Beloved (Sandman_02 and Darkangel76)

[Sandman_02]

Life becomes an incredibly small existence when much of the world falls silent to sickness, madness, and tragedy. Garin did not come from a place that falls under the qualifier "much of the world," having been born and raised in a tiny settlement in Eastern Europe that had seemed to have always resistant to change - even resistant to the bubonic plague that ravaged the rest of the continent. Perhaps it was the altitude at which the settlement was nestled, or perhaps it was some other quality - either way, the residents knew of the plague and their fortune and were willing enough to blindly go about their daily lives, lest they blaspheme themselves with knowledge that would only bring about virulent change.

And it's not as if they had good examples to look to - the town has seen the best and most prominent inhabitants venture to the closest towns (no small feet - twas' a five days journey, at least, to the closest nearby settlements, and that's if one is in good health). Nobody has ever returned from this foolish imperative - neither the doctor (yes, he was one of the *very* few individuals who could be considered a legitimite doctor back then), the priest and nuns of the now largely abandoned chapel, and even the lord's own flesh-and-blood son. None had returned, and it was almost 50 years ago that they had left in earnest to help their fellow man with the crisis. Fifty years and another generation later, the inhabitants of the village were quite content to eek out a miserable, albeit relative safe, existence living free from the plague at the expense of struggling to harvest the barron, often unfertile ground. Years and years later historians would call this the "Dark Age" for Europe, and this was doubly true for the town, having been hit with a double whammy: the "Brain Drain" that occurred roughly 50 years ago as long as the deeply-rooted hysteria and Bull-headed ignorance that became instilled in the population. Indeed, every year there was a fresh harvest of ignorance and backwards thinking, even when the crops were shriveled and stunted in growth.

Garin was different. Being only 19, he was not around during the time of the first fruitless departure to the outside world, and he though the story of the needless, wasteful sacrifice had been told to him repeatedly through bitter tongues and down-trodden eyes, Garin remained optimistic and had felt a genuine drive to venture out into the world beyond and see in what ways God saw it best fit for him to help others. This largely stemmed from the fact that Garin's father, before he died (when Garin was about 12), insisted on teaching Garin to read and write. Since the only texts that were in the family's possession was the Bible and a loose collection of assorted parables, Garin grew up absorbing this information. His favorite passage from the book of parables was this: "Before having built the nest, the bird once spent a lifetime taking flight and claiming the entire world home. So too is the destiny of man - seek out the world and learn to make it better before building your own nest."

With his drive and passion, Garin had the makings of a commanding leader whose only shortcoming was the unhappy luck of being born in a town of downtrodden souls who had refused to be lead. He was truly as destined for greatness as any one at that time could be.

And then he met Marianne - on that day, it had seemed that the outside world had come to him. She stumbled into the village literally on the same month that Garin was preparing to leave the village two years, showing up haggard, emaciated, and almost inconsolable. Hostile to visitors, the entire town had given Marianne a cold reception except Garin, who took her in immediately. After a few days of being nursed back to health, she finally related her story of being forced to flee after her family - once a respected group of merchants - started to be hunted down by the paranoid authorities once they started exhibiting symptoms of the plague. Since family members have such close contact to plague victims and usually wound up transmitting the disease herself, she was also shunned and hunted down. The desperate flee only left her alive, however - those who didn't die from the plague collapsed from exhaustion on the arduous journey, leaving her alive without a clue of why she was spared...

When she was fully recuperated, Marianne proved to be the kindest, most intelligent, most beautiful creature Garin had ever beheld. He grew accustomed to talking with her late into the night, and reading and writing poetry with her (indeed, she was practically the only other person in the village who was literate and could do so) at ever moment of leasure. As a result, Marianne left Garin's house. There was a happiness and fulfillment that Garin found in her that he had never imagined possible. The negative aspects of their union together soon became apparent, however. Marianne had absolutely refused to leave the village in fear for her life at the hands of the fanatical survivors at the world beyond, while the fanatical inhabitants of their very own village shunned the young couple, for they considered Marianne to be an "ill omen." It had gotten to the point that the town's one illiterate priest refused to wed them, saying that God would not extend his blessing. It was sheer lunacy, and despite Marianne's own patient demeanor, Garin had started to slowly develop a hot contempt for those around them, and was more than happy to live a reclusive life with her at his home on the outskirts of the village. An insular world within an insular world, and there they had both found happiness. She was his beloved.

