"Ahah! Since it has already taken place we must be in a year past 1815!" I couldn't help but blurt, which earned me a most flaying punishment, although should someone passing by have looked through the glass and witnessed it they would say it was nothing more than a glare. In that excoriating look I was made well aware that she thought disclosing that information was of no consequence, and that even if she told me the correct year of our ride my mind would let it slip moments later, for my entire world was in her presence, and my entire time the time spent with her.
"Please, continue," I pleaded, "I am taking a vow of silence until you ask something of me next. If you leave this car without doing so then I shall never speak again." I had every intention of keeping my word, even as I saw in her reaction idle musings about what sorts of torture would get me to break my vow with scream or howl.
"You could say it was the summer of 1816," she resumed, the invisible noose about me loosening as she turned her head and stared at the ceiling. Her arms moved to clasp each other just under her bosom, which was barely concealed by her furs. Despite their voluminous fluff that portion of her shape was revealed to me, and I no longer did her the disservice of assuming she was unaware of the effect, nor of the effect inside my own body.
"Except that year did not have a summer Severin. Rain fell in sheets for months, sick clouds doubled over our continent, shambling about in the gray evening-days it created. Staying indoors was immediately in fashion, but some fools ran from one set of doors to another when they grew bored, eager to be more fashionable recluses.
In one such run, across borders even, several people came to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva for a conclave. They were quite famous, a few of them. One Percy Shelley. One Mary Wollstonecraft. They'd run through the rain to hole up with a friend of theirs, a pariah from their native England: Lord Byron. Rumor was he'd had an affair with his sister, and in a huff he'd gone abroad and pretended he had a new life of holiday retreat. With him when Percy and Mary arrived, bringing with them Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, was Byron's personal physician John Polidori, who was happy to, within the confines of Diodati, be little more than a font of laudanum for further alleviation of boredom.
For a time they made themselves headaches to Byron's servants, and heartache to each other, until a particular thunder grew in the vagrant clouds. It brought night even more prematurely than usual, and these spoilt children of high society huddled together in the villa's innermost rooms, furthest from the crashing outside.
A book in their possession called Fantasmagoriana contained a multitude of ghost stories, which the men used to frighten the women, not giving a second thought to how their ensuing nightmares meant they had frightened themselves as well. No, the fools, waking in cold sweat, decided to call it inspiration.
From the terror of the tales told under the incessant rainy dark they devised a competition amongst themselves. Lord Byron was a well known poet and author, so too was Shelley, and in truth the brightest among them was young Mary. The contest was one of creativity, as each guest was tasked with writing a tale they believed would genuinely frighten the others.
As they collaborated with each other and chased after slinking shadows that might offer plot lines, as long as they were the tamer indoor shadows, there was much talk of what was frightening. Were ghosts frightening in themselves, or simply because they were dead, with death being the truly frightful concept?
Galvanism was brought up: the stimulation of dead tissue with electrical current. And they discussed vampirism too, with Dr. Polidori crafting a menacing silhouette of a character: a wealthy charismatic man, but one depraved, who moved from state to state, appearing at social gatherings as the life of the party only to leave with several people now in his thrall, drained of blood and soul alike. Byron took some offense to what looked like a fantastical exaggeration of himself. An argument ensued.
Now nobody knows if their stories would have been completed or gone on to any success, which would've been nightmares across the continent, because they never managed to write more than a few fragments each. Their laudanum and drink fueled play was more than a flirtation with the occult. It was a ritual, performed under an abnormal storm that almost looked the harbinger of a dark and evil age.
And this ritual was a success. It gave off a most enticing aroma caught by a miserable and ancient creature that similarly sought shelter from a rain it was finally tiring of, after weeks without a roof that wasn't better described as a cave.
This creature, a woman to them at first, knew to arrive at the least opportune moment, when the ghost story revelers were intoxicated and arguing about whether or not Byron's behavior was vampiric or Bacchanalian. She did not bother to knock, as it would not have been heard over the thunder, and none present had decided to lock the place up either. Who would be so mad as to be out in such weather?
