Tetri Teschi In Luce Viola

Saturday, April 30th

The last thing Yulaan remembered before she passed out, she was doing the one thing every Saiyan does best: filling her mouth with food. 

Once she came to, she found herself with her wrists chained and standing at the center of a stone circle that lay beneath an oculus of a grand Romanesque cathedral built with bad intentions. All around her, infernal tags and designs— goat heads on pikes, a giant pentagram of blood around the altar, black candles alit, occult runes given form as physical light floating in geometric patterns she was still too dazed to figure. Wrought-iron sconces jutted from the pillars at odd heights, some holding candles burned down to nubs and others holding candles that had never been lit at all.

Upon a dark marble pagan altar set above her, there were thirteen gloomy skulls in violet light, and from each, dark rubies and amethysts glimmered inside their eye-holes illuminated by some unknown source, casting small prisms down in consistent patterns Yulaan could tell were forming shapes. At the edge of the marble sat little side tables of worm-eaten oak, each burdened with silver trays gone tacky with old wine and candle grease.

Beyond her on the floor ran long threadbare rugs in wine-dark reds, their gold borders gone black with soot. A second set of rugs, these ones animal pelts gone bald and brittle, had been thrown over the stone steps leading up to the altar as though someone had tried to make the place comfortable and given up halfway through.

Above her were a canopy of dark wood ribs vaulting into shadows so black that the forms seemed as if half materialized.

The air smelled sweet, the air smelled sick.

She pulled once at the cuffs. Nothing happened. Or something happened, but not enough of it happened inside her arms.
The room swirled and distorted about as she remembered, ‘Oh damn, I didn’t watch my ass, did I? These bastards really got me!’

At a long table beyond her sat the same folks who had been so gracious before now. At the far end sat the handsome and grim-faced Count Yorga. More than his sharp jaw or his swept back hair, Yulaan dug his prominent widow’s peak. He paid her no mind. 

Far opposite of him was Lady Thérèse, pale with jet-black hair, and large sunken eyes. Her face was so sickly pale in fact that there seemed to be upon her skin an effect resembling a CRT television left on in a pitch black room. All her black hair fell straight and flat against her skull as if it had been painted there and ended in two exaggerated flipped ends, one over each shoulder. All her fingers were too long for her hands as if the bone had been distended and stretched.

And in the center of the table, facing her directly, looking upon her unblinking, was the little girl: Countess Marie-Aurore. She had large blonde curls and wore a frilly coquettish dress with a bejeweled choker set above an inverted pentacle.  Her face was so soft, her eyes so adorable, her hair so perfect, her constitution so much like a living porcelain doll, that Yulaan had, from the first moment she saw her hours before, knew only the devil lived behind those blue eyes. Whatever Yorga and Thérèse’s vibes may have been, with Aurore there was only blackened hatred for the masses of humanity and the living.

Yorga looked upon his chalice and sipped his blood wine. “Midnight of the black Sabbath draws near,” he spoke in a croaking voice. “Vodnik, if you please.”

In came a cloaked hunchbacked man with a brutal gait as if his legs had been shattered and yet he was still forcibly animated, and it wasn’t until he passed into a ray of moonlight cast through the stain-glass vaulted window that Yulaan saw the savage shape of Vodnik’s legs, showing that he was a satyr badly pretending to be human. At least that’s what she assumed. Looking again into Aurore’s eyes and then back at the very human shape struggling to reach Yorga to refill his cup, she then understood it was possible Vodnik was indeed human and suffered horrific deformation, perhaps not by birth or by accident. What skin showed through the gaps in Vodnik’s rags was mottled pink and gray, and his head was too large for his body in the way a baby’s is, though there was nothing infant about the teeth he kept showing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Yulaan turned back to the skulls and then to her feet, where she then noticed the faded splotches on the stone circle, and then back to the altar again where the shape of the skulls differed as if on a spectrum. At the furthest left end was one barely larger than an infant’s, with all the immature unfused plating of a baby’s skull. 

She turned back, and saw Aurore staring right at her.

Right next to her. Unmoving. 

Yulaan blinked, though Aurore could not have seen the actions hidden behind her bangs.

At the table, Yorga and Thérèse stood and approached one another.

“Vodnik, call the imp to prepare the dagger. I’ll return shortly to consider the promiscuous bitch. In the meantime, I trust you to behave yourself with her, lest you suffer the genital cuff again.”

And Vodnik made animalistic sounds, nodding vigorously as he carefully carried away a platter that included the chalice as well as plates of volcanic-stone.

He looked many times towards Yulaan, laughing a sloppy sadistic laugh, skipping merrily to set down the cutlery, and rushing back to handle the edges of the chains.

Aurore stared. 

