by Sean Davies
“What can I expect?” Veronica said, getting into position. “What should I do if this works?”
“I am not certain,” Cherriesa answered. “I have only seen this ritual performed a few times by the Bloodmage tribe who turned me, and the transferred subjects claimed to have shared the foremost thoughts of the host. You should have limited contact with me, and a small amount of control over what you perceive. Your sense of time may alter, and if you suffer too much psychological distress or die, then your mind will be fragmented and trapped inside of Winston’s forever, subjecting him to incurable lunacy and leaving your body as nothing more than a vegetative vessel for your empty brain. Well, it will be emptier than normal…” Cherriesa added with a sickly-sweet smirk.
Veronica ignored the insult and prepared herself for the unknown. “How do I get out?”
“Shout,” Cherriesa shrugged, “or scream. I should be able to pick it up.”
“Alice, Alexander,” Veronica said as she closed her eyes. “The Conclave is in your hands until I get back—if I get back.”
“Sure, you haven’t got anything to worry about on that front,” Alexander said reassuringly. “We’ll keep it running like clockwork.”
“There might be a dress code by the time you get back,” Alice joked dryly.
“Jonathan, tell your wife to keep her uniform fetish to herself,” Veronica smirked.
“I’ll try, but you know how much of an extrovert she is,” Jonathan chuckled cheekily, before receiving a powerful punch in the arm from Alice.
“Oh, and Alice,” Veronica began, sitting back up, “please tell the Mayor about Winston’s condition. He should know.”
The Lord Imperator shuddered. The Mayor had been the first Alt she’d ever seen, through the distorted helmet-camera footage of her Inquisition troopers; the Mayor had then hauled said troopers into the Gloom for a gruesome ‘alteration’ into human-puppet servitors.
“Please, Alice. They’re best friends, and he might even be able to help,” Veronica pleaded, reading Alice’s apprehension.
“What about the security risk?” Alice challenged. “He is an Alternative, after all.”
“Hey!” Constance exclaimed, thoroughly offended on her best friend’s behalf.
“Present company excluded,” Alice amended in Stitches’ direction.
Stitches waved his hand dismissively. “It’s fine. The Mayor can be a bit much sometimes.”
Veronica smirked at the understatement. “Please, Alice, we can trust him… and he did help us fight Omniosis, remember?”
“Fine,” the Lord Imperator agreed unhappily.
Veronica’s statement made Alice think back to her duel with the Archmage Omniosis, and his final words suddenly seemed more prominent than ever: ‘The Creator is going to purge you inferior insects from the face of the planet’. Coupled with Corriztis’ barely comprehensible prattling (some of which was translated through the hyperactive Werewolf, Lynette), and Azalea and Veronica’s vision regarding Constance, Alice’s stomach ached with dread as she worried about the true fate of Mydia.
“Enough prattling,” Cherriesa said, angrily pushing Veronica back down onto the bed. “I need silence.”
Everyone did as they were told, and Cherriesa wove a small whirling spiral of blood magic between Veronica and Winston’s temples, linking their minds.
“It seems to have worked, so now we wait,” Cherriesa said, rising from the bed while leaving her spell active. She began ordering around her retainers and Jonathan, dictating where they should unpack her possessions.
“What now?” Constance whispered to Genevieve.
“Let’s get out of here. They’ll let us know when they’re ready for us,” Genie replied, taking the Book Wielder’s hand eagerly.
Constance smiled excitedly and began to walk away with the blue-haired Vampire Nightclaw, when the Lord Imperator coughed sharply.
“Constance, Genevieve, Stitches, and Queen Azalea,” Alice began. “Let’s sort out the details of this mission,” she ordered, opening the doors to Winston’s study.
Genevieve gave Constance a disappointed grimace, letting go of her hand and joining Alice by the study.
“Yes, Lord Imperator, ma’am,” Constance said, trying to keep the overwhelming frustration out of her voice.
