NaNoWriMo - Where We Fall, part 6 of 14

[emeraldembers]

Vorador found himself wondering far more than he would have liked what had happened in the weeks since he walked into his store to get out the drinks that he and Janos clearly needed, returning to find the vampire had disappeared and only God knew where he'd headed to.

Huh. Ironic, given it was the vampire's God who seemed responsible for the fact their species in general had gone completely mad. His initial expectations had been to find Janos' body draped over a pike or sword like one of his peers, but there were certainly no signs of him having done so anywhere in the village and it wasn't as if any of the vampires had outright disfigured themselves through their choices for suicide; unlike humans they did not have the option of throwing themselves from a great height, and none had gone to the effort of removing their wings to allow themselves to die from such a method.

He'd heard Janos talk of Uschtenheim and found his thoughts wandered to that village more and more, given his own would never be the same. Word of a massacre spread quickly and besides, with only a handful of survivors to clean up the mess, removing the taint of so much death was nigh-on impossible. Heading North meant chasing a ghost, but nothing was as senseless as staying home and he had the tools of his trade with him; if his quest turned out to be a fool's errand he could easily take up apprenticeship in, or even ownership of, another forge.

Handing the deeds for his store over, Vorador took the not as generous as he'd have liked handout and headed outside; though that said, the handout was fairly reasonable given the village would not be reinhabited anytime soon. He took his time waiting for a moment's privacy to divide the money up between bags, boots and belt, aware that there was no sense in letting one pickpocket's luck take most of his savings, wondered exactly how his supplies would fare across the journey. He still felt a damned fool in some ways for what he was going to do, heading into long frozen, virtually uninhabitable territory; without shelter it was a potentially fatal errand no matter what animal skins and blankets one brought for warmth, though he'd heard Janos mention in several of his stories about his home an inn up in Uschtenheim that he might make use of.

The vampire race had become a monstrosity but Janos had never been a monster; he had been a friend, had been kind of heart and nature or doing a damned good impression of someone who was, and with little else to occupy him other than searching out a new home, he might as well afford Janos the courtesy of checking up on his health.

All this assumed Janos to be alive, but there certainly seemed no reason to assume otherwise - surely, if Janos had intended on a self-righteous suicide like the rest of his race, it would have happened in the Citadel or village like everyone else. Heading to Uschtenheim to commit suicide certainly had a poetic note to it, but made little sense otherwise; Janos had always seemed like a sensible enough person at heart.

Vorador hoped his reasoning was not just out of blind hope for his friend's health.



Any course he plotted could only be vague given he had little knowledge of Nosgoth outside the village, and reaching Vasserbunde after days of walking was outright frustrating when he discovered that, as much as he had just aimed to head North, he'd actually headed about halfway as far as he needed to in that direction; the main bulk of his journey would be in three times as many days travel East. To hear Janos speak of Uschtenheim, Vorador had pictured he just needed to keep heading North until he reached the impenetrable mountains; but given the mountains framed nearly all of Nosgoth's North, Janos' directions had been painfully vague.

Still, for all he might have expected to struggle in finding directions from locals, Vorador found that there was a darkly amusing continuity in human reactions as he headed from village to village, particularly the further into Nosgoth's obscure reaches he found himself. Entering any local tavern would be followed by the villagers switching from talking in common to talking in whatever obscure local dialects they knew - and yet, as soon as he flashed the handle of his sword and mentioned looking for a vampire, they were all ears and politeness, putting his drinks on their tabs and telling him every detail they knew about the local scourges and the direction in which Uschtenheim in particular lay. All he had to do for information was to keep quiet about the fact the sword was far likelier to be used against any person who attempted to get in the way of his finding the vampire in question than against the vampire itself.



Vorador had thought, all the way through his journey, that humans would pose his greatest threat. There were too many cutthroats and pickpockets by far, especially in outer reaches like this where there simply wasn't enough food to go around. Whores he admired in that at least, diseases aside - and those were virtually considered little more than an unfortunate outcome of the trade - they did little to hurt anyone. If he hadn't seen an uncle die of syphilis he'd likely have indulged in them, given how the comfort of warm arms and a room for sleeping in would have been preferable to camping out in the cold.

Even so, between Vasserbunde and Termogent Forest came his closest brush with death and it was not at the end of a human blade as he had expected; he'd heard of a blue-skinned demon living in the cave and thought he may as well investigate.

Thank God for small favours in that it had been too busy feeding on one of the half-rotten corpses lining its lair to actively hunt him; with vampiric strength already on its side, if it had possessed the element of surprise, he would likely have been on the receiving end of its teeth in his neck. He'd not seen a vampire feed before - had shut himself in with the merchants as soon as they had told him about fangs and draining bodies of blood. Perhaps it was seeing the vampire feasting on a half-rotten corpse that made the process downright nauseating, but something about the whole thing seemed appalling.