Yulaan stared back.

Aurore stared more.

Yulaan stared back.

“I—”

Thwack!

As fast as her arm could move, Aurore struck Yulaan across the cheek. And very slowly, very measuredly, she reset her hands behind her back and continued to stare. 

Yulaan pulled her mouth into a puffy little smile.

Aurore grimaced. 

Vodnik pranced about gathering items and trinkets to which Yulaan paid no attention, but he kept up that spitting disgusting laugh. And as he pranced, he kept saying, “Ya, Vodnik vyrvu yey pizdu! Vyrvu yey pizdu! Vyrvu yey pizdu!” 

From another room came a crone in blue. Her cloak hid everything except her chin, which jutted forward like the prow of a small mean boat, and one withered brown hand that gripped a cord of carved bone beads so tightly the knuckles had gone yellow. Through the shadows obscuring her face glowed her white eyes, as if floating in a small void. She was Tsetsiliya the Seer, and she saw an approaching cavalry. “Master Yorga,” she said as she walked briskly towards the opposing chambers. “Master Yorga, I’ve seen into my crystal ball. Simon the Hero approaches.”

In that room, Yorga admired his harem of young maidens, all of whom had been kept chained and nude, to no protest of Lady Thérèse who instead pulled a fine dagger from atop a pillow held by tiny hunchback imp and ran it across the back of a quivering young woman, and the smell of this blood excited Yorga to consume it fresh from the wound. This virginal blood revitalized his mojo and essence as he pulled himself back and gasped, suddenly again eager to return to Yulaan. 

And finally, coming down from his rapture, Tsetsiliya’s words registered to him. “What is this? The Hero prophesied? Then have at him, woman. Send the Black Knight. Send the beasts. Let me take my claim.” He pulled his cape about as he swooned towards the door.

Tsetsiliya bowed and prayed, and this prayer summoned from dark flames a walking shadow who formed fully into a wiry-haired man clad in Teutonic armor.

Aurore looked at Yulaan.

And finally she spoke: “You are not scared, child?”

Yulaan waited a beat, and then said, “I am very scared.”

Aurore backed off and said, “Liar! I can see it in your motions. You take me for a fool.” She circled around Yulaan, following the evil circle and passing in front of and behind the many glowing runes. “You deem all this a joke. You know not the danger in which you’ve brought upon yourself, fool.” Aurore made many glances at Yulaan’s bolyaga, and flicked an eyebrow. “You claim not to be a street harlot, yet you flaunt your wicked fruits so freely.” And she snarled and pulled at the top of the spandex trousers at her waist and said, “Oh you truly do take me for a fool.”  

Yulaan stifled a smile. Aurore never pulled the denim jacket, and she could not help but wonder if this was mere accident or if the countess noticed something odd and chose not to investigate. 

No, she was too haughty to be cautious. 

That just made her giddier. “I have a question for you, actually.” As she spoke, Aurore seemed to almost materialize in front of her, moving at an unnatural speed with equally unnatural fluidity of motion.

As she pulled herself in so close that their skin nearly touched, Aurore whispered, “I give you permission to speak until I choose to silence you, fool.”

“Is your father strong?”

The last syllable hadn’t fully left Yulaan’s mouth when Aurore hissed and spoke in gasps, “Strong!! You know nothing of strength. What is it you call strength? Your miserable guns and knives and poisons and prayers! If only… you knew… the power…”

She pulled herself away like a scab off Yulaan’s skin and stood a distance away, staring more.

Outside, a young blond man rode atop a steed under the crescent moon through the wilderness, followed by a glowing madonna and two figures in dark blue cloaks hidden within a carriage. 

The blond hero, Simon, kicked his horse and sped towards the entrance of the castle, carrying in his hand a holy water enchantment that began to sparkle in the moonlight.

“H’yah!” he shouted, quickening the pace. The drawbridge fell, and the quartet entered into the darkness within.

Simon waited for the white priestess to approach, and said, “Claudia, do you still have the Finger of Saint Judas?”

Claudia floated to the floor and kneeled to pray, and as she did, the air above her grew heavy and bright, and from the ether materialized a vague shape that grew into a box that fell into her hands. Inside was a golden human finger, upon it a black-studded cross ring. Simon set it in his palm and closed his hand into a fist. Between his fingers, silvery rays bled through, that whipped and convulsed in translucent tendrils before coming back upon his fist into a white shining fire. 

“They have my daughter’s friend in their custody,” said one of the obscured figures, a man with a brusk voice. “Count Yorga may not be able to wait to satiate his bloodlust. We must hurry if we are to save her!”

“Please, Simon,” said the second voice, this one the pale and sad voice of a young girl named Hélöise, “This is all my fault. Yulaan does not deserve such a cursed fate! You’re her only hope!”

