Vae Victis - Chapter 25 (Patreon)

Bond

“Something is missing here,” I heard Khalil say and raised my eyes to look at him.

“Missing where?” I asked.

“Everywhere,” Khalil grimaced. “According to my research, the vampires are… hiding something.”

I chuckled. “Oh really? What was your first clue? That they hid in the shadows for a few thousands of years?”

Khalil glanced in my direction and gave me a smile. “That was not what I meant. I am referring to their origins.”

I tilted my head. “It is just a story, like the ones in your holy book.”

Khalil glanced down at his cross, his thumb gently rolling one of the beads on the chain. “It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I invited the talk about the vampire origins, not my own faith,” Khalil said.

“Sorry Ali,” I raised a hand. “What did you mean?”

“Their origin speaks of a great calamity, a fleeing people that believed that their gods had abandoned them,” Khalil said. “This is not that strange, many holy texts have similar stories. Some believe that the reason why many religions stories have similar themes like the flood or an exodus is because of something, an event, that is shared in all of our history. Though that might also—”

I cleared my throat and he paused, then coughed uncomfortably and blushed. “Right, back on track. Their origin speaks of a hundred people venturing into a forbidden valley, seeking aid from a dark god that had predated their own. They drank from an ancient pool that they believed would let them contact this ancient being, and almost all of them died, only three of them survived. The original vampires. On the surface, there is nothing strange in that story. Until you take into account the actual science.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“The vampire biology is based on the symbiotic relationship between the Sanguinium Bacterium and a host. The change is complete and permanent, and their origin myth plays into it too closely. The pool is obviously the place where they found the bacterium, the people that died were the ones who didn’t survive the infection, the three that survived were the first vampires. Subsequent infections, the turnings, were then done by the bacterium already acclimated to their new hosts, and therefore easier. The myth checks all the boxes.”

“And it shouldn’t?”

“Where is the allegory?” Khalil asked. “Where is the grandeur, the acts of God?”

I tilted my head at him. “What do you mean?”

“First, the story was written down during the times of ancient Greece, we know that the oldest Vampire remains are at least ten thousand years old. Why nothing before then? There is… so much missing. Everything is missing!”

“We have accounts of vampires from as far back as we have of the human race.”

“That’s my point exactly,” Khalil said. “We have human accounts; the vampire records are barely existent. And no records reliably confirmed to have been written by a vampire exist beyond three thousand years ago, the start of the Bronze Age at the earliest. What about before? There is nothing, it is as if vampires just came into being right then and there. Or rather they just decided to start recording then. And yet, we have stories about monsters in the night stretching far beyond that, cave paintings, tablets with written warnings. They existed before, but we have no evidence from the source itself.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Vampires are long lived, they would see little need in recording their history. Why bother when your sire had lived through it all, and they seldom died. And they always lived among the humans, so they left no remains of their own settlements.”

“Nothing? Not even one instance? The myth too is… it is as if it was invented based on what the genesis stories of other more popular religions at the time were.”

“You are reading too much into it Ali,” I told him.

“They are hiding things, they told us that they have four stages in their life. The young or Fledgling vampire, those that were just turned. Adult, which they become once they mature, most often it requires at least a hundred years to reach that stage. The Elder stage, once they get older than two hundred years, and the Ancient, those older than a thousand. Can you imagine living for that long Mari? How much time would you have to alter history, it would be easy with their influence.”

“You are not going down the conspiracy theory route?” I asked.

Khalil grimaced. “It isn’t a conspiracy if it’s true.”

I laughed. “Next you are going to tell me that vampires sunk Japan.”

Khalil grew quiet, and continued reading, doing his research.

I haven’t had a dream since I had been turned, the state of stasis that the day brought put a vampire into a dreamless sleep. Now that had changed, and I wondered what else would change for the vampires as well as other races on Earth.

I was aware that I was dreaming, even though I could not change anything. It was as if I was experiencing the past. I sat, in the college library, a passenger in my younger body. Across from me at the table sat Khalil, my friend, he held a cross which was attached to praying beads chain wrapped around his hand as he read from a book on the table. The scene had played out exactly as it was in my memories.

I remembered thinking that I shouldn’t have said that last part. It had hurt him. He had always taken his research into the vampire history seriously, as well as his skepticism toward them.

Then, the dream changed. Khalil raised his head.

“What do you want to do with your life Mari?”

Khalil had never spoken that question to me. Somehow, I could feel the dream shifting around me, and I raised my head, now in control of my dream-self.

“I…” the words were at the tip of my tongue. That I want to do good, that I wanted to make sure that what I saw in that vision didn’t happen again. That darkness frightened me more than anything else ever had. What I had seen in the vision, the horrors that those monsters committed, it was as if I felt the presence of pure evil.