An heir of Cain, that's who, that's what. She appeared to them in a passage just as the argument spilled into it, dripping wet, hair obscuring her face. Her clothes were dingy almost beyond recognition, but they were at one point intended for leisurely bathing, so her arms and legs were bare. Without a look at her face it was impossible to guess at her age.
'Good Lord, she's half-drowned,' Mary wailed, scurrying past a paralyzed Byron and taking the figure by the hand, dragging her to the fireplace, which was barely kept alive. Claire went to fetch some towels for what had to be a lost traveler too dazed to explain herself while the doctor got down on his knees, careful not to get between her and the pathetic warmth of the fire, and separated her curtains of wet ropy hair to ascertain her condition.
What he found was more frightening than anything in the pages of Fantasmagoriana, or in the scattered leaves they'd assembled for their contest so far. Underneath her disguise sat two eyes like mine, dear Severin. Exactly as you named them: vivisecting eyes. No sooner did he recognize that their fictions had leapt from the page than she pounced on him, fingernails digging into his scalp.
Her feet clawed at his belly, rolling him backward into the open fire where she proceeded to bash his head first into the burning wood and then into the ashes as it broke away and then into the stone underneath. All the while the flames destroyed his clothing and cooked her meal.
Mary screamed and fled, with Percy and Byron not far behind. It was Claire who was too far to separate the shouts from the thunder, who thought she was finally being helpful after days of having no story to offer when she entered the heir's presence with a stack of fresh towels. They blocked her view, and no one was responding to her questions, so she hurried to set them down on a lounge and see what made those peculiar noises.
As it turned out those were the sounds of a cannibalistic creature perched in the crackling collapsed innards of her prey, feasting on the heart first and the lungs second, to steal his affections and take his breath away. Claire was frozen with fear as the heir stepped out from the hearth, came over to her, and bent down as the girl collapsed, cradling her.
They shared a look, but the power of the heir's eyes cut through the thin cloth of her human soul, and she could not be in that position and possess anything but awe or terror, so the heir spared her the indecision between the two by breaking her neck with a single twist before gorging on the pale of her exposed throat.
As said, Mary was the cleverest of the crop, but she could not intuit that they needed to leave the villa and flee into the storm despite its raging. She thought nature would strike her down and that she stood a better chance with its perversion stalking the halls. Percy was by her side, and he had armed himself with one of the girls' parasols. He would defend her, and she thought him more than capable of fending off a woman she now guessed to be in middle age... but she had not met the eyes of Cain yet. If she had she would've gladly fled into the dark and damp, and her life would've been saved.
Percy broke the parasol over the heir's head when she appeared to them, having followed the scent of their desperation. Stabbing at her with the broken tip only broke it further. Mary's back hit a wall and she slid down it at the same rate that Percy's skin slipped down his body, the heir starting at the scalp and opening him in a horrific reverse of the sausage-making process. He was dead before it reached his elbows, but screaming all the way down.
Mary was next, but like Claire she was spared the painful fate of the men, who suffered more because the heir was recently very embittered by an experience with a man of her kind, and sought revenge wherever she could take it. And so in a flash the girl against the woll became acquainted with the stonecraft; and if you catch my meaning try to drop it quickly. I'm sure all of this seems terribly cruel to you Severin, but you will learn the way of it soon enough.
Byron watched from a crack in a door, bedclothes wet with indignity, but he thought himself safe for he was quieter than he'd ever been. Quieter than he was as a child. Quieter than a church service. Quiet as the mice lapping at the puddles of laudanum their festivities had left behind in the seams of the hardwood.
He backed up into the shadows and stood, clutching himself, wondering where this vile creature had been spawned from. He would never understand it was, in the end, the same loins that had spawned him, for the heirs of Cain are the brothers to mankind, but also the betters, and ultimately their murderers.
The door flew open, and the heir charged in, taking him by the legs as he howled and begged. The fugitive from decency was dragged up the stairs, body bouncing violently, each bump convincing him to try a different tactic: groveling, bargaining, screaming, raging, insulting...
