My Little Ventrue Pt. 06 Ch. 13

A body sat in the street beside him, on his side and clutching his stomach. Dead. Dead for days actually, considering how sunken the skin was, and how some rats were gnawing on his toes through worn shoes. Another body was beside him, a woman, and they were thrown over each other like they knew each other. Family, maybe. There was no way any city would leave corpses in the streets like this. They stank horridly, and since the smell was mixed with shit from an ancient and horrible plumbing system, Jack didn't have to work very hard to figure out what time period he was in.

This was during the Black Plague. What in the actual fuck.

"Ok, I'm guessing you're showing me our bloodline. And so far, it seems like our bloodline is Julias, to Viktor, to another elder vampire, to another elder vampire." A short chain of people, very powerful people, forged over centuries. He turned to face the hovering Beast beside him, and glared at it. It simply hovered there, chains dangling and clinking, before it moved to a window.

And then Jack was inside the building. A house from this era wasn't exactly clean or luxurious living. The houses were decently large, two floors, with glass windows that were difficult to see through. The Beast took him upstairs, and he followed, expecting creaks and groans from the wood, but finding none. It wasn't real, just a moment in time, and nothing Jack did would affect it. He couldn't change the past; assuming this was the past, and not some sort of pre-death hallucination.

The woman, the small one with the black hair, his great, great grandsire, was kneeling in front of another vampire, a man, someone dressed in the garb of the church. Lancea et Sanctum? Whatever was happening, it wasn't good for her. She was on her knees, a drawn circle surrounding her, and various objects peppered the floor. A crucifix, complete with Jesus, and other things sat around the circle: a spear, a necklace with a cross, and other objects Jack didn't recognize. The vampire standing in front of her was chanting something in Latin, and reading from a book that was definitely not the Bible. Testament of Longinus, maybe?

The chains, the invisible, circling, encompassing, stifling chains on the woman's Beast, weren't present. No, wait, yes they were, just half invisible. They were coming out of the circle, out of the floor, out of the objects the priest had laid around. Not priest, bishop, a member of the Sanctified probably. Only in the moment of this freeze frame, was her Beast bound by the chains. Jack's ancestor screamed and shrieked, pounded her hands against the air, but could not escape whatever sort of binding circle the bishop had created. It was like that barrier Jack dealt with tonight, the ones the hunters made with some black powder. Magic? Theban Sorcery, like what Lucas had used against the Prince?

The bishop was doing something to Jack's ancient predecessor, binding her Beast, limiting it. Why? Why not just kill her, if he wanted to stop her.

Wait. This was the man who was watching the threesome, the one with disappointment on his face, the guy standing behind the dead dude on the chair. What sort of insanity was going on? Who were these people? This... this must have been like the madness in Dolareido, the strange relationships between ancient Kindred, manipulating each other. The Danse Macabre. There was no way his Beast would be able to explain to him the complicated relationships he was seeing unfold before him.

With a swipe of one of its shadowy limbs, the Beast wiped away the image, and replaced it with something new. Same city, same stench of dead, same scurrying of rats in the dark, and fluttering of crow wings against the cloudy moonlight. Dozens of shadows, dozens of moving bodies, dozens of tiny eyes in the obsidian death of the night.

No, not the same. There were far more rats, and far more crows. The two animals, denizens of cities as much as any kine or Kindred, overflowed the streets, poured down alleys, and scurried up the warped, aging wooden walls of homes. No living walked the street, not this late, and what should have been silence, was a constant white noise of rat claws on rock, and rat squeaks. The hundreds of crows that sat upon building roofs made no noise, except for some occasional wing flutters and caws. White noise, a lot of it, to the point it was overwhelming.

Jack stared at the mountain before him, something very out of place in the road. Ten feet high, the mound covered the street completely, and spread out onto all the streets that connected to what Jack guessed was some sort of town center. The mountain didn't belong there. Neither did the woman sitting atop it. But there she sat on a simple three-leg wooden stool, a big grin on her face, and her manic eyes staring down at the havoc she'd wrought.