Empowered, Simon gripped the hilt of his sword with the holy glowing hand, and said, “Don’t fret. I’ll send them back to Hell.”

With a violent motion, he pulled out and swung his sword, tearing apart a lantern and letting the oil-born fire spew against the stone wall. This did something: the fire dribbled down the stone in such a pattern that a chunk of the stones retracted, granting the group safe passage into a new hallway.

This one was different.

This hallway was dressed in velvet curtains of a deep arterial red that hung from ceiling to floor and swallowed all sound into their folds. High above, set into the vaulted ceiling like a watching eye, a circular stained-glass window depicted the fall of angels in violets and blacks and greens so deep they looked diseased, and the candlelight that passed through it spilled across the stone in sick prismatic shapes that crawled when the flames below them guttered. The air was thick and sweet and wrong, carrying incense layered over something fleshy that had not yet finished cooling. Black iron candelabras stood between hanging tapestries whose images had long since darkened past recognition into the mere suggestion of hooves and thrones and kneeling shapes. The floor was cracked black and white marble arranged in a pattern that led the eye towards a mosaic at its center, and the mosaic stared upward into the rose window above it as though the two had been in conversation long before anyone living had entered the room.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Black Knight waited for them at the far end of the hallway, standing beneath the rose window with his longsword held point-down against the marble. He said nothing. His armor was black and pitted and older than anything in the castle, and his face behind the visor was a darkness that did not resolve into features no matter how close the candlelight came.

Simon raised the Finger of Saint Judas and the white fire on his fist flared. The Black Knight did not flinch. He lifted the longsword from the floor in one slow motion and held it level.

Claudia whispered a prayer. Roman pulled his daughter behind him.

Simon charged.

The Knight met him with a stroke so heavy it sent Simon sliding backwards across the cracked marble, his boots leaving white scratches on the stone. Simon swung again and the Knight caught the blow on his crossguard and turned it aside as if swatting a fly. The holy fire sputtered against the Teutonic steel and did nothing. Simon’s face went pale.

He tried again, lower this time, aiming for the gap between breastplate and tasset. The Knight stepped through the swing and hit Simon across the jaw with his gauntlet. Simon hit the floor, tasted iron, and rolled just before the longsword came down where his head had been and split the marble in a long white crack.

From the floor Simon lashed out with an iron whip pulled from his belt and caught the Knight’s ankles. The Knight stumbled forward onto the blade of a dagger Simon had set skyward against the stone, and it punched through the gap beneath his chin and held him there, pinned and twitching, crucified against the marble.

Simon stood, bleeding from the mouth, breathing hard. The white fire on his fist had gone dim.

He then stormed into the main hall. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Yulaan turned her head towards the open door. “By Getavara’s wrath, who is that?”

Aurore twisted her body to see, and shifted her eyes without turning her head, “Is he not your hero, villein?” 

Brow curved, Yulaan said, “I’ve never seen that goober in my life.”

Simon drew his sword towards Count Yorga, sat at the top of his table again, fist in cheek, impatient for midnight.

“Die, monster! I won’t let you have your way with another soul.” 

Yorga swept the table with the edge of his hand and jumped atop. “You dare again, boy? What challenge do you think you stand before me?!” 

He then lifted off the table and spread his cape. 

Large eddies of flames and dark energy spun and swirled around him, spreading out through the room.

Aurore shouted in a double-voiced hiss, “Father! Temper yourself. That is much too vulgar a display of power for these mortals.”

Her body aboutfaced in planck time. Yulaan had lost it, unable to hold back a spitting snigger that left her laughing in a clipped gallop. 

“You find this amusing, whore?”

Vodnik leaned in to see the guffawing Yulaan, first reaching for her chest, and then squeezing her cheeks. “Mada’ Aura?? Can I kill it?”

He then yelped and prostrated when Aurore ran her hand across his head, now drooling and pleading, “Hurt!! Hurt!!”

Yulaan pulled herself away, grinning so wide she thought her face would rip.

Through her wheezing laugh, she tried saying something, but it came out as a scattered, “Vulgar!”

Aurore pressed her lips tightly, ignoring the kowtowing satyr. A dark mind brought with it sickened thoughts. All she wanted in this moment was this pissant utterly under her power, vulnerable and servile. How lovely would it be to see the disrespectful broken and domesticated the proper way. As she had done with the other harlots her father claimed and her mother bloodletted, all this would be brought unto this girl too afraid to show her eyes: shocked, trapped in a stupor, trained to fear her master’s voice, no longer trusting that even her thoughts were safe, quivering and humiliated!

Yulaan laughed.

Yorga stepped on the back of the knight, pushing him deeper into the blade, and came upon Simon, who parried him with a quick lift of his sword. 

