Out of the astral haze, Dalton the toddler appeared in front of Regina and pointed to the burnt body of Nayeru, and silently conveyed to his mother to slip back in here. The baby helped her, and she held Dalton’s hand, before she slipped back into the corpse. Once she was in, she at first saw pitch black, but then when she awoke, she was in severe pain from cervical contractions.
The air around her had the sterile, alcohol-like smell of a hospital, and she found herself in the patient’s garb of a hospital gown and she felt the dull prick of IV’s in her wrists. There was a doctor in green scrubs at the end of the stretcher, between her legs that were spread open to push out a baby that had decided to make his grand entrance into the world too early. There was a white board, with the name, “Baby Dalton” written in cursive with a dry-erase marker, and the date next to it was May 27th, 2016. It dawned on her that she was back inside the hospital at Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, in the maternity ward.
It smelt like blood, her own blood, spraying out of her vagina, all over the bedsheets underneath her and coating her thighs in the fluid. She screamed in pain when the doctor told her to give one final push, and she was assisted on the way up by none other than her estranged ex-husband, Jedediah. When she turned to look at his face, it was bruised and screwed up, and his teeth were sharp, white and pointed. She screamed again in terror, and then the doctor handed her a bundle.
She took the bundle to her chest, and it was the stillborn baby she’d already given birth to before. It was a faint blue, and he was still so precious even though he’d been born dead. She wept out loud, as she held her baby boy, ignoring the sharp, shooting pain between her legs from her bruised and bleeding genitalia. A comforting darkness beheld her, and it fell all around her like a velvety balm. In this blackness, it smelt sweetly of roses all around her, and then, she realized she was inside of a coffin, still, with the little boy in her arms. Outside of the coffin stood the wavy-haired woman, the vampire Enttu with his eyes reddened from nonstop sobbing, and behind them, she seen something bone-chilling that she couldn’t look away from. Two grey aliens observed everything from the distance, at the top of a hill, where the night hung over them.
Everything was hazy and buzzing, like she was living inside of a film. She slipped out of the coffin, leaving behind the body of the wavy-haired woman that had once been her not too long ago at the hospital. The wavy-haired replica outside the coffin was the ghost of the woman whom the dhampir couldn’t see, but Regina could. Next to this woman, appeared Dalton in toddler form. And next to Regina, appeared another Dalton in the same way.
The two Daltons happily ran toward each other, the gleeful giggle of babies enlivening the somber atmosphere. They hugged each other and smiled sheepishly at one another, speaking in baby talk, and clumsily stumbling on around the other. Regina’s eyes brimmed over with silent tears when the answer to all this dawned upon her. She had reincarnated from this woman, Nayeru, who had reincarnated from Elvira, the young witch who was the lover of Alucard the vampire. Her deceased son Dalton, who had aged in the dimension of her dreams to an angelic toddler of coconut-brown hair and honey eyes was the reincarnation of Nayeru’s and Enttu’s unborn son, whom had perished along with Nayeru when she was murdered. The two Daltons marched away from Nayeru and Regina in blissful peace, towards a path of light, and then they were never seen once they traversed the lit horizon. The two grey aliens, their naked glossy skin a mottled, gunmetal color, approached Regina and Nayeru. They were very ugly, and hideous to look at, with their oversized, abysmal black eyes, and unnaturally large heads. Their four fingered hands had large black claws, and the had slits for mouths and noses. They didn’t mutter a word to Regina, but they motioned her to go with them, and she protested, at how ugly they were, and she couldn’t trust them.
“We can’t help the way we look. Besides, beauty is subjective, and we think we’re beautiful,” one of the two mentally conveyed to her in a bass male voice.
Back in the Phantom Castle….
