My Little Ventrue Pt. 05 Ch. 07

~~Jack~~

"Promise me ye'll keep this a secret," Fiona said to the two of them. "Azamel's warning wasn't for aw folk to hear. I screwed up."

"I hadn't told anyone about this before you brought it up." Laughing, Jack gestured to the darkness ahead of them. "How'd you get us here? One moment I was in a jungle, next I'm walking through dark again, now I'm... in a warehouse?" Yeap, warehouse. The large, dirty windows high above, the towers of metal beams holding rows upon rows, shelves upon shelves, of boxes, the forklifts, and all the amenities. He did not envy anyone a job moving or boxing products, dealing with nothing but enormous walls of capitalism personified. Slave labor.

"Mmhmm." Giggling, the Scot tugged on their hands, and dragged them both through the warehouse, between the isles of boxes piled sky high. A big damn warehouse, exporting some sort of toy or blanket or something equally innocuous. "There's a lot of tricks I've learned from Vrall. And, both in the dream, and in the physical world, I can see the gates."

"... gates?" Damien said, glancing around. "This is Banner's Fields warehouse. They sell... I don't know, really. Nothing anyone cares about. I don't see any gates."

Jack nodded. "And we should be careful. Could be people working late."

Fiona took a moment to glance around, and everyone took a longer moment to listen. But other than distant cars, it was unlikely anyone would be around this late in North Side. Damien shook his head too; no one around.

"Lads, there are tunnels atween worlds. Ye ken nae everything is limited to the physical world, to these flesh and bone things we all like so much. There are... strange places, in the beyond. And ye ken who can see those places? Visit those places? This lass." She pointed her two thumbs at herself.

"... what sort of places?" Jack said.

"I'm nae sure, honestly." She shrugged, and skipped ahead, sneakers kicking along the concrete, and fingers touching boxes as she moved by. "There's the Shadow world, that the Uratha deal with. Begotten don't normally go there, according tae Vrall. Nae reason to. The things there are... they aren't what we need. We cannae feed off them."

Jack tilted his head to the side as he followed after her. "Something monsters can't eat? The spirits?"

"Exactly. That place is... it's a shadow, and it doesn't have what we need for food, like we find in folk. Nothing for us to devour. And, it's a dangerous place."

"More dangerous than Dolareido?" Damien didn't sound convinced. "Considering the ritual Jack described, I find that hard to believe." Walking slow, he continued looking around, eyes open for anyone that might be nearby, and no doubt ready to turn on his cloak of night if needed. "And, we have assault rifles and explosives here. Shotguns too."

"They have entities that defy reasoning!" She leaned in toward Damien, hugged his arm to her chest — hoodie and jeans were hilariously cute on her — and waved across the empty air over her. Parting the night sky they couldn't see. "Trees that talk. Deer with wings. Roads that walk."

"... roads that walk?" Jack said. What? How the fuck did that make any sense?

Fiona laughed at him, and poked him in the shoulder. "Ye'll find out soon enough. But, be careful to not... do anything? I dinnae ken much about this world, except that it's dangerous, and there's these... we'll, maybe ye'll be able to make sense of it. I can't." At the end of the warehouse, before a roll-up door, she held out her hands.

And the world changed.

Damien and Jack stepped back, and drew weapons as the wall started to vibrate and screech with a loud hammering, as if a hurricane had shot itself across the ocean and decided to pay them a surprise visit. The walls shook, trembling with the weight of the impacts Jack could not identify. The walls began to do more than vibrate, they began to bend. Both vampires ducked, expecting the twisting material to shatter or explode with the colossal pressure, but the walls had no intention of losing their solidity, bending with a curve of the air like looking through shaped glass.

It was like looking into a black hole. Fiona kept her hands up, fingers trembling, the horror inside coming out and engulfing her in its form. No longer simply Fiona, but the Vrall creature as well, both standing there, both with hands outreached. Vrall had a lot more limbs though, and she used them against the air, pulling it apart to expose the guts of the universe. The universe didn't like that, and the little bit of light in the warehouse flickered, lost to the void descending on them. Jack expected the light bulbs overhead to shatter, and rain down sparks, or for fire or lightning to crack the air. Instead, he stared into a void, a black void that cut into the emptiness before them. Black didn't do justice to describe the depth of the abyss.

