(A/N: Warning: Arachnaphobes might struggle a bit. Beware of body horror.)

Ariadne led Kerrass and me to a door at the side of the central receiving area. There were signs of recent rebuilding work that had been hidden behind a curtain when we first came down here and as such, the doorway had not been visible.

Opening the door, we found ourselves in another, much smaller, room, similar to the one that we had just left. Largely circular after the entranceway, domed with stone paving slabs on the floor. It looked recently swept, you could see the marks in the dust where someone had done a very quick job of pushing all the dust together. You can always tell because there are tracks in the dirt that the individual bristles of the broom have left.

How do I know this? Anyone who has been told to sweep out a stable would be able to tell you the difference between properly brushed and hastily brushed. There are some instances of this that still set my ears to ringing.

Inside the room were two figures that were wearing the same cowled, heavy-looking robes that Ariadne’s mother had been wearing. It was impossible to tell any kind of gender or characteristics under those hoods, so to me, they were just figures. Like statues in churchyards.

They were standing on either side of a magical portal. It was slightly different from the other portals that I have seen, including those portals that I have traveled through. There were no yellow or silver highlights. There were no runes around the edge. If you laid it flat on the ground then it would look like the service of a pond. A pond that was filled with dark, very dark, very red water. It looked thick and viscous so that if you run your fingers through it, your finger would literally leave a track in the liquid before the liquid came back together.

It was rippling.

We walked in, Ariadne leading the way when Kerrass swore.

“I fucking hate portals.” He commented.

“Why?” I wondered. “I mean, you’ve always complained and you always give a different version as to why but…”

“It doesn’t matter here.” One of the figures spoke in a rasping whisper. By which I mean that there was no sound other than the words being formed. I knew what was said. So did everyone else there. But there was no tone to it. No pitch.

The figure pointed. “You will not be coming,” it pointed at Kerrass. “Turn around and return to the entertainments of the other room.”

“It was arranged…” Ariadne began.

“The Elder has changed his mind.” The figure whispered. “You arranged for your betrothed to come. Nothing was said of a Witcher. You merely inferred it. The Elder suggests that, in future, you should be more careful about what you negotiate.”

The lack of tone in the whispered words conspired to make it seem harsher than it actually might have been. In this case, though, it was impossible to tell.

Kerrass shrugged. “Well Freddie.” he shook my hand. “It would seem that I won’t need to wait before I spend the evening with the Queen of the Night and her three lovely daughters.” He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

“Enjoy yourself Kerrass.” I told him. “At least do your best to make sure that everyone has a good time.”

“It’s alright.” He said. “It means I don’t have to walk through that portal, and I brought a stamina potion with me to help with the ladies. Admittedly it was in case something else happened but...”

We both chuckled. He looked up and nodded to Ariadne as the pair of them exchanged a glance. Kerrass turned to go before turning back.

“I wasn’t going to do this.” He said to the two cowled figures. “But I think, in this case, I will indulge myself. If Freddie doesn’t come out of this place, then I will find a way back in here, even if I have to dig with a shovel. Then I will hunt down every Elder Vampire that I can find and kill them. I know that it’s supposed to be impossible for anyone other than a fellow Elder Vampire to do that, but I would find a way.”

Then he turned and left through the door back to the party.

I looked at Ariadne and we shrugged at each other.

“Is he joking?” The other figure asked. A male voice, deep and raspy but still much more male.

I chuckled, I couldn’t help it.

“No,” Ariadne told him calmly. “Let us go.”

The cowled figures didn’t follow us into the portal.

For all that it didn’t seem like a normal mage portal, it felt exactly like a normal portal. That same shiver as though someone has just thrown a giant bucket of cold water over you. The strange sense of displacement as your body gets used to the fact that it has moved without moving. The change in the air and the different feelings underfoot.

It was cold, very cold. It was not the damp, wet cold of the Skelligan winter that had greeted me when the Skeleton Ship was coming. This was a different kind of thing. It was insidious and crept down your nose and into your body. My extremities didn’t seem to feel it but the rest of me felt like it was freezing from the inside out.

That, and the fact that the place that I stepped out into was utterly, utterly dark. I mean, so dark that I thought that I had someone’s hands over my eyes. Dark enough that I thought I was blind.

There was another strange thing going on as well, in that although it was not difficult to breathe, I felt short of breath. I had a ridiculous urge to breathe heavily and suck down more air, quicker. I felt like I had done some deep exercise or climbed up a mountain to dizzying heights. The last time that had happened was when being exercised by Letho in the hills and crags around Kaer Morhen.

“Easy Freddie.” Ariadne’s voice came. “Easy, breathe as slowly as you can. Count. In for three heartbeats, hold for three heartbeats, and then let it out.”

There was also an odd kind of pressure. My ears popped enough that it hurt and I felt the first signs of panic beginning to climb up my throat. I fought to just concentrate on my breathing.

Ariadne lit a torch. The sudden presence of the light was one of the more beautiful things that I had seen. Coupled with the fact that it was in the hands of the most beautiful woman I know, even despite her occasionally, recently renewed, sinister aura and regal clothes. The spiritual connotations were not lost on me either. The Holy Fire leading me out of the darkness and into the light.

Held by a Vampire that used to experiment on humans, Flame knows how much further up in the earth.

I know I didn’t keep all of that from my face as Ariadne’s expression flickered minutely.

“Sorry.” She mouthed silently.

I shrugged. More evidence that all of this was a show for someone’s entertainment. I resolved that I would not allow a sign, or a hint, of surprise or astonishment to cross my face.

The light did something else as well. It gave me a perspective on what else was going on around me. I was in a cave, it looked like a natural, underwater cave that seemed to have been carved out by the passage of water over however many thousands of years. I couldn’t see any sign of machining or tools being used on the stone, which in turn meant that it was almost certain that this was a natural cave. But that perspective meant that I could suddenly see where I was and what was happening. My dizziness retreated, taking my panic with it and although I still found it a little bit difficult to get enough air into my lungs to be entirely comfortable, I started to feel better.

I looked around and noticed that the portal was still open behind me. That would mean that, if necessary, there was a way to escape. Something that was far more reassuring than it strictly should have been. I also saw that there was a bluish tint to the flame of the torch. Presumably, something to do with the oil on the torch.

“You made that gate didn’t you?”

“Yes.” There was a certain amount of pride in her voice as she used the one torch to light another that she passed to me. “A standing portal to a new area. A tricky piece of work. There are strange things in the air down here and random fluctuations in the… well. That’s where it gets technical. As well as my other work, I might make that one of my next projects. A study on the formation of transportation gates and the various things that can influence the creation of those same gates. But still…

“The stipulation was that the gate would need to lead to a tunnel well away from the Elder’s sight so as not to interfere with the planar portal that the Elder guards.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Would it though? Interfere I mean.”

“It might,” Ariadne said. “I would know more if I was able to examine what was going on with that other planar portal. But I did my best to ensure that this portal was as stable and self-contained as possible. I flatter myself that I did a good job.”

“Was it not the way that your predecessors climbed to the surface?” I wondered.

“Oh, that happened long before my time. And they almost certainly had other ways of moving through the rock” She told me, leading me down what turned out to be a long, natural tunnel. It was slow going. It is hard to properly say how dark it was in that place. I was constantly lowering the torch to ensure that I didn’t trip over something.

“So why a new portal?” I wondered, making as much conversation as I could.

“For you.” She told me, there was a dim light coming from up ahead. Torchlight, certainly a light of flames. “The way that we, meaning other Elder Vampires, would come down here would not be usable by you. There is a certain… How can I put this…”

“An element of your natural abilities that makes you able to climb to the surface?” I suggested.

“Yes. Just about.”

We walked on a little further and the light in the tunnel ahead seemed to be growing as we got closer. There was a growing feeling of dampness in the air and I started to feel a strange sensation in my movements. When I jumped, I seemed to be jumping that little bit higher than I had been normally. I felt lighter on my feet and found that I needed to concentrate on where I was planting my footfalls. There were also coming to be times where, instead of feeling as though I was struggling to breathe, the air would suddenly seem that much sweeter, leading me to feel light-headed.

But a different kind of light-headed. Less dizzy, more euphoric.

Then it would go back to the thin feeling of the air and I would need to concentrate on my breathing in order to keep myself from panicking.

Ariadne noticed. It was not lost on me that she clung to the surface of the rock with grace and ease, barely needing to scramble. She seemed to know precisely where to place her feet in order to get the most movement out of it.

“You are feeling the effects of the planar portal.” She told me as she reached out and helped me climb over a particularly ominous piece of rock. “The portal itself is so small now that you could not see it with your naked eye. Even we cannot see it anymore and if the Elder knows precisely where it is in the cave that we are not far from entering, he has never pointed it out. It is, infinitesimally small. But the effects that it has on the nearby area remain profound in nature. You will notice that you feel lighter but resist the urge to jump up and down as these effects can change without warning. You could leap high in the air before being slammed back down to the ground with all of the force of a falling star.”

I nodded. “How much force is that?” I wondered.

“There is a lake in Northern Kaedwen,” she told me. “They call it lake Starfall.”

“I have heard of it.”

“Then you will know the legend of how a star fell to the ground there with enough force to create the lake, several hundred feet wide, deep enough that they haven’t properly found the bottom yet. But according to mathematicians and scientists of both a mundane level as well as a magical one. That impact was caused by an object, roughly the size of your head.”

I considered that for a moment. “On the plus side,” I said. “I wouldn’t feel it for very long.”

“I would.” She said. The way she spoke robbed the moment of its humor.

