by P. Clinen
"As darkest shadows we gather, under a night without end. Where the umbrageous pitch conceals us from the light of day, so long forgotten to these ageless trees. We have naught to guide us but our lunar orb, whose very lustre is but only reflection. And thus we linger in the shadows of the world, where our fellow ghoul has met her end. We relegate Madlyn to the artless weeds of decay. We open the door to her subterranean gateway, where she must go alone and soil seals the gate in deepest darkness."
Having awaited his cue, Arpage then began his funeral requiem, though due to his lacking of a bow he could only resort to plucking at the strings of his violin. The effect of the elegy was somewhat jarring - though the tune carried a pretty melody, the unorthodox manner of leaping between notes by way of pizzicato did not display the same smooth emotion that would have come from the glide of a bow.
The others stood uncomfortably, seemingly awaiting the song's awkward end. And when the dirge ended, Comets began to clap, though he was swiftly silenced by the glare of Rune.
For a moment, the only sound was that of a series of dull thumps, of dirt striking wood as Crow filled the grave. Another thump - Rune closing the heavy book, a noise that struck a chord in the hearts of the others, who stood crestfallen. Rune twitched involuntarily and reached for a certain spot on his scalp; his hand came away soggy.
"Rain," came Libra's voice from the coach.
Unbeknownst to the others, the lady had already returned to the coach, despite her possession of the only umbrella and awaited departure.
"We should go," said Edweena, echoing their thoughts, though her deadpan expression was heart wrenching to hear out loud.
The coffin was gone and with it Madlyn; the last shovel of soil concealing her to her resting place. As they left, the rain began to fall soft and heavy, bruising the lonely grave with bloated droplets.
By the time the coach reached the midway of the journey home, the rain was turning torrential. Though no wind assisted its violent lashings, it fell in such a screen of haze that navigation became troublesome. The horses struggled to haul the carriage wheels through the muddy turf and Edweena found her steps increasingly heavy as she walked beside Crow and his mare. The downpour hissed in her ears, making conversation with the wood hermit seem ridiculous, yet a nagging cry in her mind forced her to speak.
"Where has she gone?"
Crow took a moment to register the question. "The girl? You're asking me?"
"I can't help but think it," replied Edweena. "You mortals. Can it be that you really just disintegrate to dust?"
"It would seem that way to me as man... Surely your years as a vampire have unearthed some truth about this supposed afterlife."
Edweena's sapphire eyes swam with sorrow as the rain tore down her face. "This, I do not consider an afterlife. I am just like you, only with more years at my back. The idea that Madlyn has ascended to some eternal paradise is as much a flight of fancy to me as I'm sure it is to you."
"I'm afraid I cannot offer much in way of consolation," said Crow. "For I am certain that I will die. You, however..."
"I know."
The seconds poured onwards. Edweena spoke again. "Where will you go?"
Crow thought a moment, as though such an idea had never arisen in his mind. "I do not know. I am content to find that out when it comes."
Inside the coach, where the mood was just as heavy with sorrow, Arpage gazed out the window. Having been further crammed against the wall by Libra's impressive rump, he sat hypnotised by the downpour.
"That was well played, Arpage," said Sinders. "Given the circumstances."
Arpage twitched from his trance, "Circumstance? Oh my, by nature of the event and nature of my now stunted instrument, I say yes."
He looked at his broken bowstring, then at Libra as though imploring for an apology but she did not respond. Attempting to adjust the ruff about his neck, he discerned a sudden thud and the coach came to a shuddering halt.
"Are we there?" asked Comets.
The jester looked out the window, the great frontage of Tenebrae Manor looming before him confirmed his suspicions. "We are!"
Though the coach had stopped, the thud came again. It was as though something was beating on the roof above them, something heavier than rain and those inside became uneasy.
"Something isn't right," hissed Libra. "Usher you twit, what is going on out there?"
Her response came in the form of the carriage roof bursting open; the clawed arm of a wood golem came whistling through. Arpage squealed like a child and threw the door open and, stopping not to observe the fate of his companions, ran, arms flailing, into the house.