What was the name of that new black, blacker than black black? Vantablack? Blackest? Like that, something that pulled his eyes in until he felt like he was sinking.

"You... found this?" Damien said.

"Mmhmm. Someone, or something, made it, a long time ago. And there are others, in the city. The wolves don't know about them, or at least don't use them, but they don't need them to get into the Shadow world. And these gates can go other places too, if you can find them."

Jack gulped, and stepped beside her, and the deadly spider creature sharing her space. "You can't make them?"

"Maybe some Begotten can. I can't. I can tunnel into the dream, and into this physical world. But other places? I have to find those doors, like this one, and they're almost always locked. But..." With a big, happy grin, she winked at him, and looked back to the portal before them. "Begotten are monsters. True, real, monsters. We go where we want."

She yanked her hands apart, and tore the blackness open. It bled gold and white over them, a rushing water that had both vampires reaching up to block it with their hands. But it did not touch them, despite washing over them, covering them, burying and drowning them in the flowing colors. Plenty to see, colors shining, but nothing to touch them, like it didn't exist.

"I... holy shit." Jack lowered his gun, and looked out to the sides of golden road ahead of them. Not a road, no, an unending wall of fog, that was a road, that was surrounded by swirling gray cracking against an endless tapestry of blacks and vortex whites.

"Stay on the road," she said, hand gesturing out to the gold before them. "There are... things, in the black out there. And ye could get stuck, or lost, or... or things. Vrall has memories of things in the black, dangerous things."

"In the black?" Damien caught up, and looked out to the void around them, the dark gray of a storm incoming, with ebbing onyx tipped with curving sparks of silver. "Something... something lives in there?"

"Something lives everywhere." Fiona shrugged, rubbed her arms a little, tiny shivers working up and down her arms and legs. "I dinnae ken what or how something can live in this wall, this strange wall, but things do. Other things live in the Shadow, where we're going, and other things live in... other places. Live, in their own way."

"Nightmares," Jack said.

"No, that's where I come from. That's what I am." Fiona hip bumped him. Her horror was gone. Now, it was a only the girl, a small, curvy little redhead with a grin on.

He remembered the bloody Dolareido nightmare. He remembered the stairway to hell, where Athalia waited for him. He remembered the jungle, dark, filled with rot, insects, howling monkeys and growling jaguars. The smothering humidity that threatened to drown him, if he needed to breathe. The two moons.

None of that was as scary as the wall he was walking through, the unimaginable, the strange, a wall he couldn't begin to think about in terms of measurements. Might as well have been an optical illusion.

At least nightmares made sense, in a way, a thing born of human fear, and human imagination. His simple, weak little mind couldn't handle the width of a literal dimension he was walking through. Would it even look like a gray and black void filled with white lightning to others? What would the Uratha see? What did Fiona see?

Maybe he'd be better off not seeing where this rabbit hole took him. Ah well, too late.

The golden road was a gateway Fiona had found, not created. That alone was terrifying enough. But, as they moved along, and the golden road came to end, a wall of a new color presented itself, silvers, with black jagged streaks running down through them.

"Someone tore this door open from the other side," Fiona said. "Ye can see it 'ere. Can ye see it? There are... na words I can use to describe the shape or color, na English words for them."

Guess his gut was correct then. A simple little vampire; Athalia called his kind nothing more than blood leeches. Now, looking up at such alien and colossal constructs, things well beyond him, things that monsters touched upon in their everyday life, he couldn't blame her for looking down on him.

"I can see... a little of damage, I think?" Damien said. His sword was still in his hand, but Jack doubted it'd do anything to anything in this place.

"It's closed now. I'll open it."

Jack leaned forward past Fiona a few inches, eyes staring at the bleeding, crackling colors. "I don't understand how you're doing this."

"The world is our playground, Jack." Her voice dropped deeper, losing its giggles and chuckles as she stuck her hands out, Vrall shadowing over her once again. "The physical world is our feeding ground, but the whole world is... well, ye'll see."

The white cracks of lightning broke away, and the silver cascade of waterfall aether started to split, as Fiona's arms began to shake harder. Big grin on her face, despite the tonal shift of the voice. She was happy to be doing this for them, taking them along on this perilous journey into fucking only God knew where. She knew, but she was some sort of inter-dimensional traveler! Biggest leap Jack had made this far out of his comfort zone, of his own choice anyway, was visiting a club. This was a bit bigger a jump.