As we walked, the tunnel seemed to begin to be smoothing out until a pathway of sorts began to start forming. We came round the corner and the tunnel seemed to be beginning to widen out into a larger one. On the path, there were three more cowled figures waiting for us. They were waiting on this kind of a wide, landing bit of stone that reminded me of a boat jetty. There were large fire bowls at each of the corners of the landing and as the tunnel seemed to open out into a much larger cave. I could see that there were regularly spaced torches hooked into the walls.

There were also glowing blue-white crystals mounted into the walls, the way you occasionally find them in Elven ruins. For the uninitiated, they are like angular sculptures of glass that when you blow on them, glow with light.

Kerrass finds them annoying and strangely exhausting. He gestures at them with his air sign, only a similarly reduced version of the air sign, similar to the reduction of the flame sign that he uses to light candles and campfires. He is of the opinion that it makes people lazy and is always left with the impression that the Elves are laughing at him.

The first figure stepped forward.

“Please extinguish your torches in the bowl.” It gestured as it spoke in that harsh whisper that I was coming to expect. We did as we were told given that there was now plenty of light.

“Do you consent to be searched?” The first one asked. There was a line of three of them now. The second was holding a large grey-white flat crystal that I didn’t recognize.

“What for?” I wondered. “I mean, I can’t possibly have anything that would hurt even a “young” vampire let alone the…”

“Freddie,” Ariadne said, putting her hand on my arm with a warning in her voice. “You can ask your questions in a little while.”

“Do as she says, human.” There was no insult in the use of the species. It was just a useful word for them.

I shrugged.

Ariadne stepped forward first, much to my surprise, and held her hands out by her side while they patted her down. I finally noticed that her golden spider staff was nowhere to be seen.

The hands of the cowled figure were a brownish-grey. I don’t know how much of the coloring was leftover from the light of the flames echoing up the walls though.

When my turn came, I held a mirror image of how Ariadne had held herself, and the, presumably, vampire searched me. Not gently, but certainly not as invasively as people might search a suspicious stranger who was moving into a private audience with the empress might be searched.

In the meantime I just stood there, waiting and following the basic instructions that they threw at me. Turn around, arms by your sides. Stand up straight. That kind of thing.

I decided that the cave that we were in was quite peaceful really all things considered. There was the sound of running water somewhere and the smell of oil smoke which was not entirely unpleasant. There was a smell to the burning that I couldn’t immediately recognize and guessed that it must be some herb of some kind. Curiosity made me wonder what it was though. I still couldn’t see right into the cave itself. There were some obstructions in the way but it seemed to be a fairly nice place. Not that I would particularly want to live down here or anything but still, it was nicer than some of the places that Kerrass has taken me over the years.

Then I realized what I was thinking and I chuckled. The cowl of the being that was searching me twitched upwards and looked at me. The way the light fell didn’t give me much to see I thought I might be able to see the outline of a nose but I couldn’t be certain. Then it nodded to itself and returned to what they were doing.

I entertained myself for a moment doing some interior decorating. Having a four-poster bed here, room for a cooking fire over there, and a wardrobe over there. I imagined myself inviting guests over to come and see my cave and giving them tours in order to explore properly.

The first guard was done with me and moved me onto the next one. This search was similar to, but not quite, the same as other searches that I have had done to me. It has happened twice and neither time was in the presence of anyone particularly important. One was in the presence of a mage that Kerrass and I were consulting on a particularly difficult hunt. I can now, at the time of writing, no longer remember the mage’s name on the grounds that Kerrass took great delight in referring to him as “That Paranoid Toss-pot”. He was obsessed with his personal safety and, to my mind at least, was rather overly paranoid about it all. But he had a wand that he waved over us in order to, in his words, “detect any hanging enchantments over you.”

At the time, I was still using my amulet with Ariadne for the purposes of communication. That amulet and Kerrass’ pendant were the only things that he could detect and he interrogated us on the subjects, far more than what was necessary and far more than the piece of information that we were after warranted.

We had to leave the two amulets in the safety of a box that he had enchanted, or so he claimed, to shield anyone else from looking in.

The other time was at a gathering at the hierarch’s palace in Novigrad. This will have been during the autumn before we all went down south to see the empress get crowned. There had been some kind of formal dinner that night and the family had all been invited. Emma didn’t go and as I, in her words, “knew how to speak religious” I volunteered to go to the party in her stead. She was wise in that all that anyone wanted to talk to me about was the scandalous affair of my sister and her magical lover.

They had waved a similar-looking wand over me at the time. The amulet that Ariadne had given me was in the shape of the eternal flame and when they found the enchantment on it, I told them that part of it would have been because we had got the Bishop of Angraal to bless the amulet. I told them that the person who had cast the enchantment was currently taking instruction in the matter of the Eternal Flame and as such, things were beyond reproach.

And as Emma so succinctly put it, I knew how to debate these men and as such, although we spent quite a bit of time talking about it all, there wasn’t really anything they could do to complain at me about the amulet.

I did not call them out on their hypocrisy of using the hated magic in order to detect magic. I was more mindful of the family’s political position than that.

This flat, paddle of white crystal that the robed figure was using seemed to be a more advanced version of that.

It glowed blue when they waved it near Ariadne. The blue turned into a greenish tinge when it passed over the thing that she had enchanted in order that we would be able to keep in contact with each other. They waved it backward and forwards over that point and seemed particularly interested in the particular shade of green that the paddle, wand, or whatever it was, was producing.

“You have used Magic recently.” One of them whispered. How I heard it over the running water and the echoes of that same water, I do not know.

“I used magic to light the torches,” Ariadne told them. “I would also suggest that there might be some magical residue leftover on both of us from using the portal.”

Two of the figures looked at each other and I was as confident as I could be that there was some form of communication passing between the two.

“You also have a hanging enchantment over you to do with your…(Freddie: I am removing this so that people can’t use it as a weakness like they did last time with the amulet.)

“It is a communications enchantment,” Ariadne told them. “The other half of which is on Lord Frederick here.”

“What is the full purpose of the enchantment?” The second of the two cowled figures involved in the discussion asked with a voice like a… Well… I kind of want to say that he “intones”. He reminded me of one of the worst priests that I have ever heard speak. One of those that thought that his cassock gave him all the authority that he needed to do whatever the hell that he liked.

He was wrong.

“It allows the two of us, he and I, to communicate over vast distances without being eavesdropped on,” Ariadne responded. “It also allows me to monitor his health and to know where he is at any given time.”

She didn’t look at me as she said this. I hadn’t known some of that. I hadn’t known that she was monitoring my health, but it had been strongly implied in a couple of the conversations that we had had on the subject.

I examined myself and decided that I didn’t care.

The two cowled figures conferred a bit more. The third, the one that had searched the pair of us stood off to one side and seemed to wait patiently.

In the end, the cowled figures did not seem to be able to find anything wrong with anything that Ariadne had told them, and I was beckoned forwards.

It was a similar kind of thing. I stood there, held my hands out of my sides and they ran this thing over me. It glowed a much less vibrant blue when it passed over me before it flickered a deep, ugly-looking reddish-orange when they passed the wand over my heart and again over my eyes and around the back of my skull. It seemed to me that the color flickered a couple of times before vanishing.

This caused no small amount of scandal.

“What is this?” The question seemed more curious than I would have expected.

“What is what?” I retorted.

“You have the same residue of your passage through the portal and you have the same answering communication enchantment. But what is this other, flickering color?”

The figure turned and offered it to his compatriot and the two of them gazed at the paddle for what seemed a strangely elongated amount of time.

Then one of them grasped me by the chin and turned my head to an uncomfortable angle so that the light of another crystal could shine in my eyes. It was blinding and I could see nothing other than the bright light.

It was oddly beautiful.

An age passed where I was falling through stars, floating on a cloud and carried by a moonbeam before I returned to the cave, blinking and faintly wondering why I had not become a decrepit old man in the intervening time.

“He doesn’t know.” One figure whispered.

“Impossible.” The second intoned…

Yes, that word fits.

“... He must know.”

“Why?” The first answered. “We don’t know what it…”

“It is another enchantment.” The… I had begun to think of him as the belligerent one said. “They should both be killed for trying to smuggle an unknown…”

“May I see?” Ariadne asked.

Whisperer passed the wand over to Ariadne who held it over me. And frowned as this time, the paddle flickered once before she was unable to duplicate the response.

“There is no magic on this continent that answers to that specification.” She told them. “And I have studied them all.”

“You,” Belligerent said. “You are but a child.”

“She has studied this phenomenon of magic, or at least this world’s version of it, more than anyone else my friend,” said Whisperer. “If she says that it is not of this world then we have to assume that she is correct… And he has no memory of it. We would have found that. Even lies hidden inside the truth, or hidden from the speaker, answer to the rainbow crystal as well you know my friend.”

“A false reading?” Ariadne wondered.

“Impossible,” Belligerent said. “This has been protecting the Elder since before any of us were b…”

“Precisely my point,” Ariadne said. “Magic is chaos in this realm. If something magical has happened to mutate or otherwise change its original form then that could result in a false reading. I don’t think you understand what life is like above ground. Being in this world means that we interact with all manner of strange things and magical phenomena. As a result, the device itself might have changed or mutated. Also, when was it last used on a human? Let alone a human that has been as affected by strange magics like this one?”

“It has never been used on a human,” Belligerent said as though Ariadne had just suggested he lick her boots. “No human has ever been…”

“And there you touch upon my point again,” Ariadne said.

The two figures discussed matters a bit further before Whisperer told us. “We agree that the flickering is almost certainly the result of the changeable nature of humans, maybe some small mutations due to the prevalence of magic in this world as well as historic pressures and usages of magic about this particular individuals person.” He spoke formally as though he was declaring something in a court of law, “You may pass.”

