Post by Joliette Thorne on Jun 1, 2006 2:59:46 GMT -5
"Once again your mind explodes with a searing pain. A floodgate of memories bursts wide. Yet it is her face that keeps haunting you. Always her face. Who is she? Then things begin to crystallize. You remember your funeral. Begging and pleading for someone to release you from the darkness. You're not dead. You can't be. " - Todd McFarlane -
SINEATER
"I have not many memories of my life as it was, before the time came for me to start running. The smell of death, among my first. Not the stench of the grave, of putrescence - that would come later - but the cloying dried-mushroom smell of a body newly washed and dressed for burial. And the odour of pine as my father lifted me, small thing I was, to the caskets and the corpses that lay therein. How I dreaded their faces. Slack, discoloured masks, dark caverns of their mouths held open with an iron brace, awaiting the sin-eater's kiss."
A little girl, dressed in white lace and ribbons, hair tortured to ebon ringlets the night before, her bow lips parted above the remains of what was once considered a good man. A chill descends upon the room and the mourners huddle together, eyes closed against their own revulsion. The child looks down on the corpse with something of compassion; so heavily lay the weight of his evils on his soul. She feels it surging up now. A dark exhalation, a lifetime of lusts and lies and cruelties.
She can hear the crowd, already hissing with hushed speculation, as the shadows rise to the intake of her breath. This child, this monster, blessed and cursed pariah, takes his suffering into her own small body, a single tear falling to splash against his cheek. The writhing malignancy pervading her essence, she shudders, retches. The memories flood her mind, the bulk of them thankfully beyond her comprehension. Her soul's rare alchemy distills, refines; the blackness yields to oblivion and the sineater, having feasted, steps down.
"I'd grown an inch that summer. My parents had given me a day of rest, and I hardly knew what to do with it. I ran and ran through the whispering grasses of the fields, body bursting with exhilaration, the sun a bright and joyous luxury against my skin. A riotous flourish of wildflowers called me to lie among them, a grass-stalk dangling from my lips, my tongue relishing the sour tang of it. I closed my eyes against the light, some delightful daydream breaking waves across my mind. And then the world went to darkness. I never saw his face. His presence was worse than death's foulest shadows, the hands cruel and soft, and holding me down. A burning kiss, pressed to my forehead. Something given, something taken. And when at last they found me, they called a priest."
NECROMANCER
"The day I started running... That day, I was finally strong enough to resume my duties and had been summoned shrive a man of local fame. As went the usual, I stepped up to the casket and lowered my mouth to his. The poor soul's torment rose, but another and greater darkness rose in me to meet it. Then, to make short of it, the corpse exhaled a putrid moan and shuddered to a blasphemous mockery of life. I'll not say much of the chaos to follow except that after several unpleasant hours the corpse of the elderman was dismembered and promptly burned, with the bodies of his victims."
Her breath comes in ragged gasps, lungs pained and burning. The tainted air, the reek of charred flesh fills her mouth; behind her, the baying of the hounds and the crash and cry of the men that follow. She knows naught else do to but keep on running, eyes wild, pupils wide against the coming dark, and she knows she'll not last much longer.
Then fate, cruel mistress, ever soothing with one hand the pain inflicted by the other, thrusts upon her an unexpected sanctuary. A shallow, half-dug grave; and as she cries in terror, clawing her way from out the pungent earth, the dead rise as one to her call and shamble forward to defend their as yet unwitting mistress.
The days of the sin-eater are over, her years as a vagrant, a shunned and nameless wanderer just begun. How she survived them is anyone's guess.
In time, by trial and luck and ghastly error, the ways of the necromancer came to her; how to bind enough of the soul to a body to make it tractable and prevent it going rogue, and much else besides. She found company in another wanderer, a somewhat unbalanced elf. It was this unlikely acquaintance who gave her the name Tenebrae - the darkness that obscures - and at last each had a friend and confidant, the two going on to spend a long and somewhat reckless time together. Their many and strange adventures, however, are tales best left for another time and place.
VAMPIRE
"I was happy for a while, or as close as I'd ever been. I had a friend, and together we ran riot through the lands, our mischief bordering on the legendary. We'd just returned from the scene of a remarkably successful prank, clutching each other's arms as we laughed and skipped like children along the cobbled moonlit streets. We were creatures of power, top of the food chain, young, beautiful - and oblivious.
