Private Tales Legacy of the Damned

Vaiz Onder Elissal called his Devils to a secret meeting. The time, he said, to make the first of their covert moves had come. Like the raindrop which disturbs the placid lake, small would its impact be at first, but its ripples would travel far and wide.

Elissal laid out his plan, and it involved the lost city of Reikhurst, and the Reikhurstan diaspora. And when he spoke of the perfect candidate for the plan's first phase, the eyes of Nemeska, Boesarius, and Castulo—fellow Devils—all turned to Akiza.

But she blinked and looked baffled. "What? They're not my friends," she said curtly.

As a matter of practicality though, Akiza could hardly argue. Reikhurst, as all the tales went, seemed a ghost town, but some knew the truth: that a whole host of vampires dwelt within, underground and unseen, a dark mirror to the ruined daylight kingdom above. Indeed, a Vampire King ruled there, and into his court he was said to accept envoys and entreaties from his fellow kindred of the night, and others whom civilization scorned besides: and that garment fit her well, didn't it?

How did the Vaiz Onder acquire all of his information? Well, Akiza wasn't one to ask. Or judge.



In some ways, it felt liberating to be on her own again. She didn't have to pretend to be a Penitent, and was free of the anti-magic anklet she otherwise would be bidden to wear. The solitude of travel through Campania and through the heights of the Spine came with a kind of solace, and the motion of it felt like stretching her legs after a cramped rest. But she knew not to become too relaxed, too complacent, and always to keep a keen edge to her awareness; she'd made that mistake in the past—a few times, admittedly—and each time it nearly cost her everything. The price of simple joy could be steep indeed.

At last she came within sight of the ruined city. Reikhurst.

Menacing gray clouds, dark and bleak, choked the sun and sky, and Akiza had to wryly wonder if this was merely a coincidence of timing or if King Jürgen had secret and powerful means to keep his "kingdom" so enshrouded. She could smell rain, but as yet none fell on the city.

Without the sun's tyranny she was free to use her magic. And she did. Instead of traveling through one of the ruined gates, she became a slick of blood and slithered to the top of the city walls and became human again. There she surveyed the city, and it was much as described: silent and dead, a years-old calamity evidenced in half the buildings, and the disrepair of abandonment clear in all the rest. She could see why most people would balk at traveling here. But her kind, so she understood, would be welcome; she needed only to find the appropriate entrance.

So Akiza morphed again into a spatter of blood and dripped down from the walls and to the ground inside. Human once more, she walked through those old streets, empty of life and purpose, and her eyes darted and her ears stood guard.

She heard something. Far off. Something like the snapping of bone? Unbeknownst to Akiza, another visitor, Afanas, had just taken the skull of a skeleton and lifted it up for his own inspection.

Akiza, many minutes later, for she tread carefully, would come to that selfsame age-bowed tree. With caution she approached the skeleton, finding it headless. She couldn't know if it had been headless since the calamity of Reikhurst, or if such had happened far more recently.

She glanced around.

Was she alone?

Afanas Crowne Garisi

Akiza looked again to the old headless skeleton. Hardly could she glean anything more than what she had already ruminated on.

She'd a mind to press on, to leave the bowed tree and the little square in which it was centered behind. She did have a purpose here after all, and she needed to find whatever secret passages there existed down to the everdark Kingdom below these ruins.

But a little nagging feeling bid her to glance about her surroundings just one more time. And so Akiza did, looking here at this corner, there at that corner, into old glassless windows and through doorways without doors. And then her eyes started to search upwards, looking upon what roofs and what upper stories remained standing. She was close to scorning that nagging feeling, thinking it a premonition without good cause.

But, at last, her seeking eyes found another pair of eyes. Looking at her. From above. On a crumbling house wall she found him, still and silent as the grave.

And following a slow blink (for wonder of how she could have missed seeing him there for so long), she gave a wan little smile and said with her brand of wry humor, "Not as sharp as I used to be."

Afanas Crowne Garisi

The various strains of vampirism throughout Arethil were a minor interest of Akiza's—though she'd hardly taken the time for any sort of deep study. Spying the color of his gums and the incredible size of his fangs, the man before her was not of a strain perfectly suited for infiltration and mingling among the non-vampiric. Little did Akiza know of Afanas' true nature, however.

"The first. Regrettably," she replied. Then with a little shrug, a sentiment of who knows what the future holds, she added, "Maybe I can find an excuse for the second."

Making a display of regarding the whole of the man, her eyes tracing down from the peak of his formidable height and then back up again, she mused, "You don't look like a gallant hero, here to cleanse Reikhurst."

She didn't have anything against daring adventurer types. In some ways, she got it, she understood it, why someone or someones would come to a place like Reikhurst with monster hunting or vampire slaying in mind. Her only reservation was that "daring" had a tendency to cross over into "foolhardy" a little too easily.

"So. How about you, then? First or second."

Business or pleasure.

