Thrice Advent chapters three and four

Aflarien

The soldiers had been ordered to hide in the forest on its southward side.   Their faces smeared with mud and their green robes streaked brown with dirt.   An order of silence was signalled through the canopy of branches.   Beneath the autumn leaves, Aflarien wandered along a hidden avenue of oaks and searched the secrets of the forest.   He didn’t notice the soldier, a mere dark silhouette behind him but for a glint of the blade that reflected in the sunset.  

The Storytellers were usually paid in the mushroom for their stories.   From out of the memory of the old race those stories stemmed and the oldest stories Aflarien loved the most.   So as he stooped and bent to the leaf-littered ground to pick up the occasional clairvaric and put them in his pocket as he mused about the story of the dragon and its’ slayer, the mighty Yeric.   Yeric was worshipped in some isolated shrines and temples on the plains of Meringal as a God.   One day soon Aflarien had decided he would take the pilgrims’ route to Ket where there was a great statue of Yeric and the holiest of shrines and a festival where the enactment takes place.  One day soon, he thought, as he wandered.   He would be glad to get out of this forest on the edge of the world and learn something new instead of the names of all the different mushrooms.    He had thought in his idle moments he would be picked to be a priest or that he might be chosen to go to Ashenmoire, but this was but a dream.   As the figure detached itself from the deeper recesses of the forest, stole up toward the young man, a black darkness fell over Aflarien and for a long, long time he plummeted down.  After that day he would never be the same again.

Aflarien stumbled from the sea of sleep out of one starlessness into another empty dark.   He grasped at the blackness about him like a blind man searching for his dreams.   The cell was all there was and he howled once more as he had done each time he’d woken in the stench filled prison; no one heard.   None listened to his wailing anymore.   He got up and slid in a pile of shit he’d left the night before and Aflarien fell again into the wall, his face soaked by pools of piss.   It was so quiet but for the racing of his heart, empty but for the desperate smell of his sweat, dank with fear.

Then the young lad heard the laughter of the guards.   He began to remember – they took me.   Bile gushed onto the cell door from his dry mouth.   They took me and they burnt me Oh Yeric of the graces let someone help me.   The cell door was pushed open like a cloud revealing a desert sun.   Garek, the warder, pulled him up from the vomit and piss then dragged him from the cell down the parched prison corridor to the door of Berengar’s office.   Berengar sat hunched over his desk, a large plain table strewn with papers and invoices.   At the corner behind him a long sword, intricately filigreed with gold and ruby, leant against the wall.   The obese bald man seemed unaware of the presence of Aflarien and the warder.   He eventually put down the papers he was reading concerning troop deployments around Meringal and sniffed at the foul air they’d brought in with them.   Berengar turned his eyes to his underling.

“You’re dismissed.”   As Garek quickly scampered from the office Berengar forced himself from the chair and walked towards Aflarien.   The youth couldn’t move, weary with hunger and despair, yet somehow he reached his hand to the uniformed man as if he was his best friend, his only friend in the world.   Berengar took the hand, despite his distaste of the long, dirt encrusted nails and the awful stench coming from the boy.   Why the nak the countess would want this one he had no idea.  She lived on her whims and liked them young, and Berengar, her faithful servant, always delivered that which she required.   The soldier took his hand and lifted him from the stone floor and led him to a chair, wise enough to put some old parchments on it before the boy sat.   Aflarien met the gaze of his captor for the first time.

“Look at the nakkin’ mess yer in,” he said with a jealous contempt.   “There’s a washroom down the corridor.”   He went to the closet where he kept his old uniforms, relics of the thinner man he’d been.

“Wash yerself and put this on…I want it back mind,”

Aflarien stood up again, trembling.

“The Countess wants…she wants to see you.”   He remembered the nights he had spent with Krostic when Grannald, the old Count still lived and he could still see the old man’s stark threatening eyes as he stuck him with the Countess’ silver blade.