The golem stared down at them from the hole in the roof, wasting no time in taking another swipe at the helpless passengers below. The rain poured into the coach as the rest scrambled to exit.
Crow had dismounted his horse and was fighting off an entourage of beasts with his sword.
"Get inside!" he cried.
Pertaining to the state they were left in by the cowardly composer, the mighty doors of the manor stood wide open. The golems pursued with an unusual speed and the Lady Libra, being of hefty proportion and lagging fitness, struggled to reach the entrance. Accompanying this was the rain soaked swathes of her heavy dress and she was soon forced to feebly beat away her attackers with her umbrella. This she performed admirably, until a wayward golem escaped her notice and hooked its arm around her neck in a stranglehold. She tried to scream; breath cut frantically short, she attempted to free herself from the monster's grasp. The beast was wickedly strong and just as Libra began to fail, she felt the air rush back into her lungs. Edweena had leapt at the wood golem and clawed the thing to submission with fang and nail. Libra sat stunned at the gesture of selflessness displayed by her old friend.
"Go!" cried Edweena.
Lost for words, Libra rose to her feet and delved into the safety of the mansion's walls; Crow and Edweena following in tow. Usher locked the doors fast.
"So aggressive," gasped Sinders.
"And faster..." replied Edweena.
24: Aubade
A rush of panic enveloped Bordeaux as he crashed into the drowning wake, an adrenalin that cloaked him in a salty embrace. Twirling about an ever-shifting axis, he fought for his bearings against the violent current. The initial shock had erred him into a stuttered inhale that filled his lungs with a stinging pain. Such sharp daggers of pulpy water filled him with the sensation of a long lost memory - the sea.
The waves tossed his exhausted body like a rag doll; he felt the incredible weight of fatigue hauling him into the depths. Once or twice when his head broke the surface, he tried to open his eyes but his flaming hair lay matted across his face and extinguished his vision. Hoping to jettison excess weight, Bordeaux tried desperately to remove his maroon coat. The ocean had soaked it to his skin and he was unable to tear it from his arms.
Consigning himself to fate, his energy failed him, though it seemed that the sea had grown tired of the taste of his struggles. Tumbling from the reflective crest; a white cap bloated with waxing gibbous, the gorged moon hurled him from the tide.
Like a weaning babe, he gaped at the air and gripped his fingers into the sands to ensure their existence. The murky film of the monumental sea slid up to caress him again, as the waves crashed onto the shoreline. Around his sunken head they crawled, the waves stretching for him, trying to haul him back into oblivion.
Bordeaux lay motionless, still of limb - his heavy breathing the only trace of life. Although he felt the nagging threat of high tide swell dragging him away, he was too exhausted to move.
His sufferance had been of a potent poison; never had he felt so drained. A small influx of energy mustered within brought Bordeaux to his hands and knees before he clambered to his feet to survey his environment.
The beach spread either side of him and coiled into toothy cliffs at his lateral horizons, opening wide to engulf the moonlit bay. The light of the moon teased with the shadows, an ac
centuating sharpness that distinguished even the smallest grain of sand, the smallest seashell.
The crimson demon stood bewildered. What had happened? Where was he? He trudged forward as a somnambulant, kicking the dunes beneath his weary steps and disturbing the bustle of tiny blue crabs that scuttled in their traffic on the sands.
Libra; yes, he remembered Libra, a face of bridled fury boring into him. And then...
The dune grew sharper in its incline and soon Bordeaux was once again on hand and knee, crawling to the summit of sand to get a better vantage point of his locale. The grass grew long like reeds about him, their celadon stalks rustling softly in the ocean breeze.
Bordeaux thought he could hear wind chimes - their resplendent carol drifting through the tide in glorious percussion. The music seemed the perfect partner to the gnarled trees that stood bare and stooped; beaten by sea, glass whistles in a sculptured Thule.
Bordeaux sank to his haunches, soothed immeasurably by the seaside lull; it was not long before he drifted to sleep.
