Vermilion Dreams (Book One of A Vampire Fantasy Epic)

by M. U. Riyadad

  A half-man jumped out from the huddle. It wasn’t one that had spoken before. He was smaller than the rest. No more than six feet tall. He had a shaved head with bruises, including a broad dent above his right ear. He wore an old leather tabard with a sigil that looked familiar, something he must have gotten in Chaya. A carpet of red-brown hair ran along his body from neck to toe. He stood hunched over, and underneath the bulge in his leather tabard, something moved unsteadily, like it was rummaging through the skin on his back. Bits of loose scrap and cloth stuck to the hair around his body.

  “Master, what has the child done?” the half-man asked. His voice was a deep bellow. Not hoarse, but still indistinct and cracked, like he was trying to breathe at the same time he was trying to speak. The echoes made it more difficult to catch his words. He shouted something else that I couldn’t hear, and then he stepped farther away from the campfire, slouching against the back of another half-man that had stepped away. “I hear something. Something coming from there.” He turned to the cat-like creature with one hand out. “A creature? A daemon?” Other half-men followed him, turning in the direction he pointed and then tumbling away from the campfire with darting eyes. They spread their hands out like they were trying to feel for something in the dark around them.

  “Don’t move! Stay close to the fire, idiots!” the cat-like creature chided. “Stay close to the light and stay quiet. It doesn’t matter where you hear or see them. They can be anywhere.” It narrowed its eyes at Avisynth. “Enough! No more of this. Close the rip, boy! You’re going to get us all killed. What of your friends? You think you’ll be able to keep them safe too? Not all of them. One will go. Two will go. Maybe three or four or all!” It hammered on the floor with its paws, sending ash and soil flying around it. Pieces of ice cracked under its hooked claws. A half-man tripped on its tail. The cat creature bit at the other daemon’s leg, taking a chunk of meat out with its claws and teeth. The daemon silently limped away, not even glancing at its own leg. The cat creature then bent low and poised itself to leap at Avisynth from a distance, teeth and lips quivering in anger. Its whiskers unfurled into long cords of golden hair, lengthening stiffly across its hardened face like strings on a clay lute.

  The clouds began parting. Their colors dimmed. The campfire shrunk. Dense white flames turned into narrow embers. The already dim grey light was now no brighter than a handful of fireflies. The flames flickered without any wind. The ash had stopped moving back up, and instead piled on the floor without the clouds, the heaviest pieces falling first. Only the thinnest of strands were left, no wider than single locks of grey hair. All the while, the ripples in the dark grew thicker and more pronounced, going from small folds to surges of darkness that pushed on the light of the campfire and the clouds. The darkness swam on top of itself, fluttering and fluttering louder and louder. Bit by bit, it ate away at the light, gnawing at its corners like termites at the edge of a canvas. I kept my eyes open, trying not to blink despite what Avisynth had said. We weren’t under the best of circumstances, but there was poetry here. Poetry, and motion, and things that so few people had ever seen, and I wanted to be able to put every bit of it into a verse.

  The half-men continued to scatter around the valley. Some came close to us, but we were invisible to them now.

  “It comes from there!” the half-man with the long arm shouted. It began running toward Avisynth, head turned to look behind its shoulder. It turned to the left sharply, then ran to where the cave was supposed to be. Three others began walking backward in his direction. Only the faint outlines of their shapes were visible in the growing dark. They were bent lines and open curves, like shadows spilling out of half-open shudders.

  “I hear it,” the half-man with the three hooves croaked. “They’re all around us. ON EVERY SIDE!” Each of its three legs tried to move in a different direction, and it ended up staying in the same spot. It heaved its body to the left, then swung to the right, trying to take control of its own legs and move them in a single direction, but its legs resisted. It turned around and two hind legs kicked down to fight it. It lurched forward and two front legs stomped down to stop it. It tried to sidestep but one leg buckled to make it trip over itself.

  “DON’T MOVE! DON’T MOVE!” the cat creature roared. It stayed in place and bounced on its paws. It kept its eyes on Avisynth, ignoring the darkness that was swelling around us. I expected it to leap at him, bite his face or take him to the ground, but it stood still, glaring at the feratu boy with pointed eyes.

