I fell to one knee. Wings tucked back, neck exposed to this mighty king. My life was his to take. Slowly, his steps grew near, solid claps against the marble walls of this great hall.
My flight had taken me to an abandoned estate on the outskirts of the city. A place unfamiliar, yet I traversed rooms and corridors as if recalling memories long faded. Now I knelt. Resplendent tapestries covered entire walls. Scenes of conquest and savagery, sweeping across millennia as civilizations rose and fell, each subdued by the superior might of the next.
“Rise.”
A voice of infinite strength carried an irresistible command. I drew up before him, head lowered, arms wide in supplication.
“Show not humility, but rather reveal to me faith without boundary, fealty everlasting, obedience with no end, and I shall bestow rewards of value beyond imagining.”
His words filled my mind, as if no world existed outside this place. Only he, and a life half-forgotten. Silence hung between us. My eyes rose, with reluctance, to meet his. My gaze held on that stoic countenance, kept there by the strange power he wielded over me. At once, apprehension flooded my soul. I longed to flee, to escape the horrors that swarmed behind that stony facade.
Stone, indeed, for the gray pallor of his skin was unlike that of mortal flesh. Rough texture reminiscent of foreign life from the depths of the sea, known to me by graphic depictions of such oddities in books of science. This creature, however, was in silhouette a man. He towered above, height nearly an arm’s length greater than my own. I could discern few particulars of his features, as if a thick panel of smoky glass hung between us. A flowing cape of shimmering black hung from a broad body, clasped at the neck by a large brooch. It glowed with a lavender radiance.
Finally, my weak will forced a faint utterance.
“How might I serve you, lord?”
“Make for me a sacrifice, so that I may truly know your heart. Return a corpse freshly dispatched by your own hand, and arouse no suspicion in the act.”
I remained still, aghast at the heinous demand now put upon me. Perhaps, I thought, I had not awoken from my earlier slumber? Was I even now caught up in a nightmare of my own making? My thoughts turned dimly to a woman dear to me, yet I could not recall her name. And what of my own? Had I a name? I could not recall.
Again, the voice resounded throughout my awareness. “Do you fear me?”
“I do…my master.”
“That is as it should be. Now go, and do as I require.”
With that he turned.The sheen of iridescence which cloaked his form diminished and grew vague, as if a mist of water vapor had been thrown between us.
***
The stagnant air was filled with a stench of decay, emanating from piles of refuse. Coursing within its wayward currents, I detected the scent of a man’s terror as he cowered on the ground. It produced in me an overpowering desire to devour flesh. In my thoughts I could feel his soft, bloodied tissue satiating my hunger.
I moved closer, my raised wings casting a shadow across the ground, and my intended victim. He pulled himself further back towards the brick wall which served as the rear of a disreputable establishment so common in this area of the city. In an animal rage I rapidly narrowed the distance between us and stood over this outcast from proper society, his existence to be remembered by no one, his passing a cause for none to mourn.
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Of proximate events I am unclear, my recollection blank from that time until I landed once more on the property housing the instigator of my crime. A limp body hung between my arms, all liquid drained from its veins and organs, by what means I cannot recall and do not wish to remember. As I approached the iron door I paused briefly, a gnawing uncertainty pervading my primitive thoughts. The grotesque nature of my earlier actions gave rise to a disgust of my perverted compulsions, and I longed to fling aside that which I carried and storm the confines of he who tormented me so. I would tear asunder this abomination of all that is right and holy and rid the world of his presence!
But I did not. Still bound by the control of his desires, I dutifully entered the cursed abode and delivered the spoils of evil as I had been commanded.
Kneeling once again before his loathsome presence I awaited acceptance and, despite my growing aversion to my involuntary condition, longed for his approval concerning the completion of my appointed task.
In an act that further lessened any desire to ingratiate myself to him, he swept aside my offering with a wide swing of his outstretched arm. As he did so the drapery of his cloak opened somewhat and revealed the glint of some unidentifiable artifice worn against his body. He let forth a bellow of ungodly mirth, a sound so disrespectful to my ears that I wrapped my wings about my head in a vain attempt to shield myself from the assault.
“Oh, frail man! In perpetual need of succor from the collective, yet you wreak havoc upon those most like unto yourselves, and in such perverse measure do you bring about your own destruction.”
This chastisement held little meaning alone, but his succeeding oration chilled me to the very core of my being.
“My brethren, having exorcised such frailties eons before your kind arose, clash not amongst ourselves but are directed outwards with but a single purpose: to unfurl unceasingly across existence, to cast wide the swath of our reign!” His aura seemed to enlarge as he spoke, as if the proclamation of these goals fed his hunger for self-aggrandizement, a need which had become all too obvious to me now.
My family of recent past had suffered at the hands of Napoleonic despotism, and this unearthly visitor I had once thought a god seemed now only cruel and merciless. His plan in part now revealed to me, I spoke unbidden in a spur of courage. “You subjugate the weak, only to further your own glory?”
Briefly, I felt his glance wash across my upturned face, and I bathed in his ire. “It is you and your kin who enslave your own. We merely bring fruition to the destiny of each we encounter, in accordance with the order of their natural states. Ours is an evident course, a pre-ordained path which, were we to ignore, would let loose chaos in the schema of eternity.”
What was it the Bard wrote? I am that I am, and they that level at my abuses reckon up their own. But I held back those words of rebuke, and to allay any suspicions concerning my dissatisfaction I maintained a submissive manner.
“What is to become of me then, lord?”
“Become of you? Your use is at an end, for now, and thus shall I return you to your previous form until further need arises.”
“Which beast’s blood courses through me?”
“Do you think yourself a ghoul? Or perhaps a nosferatu of Transylvanian descent?” Again a roiling exultation of unsympathetic joy emanated from him. “No doubt you’ve heard tales of man-canine hybrids from deep within the Germanic forests?”
I nodded to express my acknowledgement.
“Trials, lowly one. All of these, and more, mere trials towards the goal of ascertaining the form most fitting of our needs for you. And you are the last. The cycle of experimentation is over, to be followed soon by the culmination of our prolonged efforts.”
My heart sank within me. This day marked a portent of grave consequence to mankind, and yet to my knowledge I alone remained privy to its existence. Who would believe me? They would be as quick to toss me into a sanitarium as to ally with these seemingly outlandish claims. Was I, a single man, to withstand an onslaught of such proportions? Had I condemned all of humanity to inevitable subjugation?
Yet once more I withheld any sign of my dismay.
“And the vial? What was held within?”
“A solution of alchemy beyond your understanding, the grasp of which would require complexities of thought not suited to the narrow corridors of your mind. Suffice to say it contained a substance with the power of morphogenesis, that of transforming men into agents chained to my whim. Your will was reigned by my own, a marionette at my disposal.”
He uttered this speech matter-of-factly, like a well-worn lecture grown routine in the telling. Without seeking my reply he approached suddenly, and as he placed a hand directly before me I found that my lungs were filled with a strangling air most foul, and the world grew dim as the gas robbed me of conscious thought.