The world had changed, things would never again be the same. I witnessed the power that Shadow held, the godlike power of the Grand Spell. What did being good mean compared to something like that. What would doing good even look like. I’ve spent my whole life being used. I had no agency of my own. Not until I stumbled onto the message from the past.

I had given Shadow the knowledge, perhaps that was enough. He was far better equipped to deal with all of that than I was. No, my goal should be fixed on Earth, and helping it survive what was going to come. I had no friends to look for, no family, my sire had watched as they put a silver rope around my throat. I was alone. But I still loved my world, it was the only thing that I had ever known. I wasn’t going to let it suffer. I remembered old stories my mother used to tell me, the books my father used to read me. The smiles of a young girl dreaming about dragons.

So, I would survive and return to Earth. Do everything I could and use what I had learned to help them. Not for the greedy who stood on top, not for the nations and politicians, not for the vampires or shifters or even humans. But for those little girls and boys, and their dreams.

* * *

I opened my eyes as the sun moved behind the world. I sat up and looked around, finding Shimi on the other side of the fire, talking with Saia.

“Well slept?” Shadow asked.

I nodded.

“I have just been filling in Saia here regarding the nature of Source on this world. She finds it very… fascinating.”

“Statement: That is correct.”

I smiled for a moment, and then turned my eyes on Shadow. “Can we talk?”

His ear twitched, and a few of his tails swayed behind him. “Of course, about what?”

I stood and walked closer, taking a seat on one of the stones next to the fire. My eyes were drawn to the flames as they danced across the logs.

“Did you think about…” I trailed off, we both knew what I was talking about.

He nodded, then tapped a chest next to him. “I’ve gone back to the room and gathered everything that I think can be salvaged. I need to bring it to someone who can restore it. Perhaps there are more clues in what the Ancient One left behind. For now, I cannot ignore it, I must act as if that vision was true. The Blight Curtain is clearly connected to what had happened back then. We need to come together and discover how. Our survival has become a lot more important Marianna,” he told me with a sigh. “Alone, I have no chance of reaching the coast, especially not if a monster Sikiri is around. I am going to need to rely on you.”

“I’ll do my best,” I told him, a part of me felt relieved that the message was not going to be my responsibility. It was better that way, he could talk to the right people in this world, spread it better than I ever could. My small part to play would be keeping him alive, helping him leave this place. That was good, it was enough.

“We need more than just your best Marianna,” Shadow said then stood and walked over to me. He knelt in front of me. “I need to prepare you better, to train you as much as I can, and we just don’t have enough time,” he sagged, as if a great weight had just been laid on his back. And it has, I had put all that I found on him. I reached over and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll do anything that you think I need to. I don’t want what we saw to be the truth, but more than that I don’t want to live with the knowledge that perhaps I could’ve prevented something terrible in the future and I just didn’t do enough.”

Shadow smiled at me, the nodded to himself. “May I know what your profession was, before you arrived here? Do you have any formal combat training?”

I blinked, that was not what I had expected, but I nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“The way you attacked me before was interesting,” he said. “And I have watched the manner in which you move your body, it speaks of someone who has had some training, not nearly enough, but some. Except that something does not seem quite right to me.”

I raised an eyebrow, but then decided to just tell him. “I was… an enforcer I guess you could say.”

“You served a Lord?”

“In a way, a warlord is a better word for it perhaps. I worked for an organization that dealt with some… unsavory things.”

Shadow must’ve noticed my hesitation because he didn’t press to learn everything. “But you were trained in how to fight?”

“I was trained in how to enforce, in how to use firearms, and yes, I had some martial arts training,” if you could call a few years of learning from my sire training.

“Martial arts, that sounds like you learned a fighting style?” Shadow asked, surprised.

I nodded. “Yes, from my sire, the man that turned me into a vampire.”

“Ah,” he scratched at the base of his ear with two fingers. “Can you show me?”

I blinked, but then moved to do what he asked without asking why. I would trust him and do what I could to help our chances. I showed him what I knew.

I went through the motions, demonstrating a couple of basic stances of the martial art that my sire taught me to Shadow. He had never told me what the art was called, and now I realized that I should’ve asked. I wasn’t very good, I could admit, I had always relied more on my superior physicality. Shadow sat and watched as I executed a few techniques against phantom opponents, then he joined me and asked for me to demonstrate on him. We continued for a while, well past the point where I thought we should’ve stopped. I was embarrassed to speak as it became apparent that he was a lot more skilled than I was. The silence between us stretched save for a few questions that Shadow had about the reasons why I would do something, or the positing of my body—questions that I had very few answers for. But I was emboldened to push through, we were bound in purpose now, had shared and trusted each other.

“That is enough,” Shadow called their sparring off. “I see now.”

I tilted my head. “You see what?”

Instead of answering, he went back to the fire and sat down, clearly near exhaustion. He motioned for me to join him, and I did as he asked.

