IV
The House of Harrow knew him as its own, as its prodigal scion. He strode in with aplomb to rival elder & immodest pantheons. Though unlike the gods of Uruk under Enlil, cowering behind the walls of heaven at the flood of their own evocation, this lord strolled unshaken by fear; unconcerned by any tides roused by his wanton powers. His confidence should ease the delegation of servants and the restoration of his estate into his hands under a new name. The old manor of his callow line groaned tenor jubilees through each granite contour and graven glass. It bowed to his desire as would those helots, who’d renew their contracts under fresh face & premise. Arden was eager to order the first steps of the grand transformation he envisioned. For this estate was his stair to ascend and stretch the wings of a nascent dream over all he beheld.
“Sir?” The sentinel-lieutenant among his servile flock inquired of Arden’s presence with an eyebrow rising like a stalagmite from the floor of his temple.
“Aldred Harrow. Cousin to your former charge. Owner of his estates by the manner of his Will, and proud partner to your service, if you would have me.” The crypt fiend introduced himself with affected chivalry. The mien of his prime servant was familiar, though shrouded by chthonian drapes. This face had changed as well in the severe span of nights past his petty entombment. The man had weathered years in the uncounted days which divided him from his master, now returned & rechristened from his dip in baptismal dirt.
“Ah yes, sir. Well met, sir. Raykin Moldren, at your service – if you should seek it.” Moldren bowed low and grasped a firm handshake. The trained custodian possessed an elegant command over his own expressions, a talent which the most ravenous of courtiers most assuredly were in envy of. For he concealed all spasms of surprise when his hand caught the rimy & bloodless branch of his master. Even as a windfall of pulsations lashed wintry gusts from the veins tucked in that proud forearm, the servant’s pulpy grip remained politely devoted to the motion. “You look so stunningly like your…. Cousin, our master Arden. The stamped papers are here, somewhere. Apologies again, we did not expect your company at such a late hour.”
“What better time to roll into town then when the most tiresome of the lot are tucked in slumber?” Aldred chuckled a biting chill, grinning with spurious moonlight. “If only it were not on the heels of tragedy, this news of my kin’s passing.” He tapped his traveler’s cane and gestured to the candle-less halls that basked in dark. “At least I gleaned enough through our letters to know the nature of poor Arden’s work – it’s importance. The evolution of disease and our means against it seems more pressing now than the excavations into our history I once led.”
“Well, sir, his work is yours to continue. Master Harrow.” The coarsened grace of Raykin’s gray countenance dipped then to another half-bow, and no aspect of age hindered the fluidity of his motions. “As is this house now yours, by blood. Barren as it may seem, the relics of your ancestral coat remain, untampered by the taxing scythes of tithe-harvesters. And-”
“And you, the keepers of this house, what shall become of you?” Aldred broadened his smile and gestured to the glinting eyes of Moldren’s fellows lurking in the far corridor. “You are the arisen signet of our young branch, our arms if you will. But only if it still is so by the ink on your soul’s quill.”
“Our contracts expired with… well, tragically. With your cousin’s rude fortune, I fear. Beyond the overseeing of this transference our fate is harried by the choice of the winds. I am tied longer than the rest by rank and mention in the will. As for my want,” new moons nestled twilight in the servant’s hollows, Raykin’s pupils eclipsing his iris, “it is no matter.”
“You are each unbound once more. Your choice alone shall decide which wind you ride on, which lord you keep to.” Aldred had embraced him with a balmy hug so distant from the feel of his breathless flesh. “We will not repeat the steps of senseless bondage, no. I am simply a doctor of mine own school and given this luxury by relation. If it displeases you to serve, you may leave.” He stepped forth, with a pouch of coin older than his fortune in life gelled to his palm – hiding this measure of persuasion with a gleam in his eye. “Yet if it is your will, I would delight in your company to assist me. Perhaps you could curtail the symptoms of my insomniac habits, of slaving for inspiration in the ebony hours, by keeping hold of daylight affairs. You would be rewarded more than my cousin’s contract offered. To live & dine well, for our accord.”
Mr. Moldren ushered out a troubled cough from his airs before confessing his doubt. “Sir, my former employer’s work was rather ghastly at times. Quite wearisome at times, in fact. Necessary, I suppose. At least it was an honorable pursuit.” The proposed successor to his employer heard the shuffled of Raykin’s thought beneath his coldly genial manners: ‘for a rake of a man, that is.’ But the man quickly gulped down any derision in his mind and pressed on. “I was afeared of the sickness he mined to combat, to speak true.”
“And the more hermetic pursuits?” Harrow’s eye nipped the helot’s vital sheen.