The hero tried to impale the count, yet no blow felled him or drew blood. 

Tsetsiliya and Thérèse flanked Claudia, who gasped upon sight of the pair and backed away behind the third man in the blue cloak, who stepped forth and unsheathed his own sword.

Thérèse stopped, looked at the blade, and then her ghastly yellow eyes looked up at him. “You truly dare, Roman.”

Vodnik, upon seeing this, jumped to his feet and hobbled over to a large gold bell, and began furiously ringing it.  

The hall silenced.

Yulaan looked off to the side towards a particularly shadowy end of the hall, and saw red eyes approach. First two, then twenty. 

Men snarling and drooling, who then passed through another batch of shadows, and emerged on the other side transformed, their bodies twisted into hairy wolf-like forms, all carrying serrated claws and vile fangs.

Simon saw this and made the sign of the cross. “God above, they’ve united…”

He turned towards Yulaan with a hopeless gaze, and she returned his motion by nodding upwards.

He looked up.

A werewolf fell upon him, snarling and howling. He just barely managed to roll out of the way, but found himself pinned down by its powerful claws and legs, his sword sent sliding away.

Yorga stopped its motion and kicked it into his hand.

“A daring attempt, Simon. But your god’s favor has betrayed you tonight. How silly it is that you’ve thrown your life away for a worthless wench.”

Simon struggled and gnashed his teeth, snarling himself, as she spat back, “I won’t let you get away with this, devil!”

Yorga’s face pulled against itself, cracking and dry.

The werewolf closed in.

Around his comrades, the others paced and snapped their teeth. Roman held his daughter close, and Claudia fell to her knees. At once, the cloaked pair tried to strike, but were then pinned against the ground by the werewolves overwhelming force. Only then did they notice the incense swinging at the end of beads held tenderly in Tsetsiliya’s hands. Her lips moved but no sound came. 

Yet every second, a deep fatigue grew upon the two fallen figures. 

Vodnik hopped from side to side, slapping his head and ass, cheering, “Let me eat! Hungry! Let me eat! Eat girl thigh! Eat girt cunt!”

Tsetsiliya grabbed and whipped Claudia back to face her, squeezing her cheeks in her hands, and pulling her face in close enough to see the withered skin under her eyes.

“How tragic. Fate ordains your death. Oh, darling, to think you chose such pain for the sake of a common whore.”

Aurore smirked and turned back to Yulaan. She frowned.

“What leaves the doomed slut so smug?”

Yulaan had her chin held high, not even facing Aurore. If there was any warm blood left in Aurore, it would have ran her face hot enough to boil water. 

At last, she had enough. She threw herself onto Yulaan, biting into her neck. Her fangs dug deep into Yulaan’s pale skin and she made sure to thrash around to rip more tears into her flesh and cause as much pain as possible as she sucked.

Simon watched on, seething, “N-no!”

Yorga turned and sneered, perhaps upset he could not have sucked first blood, but pleased to see the coven’s success. 

And then Aurore jumped back and vomited. 

Vodnik turned back and started. “Madame! Madame!”

Tsetsiliya and Thérèse also rushed to the girl’s side as her hands shook and quivered.

Horror gripped their hearts as they saw half of her face melted. 

Tsetsiliya kissed a miniature jackal’s head and said, “What? What could have caused this?” And turned to the cackling Yulaan.

“Stop looking at me. Your problems just got started.” And she nodded back towards the hall’s entrance.

There, standing in the light of the stained glass, were two new figures. One with a crazed skyward vidalia-shaped hair, the other sporting a wild black mane, both clad in spaceman armor unfitting utterly for the mood, and both utterly relaxed.

“Who are you? Where do you think you’re going?” shouted Thérèse. “Do you have the slightest idea of what you’ve walked into?”

Yorga twisted through the air and landed in front of them.

“You come with Simon?”

Simon struggled from the weight of the werewolf. “I’ve… I’ve never seen them! Who are they?!”

Tsetsiliya threw Claudia to the floor and could see it on her face that this was no feint. 

Kevelnege walked towards Yulaan, to which Vodnik and a small army of werewolves approached.

One lunged at her. 

Kevelnege raised her finger towards it.

And just like that, its brains were all over the walls.

Everyone silenced, sans Aurore who still writhed on the ground struggling to overcome the pain. Even the wolf stomping on Simon shuddered.

“Scrunt, don’t tell me you were having trouble with them!”

Yulaan giggled. “I wanted to give you a chance.”

Ghojin pulled from her mouth a cigar that cast off a sparkling purple haze from its burnt end, and blew smoke. It drifted out slow and violet through the diseased cathedral light, and the whole room seemed to recoil from it. The incense in Tsetsiliya’s hand went dead. The floating runes dimmed and then scattered like startled birds.