The mountain, was made out of bodies. At least a hundred bodies, piled onto each other, bleeding, rotting, and providing a feast for the rats. The little creatures gnawed and chewed at the flesh of the dead, and the woman upon them smiled down at her flock. Blood soaked her face, moonlight catching it enough for Jack to see her. She was wearing loose rags and trousers, and a hat, something a farmer would have worn. Dressed like that, she looked like nothing more than a simple tradesman, her curves hidden by the rags.

She held a sickle in one hand, bloody, dripping, and she held the severed head of a corpse in her other.

Jack gulped as he stared up at her. While the scene was frozen, he could hear her chuckling, and feel the bloodlust flow from her, down over the corpses, and onto the rats and crows. Her army. They scurried around her, moving yet not moving within the frozen memory. A crow perched on her shoulder, and another perched on her hat, a human finger in its beak.

This was the brunette from before, the small woman, his great great grandsire. A serial killer.

No chains bound her Beast, and the more Jack stared, the more she didn't feel like a Kindred. Her Beast was huge, an enormous creature that mixed into the shadows of the streets, the windows, the sky, everything. So titanic and colossal, a gate to Hell must have opened up, to let such a creature out onto the plains of human existence. Free. The Beast within this monster was free to rampage and roam, slaughter and bathe in blood, and indulge every base desire it had. The Black Plague itself couldn't have been its doing, but that didn't mean the woman and her Beast half didn't take advantage.

She was a monster, a bloodthirsty monster upon her throne of corpses, and the rats and crows obeyed her.

"I... I don't understand. She's... she's a Ventrue, right?" He looked to his Beast, and frowned at the chains that bound it. Bound as it was, his Beast was the same size, shape, and moved in the same way the other Beasts it'd shown him had, of other Kindred not in Jack's bloodline. Another glance to the short woman sitting atop the bodies showed that hers was different. It was more than just its size, it was how it moved, lifting into the air and burying the area in its invisible shadow.

This was a massive Masquerade violation. No Kindred who saw this would let her live. There was no way out of it, no way to explain the situation that didn't involve 'dark creature of the night' in the response. She must have been a menace, and any Kindred who found her would kill her to keep their kind secret. Did the Masquerade even exist in this age? It had to, in some form or another. Maybe it didn't go by that name, but no vampire wants to get caught, or have their food source be enlightened on how to deal with their hunters.

He looked down at the bodies, and the rats that poured over them. The little creatures came out of holes between the limbs, and some holes in the bodies themselves. They were getting fat on the carcasses. Chittering, scampering, they moved with the same one-minded swarming motion that the rats he'd once summoned had. This use of Animalism was awe inspiring, and Jack couldn't help but take a step onto a corpse, and then another, as he stared at his great, great grandsire. Closer he came, closer, ignoring the way the rotting flesh felt under his feet. It didn't respond to him, not really, being a memory and all that, but his Beast was content to make sure he felt it against his shoes. The texture of flesh, some old, some new, coagulating blood, bones, he felt it all through his soles.

At the top of the small mountain, he squatted down beside the stool and the woman who sat on it, and he stared at her eyes. No remorse there, no regret, nothing to suggest compassion for the damage she'd done, or for the damage she was helping magnify. The Black Plague had killed tens of millions, maybe even over a hundred million people in its time. Any vampire with an agenda would have found it easy to take advantage of the carnage, and thrive, immune to disease as they were.

But this woman didn't look like she had an agenda. She looked like she was enjoying herself, with her army of rats and crows. A queen on her throne, a queen of mayhem and destruction. In a city, rats and crows were everywhere, and would come as a natural choice to any Kindred looking to use Animalism. But to use it on this scale, and to pile up bodies like this? No Kindred would do that, and an elder would have struggled to create this mess. This woman looked like she'd been enjoying her midnight stroll, and had randomly decided to summon an army of animals while she slaughtered a hundred people, for fun.

Fuck, she looked like a psychopath.

"So this is what... what she was like, before someone chained her other half down?" He looked down the bodies to his Beast, and it stood at the base of the corpse pile, a pale shade of the enormous silhouette of wings, claws, beaks, fangs, snouts, eyes, and feathers his great, great grandsire's Beast displayed. "But, she's not like other Kindred. What happened? What—"

It all vanished. In a blur of black and red, shadow and blood, the images turned into mist, and the textures, the sounds, the horrible smell, it all went away. Jack was left standing on the endless white oblivion, same as before, and his Beast, still wrapped in its chains, was now level with him, hovering beside him.