None had any effect; there was no penetrating the fog in her mind. She was thinking of her recent lover and what he had stuck her with. The humans about her were barely more than objects, and might have even escaped her perception if they hadn't so tempted the dark forces patrolling the loam of the Earth, biting through the oldest roots. These are not the shadows one can flirt with. They are not the shade of a flowering tree, nor your hand blocking out the sun.
Heirs of Cain can kill without reason, but she had one. Once she'd spied Villa Diodati under the storm she'd seen the perfect place to nest, seeing as it came with plenty of vital food for her time in brooding.
For you see the heir had fallen pregnant, and was struck with terrible bouts of bitterness and craving alike. She wanted to be alone, and violent, and asleep, and eating all the while, which the year without a summer and the conclave provided.
So she rested, and moaned through her various pains, and ate from the corpses of the writers whenever she felt the urge, keeping them by a constant fire to slow spoilage. Her natural aura prevented visitors, and by the time the truth was learned months later there wasn't enough left of them to tell what had occurred. Just five skeletons sitting cross-legged in a circle, all their hand bones flat on the copy of Fantasmagoriana at the center, with a few pages of something called The Modern Prometheus and another called The Vampyre used as bookmarks.
Now an heir of Cain is a creature of much variance, and in this instance she did not brood very much like a human at all. It was less of a pregnancy and more of a prolonged illness with chronic bouts of labor. Offspring were produced, but intermittently, over the course of months. Each one was taken out into the woods and abandoned, as is their way. When she was done producing them she finally moved on from Geneva and disappeared back into the space between society and wilderness.
One of these offspring survived. She grew into herself, then realized it was time to grow into the world, to take up her ultimate place and live out the rest of her days as what she was meant to be. The first step in this process was to board a train headed to a reverse-quarantine, and the second was to sniff out the car of one Severin Molochi, both of which she has now done. And now she wonders, ready for anything he might say but unsure which response he'll pick, what Severin has to say about everything she has just revealed."
Severin could not say anything, not for several minutes anyway. The whole time she unraveled her hideous tale she had her head against the cushion, staring into the ceiling. But she wasn't, I realized. She was looking straight through it at the stars, recounting a past as wild and unbelievable as the stories that assigned the constellations their names and poses.
Once finished she turned in her furs without letting any of them slip from their many crucial positions protecting a decency I was now sure she did not possess. She turned to look at me, head resting on one palm while her bare legs glided across one another.
In that moment my eyes were almost as powerful as hers, but only in the shock they expressed. Any wider and I would've broken them, being the first man to invent that particular injury. Clearing the roadblock in my throat proved impossible, so I spoke through a crack in it while holding the incredibly defensive posture I'd taken up during the story, with my legs crossed and both hands over the higher knee, like a hermit crab trying to seal his shell off from the very air.
"You, Wanda Pelts, are also an heir of Cain."
"And an heir of Cain is a variety of goddess, just not garden variety."
"I believe you wholeheartedly when you say you are unchristian, but would this be the biblical Cain? The first murderer?"
"That is the name history has chosen, though he has had many names throughout. Even his parents Adam and Eve have had others, like Ask and Embla. Every name has a story attached, but within those stories only one or two correct details.
You'll forgive me for rushing an account much grander and older than the Conclave Diodati, but I assure you that the time I'm keeping in a drawstring pouch, to protect you from its distractions, is still limited.
The evolution of life that crawls, that spawns in slime, is entirely separate from the evolution of the spirit. While there is no definitive separation where the bodies of the cave dwellers became the bodies of the villa dwellers, one does exist for the ascended, intellectual, devious soul.
There was a first couple of this sort that would come to dominate the world, owing their ascension to the paradise in which they dwelt: a secluded natural garden of plenty. No large predators roamed there and the animals the first couple ate knew no fear, and had lived complacently for so many generations that they did not feel pain when slaughtered.
Fruitful they were, and their first four children were two men and two women who paired and married. The brothers we now call Cain and Abel. Cain, who is my ancestor and not yours Severin, was of an exceptional intelligence but tumultuous emotion. He alone saw what death was, though its painless state obfuscated its meaning to his family.
He feared it would eventually come to them, for his parents were growing gray as the animals did, but they insisted they were immortal, and that immortality was due to the plucking hand, which is what they called the high spirit that split them from the animals by plucking their fruit from the tree of the world.