  The half-man with the long arm took three steps to the left of Avisynth, and then he vanished. I blinked, expecting him to come back, but nothing changed.

  Nothing took him or grabbed him or pulled him into the dark. No claw or tentacle lashed out, nothing with teeth or nails suddenly revealed itself from the dark. Instead, in the space of a breath, the dark had rippled over his body and he had disappeared. There were no sounds of his voice being muffled, nor any sign of a struggle in the area beyond the light. His voice was cut off so sharply, I thought my mind had blanked out or that my ears had closed.

  I shook my head, then turned to where he had disappeared to look for what had taken him. The rippling had already receded, and for several minutes the dark seemed to return back to normal.

  All the other half-men froze in place, turning to the area to the left of Avisynth. The feratu boy wasn’t looking at the half-men, or the dark. He was looking in the direction of the cat creature—not directly at it, but into the space right above it. Avisynth wasn’t here. His mind was somewhere else, his thoughts were somewhere else, even his eyes were somewhere else. I knew it because Taa had the same look often enough. His mouth was a thin, expressionless line. His brows tugged at their ends, and the rest of his body moved in the tiniest, and barely noticeable of ways. A twitch in his finger, a wrinkle in his lips—things that suggested he vaguely remembered he had left his body here with the rest of us.

  And then the dark came again, rippling and fluttering, caving in from the top and the sides, and even from below us, like the ground itself had begun to dissolve along with the ash and the clouds. I closed my eyes and kneeled, thinking I had seen enough and deciding it was better to go with what Avisynth told us to do. Elsa grabbed onto my arm. I grabbed onto hers. Jahlil held one of my feet, and the other was tangled with one of Mawlik’s and Nikhil’s. We were huddled closely, eyes shut, ears perked. The fluttering grew louder. It grew louder and closer until it became overwhelming. Elsa screamed, telling Avisynth to make it go away. The half-men were shrieking and crying. The cat daemon howled and roared. The flames cracked so loud I thought the campfire might have exploded. And all the while the fluttering grew louder and louder. Rippling, rustling, restless, relentless and ravenous, raucous and rabid, rampant and raging—I held my ears shut to stop the noise. I hummed as loud as I could just to be able to hear something besides the fluttering.

  I peeked one eye open and saw Jahlil staring into the dark, eyes as wide as marbles. Lidless eyes that peered so deeply into the fluttering their whites had disappeared and you could see nothing but the reflection of ripples and black tides, surging in and out like ink oceans and rings of oil. The corner of one eye blinked after several seconds, like he was struggling to get the whole thing to close but couldn’t manage it. They were lost and decrepit, adrift in the nether, the cabalistic, the unnatural, and falling deeper into foreign sensations while leaving the rest of his body behind like Avisynth. But where Avisynth’s eyes were bright and burning, Jahlil’s were dark and still. I pulled my hands from my ears and pushed his head down to the floor. I heard him gasp, then take in sharp breaths like he had been suffocating all this time. He convulsed on the floor, and then grabbed his throat and eyes like he was trying to keep something out of them. He cried something in a different language, thick and guttural, pushing out the words like he was choking on them.

  “They’re coming out of the cave! I hear them!” the cat creature screamed. “There’s another in there. Another besi
des the ones you’re looking for. Let us go, boy! You’ve got what you wanted!” Its voice was a distant echo now, moving farther and farther away from me every second. It was as far as the old continent, even as far as the Shoreless Seas beyond that. Everything that wasn’t close to me moved with it, farther and farther away, while only the fluttering and ripples were coming closer and closer. There was no force pulling me away, nothing telling me to get up and run, but the instinct to get away from where I was, to be anywhere but in the spot I was kneeling in, grew inside like an uncontrollable itch. It was a shudder, a tremor, a tic that was impossible to contain.