Sleep came to him in drifts. The cold gusts of the dream toyed at him, pulling his mind this way and that, as though he were merely a puppet in a carnival show. All colour fled from his thoughts, all save that grey and green of the beach. The celadon washed over him like the notes of a piano and filled his dreams with recollection. Lady Libra and her magical prowess; Bordeaux had not realised the extent of it. She had banished him, somewhere far from Tenebrae Manor. He dreamt of her hands waving before him hypnotically and for a moment, recalled the pain he had felt tearing at him. It had been an unbearable affliction and, on remembering it, he kicked fitfully in his sleep. How could it have been that Libra had such ability - ability that could throw him from dimensions and maroon him at any impossible distance from home?
His mind went black again as he plunged in a deeper period of slumber. Bordeaux felt his ears fill with the distant cry of the savage. The tribe beat at war drums and the light of a fire pierced apart the darkness. Though wood or flint did not kindle this fire. Its core was aglow with that beautiful heart-shaped talisman Bordeaux had found in Libra's secret room. The flames burned with shades of red, amber and green. And around the great fire, he could discern the twisted shapes of terrifying monsters.
The wood golems danced an ancient ritual about the flaming heart, which lit up the ghastly deadpan of their faces. Those expressionless eyes bulged with blind malice and, from their heads, they tore at the branches that sprouted. The wooden bodies ripped the sticks and roots off their bodies and beat them together as they shuffled a slow dance around the wood heart. The sinuous shape of claws faded into existence about the heart, though they were, in fact, the branches of a mighty tree. As the golems danced, the tree grew until it towered over them, the wooden heart ablaze in its trunk. Roses blossomed along the branches and from various points, vines dropped to the ground below. These tendrils slithered about the roots - the dreaming Bordeaux watched as one constricted itself around a nearby tree stump and hauled it from the ground. A stump revealed itself to be the head of a new golem, the body of which was wrenched above ground by the noose about its neck.
The wind had increased when Bordeaux awoke at length. A certain freshness in the air revived him as such as he was able to stand up again. It was then that he saw that the portion of beach on which he stood was in fact a sandbar, a sort of natural barrier dividing the tumult of the sea from a still inland lagoon. Though their similarities were obvious to the naked eye, Bordeaux felt strangely unsettled from his vantage point. To his left, the sea roared restlessly and shifted evermore in its being. The lagoon on his right, filled with the very same salty water, lay in pristine tranquility reflecting the sky like a mirror. The mangroves cut inverted patterns on the surface of the pool, while the clouds whispered across a canvas of stars. Overwhelmed as he was, a realisation had dawned on him; the threat to his home, the onslaught of beasts that had placed the livelihood of Tenebrae Manor in doubt - it was internal. The great gem that he had found in Libra's possession; he had read of it in Rune's book. It was the heart of that ancient magic, the black rose tree. The wood golems were merely trying to retrieve that which belonged to their creator and it was Lady Libra who withheld it from them.
Across his tired face Bordeaux fashioned a grin and cursed his ignorance. The strange happenings in the forest, the numeral increase of monsters, the ascension of Lady Libra to the apex of Tenebrae's hierarchy - they all coincided perfectly. Libra has not overtaken him on her own merit - that powerful talisman had endowed higher magic prowess onto her! Bordeaux clasped at his skull in anger; it had been Libra who had brought peril to Tenebrae Manor. She had thieved that treasure and hoarded its powers for herself alone.
The wind paid no mind to his revelation; the demon stood at a loss. The answers were his but how helpless he was in this exile! How futile the knowledge that revealed itself to him! Would that he could beat upon the dunes with his fists, although his attention was presently arrested. The sea breeze had ushered in a change felt not by Bordeaux for ages.
He looked to the lagoon that stood bruised in the purple twilight of the setting moon. The leaves of the mangroves shone with a fiery brilliance, the twisted ruggedness of their muddy branches accentuated by the reflection of a light long foreign to him. Bordeaux turned to the sea and was awestruck.