“Nay. Not me, at least. Perhaps others here have had their senses tarnished with the fear of odd lights and broiled concoctions. Some called his purpose wretched. I, myself, own some reverence for alchemy and the occult, despite my lack of talent. The warlock painted by whispers of my master’s superstitious peers was not known to me. Though my host’s intellectual labors effects on his manner were on occasion disturbing. Yet, if you’ll forgive my rashness, I ponder if he was drawn by passions and instincts – that destroyed him – more than that rare science.”
“Shall you stay then, Mr. Moldren? You shall be handsomely paid, yet the wretched work must continue.” Aldred placed the coin purse in Raykin’s palm, beaming smiles multiplied by the unwaning gleam of elder tender. The mint he offered was a relic from the buried tombs he’d so recently slept in, having borrowed some untended gold. A visage that made the regal mien of Queen Caoimhe on the coinage of the day look rusted and infantile compared to its deep mineral brow. “This mint was mined from ruins, yet we will begin enterprises to excavate troves pressed with our Queen’s eminence. For Arden’s legacy, we shall install precautions enough to complement his stalled efforts. May you be a partner and a friend, to bridge House Harrow to Moldren, in this delicate work. Though I still must confess to odd habits.”
“Well, sir, I believe we can come to a rich & fruitful agreement.”
Thus began Harrow’s bid, casting his few servants as masons to alter the estate’s shape to his liking. They were to deny the sun it’s oppressive reign through stone shutters and obsidian slabs befitting an archaeologist. How fair this bed was for his resurrection, far preferable to the mysteries in the dank catacombs beneath the putrid terraces of grand Gorgotha. The laboratories would be refurbished and spread throughout the wings. The kinder facets of Arden’s work could pad the rising floors, while the heart of his toil & refrain would now take root in the basement crypt. He cushioned his plinth here, where the wisest of his forebears – and those most reviled by the memories of storied courts – slept through eternity in stone, under epitaphs honored by their House. Let them wake to see my glories shake stone and supplant graves. I shan’t be the least of the stars hung upon our bower. The hateful order that seals you here shall be soon deposed.
...
Arden, or Aldred as he was now to be known, made a show of seeking a cure. Under assumption of his cousin’s personhood and cloven will he’d become the legal heir once more. Yet the galley of servants he could rely upon dwindled; he’d only a few willing to submit themselves to the changeling order of his House, and he was far from any shore that bore fruitful arbor. Still, the dearth of additional eyes was to his liking. For even voiceless helots could prove a nuisance when his work redoubled past dealing with necrotic patients into evermore grievous means. They’d complained before, chittering black whispers about the conditions they were subjected to by mere proximity of the ill & infected. Even with the beaked masks their reformed lord provided them, they dipped their noses in spite, more than protective oils, and veered away from any useful function when so deep in the throes of their fear. A few loyal savants & tastefully neurotic eccentrics served his need for darkness and discretion.
He made overtures to the mission of his mistress, his maker. For Hialeah, Harrow prowled the sectors of Gorgotha where the fecundity of the masses blistered against their stagnant corners to bloom into buboes. Free to analyze the symptoms of the impoverished without need of an herbal mask, he kept to one to conceal his lack of requirement. The feverish pace of his task adjoined his evening delights in snatching barely living bodies for medical purposes, and robust subjects to sup. Still, veiled embers simmered in his chasmal chest, crackling phantom fingers past this distracted ambition to tear through the cracks in his sunless state. Oh, he swore the means of resurrection against the plague, but for no reason he could trace outside that arraigning promise. Though he’d begun to believe he’d lean into full lunacy should he pry too far beyond his means, he tested his thew as much as he tried reckless serums. But his heart was hampered by other matters, abraded by aspects too close to his old life that engraved his restless pith.
Those ole & lasting rumors of his family’s sorcerous ways were overblown to his knowledge. Though that mystery & fear had been a useful lever & pulley to navigate the power plays of the court, to ward off the most gullible & hateful among them. Yet now, true blooded magick now cascaded through his sinew, surges of the supernal to replace & reinvent the animating course of mortal red within. A nascent madness grew talons from his heated embrace of ghoulish method and spectral cunning. He tore at layers within, unburying old fancies that had not been dined on properly in his young years, and lapped up the splashings of morbidity aroused from the blood required of his study. Aldred dove into plots, furrowing under the present tasks. While he held meteoric jubilees in his cavernous soul when the act of medicinal wonder asked for the disposal of subjects who’d failed to respond to the praxis of his theorems & recipes, greater reveries were cast in shadowed vestibules within. Seeking after winding corridors that led back to the court of the living, he delegated hypogeal districts of his consciousness to chart alternative roads with which this power could allow him to travel.