Once Aflarien had drunk deeply from a water basin and had scrubbed himself as best he could, until the water was black, he put on Berengar’s old uniform baggy on his skinny frame.   The officer paced impatiently in the corridor until the kid emerged from the washroom.   Berengar motioned for him to follow as he took off briskly from the basement of R’thera, up the steeply graded stone stairway, worn away by hobnailed boots and the red stains that were all that remained of long dead prisoners.   Finally, they reached Countess Krostic’s arbour where a cool fountain and scents from the gardens of the Keep refreshed him of his weariness and light-headedness after the endless race to keep up with Berengar.   He continued through the silk drapes that led to the garden where torches of red flame hung from the walls that enclosed the arbour on all four sides.   It’s garden seemed so bright in the darkness of the heavens that it seemed a place of perpetual day.   Beyond the line of elms which Berengar raced through where broken and fallen statues of old Gods and Kings lay scattered like carrion on a battlefield. Then in their midst stood a woman so slender, her pale face bathed in the firelight and her lustrous dark hair aflame in the red light  Aflarien stumbled in awe and knelt at her feet as if by some others’ volition.   She stood as still as the statues yet she was neither flawed nor broken.   While he knelt his wet hair anointed her bare feet- she turned and glared at Berengar.   He shrugged off a bow and told the boy to get up.   Aflarien lifted his head and felt her gaze like a thousand fingers massaging his brain.

“Looks good in a uniform, doesn’t he Berengar?   You can go now, have some dinner you look a bit peaky,” she laughed coldly and took Aflarien by the hand and led him into the deeper recesses of the garden

Aflarien accepted to be her slave. What choice had he? She had tethered his will to hers. She led, he followed.  Behind the black mist of his desires he foresaw a day when he’d walk equally by her side. He kept these secrets to himself and obeyed his mistress at all times.  More and more often Krostic treated him well, yet tested him time after time.  She trusted him now; after all there was no escape from her. She led him, that night before the war, once more to the walled garden, high walls hiding the stars. She opened the gate into the garden and whispered into Aflarien’s ear.

“There is such a world beyond these walls, walk beside me and I will show you its wonders.”  He let her guide the way under the hanging bowers of the overgrown trees beyond the Countess’ door. Through the screen of trees, breaking through cobwebs, and snagged by the braches they saw ahead a vast lawn spread out under the sun. She was dressed in black with a silver sash falling down her shoulders and over her breasts. The sash gleamed like moonlight and as he stepped on the lawn Aflarien thought in fact her heart was a star trying to burst radiantly from the confines of her flesh. She walked ahead of him stepping lightly as he feet passed over the fragile mushrooms. They were of all variety, those poisonous and wholesome.  She came to a rise in the lawn and soon she was dancing and cavorting to some inner dervish sounds of the voices of the mushrooms.  Aflarien bent to inspect them, to his surprise there were a few he had never seen before. When he stood up again he found Countess Krostic was standing beside him, a youthful grin on her face, she seemed a teenage girl – the weight of time fading from her.

“Why don’t you eat one?”

“What are they?’”Aflarien asked

“O,” she laughed, bent to her knees. “They are very poisonous. They will kill you eventually....” she picked a mushroom Aflarien had been studying.  She handed it to him. “Eat.”

“But, may Lady...” Aflarien hesitated, his hand hovering over her pale, slender hand, her blue veins visible.

“Eat. Take it, Aflarien.” Krostic’s eyes were now hard and stern.  In a second he took the mushroom, shrugging his shoulders and popping the mushroom in his mouth.  There was silence for a long time in the walled garden. The stones of the red walls were trellised in spidery veins. The red rock was embedded with the blood of the long dead slaves that had built R’thera. Over these walls into the free lands rolling away in waves Aflarien’s first scream echoed.

Tonight was a night of nightmare as if a chasm had split open the World and from its ancient bowels fresh evil issued. 