Chapter 7
Winston’s Woodsholme
Veronica Reynolds took a moment to adjust to her environment and situation. Truthfully, she had been doubtful that the ancient blood magic would even work, but as Veronica looked around at the night-shrouded rural landscape she couldn’t deny that her consciousness had been sent somewhere else; she hoped that she had indeed crossed into Winston, and not a sheep or something. Veronica hadn’t been sure of what to expect from Cherriesa’s spell, and now that she seemed stranded in Winston’s dream version of the Rura countryside, she felt truly clueless.
“Hey!” Veronica called at the cloudy night sky. “Cherriesa! It worked! There’s like, a whole world in here, so what do I do?!”
“I do not know,” Cherriesa’s voice boomed through the clouds like thunder. “Have a look around.”
Veronica sighed and tried to get her bearings, hoping that her husband’s psychological Rura was at least partially true to its real-life counterpart. She was in a large grassy plain surrounded by trees, so it was hard to see anything of use, but there were mountains in the distance ahead of her and to her left. Having lived in on Rura for most of her long life, Veronica assumed that meant she was somewhere in-between Fort Dominia and Woodsholme. Without anywhere better to start, Veronica began to trek towards (what she hoped) was the North-West, towards Winston’s old home town.
As Veronica approached the fearsomely dark treeline, the busty Vampire noticed that her lacy dress had morphed into a pair of thick jeans, hiking boots, and a cool black and red hoodie.
“Cherriesa, I think I changed my clothes!” Veronica gasped.
“None of what you see is real. Get over it,” the trees whispered in Cherriesa’s high-pitched voice. “Stop bothering me, I am busy.”
“You and your boy toys had better mop up afterwards!” Veronica frowned, as she pushed through the life-like foliage. “And if Winston and I get out of this weird crap in one piece, we’re joining in to celebrate,” she added cheekily.
There was no reply, so Veronica made her way through the silent woods, mesmerized by the level of detail in the dreamscape. She couldn’t help but reach out and sample a touch of the trees’ bark and cool leaves. Everything felt so real, even down to the crunching sound her boots made as they trampled over the old dry leaves, and Veronica had to keep reminding herself that her surroundings were actually fake.
After Winston had restored Mydia, the woods and forests became rich with strange creatures that lived alongside their regular animal neighbours, making a woodland stroll a potentially dangerous pastime. However, Winston’s dream of Rura’s woods was eerily empty, and Veronica soon grew disturbed by the overwhelming quiet. She found herself flinching each time a twig snapped underfoot, so when she heard a garbled screech from above her heart felt ready to explode from fright.
Veronica looked up, quickly preparing a spell. Her red Vampire eyes had no trouble seeing in the dark, but she couldn’t locate the source of the strange noise. She stared around at the canopy, knowing that there was something out there, but eventually gave up. When she looked down again, Veronica was face-to-face with a smug-looking white mask.
The Vampire Bloodmage leapt backwards and blasted the Demon with a bolt of red magic, but the spell fizzled over its form ineffectively. Veronica got a good look at the creature and could see that it was cloaked in a fine black robe, with a thin sliver of an opening that revealed its armoured body. She could just about see the screaming masks built into the white armour plates.
“Omniosis,” she gasped.
The corrupted Archmage let out a raspy chuckle, spitting foul black blood out of its mask’s grinning mouth gap.
Veronica sear
ched herself for a weapon in a panic, patting the pockets of her hoody and jeans, but came up empty. She continued to back away, using telekinesis to split thick branches and launch them at the Demon, but Omniosis swatted them effortlessly away with the back of his gauntlets.
The Archmage took a step forward and began twitching violently. He threw off his cloak and swelled in size, until his rank half-decayed body was splitting out of his masked armour. The bulbous mass of putrid black, purple, and white muscle tissue formed into the rough shape of a scorpion, and liquid metal leaked from its exposed flesh, quickly hardening into vicious barbed armour. Masks wearing all manner of expressions pressed themselves out of the freshly made plates, and they wailed, laughed, and screamed. The mutated Omniosis clacked his pincers like a pair of scissors and waved its giant syringe-like tail stinger side to side, scuttling forwards with his six new legs.