The pair of them fell in behind us.

The third remained where he was and I guessed that he was the lookout left behind in case anything else should… I dunno… crawl up through the stone or something.

We were walking next to a stream now and there was a path that had been worn next to it. There were occasionally planks of stone placed in the same way that some wilderness trails have planks of wood in order to make the footing that much easier. We walked easily and silently with the two individuals that I had nicknamed “Whisperer” and “Belligerent”. Now that we were walking through the more civilized areas of the cave, the amount of light that was around was increasing and it was not difficult to tell the two of them apart. Belligerent was bigger, broader, and had a dirtier robe which was of a lighter shade. Whisperer wore a darker shade of robe and was much slighter to look at. I wondered if Whisperer might be my future mother in law but there was no real way of telling that one way or the other.

The path weaved to the left and the right, occasionally bridging the stream, all the while, occasional bouts of ear-popping and dizziness continued to assail me so that I was often forced to stop in order to get my breath back or focus on my breathing.

I felt like a child being taken on a hike that was too much for me, or a decrepit old man trying to do some kind of active chore that was now past his abilities to perform.

After some minutes, I have no idea how many but it wasn’t a long time, we emerged into a huge, underground cavern. When I had first had the home of the Unseen Elder described to me, I had imagined a dark, hole in the ground, utterly quiet and still. This was anything but that. This was large, well-lit by the Elven crystals and the lit fires. The music of running water was constant as it flowed over the various rock formations. There were crystals and things that I would guess to be precious stones and metals in the walls that glittered in the torchlight. Dwarves or other craftsmen of the mining variety would go mad to get into a place like this.

If any of that craft is reading this, do not go looking for the cavern, you will not survive the experience.

I was again struck with the thought that, although I would miss the fresh air and things, this would not be an entirely unpleasant place to spend the rest of eternity.

It was peaceful. The sound of the running water echoes around the cavern and around the many tunnels that seemed to exit and enter this place. It was a warren and an unpleasant image arrived of giant worms and insects that made their homes in places like this.

When I heard about the attendants of the Elder, I had imagined maybe half a dozen people doing their best to manage this being from another time and another place.

There were not a lot of people here. Certainly, there weren’t hordes of people hanging around. But it was more than a dozen who turned to look at us from their featureless, shadowed cowls. Uncomfortably, a couple of them were even standing on the walls and ceiling.

“So many,” I commented quietly. I had the feeling of reverence you get in the depths of the largest and most ornate churches, those places where to break the silence seems to be a kind of sacrilege.

“There are more of the older generations of us than we know,” Ariadne told me. She was walking next to me as we went, plainly ready to turn and catch me should the dizziness or whatever overcome me. “After all their years, they find life in the modern world overwhelming and retreat beneath the ground. Either to sleep or to attend on the Elder One. The closest that your world would come to this kind of thing is for those people that retreat from the world to join a monastery or a convent. That and, so I’m told, the elder needs his attendants on a regular basis and so they are not small in number.”

“The same way,” I began thoughtfully, “that a King has more servants than the next noble, merely because he is king and therefore needs more servants because he is king and a king needs more servants.”

“That is a fitting parallel.” Ariadne said, “If a little insulting.”

We continued to follow the path that was curving around the outsides of the cavern. One distressing moment occurred when I realized that I was walking up the wall with apparent ease. I nearly fell then and Ariadne caught me.

“Try watching your feet as you walk.” She said. “Examine the ground in front of you and keep yourself grounded.”

I did as I was bid for a while until I found that my sense of perspective had changed. I no longer thought of myself as walking on the wall, I was walking on the floor and that was now the wall.

It was helpful that the water seemed to spiral around on the floors and in the tunnels and the walkways of the cavern.

Eventually, we came to a drop off which led into a chasm, down which, all was blackness. We were still being led by Whisperer and Belligerent. Whisperer led the way and stepped out into the darkness so that their entire body seemed to rotate so that he was walking down the wall. Belligerent followed as though it was the easiest thing in the world.

I was game, but something in my body rebelled.

“Take my hand, Freddie,” Ariadne said. “Take my hand and close your eyes.”

I did as I was told and she led me on. It was like I was just walking down the same old path. I did not detect the edge, I felt no sense of odd movement, certainly no feeling of falling. Instead, I was just walking forward.

“You can open your eyes now Freddie,” Ariadne told me.

We were walking down a long dark tunnel, as I looked back I could see the circle of light that led back into the cave of lights and running water.

“I thought that that was where the Elder lived,” I said to no one in particular.

Someone chuckled, I thought it was Belligerent but I could not be sure.

“No,” Whisperer said. “As I understand things, the way to think about that place would be to think of it as the first and only vampiric city. The cave where the Elder lives is normally dark so that nothing can distract him from his ancient vigil. There is no sound for the same reason. I hope you realize the great honor that you are being given just by being allowed in his presence.”

I made some honored sounding noises but the truth was that I was beginning to wonder what might be going on.

“How will I see him in order to talk with him,” I said.

“You could talk and he will hear, you do not need light in order to…” Belligerent spoke but Whisperer overrode him.

“

That has been taken into account. You will be able to see fine.”

I nodded.

“So,” I began. “The first Vampire city.”

“It’s not as impressive as you make it sound,” Ariadne told me. “According to what my mother told me which she got from the earlier people, we emerged from the portal and there was simply not enough space for us all inside the portal cave. Therefore, while those of us that were scholars and understood such matters, studied the portal with the Elder, the rest of us needed somewhere to go.

“That other cave, with the crystals and the fires, was where we settled for the first, couple of hundred years or so while we waited for direction from the Elder and those people studying the portal.”

“Should you stay or should you go,” I wondered.

“Broadly correct,” Whisperer said. “Although a vast simplification. There was much debate on the matter in all truth. The other two clans left and we were the ones that remained.

“You are human and therefore you will not be bothered by the presence of firelight,” Belligerent said. “And we have discovered that Fire and heat are not going to impact that portal in any way. Therefore, that will be how the portal chamber is going to be lit for you.”

It was getting dark again and I noticed that no one was lighting any torches in order to help me see. It seemed as though we were getting past that particular bit of whatever was happening. I was now, very clearly, getting the “Don’t look the Emperor in the eye,” speech where they tell you how many steps to take forwards, backward, how to bow, how not to bow, stand on one foot, advance 3 steps and then bow again before following any given instructions carefully.

Sure enough…

“When you speak to the Elder,” Belligerent went on. “Look directly at the Elder. Feel free to make eye contact if you wish. You are in no danger from doing so. The Elder has agreed to answer your questions and will do so until such a time as he sees fit. When the Elder has decided that your meeting is over and he must return to his other responsibilities, I cannot recommend enough that that is the time that the meeting ends. At that time, an attendant will come for you and lead you back to the portal which will take you to the surface.

“Be respectful to the Elder at all times. Bow, to him upon greeting and bow upon leaving. You may feel as though the Elder is not watching you properly. This is an illusion and should not be taken for granted. Believe us when we say that the Elder is always watching and even when he is not using his eyes, then he is well aware of what is going on around him.

“Also bear in mind that the Elder’s responsibilities are vast and unknowable for a mortal such as yourself to comprehend. Therefore, be aware that if the Elder doesn’t speak for a protracted period of time, he is, in fact dealing with other matters that are outside the understanding of the rest of us. Be patient. If you are required to leave at any given time, have faith that the Elder will tell you so and that an attendant will come for you accordingly.”

I nodded along. It is a mistake not to listen to this kind of thing. The droning on of the herald or whoever it was that gives these speeches can be tempting to ignore and just think about what you are going to be doing when you speak to whoever it is that you are going to meet. Do not give in to this impulse. Men and women have lost their lives over such things and I was more than convinced that if this Elder that I was going to meet really put his mind to it, then I would not even realize that I was dead.

As we walked, it got darker and darker as the tunnel moved further and further into the depths of the earth. We twisted and turned and I was now walking in pitch black. The popping of my ears and the dizziness spells started to become more and more intense and I was now, all but leaning on Ariadne. The two attendants, Whisperer and Belligerent didn’t seem to notice or care a great deal. If they had been human then I would have expected to be hurried along, but here, when I needed to stop and take a breath, I was waited for patiently, the speech about etiquette would stop and I would be allowed to catch up with my thinking.

In that much darkness, it is strange how the other senses can become heightened. It really isn’t a myth as I have sometimes assumed as what happens when you lose one of your senses. You find that your hearing becomes that much more pronounced and your sense of feeling along your flesh becomes heightened. I felt relatively safe, certainly a lot safer than I have done when I have been following one of Kerrass’ torches along and down a pathway.

Ariadne held me by the hand and the ground was nice and solid under my feet. There was no feeling of rocky outcroppings or feeling of danger that I was going to slip or scramble up and down different things. The ground was pleasingly smooth and when there were different levels or steps, I was warned well in advance.

So when the darkness of the cave opened out into a new cavern. I didn’t see it. I felt it instead. The air was suddenly cold on either side of me, there was an echo to the air that hadn’t been there before, even in the relatively dead sounds of our footfalls and steps up until that point.

They shuffled me around a bit at Ariadne’s murmured insistence so that they could find, and I quote, “a level of air and gravity that Freddie will be comfortable with.”

Then light flared up all around me. It was sudden, roaring, and dazzling at the same time. It came with a sudden blast of heat that I felt sure singed my eyebrows more than a little bit. I flinched backward automatically and raised my arm to cover my eyes as a large column of fire shot up towards the ceiling.