Afanas

She watched him as he paced in leisurely fashion around her. Wasn't that something. A man of practical means, so he attested, neither for nor against spilling blood for this principle or that. A man after her own heart in that regard. Life (or unlife, but semantics) doled out a set of unavoidable circumstances to you, and you had to deal with that. Akiza had, and was doing so even now. Things hadn't gone perfectly in every instance, no, but she was still here, wasn't she?

He came to stand before her, hand on her shoulder, and truly it was then that Akiza became acutely aware of the difference in stature between them. His hand engulfed her shoulder whole, and she may as well have been watching the gray and clouded sky for birds, such was the fashion in which she had to look up to meet his gaze. Oh he must have been quite the terror among men in life. She could only imagine him now, if coin turned him into one's enemy, or if there was a fool out there in Arethil reckless enough to provoke his wrath.

"Akiza," she said, greeting him in kind. For the sake of facetiousness she thought about returning the gesture of the shoulder squeeze. But that was a long way up there.

"Your timing is..." she settled instead on giving his belly a little poke of her forefinger, right as she said, "impeccable. I need to have a chat with the good king too. But. There's a first time for everything."

She smiled with an easy mirth, dry humor coming out again.

"And I'm having trouble finding the front door."

Afanas

"A land now forgotten," she said with a small hint of resignation, for homesickness was a feeling she seldom (though not never) knew. In truth, she knew not what became of her homeland, and sought no news of it—if indeed news could even be sought, as Arethil at large knew little of her homeland, and her homeland little of Arethil. All that mattered was, whether her homeland thrived or whether it had come to resemble Reikhurst, she could never return. What she had left of it were some of those very garments which the man had remarked on, a weapon, and her contrived surname, fashioned in the Gildan way and meaning, to remind her.

Yet all this she kept to herself. She didn't particularly like speaking of it.

And so shrugged, intent on projecting coolness instead of reticence toward the matter, and said, "But I've got a new home now." Then with visible realization on her face, she snickered and added, "And this is not the first time I've said that."

Afanas

Akiza supposed, then, that she had a wandering home. There were some bards' songs like that, she recalled, song from the perspective of some iterant adventurer fondly recalling the joys of his or her travels.

Abandoned by his mother though—that's a sorrow. She did have a mind to ask if everyone was as tall as Afanas himself where he came from, but in light of his story it seemed an inconsequential thing. But whatever one's circumstance in life, certain was it to change in the many years of unlife. And that they had in common, no doubt.

Akiza glanced about the ruins around them, looking there to this old home, there to this lonely wreck, all of it quiet and still.

"At least having your home in your heart saves it from this," she said, not in any way to invoke solemnity, but merely making the observation. Brick and mortar and wood and stone, all these could be brought down.

From what the Vaiz Onder Elissal had said to her, the Reikhurstan diaspora did not at all feel as blithely about it as Akiza did. They were organizing, so Elissal had told her, to retake this city from the King and his vampires. They were willing to die for this place.

A strange notion, Akiza noted. Foreign to her. But very pervasive, she had to admit. And she couldn't help but wonder if there was something to it.

Afanas

Funny he would say that. Because in the case of the Reikhurstans, that was exactly what Akiza had come here to prevent. Rising to the challenge they were, but the Vaiz Onder Elissal thought them incapable of besting it. And that would be such a waste.

Akiza and Afanas's brief introduction to one another came to a timely end. Someone, clearly intent on making himself known for all the carefree sound he made, approached. Akiza had to turn to face the sound the newcomer, and when she did she saw him just then, dressed in black much like Akiza and Afanas. A popular myth pervaded many lands in the world, and Akiza had heard a few variations of it, but its core was always the same: a grim boatman, who beckoned to souls upon death, to take them down into some underworld forever. Their guide seemed like the myth come to life.

Or unlife.

"Kindred," said the man with the red eyes and the hood. And with a slow sweep of a hand, he greeted them, "Welcome."

To Afanas: "You are expected."

To Akiza: "You are not."

"In my position, I couldn't send a letter ahead—"

The man held up his hand in polite interruption. "But the King is generous. You will be given an audience all the same."

"Lovely." And with a cheeky glance up to Afanas she said, "If you get better accommodations than me, I'm inviting myself into your room."

Afanas

The revealed doors in the church gave them passage to what lay beneath.

And, even so far as the hallway into which they first entered, the sight surpassed Akiza's expectations. She thought of...well, not a crudely fashioned tunnel in a cave, but something not so far removed from it. Polished marble definitely wasn't what she had in mind.

Neither were the gargoyles, though they made for excellent sentinels she reckoned. Their spouted flames cast away the darkness of the hall (not that darkness was any impediment to the three of them) in bursts of brightness like lightning in a night's storm. She made a conscious effort not to stray, to follow more closely the path established by the Guide and to stay close to Afanas's side.

The Guide, then, reached another set of heavy iron doors at the hallway's end.

"Feast your eyes..."

And whether by some secret force of the Guide's own doing, or if the doors were opened for him on the other side, it mattered not, for the doors swung inward all the same.

"On the domain of King Jürgen Kaiser."