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As for Hialeah’s pact to become a savior to ailing Gorgotha (who even in her prime was far from benign), Arden felt no solution of man’s make nor nature’s allowance would suffice. In the catacombs that made her bed, both the city’s and his nocturnal matron’s, he conspired a use for the neighboring denizens of a caste happily unseen. Sacrificing a troubled rest in the day, tucked behind seamless walls that denied the burning rays, he crept into the dayless mansions where the dead and the hunters of night feared no wayward eye from the sun and her strangers.
Through the Cascades, the water walls where caverns interlinked the middle district to the lower, he sought the buried dens. He slid past the streaming maw into the labyrinthine tunnels where the city’s stone was stitched & tailored into the mountain which held up the highest courts upon the shoulders of the earth, overlooking the great river. Impossible dimensions bore the breadth of the unwaning catacombs forgotten by Gorgotha’s children as her founding base. Here, Harrow pursued the legends his pale mother’s tribe had passed to her in life; seeking that species which endured the fell star that blackened skies and the wroth return of the sun which scorched the continent by shifting their ancestral homes into the barrows & their diets to consuming flesh.
Harrow passed the cairns that marked the fiends’ hearths. He renounced fascination with the deposits of minerals, their beds of allure scintillating with impish forms and the gloss of Fae to step sprightly. No time yet to marvel at the elements, both wondrous & appalling, of this swollen gorge beneath the grounds of living knowledge. Between the palls of a dead palace bared of names & inscriptions Arden could make sense of, skittering paws traipsed. Slobbering vitriol seeped from the lurker’s mewling cry. A shrill bark bounded from its snout between cyclopean pillars. The sound funneled through withered, humanoid cords and echoed in imitation of a lupine choir through snarling throats sulking in surrounding tunnels. A vagrant pack of vermin, sprouted from a tortured branch from humanity’s boughs, yowled vigils to one another. Shuffling blind, roaming through the warbling ripples of their brethren chords and by the wormy tongues flitting from their nostrils, one of those vorpal creatures crept upon their guest.
This ruinous denizen smelt the filched blood in Harrow’s body. It pounced to test the interloper for a feast, only to be preyed upon by him. He knew its fear of him from its eyeless stare, sulking back as he sauntered to study this hound of the umbral halls. This thing, with its siblings, burrowed tunnels through mountainous crypts and burst into caskets to gnaw on fetid mead and dew-claimed bone. Those tribal kin yipped, chattered, and hissed a baleful hail to hear how swiftly the bones of their brother were dashed and broken; the cilia laden lungs of their fellow gurgling as the revenant impaled him upon a column below their lairs.
A swift trial of his own sinew and the fabled resilience of the canine scavengers brought Arden to belligerent glee. His wolven howl burst the bowels of the chthonic pits, cackling as his claws severed the barghest’s paws and split the thing’s vertical mouth till no gangrenous yelps could spill into the dissonant symphony of his crimson toil. What Triumph would be won of tampering aberration? What miracles could this alchemy produce, to mix the ghoul’s restorative properties into a balm for living beings?
With night’s drapery unfurled, the greater predator scurried up with its limbless game. Before those maimed stubs he’d made of the (overcurious) beast’s ambling faculties regrew Harrow carried it back to his manor. Strapped down, staked, yet quivering with stubborn unlife and festering to regrow its wounded form, the ghoul was rendered for perpetual tests. Ceaseless dissections became its lot, to extract, rend, and drain for the discovery of its regenerative means. Soon, the profane alchemist discovered easy means of dealing with deceased mortal subjects and keeping this ghastly subject fed. Carrion granted sustenance to it, as did the dead ease & exceed the rate of regeneration. Fangs & arms regrew at a pace which would be appalling to most eyes, though those means were soon severed by its caretaker. The thing seemed in no worse shape for having made of meal of afflicted flesh. Besides the wounds & contortions prescribed by its steward the creature kept to the shape & shade he’d first found it in.
The burgeoning scientist siphoned silence from the carrion-thing’s veins, drawing the materia that halted illness (but refused life & death as it was known to the waking world) into his syringe. Could aberrations beneath earth be gainful against the blights that swept her surface & scraped the sky on demon wings? He aimed to see it so. Curiosity and that damned promise to Hialeah beat back the whispering winds of caution, doubt, and warning. Diluting the serum with additional aspects to the formula, he then injected this dark miracle into the dying. To placate plague and shiver away the fatal symptoms with rejuvenation he tried this hand.
This gaunt surgeon diverted his concentration from dwelling on the possibility that he’d merely cure a mortal condition by delivering his subjects into a preternatural curse, an affliction deeper than the wan mold their illness leered to make of them. Indeed, his measure seemed hardy enough in halting the boils, forcing them into cessation, yet the state which replaced their warbling cries was a cadaverous half-sleep. These half-successes were shortly celebrated until the torrid face of his failures soon proved themselves more difficult to dispose of. The minds of the subjects perished in agony, but the purgatorial film in their vessels refused the laws of rot & entropy. These deathless, soulless, patients Arden offered to the primal power of immolation. Thus, the forges of House Harrow blemished the nightsky with baleful fumes. Through the coming nights the chimneys spat the refuse of those horrors given to their furnaces. Each billow, a salient emission of unnatural ruin combined with the persistent breath of corruption.