Veronica narrowly dodged a frighteningly quick strike from the demonic creature’s stinger and somersaulted out of the way of its snipping claws.
“Think, Veronica, think!” she chided herself loudly, slamming a tree down on her foe.
The masked scorpion was pinned for a moment, but quickly shredded the tree into firewood; in that short time, however, Veronica had calmed herself and focused her thoughts. She remembered how she’d subconsciously changed her clothes in the dreamscape, indicating that she did indeed have some level of control over Winston’s shattered mind, and she tried to force a weapon into existence. Veronica remembered sinking Xavier’s Spell-forged steel sword into Omniosis’ physical form (before Alice finished the deceitful creature off for good), and she imagined the feel of the hilt in her hand, the shimmering sharpened metal, and the clear crystal runes that ran up the flat edge of the blade. She smirked at the mutated Archmage and raised her newly manifested blade to the masked creature in a duellist’s salute.
Omniosis let out a distorted hiss from his primary mask and jabbed repeatedly at the Vampire Bloodmage with his stinger, which leaked reeking black poison during every strike. Veronica parried each blow and then ducked before its pincers could snip off her head. She rolled to the side, picked herself off the ground, and swung the manifested sword at the pincer nearest to her, hoping that the Spell-forged steel would react the same way it would out in the real world. To her elation, the blade flashed white as it sliced through the beast’s barbed armour and bit into corrupted flesh.
The scorpion screamed and spun it’s heaving form around, smashing Veronica into a tree with the side of its tail. The mutated Archmage scuttled towards the wounded Vampire as she desperately tried to get herself back into the fight, but instead of trying to finish her off, the scorpion just stopped and waited patiently.
Veronica coughed and winced as her body healed itself, hating how accurate it felt compared to the real deal. She scrambled for the sword and wrapped her fingers around the brown leather hilt, immediately raising it to deflect an incoming attack, but still found the one-pincered scorpion standing in the same place and watching her moronically.
The Vampire held her blade out towards her foe and sidestepped to the left, and the mutated Archmage followed. She tried moving to the right, and the same thing happened again.
“Why aren’t you attacking?” Veronica asked angrily.
The creature laughed from behind its main smug mask, while the others protruding from its body cackled evilly.
Veronica risked a glance behind her, and then to the dark canopy above, expecting to see a second foe stalking her, but there was nothing.
“Weirdo,” Veronica shot at the warped version of the Archmage. She didn’t understand why it hadn’t attacked her while it had the chance.
She charged forward, screaming like a banshee as she hacked away at the beast’s limbs and sliced them off one by one with well-trained strikes, starting with the remaining pincer. The tail lashed out, aiming for her legs, arms, and shoulders, but Veronica batted the armoured stinger away and cut it off when the moment presented itself, leaving the demented version of Omniosis immobile and completely defenceless.
Long before she had been turned, Veronica had trained with a skilled young knight in exchange for sexual favours (a deal she hadn’t minded in the slightest as he was ruggedly handsome), and had learnt how to use a sword and the long-outdated flintlock pistol. After becoming a Vampire Bloodmage, Veronica had let the skills slip slightly, favouring her blood magic instead, but she made a habit of refreshing her abilities every few years. In recent times—before meeting Winston—Veronica would often train with Genevieve in-between partying, and have a great laugh at how embarrassingly badly she fared against the swift Vampire Nightclaw whose natural talents with blades were phenomenal. Nonetheless, Veronica was more than a match for the nightmarish monster born within Winston’s mind.
“What have you done to Winston, Omniosis?!” Veronica demanded, poking the defeated creature in its face mask.
“You should be asking what he’s done to me!” the mask rattled in pained laughter.
Veronica stuck the point of her sword through the mask, causing the demented Archmage to squeal like a pig. “Don’t make me ask again.”
“I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to—which I don’t,” Omniosis growled, before bursting into another round of laughter.
