“Nayeru, I saved your life…”
“Oh sure, you saved my fucking life. But you know what else? The entire time we’ve been married, I’ve always supported you! When you were gone away in battle, I always held things down at the castle. And even when I worked relentlessly, to give this city its electricity, and my scientific studies that have overall bettered the living here, I am ignored! You are absent whether you’re here or gone! You are nothing more than a shadow, and I am living in it! Have you truly ever realized everything I’ve done? Do you truly know me Enttu? Do you truly even know your own daughter?”
She was truly laying a guilt trip on me that was both angering and saddening at once. There was nothing more for me to do, except embrace her prolongedly, and wipe away her falling tears from her wet amber eyes with my sleeve. She was gorgeous even when she cried, with her quivering red lips, and expression of wanting to murder me or of hurt, I couldn’t tell.
“I am so sorry if I have ever hurt you. I love you with everything that I am, even if I have failed in showing it. I’m fighting inner battles that I keep you away from, to protect you. You have the option to leave should it ever overwhelm you.”
“What? No. You’re crazy. I have struggled too. I grew up with an abusive father who molested my sister and I until we were old enough to fight back and run away. I think we need to sit down and talk about these things later, but not now. We have very good reasons to celebrate. We will be King and Queen, we are moving to New York. Just know that I’m not going to abandon you, and you better not do it to me, or I will murder your undead ass,”
She forced a weakened smile out of me. Her and her ferocious attitude she had about her were always able to pierce through my demons with her sharp tongue of fire, and her witty remarks. Many people asked me how I could have let her act so scornful in my presence, and that if she was someone else’s wife, they would have beat her a long time ago. Not me. I loved Nayeru for who she was, for what she wasn’t, and for her resilience to come shining forth from the dust and dirt she grew up amongst. Nothing could have ever stopped her, and not to mention, I was slightly afraid of her power to manipulate electrical currents, and it was ever increasing from training with Marion.
We kissed once more, bathing in the rays of Selene, casting our tall shadows onto the snow. I think we would have made love here, had it not been for a distant commotion that caught my attention. I heard the loud angry voices of quarrelling men coming from the castle courtyard about a mile back, and my wife and I sped in a blur that way.
Closer to an apparent fight now, I could see that Cain was in fisticuffs with a black-haired male that I hadn’t ever seen before and didn’t look like he was from here given by his black leather and grey garb. I jumped in between them to break it up, and punched the attacker in the jaw, knocking him down on his bottom.
“Who in the fuck are you, and what brings you to my city?” I said, almost spitting in the man’s face, and holding a dagger to his throat. He said nothing, and only let out a crazed laughter, and turned to look at my wife.
“That’s your legendary whore, eh?”
Like a reflex, I kicked the man right in the mouth, breaking all his front teeth of his grille, and he spat out a puddle of teeth, slobber and blood, some of it running down his chin and onto his clothes.
“Guards take this scum to the prison cell!” I ordered, and two of our city limit rovers dressed head to toe in black armor and horned headdresses showed up. They dragged the intruder away to the jail cells in the confines of the catacombs underneath the castle, where I would subject him to intense interrogation later.
After he was dragged away, near onlookers rushed to us and asked us if we knew who he was, none of us had an answer to it, and it was really worrying me by the minute. Nayeru disappeared briefly and came back with Vanya in hand. We went on have one last drink before retreating inside the castle. Cain and Lieutenant Raluca Kristian were with us having a mug of ale, and my daughter was growing impatient with so much energy brewing in her veins to go play with her friends. Under distant adult supervision, we let her and Raluca’s kids go play and buy trinkets at a bazaar tent set up outside the castle. We were on the bridge on the second story, overlooking the garden and the different tables and merchant tents. Vanya and her friends had run down the stairs that led to the ground level of the festivities, and I kept an eye on her like a hawk from up here. A feeling of uneasiness burned in my stomach, and the crescent moon crystal pendant that I wore on a strap of black leather began to glow a bright blue. Nayeru stared at it then at me.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
I drew out my sword and didn’t say a word, observing another man dressed in the same garb as the other man trying to talk to the children down below. Two loud thuds distracted me, and then the crowd dispersed in a circle. The bodies of my two city limit rovers were dropped onto the ground by two men riding through the crowd on two black horses that stampeded through, trampling carelessly through anything in their way. It took a split second for me to jump down with the hilt of my katana in my right hand, when I heard the screams of my daughter piercing through the cacophony of the confused crowd. When I looked, I knew I had been a second too late as I watched her being dragged away by one of the men on the black stallions. They bucked through the fallen snow towards the dense forest of pine and oaks, heading to break the barrier they’d apparently broken in through.
