XXII - Le Dragoon Rouge
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> When first did Lucifer bleed, to place His right eye upon the firmament so that Creation might see, He did so maketh that most dreadful of creatures; the red dragoon, the imp of serpents whose hunger knows no end for it is the stillborn sun that aches to become what it could have been and never would be. Spilled, misbegotten seed sown upon the womb of the abyss.
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> The first, primæval creature did Azazel take pity and so blessed it with a name; Lucifuge Reficul, She-Who-Flees-The-Light, Nightbringer and Anathema to Lucifer and His ærengeists.
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> When first did Lucifer mould Lilith from the dust of the earth, breathe not did He life into inanimate clay as the Luciferine scriptures dictate; for it was already alive, born of His coagulated and forgotten blood.
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> She before Lilith, He did not see.
—Le Dragoon Rouge excerpt (She Before Lilith), pg. 616, paragraphe 12, by persons unknown; the Grand Grimoire of Heresies: A Compiled Archive of Witchcraft & D’yabelwork by Decalian Magistaire and Witch-Finder General Antoine Veniti D’Rabitna; original manuscript currently held by the Black Vault of Shabiri within the archives of the Collegium of Saint-Mahault, an institution for the rearing of sorciers and scientists in the occult and natural philosophies.
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Pain to a vampyre is a draught of insensate bliss, stronger than the purest Jartoshi opium and deeper than the blackest Adraqian tub āq.
If not for this, I would have died in spirit. Become a catatonic vegetable in the garden of the Asylum or planted seven palms beneath the dirt.
Instead, I became intimately familiar with my body. Each and every muscle’s connection points to the skeleton and anatomical name, how much skin weighed and how light you felt after all that dead weight was removed, how much force was required to break a molar and how much more is required to rip it out, root and stem.
I studied the art of breaking a human, of butchering them as if an animal carcass, of harvesting their leather as if a skinless saint. Lord-Executioner Alexiaries was astounded at my body’s many idiosyncrasies and brought alquemists and occultists to study me. Even Pierre was impressed. They’d yet to find out my true nature as silver did not burn me. My pseudo-fangs were hidden beneath my hard palate and would only erupt at my discretion now; they thought I was a foreign agent of either the Crown or another Cairn, come to steal the heartblood of Sol since the sympathie compasses pointed towards me no different than a true-born of House Solaire.
If only they knew that there was indeed a sun-blood inside my heart.
Claude had sold me out as a vampyre, yes, but the nobles would not believe it as no Narancan-sign manifested from me. As they knew not what exactly I was—I was no sacrūna with unmarked skin, that was for sure—they tested me at every turn so that they might discover the secrets hidden in the marrow of my gilded bones and how exactly their glyphes gave me my abilities.
Alexiaries and his cadre had yet to grasp that I had a heart of stone—ruby amber in specific. The alloy that replaced the calcium matrix of your skeleton is composed of various heavy metals, Lamaré lectured, his voice the only thing keeping me sane. Along with ambarique interference, auguries that rely on light—Röntgen-radiation, for instance—cannot pierce through your ribcage and return a stable enough héliographe. Ambarique resonance compounds upon itself, as the name implies, scattering ambaro-waves and returning only inference.
It was during one of these scientific rounds of inquiry inflicted upon me by my captors that I heard the most interesting thing: “Have you exposed him to sunlight yet?” An alquemiste asked as he applied an extremely basic solution to my hands to hydrolyze them into soap; a rare opportunity to test the best method to make alquemique reagents from the human body as my skeleton proved inert to any transmutation whereas my flesh did not and would reform, unblemished. “Won’t have to go too far up. Could take him to the ravine.”
So we were in the Underbowels of Saint-Getaine, then. The massive network of underground tunnels intersected with the sewers and other infrastructure; there was a city beneath the Cairn, the slum to lord over all slums, a land where the living cavorted with the dead.
The Lord Executioner gave the offending, loose-lipped alquemiste a severe look—I knew this by the positions of their bodies through heart-sight and the creaking of the muscles at the corner of Alexiaries’ eyes.
I laughed but did not say anything as Alexiaries had taken my vocal chords again recently. It was a hoarse, gargoil-like thing. As with my tongue, he’d gouged-out my eyes but did not otherwise attempt to deafen me as a blade could not pierce my skull and loud noises rebounded far too much in these confines. Acid was likewise ineffective while pressure wasn’t used because ear-drums ruptured in such a way regenerated every one-hundred-twenty-four breaths and a half; wasn’t worth the continual upkeep of effort.
