by Jade Alters
And so we wait, in a place that looks not unlike Earth. The grass is green, although a more aqua shade than anything I’ve seen before. Gray boulders pop up here and there in the distance as my eyes climb to the snowy cliffs high over me. What’s odd about them are the bands of black that poke through the white. Even odder is what hangs over those treeless mountains. The sky is an aurora swirl of blood red and orange. It’s like the place is bleeding and on fire at once.
“Is this…” I hear a voice I barely recognize as Bart’s. I’ve never heard him so full of wonder. The sight of the place has shaved a hundred years off his usual maturity.
“This is it,” Lucidous answers.
“Alright, Cece. We’re going to leave the Gate here for a while. Think you can hold onto Helena a little longer?” I try to nod, but I can’t be sure of what Helena’s body actually does in the slightest. An out-of-not-even-my-own-body experience has robbed me of all sensation. I must do something to confirm it, because I see a few pods appear beneath me.
One Vampire after the next wheels them in on huge flat-bed carts. The humans inside bob with the bumps hidden beneath the odd, aqua grass. Not one of them stirs from their magically-induced dream. The carts let the pods down, then turn back at the hands of their drivers to head back beneath me. I can’t see exactly where the portal is that corresponds to the Runic Gate. Maybe I am the portal, I realize after a few more pods are wheeled out. The process repeats itself over and again until four rows of ten pods line up in the off-color field. That’s when I see something out in the foothills around the rising mountains. Something that moves towards us.
“What the hell is that?” I ask as I train my sight on its lanky shape moving through the brush. I’m not sure if my voice makes it through to the Realm where the others are, but I hear another voice from below say:
“Hey… You see that?” One of the Vampires puts a finger up to the other side of the field, where a second of the lanky things creeps and glides towards us.
“Yeah… What the fuck?” a second Vampire asks.
“Lucidous,” I hear Bart’s voice from somewhere else, when the things pick up pace. They crouch low just before I might be able to make out what they are. Now all I see of them is the wake of stirred tall grass that marks their paths. “Those couldn’t be…” But Bart says no more. He must be watching, along with all the Vampires by the growing collection of pods. Along with me. We all stare, until the grass stops moving.
A giant, gray blur shoots out, between the pods. Even from above, I hardly get a look at it before it’s gone. The thing is all limbs and rib cage. Its legs and arms aren’t jointed exactly the way a human’s are, they’re more like collapsible stilts that hurl it forward at obscene speed. Around the last place I tracked it to, a burst of glass leaps through the air. The fluid from the inside of a human-pod spills out over the floor. Then I hear a scream in a completely different part of the tiny Blood Farm. All I see there is another flash of gray, followed by the schlop of body parts and organs on the grass. What happened to the Vampire, or the thing that got him is completely lost to me.
“They’re real…” I hear Lucidous whisper. The horror in his voice is purer than any from the lips of another.
“Close the Gate!” Bart screams through my mind, “ Before they get…” His sudden silence can only mean it’s too late for that. A few gray blurs shoot from the grass to the area below me. I can’t seem to look. Through the portal. Behind them, they leave mounds of glass, liquid, and shredded Vampires. The next second, the Realm is swallowed inside the neutral violet glow of a Runic Gate without a destination.
I feel the machine around me disengage. For a second, I blink into a glimpse of the Runic Gate chamber. I scoot back inside my own pod and let out a little yelp. Flashes of colorless flesh too fast to see have already shredded through a number of bodies on the floor. I see one Vampire with her entire throat in one of those thing’s mouths. Its teeth put a Vampire’s own fangs to shame, with all of them slicing down like wicked scimitars. Its arms are like a fleshy praying mantis’, long enough to wrap its prey’s entire body. This one bites the entire chunk of the poor Vampire’s neck right off and swallows it, leaving her face stuck in the fatal scream as it dangles by what’s left of her neck.
I shoot a horrified glance around for the others. Lee has River on his back, circling the high-ceilinged cave in his true form. Thank God it seems the things can’t get to them up there. Bryant surrounds himself with a solid black shell of manipulated black steel from the floor. If they can just hold out for a few more minutes… I have to go back in if I want them to make it any further than that. I close my eyes and try to envision the portal. I force Helena’s power out into the machines around me.
The violet light of the Runic Gate appears before me. But how to find the Realm I need to? I try to call out to Bart, to send me back in, but Helena’s lips just won’t obey. I try to picture it myself, but what would it even look like? The Dragonic Realm of Power. If I could just find it… Maybe we’d stand a chance. But then, those Vampires visited their Realm of Power and they… Before I can decide, I’m yanked forward out of my pod. Any hopes of finding anything through the Runic Gate vanishes with the muffling of the violet light.