Aflarien became a wolf.  He looked about him and howled in the night. He howled for his pack, he yearned for their company. But they were beyond the walls and no matter how high he jumped he was always thrown back into the garden, on this side, the side where laughter was eaten. He saw the Countess with his sharp eyes; she was on her hands knees chewing at the grass like a goat. He pressed his long face to the grass, watching her, waiting for her to turn. When he saw her fear he would attack. When she was shaking and frozen to the spot he would rush forwards and rip out her throat. He’d drink the ruby fountain of her blood as she twisted beneath him, rolling in an orgasm of death. But as she turned to look at him, the huge, slavering wolf, Aflarien quailed like a beaten dog. Pulses of purple orange and reddish lights flowed from Krostic’s eyes. The light blossomed and encompassed the garden, swamping him. Aflarien lost his footing and began to drown in the sea of light which had become his world.

The wolf stalked.

 He had struggled to the surface of the sea of light and saw on the horizon an island, barely ten feet across. As he struggled forwards all he could was a see a figure on the island looking out at him. The figure waved. He swam faster.  She became clearer. It was her. She drew him like a magnet as his eyes rested on her hands with which from the invisible air she pulled fruit of different variety and wheat. She devoured them, quick with hunger. As he pulled himself out of the water, a dishevelled, half drowned cur, water gushed from his soaking fur.

 Countess Krostic dragged from the aether about her great slabs of meat, halves of cows and a flock of birds: chickens, geese and ducks and rarer birds that fluttered their wings in terror as she enlarged her mouth opening it huge and wide, swallowing every bit of them. He cowered afraid of her, whimpering at the rocks at the edge of the sea. She grew larger and immense with power. With a shriek of delight her hands fought an invisible adversary. Into the sunlight a couple, a blind man joined at their shoulders with a blind woman.

 They were embracing, kissing each other, aware of nothing but their kisses.  These too she devoured. She ate rock and shale. The wolf watched her eat a mountain and so became so huge he could not see her head above the clouds. The wolf knew that she would eat the Moon the Sun and also the stars lost in the uninterrupted dark. No doubt soon she would be so strong enough. She would be the ultimate power. She would always feed.  Krostic felt the presence of her slave far, far beneath her. Reaching down for him, cupping him in her hand like a precious egg, she lifted him high into the nightmare sky, and up still further. She took him to the shadows of stars far beyond the confines of Menerth leaving him to howl there alone.

Then he fell. The howl fell into a scream and he fell into his human form. Aflarien Omelyn. Screaming. Falling and landing on the lawn of the walled garden. The colours of the water changed and solidified. He b lacks out. The long scream ends.

He awoke, or perhaps the dream changed to another and he was lying in the sweet smelling grass of the lawn. She was beside him.  Would she always be there? He wondered and closed his eyes against the heat of the sun. She cradles his head and smiles reassuring at him. He nestles there in the Krostic’s bosom, so warm. He looked out across the lawn, but the grass was scorched and denuded of beauty by stinking mounds of bodies, the long dead of a thousand wars called his name, demanding his attention, but he did not know what they wanted.

But her voice filled his head. Krostic kept telling him all he had to do was not to worry. So he lay back again and she looked at him. In the reflection of her eyes he saw a man exactly like himself rise from the grass holding aloft a great spear. He listened as the Countess told him just to lay back and close his eyes. Sleep. And he did.

                                                                            

 

 

Chapter 4

Misha’s Tale

 

                Jon Esierk had retired with his glass to the company of the warm fire, his pale eyes glinting with flames, turned to Misha and said,

                “Tell us the tale you told me on our way here, young clever one.”   Misha, tall, his black long hair sticking to his face with the sweaty heat of the tavern, his wine untouched upon the bar, turned to his audience whose laughter was silenced as he opened his mouth.