I oriented my eyeless face towards the alquemists and shook my head ever so slowly and deliberately; they’d made a mistake. I could not smile—they’d taken my lips again, along with my fingers, degloved down to the bones, and another member not so dissimilarly shaped—but I knew that they knew I smiled at them.
It wasn’t the insane smile of a madman—I still had my wits about me even after however long this stint in Hel be—but instead the grin of a man that knew something you didn’t. I looked them in the eye, my sockets devoid of eyes themselves and yet they bored into the black souls before me.
Spines stiffened and my peals of chuffing laughter only grew more manic. I knew each and every one of their frightened muscles: from their protracted trapezii and their trembling latissimus dorsi down to their deep musculature, splenii capitis and cervicis tight as bowstrings while the levator scapulae and erector spinae were rigid as if stone.
I knew them by voice.
I knew them by smell.
I knew them intimately.
I would find them.
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They brought me into the light, the wooden bridge that cleaved together the opposing sides of the ravine creaking. Through the wind on my flayed skin, I could extrapolate a fuzzy héliographe of the space within my mind’s eye: cavernous, the cleft was twice as deep as it was wide, the stone worn away by water until it was smooth. There were veins of marble, evidenced by the smell of calcite and salt, though most of it was naturally hewn of igneous rock due to the sulphur and cinnabar undertones.
The marble is likely due to ancient, prehistoric deposits of clamshells and other marine animals fossils, ground up through time and tide and then subjected to the natural alquemique processes of geolithic metamorphosis.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I was no fool; I knew that Lamaré wasn’t much interested in the dead stone of the sarcophagus we’d found ourselves in. No, he was doing what he did best, concealing fear under recitation of fact and consoling trauma through poetics.
The sound of the wind changes when it brushes against the denser crystals, evidence that the calcium here is present in allotropes of aragonite and vaterite. Seems this was once part of an oceanic trench, metamorphosed through countless æons.
When the blood of the sun graced me, it did not burn me any longer. Whether by the simple fact that I had no skin left to burn, through the heavy infusion of alquemiques in my bones, by the torrent of ambaricité after I awoke in the gaol, or through unknowable happenstance, I drank of Lucifer’s Right Eye unhindered.
My healing had begun to wane through my stay in this Hel-on-Earth, time measured in the mending of the cracks of my heart. The ichor in my veins drained in my heart’s attempt to restore my distraught form; they fed me just enough élixir to keep me above Azazel’s threshold and to prolong my torment but not nearly enough to regain my strength.
However long ago, they’d stopped caring as much about any information I might disclose through speech, evidenced by my lack of tongue. Besides, torture wasn’t much effective at prying out secrets as it was for the sick satisfaction of the torturer. I knew so because the Malleus Maleficarum, though considered contraband in the hands of the layman, was printed en masse within the Cairn.
The Inquisition’s de facto treatise on everything from extracting teeth without risking death to detecting a bedfellow of Azazel through their witchmark and other such things. The implements of torment described within the Malleus better fit the lowest circle of the Sixty-Seven Hels than a supposedly holy tome.
But I digress, as I am wont to do; a habit I had picked up from Lamaré and so blame him for my long-windedness.
Today, the amber in my chest was carved into a chalice, filled to the brim and spilling into the rest of me. Warmth concentrated in my golden bones, setting them aflame as the marrow festered to produce more of God’s blood. Lord-Executioner Alexiaries had once hollowed-out my tibia with a very long spoon and poured molten silver within to see if it would disrupt the glyphes carved upon my skeleton; this was worse.
I had not screamed then, during the torture, as my body had well accustomed to the abuse. I had only gritted my teeth and borne it, breaking them in the process.
I screamed now, ragged and wailing as I felt my flesh writhe. As if a dragoon’s würm-brood, sinew wriggled and meat bubbled, bringing to bear new life in the terrible manner that is known to all births. Heavy bromine vapour ignited, tongues of bleeding-dawn clinging to me as if tar set alight.
Had Lamaré not been there with me all throughout the ceaseless torment, I would have died in spirit. Had he not been here now, I would have in the flesh; my regeneration was cancerous, producing tumours with teeth and malformed homunculæ from my blood and marrow. My Ré was my foundation stone as I attempted to retake control of my rapidly-mutating body.
Leeches with human eyes within their maws fell from me, wet and slick and aflame on the wood of the bridge. The Lord-Executioner gave them and me a wide berth for fear of infection—you did not touch a dragoon’s würm-brood for much the same reason. The maggot-like vermillion larvæ could infest flesh in an instant and eat a man from the inside out.
I understood then how Narancan conceived of the vampyre curse: he used the blood of dragoons, truly. The play by the Bard said as much but I had thought it nothing more than rumour and myth and legend.