Nicolae and Enttu had split off to begin the search for Regina, the female vampire, disappeared from their sites. The underside of the castle was a whole other, expansive temple that the dhampir had never recalled before, in dream nor reality. It was expansive and reached past heights of over one hundred feet in some passageways made of blackened marble and limestone. There were dancing black wraiths that hovered above in the darkness of the ceiling in harmless display, and Enttu recognized some of them as some deceased Selenians. They preferred to be called Alucardians. No light saves for the flames of candles in menorahs screwed into the walls shone in here. For everything that the flame light did touch, it was either black or red, and glossy. The air in here was rancid, from old, decrepit wood and decay. It also smelt of the fishy metallic odor of roaming insects, namely cockroaches, that Enttu despised with a visceral passion. The pitter patter of his boots echoed in the marbled floor of the expansive passage he ran in, towards the shadow of a ceramic monolith of a winged creature. He held his blue-glass dagger that the goddess Selene had given him when he made his quick visit to the Afterlife that she quickly booted him out of.
An angel choir emanated from the statue the closer he approached it, and once he stood before it, it turned its head and eyes toward him, and it caused him to jump back in defense. It’s bat-like wings spread open side to side and fluttered. With each flutter, color came spilling back into the statue, first the opalescent raven wings, and then the crimson and gold duster, then the black leggings and red calf-length boots, with a black tunic tucked into his pants. To life came a black-haired, blue eyed man that cocked its head upon recognition of the platinum blonde dhampir prince gawking in awe up at him. He descent down to greet him in benevolence and instructed Enttu to put his dagger away. Violence wasn’t necessary here.
“Prince Enttu Tepes, we finally meet,” the black-haired man bowed down, “Pleased to meet you. I am your ancestor as well as your past-life before you were reincarnated into whom you are today. My name is Alucard, son of Vlad Tepes the Impaler, Voivode of Wallachia in the 15th century. Otherwise, whom you know as Dracula,”
“Lord Alucard,” Enttu bowed down to his ancestor, who was essentially him, with raven colored hair.
“Follow me, my protégé,” said the elder vampire.
“My father Nicolae is trapped somewhere in this castle. He went looking for my lover, Regina. I can’t leave them behind,”
Alucard chuckled gently and shook his head.
“Don’t worry for either one of them. Nicolae is dead, he is only a phantom. And as for Regina, Nayeru, Elvira, she is all three women in one, she is discovering her own truths about her past. Don’t interfere in the works of the Lower Astral Planes. You will need to come to accept the darkness of your own as well as of your loved ones if you want to defeat the return of Basilisk. Sekhmet sent me to you,”
“Sekhmet, the original vampire Goddess? What about Selene?”
“Selene won’t meddle with this plane. Besides, she has the Afterlife to guard,”
“So, if these are the Lower Astral Planes, then why is Nicolae here?”
“Because Enttu, these planes are largely shaped and influenced by all of the negative emotion you carry within yourself. Most of everything you see here is the product of your own mental burdens that you haven’t resolved. Nicolae has transgressed to where you won’t find him, but you see him here because his loss still poisons you. Plenty of the things you see here do. Follow me,”
Alucard led Enttu past an open space underneath an arching mausoleum, and in here, they were both swallowed by a bottomless abyss. The nauseating tickle of falling to his death almost caused the blonde dhampir to vomit blood, but the black haired dhampir stayed with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I leave you now, Enttu. You have my eternal blessing, my young protégé. I’m honored that Sekhmet chose you,”
And with that, Alucard disappea
red, and Enttu landed upon an unpaved road, illuminated by yellow street lamps with a thud. It was cold, and the silence here was loud.
Who is Dracula, exactly?
Wispy willows lined the curving road on the hill that was lit by sparsely spaced, yellow street lamps. Like this hill, there was a formation of plenty of others, steep and rolling, high and curved like the tops of mushroom caps, green with trees and vegetation. Daytime never came here, it was a perpetual night, mostly always, moonless and pitch black. Civilization was practically a myth here, except for a few humble houses, miles apart. The air felt cool and dry, overlooking the cliffs that opened to a horizon where the black firmament met with a thin red line of the setting sun. It was also a little harder to breathe the thinner, less oxygenated air. Endurance of the lungs would have greatly sufficed at these great heights. Across a small single-family house on the peak of the hill, where an older, boxy sedan was parked beside the house, there was a weeping willow with its branches perched high above a white metal rocking chair where one could overlook the valleys. The seat was taken, and Enttu found himself in the pleasure of tranquility, where he meditated in silence with his eyes open, vicariously through the nature he craved all around. The willow tree lit up with blue fireflies that swarmed around the leaves and branches like dime-sized nymphs that radiated neon blue and smelt of nag champa incense when they whizzed on by. A grey alien had appeared in his left corner, observing through deep and oversized black eyes that wrapped around its misshaped head. Planets appeared above, in distant, diaphanous circular shapes.