Then the disapperarances started. It always happened late at night. There were a few time where the victim had sometimes seemed to have simply vanished from this meager existence. Most nights, however, left fresh new evidence of a bloody and violent struggle at or near the victim's residence. Nobody claimed to have ever seen anything, but then again this was not so surprising given the long-standing culture of paranoia and apathy. Regardless of whether anybody *had* heard something, people were always consciously trying *not* to hear anything beyond their locked doors. It had gotten to the point where more than two dozen people were carried off whether one soul within the village having a credible theory as to why. Hysteria bred rumors of dark creatures, vengeful angels of death, and even terrible spies within the community - a theory at which Marianne was a central component (Garin had known this but not Marianne - she had always given others a heavenly benefit-of-the-doubt).

It was at this point that the desperate situation finally prompted action from the docile villagers. A group of five able men had prepared to set out for their Lord's manor, which was roughly a day's journey through dark forest. The purpose of the journey was two-fold. One was to have their lord petition for aid from the nearby settlements (an almost fruitless gesture but still better than nothing). The other purpose was the implicit one - to merely see if their Lord was still alive, whom they had not heard from in months. The group of men pleaded for Garin to join them, since Garin's father had a long and genuine friendship with the Lord before his death, but Garin refused. Part of the reason was that he did not trust leaving Marianne to the whims of the rest of the villagers, but there was also another reason that seethed into his heart even as he cast his gaze up to the pleading eyes begging for his help: that he simply to not give a damn what happened to this rabble. A week had gone by without any more disappearances, but the group of men who had left had never returned. Garin was sure to never tell Marianne of his refusal to help them.

Now everything has changed. Everything has become horribly, horribly wrong. Marianne was now gone. No signs of violent struggle thank god, but she was gone. The depth of his hysteria and his grief was unfathomable, his hands shaking and his bewilderment of how she could have disappeared when she was lying right by his side?! He had failed to protect her - he had failed to do *anything* about this situation until it was too late. But not... it may not be too late...

Before he knew it Garin's body was beating hot sulfur through his veins as his body began to move briskly and erratically, almost beyond the reach of conscious control. Infirm of proper reasoning but full of purpose, he hastily gathered together some meager supplies and set out towards the wooded path. He knew not what awaited him, but it did not matter - he would set things right, through either rescue or vengeance alone. Much of the village was still sleeping - he figured none of them would notice his passing or notice him gone for at least a few days. But before his entrance into the woods he made one last confrontation - one with the hateful, hysterical town priest.

"An odd time for a stroll through the woods, Garin - odd for anyone, but even more odd for you," the priest had said immediately upon spotting Garin, giving a caustic stare. "Are you going to poach a rabbit or something?" Garin brushed him off, not bothering to change his frenetic pace.

"Never mind, old man..." Garin said plainly as he entered the clearing. It was clear to the priest that Garin was being driven by black emotions, and though Garin had not looked back to see it, the priest's eyes suddenly sparkled with immediate understanding.

"IT'S MARIANNE, ISN'T IT?? SHE'S GONE MISSING!" the priest had shouted out to Garin, crudely and full of scorn. "WHY ELSE WOULD YOU BE PROMPTED TO ACTION SO AFTER NOT A WEEK BEFORE YOU DECLINED TO HELP US, WE WHO HAVE LIVED WITH YOU YOUR ENTIRE LIFE?? NOTHING GOOD WILL COME OF YOU CHASING HER DOWN NOW, GARIN. YOU'VE RETREATED FROM THE WORLD THE DAY YOU MET HER, AND IF YOU CHASE HER DOWN NOW YOU WILL DIE ALONE. YOU HEAR ME??"

Garin had heard him, but it mattered not. He pressed on.

 

[darkangel76]

The night was still fairly young, the silvery moon shining ever so brightly against a pitch-colored sky. It was just past midnight and Katia Burian had managed to capture yet another blood host to feed her dark craving. A craving that could never be sated and would forever burn deep within whatever soul her immortal body possessed.

The deed had been a relatively easy one. Though, Katia had to admit that she feared for the briefest of moments when the man next to his woman stirred ever so slightly, making a delightful rush of adrenaline course through her flawless body. He’d been holding the woman close as they slumbered so peacefully in their beds, neither aware of her presence looming above them both, her sinister smile playing on her lips, letting her gleaming white fangs show forth for any daring to gaze upon her porcelain face.

The woman was Katia’s target, though not her primary one. She’d been eyeing the villagers for quite some time, carefully choosing blood host after blood host for her taking. The first had been the lord - the easiest of all the targets. His somewhat arrogant and pompous behavior had been his undoing. It also made his existence as her blood host a very short one. Funny how men such as he’d been were the ones to beg the loudest and the hardest, the first to give in to anything thrown at them. So boring.

The woman Katia had sought out was a means to a game. A game for the blood host she was looking forward to having most. A blood host she wanted to have last a very long time. For all eternity if things played the way she hoped. But only time would tell on that one and she wasn’t much for predicting things. In all her years, trying to predict anything had become a rather mundane task, not to mention she found the whole notion rather silly and more often than not, disappointing.