That, and the smell; caves did not lend themselves to fresh air, and being trapped in with the results of multiple corpses was not pleasant, especially given that on top of the expected rotting, there was a definite accompanying scent of excrement and urine. Not just a larder, then; the vampire had brought humans here who weren't dead.

Well, the vampire aside, no one would be adding to that smell anymore; Vorador looked at the detached head, had swung out almost instinctively with his sword when the vampire lunged at him initially. It was more of a relief when he brought the vampire's head outside to realise in the better light that he had not killed a vampire he knew, though there was not much of a surprise in that; after the war ended many vampires had gone back to their original homes in Nosgoth rather than staying at the Citadel. Besides which, Janos aside, he'd normally only had the briefest of visits from any vampire; the initial visit to request a weapon, trinket or piece of armour be forged; the second and final visit to collect the finished article.



He could not be entirely certain if it was tricks played on him by his mind or a strange truth, but the very days seemed to change as he headed further towards Uschtenheim; night seemed to last longer in the central regions of Nosgoth, and while they were not so cold as to hurt, there was a definite chill on the wind. Distressingly, the chill did not entirely seem born of cold; curled up in a makeshift tent at the outer regions of Termogent Forest, careful not to go deep enough to lose track of the mountains at any point or to find himself in the swamps, Vorador could not shake a sense of wrongness. He lacked the sensitivity of vampires to such things, could not say "Oh, the land is wounded" or come up with some such metaphysical nonsense to explain why, despite being perfectly safe and utterly exhausted where he'd set up camp, he could not sleep.

He'd often suspected there was more to the war between vampires and Hylden than mere religion; granted that they took their beliefs far more seriously than humans, on average, but even so. He'd only met a Hylden once - Shia, if he recalled her name correctly, one of Janos' acquaintances - but there was something a little unsettling about the way the temperature around her dropped noticeably. It was something Janos had told him about - a trait all Hylden had - but seemed completely unnatural even with the warning in mind; warm blooded creatures radiated heat, even cold blooded creatures simply were one with room temperature for the most part, but he had never known something that took warmth from the air.



Uschtenheim was not so far from Termogent Forest, even if finding a way into that part of the mountains proved no small task. Its beauty was striking even despite Vorador's natural distaste for cold, soft white snowdrifts and faintly blue glacial structures making a startling change from much of Nosgoth.

There was no real need to ask if he'd ended up in the right area; the dialect of local humans carried an accent even stronger than Janos' own. Moreover, where Janos had called Uschtenheim 'cold' - and Janos was someone who seemed discomforted by even the mildest heat, skin clearly used to low temperatures - 'cold' in human terms was apparently 'freezing to the point of permanent damage'.

He could have cursed on arriving in Uschtenheim's village and hearing no vampire stories, no complaints of attacks from blue-skinned demons or similar. Certainly there was a structure known to have belonged to the vampires, but the humans had nothing to say on the subject of finding drained bodies lying around; simply that there had been a strange number of disappearances lately, but they were all more concerned with a mysterious plague that had led to people dropping dead for no apparent reason.



In between hoping that the mysterious plague was not some genuine illness likely to claim his life before he made something of the promise to himself that he would at least try to find Janos in Uschtenheim, Vorador headed to where he'd been told the vampire-built structure rested.

All very over-dramatic, as to be expected of vampires, he supposed; sweeping balconies, majestic, somewhat imposing figures.

And damned near impossible to get to without risking life and limb, given the mountainside had been worn smooth by the years, which begged the question of how the aerie had not collapsed already; probably held together by some impossible magic, as if the vampires thought that for all oddities exhibited by the human race they had to try and go one step further each time.



There were no locks in the aerie; Vorador had felt his skin tingle when he climbed along to the balcony with more than the expected vertigo and fear of falling to his death, so it seemed any wards set up were aimed only at warding off Hylden visitors; maybe vampire visitors too, given the situation now. Human break-ins probably hadn't even been considered with the only entrance Vorador could find being through the balcony - if one didn't have wings or the ability to teleport then the only way up was to scale the damn near sheer mountainside without slipping and cracking one's back on the ice and rocks below.

The silence ought to have made him uneasy, and the dried rust-coloured stains around the balcony ought to have made him fearful, but for everything he ought to do Vorador found his instincts were nothing compared to the need to complete his journey. He had no inclination towards backtracking, not after coming this far, and even if he did suspect that the sword he carried would be useless against a feral vampire of Janos' fighting ability he was not about to turn coward.

Keeping his footsteps quiet as he could manage, knowing the worst possible outcome short of death would be to startle Janos into fleeing - and that was assuming that he had found Janos and not some other vampire - Vorador stalked down the corridor, opening the door to each room he passed with care, until he finally stood at the last door in that particular hallway, taking a deep breath.