The voice that lives in the back of my head, the same one that makes jokes about the clothing of kings, the one that mocked a Dragon about her staff and asked stupid questions of the personification of death. The voice that I am beginning to think of as being called Jack. That voice that looks out on the world and laughs at all of the things, including myself, that take themselves far too seriously.

That voice said “Very dramatic,” in a tone of sarcasm so thick that I am not sure that the human throat could produce it.

I would later figure out that there had been a lit bowl of fire on the ground that had been covered in order to obscure it from sight. Then, by a conspiracy of exposing the fire to the air, or dumping a load of extra fuel on it, the fire all but exploded.

But in the literal heat of the moment, I did not have time to look to see what was going on. I recoiled from the flames as I watched them shoot from the ignition point, high up, well above me with the sparks rising even further than that. The flame seemed to be drawn towards a single point the way that water can be sucked towards a hole in the floor or a hole in the tub, it seemed to swirl in some way as it focused on this point before the flames as a whole seemed to die down again.

I tried to find the dot at that moment, the point where the flames were sucked towards and I couldn’t. I wasn’t fast enough to see it but you could feel the effects of it. It was as though the point emitted darkness.

I have had to describe this since and here is my best, most condensed attempt. Imagine a candle flame. A candle flame emits light, heat, and smell depending on the quality of the candle. Take away the heat and the smell and you just have a light source. Now imagine that instead of emitting light, the candle emitted darkness.

And then make the candle vanishingly small compared to the surroundings. It still emits light, but you can’t actually see the light, only the effect that the light is having on the surroundings.

As for the flames themselves. They reduced to the size of a large signal flame. A large bowl of fire upon which a cone of logs had been constructed in order to house the fire which reared up. The contrast between the two, the strange point of darkness and the bonfire flame, gave the room a strange, eerie effect. Not quite burning flame but not quite a darkness. It was off-putting. Strange and disquieting.

I didn’t pay attention to that though as there was a figure that stood in the light of the flame.

I don’t know what I was expecting. He was grander than I was expecting when I imagined the elder. But also lesser in many ways. But the most surprising thing about him was that I found him quite handsome.

He stood a little shorter than me maybe. Utterly hairless and in the firelight, his skin looked pale and grey. His front teeth were pointed, stuck out, a little over his bottom lip and he seemed to hold his mouth slightly open for that reason.

His skin looked like thin leather that had been stretched over too much stuff. I felt as though I could see the stretch marks over his rib cage in particular and about how the skin had been stretched to fit over the breastbone and the ribs. When he moved, I kept expecting the skin to go too far and tear as it went with the same kind of ripping noise that really expensive silk makes when it tears. He seemed to wear a kind of skirt, but the flapping torn parts of it suggested that it had once been some kind of robe which, over the years, had torn and rotted to its current state. He was wearing an outer garment that in another context might have been considered to be a King’s mantle, but the way he wore it seemed to suggest that it was more the mantle of a powerful priest.

As a result, I could still see his chest and the sunken belly. The skin was tattooed heavily in a display of lines and circles that I guessed to depict some kind of script although what it was, I couldn’t have told you.

He was stood to one side of the fire and maybe a little bit behind so that we would still have to go round the fire to get to him. The fire was reflecting in his eyes, giving him the appearance as though his eyes were glowing.

He was smiling.

“Welcome,” he began, a strange dark liquid leaked out of his mouth and between his teeth as he spoke, “The unseen Elder of the Vampiric race, bid you welcome inside my halls.” He seemed to chew the words, the movements of the jaw, the teeth, and the tongue all seemed a little emphasized as though he had a piece of meat stuck between his back teeth.

In comparison to the horror of watching his mouth move, he spoke in a deep voice which only rasped a little as he spoke. It was, otherwise, velvety and smooth. If he had been human, I would have put him down to be some kind of courtier that was out of practice. Or the musician that had come out of retirement for one last gig.

As I say, he seemed charming and personable. He reminded me of a priest. That happened a lot and I hope that no priests are offended by that. Part of the situation was that I had already been reminded of monks as I had walked through the caverns. The hooded and cowled figures had stood around in exactly the same way that monks stand around when intruders come into their abbeys and their buildings. They treat you as interlopers and intruders and treat books as though they are sacred vessels that are somehow lessened when they are opened and read by normal human eyes.

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So this being had that kind of attitude and air about him. The body language and the movements that he had looked like a benevolent village priest. The kind that is far more intelligent than the average members of his congregation and takes great delight in skewering the self-important while uplifting the rest of the flock. He would have been the kind of priest that would have rolled up the sleeves of his cassock when it was time to build a house, or bring the harvest in before gently chiding those of higher station for not getting down and helping.

All this is meant to show you just how put-off I was. I was expecting a grand and austere being. A towering figure of power and intimidation. I was expecting to feel the… I don’t know… the history coming off him likes waves of smoke.

My brain frantically tried to remember the long lecture that I had been absorbing on the subject of etiquette and bowed back. I mean really, how is one supposed to remember all of that stuff when faced with someone that could eat you whole without really thinking about things.

Instead, I bowed deeply. I would have gotten down onto one knee except one of the few things that I had been told about the Elder that I could remember, was that he despises this kind of thing.

“I thank you.” I began. “I thank you for your gracious hospitality and for your welcome. I am deeply honored to find myself…

“ADDRESS ME IN PERSON RATHER THAN MY MOUTHPIECE.” The figure roared, his voice thundering in its rage. The sheer force of that anger, the depth of feeling behind it was like a hammer blow to the front of my skull and I fell backward.

Despite the tone of voice despite the anger and the rage that had been part of that onslaught. The figure’s body language didn’t change. He had opened his mouth wide in order to bellow but other than that, there was nothing about his body language that seemed to suggest that he was angry.

When I fought myself upright again after flinching back from the sheer force of that… rage, I looked back at the figure who had clasped his hands together in a strange way. I looked at the hands and I realized that he was pointing towards one of the walls.

I turned and what I saw there took my breath away.

That voice that I mentioned earlier. The sarcastic one. It said, “Now that’s more like it.”

Into the side of the cave, there seemed to be carved a vast figure made of bone. It was seated as if on some kind of throne that had been carved out of the side of the cavern by long years of this figure sitting there. It was huge, vastly imposing, and quite, quite terrifying. It wasn’t looking at me, it was looking at a point in the air a little bit above the fire and off to one side. Like the other in the room, it was utterly bald, but in saying that, is to belittle what I saw. It wasn’t, even remotely human. It was like the corpse of some kind of ancient King.

I never got the chance to measure it, measure him. Funnily enough, I don’t walk around with some kind of tape measure and ask people how tall they might be. But when measured against me, it was well over a foot taller than me again. The skin, such as it was, was pale and dry. Closer in appearance to paper than to any kind of actual skin. His hands that were resting on the armrests of his, well, his throne, were elongated into long claws that put me under no illusion as to just how easily it would kill me if it put its mind to it.

And the only thing that he wore was some kind of loincloth that covered its modesty. Again though, I had the impression that the loincloth had once been part of some larger garment that had been eaten away by time, wear, damp and any of the other things that might be going on in a place like that one.

Like his, well, his interpreter, His teeth were pronounced, and if he had ever had lips, my guess was that those lips had rotted away to nothing. All there were teeth and those teeth were sharp. His eyes glowed, the irises standing out in the darkness as a strange, powerful kind of amber glow. This was more than just the flames reflecting in the depths of his eyes. This was an active storing of the light before that light was projected back outwards.

The throne, such as it was, seemed to have been shaped out of the wall of the cavern itself. There were no marks of ornamentation. There were no signs of chisels. No obvious effects of wedges or strikes of a hammer. I wondered if the stone itself had shifted around this figure in order to build a throne around him.

There might have been no marks or ornamentation on the throne. What there was was filth and dirt and all kinds of unspeakable slime that were dripping down the front and onto the floor where the stain vanished. It was impossible to tell what it was but looking at the ceiling and the wall immediately behind and above the Elder’s throne, there were no signs of where any kind of liquid or filth could enter. Nor were there any signs of where it could drain away to. There was no water in this particular cave.

It took me a moment for my brain to catch up.

“Forgive me,” I said, my mouth moving and speaking automatically. “I was unaware of the fact that you had an interpreter at all.”

The figure was so still. For all I could tell, I was staring at a statue.

“Really? The interpreter said in the same tone. “An oversight on the part of those that have guided you here. I shall have to address the matter with them in a forthright manner later.”

Ah, I knew this game. I was being tested.

“Such a shame,” I said. “A simple oversight like this one. I trust that no insult has been given and I emphasize that I, at least, am not offended in the slightest way by the oversight. Please, do not punish the wrongdoer on my account.”

“We will deal with the matter, later.” The interpreter said, presumably in the voice of the Elder.

“Just checking though,” I said. “You don’t need my words to be translated to you at all?”

“No.” Came the voice from the mouth of the Interpreter again. “Your primitive languages are easy to understand for one such as I. To answer your other question, yes, I am perfectly capable of speaking, but frankly, your basic speech is actually harder to understand than more proper higher pieces of language.”

“Then why…?”

“Because your words are primitive.” The being on the throne said. It was a harsh whisper and the voice was heavily accented. I have no idea why or what the accent was. “Your sentences are basic, your concepts are flawed and your entire language is barely the language of slime.”

The interpreter took up the speech again as the Elder subsided. His lips had moved. Certainly, the jaw had opened and sound had issued forth, but the rest of his body hadn’t moved.

“It is an insult to our mouth and to our tongue to force it to conform to so primitive a language and I do not like the way that it tastes. It is an insult to my mouth, just as it is an insult that we must take time away from our vital duties to speak with you.”