Katia paced back and forth, back and forth, her long dark hair cascading down her back in thick spiraling ripples. It felt like the night would take eons to pass by given that it was still relatively early. And she desperately wanted it to pass by quickly, wanted the next night to come so that she could begin her little game. Her pale eyes flashed and a smile crossed her lips as she decided to pay a visit to her current and soon to be terminated, blood host. But oh, this termination was going to be special, was going to make all her decades of existence seem worth it. It was as if her sole purpose had been to conceive this little plot, this little game. If things played out as she hoped, her future would have purpose too. The anticipation made a rush of excitement wash over her, making her skin tingle.

Smiling, Katia began making the descent down the long, spiraling stone staircase into the deepest parts of the castle, the lord’s castle. She snickered at how easily she’d been able to take over the place, making it her own. The air at the bottom of the staircase was cold, but it didn’t bother her at all. Such things didn’t matter once you became a child of the night. Slowly, she walked along the torch lit corridor, the stone walls lined with heavy wooden doors, rooms designed to punish, to hold criminals until the proper authorities could do what they needed. Rooms in which she held her blood hosts, her victims.

Katia reached one of the doors and stopped. She opened it up and inside was the young woman she’d captured earlier that evening. She was a pitiful thing to behold really. So common. So… human.

Katia shut the door behind herself and approached the woman who was wearing shackles, keeping her secured to the far wall. She smiled at the woman, baring her fangs with a hiss.

“My dear, I’m hungry,” Katia stated plainly, her voice like the most melodic music, a sweet caress upon the ears. “Come feed me.”

Without hesitation, held deeply within Katia’s trance, the woman approached. She tilted her head so that her neck was easily accessible, her pulsing vein so very visible. It made Katia’s mouth water, her senses instantly heightening, preparing for the feed. She could make it pleasurable. But not with this bitch. She still held sway over her prize. So there would be no gentleness with her. None.

Smiling, Katia grabbed the woman’s hair with a hard tug and all but plunged her fangs into her throat. The woman cried out in pain, but she did not move, held fast within the vampiress’s dark embrace.

Katia drunk deeply and greedily, drinking down every crimson drop she could before it would detrimentally affect her new blood host. When the woman began to slump in her arms, she dropped her. Leaving her in a heap on the floor. Oh the fun she was about to have with this one and oh what a glorious future she would soon have. Ending her seclusion. Ending her loneliness. Bringing forth the life she felt she so rightly deserved.

 

[Sandman_02]

Garin trudged through the monochrome forest steadily, and realized that this is the part in tales that most people leave out. Heroes are always only depicted as being on the charge, not on the long, joyless march. Garin was now living the sequence that never merited being retold to others after the passing of an even, and he hated it. It alotted too much time for think.

His mind pulsed ceaselessly from one loose thought to another. He thought of Marianne in one hundred different dimensions, all prodding at his soul, from her calm and soothing nature to the canvas that was her silken, ivory skin. He thought back to biblical stories and how man always seems to inadvetently destroy that which they want the most - or that which they cannot have - if such things are not simply denied to him entirely. He thought of his times as a kid hunting in these woods, and how he had lacked a certain "sixth sense" like some hunters had but made up for it in preparedness. He was somehow able to dismiss every uncertainty with his knowledge that he had in his pack anything he could possibly need for every necessity, cataloguing everything from pieces of flint to arrows to the various bird whistles he used to own.

He inadvertently started to catalogue everything that he had on him now and actually laughed out loud. Besides the clothes that barely covered his naked flesh, he had on him a sturdy old knife, a lambskin pouch for water (which was only half-filled), and a few pieces of flint. But Garin knew that it all mattered little when facing against the supernatural. He was not naive enough to prepare for some foolhardy war - he figured that if he came to need weapons he would find them in the Lord's keep anyways. And if he confronted whatever he set out to confront in the woods before then, well hell, maybe he would succeed in just burning the whole damn forest down - with himself and the creature down with it!

Of course, that last part was a ridiculous statement born of pessimism, but Garin was far from despair. He was not fervently religious enough to believe in foolhardy notions of mystical protection that arose from just holding out the Bible in front of you like some poor man's shield, but he let his teachings build upon his steadfast nature. If the religion has taught him anything, it was that nothing was as indomitable as the human spirit. After all, that is why God held man up to His highest favor.

Or at least, so he believed. Nevertheless, Garin was acutely aware of the fact that the forest was entirely desolate of all of the signs of life that he was accustomed to seeing in this forest, except for some black signs of death and decay. Flies were abound, but they always seemed to be attending to carrion that was just beyond Garin's field of sight. Black caterpillars wormed their way up trees, and various other insects scurried along while shuddering chitinous black exoskeletons. Every sight assailed the senses.