Now before them, as they stood at the height of a great stair leading downward, a vast cavern yawned wide and high, and nestled within it was a city of dark splendor. Spires rose in malefic magnificence, looking like spears pointed upwards to the cavern's ceiling and threatening to impale the Reikhurst above. Blue flames similar to the ones exhaled by the gargoyles dotted the undercity's structures and the cavern walls, gleaming like gaudy sapphires in moonlight. Closer scrutiny over the city would yield to one's eyes that much of it was still under construction, despite the astounding progress that had already been made; to this end, hulking vampiric creatures called Wargheits, monstrous creations of mutation and magic, performed labor and excavation, while risen ghouls and zombies performed more intricate tasks of building and shaping—all this certainly under the direct control of overseeing vampires.

And in the distance, down from the great stair and down the main thoroughfare, directly ahead of them, it could be seen: the Keep of Kaiser.

"Never would have thought I'd see such a thing," Akiza said, commenting on the whole of the midnight domain, all of it home to perhaps one of the largest hosts of vampires upon Arethil.

Afanas

Akiza watched the small interaction between Afanas and the Wargheit and thought nothing of it; a bestial creature, those massive Wargheits, so it seemed hardly out of the ordinary. But little did she know.

She did, however, become increasingly aware of her subtle aversion to enclosed spaces the further down the main thoroughfare, and thus further into the cavern, they went. She wasn't claustrophobic, no, and the slow burn of her fear was quite rational as opposed to irrational. Enclosed spaces, naturally, did not lend themselves very well to having many exits (hard to assail, like Afanas said, but also hard to escape). In familiar spaces this wasn't a problem, but in the unfamiliar it seemed a gamble to her survivor's mentality. Even though she reckoned she had little, if anything, to fear from this Vampire King so long as she paid deference to him, still the wariness of her enclosure remained.

And so, unconsciously, Akiza rather much kept herself to Afanas's side, for while they had only just met, they were both strangers in a strange land, the only beacons of familiarity, however novel, to one another.

The Guide stood by while Afanas rapped on the doors—his job was done.

Now like before in the marble hallway the doors opened as if by their own accord, swinging inward to reveal first a large vestibule. Beyond this another set of doors, and only a moment after entering the vestibule would they in turn swing open.

The Grand Hall lay beyond, full of pillars and blue lights and feasting tables (upon which lay enthralled humans and other captured races, their senses dulled). Grandeur and magnificence stood resolute as the watchwords of the Hall's design, as all was meant to project power and kingly nobility. Vampires of various strains occupied the Hall, here in this corner, there at this table, going thither to this stair or hither to that adjacent hall.

And the centerpiece of it all: the Throne. Upon which sat King Jürgen Kaiser, who presently treated with another party of foreign vampires who had come to Reikhurst.

Akiza took the moment while they waited to ask, "This might be a silly question. But you and your father...was it just the two of you? In that fortress?"

Perhaps more remarkable than all the architecture to Akiza was the now plainly visible fact of so many vampires gathered all in one place, more even than as a large coven or host, but as seemingly in a Kingdom of their own. In her experience, vampires were by and large solitary.

Or maybe she just didn't make friends very well. She did say as much to Nemeska before.

Afanas

Oh. So he did live amongst the living. But maybe she was getting ahead of herself; she too had a life before being turned. It might have been this way with Afanas and his father, it might have been that his father provided him with a home and cover after he had been turned. Regardless, it wasn't some enclave of vampires, comparable to Reikhurst in structure if not in scope, that Afanas was from.

"A dragon head," she mused. "Impressive work for a hobbyist monster hunter."

Or maybe Afanas's father was eight feet tall. And had wings. And could breathe fire himself. For all she knew.

Facetious thoughts aside, one of the many vampire nobility approached them. Red certainly was her color.

"We are," answered Akiza to the question asked. And then, because her sardonic humor was like a horse without reins sometimes, she added in echo of their former Guide, "He's expected. I'm not."

Afanas

"Try him yourself," Akiza whispered back, with a small curve of a smirk. Her eyes met Erzsebet's when they could. "You won't be disappointed."

Why not play the game?

Afanas seemed to be enjoying himself.

If that quiet catching in his throat was anything to go by.




Afanas

"Yes. I did," came Akiza's reply, now with a smile full-fledged. Like a moth she often courted the flame, even as she knew what awaited should she hover too close. A flaw, her more pragmatic and realist side would conclude. Yet in another way she was happy that this was something she indulged, or even at times couldn't be helped.

To survive was one thing. To live was another.

From half-lidded eyes looking up did she see high up on Afanas's cheeks the oddly-colored blush. It matched his gums. A peculiar sight, but peculiar in sight only, for its purpose seemed much the same. Well color her shocked. Akiza never would have thought to see a blush from a vampire who cut such an imposing figure. But there was always a lesson to be learned about hasty assumptions, wasn't there?

She flicked her eyes in the direction Erzsebet had retreated, blinked, and her gaze was back up on Afanas.

"What a villain. She stole your hat. Were you going to go get it back, when you're done?"

Afanas