One man hadn’t been quick enough, the very same that suggested I be brought forth into the light. The irony of his death as he fell into the dark was like the sweetest of red wines that I would never again taste on my lips—Sauvignon Sanguine.
Where first I fell to drown in the sea as if Cauris, now I flew too close to the sun such that I was set aflame.
I stumbled and fell into the gullet of the seemingly-bottomless Hel’s mouth below me.
Down and down and down I went.
Down.
Down.
Down.
I went.
A fallen godling going to meet another of its ilk.
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Some time ago I had awoken in chains of metal. Now I awoke imprisoned within my own body and still within those very same chains. I was a broken thing now, crippled and plagued as the blood of Sol and Narancan fought for control.
But I was not a single person but instead two and so took the flagging battle from Lamaré’s hands and took up the shield-wall against my own flesh. Teeth bit into our lungs as our liver grew fingers and attempted to flee from our abdominal cavity. Bones shed sharp tears of pyrite, razor blades bleeding into us from our skeleton. Organs cannibalised their brethren, oh so very hungry and dumb and blind.
The polymorphism of vampyres is derived from the changeling blood of würms and so is its pyromancie. Dragoons were a territorial sort, we knew, and so fought against one another for control over a hive. And so we breathed out fire from our lungs, turning to ash any unruly rebel of our fleshly host.
We were reborn then, baptised in Hel-fire.
Our bones were the charred black of immolation over a gold reliquaire and from our marrow we regrew the flesh, our skin no longer cinnamon-brown but rather tub āq-red. Like a newborn, we crawled in the darkness of that abyssal womb, in search of a place in which we could rest.
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When the feverish delirium abated, I drank all of the excruciation so that Lamaré did not experience even a lick of it. I had done so throughout the torture, suppressing that anemic part of my spirits that had been so whittled down by the malice of the carving knife and other implements best left unnamed.
Ré had thrown away his life for me and I would bear this pain for him. The least I could do to repay the unpayable debt of death. Ré had guarded my soul from Methusael and I would guard his from the torment of a second birth.
Time now was measured in the waning of pain, whether through growing callous and scar-flesh upon my psyche or reconvalesence of the body. I did not need light to know my condition for vampyres, or whatever I had become, are intimate with all that which touches their blood.
Hadn’t broken a single bone but had lost so much muscle, my flesh scraped-off against the stone and my ligaments torn asunder from the fall as if the wings of Azazel’s compatriots after having been cast out of Heaven.
Fitting then, that I sought to escape the Host’s representatives on Earth.
I set out in the opposite direction of Ashen, for I knew that the soul-bound sword taken from me would be kept within a Church’s vaults and I would not risk true death. No matter that I had begged for it all throughout the past eternities, unheard if not for Ré, ever the saint on my shoulder.
During one of the many countless respites I took in the roots of darkness, travelling the roads beneath the earth as a pilgrim lost, I prayed for salvation though not from Lucifer given that His ærengeists were wont to relieve sinners and saints alike of their skin.
When first I made a pact with Abeloth, I called out to Heaven. Now I invoked Hel and out of all of its infernal spirits I chose Azazel’s Apostle of Envy, the Soul-Stealer of Sathariel, the Raven-God, patron deity to all that would make bump in the night, moonless and unseen be they thief or assassin or lover seeking to avoid the cuckold’s horns.
Star-pacts are done so for the gaze of the Alephen, the constellations of the Apostles. But Hel did not need such paltry beacons and could be summoned without the need for light. Oh the irony that in my perdition, I sought escape through damnation; it was poetic if only I had a mind to savour the metaphor.
“I call upon the Tzaraathen; harken O Nameless Things of the Infernal Host so that might mine own sign be affixed with that of the Effigy of Deathknells, now and forevermore.”
My spirit was currently occupied with vengeance and understood then, truly, why someone would want to hurt another so deeply. My body held no scars due to its supernal physiology but the same could not be said for that which is beyond even the bone; I would commit deeds worse than those of René upon the blackhearts that had imprisoned me.
There is a reason that people do not empathise with the depraved, for to admit that you can hold the sin of another in your heart means you’re kindred to the very same. But I was past human sensibilities of morality and shame—those had been carved and gouged from me.
I took from the abyss a shadow and let the sin of envy stain my soul.
Those that took from me I would not suffer alive and unscathed. Hate so deep, so pure, burned in my throat; a coiled serpent, there was vitriol on my tongue when I spoke the next two words that sealed the fate of the Cairn of Saint-Getaine.
“Mote it be.”