He’d come to the point in his life where he had accepted their visit at the edge of the cliff with the willow, by his rocking chair. Though the rest of his life before he reached this point, he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that he lived on his own, and that every few months the rain would rebirth the waterfalls that led to the edge of the earth. The small grey creature on his left led him on to the street, where it walked past where the lamp post illuminated, and walked up a smaller hill that led up to a dark plateau only dimly lit by the galaxies and the reachable visible planets. The alien perched itself atop the plateau, while Enttu stopped in his tracks to examine the scene before going any further, and from what he saw right away, he remained where he was. Ahead, the oval-shaped head of the alien spoke to a towering shadowy figure in a floor-length cloak that gently swayed in the breeze.
Behind the shadow of the man and the alien, a neon red disk of sanguine light that had small wings on either side rose above the plateau but didn’t illuminate the blackness, only the two beings. Much to Enttu’s shock, he immediately recognized who was the other vampire, Narciso Tepes, in full and thoughtful dialogue with the alien. Another grey’s presence was felt lingering right behind the dhampir, and he looked peripherally, when the being sent him a telepathic message to “Not attack, merely see. My name is Kyorg, I am your friend,” said the other grey, named Kyorg. Narciso was seen fallen to his knees, and he transformed into a white haired, white skinned being with long pointed ears.
Beside him on either side, there were two women, one of them blue-skinned, with bulbous and oversized, juicy black eyes, and the other woman, red-skinned, with cat like ears and the same grape jelly pools to see out of. They were staring beyond the dhampir straight ahead, but Enttu couldn’t take his gaze off them, almost in repulsion of the real state of the women. The Goddess Selene and the Goddess Sekhmet were indeed aliens as well, and this was their true nature. The white-haired man who looked like an older, paler version of him was struck by a wand of silver and amethyst in the hand of Selene. One rap, and he turned into a stone, which shortly after, it molts off like an exoskeleton and vaporized into dust that was carried away by the wind. He was a real-like mamushka doll! The next layer revealed was a man with long black hair and a heavily marked widow’s peak. He had long, dirty fangs, so he was a vampire, and a swarm of small black bats hovered around him. When he tried to reach his hand out to Sekhmet, she touched his forehead with one rap of a metallic red rod with a glowing citrine at the end of it.
“That is Dracula, the one responsible for splitting your kind into two separate covens, only about 600 years ago,” Kyorg mentally conveyed to Enttu, in a synthetic monotone voice.
Dracula petrified into place, and then this skin molt off and went into the air as a giant shadow of a bat with sanguine circular light in the background. From Dracula, there was Narciso again, his face in his hands, on his knees. This time, Selene rapped at him again, and he petrified into a hard, opaque blue shell, that cracked and ebbed into the atmosphere as many tiny black bats that flew towards, and past the dhampir and Kyorg who hid behind Enttu’s black velvet cape, tugging the fabric with his four-fingered hands. It turned out, from what he could make of it, that Narciso was from Dracula, who was from the unidentified white-haired man. The two goddesses pointed past him and at Kyorg. The two turned to see what was being pointed at, and that is when they saw the planets fast approaching the atmosphere of Earth as spinning, neon balls of gas and rock, coming to collide with the surface. Once more, he looked behind back to the goddesses, and saw the winged red orb, a planet, had a black hole open in its center, and it was sucking in all of the stars on that side of the firmament. The gravity was so strong, the planets were getting sucked in as well.
He’d lost his footing when the pull knocked him off his feet and dragging him into the infinite dark cyclone. It howled loudly like a violent hurricane and pulled trees off their roots. The dhampir clung onto the trunk of a willow tree, when the body of his grey friend Kyorg, was ripped away by the black vortex, and then Enttu also went with it, and he was swallowed into the endless cycle of black clouds and the stardust of supernovas.