“Can you tell me about this… thirst of yours, what does it feel like?”

I started at the change in topic. I wondered why he wanted to know, but then decided that he had the right to it if he was going to be spending time near me. Slowly, I started to explain.

“The thirst is like a… ravenous maw, always hungry. It can be sated for a time with blood, but never fully suppressed. It is always here,” I placed the palm of my hand over my stomach. “Always waiting in the background. It amplifies all that we are, our emotions and our desires. Ultimately, it wants to ensure its and my survival, at all costs.”

“A survival instinct,” he said thoughtfully. “How do you learn to control it?”

“Control comes with age,” I told him.

“You were not taught any ways of controlling it?”

“No, when I was a fledgling, I was just kept away from people and given blood daily. Then I—” I stopped and remembered what it was like when I was first allowed back into the world. The first place I was taken was my sire’s cabin, and the first thing he did was to start teaching me martial arts and the art of tea brewing, chadō. Now that I thought about it… that had helped center me. I hadn’t even realized it at the time. “Maybe I was, actually.”

Shadow nodded. “My kind, or rather, my father’s race, the Tengu-gi have something akin to your thirst. We call it the way of the mind. It allows us to enter a state that increases our physical attributes and gives us a pure and unbreakable single-minded focus. But it is hard to control, and often young Tengu-gi lose themselves in it. To combat it, the Tengu-gi of old had developed several different schools of teachings. Some are combat related teachings, others are meditative techniques refined over thousands of years.”

He paused, his eyes holding mine. “This art that you’ve been taught, it was not developed for your kind.”

I blinked, then tilted my head in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“It was not made for someone who is as strong and as fast as you are. Your movements, even if they are unpracticed, reflect a wastefulness in execution. It is not refined. Perhaps the intent was not to teach you to fight, but to control this thirst that nearly consumes you.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but then I paused, thinking. I was not at all familiar with martial arts before I was turned. I wouldn’t know the difference, but the little things that my sire did were starting to make sense. The way that he spoke, tried to teach me calm, precision, and control. We never trained at our full vampire speed, only as fast as a human could move. Was that because what he was teaching me was indeed a human martial art, or had I missed something. My sire’s gaze at the end came to me again, the disappointment that I saw.

What Shadow said was interesting. I didn’t know if a vampire martial art even existed. I learned nothing of anything like that in my classes, nor had I heard anybody talk about it. If a martial art developed for a vampire existed, it was kept a secret. Or perhaps there was none, Elder vampires hardly had a need for it, they stood at the top of the food chain on Earth. I glanced at Shadow, thinking. The people on this world would have a lot more to train for, both physical improvements and skills.

“You might be right,” I said finally. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

He didn’t answer immediately, instead he looked down, almost ashamed.

“I must apologize again,” he started. “What happened before, with the healing potion, was my fault.”

I frowned. “No, no,” I started. “I shouldn’t have let the thirst take control like that.”

Shadow smiled. “I am much older, and much more powerful,” he looked away. “I am supposed to be wise. I knew that healing potions had side-effects, and I decided to use it still. Not because you needed it, your own healing capabilities were sufficient to handle it. I wanted to speed it up, in part because I was selfish. I need you,” he turned to look back at me. “I need you in order to survive this place. And I decided that having you whole was worth whatever side-effects you might suffer. It was a miscalculation on my part, a most grave one. I know what you did, I saw how you fought your deeper nature and ran into the jungle to get away from me. You decided to go out there where you knew danger existed, danger that could kill you, just so that you could minimize the chance of hurting me.”

“That’s…” I trailed off as his smile turned sad. He inclined his head at me, which made me feel embarrassed for some reason.

“Thank you for what you did, Marianna,” he said. “I owe you a debt, you remained by my side when I was injured. You decided to stay with me when you could have left and hid alone. With your skills you could’ve survived in this place for thirty days and then gotten back home safely. Blights, you could’ve just stayed here, in this ruin, and you would’ve lived.”

“You saved my life too, and I didn’t know anything about this place,” I told him.

Shadow nodded. “You could have left after I woke up, after we talked at any point. Once you knew what was out there. No, you repaid me when you saved my life in turn. Now, I owe you twice over for what you did. And now, now there is more here than either of us understands. A message from the Ancient Ones that ties the blight to the creation of the Grand Spell. Dangerous history and a vision. It is not fair, but it has fallen on us to make sure that the message doesn’t die here with us. I had stepped away from the world for too long, if I had a choice I would’ve ignored this. Perhaps if I was alone… No, the Grand Spell had initiated another Expansion, your people are arriving. We must do our part. And there is something that I can do to repay my debt and perhaps give you more tools to help us now. Give you the tools to survive what your world will have become.”