I chased after the two men, and leaped up in the air past the crowd, jumping rooftops, with my sword in one hand. The horses rode at the same unnaturally rapid speed that I ran at, and I was slightly winded catching up to them, but I managed to keep up. I then made a leap of faith, where I jumped and grabbed onto the rump of the animal sinking my claws into its flesh, hoping the pain of breaking flesh would slow it down. It only gave as much as a deafening screech, but wouldn’t give up and continued to run, with me floating behind it. I heard my daughter’s cries of desperation, and this awakened the power within me. The rider looked back and hissed at me, bearing a set of four frontal fangs. A Dragul vampire.
I continued to climb the rump of the animal, and it screeched each time I stabbed my claws in on the way up. But my efforts were halted when I felt the blast of a gunshot hit me in the kidney and the bullet lodging in my organ. I let go, the pain powerful enough for me to loosen my grip and I rolled multiple times on the ground, scraping my face, arms, breaking two ribs, and scraping my forehead. The pain was unbearable, but I knew it wouldn’t kill me. I was then shot once again, this time, right through the liver. The right side of my white shirt began to stain red from the bleeding wound that I covered with my hand as I slowly picked myself up, and recovered myself back up on my feet, disoriented from the bullet wounds. I tasted the slight copper of my blood in the back of my tongue, and I coughed up a bit of blood, as I trudged back to the city. I was losing blood very quickly, and I had to feed quite soon, my vision was beginning to blur and darken. Not too far away, I saw rings of fire and lighting dancing in a dazzling formation around the silhouette of a woman that I realized was my wife. She was yelling incantations for her spells she was performing to fend off a man that was trying to attack her, but she only advanced forward and he retreated backward.
“Get out of my city and give me back my daughter or you will pay!!!” she screamed. The commotion was now close to me, and I collapsed to my knees, weakened from bleeding out.
“This means war!!”
I had enough power within me to assist her. I slammed my fist on the ground and sent an earthquake rumbling through the ground, to the man’s feet to make him lose his balance.
“Enough!! Leave her be and give us back our little girl!” I yelled hoarsely, my throat dry and voice raspy.
The man who turned to look at me, I then realized was Narciso Tepes, the same man I had called a truce with ten years ago. The sting of betrayal seared in my bones, and I wished I had been strong enough to get up and
rip him apart with my own bare hands. I was betrayed, and sheer hatred emanated from my eyes into his. He then turned his back to Nayeru, walked past me, and threw me a cross-dagger, marching silently away from us. Nayeru rushed toward me, and her face of a warrior softened into the familiar face of the woman I loved. I was able to bring myself on my feet again to embrace her, but only for a split second, before an unseen force defeated me again.
I felt myself being jerked backwards by my hair, and then, the immense, indescribable pain burned like spreading vitriol. The tip of a wooden stake protruded out of my chest, my blood leaking around it in syrupy crimson streams. I couldn’t speak and was choking on my own blood with every inhale or exhale, and I felt my lungs filling with fluid.