He tried to imagine Azamel doing this, the titanic, giant elephant monster, opening doors for the two little vampires. He couldn't.

The door, or silver waterfall, or whatever the fuck it was, split apart, and the next world greeted them. The gold and white of the road, the black, gray, and white lightning of the wall between realms, it all collapsed and shattered, crashing down around them with explosive effect. Jack and Damien jumped, smashing into each other as each leapt away from the walls that had once surrounded them, threatening them with its void. For a moment, Jack thought he was inside a mirror, and someone had come along and smashed it, like falling sparks, bits of mirror glass splitting and crackling around the asphalt around them.

Asphalt! Street! Oh thank fucking god. Jack climbed off of Damien, and tapped on the street a few times with his palms, before bouncing up onto his feet. Yes, asphalt, something he understood. Damien held out a hand, and Jack yanked him up so the two of them were standing, and looking behind them. The wall of the factory where Fiona had originally opened the strange gate. Now they were on the other side, out on the street.

It looked like a dinosaur had gone to town on the wall. Enormous claw marks decorated it, jagged, snaking, black lines left in their wake; the poor building was ripped into. The claw marks didn't penetrate the wall, but they looked deep enough, big enough, like they should have. Instead of being able to see through the giant slash marks, he found only a strange blackness inside the slashes. Staring into the void? No, the void, or wall between realms, had been black and gray, with white lines, to his simple Kindred eyes. Whatever he was seeing beyond these slash marks, was solid black.

"Torn... open...?" He looked to Fiona, and she nodded as she scanned the scar marks herself.

"I guess ye cannae see it? I can see the gate, and the damage this thing did, opening the gate. But nae on the other side where we entered the gate, almost as if someone opened the other side with a key." She shrugged, and reached out a hand to press against the wall of the factory, beneath one of the enormous scars. "I've seen other gates too, with this sort of damage, opened from the physical world's side though. Someone or something is traveling around, and doing... something. Lot of somethings. But that's why I brought ye lads! Ye're the smart ones, sneaky ones. I bet ye'll be able to find out who." She shrugged, and gestured back out to the street behind them.

Jack and Damien stared on, and gulped.

The Shadow world. The most ridiculous name he'd ever heard, but, as he looked across the darkened asphalt, the twisting and bending street lamps, the moon above fading in and out like a heartbeat, and the skittering black wisps on the air, he couldn't think of a better name.

It was Dolareido! It was, and it wasn't. What the fuck was going on? He stepped out onto the street and peeked left and right. It was North Side, not too far from South Side at this point, and normally there'd be visible traffic no matter the time of night in this area. Not here. And yet, it was Dolareido, sort of. The street lamps all had a bend to them, and a bit of a corkscrew twist, each pointing toward South Side. Bats flew by, but they weren't bats. Eyeballs? They had tendrils, tentacles even, so they looked a bit like a squid, who happened to have a giant eyeball in the center of the main body.

The insanity didn't stop there. It wasn't obvious at first, hidden in shadows and the uneasy lights that never stayed perfectly consistent, but there were things, moving things. Jack drifted toward a sidewalk, and looked up and down the building. The windows were solid black, and they dripped of a clear liquid. Water? He bent down by the building's side, and squinted at what looked like rats. Except, not rats. Their features weren't defined enough, as if someone had only done the basic layout of a rat, and forgot to tighten it up with specific fingers and toes or a face. And it wasn't running, it was floating, a couple inches over the pavement. Three of them hovered together, and moved along the base edge of the building, into the shadows beyond.

He looked up, and gasped. A crow! Except it was huge. Gargantuan and overwhelming, the great creature flapped its wings once, twice, and settled on the top edge of the building.

"... from Gurihal?" it said, blinking its immense black eyes at them. The head tilting was very birdlike, but it was talking English. The voice was crow-like though, a half caw, half croon sound.

Either this was a strange coincidence, or crows and Dolareido had more of a connection than Jack thought. Mental note: get back to the real world and give Mulder and Scully some attention. They deserve it.

"You speak English?" Damien said.