In being harvested from the tree they no longer drew nourishment from it, and would neither draw the signals in its fluid that eventually caused death and decay. In thanks the first couple bowed down in worship of the plucking hand, made it a ritual to be performed daily, which they insisted their offspring join.
But Cain had seen no bright hand, no giant's fingers. He asked this high spirit to reveal itself, and it never did, though he did not go unheard, for while there were no other man-like creatures in their secluded garden there were other older minds who made their way in from underneath and above alike.
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One day he refused to worship, much to the consternation of his parents and siblings who did not understand that it wasn't their place to worship anything, now that they had the fire of intellect. Cain, aware of death, but not well versed in its mechanisms, went instead to keep watch for it, as if it was a beast that might patrol and drag them away as they slept.
Leaving his family behind he did in fact find a beast, but not death incarnate, and the creature willingly revealed itself. What he found was a great serpent, the biggest in all the world, large enough to constrict and choke the life from the tree of the world. This world serpent had been plucked from ignorance as well, though trying to fathom by what can kill a man's sanity easier than a fatal fall from a cliff.
Plucked man could and would proliferate, spread his ascension far and wide, but the world serpent kept its ideas to itself and did not seek a mate. Instead it taught other creatures, and sometimes these lessons were actually assaults, heavy burdens on minds meant as retribution for some slight offense the serpent did not care to shrug off.
It is not known if Cain had offended the creature, for there are many ways to interpret what he was shown. First came their conversation, in which the serpent asked what he was doing so far from his family. Cain answered in frustration, saying he was only acting out the gulf that already existed between their spirits. He was separated from them because he was drawn to the truth.
Truth. Now there was a word that riled the serpent, for its prodigious girth and length afforded it a much more extensive view of any truth anywhere. With thrills flicking on its forked tongue and hunger in its narrowing eye, the beast told Cain that it could reveal so much more, and that he need only ask.
My forefather, even under its predatory breath, demanded rather than ask, and the world serpent obliged, telling him to ride upon its back as it slithered deep into the sky and showed the man the abyss of space.
Cain saw death, and saw it wholly different from the serpent, pupil going wide instead of narrow. He saw that even planets and stars die. He saw the idea of extinction, of death so common that entire forms were erased from time's march forever more. The mammoths would go that way, and the flightless hunting birds that stood taller than man.
Death could not be beaten by simply keeping watch for its approach. All the world was its approach, mere prelude to an expansion of the abyss of space. We exist to be emptied out, to be cleared like weeds, at least that was all Cain could make of it in the wake of his dive into the infinite.
So lost in despairing thought was he that he didn't noticed when the world serpent dropped him off right near his home, mocking him with the smallness of his life until that point. It was as if he'd been placed on a stage, and only in the process of being lowered in understood he was merely an actor.
This false play was the worship of the plucking hand, a hand that did not even pen the script. My forefather became violently angry, and when his brother, still an actor, still a mind blissfully truant from the truth, came to him and asked if he was going to apologize and join them in their rituals Cain took up the nearest stone.
With it he scattered Abel's closed mind across the ground in order to open it by force. This was the only way he could be made to see death, for he would never possess the guile of Cain, or so the brother that still stood thought. He shed no tears for his brother, as the fool died with no knowledge of death, so his capacity for suffering was infuriatingly small.
But the others came upon the evidence, and so learned of mortality, and further accused Cain of creating it within man. He tried to tell them it was all the approaching tide of the abyss of space, but they saw only the sky, and even if the serpent had come at Cain's call his family would have been too frightened to accept a seat on its scaly neck.
And so came the sundering of elevated man into its two lineages that live to this day. At the time of Abel's death his sister-wife Zillah was already with his child, and so through her came many, including you my dear Severin. Although Adah, Cain's sister-wife, was horrified by what her now bettered half had done, she would choose his companionship over the integrity of their old lives and structure.
The first couple banished them both from the garden, which had, for one reason or another, had its stone walls opened by the slithering of the world serpent. My ancestors took their leave, and also bore children across a vast stretch of time, at least by the standard of man, for Cain had taken his brother's life and so lived it too.