  “Avisynth!” I yelled. “Make them go away! Make the fluttering stop! It’s becoming too much for us!” I felt Nikhil pulling away. Mawlik loosened his grip on me. I turned to Avisynth. Even with my eyes closed, I could make out his face through the light of his eyes. They glowed through the dark, glowed through my lids, glowed through the fluttering and the rippling, even through the sounds and the sensations that the dark had brought with it. They looked even brighter now, contrasted against the dark that was coming closer and closer. Colors streamed out of his eyes and leaked and bled and poured all over.

  “Avisynth, Can you hear me?!” I asked.

  The cat creature laughed, no more than a patter of sounds against the fluttering. “You can’t do it boy, can you? You can’t make them stop. I told you. Nether-borne daemons aren’t commanded. They aren’t animals you put a leash on or soldiers that swear fealty to you. They aren’t weapons or tools or mercenaries.” There was bitterness, and amusement, and resentment in its voice. There was cynicism and fury in its tone, but I still tried my hardest to hear every word it said—just to hang onto something other than the fluttering. If the cat creature stopped speaking, I was sure nothing would be left for my mind to hold onto. It would leave through the sound of the fluttering.

  The creature spoke again, in a higher and more mocking tone. “You thought you could command the earth because you built a sand castle. Do you command the wind if you know how to make a fan of leaves? Fire if you can make a lamp?” The creature was screaming to be heard clearly over the fluttering. “See why there are so few feratu? Once upon a time your kind ruled the whole of the old continent, and now you’ve all lost your minds to the dark and your eyes to the shine. You’ve lost your senses to what sleeps in the dark and you hear nothing but fluttering in your dreams. You hear nothing but fluttering and rippling and voices in the dark, and you can tell no difference between your dreams and your waking world. You’ll be there soon enough. Give it a few years, a few more trips to the nether with good intentions, and your eyes will be too bright to see through their own shine. People forget that light can be just as blinding as darkness.”

  I screamed Avisynth’s name once, twice, three times. I hit his leg the third time. I even considered leaning over and biting it. I wasn’t going to die here like this. I’d pull a good whole fucking chunk of his calves out if I had to. I’d close my eyes and imagine it was chicken. He finally turned to me, maybe sensing what I was going to do next. He turned hesitantly to Elsa and Nikhil, and then to the cat creature, as though just remembering now that we were all here with him. He clenched his hands. His expression was still distant, but he looked awake now, aware of what was happening around us.

  The fluttering began dying out. It went slow, fading behind other sounds that were close to me. I felt my heart beating again. I could hear Elsa and Mawlik and Nikhil breathing. The cat creature growled, and then somewhere farther away, I heard animal sounds. Trees swaying, leaves rustling. The Dwah Forest. I touched my ears unconsciously, and then random parts of my face like I was trying to make sure they were still there. I opened my eyes and saw Elsa doing the same. Nikhil was holding onto his sword. It had withered to half its size, both in length and width. Mawlik had his arms crossed and rocked back and forth on the floor. Only Jahlil remained motionless. The whites of his eyes were still gone. Every few seconds he made a sound, like a syllable or a fragment of a word in a different language, but put nothing together in a full word, or at least not a word that any of us knew.

  Nikhil shoved Jahlil, but the boy didn’t move. Mawlik yanked his hands, shuffled his hair, but nothing helped. If we tried to lift him, his head would limp over to one side and he’d make more sounds, but we could get no more out of him. We pricked his fingers, we squeezed his ankles, we took off his shoes. Nothing changed in him. His forehead had gotten hot, but the tips of his fingers, his toes, his ears—they were all cold. He breathed in short bursts, struggling to get in air between syllables and muffled words.

  “Jahlil?” Elsa called. “Jahlil!” she shouted again. He didn’t move. His ears twitched a bit, and his nose flared several times, like a part of him was trying to feel the sensations of his face, but his eyes were still gone. It feels redundant, and maybe a bit silly, to say that his eyes were becoming a darker black, but it is the only way I could imagine describing them. It wasn’t the shade of his eyes that were changing; it was the depth and how much of the dark you could see in them. You could still see the reflection of the dark rippling in his pupils, but now you could also see rippling underneath that, and then a third layer growing underneath the second. The longer you stared into his pupils, the more of your own eyes they took up. You could see all the details in the patterned layers, and the fluttering creatures growing behind one another like flatworms. Their folds, their creases, their movements—all of it combined to make an impossibly precise kind of illusion.