Veronica ground her teeth, realising that she’d get nothing of use from the masked monster, and wondered if it was just some mindless image dredged out of Winston’s nightmares. She grunted and pushed the sword all the way in, shielding her eyes as the scorpion’s body (along with its severed appendages) disappeared in a flash of blinding light.
The Vampire Bloodmage readied herself for another ambush, but the forest was as quiet as the grave. She brushed herself off and made sure she didn’t look too dishevelled, feeling silly for doing so. Veronica once again reminded herself that she was tramping through a dreamlike construct in her husband’s head, and not a real forest.
As she continued her more guarded journey through the woods, the back of her throat started to feel rough, and her mouth and lips grew dry.
“No, this isn’t real,” Veronica said firmly, frowning as her stomach rumbled and churned; she needed blood.
She tried to will the sensation away, remembering insistently that she wasn’t even in her physical body anymore, but the hunger pains remained. Her thirst grew so unbearable that Veronica stopped to manifest a blood pack into her hands and bit greedily into the plastic, but the blood turned to sand in her mouth. She spat out the disgusting grains and scraped her tongue clean.
Unsure of what had happened, and tormented by her nagging thirst and hunger, Veronica tried her luck with another blood pack, and then a flask, and then a wine bottle, only to find each time that the blood transformed into sand as soon as the red liquid touched her lips. She smashed the bottle onto the ground and growled ferally, feeling her fangs and teeth growing slightly.
“Cherriesa! I need blood!” Veronica roared to the heavens. “Answer me, you stuck-up bitch!” she screamed when she didn’t get a reply.
Veronica waited for a moment, staring at the trees above, but there was no answer, although a harsh gale swept through the woods and the creaking branches sounded like coarse laughter to her ears.
The busty Vampire Bloodmage sprinted angrily through the forest, hoping that the citizens of Winston’s imaginary Woodsholme were ‘real’ enough to sustain her psychological self. She reached the edge of the woodland and sighed with relief when she saw the welcoming light of civilisation across a long field, and she sprinted towards the town.
Veronica could tell from the layout of the buildings that the town was indeed Woodsholme, and despite her intolerable thirst she still managed to praise herself for her pathfinding skills, and Winston for his attention to detail in the geography department. It felt as though she had gone back in time as she got closer to the outskirts; it was unusual to see settlements without a wall or barricade of some description following the addition of magic to the land.
/> The Vampire looked around wildly for people to drain dry, but Winston’s Woodsholme looked completely deserted from the outset. She stalked down the pavements, staring hungrily at the brick houses which all looked like they’d been painted in varying shades of grey, and hoped to see at least one with their lights on. Veronica could feel all of her teeth growing and sharpening into points, becoming an array of fangs designed to tear flesh and crunch through bone, and her long hair began to move of its own accord like a veil of mesmerising black waves. Veronica upped her pace, gliding through the dreamscape with ghostly grace, knowing that she didn’t have long until she became a Feral Vampire and that all hope for her and Winston—and possibly the world—would be lost forever.
As though her prayers had been answered, the windows of a nearby house lit up like a lighthouse in the dark night, and Veronica could make out movement on the inside of the drab dwelling. Her instincts took over and she leapt towards the simple looking two-storey house, smashing through the large living room window without a second thought.
Inside, the house was decorated with simple furnishings, all of which shared the same painfully dull hues, and a human family were sitting at a dining table beneath a flickering lightbulb, eating what appeared to be grey stew.
“I hope you’re going to pay for that,” a grey-skinned man with sunken eyes said dryly.
“Look at that mess,” a dead-looking woman droned, before slurping some stew off her spoon.
“I think she’s here to kill us, momma,” a rosy-cheeked little girl said sweetly.
“She is a killer, after all,” a lively young boy piped up with a smile.
Veronica growled like a wild animal. She could sense the blood pumping around the children’s bodies, and her painted nails grew into savage talons. Her instincts tried to force her body to attack the kids, but her lingering scraps of humanity guided her to the parents at the last second; as soon as she lashed out at them, however, they turned to sand.