“How many people are going to die here because you’re a dumbass?”

Yulaan, still swaying on her feet, said, “Define ‘people.'”

Simon had braced himself and said, “Enough of this! Midnight has come. Do you girls have a death wish?”

Kevelnege looked at him and said, “Nice threads, man,” and saluted him. He blushed, and looks down at his black battle armor and back at her, taking notice of her own chrome black chestplate shimmering in the dim light. She took in the room the way a person takes in a restaurant they’ve already decided isn’t worth eating at. Her eyes passed over Yorga, over Thérèse, over the werewolves, over the skulls on the altar.

“This world continues to fascinate and disappoint me.”

She approached the still prone Aurore and kicked her to the side. The girl wailed and bowled a guttural noise from somewhere deeper than her small body should have contained, and it rattled the glass windows out of their frames and sent perched vases and chandeliers crashing to pieces like a hailstorm of knives. Shards of stained glass rained across the stone in all the colors of the martyrdoms they’d depicted.

Kevelnege didn’t cover her ears. She didn’t flinch. She watched the glass fall around her the way someone watches rain from under an awning.

Yorga clenched his fists until his nails pierced his own palms and blood ran between his fingers and screamed.

“YOU RAT!!”

Kevelnege turned and winked.

Yorga flew back through a stone pillar. The pillar buckled and dropped a chunk of vaulting that crashed where he’d been standing half a second before, and dust bloomed through the cathedral in a gray cloud that turned violet where it passed through the remaining candlelight.

Thérèse had collected herself and stood snarling, her too-long fingers wrapped around the obsidian dagger, letting her fangs glint in the moonlight. Her yellow eyes passed around the room. At her feet Aurore clutched desperately at her dress with both hands, the lower half of her face a ruin of melted tissue that was already trying to knit itself back together the way vampire flesh does, pulling and stretching in directions that weren’t quite right, rebuilding her jaw slightly crooked. The pain of the regeneration seemed worse than the original wound. She kept making small involuntary sounds through teeth that were regrowing at different speeds.

Then Thérèse’s face dropped as she noticed the presence in front of her.

Then her face literally dropped as her back smashed into the floor, caved in by the backside of Kevelnege’s fist. It had been an almost lazy motion: a backhand knuckle-duster, but no one knew how she had reappeared in front of the Lady without her noticing.

Thérèse lay on the stone with her nose flat against her left cheekbone. Her yellow eyes rolled and struggled to focus. In four hundred years of unlife no one had ever simply hit her. She had been stabbed, staked, burned, exorcised, shot with silver. 

No one had ever just punched her in the face.

Aurore screamed again, but this time it came out wet and broken through her half-rebuilt mouth, and the sound was worse for being pathetic rather than powerful.

“You CRETIN!!” Yorga roared as he pulled himself from the rubble and descended. From across the room, seven swords wrenched themselves from wall-mounted displays and sconces and formed a halo behind him, all pointing towards Kevelnege. His cape spread and darkened until it seemed to merge with the shadows behind him, and the air around his body rippled with heat that smelled like sulfur and old pennies. Whatever pact he’d made with Zoso, he was drawing on all of it now. Vile bloodlust raged forth. He needed her dead. No. He needed her vulnerable and under his power.

She leapt up.

His eyes nearly fell out trying to follow her.

Tsetsiliya’s eyes went even wider. “It flies!!”

An imp shrieked from a dark corner, “What is that thing?!”

She vanished.

The seven swords hung in the air without a target. Yorga spun, his cape whipping, scanning every shadow and corner. His centuries of predatory instinct screamed at him that he was being watched, but from everywhere at once, which was the same as nowhere.

Simon and Claudia had pulled themselves upright against a pillar. Roman had pushed Hélöise behind the altar and stood over her with his sword drawn, though his hands shook. The four of them watched the scene with the stunned silence of people who had come to slay a dragon and stumbled into a war between gods.

Vodnik cried out.

A hand had pierced the marble floor and caught his ankle. He didn’t even have time to scrabble before he was pulled through the stone so hard the hole widened around him, and the scream that came out of him as he vanished was the first honest sound he’d made all night.

“Vodnik!” shouted Yorga. He rushed towards the hole but caught himself and turned back towards his wife and child. Thérèse had pulled herself to sitting. Her nose had already started regenerating, but the cartilage was coming back lumpy and wrong, and she kept touching it with those too-long fingers as if trying to sculpt it back into place. 

Aurore had stopped screaming and gone silent in the worse way, staring at nothing with her one functioning eye while the other socket rebuilt itself with slow horrible patience.

Something about the silence made them sick.