I glanced at the Interpreter who had moved next to, and a little in front of, his master. He caught my eye, winked, and minutely lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

And then he screamed as the Elders bloody claws exploded out through the front of his chest.

The Elder had stood. I had not seen him move and he now towered over the rest of the cavern as he lifted the interpreter off the ground. Gore dripped down the Elder’s arm and off the Elbow onto the floor. The Interpreter looked down at the claws coming out of his chest and screamed in horror again.

I felt a hand on my arm as a restraint but the truth was, I was so frozen by the sudden shift towards violence that I had absolutely no intention of trying to do anything.

Almost leisurely, the Elder’s other hand pushed itself into the body of the hapless interpreter who no longer had the breath for more screaming. Instead, he groaned in, what must have been agony as his body started to spasm.

The Elder then turned towards me so that the Interpreter’s body was in front of him and facing me. Then, the interpreter was pulled apart before my very eyes. Blood and gore splashed everywhere as the Vampire was ripped apart. In the same way that you might rip apart a roast chicken. It was like that. Sometimes, the muscle and the flesh, such as there was, were just torn. But other times, the efforts of the Elder were interrupted by the presence of bone and cartilage. There was no sign of exertion from the Elder though. There was just a brief pause before there was a series of wet, popping, snapping, and splintering sounds as the task was finished.

I know that Vampires are made from sterner stuff than humans are. So I have no idea if the interpreter died in that frenzy of bloodletting. According to everyone that had spoken though, the Elder did not kill his subjects so I had hope for the Interpreter’s survival. Instead, I wondered if the Interpreter felt it as it all happened or whether his body and brain just shut down as it was happening.

The Elder made sure that there were only bits remaining though. When he was done with the torso, he pulled apart the limbs at the joints.

The now legendary former questioner of the Eternal Flame. Father Jerome. The man that will be performing my marriage ceremony. The man who, quite literally, brought me back to life. He told me quite a lot about torture. I don’t know why. I was deeply, dangerously depressed, and suicidal at the time. The only time to rival it was immediately after I had tried to call off my marriage with Ariadne but that was a different kind of despair. That was self-loathing whereas my time with Jerome was more about convincing myself to live. So why he thought that telling me about thumbscrews and garrottes and red hot pokers and the utter uselessness of an iron maiden as anything other than an intimidation device would help with that? I couldn’t tell you.

But tell me he did. And one of the interesting things, purely from a medical standpoint, was that when you put someone on the rack. You stretch them and distend limbs to the point of breaking them. It is not actually the cartilage around the joints that breaks. They can come away from the bone as the joint is weak. The muscles can tear but that’s not the same thing. The joints can pop out of themselves, but the cartilage itself is actually stronger than steel. So when you think about things breaking, stretching, and snapping in limbs. It’s the bone that’s breaking. Not the cartilage around the joint itself.

Why do I tell you this important and utterly appalling fact?

Because the Elder pulled the Interpreter’s arms and legs apart at the Elbow and the knee joints I don’t know, maybe Vampire muscle and bone structure are built in a different way to humans.

When he was done with everything else, the Elder put all the ribbons of flesh and still twitching bits of bone and sinew into a heap, he placed the head on top of it before standing on the head in order to squash it like an egg.

Then he moved and sat back on his throne in a leisurely fashion.

“This is a solemn moment.” The voice of the Elder hissed out of his barely open mouth. “Levity and disrespect have no place here.”

I swallowed the first words that were coming out of my mouth. I wanted to know whether all of that had been a show for my benefit. I wanted to know if that particular interpreter had been chosen for a reason. I wanted to know if it was a point that the Elder was making for the benefit of someone else. I wanted to know if there were factions within the ranks of the Elder Vampires and I wanted to know if the Elder had just destroyed one of the leaders of an opposing faction. Or if he had destroyed a favorite of another faction.

But I said nothing. If it was a point, then the point was well made. The Elder might have promised not to hurt me and to let me out of this place alive. But in the same way that Kings can decide to break a promise for “the good of the realm”, the promise of this Elder was worthless and would be worthless until I was well out of here.

The Elder waved a claw towards the bloody mess on the floor. As he sat on his throne, there was still blood, gore and other unspeakable things dripping from his arms and from the ends of his claws. He didn’t move, nor did he examine them.

One of the two figures that had accompanied us, left. I thought it was Belligerent but I had lost track of which one was which given everything that had just happened. I was also not watching that carefully on the grounds that I wanted to keep my eyes on the thing that could kill me at any moment.

Three figures came into the room. Two had buckets and one was carrying a large roll of cloth. I didn’t see beneath the hoods and as the robes were shapeless it was impossible to tell. But again, I wondered if one of the figures was my mother-in-law.

The one with the cloth spread it out next to the pile of gore and started shifting the bones and the limbs and things onto the roll of cloth. The other two placed buckets next to the Elder, from which they removed cloths, dripping steaming hot water that smelt of Lavender.

A fact that was oddly incongruous given everything that had happened.

Taking the cloths, they wiped the hands and the claws of the Elder clean as best as they could. The Elder didn’t move or lift either hand so that they could clean underneath and so I imagined that there was still quite a large amount of filth underneath the arms where the cleaners couldn’t get to it.

It was an odd sight. Not that disgusting as I have seen far worse in my time. Especially considering that I had met the man or being that the blood had belonged to, however briefly.

I have even seen similar scenes in the past. When Lords and nobles have made a killing in the hunt and their hands are covered in blood. If they are then forced to eat something or drink something with some semblance of manners about them, then servants are summoned with cloths of scented waters in order to clean them up before, for instance, taking the hand of a lady in order to kiss it.

The difference here was that the Elder didn’t even try to make the work easier for his attendants. That showed a level of scorn and disdain that I found… distasteful.

They did their best before a fourth person arrived with a mop and a bucket and set about the impossible task of cleaning up all the gore from the floor.

There was another point being made here. Ariadne, the other escort, and myself watched the attendants work for a long time, saying nothing.

Then Regis turned up. He was wearing a new robe, similar to the ones of the other attendants. Whether it was over the top of his other clothes or not I couldn’t tell. He greeted us with a nod and a slight smile before bowing to the Elder.

“Summoned, I have come.” He said.

Then he howled.

I write that as though it happened straight away. As though he just opened his mouth and that the noise came out, but that’s not quite true. I’ve thought about this a bit since it all took place and I have come to believe that it didn’t happen like that. He didn’t just open his mouth, it took a bit of time to get to that point. Not a lot of time, but it was still a little bit of time.

After he greeted us, he bowed towards the Elder. Then… and I stress, this all happened in a fraction of a moment, his eyes widened and bugged before his face twisted into a rictus of horror. His hands came up to the side of his head and covered his ears as though to shield himself from some awful noise. The scream also started slowly. It started off as a moan of terror and disbelief before it escalated in hysteria and volume.

Then he took a horrible, rasping breath before really, properly screaming with a harshness to it that made me think that screaming like that would actively damage the throat of a human.

His legs gave way and he fell, collapsing to his knees before even holding himself up in that position was too much to bear and he fell over sideways, curling into a fetal ball.

He didn’t stop screaming. The only pauses came when he stopped to take a breath.

I went to help him. Regis is a strange person to know in that I found that I didn’t really like him, but I already considered him a friend and was looking forward to seeing him again. I can’t explain it any further than that. To see him in such anguish was hurtful to me and I went to support him. I don’t know how I was going to do that. Something about taking him by the shoulder and holding onto him just to let him know that I was there so that he wouldn’t get lost so that he would know that he wasn’t alone.

So I jerked forwards, reflexively and I found my arms caught. On one side by Ariadne and on the other by the remaining guide.

I could see no face in the cowl so instead, I turned on Ariadne who returned my gaze impassively and with a serenity that I found appalling. I don’t think I hid that from her and to be fair, in the there and then of the moment, I wasn’t really trying to hide my feelings from her. I did see that her other hand was clutched in her skirts though, which is normally a good sign of her extremes of emotion.

I turned back to Regis and watched as he screamed himself hoarse. If the only thing that I could do for him was to witness his pain, then I resolved to witness it and remember every detail.

Eventually, the sound died down. Not because Regis was no longer in pain, but because he had, as I say, screamed himself hoarse.

“It can take people like that sometimes.” Said the other attendant. Who turned out to be Whisperer for certain. “Especially amongst the young. There are many factors to be taken into account on the matter of whether or not a mind, or a body, can accept the presence of the Elder in them. But age, experience, and no small amount of training is heavily involved in all of that.”

“And Regis is very young for all of his knowledge.” Ariadne all but whispered it.

“He should not have killed that other one,” Whisperer said. Interesting to me that he didn’t know Detlaff’s name. “I know why he did it, but there must have been another solution. Putting him into sleep would have done. After a century or two asleep, the other would have forgotten his heartbreak.”

I very carefully did not reply that such an action might also have calcified Detlaff’s feelings on the subject. As well as making him hate Regis as well.

“So is this further punishment?” I wondered. I was trying really hard to keep my emotion and disgust from my voice.

“It will certainly be part of it. I had wondered why the Elder was so easy on him.” Whisperer made it sound so casual.

Regis had stopped screaming now and climbed to his feet. He was wobbly, jerky, and uncoordinated in his movements and as I saw his face, I could not keep myself from recoiling in pity and shock.

His face was a rictus of pain and terror. He was no longer screaming and his mouth was closed, but his eyes were screaming. I have no other way to put it than that.

A single line of blood dripped from his left nostril. I don’t even know if Regis noticed.

“Such is the price for disrespect.” The voice that emerged from Regis’ mouth was the same as had emerged from the interpreter. It was deep, warm, vibrant. It was also, utterly unlike Regis’ normal speaking voice. I saw the same movements in Regis’ jaw that the interpreter had. It was as though he was also chewing something hard and tough at the back of his jaw, or trying to extract a piece of meat from between some teeth with his tongue.

