Warrior of Light
mrsquishr
Interlude: Whispers Travel Far in the Dark
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For Lucien the brief encounter in the woods was nothing noteworthy, jaded as he was by his past. For Rob and Lucy, however, it marked a significant change in their lives.
They had been sent to the area with a small team to hunt down reports of bodies turning up drained of blood, the hallmarks of an inexperienced fledgling vampire. What they stumbled into was a trap laid by something much more powerful than they were prepared to face.
The first of their crew had fallen before they realized anything was amiss, leaving just three off-balance hunters to huddle back-to-back in an attempt to spot their attacker. It hadn’t helped, and the next blow cleaved through their fellow before being stopped by Rob’s plate. That didn’t remove the energy behind the blow, and his ribs were crushed inwards.
He was spun away from Lucy from the force saving him from most of the final slash, though it left a large gash in his leg. By then, Lucy had gotten her bearings, and she threw down a smokescreen to hamstring their unseen attacker. With the brief respite gained from the blinding cloud, she managed to tighten a tourniquet around her partner’s leg and hauled him to his feet.
Dropping another potion to help cover their tracks, they stumbled deeper into the trees to escape. Lucy knew that it wouldn’t work for long, and she could already hear trees crashing down as the creature attempted to knock them down through the smoke.
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After only a minute of running, they entered a small clearing close to a house. A rustling in the trees drew her attention, and she paled as she saw it step out from the tree line.
Tearing one of her special mixtures from her chest, she hurled it towards the sound and was momentarily relieved when she saw the cloud envelop the thing’s foot. This elation was quickly squashed when the thing just laughed and started taunting them.
The monologuing was interrupted, however, by a most unusual sight. A little boy, with an otherworldly air about his features, hopped over a fence and addressed the group. Lucy didn’t even hear the words he said, fear for his safety quickly consuming her. This fear was quickly replaced by confusion as the boy’s eyes bloomed into dark voids.
The confusion only grew as she watched the air start to warp around him, almost like a heatwave. She saw the veins in his neck and face pulse with strange light and saw a glimmer of that same light flicker in the middle of the holes in his face. Before she could think about that, she was left seeing spots as something flashed through the clearing, and her a crack rang out behind her as the vampire’s head exploded.
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In the days and weeks after this encounter, Lucy and Rob remained tight lipped about what had happened in those woods. They would begin to relax as time passed though, and the incident passed into memory. It was Rob who shared the details first, in the back of some dirty bar while comparing past injuries with old friends. The holes that had been seared shut on his chest, from where his ribs had broken the skin, won him that dick waving contest. They also led to the story on that afternoon spreading rapidly among the tight-nit hunter community.
In a matter of weeks, everyone who was somebody knew that there was an angel in the woods of New England. And of course, as soon as the knowledge became public, someone tried to cash in on the rumored bounty on the supposedly divine creature’s head. This was immediately followed by a different group that viewed the angel as a gift from God, and therefore as sacred, breaking into the warehouse the angel hunters resided in, and butchering them to the man.
There would be a reprisal by friends and benefactors of the slaughtered group that would decimate the crusading company. Another attack followed in turn. And another. And another after that. A war had erupted in the shadows between ancient brother and sisterhoods, destroying the tenuous status quo that had existed supernatural underworld for centuries, all while a little boy with a sun burning behind his ribs slept peacefully in his bed.