The heirs of Cain are violent, amongst each other and their lessers, so of us there are few. Tens of thousands of you for every one of us, but we live long and powerful, and in the emptiness of the abyss we see the emptiness of material, and so can mold some of its less stubborn facets into different shapes.
We take and use your lives because we know what to do with them better than you do, which Cain proved when he took Abel's life and built our lineage, one far more powerful than yours, little Severin. What say you to that? How does a tailor and a poet such as yourself react to the shadow of the world serpent, and a woman whose soul could smash yours into oblivion with a single swing of a stone off the ground?"
At first I had nothing to say, as I believe would have been the reaction of all my equals. I knew what she said to be true, for she had already made herself my framework for existence with the simple act of stepping into my private car. There was no privacy from her, nor from the abyss she kept wrapped in her furs, which she could no doubt open by lifting a flap and toss me into, like a pebble down a well.
"I would dare to, rather than say, ask," I finally said, seeing the slight impatience in her eyes, as threatening as the groan on a mountaintop overdue for an avalanche. She had mentioned that time was limited, but not what was limiting it. "I would, understanding there is some urgency at play, fly by the thousand implications of her and her story to ask what on Earth any of it could have to do with me."
She grinned wickedly, but also with satisfaction. Somehow my statement was the desired effect, and I wondered if I only made it because she'd stranded me in an ocean of her schemes without my noticing the rising floodwaters. How would a man less to her liking have reacted? Was one such man safer from her designs, or would he be dead already?
"An heir of Abel you may be," she said, sitting up, furs clinging to her unnaturally as she leaned forward and flashed her pert little fangs, "but never has your kind been useless. You are food. You are reminders of what we are without our abyssal truth. You are less demanding companions than our own kind, and you can make exceptional servants."
"But this is a train full of servants my dear Wanda, unless I made the most egregious blunder when boarding back on the platform. Why would you want a servant from this car?" Rather than speak she retreated into her furs again, head, arms, and legs swallowed up.
The lump, predominantly silver, but with flashing sashes of brown, black, and red, flowed onto the floor like a vapor and made its way to my side, as if I was being accosted by an overturned tub of hot taffy yet to be pulled. It slithered up my legs, applying the most sensual pressure, and into my lap where my Venus in furs unfurled once more.
Her clothing was back, and I suppose now technically counted as riding clothes, for she straddled me more aggressively than I ever had a saddled horse. Her full weight sank onto my thighs, communicating an otherworldly density to her, as if to say the abyss of space was actually a lake of tar, compressed to black as crushed and liquefied stars, one minute drop of which had just fallen into my life and anchored it anew.
So overwhelming was her nearness, her veiled touch, that my vision temporarily went bright and then black, as if I'd just held my breath for several minutes. I would've been reeling, but she somehow pulled me up into full consciousness, which was almost painful to maintain, and she did it with psychic force alone. Wanda looked down at me, salivating expectations into me, craving my usefulness in her employ. I think it was all she could do to not take it then and there by force. And as much as it felt like it, this was not force, not by her standards. It was mere pressure, an enticing lean. This was her holding back for courtesy's sake, as we'd only just met, so all she dared do was become my everything organically rather than ravenously devour and digest it outright. In the back of my mind I saw her nightmare mother similarly atop Dr. Polidori, doing just that.
"Long has it been since the heirs of Cain have asserted themselves as the gods they are," she told me hungrily, nearing a growl. "Partly because of things like this train. It used to be one of us could appear to a starved tribe of Abel's nomads and aid them in the hunt, or lead them to a valley of plenty, and take the place of the plucking hand in their adoration.
We, unlike that hand, are real. We deserve worship, and I know this because it enriches us, increases our supernatural abilities. My mother never sought her place on an altar-throne, content to be a stalking horror, but I am different. Just as she was drawn to the imaginations of those writers who unwittingly colored them with abyssal shadowy truth, I am drawn to the industrious and frightened aboard this train who plan to found a new and isolated town.