My eyes shoot open, expecting to see one of those things hoisting me over its mouth. I face my mortality as best I can in such an abrupt transition, which is to say mortifyingly little. But then I see Serge and Emery in front of me. Both of their fingers are still poised in the trick they used on me. Dorian isn’t the only one who used the parlay as a cover, it seems. They tear me right out of Helena. The next second, my eyes pop open in a completely different part of the Runic Gate Chamber.
I’m on the other side of the room, slumped against the wall on the floor, right beside the door. I can’t believe how strange it feels just to be back in my own skin. I stumble to my feet on a rocky ledge overlooking the slaughter. A few Vampires have managed to stab one of the lanky, gray things, but it hardly seems to notice it’s bleeding. It just rends limbs from torsos with its mouth and swallows them whole with an inhumanly huge jaw. Back on the other side of the room, Emery helps the groggy Helena out of her pod while Serge tricks the gray things away from them. I steady my legs with my back against the wall until I can bear to lurch forward. To fight.
“Wait,” Dorian says as his giant hand catches my shoulder. He comes into the room through the door beside me. “What…the fuck happened here?”
“We found…the Vampiric Realm of Power,” I tell him, my voice hoarse from disuse. It’s strange to hear anything at all actually make it out of my throat. “Those things…came through.” Dorian’s eyes drink in the carnage. I see the decision make itself plain on his face within a second, along with an unsettling dose of true fear.
“We need to get outside. Seal the Stronghold. There’s only a few of them- we can contain it if- where the hell are you going?” Dorian stops me again as I jerk forward from the wall.
“You go seal the Stronghold…if you want... “ I tell him. I fill my chest with air to even out my breathing and speech. “I’m not leaving people I love to die.” This time, when I leave and Dorian tries to stop me, I slip his grasp. I stumble off the edge of the rock and spread my wings.
I shoot across the air above the hopeless battle. I aim for a particularly screwed crowd of Vampires – three of them pinned down by two of the horrific creatures. The group is being dismembered by limbs and teeth at the same time, not dead fast enough to be free of watching their own devourment. The flame in my throat lights my scales a searing orange just before I flood the area with hellfire. The things zip away just in time to suffer second-degree burns, screeching out a sound my ears only half understand. The Vampires rest in peace as ashes, truly better off.
“Lee!” I cry through the Soul of Fire, “They don’t like the heat!”
“Let’s crank it up, then!” he calls back. The two of us circle the Runic Gate Chamber, unleashing a steady spit of napalm anywhere where
other Kyrie members won’t be caught in the crossfire. It doesn’t always hit the things as they zip around, but it does fend them off for a while. In my flight, I catch sight of Bart taking one of them on. He defends a fellow Vampire with a zooming knee into the pronounced rib cage of one of the things. It squeals and seizes him in its oversized hand.
I dive, lower talons flexed to slice. I dig into the thing’s chest before it can chomp half of Bart away. I unleash a booming roar when it bites back, right on the side of my chest. Its teeth poke through the outer layer of my scales. I arc my neck back to spray it with a cone of searing red. The thing releases both Bart and myself, then poises to leap. Its yellow, slitted eyes scream even louder than its hungry jaw. Before it can get to me, though, it hits Serge’s trick. The thing flattens against an illusory wall it doesn’t remotely understand. It slams against it several times before abandoning me for a new target. Bart and I turn in to face Serge, half the room away. Emery and Helena are already gone. It’s just him now, and he could have been gone, too.
Serge lingers only long enough to share a conversation of eyes with me. Even the gray things seem to blur around in slow motion in that moment. The moment when we understand one another. I look at him, so full of longing, and I know that he loves me. I know that this is the last time he’ll let me go. When I look back at him, he knows that I feel the same. He knows that, once this debt is repaid, we owe each other nothing. We can’t hold back anymore. I nod to him, and he to me. Then I turn, with Bart, back to the fray. The next time I look for Serge, he’s nowhere to be found.
Bart shows a daring I’ve never seen before, zipping about with Lucidous to take well-timed strikes at the gray monstrosities. Through their combined efforts and risked lives, they save a plethora of others, who are able to flee or regroup. But there’s no hope of victory, only escape. That is, until the loudest sound I’ve ever heard fills the Runic Gate Chamber, wall to wall. Dorian’s roar.