 

Once there was a city, eternally wreathed in smoke and fog, and there dwelt a vampire called Dalrosse who lived alone in a piano shop, a long way from the centre of the city.   The leaders of the Council of that city were cruel folk who left in the street the old, the vagabonds and the destitute to die rather than feed or bury them with dignity and into the endless night, once the sound of revelry had died down, Dalrosse would prowl upon the palsied flesh and the bitter, unsatisfying blood of these people that it seemed were left, as offerings, to placate his blood greed.   Then he would return once more to his dusty piano shop, alone, loved by none, and listless, as he never slept.   It seemed sometimes he wept for those he killed, mourned for them because none in that dismal city cared for them.   Yet, his tears were for himself.

One evening, he dressed himself in a seemly form of a gentleman and went into the town and milled in the crowds of the young and exuberant, tipsy with youth, their work left behind as they streamed into the street from theatre houses or taverns and built bonfires about which they danced.   That evening, as he watched the frolicking crowds Dalrosse fell in love for the first time.   A flaxen haired buxom girl, Gabrielle, stood alone, conspicuous by the lack of people about her.   She, it seemed, could find no enjoyment from the dance and drink, her face a frown of scorn to the merriment.   She placed her bonnet upon her head and turned her back upon the bonfire and started for home.   Dalrosse followed her.

She turned into the shadows of a side street where nobody could push and pull her, her skin dirty from the smoke of the fires and she could still hear the songs of the people who would dance until another false dawn.   Her tenement was just around the next corner and for a moment she thought she could hear a light footfall but put this down to the scurrying of a rat and didn’t look back.   As she turned into the last corner she heard a slight cough and felt a hand on her shoulder and as she twisted her head round she saw Dalrosse.

“Miss,” the dark man said, his accent foreign, the words unwillingly coming from his mouth as if with nervousness.   “I’m lost in these alleyways.   Could you direct me back to the centre.”

                                Ill at ease she kept walking forward.

“Just follow the alley back and head for the sound of the hullabaloo.”   Yet he continued to follow Gabrielle to the archway of her tenement so she turned to face him squarely, the yellow glow of her landlady’s flat light on his face.   How beautiful he was.   Not like the pasty faced city dwellers but erect with vitality and she gazed into the double blue of his eyes.   Breathlessly she asked,

                                “Who are you?”

“What does it matter what my name is Gabrielle.   Will you not show me the way back to the ‘hullabaloo’ and we can dance together?”   He took her cold hand and led her back the way she had walked.   Gabielle replied a minute or so later.

                                “I do not dance.”  

                                Dalrosse laughed.

                “Then I will show you, my sweet.”   With his free hand he stroked her hair then untied her bonnet and it fell to the cobbles behind their soft stepping feet.   He moved to her dry lips as if to kiss her but lifted her head and pointed to the sky.   She looked above the dark tenements where the smoke and fog had cleared and followed the arrow of his pointing finger.

                                “What is it?”

“It is the moon.   Have you never seen it before?” a tear of pity left frozen behind his eye.

                                She could hardly speak, then in a gush of exclamation.

“The moon, no, no, never.   This moon is the only light I’ve ever seen above this heartless city.”   Then as she stared, craning her neck, her hand in his, the vampire took her beyond the passed out, songless revellers and ebbing embers of the fires, down hills and then up to the piano shop.   Then as the smoke drifted back to obscure the moon she stepped into the threshold of her new and the last home she would ever know.   Gabrielle slept in the embrace of the sleepless vampire, dreaming of the moon.

He killed Gabrielle three weeks later and ate her flesh; Dalrosse could do no other.   A bliss of a honeymooning couple, the lovemaking of their days together were like sonic booms over the city that seemed to grab and gust away the smoke and clouds of the city and the bemused citizens sat under the blue of an endlessness day, the sun, a new friend, to laugh and play beneath unfretful and inebriated by the heat and light.  One morning, Gabrielle, as Dalrose tinkered on an old piano, cut her finger, the scent and sight of the tiny rivulet of blood wrenched the beast he was, back up his throat and his glamour fell away.   Then he came as a storm over the city, intoxicated by her fresh essence, and he fed upon the citizens as they lay in glory beneath the thing called the sky.   The starless moonless night fell again over the city like a mourning shroud.   And once more the citizens and Council became wary and fear was doused with drunkenness and the sacrifice of the poor to Dalrosse.