But above all, the thing that sticks out in my memory more than anything else at this juncture. The same black liquid seemed to seep from Regis’ jaw. It stained his teeth and dripped down his chin.

I forced myself to turn away from the wreck that had become of my friend and faced the Elder who was still sitting on his throne. The cleaning attendants were in the process of finishing their tasks and leaving. Belligerent did not come back.

“I shall try to remember the lesson,” I said. “May I ask a question?”

Regis sighed in the voice of the Elder. “My understanding is that you were brought here to ask no end of questions. You waste more of my time by asking such a foolish one. Ask your questions, if I do not want to answer, then I will not.”

“How is my friend?” I asked, gesturing towards Regis. “I thought he had already been punished for the killing of the other.”

See that, taking on the terms of address that my opponents use? That’s training that is.

“He is not being punished.” The Elder replied. “It is an honor to allow me into his mind. He was told that he would attend upon me this night and this is how that works.”

“I see,” I commented.

“Humans really do enjoy wasting their breath, don’t they?” You could hear the Elder’s sneer. “Their breath and their time which is so finite that I really do not comprehend it.”

I risked a glance over at Regis. The look of pain in his eyes had not retreated but there was a new look in those eyes now, one of sorrow and... Pity?

“But before I answer your questions,” The Elder said, “I would first deal with some other business, if you do not mind, of course?”

(Freddie’s note: For reference, when I say that the Elder speaks, he is speaking through the mouth of Regis. Believe me when I say, that when the Elder himself speaks, I will tell you.)

“Of course,” I said, bowing in my best courtier fashion.

“Stand before me Eight legs.” The Elder said.

Ariadne squeezed my arm as she passed me and moved to stand in front of the Elder’s throne. I glanced at Whisperer and Regis. Whisperer was still cowled and Regis’ expression had not changed from his expression of pity and horror.

“Report on your experiment Eight Legs.” The Elder ordered.

Ariadne took a deep breath as a moment of realization struck me.

“This is about me,” I whispered to myself. I didn’t mean to speak aloud but I must have. Whisperer caught hold of my arm again and when I looked at him, his cowled head shook from side to side.

“The experiment continues apace,” Ariadne reported. “The humans are in a period of progressive advancement. Popular thought is turning against the conservatives of their various religions, racism is declining amongst the educated and in the aftermath of the most recent war. The spread of education is, however, perhaps irreprably damaged after the damages done to the libraries of the north by religious zealots.”

Notice how they were speaking in human language? I did. Especially for a language that had so many weaknesses according to both Ariadne and the Elder who had just delivered a speech about how awful our tongue is.

“All of that is fascinating.” The Elder said. “But contains none of what we wanted to know. How would our people be accepted into the world as it currently stands?”

Ariadne took a careful breath. I was, again, struck by the fact that these Vampires, no matter how ancient, were not so different from ourselves in this. Ariadne was avoiding a topic. The Elder had seen it too and was not letting her get away with it.

“It is my belief that our people could settle in the more urban areas,” Ariadne said carefully. Some people have fooled themselves into thinking that we do not exist and the majority of people would simply refuse to believe that their next-door neighbor was a Vampire. Those people, perhaps more knowledgable or more primitive in their levels of education, would be afraid. Any member of our species that was living openly as what they were would need to take steps to prove themselves in the eyes of the public.”

“And how long would that take?” The Elder asked.

“It took me about a year and a half, but that could not be typical. I took over in a time and a place where the people had been used cruelly by their previous masters. Therefore I was accepted far more readily than most. I also had an element of their power of nobility over them. I was their noble protector.”

“Yes of course. Are there any other ways that you would suggest that a Vampire could ease their way into human society?”

I knew what the answer was. So did the Elder, that was why he asked the question.

“Find a person of influence,” Ariadne said. “Make them love you and then marry into the society.”

If the Elder had been human, he would have nodded there. He had made Ariadne admit to a point.

“And how are your own efforts moving in that regard?” The Elder asked.

I watched as Ariadne tried to deflect the question. I felt relatively secure in what I was hearing. None of it was new to me. I knew that one of the things that Ariadne had agreed with her people was regarding this so-called “experiment” to see how human society would accept a Vampire. I also knew that her attentions towards me were helpful in that regard. The Elder was trying to hurt me…

I felt myself frown in thought. This was about me, but was it for me?

“I have made friends with many influential people,” Ariadne said. “Including, but not limited to, the magical leaders of the continent as well as the Empress and ruler of the continent. I am on speaking terms with a number of other rulers and powerful people. I would describe myself as close friends with relatively few people, however. Some of whom date from back before my imprisonment in the tower. However, I am close friends with the leader and director of the most powerful mercantile company on the face of the continent.”

“Who is this one’s sister is she not?”

The gesture was a mental one, not a physical one. But I felt it, I very nearly saw it as if the Elder really had gestured towards me.

“She is.”

“No other close friends?” the Elder seemed surprised.

“Using the common metric of the amount of time spent with each other, no,” Ariadne said. “There are a number of people that I have hopes for a relationship maturing into such. A few people have turned out to not be friends who I thought were, and a few people that I had formally disliked have turned out to be moving towards friendship.”

A distant part of me wondered who she was referring to.

“And how about the main subject of your experiment.” The Elder wondered. “How is your relationship with him?”

“I…” Ariadne hesitated and I felt a shiver of ice run down my spine. “I am as confident as I can be that he loves me unreservedly.”

“But you are not certain.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“To be certain, I would have to read his mind, and to do that would violate a very fundamental foundation of his trust in me.”

“Why is trust important? Simply make him love you.”

“For this one, love is based on trust and respect as well as other factors,” Ariadne told him. “Although he is an appreciator of physical beauty, that is not everything to him.”

“What other factors?”

“Physical appearance cannot be denied.”

Again, there was a pause where a nod should have been.

“I can see your young friend is confused about why I am asking these questions of you.”

I wasn’t. I had decided a little while ago that the Elder was being cruel.

“I said earlier,” The Elder went on. Regis had faded into the shadows now, “is true. Your language is woefully primitive and lacks certain factors. However, there are other things that your people are simply too backward to understand. And one of those is regarding the study of society. The closest term that we might invent for your language about this study is ‘Social Science’.”

I nodded to show that I was following along with this so far. I was, I remember Ariadne touching on some of this very early on in our relationship.

“I grow tired of this.” The Elder said. “You explain it to him.”

Ariadne turned to face me. There was a sense that she was forcing herself to look me in the eye.

“There are two ways to study a society.” She said. “The first is to do so remotely, as an outsider. The observer sets themselves up nearby and watches the society interact. They might, on rare occasions, interview the people that they are watching, but otherwise, they keep themselves separate from everything that is going on and do not get involved. The argument for this method is that you are not influencing the subject of your studies and therefore you get a far more unbiased impression of what you are watching.

“The stipulations of this would be that the observer would never be involved, never interfere, even to the destruction of the observed society. An example would be a society that lives next to the sea. An earth tremor occurs. The observer knows this to be a natural phenomenon and is also aware that the tremor will almost certainly cause a tidal wave and therefore flees. Society sees the tremor as the sign of the Gods and prays for their redemption. They are still praying as the tidal wave hits and drowns them all.”

I nodded. There were flaws to the model. There is a recent paper written on the subject of scientific observation that states that the act of observation, no matter how remote, has an effect on the experiment. And I rather thought that this would happen here. The paper itself was about the presence of an observer affecting the Alchemical reaction by, among other things, breathing in the same air as the reaction. But there was a whole group of scholars arguing over where else the observation might have an effect.

“Tell him of the other way.” The Elder said.

Ariadne took a moment, rearranged her skirts a bit, and ran her hands down her bodice.

“The other way is that the observer enters society as part of that society. They interact with people, they follow their religions, they have jobs, they interact with the social normality of that society with regards to its politics and etiquette.”

“What else do they do?” The Elder prompted.

“They take a spouse.” Ariadne made sure she was looking me in the eye when she said that before her gaze fell.

There it was. There was the point that the Elder was trying to make. I was a science experiment.

“Why do they do that?” The Elder was unsatisfied with the hint of doubt that he had managed to put into my soul. He wanted to widen the wedge, to shatter the bond irretrievably.

Ariadne took a breath and, again, forced herself to look me in the eye.

“The mating rituals of any society are vital towards understanding the society itself. Whether we want to believe it or not, the urge to reproduce is a vital one as part of the formation of any civilization. Even the decision not to procreate is important. Therefore, the interaction with that element of society is a vital part of any study into the way that they work.”

“If the scientist.” The Elder pressed, “follows this rational. Is love a part of that equation?”

“It can happen,” Ariadne admitted. “But is rare and should be avoided at all costs. The scientist might have another spouse elsewhere that is not part of the equation or might have societal mores from their own society that would make love inconvenient. Not least of which is the heartbreak that might come when the observing scientist is recalled home.”

“The heartbreak of whom?” The Elder asked.

“The scientist,” Ariadne responded.

“What of the subject, the person whom the scientist has married? What of their heartbreak?”

“Such a matter would be irrelevant,” Ariadne said.

I won’t lie, that one hurt. I dropped my gaze without meaning to. I didn’t know that I had done it until I realized what had happened. I took a deep breath and forced myself to raise my eyes to look Ariadne in the face.

She had turned away, back to the body of the Elder.

“So continue your report.” The Elder told Ariadne. “You chose your subject for study. Why this one?”

“There were a number of factors.” Ariadne began.