And then Garin reached the clearing. It must have been an unnatural one, for according to Garin's memory this section of the woods should be as dense as that which he had just exited. But here it was nonetheless - a clearing littered with a dense carpet of soggy, brown leaves. As Garin continued, he found himself approach several human shapes at an angle, all unnaturally positioned with their torsos horizontal to the ground.

Garin did not know what to make of the omen but he raced towards it all the same. All these shapes... about a half dozen of them. He stopped in his tracks when he was able to bring into focus exactly what the shapes were. They were the group of men that had last ventured into the forest to make contact with the Lord, or at least their mutilated remains. Their skin complexions were ghastly pale, and their bodies were tightly - painfully - secured to the rotten, wooden scaffolds that must have be taken from the Lord's Dungeon and all planted into the ground here, somehow. None of them had shown the slightest bit of movement. The one closest to Garin was an elderly gentleman who clearly should never have undergone such heroics in the first place. His frail body made no signs of movement, and his face - almost unrecognizable - had horrible gashes and marks that looks like it was mauled by some feral animal. Or worse.

And then came the screams. Some sort of feral, bloodlust howling that overwhelmed his senses first before his senses scrambled to piece together the rest of the scene. The bodies on the scaffolds came alive with eyes with eyes of bloodshot murderous intensity. The one closest to Garin had even managed to spit a steaming mess of blood onto his face (given his appearance, it was amazing that their was even a drop of blood left), which seethed into his eyes before he could shut them. It felt like unholy acid as Garin clawed at his face, temporaily blinded. His returning vision revealed a desperate situation. The 6 shambled corpses began to crack and tear through the scaffolds that bound them by the head and arms, and Garin realized that he must act quickly, clutching his knife. In his peripheral vision, however, he could see another dark figure hovering at a distance, all at once seeming to be something human and something beastly. The way it moved was grossly unnaturally, and it kept encircling this scene of chaos, almost playfully. Garin simply could not believe how easily he had walked into such a deadly trap.

 

[darkangel76]

Katia remained hidden in the shadows as she watched delightedly at the show. Her prized blood host was scampering about as he tried, in vain, to fend off her minions. Minions she knew who would hit a nerve with this one since they had once been people he’d looked at, conversed with daily back in his village. But that was exactly why she transformed them, made these specific men the ghouls that they now were. She wanted this one, her special blood host, to know that it was indeed she who held the power, she who had ultimate say in his fate. If he chose wisely, she could give him a life unlike anything he’d ever known. But to choose poorly? Well, that would result in an ending she was sure he’d fight with every ounce of humanity that oozed from his pores. An ending she hoped to avoid if at all possible.

The ghouls were nimble, quicker than one would ever anticipate as they surrounded him like a rat. Then, Katia was a powerful vampire, an ancient vampire. The blood, if one could even call it that, that allowed her to walk, to run, to live… it was steeped in the darkest of powers, those of her kind. Feed a human enough of it after they’ve been nearly drained and they will follow their maker forever, mind gone, bodies broken. Feed an undrained human enough and you can instill the dreaded cravings of the dark ones, make them children of the night, vampire. Feed them in excess and you create the abomination, those her kind rarely ever spoke of and desperately tried to avoid making… a crazed vampire in a state of permanent bloodlust, never sated, mindless save the urge to continuous feed, to continuously kill.

Katia watched her prize as he tried to think his way out of his current situation. She found him to be rather admirable in that regard. It was plainly evident that his mind was reeling with various possibilities, all of which she knew would fail. The odds were stacked against him. Even if he managed to kill and destroy her minions… he still had her to deal with. And she held something of great value, something she could always barter with and thusly win… every time. Oh the joy she would soon have in torturing that whore who held this one’s heart. Soon he’d be hers, begging her for more. Wanting her and only her. The very thought made her skin tingle, become warm like the blood that had once coursed through her veins. She could feel her breath quicken as a strange and lustful ache settled at her core.

Licking her lips, Katia could hardly wait to put her plan into action. Her ghoulish minions were closing in on her prize, her little pet, her fragile human. The anticipation rising within, she moved closer to the scene, her eyes fixed on the human that would soon be hers. Feeding her, sating her, giving her everything she so desired and more. At that moment, she felt her fangs elongate, desperately wanting to taste the blood she could now smell filling the air, the intoxicating blood of her soon-to-be blood host. The scent was more than she could bear. She could feel herself becoming consumed by the dark craving her kind could never be rid of. The need for human blood. To help tamp it down just that much longer, she thought on the expression her little pet would have when he saw his beloved held in her grasp, under her spell, serving her and no other. It would be priceless, a treasure worth more than words could describe. It would make him hers. She was sure of it; she could feel it. Yes, soon…

At that, Katia’s pale eyes flashed as she continued to watch, her lips quirking up into a very broad smile.