"Yes. I speak English. Give me your names, tiny bugs."

So very tempted to say 'well fuck you too', but, that wouldn't work so well on this side of the wall, he imagined. Oh good god he was going to play intermediary to spirits, or at least, first contact... ambassador?

"I'm Jack Terry, Kindred of the Invictus," he said, to the giant talking bird. Hard to wrap his mind around, hard to accept, but there it was, sitting on a building with black windows that continuously dripped rain despite the lack of rain. "I'm investigating this." He gestured to the damage behind him.

He had no idea if it was a good idea to be honest with this giant bird thing. It wasn't like it was a secret, but having these spirits know who he was wasn't the smartest idea. Lying wasn't necessarily better. Welp, when in doubt, go with your instincts. Something Jessy would say, he was sure, and something he'd never do in the past.

"... so you are the Terry." The enormous creature flapped its wings once again, before settling down, and began preening itself.

"The Terry?" Fiona said, standing beside him. "I'm sorry, ye know about Jack?"

"... you wish to know?" It flapped its wings once again, thrice this time, and the heavy air fell on them with the gust. Jack couldn't identify the smell. Kind of like Mulder and Scully, but not. "Trade."

Damien frowned, and came in close to the two of them. "We should leave. We have seen what we wanted to see." Hand back and pointing to the enormous claw marks and the dark abyss they left behind, he came in closer until he was almost touching foreheads with them. "This place is unnatural."

Fiona shook her head. "It's nae unnatural. This place is old, Damien, just as old as the physical world that ye think is the normal world. Been 'ere since..."

"Since the divide. But, that is not knowledge for me to share." With a long, gentle caw, the bird entity stuck its head out, and tilted it to the side to look at them with one eye. "I will tell you why people know the name Terry, if you will tell me why you have come."

"... you could lie," Jack said.

"Could I?" The creature shook its head, ruffled its feathers, and clawed at the building's roof edge a few times.

Damien did not like that. Frowning all the more, he began to walk around, pacing, steps slow and calculated, eyes darting around. Normally he'd walk with his hands in his overcoat pockets, but he had them out, sword drawn and free hand ready to draw his pistol at a moment's notice. Would those things even work in this place?

This was the third Dolareido the three of them had seen, now that he thought about it. The physical one, the specific nightmare version that Fiona had found, and now some sort of mirror world of Dolareido. Why, why couldn't things remain simple, grounded in solid matter? This was turning into witchy magicy overload. He had to get back to the physical world, go hang out in a club and seduce some ignorant kine, or maybe stalk the alleys and catch one by surprise. Hunt on the asphalt, hunt in the buildings made of wood, brick, marble, concrete, and steel. Wear sunglasses at night and edgy trench coats, typical vampire stuff. Solid things he could wrap his mind around. Looking around at the spirit world was giving him the impression it wasn't solid at all. Felt solid, but whenever he let his eyes linger on something, he started to notice a piece of it wasn't holding perfectly still.

Poor Damien couldn't have been happy about this. Visible confirmation of a parallel world probably didn't jive too well with his beliefs. Jack didn't think they were mutually exclusive, but he was no expert.

"Ye cannae lie?" Fiona said.

The crow shrugged. "Maybe?"

Ok, diplomatic moment. Trust the bird. Don't trust the bird? He knew nothing about negotiating with spirits, and he doubted any Kindred did. The Uratha did, but they wouldn't share that information. What did Avery say about the spirits? They existed for one purpose only, to spread their influence, and for the case of spirits, that was a far more impactful, palpable thing. And how they went about doing that wasn't something that just happened to be a motive, it manifested in the spirit itself, if those sex spirits were anything to go by.

What did that make this bird? It was enormous, and it was a crow. A bird well adjusted to living in the city, smart, observant. And maybe it wasn't only the bird itself, but what did crows represent? He had no idea if what they represented would affect its portrayal here, but, crows were often considered signs of death in some cultures, signs of messages and revealing information in others. In Dolareido, they were the denizens of the sky, as much a part of it as the humans living there, so people generally felt. Maybe that was it.

"... like I said, we're investigating," he said, and he gestured back to the cut in the world, the slithering black lines, and the deep crevices they'd left. "We want to know who or what is causing things like this, as there are more damaged gates like it."