Teasing the waves with golden highlights, the dawn poured onto the beach and it was not unlike the coveted painting that hung in his chambers back at the manor. But this was reality observed; Bordeaux squinted his crimson eyes and saw the sun rise for the first time in centuries.
25: Edweena & Crow Quarrel With Libra
For Edweena, it was the opportunity wasted that frustrated her most. So much as it seemed to linger about her stormy person with the loveless impressions of rain unrelenting. An opportunity that, had she indulged upon it, would have seen her any amount of leagues away from the disintegration of the mansion that confined her. Dragging her down with it toward crumbling foundation, Edweena felt more than ever before, a predetermined binding to this place - this place called 'home' through gritted teeth. Were she to pursue the harvest of her dream, she must surely now wait for a timelier hour. It had been Bordeaux that she had called upon through the sufferance of such internal anguish but pertaining to his costly vanishing, she had only herself with which to wallow in her brooding; and it was the challenge of channeling her anger towards a more fruitful solution that Edweena found most difficult.
She had been thankful for Crow, the one who had provided her with some consolation in wake of such mounting melancholia. Yet it was obvious to her that he lacked the wisdom of years. In Bordeaux, she had another eternal refuge from death with which to transpire the similar struggles of a life forever locked in its twilight. Edweena considered Libra; her oldest friend with whom the early years of her damnation had been received with some joy. The vampiress observed the way Libra coped - through means of suppressed denial and lust for dominion over what was still obtainable to one of her stature. But Edweena could not be pushed into these realms of the oblivious; a heightened sense of being had her constantly questioning her existence, a trait that she cursed.
Yes, the bats had flown and she was not amongst their black leather flight; Edweena felt now that responsibility beckoned her. Although she wanted to turn her dusky head to see where the bats had flown, she was instead called to protect those few who were her friends and the many whom she considered weaker than her. She had resisted the calling, ignoring the outstretched arm that would pull her from the quicksand. But the consideration of her decision had been made more difficult by the ruining of her favourite drawing room on the third floor. It had become so overrun with vines that she was now unable to gain entry.
This occurrence had driven her to the armoury of the household, a rusted hovel wrapped in stone and buried deep in the maze like topography of the manor. It was here amongst the disorderly regime of rusted swords and time eaten shields that she mused upon her sufferanc
e. It was a cold and indifferent cave, not unlike those other moth-riddled rooms that populated the manor. When Edweena had properly lit the room, she had been as a child gazing at presents. Each weapon personified the sharpness of her angst and it was the deliverance of the sword strokes she proceeded to swing that brought release to her anger. She had chosen a sword less brittle in its archaism and, observed only by the faces of shields hanging on the walls, she was applauded as her stealthy arm threw the blade into a deadly rhythm. The silver sliver of the rapier cut the air and flowed like ribbons and, being so deeply entranced by her imaginary fight, Edweena was startled to see Libra standing at the doorway.
“Oh, my lady. I did not think anyone else…”
“Let us just forget the formalities, Edweena,” said Libra in a surprisingly soft tone.
“Indeed, Libra.”
“What were you doing with that old sword?”
“I supposed it might be beneficial,” Edweena replied. “To fight away any threats. Those monsters seem more aggressive…”
Libra nodded empathetically. “That is a good idea.”
They stood silent a moment, their eyes darting about in avoidance of eye contact.
“I, uh, I wanted to ask – why did to rescue me from that beast before?” queried Libra.
The vampiress shrugged. “I would not abandon a friend.”
Edweena resumed her air swings, the blade whistling an echoing song.
Libra felt a compassionate throb in her chest, one she was not used to acknowledging; the idea that someone would put themself ahead of another. The fact that she had been spared by what was a strained friendship softened her heart further.
“Thank you, Edweena.”
The vampiress did not turn to face Libra for fear of revealing a smile, yet she shrugged again in response and grunted with each sword swing. Presently she spun about, half expecting the Lady to have departed from her presence but still she stood there. The corner of Edweena’s mouth upturned as she proceeded to the pile of rusted swords and threw another at Libra’s feet.