Yorga presented them with a red cotton towel pulled from inside his cape. “My lord,” quivered Thérèse, speaking through a bloodied nose and busted lips that split again each time she moved her mouth, “what are they? They could not possibly be those ‘superheroes’ spoken of by the villagers and cosmopolitans!”

Yorga gritted his fangs. In his centuries of life he’d encountered all sorts of anomalies and elements of superhumanity. The rival clan of Scarlatov, from which Roman drew his blood, had been par to him since the Crimean War. He’d fought witch-hunters and holy knights and once, in a Carpathian winter he preferred not to remember, something that came down from the mountains that wasn’t a man or a beast or a spirit but something older.

But Yorga’s pact with Zoso was supposed to have granted him inconceivable powers. No human power could compare. No, none of it! 

He looked down into the darkness below. 

From below came the beating. Not a fight. A beating. 

Fists hitting meat, over and over, so hard and so fast that Vodnik’s screaming couldn’t keep up with the rhythm of it. He’d start a scream and a hit would break it and he’d start again and another hit would break that one too, until the screaming and the hitting blurred together into one continuous wet noise. Something came loose with a heavy pop and Vodnik’s voice jumped an octave and then something else came loose and his voice stopped being a voice at all and became a sound like air forced through a split pipe.

It came in fragments between the beating, desperate animal fragments in three languages, and then just in sounds, and then in a high whistling whine that meant his lungs had been punctured but he was still trying.

Then a noise like a pig being halved at the carcass.

Then laughter. 

The hitting didn’t stop when the screaming did. It got faster. Each impact now came with a splash. What they were hitting was no longer holding its shape.

Yorga stood at the edge of the hole and looked down into the dark.

Vodnik’s head came up first, tossed through the hole like a ball, and rolled to a stop near Aurore’s feet. She flinched for the first time in the entire evening and the flinch hurt her rebuilding face and she made that small involuntary sound again. Then came the limbless torso, riddled with fractures and deep blunt force wounds, the mottled skin now entirely gray. Then came pulsating organs and eviscerated remnants raining down like offal from a butcher’s chute.

Kevelnege and Ghojin floated out of the hole, heads down and fists soaked in blood. 

Their feet touched the marble.

The family flinched.

Yorga brought his cape over his family and said, “You… you think yourselves capable of intimidating me? I’ll slaughter you!”

“You’ll die trying.” 

He turned and slashed at the air behind him. The seven swords followed his motion in a sweeping arc.

They cut nothing.

For the first time in centuries, a rivulet of sweat ran down his face.

This can’t be happening.

“Behind you,” shouted Tsetsiliya.

He reacted instantly, sweeping his leg in a frantic kick. Kevelnege caught his shin the way you’d catch a child’s thrown ball. Then she bobbed her head to the side and let the obsidian dagger come down on her neck. Thérèse was behind her, slashing and tearing and ripping with abandon, her too-long fingers working alongside the blade, her yellow eyes wild and her rebuilt nose already cracking again from the exertion.

The dagger fell to pieces against Kevelnege’s skin. It didn’t shatter dramatically. It just came apart, the obsidian flaking off in chips that pattered on the stone floor like gravel.

Thérèse stared at the handle in her hand.

Kevelnege cracked her neck.

“Nice work, hag. That part of my skin itched.”

Then she twisted Yorga by the leg she was still holding and brought him down on Thérèse and Aurore, leaving all three in a heap. Aurore’s half-rebuilt face hit the stone and the regeneration reset. She made no sound this time. She had learned that screaming did nothing.

From across the room, Simon watched all of this with a face that had gone past fear into something closer to theological crisis. Claudia was on her knees, her lips moving in prayer, though whether she was praying for deliverance from the vampires or from the thing killing the vampires was unclear even to her. Roman held Hélöise, whose pale face peeked out from behind her father’s cloak with wide dark eyes that kept darting between the carnage and Yulaan.

Tsetsiliya had backed herself against the far wall, clutching her bone beads, her white eyes fixed on Ghojin. The old seer had seen many futures in her crystal ball over the centuries. She had never seen this one.

She began an incantation. The bone beads glowed. The air around her hands thickened into something black and wet that moved with its own intelligence, reaching towards Ghojin with tendrils that left scorch marks on the stone where they passed.

Ghojin looked at the approaching hex the way someone looks at a bug on their windshield.

Then she stood, walked over, and took hold of Tsetsiliya’s face with one hand. Her fingers wrapped around the crone’s jaw and forehead. And she pulled.

The sound was brief and total. Claudia turned away. Simon did not.

Ghojin held the face in her hand, examined it the way you’d examine a mask at a market stall, shrugged, and bit into it. She chewed slowly, looking out at nothing in particular, and then punched what remained of Tsetsiliya into the wall with a single strike that left a crater in the stone and not much else worth describing.

