We return to our suite, eat and drink our fill, and pass out in each other’s arms in a mild food coma on the firm bed that has been dedicated to us. When we wake, Teuila has returned to sadness, grieving the loss of Dawn. I can’t blame her. My heart, too, aches for My Friend, she was almost entirely erased from existence. It’s so hard to move forward, knowing that so many hearts and minds were relying on Dawn’s curse being broken.
I wonder if my mentor in Rayileklian magic, Jarrah Bettergrove, the crazy-eyed celestial hiding out amongst the Fae of the Hidden Heart, would feel about my failure. He stands in direct opposition to our mutual manxome foe. If the Hidden at the Heart of the Wilds is the final bastion of civilization to be brought under sway of the Celestial Emperor and the banner of his nations, then the Enochian Enclave is that bastion’s first, last, and best line of defense.
The archfey keeping the forested region of the Hidden Heart enchanted can only hold out for so long, and I’ve done them the disservice of disarming one of their royal guards. To be fair, Sindred was a murderous psychopath, bent on slaying me to retrieve Lullaby, Requiem of the Windless Wilds. Sending Balchar’s Flame, and Dirge, Requiem for the Wounded away from her position is one of the two reasons that I’m alive. The other is that Teuila caught on to the fight, and stepped in while Sindred was pummeling and crushing my unconscious form. Huff. I wish I could access my Can’Z’aasian magic without bleeding light and vitality all over the place, or passing out half the time.
Long, half-sobbed, shuddering breaths are a mainstay of the few sounds that break the otherwise silent air of the Sisters Hidden in the Mist’s compound. There’s a story there, something in Rayileklian history, why these three close yet disparate groups are all the Hidden of something or other. The assassin village in Vale Valley are the Hidden of the Vale Beyond the Veil or beyond the wilds or something like that, then the Fae are the Hidden at the Heart of the Wilds, and the Sisters, well, yeah, Sisters Hidden in the Mist speaks for itself. I don’t really have the energy, time, or luxury of seeking out Rayileklian history to study such curiosities however.
My own life’s ticking clock grows shorter and shorter as the dragonforce from absorbing Kozzurth’s heart weakens by the day. Teuila can’t even bear to talk about it since the sisters indicated we need over a dozen more elder dragon hearts. I’m running low on options here for learning anything useful that might get us through either living until we find my cure, or stopping our manxome foe before I die. I’m pressing harder and harder to learn every spell that sounds remotely useful, but I’ve got to be careful with my daily rune limit, my sorcery points as Bud calls them. Teuila has short bursts of hype and amped attitude every time I tell her I mastered a new spell, and we try to savor those short moments of happiness.
Despite our desires to maintain our levels of happiness, Teuila and I fall into alternating cycles of despair as we come across reminders of Dawn everywhere we look. I suck down a ragged breath and drop my face into my hands once again. We’ve been getting almost nowhere with the Sisters’ aid. They seem more and more frightened of us the longer we stay. Especially since Teuila has grown cold and distant once again.
While I dearly desire to make use of the bubble room, I know that I can get sucked into the readings, even if they aren’t particularly relevant to our current struggles and strifes. I guess the only thing left to do is check out the one suspicious room that both my genre senses, and danger wraps are wary of each time I pass within my sensory range of it. It takes going through a bit of a maze to get there, from what I can tell, but that’s not really an issue. I still have my sense of direction baked in, and the right hand wall rule rarely fails.
I jokingly ask Bud to cover my back as I explore closer and closer to the room that I’m certain holds a massive runic circle. The Sisters have been mysteriously absent most times, unless we specifically call out for one to let us out of the compound. My heart hammers like a stampede of rhinos within my chest, and I gulp back my apprehension as I draw nearer yet still. My eyes grow heavy and my sight grows dim, but still I press onward.
For the first time since before Dawn’s death, I spy a Sister that doesn’t just appear from somewhere. She stands in a doorway, behind which I swear I can hear a mission bell. The door itself is massive, and completely unique amongst the doors of the compound. I draw a shuddered breath and approach the Sister. I know she’s, or rather, they are, telepathic, but she makes no move to dissuade my curiosity.
From beneath her robes, she withdraws a candle. She lights it, and motions the way forward, beyond the door. Compared to the heavenly bubble room with access to scrying bubbles containing all the written works on Rayileklia, this room feels hellish. My sense of smell is mostly non functional, and yet a familiar presence assaults my nose. There’s no mistaking gore, even lacking most of my olfactory faculties. I gulp as I press onward towards the door.
I pause a moment, trying to make certain I have my escape route memorized, so I can find the right passages back towards the place I was before. The Sister offers a polite smile that I can only sense with my silent sonar due to her heavy veils. Like all the others, the rest of her face is featureless, and that smile hides rows of needle-sharp teeth. They’ve never once acted hostile towards us, but my danger senses and genre senses are both on edge as I slowly shove the double door open with all my might.
The waft of gore in the air assails my nose further, and it’s no wonder. It appears the runic circle is painted in blood. There are remnants of animal carcasses being prepared at a long table, or hanging on hooks. It all seems very clinical, and I wonder what they even use the leathers, hides, feathers, and bones for. I’m not even certain they need to eat, but if they do, I don’t need to question the meat at least. The far end of the room is pitch-black, as the Sister’s candle is the only light to guide my way.
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The Sister leading me about within the room stops me to plead, “We choose kindness, no matter your choice. Your fate need not be grim. We hope you offer us the same.”