His second wife, Clarissa, was an actress at the Royal Theatre.  The enlightened folk of the city had been wooed by Clarissa with her pale, red haired beauty, sensitivity and passion.   She was a living legend and it was not by mere accident that Dalrosse, once more in the glamour, perched high on one of the boxes, scrutinising every detail of her form, had come and sought her out.   After the performance, as Clarissa removed her costume and makeup, Dalrosse slithered downward into the form of a lizard and scurried under the dressing room door.   As she wiped away the makeup from her face she felt a hot breath on her shoulder, but the mirror revealed no one behind her.   Then she felt a cold touch upon her bare shoulder and turned in fright and there in all his stark beauty the vampire stood.   He took her as his own, on the clothes strewn floor, his blue eyes piercing into her as she clenched around him, and as willingly as Gabrielle forsook her life in the city and went to live with him in the piano shop.  There also did she die.   His bloodlust was curdled and once more he ripped through the flesh of the city until his need for sweet blood was diminished.   Time and again he took wives and each fell and his rampages of grief became more and more bitter on the city dwellers until the Council employed the holy assassins to remove the curse from their city.

Dalrosse had taken Rose, a young dancer, as his lover.   She, it seemed to the ageless vampire, was the most beautiful woman, as if she were aspects of all his wives and Gabriele and Clarissa, perfected by the greatest aspect of Rose herself. He was determined not to let his blood lust destroy this new love.   So he went hunting as he had done before, while she slept peacefully in the piano shop, and rather than becoming intoxicated on her blood would prey upon the detritus of the city.   He stalked an old woman, a homeless dame who would scour the city for the leavings of others and try and sell them in the third hand shops in the morning.   If she was lucky she would find coins that were enough to buy her food or even lodgings and a place of safety to rest her weary body.   As Dalrosse watched her the holy assassins blessed their blades and waited for the vampire to be lured into their trap.   In vampire form, Dalrosse fell upon the woman and she offered her neck to him as if yearning death and then the hunters encircled him, the dull glint of their swords a warning unheeded as he fed.

A sword hacked off his arm and the old woman, drained and lifeless fell to the cobbles, steam and fire issued from Dalrosse’s wound and the assassin’s sword melted as if acid had destroyed it.    The luckless hunter felt the grip of Dalrosse’s other hand upon his neck and his head was ripped from his body.   Then as the other hunters rushed towards the vampire he ran heading for Rose and the piano shop.  He knew, deep within himself, that he would die this night and yearned to see Rose’s face once more.

       The vampire was like a bolt of lightening fleeing through the miserable streets of the city and at times he would double back and as he did killed two more hunters, slashing and drinking deep, then fled onwards.   However, as he returned home to Rose and her laughter, three shadows fell upon him and the one that survived plunged his pure blade into the vampire’s heart.   All strength and glamour was stripped from Dalrosse and even so, in his deformed and hideous form, he came to Rose’s side.   She awoke with a smile as she had been dreaming of him and even in his true form and almost destroyed, she saw him for what he was, her love.   The final hunter broke into the piano shop.

“Let me kiss you one last time,” he whispered and took her rose face in the hand that remained.   Their lips touched and it seemed an eternity that they rested upon each other’s lips.  Rose, with all her strength and love bit into the mouth of her dying lover and sucked the blood from him.   Dalrosse died.   As the hunter advanced upon the bed Rose lifted her eyes to him, which seemed to sparkle with all the light of life that Dalrosse had devoured.   Then the hunter fell to his knees, his sword clattering uselessly upon the wooden floors.   He fell into her gaze and was never seen again.

 

                A thunderous applause filled Erafien Omelyn’s inn and Jon Esierk smiled drunkenly at his young chelah.   At that point the soldiers stormed the village and attacked the inn.   Jon Esierk fell into a long sleep as the joy of the evening turned into a cacophony  of fear.