Again, the madness which leached his focus and bled into his dubious progress seized the ageless man’s head. Abyssal chutes charted the dams of his consciousness, pressing Lethean surges upon his memory that hampered true introspection. The protean plasma that awoke in Arden and the enraptured genius of his will was breached by the presence of gross headmates. Phantasms burst from each reflected glow. A face burned in the mirror. This likeness shining back was not the glass mocking him by illuming the awful angles under his expression, which held stoic, even beatific shape that erased the little injuries which life’s woes and the stress of passion marred his visage with. What grinned back, above his head, was a medley of faces; not ghosts but living figures as starkly distant from him. These tulpas combined their shapes to bridle raw emotions in each sewn effigy.
Twin lunes of divergent sheen glared dual spheres, entwined in the spectral sockets hovering there. One eye shone with such hubris & hate, bearing back the glean of a loathed rival. Vinsss-sseent. Bestial aspects embraced Harrow till a brighter muse bestowed on him a grander orbit. Her celestial caliber sheared the dual half of the phantom’s face to bathe his own. A feline, feminine grace lined the brow and reared from her luminous spheres. He knew her, that haunting beacon of bliss & the one noble lady who lived true to her acclaimed blood in society – as an ethereal being worthy of all heaven’s affections. Luuus-ssillaa.
There were other shapes among the choral specters and decayed jeers from beyond. Among these two might’ve been his mother & father, yet what were they but ghosts. No, the prime movers of his purpose – surpassing the scientific servitude to his eternal Lady – were enough to spur the wheels of his being to a fateful course. No, these two showed him to the rivers he might seek a more intimate reason to abide in the night for. They were saints of reckoning and carnal currents. Through them he returned to a semblance of who he’d been before the fatal shot, his subsequent rebirth as a revenant, and the thirst that chased the drought of his wellspring. A coal within Arden’s receding pyre fed on the tinder of those smoldering envoys of inspiration.
Assuming the written pose of Aldred Harrow, the spurious cousin to the deceased exercised his hand and the legs of his servants (and the hooves of their steeds). He penned gestures of passion & intrigue, reaching out to the respective members of the Duskmont & Gentwind estates. With ardency cloaked in gentleman’s gallantry, he re-introduced himself to his murderer and the woman whose smile he’d suffered the lance & powder for. His insinuations were there but he refrained from being overly blunt or revealing himself, caged by a hope that he impressed enough through the letters to earn their interest and thus his avenue.
For all his efforts neither party returned a pledge of curiosity. For nights innumerable he waited on the word of either, peering back from his grotesque work – that unnatural science he aimed to perfect – to no avail. Inquiries as to his person and the nature of his stay in his ‘cousin’s’ newly possessed manor came only from the elden city’s loudest gossips. He depleted the resources of his helots further, driving them to fruitless missions to shovel & scratch more information on his newfound mother, in case her young in him might need means of true liberation from her blooded chains. Yet this too was a farcical attempt. He was dead to this town and its folk, no matter the hue of their blood. That was until a dawning evening when, on the cusp of night, a courtier arrived at his threshold bearing news of opportunity that set his lunatic glee alight evermore.
“What is it?” Aldred inquired of his servant.
“A most curious invitation. You are asked to attend a masquerade ball-”
“Oh? What makes it so uncanny to your sense?”
“That it arrives on the eve of the sabbath. To be held then; on our hallowed morrow’s dusk.”
“Where is to be held?”
“The old Gentwind place. Per the manner of the coming hour’s host: lord Vincent Ga-”
“Ah, excellent.” Harrow clasped his palms into a triangular pose, directing his thought and pressing it to his lips as a whisper escaped him. “I wonder if he feels an inkling of guilt over my,” a pregnant pause littered his words when Arden then remembered himself, “-cousin’s passing. Perhaps he wishes to court the opinions of the high public and win back affection from the Duskmont heiress he so desired to take as his own.”
“Good sir, you have immaculate knowledge of Arden’s affairs, and his enemies.” Said Raykin flatly.
“We were – we are – closer than brothers, even in death.” Harrow waived his servant’s suspicions, should any be hidden beneath the bland bed of his tone. Again, the joy of frenzy lilted into his voice. “Well, friend, the god’s day of rest shapes the perfect hourglass to contain all sin, all vice of this event. Let him who fathered the world sleep happy in the gulf above without seeing how we gyrate and copulate in the garden his marvel has left us.”