By this point, Jack knew to just wait, but his mind drifted to where he was a minute before this insanity occurred. He was in a hallway, with Angela, Elen, Sándor, a bunch of hunters, and the ashes of his sire, and friend. He was going to die, the moment this alien entity stopped this journey through his ancestral past. It all felt so pointless, and yet, he wanted to know.

The white oblivion vanished, and darkness replaced it. Jack spun around, looking for his guide on this horrible 'A Christmas Carol' rip-off. It was there, hovering beside him, chains still occasionally making their clink clink sounds, and it did not waver, as the world around them descended into the depths. Down, and down, the world sank, and the familiar darkness of earth and its swallowing mouths enveloped them. Tunnels.

Deeper, and deeper, and deeper, down slopes of rock, down landslides of bat shit, down fungus and moss, down wet bones, down a spiral chasm of blanketing weight and cold humidity. Down, and down, into the awaiting arms of the center of the Earth. Each foot down was like a step into a graveyard plot. He could feel the dead above him, thousands, millions, billions. Ages upon ages of dead inside rock and dirt, inside petrified bones and trees, inside amber, inside the darkness that surrounded him.

A tiny fire was the only thing that separated the endless darkness, from the small woman. She wore some rags, dirty trousers and a ripped up shirt; must have not been too far removed from the time period Jack was just in then, by the looks of them. A decade, a century, or two? Hard to tell this far back in time. And upon closer inspection, he realized this woman, crouched and alone at the bottom of this pit, was his great, great grandsire again. She looked battered, but like any Kindred, she didn't bruise.

She was Kindred, and surprisingly, her Beast looked normal. No longer was it the giant, swirling mass of death and shadow, but something far more subdued, and sneaky. That was the normal essence of Kindred, to be subtle, manipulative, to hide in darkness and strike from it. The colossal Beast he'd seen in this woman when its chains were off was not that. But now, it had no chains, and it wasn't the titan he saw on the mountain of bodies and rats. It was normal; for a ghostly, inhuman presence.

There were circles on the ground, etched in with stone, the humidity and wet rock of the earth reflecting the small fire. In the center of the circle was his ancestor, and beside her was another vampire, someone who looked an awful lot like her. Way too much like her. Jack blinked down at the vampire, a stake through her shirt, straight into her heart, keeping her paralyzed.

His ancestor held up her hands, as if awaiting rain to fall onto her palms. Why? There was nothing down here. It had to be some sort of cave, the end of one, at the end of some sort of spiraling network of natural tunnels. No living thing existed down here except for insects and whatnot, so it wasn't like a Kindred could do much down here. Hide, sure, but without a regular source of human blood, living down here wasn't an option.

But he looked up to where his ancestor was looking, and froze. The flicker of her small fire was enough for Kindred eyes to see in the dark, but as he looked the crucified mayhem up and down, he wished it wasn't. Total, blinding darkness, would have been better than seeing this.

Only now did he notice the tree of black, and the bodies tied to it, hooked to it, split apart and spread along it. Once his brain registered what he was looking at, the rest of his senses kicked in. It was almost complete silence this deep in the Earth, and the only sound was the crackling of the small fire. It was cold, so far down, and wet. It was the smell that hit him, similar to the smell of the streets of the city he'd been in, but different. There weren't as many bodies, but there was no breeze down here, no fresh air of any kind to cycle out the smell of rot, blood, and shit.

Why was there a tree down here? How the fuck did a tree grow down here? It was dead, but it was big, no leaves but solid branches that had no trouble holding up the remains of what must have been thirteen bodies. Jack stepped closer to it, and eyed the symbols carved into the black bark. He didn't recognize any of them. None looked like the symbols Elen seemed to use, or the symbols the bishop had used, further in the future when he bound this woman's Beast.

Jack turned back to look at his ancestor. The image changed, jumping forward in time, and his ancestor now Kissed the paralyzed vampire. Sister, mother, daughter, he couldn't tell except that the resemblance was obvious. And that made the sight all the more horrific, as his ancestor sucked down the blood of another Kindred. Vitae addiction, and the Vinculum, were two of the three fears that stopped a vampire from feeding on another, but neither meant anything to someone who performed Diablerie.