I won’t lie here, the cold way that she recounted all of this was… chilling and more than a little upsetting. Some people reading this might be wondering why it was so upsetting, even now they will be thinking of all of the previous occasions where to the observer’s eyes. Ariadne has proven her love and affection. Not just for me, but for others as well. And that is true. But I would also argue that those people saying those things have never stood there, in the dark. Feeling the cool damp air seeping into the depths of your being while you listen to the woman that you love talking about you as though you were something to be dissected under a microscope.

To later be discussed with her peers.

Not least was the issue that, a lot of what was being said, played on my own paranoia and lack of confidence that this had been the case all along. What followed, did not help.

“The first factor was in the manner of our meeting.” Ariadne began. “I did not realize this advantage until later of course, but the subject rescued me from my captivity. This gave him a very real sense of responsibility for me. This was sheer luck on this part and I had in no way planned for it.

“The second factor was the matter of the subject’s intelligence.”

“For a human.” The Elder prompted.

“Indeed,” Ariadne agreed, “however, his intelligence was still relatively high and much higher than I would have expected for someone from the society that I had seen growing before my imprisonment. Again, this was sheer luck on my part. There were other potential subjects occurring at the time and this was one of the factors that were involved in my decision. An intelligent specimin, even relatively speaking, would teach me far more about the society that he was from than a stupid one.

“If the Elder would remember, it was about here that I agreed on the tone of my experiment and I started to actively and consciously choose my subject. This one had many other factors that were attractive to a person in my position…”

“What position was that?” The Elder interrupted.

“The position of scientist looking for a subject.”

“So you weren’t looking for a rescuer or someone to love or a way to artificially get yourself into society then.”

“No. I needed none of those things. I was weak, certainly and I was invested in investigating the source of the totem that one of my other potential subjects was touting as a means to control me. I had already ascertained that the totem was incomplete, so I could have left at my leisure to rebuild my strength elsewhere before returning to society, whether human or Vampire, at my convenience. The only person that could have stopped me was the Witcher who was captive himself at the time.”

“I see.” The Elder seemed pleased. “Continue.”

“So now I was actively choosing a subject and more and more factors suggested this one to me. Practically, he had rank, but not too much which would have been an inconvenience and brought too much attention on me. As I said, he was intelligent and valued education, which meant that his access to further sources of information would be considerable. He was also friendly with the Witcher who was the only real physical threat to me at that time, given my weakened state.”

“Why not use the Witcher as a subject?”

“There would be distrust factors. He was trained to see me as a monster rather than that belief just being a matter of societal conditioning. And it was relatively easy to detect that he was too unstable mentally for such a relationship as one that I would want to foster. He might detect my manipulations and seek to destroy me. And this one was, by far, the better candidate.”

“I see. Continue,”

“Psychologically, the subject was rather naive about the ways of the world although he was forcing himself to confront his own learned viewpoints at the time and I found that interesting. He was also, clearly, very lonely, lacking in personal confidence, and desperate for some loving company and affection. I thought that these factors would leave him vulnerable to my charms, meaning that I would be better able to overcome his, quite sensible fear of me. He seemed to be the obvious candidate for study and so I made my choice.”

“How did you pursue him?”

“I questioned him about his society in order to fire up his intellectual interest in myself. I enquired about his romantic preferences which he was naive enough to tell me straight away. Not helped by his friend and companion who added some very interesting pointers as to how I could appear physically in order to appeal to the subject. None of which seemed to be insurmountable obstacles in pursuing him.

“Then I found out that I didn’t need to pursue him at all. His society believes in arranged marriages and as such, I could simply go to his superiors and force the issue. The rest of the matter was merely cosmetic.”

“Cosmetic.”

“Simple things.” She said. “I ensured that I would appear vulnerable. The subject was and still is rather naive and as such, he occasionally needs to feel as though he is a rescuer. So in appearing less than I was, he could feel a sense of pity towards me. I told him that I loved him. I cared for him as best as I could… In short I followed all of the rules of courtship in his society.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would make the relationship far easier if he genuinely cared for, or loved me. It would leave him vulnerable for other experiments and factors at later dates.”

“I see. Were there any other obstacles?”

“There were a few. One of my enemies nearly succeeded in driving a wedge between us when he tried to frame me for massacring a village. The religious issue was easily overcome by my conversion. His family took some time to come around and then there was the matter that he fell in love with another woman during the course of his adventures, forcing me to speed up my timetable and force the betrothal.

”

I thought of Marion and continued to say nothing. Why did I say nothing? I don’t know. Partly there was the fact that there were still a set of attendants clearing up the blood on the floor, but partially because my heart was breaking a little bit. I didn’t believe a word of it, but the fact that it was all so plausible, as well as playing into so much of my own paranoia and anxiety about allowing myself to love a person, any person, meant that I did believe it at the same time.

Doubt, the insidious death of trust. And still, Ariadne’s droning, emotionless voice carried on.

“He was nearly taken from me.” She carried on. “The Empress of the humans nearly decided that she was interested in him at the behest of his younger sister. But fortunately, I had forestalled that. He already loved me and I had already ensured that our betrothal had been sealed according to his customs. Enemies came for him and nearly killed him. That was a mistake on my part and I had overestimated his mental fortitude in the face of the horrors that he subjects himself to on a regular basis. He nearly tried to call the entire thing off as part of a foolish sense of honor.”

“How much of this does he know do you think?”

“Up until now? I think he only suspected but put it down to his own paranoia. His instincts were telling him to flee from me, but his desperation to believe in the love, to believe that he was special in that he could possibly appeal to me. That made him blind to the dangers.”

“Do you love him?” The Elder asked. This was the question that I had been dreading. Whether she answered in the positive or the negative, would I believe it? Could I believe it?

“No,” Ariadne said simply. “I have pretended to it, but no, I do not love him.”

“There are a number of your peers that believe otherwise.” The Elder argued.

“I cannot answer to that,” Ariadne said. “I have immersed myself in the feeling in order to pretend to it. But truth be told, the pretense was not hard, the subject was easy to manipulate. He is young and far too much of a prisoner of his own biology. I cannot answer for the accuracy of other people’s judgments.”

“Interesting.” The Elder said before he addressed me. “Step forwards young man.” He told me.

I was breathing hard. Whether I believed what Ariadne said before this night, or now, didn’t matter. I could sort that out later when I had more time to think.

I took a step forward.

“What do you make of all of this?” There was a tinge to Regis’ voice that had not been there before. Something close to curiosity.

“I am unsure,” I replied as honestly as I could. “I have a lot to think about.”

“You have heard everything that she has said. What she has said, is according to what she was ordered to do as part of her investigation. And I am the Elder of her race. She cannot lie to me. Given that, do you still love her?”

I took a deep breath and stared at the back of Ariadne’s head.

“Turn and face him,” The Elder ordered. “You should watch his face as his heart breaks and put it in your memory. I will be interested in your analysis of the process.”

Ariadne turned. I looked for some kind of signal, something in her eyes, but there was nothing there. I wondered if she was wearing an illusion and so I looked at her hands. Clenched hands around the skirts would mean that she was in emotional turmoil. I expected that, I needed to see that I think.

She was still, her hands down by her side.

“Do you still love her?” The Elder asked again.

“Yes,” I said. I wanted to make it firm, a defiant snarl into the face of this thing that was doing this to me. Whether I was showing defiance to Ariadne or the Elder, I didn’t know.

I wanted to be defiant, but the doubt was doing its job. Hearing Ariadne say that she didn’t love me hurt, even if it was a lie. It hurt me down to my soul.

I wanted to be defiant, but it came out like a sob.

“Yes, I still love her.” I wailed before I could find my anger. I gritted my teeth and forced my tongue to speak. “I will not deny that there are things that I have heard today that have hurt me and hurt me deeply. But yes I still love her. She told me that if she had been rejected elsewhere, then she would have come for me, even if I had my rank taken from me, which was not beyond possibility at times. She told me that she would have approached me regardless.”

“Really? Your rebuttal Eight legs?”

“I told him,” Ariadne said calmly, “that if the matter in Angraal had fallen through, then I would still have approached him. That was all I said and all I meant. I would have chosen him. He made a good subject for study. If his rank was removed, I would probably have gone elsewhere with my interests.”

She was right about that too. That was all she had said, it was only in my romantic memory that she had said elsewhere.

“I don’t care,” I said. I sounded childish and I knew it.

“Do you still love her?” The Elder asked through Regis’ mouth.

“I do.” I snarled it.

“Even though she lied to you?”

“I believe that she is telling the truth now,” I told the room. “And I believe that she told the truth then. Beyond that, I must consider things further.”

“You misunderstand.” The Elder said. “She claims that, for you, love is based on trust. She lied to you and I can prove it.”

The voice in the back of my head had a moment to take that in before it muttered in the back of my head ‘oh, this should be good.’

I also had a moment to take a long look at Ariadne and tried to see if I could tell what she was thinking. My effort was not entirely successful. I thought that she might be standing a little stiffer but I was also aware that I might be seeing that because I wanted to see that. My brain was doing an interesting thing where it had kind of decided that it wasn’t going to make any decisions tonight. It was going to absorb everything, take it all in, acknowledge how it all made me feel before setting it aside so that I could take it out later and have a proper look at it and make some decisions then.

After, say, I had had a good night’s sleep and was no longer in the presence of a horrifically ancient thing that lived before the recorded beginning of history, that I still had to interview.

When the Elder started to speak through Regis again, I swear to the flame that the voice had taken on some of Regis’ lecturing tone.

“You are aware of course,” he began, not turning the ancient body towards me, “that our appearance is self-actualizing and under our own control. We change our shape and our abilities according to our needs as well as after a certain amount of practice.”