“ENTTU, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”
Nayeru was horror stricken, as some of my own blood sprayed onto her face and her dress. She caught me as I fell to meet death, on the ground. She laid me softly onto my back, and caressed my face, as I tried to muster my last words to tell her, but I couldn’t due to blood bubbling out my mouth, onto the ground. I felt myself weakening, and I was slipping away into darkness.
“Stay with me, stay with me!!!” she screamed frantically, slapping me hard to no avail.
I felt her pulled away from me forcefully, and I heard her struggling with two different men, trying to subdue her. Distantly, I heard the crackle of fire and thunder from her magic, but then I also heard a piercing shrill as she was subdued. The last thing I had seen with the dregs of strength remaining in me was her blood sprayed on the walls, and I heard her agonizing wails, before her silhouette caught fire. It was almost as if I felt her soul drag mine out of my body, I felt her death after I took my last breath. I sank into the abyss of the vast oasis of death, where blackness ruled my surroundings, all my senses, my physical and all astral bodies. I was dead.
I don’t know how much time passed and it didn’t have a linear feel to it anymore. When I was finally able to regain control of at least my sense of sight, hearing, and touch, I found myself to feel lighter than a feather, and around me, glittering specks of light swirled about me in all directions when I pushed through the ocean of blackness. I was cutting the darkness and the flesh was the plethora of sequins of light whose quality wasn’t solar; it didn’t sear my flesh to ashes. An invisible but clearly audible voice that sounded like my Nayeru spoke to me and echoed distantly in ripples that bridged through space and time. Behind me, I saw my body on the ground, bled out, and I saw the priest Magalesti leaning over me, and telling my empty vessel, “You are now dead you goddamn vampire.”
I witnessed him tying the feet of my vessel with a thick twine and then dragging me behind him.
“Don’t look back, and just follow my voice, Enttu, follow the lights you are creating with your spirit body. Nothing in this plane can harm you.”
“Nayeru, is that you?” my voice echoed the vast, barren blackness. It was so expansive and yet so silent, that a pin drop would resonate through here.
The ground below me or what felt like it had no foundation and infinite, warping depth. I was walking above a firmament of stars on either side of me, and comets of cerulean crystal tails whooshed by me at such a proximity. I grabbed the tail of the comet, only to realize my hand went right through it, though I felt the cold of the ice. My hands were translucent when I did look at them, and they appeared to melt inwards in the center. The backs of my palms were the same, silky, pale, and bony, but I could see through them. The path I walked directly below my feet was shallow water the same color as the firmament, but this was fluid that soaked through my shoes, and it felt refreshing, and smelt of fields of lavender. I removed my shoes and let my toes curl out and expand into the stellar water. I continued towards where my soul cut the ebony glimmering plane into light. Further ahead, I could see a circle on the ground illuminated in the shape of a pentagram of blue light, and this is where I needed to be. As I neared it, I could see the outlines of pine. It was a view of the limits of the physical plane I was transcending, the Wallachian forests on the outskirts of Meytros of the humans. I finally reached the pentagram and was able to walk above it, and then I sat in the center and meditated a while.
My surroundings took on a veil of teal light that illuminated as far as my eyes could see, and before me appeared a stairway of marble and gold, and instinctively, I proceeded onwards, this time, I noticed that I was now wearing a simple white robe made of a fine material of light and something like velvet. My hair went flying straight up when I reached the top of the stairway onto a platform that had two marble pillars that extended at least one hundred feet up. The platform overlooked an amphitheater all the universes, solar systems, and galaxies, and in front of the platform, there was another stairway made of glass that started upright but then curled upside down, like the tracks built for toy cars. I wondered how in tarnation would I cross that without falling into space.
A voice that I heard behind me entered my thoughts and spoke in an unnaturally deep bass that was otherworldly in nature. I still made out as English through its gurgling annunciation.
“There are no laws of gravity here. There are no limits,”
I turned, and what I saw made my skin crawl, and I almost had a heart attack that would’ve killed me had I not already been dead. I saw a grey creature that I had seen before in my dreams of the ziggurats and of other bizarre worlds, its insect-like, luminous black eyes bore into me. It pointed me to the direction of the steps and motioned me to go on. I did without question, hoping to not see any more like him, and I sensed strongly that the energy of the creature was male.