And it was Diablerie. Jack stared, hands locked at his sides, as the image shifted forward again, and his ancestor was left holding not her relative, but a pile of ash in each palm. She had drained the relative of every shred of their blood and vitae, to the point it killed them. And if legend and myth were to be believed, his ancestor had absorbed more than her blood, but a piece of her soul. No one who performed Diablerie had to worry about suffering the Vinculum for their victim.

It sounded ridiculous, the idea of absorbing, devouring, destroying a soul, but he was looking right at it. His ancestor glowed with a new energy, almost like a new life, and it made Jack's insides freeze. It only grew worse as the woman got up, carried the ashes of her kill to the tree, and rubbed the ashes into the bark.

And when she did, the tree woke up. Flowing waves of black mist, lit only by the flickering flame, poured out of the tree, and fell upon the woman. The living shadow leaked out of the eyes, mouths, and nostrils of the corpses on the branches and trunk, some of them new, some of them old, some of them nothing but skeletons. It oozed from them, heavy, and fell upon the vampire, flowing over her, and coating her.

The air grew colder, and stiller than death, as his ancestor fell to her knees, and screamed. The sound was an explosion against the silent walls of the cave, and Jack almost jumped back as the image shifted forward again. The scream echoed for an eternity, crashing against the walls with nothing to deaden it. As the sound smashed into him again and again, Jack couldn't tear his eyes away from the small, pale woman with dark hair, and how the Beast inside her began to grow, and grow, and grow.

The little fire she'd built, a tiny thing of twigs surrounded by small rocks, struggled against the rising tide of obsidian mist. The lack of wind was the only thing keeping it alive, as the heavy fog descended from the tree, onto the woman, and the ashes of her kill. It swirled around her, crashed into her, and tore through her with far more inertia than mist had any right to use. It threw her to the ground, and bore into her, entering her without creating wounds, but as the flash-freeze images moved forward, each a second apart, he could tell she felt like it was shredding her apart. And when the mist started to pour into her through her eyes, she fell to her knees, and screamed up at the darkness above her, the tree, and the things on its branches.

As the Beast within her morphed and grew into a colossal titan of morphing shapes and shadows, something new appeared. Jack stared from her, to the tree of the dead, and he blinked at the silhouettes that appeared there. There'd only been dead bodies before, but now, there were flickers of black caught by the fire. Feathers? He peered harder, squinting, trying to make out what it was that now perched on the branches. Not crows.

Whatever it was, there was more than one. Their eyes opened, and began to reflect the fire light, glowing amber in the darkness; the eye glow was brighter than the tiny fire warranted. There were feathers, and wings, hugged tight to oval bodies, that sat upon claws, bird claws. Owls? What the fuck. Why were a bunch of black owls down here in this Hell pit, far below any source of life?

The owls, bodies as much misty shadow as the fog that penetrated and mutated his ancestor, looked down at her, and if owls were capable of showing a satisfied expression, it'd look like that.

The image and memory shattered as Jack's other half quaked, body of rippling shadows and evolving animal parts practically falling over; if such a hovering mass of darkness and limbs could technically fall. The darkness of the cave vanished, along with the dead tree, the corpses tied to it, the owls that sat upon it, and the ancestor. All that was left was the endless, white oblivion, the staging area for this fucked up conversation between Jack and his other half.

"So... so that's it? Like, almost a thousand fucking years ago, my great great grandsire committed Diablerie, and... and made the sacrifice to... to... a bunch of owls, and that gave her Beast great power? And then some Sanctified person chained it up?"

His Beast hovered back up to its full height, standing maybe six feet tall, chains clinking against each other as it came back to its full strength. Except, full strength wasn't really full, because it was bound.

"The reason you've been fucking with me, been ruining my life, is because of some ancient fucking ritual? Something that happened almost a thousand years ago, is haunting me?" He stomped toward the abomination, and tried to look it in the eye, but it had too many eyes, and they disappeared and reappeared in a constant, unending sea of shadow.