“I was aware of that,” I admitted. “Your senses become sharper the more you use them, Your claws and teeth become sharper when using them for combat. You are also, I have learned tonight, more powerful the older you get and the closer to the first generation of vampires.”

“That is true.” The Elder continued. “Our physical appearance acts on that. We can control our appearance if we choose to. It can take time, it is not a glamour or what you would understand as a magical effect.”

“My understanding was that it’s like practicing something, practicing a musical instrument or something.” I tried to offer as a contribution.

“Largely correct.” The Elder said, I wondered if the smugness in the voice belonged to the Elder or whether that was a part of Regis’ general tone of voice. “Tell me, do you remember a conversation where she asked you what your ideal woman looked like? Or what you looked for in a romantic partner?”

“I do. And I remember Kerrass doing most of the telling.”

“And do you remember her telling you that that was her natural form?”

And there it was again. The little doubt. The thought that I didn’t believe but feared that it might be true.

“She lied to you.” The Elder told me. “She told you that that was what her natural form was. It wasn’t. She twisted herself to look like that in order to seduce you. In order to manipulate you for her own ends. She made herself into your ideal woman so that you would not question it when she insinuated herself into your life. It played off your vanity and your loneliness and your desires.

“She adjusted her hair to make it silkier and smoother. She increased the size of her mammary glands (Freddie: The scientific term for breasts for those people that don’t know), she toned her muscles to pleasing human proportions, modeling her physical body on some of the other Sorceresses in the continent. Making sure that she was slim, with just the right amount of hip and leg. She adjusted her face to be close to the ideal form of beauty, which she took from where Eight Legs?”

“I took it,” Ariadne began. “From the portraits of The Lodge of Sorceresses.”

“Be specific.” The Elder snapped. That was definitely not Regis.

“Specifically, I used the Elven appearance of Ida Aep Emean for a touch of non-humanity. Then a cross between Yennefer and Phillipa for Facial structure. Then I added a certain amount of softness from Emma, his sister. I made some small adjustments to appear youthful from the face of the Empress when I met her in person. The life and animation of that lady and similar.”

“Why his sister?” The Elder asked as I searched Ariadne’s face for the signs of those women that she mentioned. It took me a moment and I also had to acknowledge that I might have been imagining it due to my own… I don’t know, mental state I suppose. But I thought I could see Lady Eilhart’s chin and Yennefer’s cheekbones.

“Freddie adores his sister, to the point of idolization,” Ariadne said coldly. “He has stated often and publicly that all women that he meets are unconsciously compared to his older sister. He credits her with all of the goodness in his character and that he regularly declares her to be beautiful in his eyes.

“I also knew from his account in the matter of the Shadow in Amber’s crossing, that he was tormented by his sexual arousal in the presence of a lewd hallucination of his sister. The Beast even commented on his tendency towards loving his sister in a minor way. I thought that that might encourage him to trust me a bit more if I reminded him, even a little bit, of the sister that he adores.”

The Elder paused to let that sink in for a moment. I don’t know what he was expecting me to do. It was a lot that he was expecting me to take in. Instead, though, I looked at Ariadne and searched her eyes, and wondered if my heart was breaking.

“So that is not your true form.” The Elder stated rhetorically.

“No. We have no true form.”

“Oh but we do, don’t we Eight Legs.” If the Elder moved, he would have been rubbing his hands with glee. “Show him how you dress for war.

Ariadne sighed as though faintly bored about the entire sequence of events. Her hands extended into claws with a strange kind of stretching noise. Her teeth lengthened into fangs, her cheekbones extended upwards and stretched the skin over the cheek hollows, while her ears lengthened into points. She snarled anomalistically.

“What do you think little human? Do you still love her?” The Elder’s voice echoed.

I looked into the eyes of the creature that Ariadne had become. I looked into her eyes. The thing that I had been terrified to do for so long and looked for some sign of the woman that I loved.

And there was my answer, even before I found anything. I still loved her. Even as I looked and found nothing, I was looking for the woman that I loved. I know that the Elder was trying to set me this impossible task, this thing that I would not be able to overcome. But I still loved her, even if she was breaking my heart. I still loved her.

“Yes,” I said and turned to look the Elder square in his fucking eye sockets. “Yes, I still love her.”

I looked back at Ariadne then and thought I saw something in her eyes, a glimmer of some emotion.

“Do you know why we call her Eight Legs?” The Elder asked. “She is dodging the question, dodging the order that I gave her, for which I will have to punish her. I asked her how she dresses for war? That is how she dresses for war now. But that is also a matter of practice. That is not how she went to war in times gone past. It is not the way she appeared to the humans in this keep. That is not why the humans of the North called her Spider Queen and it is not why we call her Eight Legs.”

I had looked at the Elder as his voice had continued to emerge from Regis’ mouth. When he had done making this little speech, I turned back to Ariadne. Her eyes had widened, just a little, even in that feral combative state. Finally, there was an emotion in her beyond coldness and remoteness.

She was afraid.

“You know, of course,” The Elder began again when he was sure that we were listening. “That vampires are typically associated with Bats?”

I nodded as I tried to guess what was coming.

“We can turn into bats, some of us can communicate with bats, and our… what we call ‘War Form’ is similar to that of a Giant Bat.”

“I have read the account of Lord Geralt fighting Detlaff,” I said. “When injured, Detlaff turned into a giant, bat-like creature that moved supernaturally fast and with a force that knocked Lord Geralt from his feet.”

“Yes.” The Elder agreed. “And that from a, relatively speaking, young Vampire. What you see before you is generally the most expedient form we can take for war. It uses characteristics that we need. But when injured or our body is under stress, we have a greater form that is more associated with the animals that we are most associated with. Detlaff and Regis, indeed the majority of the more public Vampires take the form of bats. But there are others as well.

“Many take the form of Wolves and have an affinity for that animal for example and their war form would be very similar to what you know of as Werewolves. This is, of course, highly insulting as those of us with Wolven forms would tower over even the largest Werewolf and we could tear them in two with relative ease. Indeed, the one you call Regis tells me that there is some evidence that the first Werewolves were cursed by Mages who were trying to emulate those early Wolven Vampires. But that is what happens, where the one you call Detlaff summoned an almost weaponized flocks of bats, these wolven Vampires summon packs of Wolves to do their bidding.

“Why are some Vampires affiliated with Wolves instead of bats? I will admit to it being a mystery. Bats came with us through the portals. Wolves were already here. There is an attendant somewhere that thinks it’s due to personal character.

“But the woman, the Vampire that you love, is affiliated with Spiders. She would crawl about this keep in her war form because she would claim it to be more efficient. It would mean that she could scuttle across ceilings when people were in the way. She also found it useful when the other humans could not help but display their terror of her.”

Ariadne glanced up at the Elder. I was watching her and she looked over at the Elder with fear and… I think it was horror in her eyes.

“Show him.” The Elder demanded. “Show him why we call you Eight-Legs. Show him why the people in the lands that you call your home, called you the Spider Queen.”

Ariadne shook her head.

“SHOW HIM.” The Room shook with the strength of the Elder’s order and Regis coughed and spat a black globule of Flame knows what onto the floor.

Ariadne backed away from the Elder, it looked like a reflex action. Whatever veneer of calm that she had once worn had fallen away. She backed away, looking at the other exits and the tunnels in and out of the cavern. She looked at me in fear, she looked at the Elder with pleading on her face.

The Elder moved again., just a blur. He was standing in front of Ariadne and then he blurred again as he tore open her stomach and her chest with a single swipe of his claws. Blood and other gore-splattered up the walls. More blood exploded from Ariadne’s mouth as she screamed before coughing as more of it came. She looked at me again with such a feeling of sorrow in her face that made me sob.

Then the Elder was back in his seat.

Whisperer, who I had forgotten about, sighed and moved to the exit where some of the cleaning attendants must have been nearby. One of them came in and started to reclean the Elder’s bloody claws.

Ariadne’s blood on the walls was left to drip as she fell to the ground in fetal agony.

I jerked forwards to help her, to offer some comfort or… I don’t know. I still loved her, despite the revelations that I found that I believed.

Whisperer caught my arm and held it firmly if not painfully. “She’s not dead.” He whispered for my hearing. “But she might wish she is.”

Ariadne reared back and screamed. There was nothing human in that scream.

And she changed.

I’m going to try and describe it as best as I can. It is not easy and it is, by no means, pleasant. It might be a little late to warn you about this kind of thing, but if you are squeamish about changes to the body then I might suggest that you look away now.

My other problem is that I only saw this once and I have no intention if at all possible, to ever see it again. I was desperately trying to take it in, but I was also, desperately and instinctively, trying to look away and not see it. My heart bled for the woman that I loved going through something like that. But I was also angry, a little heartbroken and fascinated with what I was seeing.

So this is my best attempt to try and describe what happened.

As she reared back and screamed, it was as though the skin of her upper lip flowed up and over the back of her head. It was half growing, half stretching as it did so. The upper half of her face, her nose, and her eyes seemed to melt into this expansion of flesh until the top of her skull seemed to be smooth and pink with this new skin.

Her hair, hair that I had, in the past, enjoyed running my hands through the softness, shrank back on itself until it became relatively short and stubby. Individual strands melted together to form larger, tougher, and more individual bristles. After that, along with the stretching skin movement, it seemed to flow down and over the rest of her body. The bristles were sharp enough that I could see them tearing at her dress.

I then realized that her legs had been brought together by bent knees and what I had first thought was flexibility in the knee joints was actually the two halves of the legs melding together and then the one to each other. She was now a torso and a bottom half, joined by a narrow waist.

She was still screaming.