She sat back down.

Yorga rose.

“Enough of this farce!”  His voice doubled. “Grant me POWER!”

What stood up from the heap of his wife and daughter was no longer the handsome sharp-jawed man with the widow’s peak. The moonlight twisted into a violent cyclone around him until it became a pillar of shining energy.

His spine extended and curved forward, his ribcage split and widened until the skin couldn’t contain it and tore away in flaps, his skull elongated into something between a ram and a lizard with black spiraling horns that scraped the vaulting above. His legs bent backwards at the knee and thickened with ropy muscle. A tail uncoiled behind him, long and barbed, sweeping Thérèse and Aurore aside. Wings of stretched membrane and exposed vein spread from his back and filled the width of the nave, knocking candelabras and pillars aside. His lower jaw split into mandibles lined with teeth too numerous to count. Where his eyes had been there were now six, arranged in two columns of three, each burning a different shade of red.

The pact with Zoso, fully realized. The thing underneath the count that the count had been keeping leashed for seven hundred years.

He screamed, and every piece of remaining glass in the cathedral turned to powder.

Simon fell to his knees and made the sign of the cross with trembling hands. “Mother of God… this is what we were fighting?”

Claudia wept openly. “We never stood a chance. Not once.”

Roman stepped forward, pulling his cloak aside. Beneath it his skin was pale as Thérèse’s, and his eyes held a faint red tint. Hélöise emerged beside him, similarly pale, her dark hair carrying a red sheen in the candlelight. Father and daughter, Scarlatov vampires both, and Roman’s face held something beyond fear. It held grief.

“I can’t believe how far gone he is,” Roman said. His voice cracked. “Yorga… we were of the same stock once… Two gentle brothers of the landed guild to defend this realm…” He shook his head. “This is what Zoso does to you.”

Hélöise gripped her father’s arm. “Papa, we have to go.”

Yorga’s Baphomet form reared up and brought both clawed fists down towards Kevelnege. The floor cratered around her. Dust and rubble erupted upward. One of the remaining pillars toppled and crashed across the altar, scattering the thirteen skulls in every direction, their gemstone eyes rolling across the stone like marbles.

When the dust cleared, Kevelnege was standing in the crater with her arms folded. There wasn’t a scratch on her. She wasn’t even dirty.

Yorga’s eyes widened. All six of them. The mandibles worked open and closed without sound.

He tried again. A torrent of black fire poured from his mouth in a column wide enough to engulf a house, and it hit Kevelnege full in the chest and washed over her and pooled on the floor around her feet like burning oil. The heat of it blistered the stone and set the remaining tapestries ablaze and turned the wine-dark rugs to ash.

She stood in it.

The fire died.

She unfolded her arms and scowled in boredom.

THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING.

It was written across every one of his six eyes. Seven centuries of accumulated power, a pact with a being whose name alone could drive a mortal mind to madness, a form that had brought kingdoms to ruin before the modern age began, and she was standing in the middle of it with her arms folded like she was waiting for a bus.

“Thérèse,” he said, and his voice was wrong now, resonant and layered with frequencies that made the remaining stone vibrate. “Take Aurore. Take her to the First Circle. Now.”

Thérèse gathered the girl in her arms. Aurore’s face had stopped trying to regenerate entirely, as if her body had decided the effort was no longer worth the energy. Half of her was porcelain perfection. The other half was ruin. She stared up at Kevelnege with her one good eye and there was something in that eye that had never been there before in all her centuries of undeath.

She was scared.

Kevelnege smirked and flicked something from between her thumb and forefinger. It looked like a tiny sparkle, a mote of light no bigger than a firefly, and it drifted towards the three of them in a lazy arc.

Yorga saw it coming. He threw his wings around his wife and child. He braced.

The sparkle touched his wing.

The twinkling took all three of them through the wall of the cathedral, through the outer fortification, across the moat, over the treeline, and into the distance. The trajectory was visible as a sonic boom that arced across the night sky like an invisible shooting star, shrinking and shrinking until it became a point of light against the distant mountain range.

Stone and dust rained down through the hole in the cathedral wall. Cold night air flooded in. Somewhere in the forest, trees snapped and crashed in sequence as the shockwave passed through them.

Kevelnege turned back to the group and shrugged.

“Hey, sword boy. Where’d you even get that glowing finger?”

Simon opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it. He looked at Claudia. She was doing the sign of the cross over and over, her lips still moving in prayer that had become purely automatic. He looked at Roman, who was staring at the hole in the wall with the expression of a man reconsidering every decision he had ever made.

Simon tried again. His jaw worked but he could not summon the sound.