Endless loops and thousands of steps that curved over nearby worlds were encircled by rings of colored ice and gas. Strange metallic vessels flew all around me that I had never once before, and they stole away at least a third of the stars when they approached. I finally reached two monolithic golden gates, tucked away between the ethereal and light astral planes, as far as I knew, non-tangible and inaccessible in the physical plane, in the same existential nature as those grey awful beings.
Two guards, these winged, gold-skinned creatures with platinum hair much like mine let me in the gates, almost as if they expected me. I could have only assumed they were what I was taught were angels, they let me on through, and opened the gates that led to an expansive courtyard made of glass tile that shone pristine, reflective blue light that mirrored the cosmos. And in a gazebo of gold, pearl, and diamond, was the blue-skinned, lavender haired goddess of the moon, our Selene. She looked just like the way she was described in textbooks and spoken about through vampiric testimonials. The only exception was that she had no pupils, or irises, only whitish purple light that shone through almond-shaped eye sockets. I bowed down to her, and she came to me, placed her hands on my back, and motioned me up.
In her presence, I felt so much at peace, so serene, as she bathed me in the same purple light of her eyes, that suspended me off my feet and flowed all around me, into the very depths of my spirit. I felt gentle vibrations of a higher frequency and an ocean of balmy water in every fiber, every nerve, every cell, every chakra, swirling in the depths of my being. She spoke to me about my purpose on earth while the light carried me in limbo and told me I could not stay here. Nayeru and Vanya came to mind, and telepathically, I had asked her if it was my wife who guided me here. She affirmed that it was but that I was not ready to meet her until the time came in the physical plane that I was ready. She told me not to worry, and that it was part of the reason I was born into an immortal vessel.
It couldn’t have been that immortal, I was most certainly dead and gone in the physical astral plane, I had even seen my corpse. Had I gone back, I wondered if I would reanimate into a catatonic creature without brain function except for the frontal lobe, a zombie. I desperately longed to be with my wife, my daughter, my Selenians. Above me, when I opened my eyes to see, I had seen hundreds of green and blue stars shooting above us into a nearby horizon
behind the courtyard. I had asked Selene what was happening.
“They are the people of our coven, Enttu, you will find that most of them have tragically deceased. Which is why you cannot linger here too long. I will send you back. You have a mission,”
I was flabbergasted at the news, and my heart shattered to think about my dear people who couldn’t save themselves. Just what kind of evil had truly befallen us that even vampires could not survive it?
“Basilisk is nearing our borders. Don’t let the loss of your people break your heart or you will assuredly be spiritually blinded. The demon feeds on hatred, and all forms of negativity, and knows no justice,”
I tried to inquire more but she sent me off sooner than I could form my words, along with a blue dagger of the same material as the tile of the courtyard. She struck a singing bowl, and then the spirit of a tall thin man in a red kimono, with floor-length black hair, and cerulean eyes showed me the way back and we retraced the path that led me here. Beside him was one of those grey creatures with the massive black insect eyes, and my skin crawled feeling its stare into me. Mentally, it conveyed a message into my head, in its bass-deep unearthly voice.
“Let me be of assistance to you in all dimensions of this universe,”
Grief-stricken, and still reeling with dregs of bitterness and sorrow, I rudely dismissed the creature in a harsh command to “spare me his unwanted company and his silly stories.” Much later into the 20th century, I came to regret this, but that is as far as I will elaborate here.
The young man floated above me and kept a hand on my shoulder that gently shoved me forward the entire way onwards. It took me a while to recognize him as the very spirit we honored and revered, the great Alucard, deceased son of Dracula who was murdered for contending against his own father. He had dedicated his existence in the “further” in assisting the Selenian coven.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 22