The breath was knocked out of him from behind, strong claws grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him up against the wall. Preservation instinct had him kicking out and sheer damned luck meant his kick hit the creature behind him between the legs, causing it to let go and double up in agony, and then he turned and kneed it in the throat, some strange, serene even in danger part of his mind thinking "Well, this is one way to say hello" as the vampire passed out. Luck again, letting him knock the creature out with the right amount of pressure to its jaw; clearly whatever divine force governed luck had the desire to keep him and the vampire alive today.

Blazing red eyes and new silver streaks in his hair or not, the face on the vampire at his feet was clearly Janos, and Vorador breathed out with a strange sort of relief as he took the loops of rope from his shoulder and used them to make sure he wasn't going to end up a feast as soon as his friend woke up, even though it was a bit unsettling to tie wings in place when they weren't limbs he could call familiar.

After some deliberation Vorador decided that the answer to his constant thought of 'Well, what now?' was to drag Janos to the nearest bed by his feet so that when he woke up the discomfort of being bound and tied would at least be eased a little by being on something soft, though it was very odd to realise that while the bulk of Janos' body was unusually light, the wings were one hell of a weight compared to the rest of him; no wonder vampires tended to be built top heavy. Most of him wanted to head off and find the source of the smell that permeated much of the aerie but priorities needed to be set and until he was certain that the binding he'd come up with was effective, his number one priority ought to be waiting out Janos' unconsciousness with the sword he still hoped he wouldn't need. Fighting the feral cave vampire he'd met on his way up to Uschtenheim had been difficult physically but easy to deal with because not only had it wanted him dead, but he hadn't known it as a fully coherent being with a personality. Janos had been a friend.

Strong legs stirred before lashing out on realising how little they could stir, but apart from being able to roll a little on the bed it seemed Janos had as little ability to move as Vorador had hoped. "Morning," Vorador greeted his involuntary host, though judging by the sky, 'afternoon' would have been more accurate. Another thing hard to tell with Uschtenheim's peculiarities.

Janos seemed to recognise his voice, freezing still and falling silent, and somehow that seemed worse than the lashing out mindlessly.

"It's good to see you too," Vorador prompted, toying with the handle of his sword while keeping his eyes on Janos' face even if the vampire did keep trying to avoid his gaze. "Thank you for going through a couple of months of hell to find out if I was alive or dead and nearly breaking your spine on the mountains because I wanted to live in an ice cube." Janos made an odd choking noise but it wasn't out of humour, far from it, and Vorador folded his arms before finally asking, "What?"

"You've seen what I am," Janos replied, trying to curl in on himself though the binding didn't allow him the freedom to do so. "I'm weak. I gave in."

"Gave in to what?"

"The thirst."

Vorador realised all too clearly that he did recognise the smell that had been following him through the aerie, though he had not known it at first; back in the feral vampire's cave it had been stronger, laced with additional rot courtesy of the damp surroundings. "Where have you left the bodies?"

"The courtyard," Janos replied, and Vorador wondered how long it had been since Janos last cut his hair because the silver streaks looked out of place on locks that had grown shaggy. Wondered how long it had been since Janos took care of more in himself than hunger.

"I'll be right back," Vorador said, ignoring Janos' pleas for him not to go looking, heading out into the corridor and following the smell with some confidence now, content that at least he knew what he was going to find at the end.

Strange that this was the third mass grave he'd seen in his life now, and perhaps because of familiarity with such things, or perhaps because he knew nothing of and had no empathy with the victims strewn about the place, it did not truly move him. None of the visible bodies were bloated with rot, and most looked as if they had been fed upon several times past their death; drained as best as possible, though Vorador still felt something about the process was inefficient.

Empathic with the wrong sort, as always.



If Janos had been hesitant to meet his eyes before, the refusal to look was even more intense now, burying his head in the pillows as best as he could. "Do I make a good godless butcher?"

"I can't say it suits you," Vorador said before walking over to the bed and pushing on Janos' shoulder to roll him onto his back, crushing the bound wings slightly but making Janos' attempts to avoid him even more futile. "But I think this self-hatred suits you less. I want you out of these ropes and we're going to find a way to help you manage this thirst."

Janos stared at him at last, eyes disbelieving. "I massacred."

"I've killed animals for food before," Vorador shrugged, before pushing Janos' hair back from his forehead. "And seeing as you're not trying to bite me anymore, I'd think that the thirst is manageable."

"You're mad," Janos replied, and Vorador bit his tongue to stop himself laughing out of place even though Janos' comment had him bordering on the edge of helplessness, as much from mild hysteria as anything else.

"Probably. But as long as your name is still Janos Audron, you're the only one of your kind I would call a friend. Seeing as almost everyone else I would have called the same left after the village was destroyed, I think I have the right to make a host of you."