance. “Yes… yes,” I began, my mind racing. “I can tell that dawn will be coming soon.” Again, the liche paused. Did it believe me? “I’ve already told you, Alaric, daylight cannot destroy you.
Now make haste. You are traveling far too slowly." “Yes, of course…. haste.” I began to move at once, but soon after the voice returned. “Oh, and Alaric…” “Yes?” I thought, praying that the liche could not read all my thoughts. “Stay away from any circles like that one.” I felt my head turn to glance upon the spiral. “Why? What is it?” “Something that shouldn’t be there,” and then it was gone, returned once more to the shadowed depths of my unconscious mind. -Alaric the Damned