SHE’S HOLDING THE DAGGER ABOVE HER HEAD, the candle lights flickering off its silver surface, and for a second I can only think how beautiful it all looks.
I also think how it’s going to feel having it plunged into my chest, but that comes a second later, after my mind has finished catching up and I’m ready to fully appreciate the fact this is my last living moment. Arani seems to do the same because the smile on her sprawled lips, two rows of porcelain white teeth on display, can’t be contained. She’s been waiting for this a long time and she’s finally getting her due.
Well, at least one of us is happy with my upcoming death.
“If you have any last words, child,” she says slowly, tongue licking blood red lips impatiently, “you better utter them now for the Beyond is forever silent.”
“I hope it is, after that ten-minute monologue,” I say, wriggling in my restraints and attempting to find a comfortable place on the marble altar one last time. I quickly give up with a disapproving grunt, feeling my back get stiffer.
The two guards behind her lose their composure for a moment and smile in the shadows the candles don’t reach. They think I can’t see them because Arani can’t, she wouldn’t be able to tell without one of her spells even if she was facing them under such limited light, but I’m not her. Which, all things considered, isn’t the best deal right now. She’s the one about to gut me and I’m the one chained on the world’s most uncomfortable sacrifice table.
She lowers the dagger. “Tell me, child, do you regret your insolence? Your jaded judgement? You could’ve had it all. I could’ve given you everything if only you’d agreed to join me.”
A war against humanity, the First Murderers, has been talked about forever and is considered more tradition than an actual goal by now. The ones that know and aren’t blind to what the shadows hold, have hunted both witches and vampires down since the dawn of man to this very day, bringing us close to extinction more than enough times. But both factions forget that it was each group’s fault they stopped hiding. We wanted more, and more, and more, making our presence known more than we had to. More than we should have.
Arani wants to go to war with humans, all humans, and was the first witch crazy enough to, unlike many before her, actually make an effort to come through with her words. Recruiting vampires to her already big coven has doubled her numbers tremendously the past few years and, honestly, I don’t know if she could be stopped if she decided to make the first move. Witches are little elitist, self-absorbed bastards that think they deserve to have their sparkly fingertips in everyone’s pies, and vampires—we think we’re better than everyone else, even among us, because that’s how we survive, but there’s one thing that’s never allowed us to actually kill humans in massive numbers: their souls. Human souls are the source of Meridian, the pool of magic witches draw power from, the same source that’s said to give vampires their very life force. If humans go extinct… hell, if humans just so much as decrease in numbers dramatically, witches will wither away and vampires will drop dead. Killing them would kill us.
Arani and her followers would rather massively commit suicide to “purge this veil of the sickness that’s called humanity”, rather than put on their big supernatural being pants and shut up. Thankfully, the other covens and families don’t see things her way, they’re too sane to listen to ancient prophecies, but there’s still a frightening amount of stray witches and vampires that believe in her.
No, they don’t just believe. They worship her.
This is why she invited everyone willing to listen to her coven’s church, under tonight’s full moon. An open call to the masses offering eternal power and riches beyond the mind’s eye, if only we’d just “stop and think”. It was a glorified recruitment office.
I had to check it out because Arani’s movements have been my top priority for two years now, being seemingly the only one actively making an effort to not just allow her to kill us all. Instead of worrying about feeding this entire week, I’ve been saving humans from constant attacks, fighting and killing her lackeys so they don’t accidentally completely eradicate the city’s human population. My activities have caught her attention before, she knows who Erin Fryar is because her followers have returned home bloody and broken more than once with my name on their cut lips, but this time it was different. This time she was prepared.
“I told you I want no part in your stupid war. I told you from day one. But you didn’t listen back then, you don’t listen now.”
“On the contrary, night’s blood. I did listen and it is because of my attendance to your words you’re now here, about to join your brothers and sisters.”
She killed everyone in the church with one of the most powerful magic spells I have ever witnessed, leaving broken bones and disassembled extremities on the floor. The ones who agreed to join her, the ones that survived; I saw the look in their eyes when they realized what she had done. What they had allowed her to do. Nobody said anything, they just followed the witches out of the church as they promised them rest and a month’s supply of blood just for agreeing to join, but nobody will forget. The ones who will are sure to rise in the ranks of Arani’s coven quickly, becoming a few more loyal vampires to do her bidding.
But still, “brothers and sisters” is a reach when I barely knew any of those vamps and had no intention of ever doing so. Vampires forming pacts, or families like some find such joy in calling them, is stupid and dangerous. Big numbers draw attention, attention brings hurt or death.
I’ve still ended up one step too close to dying but at least it was my big mouth that did me in and not some false sense of safety.
Arani whispers something, an incantation that’s not charged with magic, but with a bowed head and closed eyes, she clearly believes the words. That’s one more problem with witches: unlike us, they want to remember the past a bit too much. Honoring your ancestry is a great shtick, but willing to destroy everything just so bones and dust don’t disown you is cutting it a bit too close to insanity.
“I’m praying for you,” she says after a while, opening her eyes slowly. “You’re but a lost child… yet I hope they welcome you.”
“Welcome me? Isn’t the Beyond “forever silent”? Are they huggers? Let me be honest,” I smile, intentionally allowing my fangs to show, “I hate hugs.”
She looks at me, silently. The candle next to my face is about to burn out completely and I see for a moment a wave of sadness cradle her features, like she’s not really there, this is just something she needs to do and then return to her real mission.
I also see the certainty of her actions, how nothing can change her mind.
She takes the few steps to reach my side, and touches my arm, her hand warm and dry. I don’t recoil despite my everything screaming I should. Looking down upon me with freakishly convincing compassion, she shakes her head. I register her other hand that's holding the weapon rising again.
I don’t find it beautiful anymore.
“The weak will never survive.”
And with that, she brings the dagger down, fully sinking it into my chest, and all I can think between the white-hot pain and my senses dulling to a lull is how this is exactly the way I imagined death to feel like.
Comments (1)
See all