This reverse-quarantine will be the perfect place for me to nest, though what I will breed is a new faith where I am its central figure. I wish to grow, and thrive, and be strong, surrounded by devotees who understand that in wrath I will take their lives and fashion them like furs but in contentment I will encompass, enrich, and protect everything they feel is theirs.
I am not the first to do this, and I will not be the last, but I believe I am the first of this more technological age. If I am going to solve their problems I will not be able to compete with the most practical modern solutions. I would be bested by express freight, by efficient mass manufacturing, and even by humble tinned foods.
Instead I must solve emotional riddles deep in their souls: a true challenge for an heir of Cain who would rather, historically, bite out the throat of the issue and let a solution bleed forth. I must be comforting, understanding, but still in full control of what they fear. Perhaps I can be a romantic god, a sexual god, as no man has yet understood every dark corner of his desire. My abyssal truth can live there, cozily in fact.
They will think of me as you do right now, my Severin. Without awareness you have granted me so many permissions, so many licenses on this body of yours. Within the temptation of this train you were added, your demeanor even more alluring. You've already allowed it, so now I will test exactly how much you are mine."
I made no attempt to stop her. You might think me spineless for my passivity, and perhaps I was, but by virtue of being the first man in that situation in a long while, at least according to her, I can attribute my reaction to unfamiliarity and even call it bravery that I didn't flee. Taking her advances thankfully, rapturously, took far more confidence than squirming and mewling would have.
Wanda's right hand climbed up my stomach, over my clothes, but I felt her claws against my skin nonetheless. Each one gouged a hole, but only in my newly wild imagination. She was not carving my literal flesh, not yet, merely making her way to my heart, which jumped to a higher tempo with each stretch of her fingers.
When she was settled over it her palm came down, cast a shadow on that most vital organ, which somehow stoked the fires within all the more. Staring into my eyes, locking them in place with hers, she gauged my reaction as her fingers slowly twisted about the skin over my heart as if adjusting a valve.
The further and slower she went the faster my heart pounded in turn. She was setting its pace, for she controlled my time and space, and if she wanted me to live faster all she needed was for the instincts moored in my flesh to be receptive.
In her clutches I did not believe there was an upper limit to her manipulations, but, somewhere within my soul, there was. She quickened my heart to an agonizing gallop, my breath throttled in and out like the sputtering blast of race horse nostrils. Any faster and it would be indistinguishable from stillness, which would've killed me on the spot.
But my heart refused to accelerate further. Her hand still twisted, but at a snail's pace. The space between my survival instinct and my fawning self-sacrifice was but a hair, though her growing precision expanded its details. Wanda had to know its exact width, exactly how much of my core being was not automatically subject to her domineering will.
It was plain to see on her face, once the twisting stopped but the pressure remained, that its breadth concerned her. My Wanda's concern was anger, and I now knew why. It was only rage and frustration that pushed Cain away from his family. Turmoil turned him to the stars and empowered him, but always through anger. The curiosity of his heirs was eternally infected with it.
Just as my mind was alive with all sorts of scenarios, delectable and unsavory alike, where Wanda did what she was wont to do with me, I know she saw one playing out as well. It was her forefather all over again, raising his rock to bludgeon and repurpose the misused life of Abel. Except in this version Abel was not felled in one blow. He still crawled afterward, begged for his life. This imperfect result could've sent them both down even more terrible paths, and this was the sort of possibility enabled by my heart's insistence I, not Wanda, had the ultimate control.
"You're keeping things to yourself," she said, revealing how she tended to phrase incomplete submission. It was couched in an almost petulant and pouting tone. I'd robbed her of me, or disappointed her. "Now I will have to ask, which is not ideal. Will you help me achieve fullness Severin?"
"How?" I breathed.
"Every faith needs its chief disciple. You will be my representative among the people. Through loving me you will learn the contours of my nature, and understand Cain better than your peers. Your devotion to me, and obedience, will be met with faithfulness on my part. We will be together, disguised so commonplace as man and wife that our emotions will grow to match. However, the abyssal truth will remain: I am goddess and you are servant.