Meanwhile Ghojin had found a pew that hadn’t been smashed yet and sat herself down. She crossed one leg over the other, took another pull from her cigar, and rested her cheek against her fist.

Kevelnege lost interest and turned to Yulaan, who was leaning against a pillar trying to keep the room from spinning.

“You ate food that a vampire gave you. Without thinking about it.”

Yulaan made a noise.

“You ate food. From a vampire. The thing that poisons people.”

“It smelled good.”

She noogied her hair and grinned. “You’re a Saiyan. Everything smells good to you. That’s not a defense.”

“It was lamb.”

“I don’t care what it was.”

Yulaan pushed herself off the pillar, staggered two steps, and sat down hard on the floor. She pulled off her denim jacket, and the tail unwound from her waist and swung free behind her. She looked at Simon, at Claudia, at Roman and Hélöise, all of whom were staring at it.

“We’re not exactly human,” she said.

Simon said, very quietly, “I gathered.”

Hélöise came out from behind her father and knelt beside Yulaan. “Are you alright? I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. I should never have let you go to that dinner alone.”

Yulaan waved her off. “Don’t sweat it. Your vampire friend had really good lamb.”

“She was not my friend! They were all monsters! And I trusted they were acting in good faith…”

“Yeah, well, that Vodnik dude seasons it like he means it. I’ll give him that.” She looked back to the mess of giblets. “Oooooh…” She pulled her face in a grimace. “Well he meant it.”

Kevelnege was about to say something cutting when the night outside went white.

It started as a flash on the distant mountain range where the streak had landed. Then it grew. The flash became a light became a wall of fire that climbed the mountains and swallowed them whole. Peak after peak vanished behind it. The fire rose in a column that punched through the cloud cover and kept going, spreading at the top into a shape that everyone present recognized from photographs they wished they’d never seen.

The ground shook. The remaining walls of the cathedral groaned. Stones fell from the ceiling. The shockwave crossed the distance in seconds and hit like a freight train, blowing Simon and Claudia and Roman and Hélöise off their feet and sending them tumbling across the stone floor in a tangle of cloaks and limbs.

Yulaan stayed where she was, sitting on the floor. Kevelnege stood with her hair blowing back. Ghojin didn’t even look up from her cigar.

The roar of it lasted a long time. When it finally faded, the silence that replaced it was the silence of a world that had just learned something new about what was possible.

Simon lay on his back, looking up through the shattered walls at the white and orange mushroom cloud still climbing the sky.

Kevelnege noticed them staring.

She made a face that was somewhere between a smirk and a sneer, and scoffed.

“What?”

The rest of the night passed slowly. Once Simon could confirm the three women weren’t going to kill him or anyone else still breathing, he took a torch from a surviving sconce and began to explore the castle. Room by room, corridor by corridor, he found them. 

Girls. Women. Chained to walls, locked in cells, kept in various states of undress in harem rooms decorated with rotting finery. 

Some flinched when he opened the doors. Some didn’t react at all. One girl, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, started screaming when the torchlight hit her face and didn’t stop until Claudia held her and whispered prayers into her hair.

There were dozens of them. Yorga had been collecting for a very long time.

Simon broke every chain. Claudia tended to those who would let her touch them. Roman carried those who couldn’t walk. Even Hélöise helped, guiding stumbling women through the dark halls towards the cathedral, where the hole in the wall let the predawn air in and the women could breathe something that wasn’t dungeon rot for the first time in weeks or months or years.

Yulaan watched from where she sat and said to Kevelnege, “I’m gonna tell Miranda about this. You think she’ll freak? She’s gonna freak, ain’t she? When she hears you totally vaporized some vamps. She’s gonna be so angry you humiliated her kind.”

Kevelnege said, “Shut up, Scrunt,” and clocked her in the jaw, which sent her to back to sleep.

Ghojin had gone to sleep on the pew.

When dawn came, it came in a band of pale gold through the hole in the eastern wall, and it crept across the floor towards the spot where Roman and Hélöise sat in the shadow of the altar. Roman pulled his daughter deeper into the dark. Their skin, already pale, had taken on a faint translucence in the approaching light, and they watched the sunrise with the particular longing of creatures who remembered warmth but could no longer safely feel it.

Hélöise looked across the ruined cathedral at Yulaan, who had woken up and was eating a piece of rubble she’d mistaken for bread, realized it was rubble, and kept chewing anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Hélöise called out. “For all of this. Truly.”

Yulaan swallowed the rubble and said, “Don’t be. This is exactly the sort of stupid supernatural bullshit I was hoping we’d find on Earth. Between you vamps and the capes and that one Zulu god, the planet ain’t too strong, but it’s at least got some zest.”