They took us down like yearling lambs, a dozen or more revenant vampires seemingly out on the hunt, their rooftop ambush hardly necessary in the face of our imprudence. My friend fought like a demon, broke free and ran. I blamed her not, then or now, for abandoning me to them."
They sired her that night, all of them, upon the orders of the cruel creature who ruled them. Temple of the Leeche, they called themselves; a band of criminals and lunatics, revenants all, raised from their graves insane and starving by their machiavellian master. Tenebrae they kept alive, if barely, while they all drained her, leaving her body a mass of bites and scratches, then fed her from a chalice filled with their collective sanguine vitae. She rose a vampire like them - and yet unlike them; no revenant she, having not suffered true death nor hideous resurrection.
But other horrors, perhaps worse, lay in store for her. Chained, beaten, starved and brainwashed for weeks, she at last came to accept herself as one of them, or so it seemed. Rumours of an imminent visit from their seldom-seen master abounded, the pack becoming ever more fervent in their blood-lust, as well as their cruelty toward Tenebrae. The night of his arrival the vampires bound her in chains and threw her at his feet. She never saw his face but only a whirling shroud of darkness, as the vampire lord bent to lay a kiss upon her forehead.
Sineater, necromancer, vampire; never before had all three been fused together as one and he could not wait to find out what she, this weapon he'd wrought, could do. What his agenda for her might have been she never really knew, but when time after time she failed to raise a simple corpse, let alone any of the more bizarre experiments she was told to perform, the master raged and commanded her punished, so severely that she almost gained true death. It appeared his new toy was worthless and so was eventually handed to the revenants as a plaything.
They kept her for more than a century.
PER DURABO
"I was ever so patient. And I fooled them, all. I was going to be no slave, not to that. Not to anyone. So I made out I'd lost my abilities when sired and put up with the consequences as best I could. Somehow I lived and stayed sane through all the beatings and tests, and later -- other things. A century of other things. And all the while I waited for the day I could make my escape.
Finally it came. I stepped over the last of the bodies and through the door, into a world I hardly knew anymore. Hell, I hardly knew myself. It took years to regain my strength and my skills so long left fallow...
I wandered from place to place, another two hundred years almost, until I came to Kelay. It was never my intention to stay. I'd just popped into the tavern for a quick drink before continuing my travels east. But, as fate would have it, I was compelled to pause a while in this strange land and, for reasons largely unknown even to myself, wound up making it my home. I loved and fought, lost and won; saw changes wrought and stagnancy prevail. Made friends and enemies. Made something of a life for myself.
Then, in an act of cold and bitter revenge upon one who'd slighted me, I made a pact with certain -- beings, whom I employed to built me a headquarters for my clan in a single night. An astounding feat, for which I paid, believe me, and continue to pay, as the building is all but uninhabitable due to a presence within, a lingering malignancy that even my own darkness cannot abide. Keyless keyholes set in solid stone walls, cryptic inscriptions and an abyssal pool of blackened waters are just part of the mystery of it, which I am now determined to unravel.
"And just when I'd given up hope of ever finding happiness again, into Giolla's it strode in the form of the drow Castellian; noble and stoic, cultured and witty, handsome beyond compare and utterly desirable. I didn't -- indeed, couldn't -- resist when he swept me up and claimed me for his own. Well, alright. I did my share of claiming, too. He risked his heritage, his very life for me and I -- all I had to offer was my heart, such as it is.
"But again, Fate's master dealt his hand, and while Castellian struggled with a growing evil within, I was struggling against a different tide. During my Lord's long absences, a thief had stolen into my affections; an odd-eyed pirate with ill regard to any but myself and his love of gold. My companion through many an adventure, this roguish man - a mere human - reminded me of what it was to have a heart. To care for another as if every day was a precious and fragile gift. He wooed me, incessantly, despite that the act was as good as a death-wish.
"And his risk paid off, in the end. My pirate, thief, rogue; my man. We loved and lost each other and, through twists of Fate so sharp they left us bleeding, we found a way to love again.
For as long as stolen life animates my flesh, there will be no other. Fate is truly a bitch, but now and then even She will indulge the shining light of something good, and true.
"And there you have it. One chapter ends, another begins; and thus the tale spins on."