Inside the gaseous and freezing black clouds of stardust and dark matter he spun inside a cosmic whirlpool. He cursed and screamed out loud, in English and in Romanian. Then finally, he landed again, this time, on his feet. He was now standing in a desert-like land full of sand dunes. The light here was nonexistent except for the deep red that dropped down from the sky, making everything appear as shadows against cloudy blood. There was a black watered sea ahead of him that glistened with white specks of moonlight.
Tiamat.
His boots hit solidly against the compacted sand, and the arid, hot gusts swept up his cape sideways. Enttu cuffed up the sleeves of his shirt and undid the top two buttons, then wiped off a thin film of sweat forming on his temple. Among the minute, trivial things he detested, heat was one of them. He’d become well acclimated to Romania’s relatively cool temperatures, which remained that way as he was also a nocturnal creature. Ahead in the distance, atop of a sand dune, there stood the shadow of a mustang, it’s coat glistening like black satin in the night. The steed felt the vampire’s presence and turned its head toward him, as the other squinted to make sense of the unbetraying energy he felt pulsating in his hands. The horse noticed the blue aura around the vampire before noticing him, and then it neighed once or twice. With two fingers in his mouth, Enttu whistled twice, sharply at his old companion and trusty stallion, Mephisto, who was a gift from his mother Dayanara when he was a ten-year-old boy. Mephisto had perished in the grand ambush of 1894 in Lower Meytros.
The mustang came galloping toward the vampire, kicking up dust under its hooves, when he reached his master, he bowed his head down in reverence, and he let the vampire stroke his mane. Mephisto’s coat felt smooth and cool, and Enttu made a psychic eye to eye connection with him to regain his trust, speaking in warm, soothing tone to him.
“Du ma la baiatul de la mare, eh?” he whispered to Mephisto.
The mustang let out a billow through its nostrils, almost in complaint. The vampire planted his palms firmly on the center back on the animal, and then he swung his leg over its rump until he sat securely on its back. With the side soles of his boots, he gently tapped Mephisto’s sides, and gave the order to take off into the night.
“Hyyaah!” and the mustang too
k off with the vampire mounted on him, and they both looked like majestic black silk figures, shimmering like satin, contrasting with the severe alabaster pallor of Enttu’s cold skin.
They galloped towards the shore of the black ocean that rippled like a giant pool of liquid fountain pen ink but could never seem to reach it once Enttu thought they were getting close. More and more they pushed on, until he noticed that they had went further into where the water should have been. This made him a bit apprehensive and caused a surge of adrenaline to course through his semi-functioning systems, where his heart still beat on its own due to him being a half-breed. If the water were to come rushing back in, both Mephisto and him would both meet a watery grave, as most vampires couldn’t swim, and the negative charge of salt water rendered their metaphysical powers useless. He waited a few seconds for the deluge of death to come rushing in, but nothing happened. Then, the black water ahead vanished into white sand altogether.
“The fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
He stepped off Mephisto and led him to where the water had receded into, and a barren land that had once been an ocean floor surrounded them, with dead kelp and the shells of sea animals strewn about the sands. The ground beneath began to tremble and caused the dhampir to stumble forward, but he caught himself by shifting his weight to one side. Out from the ground, appeared a scantily clad woman surrounded by a dark purple mist, and her skin was grey, her hair covered by a slickened black helmet that hung in an arch and reached her heels. She wore an outfit of black vinyl-like material, but its quality seemed like it was organic, and it didn’t look removable. The outfit barely covered her breasts and where her vulva would have begun, more of the material covered from here on down as a skin-tight skirt that wrapped where her legs should have been all the way down, but there was no culmination where her feet should have been. Instead, the material coiled and coiled, like the tail of a snake. Her slit tongue flagged out of her black lips and lapped at the presence of the dhampir. From nowhere, she produced a beautiful, young woman, a red-haired damsel that sobbed as she was shoved on her knees to the roughed-up soles of Enttu’s boots. He looked confusingly down at the girl, and then at the snake-woman, who turned out to be none other than Tiamat, from his textbook knowledge.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 32