Shadow stood, and I could see how shaky his feet were, how tired he was just from the short exertion of light sparring and demonstration. “I lived this life for a long time Marianna. I have witnessed the arrival of other worlds and races, two times before. I have seen the upheaval and turmoil that such events bring. And I have lived through all this alone, scorning companionship save for just a few brief moments burning in my memory. I am an outcast, a man of no people, a Tsu-gi. A freak of nature in eyes of many.”

I could feel the passion, but also the pain in his voice. Something about it called to me, to the parts that made me feel like he was a kindred spirit ever since I met him, though I had no way of putting it into words. I had spent my life feeling much the same.

“You Marianna Rojas had risked your life for me when you had no need to. You took it upon yourself to stay by my side, something that many others would not have done. You are owed for that, but even more than just a simple debt, I feel… a tsinju!shi,” Shadow said a word that I didn’t know. In my head I saw images instead of words. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was a word that did not have a direct translation into a language I was familiar with. What I saw was a bond forged in fire, camaraderie, friendship, partnership, love, all these things and more beyond anything that we on Earth have a word for. An unbreakable bond forged in a short time, a spark that moves mountains, that reshapes the world. A moment that changes a direction in one’s life by pulling them onto a path they never would’ve tread otherwise.

“For that, I would offer you something, and I hope that you accept,” Shadow paused, then took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. “Out of all the YoKai-ni races, that of my father’s side is the rarest. My father’s race lives in the mountains of Asha Kai-ni, beneath the shadows of the Old Tree. And they rarely come down from their hidden libraries and archives. Very few people ever meet one of the Tengu-gi, and even less so their young. All the Tengu-gi children inherit the way of the mind from birth, the ability that grants strength and unyielding focus. They are not allowed to climb down the mountains that are their home until they master it, for that is just how dangerous it can be. There are many different ways and teachings that help in mastering it, and many are similar to what you were taught, based on calm and control,” he said.

He made an effort to stand straighter even though it obviously hurt him. “I was not born in the mountains shrouded in mists, and though I never knew him, I inherited my father’s blood’s gift—the way of the mind. I had no teachers to help me, no ways of mastering myself. And my mother, she meant well, in her own way at least. But, she fueled many of what I would consider my worst appetites.”

He turned around and started pacing. “I was not a force for good in my youth, Marianna Rojas. And yet, I had done good. I had used my might for the good of all in this world. Once, long ago, when war threatened to consume us all, when I saw how we could destroy our civilization and fall, I acted. I brought empires to their knees, I stopped countless slaughters and forbade wars of annihilation. I forced the entire world to a table and under threat had them all sign an agreement in blood. I gave them rules for war, no use of weapons that cause suffering in their victims, no weapons that razed cities with both innocent and the guilty. I made rules for the exchange of prisoners and their treatment.”

I blinked, that sounded like the Geneva-Budapest Conventions, the treaties written after the Great War, agreed by the vampires, the shifters, and the world powers.

“The Shadow’s Peace they called it,” he continued. “And even now, thousands of years later they still abide by it, because they are so terrified of me returning. But I had never wanted to be that thing that they fear in the shadows. I wish that they could have put aside their greed and been better. But we must all accept the reality of the world. I had learned a lesson when I forced those rules on them, it had only made them find different ways to get what they want.” He shook his head. “I was wild back then, but those experiences helped anchor me, they helped me to fully master the way of the mind. Because of that past, I devised my own school of being, the way of life, one that differs greatly from that of my ancestors who keep to themselves. It is a way of life for a half-Tengu-gi who does not live amongst his kind in the mountains, but who is in the world among the other races. It is not a school of calm and control, of meditation on the mist covered peaks. But that of passion, power, and pursuit of overwhelming victory in all things. It is a way of having power so that you would never be subject to the influence of another. I am the only user of it, I have never had a student, never passed on my teachings.”

He closed his eyes for a few moments, and I remained quiet.

“I have always thought myself invincible,” he opened his eyes and smiled sadly. “These last few days have made me think again on my belief. I find that I regret it, not leaving something of what I have gained over the years, something to endure even after I was gone. The Shadow’s Peace is a mockery of what I intended it to be.” He bowed his head, and then whispered. “I want something that could be good, even if it is on a smaller scale. Would you accept this? Would you listen and learn what I have to teach?”

I looked into his eyes, and I saw my sire, my teacher. I had always looked up to him, even though I could reflect enough to know that I was not a good student. My sire was a quiet man, very much unlike the cartel’s Master. He had tried to teach me, and here and now I understood just how many of his lessons I had not learned. I failed and for that I was set to be executed. If I had been a better and faster fighter, perhaps Pablo wouldn’t have died. Or perhaps if I had more control, if I had left that warehouse, perhaps everything would’ve been different. But none of those things were true. I was here and the past was the past. It was only chance that I still lived. This was a second chance, a gift. An opportunity to be better than I was.

“I accept.”