I furrow my brow at her and gulp. Something at the back of this room, something shrouded in darkness is making muffled sounds. The stampede that is my heartbeat races across the Serengeti at full tilt. Every fiber within my being screams at me to flee, to not learn what lies beyond in the darkness. I hear the swish of a knife cutting air, and the soft sound of quickly tearing flesh. Gulping back my fear and hesitation, I move onward.
I withdraw my potent staff with a host of spells in it, and cast a simple lighting spell to light the rest of my way as the Sister remains behind, caught in her own apprehension. When I finally light the rear of the room, I can hardly make heads or tails of what I’m seeing. A pale, feral, rabid person with wild red locks is chained to a device that appears to funnel blood from their wounds into paint buckets. The person recoils from the light cast by my staff. Despite having heard the Sisters stab this individual, they haven’t slain the person. In fact, there are no wounds marring their flesh at all. Stab as much as they might with their steel knives, they just can’t kill this beast. Its wounds recover nearly instantly each time one is inflicted.
Drawing nearer, the facial featu—. No. I fall on my rear and scrabble backwards, into the Sister who’d been holding the candle. Despite being terrified of them at the moment, she offers me a hand up. I gaze at it incredulously. I know they’re ephemeral, ethereal, only as solid as they need to be in any given moment. She could be offering me her hand up earnestly, or is it a ploy to get me to take a vulnerable position with my arm extended as it passes through hers? She shakes her head sadly at my train of thoughts.
My paranoia has saved my life on several occasions, and times when I have tried to ignore it often ended in disaster. Still, I gulp and accept the hand up. I glance between the sister, and the wildly ravenous humanoid creature. One with my facial features, and my wild mane of unkempt red hair. Their ears are slightly longer, and pointier. Their canines are far longer and sharper, visibly jutting over the gag in their mouth. If I didn’t know that I was me, I would think that that was Reggie Shellcracker, only one who had been turned into a vampire.
Who am I supposed to choose kindness for? Should I free this creature that looks like me? Or am I supposed to let the Sisters go on about their business? They’ve done much good for Rayileklia, as far as I know, including sending us to put an end to a dangerous cult. So what the hell is this? As a bucket finishes filling, one Sister replaces it with an empty one, and takes the full bucket, along with a brush, to put a new, fresh coat of blood on patches of the Runic circle that are drying unevenly, or wearing thin.
I turn to her and try to remain as polite as I can as I demand, “Explain.”
The nervousness and fear that wells up within this otherworldly creature in the guise of a veiled woman is palpable. She hazards her answer, “You’ve experience existing outside the natural flow of time, young, ancient Shellcracker. In some cases Reggie, the timeline itself rejects the course of events, leaving fragmented timelines astray in the cosmos.”
She pauses, and doesn’t offer further insight at the moment. I’m supposed to draw my own conclusions from that bit of mysticism and cryptic conjecture. Sure, it’s true, I’ve been outside of, and messed with the flow of time. But it’s not like I— Oh. In some doomed timeline, Reggie, me, I am consumed by vampirism. But why are they here? Why are they being used as an unending blood battery? My genre senses earlier had a guess that this runic circle is what ties these otherworldly creatures and their compound to within a near enough phase that they can interact with the physical plane of Rayileklia.
I’m almost certain that those senses are right. This is why they fear us, fear me. It’s why they shuddered whenever my genre senses were making guesses about this room as we passed near it. Not because they were cold. Rather, because I could sever their link to the plane of reality that they choose to associate with almost instantly. I kinda figured. Could they even set it back up, ever, if I did that? Huff. What am I supposed to do with this information? They beg that I choose kindness, but they’ve got a liv— okay, maybe not a living being, since that Reggie is probably undead. Point is, they’ve got a sapient creature chained up, being endlessly tortured.
The vampiric version of Reggie, err, me I guess, can never leave. Sure, I can check out any time I want, either escaping into infinite literature in their bubble room, or back into the wilds of Rayileklia. Vampiric Reggie though? While I can check out, they can never leave. I knew this place was too nice, these lovely Sisters in this lovely place were too good to be true. These faceless spirits in humanoid form are going to continue stabbing and draining vampiric Reggie for all eternity, driving them senselessly mad I imagine.
Is that Reggie wild and crazy due to their vampirism? Or is it from being stabbed repeatedly? If I politely ask, would they free this Reggie? Where would the vampire Reggie go? Do they have an insatiable bloodlust? Would they kill? I, I’m at a loss here. Worse, I’m fairly certain that this isn’t the only creature they’ve used as a blood faucet. There’s so little wildlife on this side of Rayileklia, outside of the Hidden Heart. There are also seemingly absolutely no bandits or marauders, despite Aces memories having mentioned them.
I turn my gaze to the Sister and ask, “Bandits, marauders, others of the like?”
The Sister places her hands forward placatingly as she attempts an answer, “Some, those that seek no better life, those that thrill or take delight in the bringing of misfortune to others. However, those that are simply downtrodden, we laden them down with furs, pelts, leathers, hides, bones, and meat, and send them to villages in need of such things.”
I try not to growl as I breathe huffily. Do I trust her? It’s not far off from what I would do. What I have done. But the answer is too perfect, too right on the money. Fine. I huff a weighted sigh as I’m determined to ask a question I’d been avoiding.
I close my eyes and sigh once more before asking, “Who is it that you serve? You’d given me some cryptic statements previously about a message being delivered or something. Out with it. Please. What’s their overarching desire? Their endgame?”