  “What did you do?” Nikhil asked, turning to Avisynth. He spoke slow and desperately, anger teetering at the edge of his voice. I could understand why he was upset something had happened to Jahlil, but to be mad at Avisynth now was a waste of energy. We had to think fast and act fast. Avisynth had saved us, but I still needed to get my sisters, and Jahlil was getting worse every second. His breathing had gotten shallower, but not calmer. He stopped speaking aloud, but his mouth still moved every few seconds to try and make a new sound. Elsa held him up in an embrace to let him breathe easier.

  Mawlik hadn’t spoken yet, but he had snapped out of his stupor. He touched Jahlil’s forehead with the back of his knuckles, then touched his hands, his palm, his finger. He pulled back Jahlil’s hair, then moved his hands in front of the unconscious boy’s eyes to see if his pupils followed at all. There was nothing.

  Avisynth looked at Nikhil, and then me. His eyes had gone back to normal, shifting between violet and green under the blue moon. The campfire had returned. A piece of a branch cracked and splintered in the flames. The wood was almost gone, leaving behind a faster burning bed of leaves that gave out a light and crisp smell when they caught fire. Fresh apples and spring leaves, with bitter and rich undertones that came from the smoke. I hadn’t forgotten about the daemons in the valley, but they had gone more quiet than Mawlik. Daemons in thought. If it weren’t for how many more urgent things we had to think about right now, I would have paused to take the moment in. The irony, the absurdity. There were at least a dozen angels above doubled over in laughter right now, harps in hand to create the right background tunes.

  The cat creature was gone, and the totem creature with the same clay face had returned in its place. Only four of the original twelve half-men remained, including the one with the long arm. They sat by the campfire, as still as stones, quietly glancing at each other every few seconds. The totem creature watched them for a long while, and then turned to us. Its eyes went back and forth, but it hadn’t moved its body or legs yet. My ears still throbbed from the rippling. My eyes were tired and my chest still felt heavy from the weight of the dark. Compared to all that we had seen, the forest was a quiet and peaceful sanctuary even under the blue moon. The animal sounds, the trees swaying in still air—it may have been eerie, but it was all utterly natural in a way that the fluttering and the rippling could never be.

  The totem creature moved, stirring us all awake. It turned to Avisynth. It took a step toward him, then another. Two pillars, as
wide as old oaks, crashed next to the feratu boy. One was grey, with deep cuts used to make three different variations of a laughing face. A wide smile, a thin smile, a broad grin. Each face was crooked and off-center, carved to look asymmetrical against the markings on the rest of the leg. I was familiar with every language in both the old and new continents, but I could recognize none of the letters or symbols here. I could not tell what parts came together to make a word or a sentence, nor even which direction the letters went.

  The other leg was turned away from me. I could see no more than the three dents used to make the three pieces of the leg. Each dent had chipped wood sticking out, with crudely shaved surfaces and flakes of loose splinters, like rats or termites had gnawed down the center to create the gap. The creature moved its head toward Avisynth. Its tongue slid out from the bottom corner of its mouth, striking the floor in front of the feratu boy’s feet. It moved in long, heavy strokes, licking up leaves and dust and soil as it went. The rain had gotten lighter.

  “You said you’d leave us alone,” Avisynth said. It was hard to tell if he was brave, dazed, stupid, or indifferent. All would’ve been equally impressive. Tell me—if you stood in front of a boy who remained so impassive against the presence of a giant totem daemon with a forked-tongue that moved like a worm, would you not want to know what was in his head, even if it was out of stupidity? Something like that could make a girl inarticulate for days, just through sheer wonder.

  The totem creature grinned. There were at least three lines of teeth on the topside of its mouth, and four on the bottom. Still, I preferred this to the fluttering. This creature had teeth and I had teeth. This creature spoke Emel and I spoke Emel. It was a daemon, but it wasn’t crazy to think we had similarities. And if I could speak to a creature, if I knew what it wanted, I could always find a way around it. It is not the same thing to find something in the dark that takes you with the flourish of a ripple.