You enticed me so because you are mostly willing, but not wholly. You keep your life to yourself, though I have just explained to you why it is Cain's to take and use. More of you should be mine I think, but we can make do. Your choice to obey me, rather than your compulsion, is what qualifies you to be my chief disciple. If you make this choice it means your loyalty extends beyond my influence, and so beyond the influence of other heirs of Cain."
"Others?" I breathed harder.
"Yes Severin, others. Such a clear opportunity to found ourselves is rare, and I will not be the only one to sense it. Already there is another, and he is aboard this train. It is he who constrains our time. It is all his fault I cannot get to know you and your limits with more measure, and for that I will never forgive him."
"Will we be attacked?" I breathed my hardest.
"Not if we attack first, my Severin. You must understand... heirs of Cain do not have the power to kill each other. We never earned it, with stone or otherwise, but we can fail our ancestors, and be felled by heirs of Abel.
You will need to end his claim on our territory Severin. As it so happens I know this heir already. He is called Ruthven Typhus Andronicus, and in form you would call him a vampire. While we prattle away he is recruiting disciples of his own from the other passengers, and I imagine he is quite enraged that I got to your car first, for you are the best candidate aboard, by so very far my dear little Severin."
"You mean to dispatch me to the task of murder!? I haven't a violent bone in my body. I outright lament whatever compels poets to write about war. I grieve for them in the hopes they will turn their pen to lighter subjects!"
"You do have a violent bone; I just explored it and planted my flag nearby," she insisted with a feminine snap, like a steel trap about my Adam's apple. "It's right here." She jabbed at my heart with a finger and I felt a twinge of deep retaliatory fear. She referred to what I would do to defend my own life. "That is what you will use, and you will be willing to use it, for while you will enter his presence first, he will be the one to strike. You will but respond in kind."
"Will we not fight together?"
"You will go alone. Do pay attention. If you won't allow me to make something of you then you must make something of yourself. I cannot kill Ruthven, nor can he kill me. However, if he were to exert his vampiric control over me it would be far more disastrous than him acquiring another Abel-thrall.
By now, just as I do, he will have at least one servant. They must be neutralized so they cannot compete with our claim upon arrival."
"Wanda you expect too much of me. I blew onto this train like a leaf on the wind. I am no element of anyone's grand fate. I'm barely worth a passing comment."
"No talk such as that will be tolerated in my presence, nor about my chief disciple," Wanda declared as she squeezed my thighs with hers. "I will debase myself and ask, once and only once, as this is our first union Severin. Will you be mine? Have my will move your body? Submit to my commands and defend my name?"
"My body screams an answer," I said, nearly choking on that answer suppressed. Wanda's face was ablaze, all the potential of the expectant smirk she wore upon entering my car fully unleashed. She was a wall of fire, but incinerating in total darkness. Heat without light. When her avaricious hunger did not immediately convince me to acquiesce it destabilized and collapsed into a landslide of entitled lust.
Even then I thought it was incorrect that I could ever be so crucial to anyone. Severin Molochi was the boy picking flowers in the schoolyard, still wearing one of those flowers over his ear decades later as he ran errands and socialized. Would that person willingly be baked in a divine kiln, hardened into some sort of enforcer, for... what even was this?
A relationship. No matter what grand forces were at play, this was ultimately what I would be entering into. A romance, and an entire future, with this admitted creature of times deep and spaces dark. She thought herself my superior, and demonstrated much that damn near made that claim into revelation, but in her vivisecting swallowing eyes, like spots where a planet used to be, I saw her desire for me and a knowledge that nothing could be done without my willing participation.
I always wanted someone else to make something of me. It was time for Severin the object, Severin the tool of a divine trade, to exert just enough will to tumble off the shelf, and into the stern hand of the master craftsman. Perhaps, from now on, simply called master.
"And my soul matches it, my Wanda, my everything, my all but the last breath. Yes! I trust you. I am yours. We will found a home together." Her arcane strengths collapsed onto me, penetrating my surface, making me feel more alive than I'd ever felt, perhaps because I was being showered with underutilized life from fellow heirs of Abel that she had for safekeeping. She had me, and for the briefest moment she just savored the fact, before thrusting her full being against mine.