His full sized dark scale transformation eclipses more than half the ceiling of the cave. The flap of his wings sends papers and small objects sailing all around. It also draws the eyes of every gray abomination around the room up. The second I see the ruby flame building through his chest plates, instinct takes me over. I leap. I flap. I spin and ignite. When my wings unfurl again, they are a half-size bigger and dancing with fire. I follow Dorian’s tail with my nose while the flame builds in my own chest. Before I know it, Lee’s draconic snout follows my own tail.
The Vampires gather at the center of the room, led by Bart and Lucidous, to force the gray things out to the perimeter. A body is snatched, torn and swallowed here and there as we build our heat. Dorian’s, Lee’s and my own jaw crack open at once, frothing with infernal light. Three heavy beams of heat converge in a swirling firestorm that frightens even the gray beasts. They flee from it to the center of the room, only to be forced back out. With the last of our breath, the three of us steer our flame from above to the panicked beasts. Two of them are incinerated, down to bone dust. What happens to the rest, we don’t see just then, because of how fast they move. They just blur out of sight.
The circle of fire in the Runic Gate Chamber is too hot and too massive to put out, so Lee, Dorian and I swoop down to round up the survivors and bring them out of the cave. We have no choice but to leave behind what’s left of Lucidous and Bart’s Blood Farm. The Runic Gate, most of the homeless-turned-crops, the dead left behind… All of it is wiped away in the inferno that saved us. We close the door behind us to seal the flame inside, choke it to death.
It won’t be until much later in a very long day that we confirm none of the beasts remain at the Stronghold. It’s longer still that Horace confirms his children and any other Academy Magicians are long gone. All that’s left in the Stronghold are the surviving Kyrie and the coals of what once seemed like such a brilliant plan.
Epilogue
Bart,
The Kyrie Stronghold
It can’t be true. It can’t be true. It can’t be…
But every time I open my eyes, I’m reminded that it happened. It’s done. The research. Most of the minds behind it. The labor hours of rounding up a crop and cultivating humane conditions. It’s all gone. The Blood Farm, along with my hope for a different story. We’re cursed it seems, Lucidous and I, to sing the same song until someone finally manages to cut us down. Maybe I should go out hunting for those things. Those Fiends. I can’t believe they’re real.
We’ve all heard stories – the really old Vampires, anyway. They’re fairytales. Fables. Or they were, until three days ago.
“Vampires descended from gray Fiends that once walked the earth in droves,” the eldest in the tribe would say, when we still lived as hungry nomads. “It’s not certain if the Ancients stumbled upon their Realm in the universal search for answers, or if they indeed created a Realm to cage these destructive creatures.” There is but one consistent baseline to all the legends, which only solidified its status as myth. “Whatever the beasts bite, becomes a beast itself.” Like the Greek Gods of old, it was a tale invented to explain that which had no other explanation. In this case, it happened to explain the truth.
Who would ever have thought? Who could have dared imagine we would be the ones to prove it? We, the ones who finally tried to break the endless cycle of pain between humans and Vampires?
Someone pounds on the door to my room for the fourth time. No, I don’t think I’ll come out today. Not the next day either. Maybe this is the way to break the cycle. I’ll just wait here. Until blood turns to sand in my veins. Until my heart beats its last shallow beat. I let out a long sigh, and am surprised to find a cloud of mist come from it. I sit up only when a voice says, so close to my head,
“You going to play hooky for every meeting or what?” I twitch back from Cece’s shimmering blue face. As a matter of fact, everything in my room has a blue tinge now.
“You’ve…been practicing, huh? What am I, possessed right now?” I ask her. I do my best not to give her the idea that I’m interested. I’m not quite ready for something so invested as interest.
“I had to get into this room somehow. You know, even Lucidous came to the last one. We need to figure out what to do next… We need you, Bart,” Cece says. I shrug, eyes trained on the dimly glowing blue wall.
“It took you, what, three days to figure out how to drag someone you’re possessing into the Blue Plane?” I ask. “They don’t need me, Cece. They need you. Maybe it’s time the Kyrie had some new minds behind the wheel.”
“They need all the minds we have behind the wheel. Especially one of the oldest ones,” Cece tries again. All I can muster the energy to do is shake my head.
“You do realize what I have under my belt now is a collective hundred years of failure?” It’s time to cut the act. “Everything we worked for, for a more peaceful future…has reintroduced something ten times worse to the world.”
“And what are you going to do about it?” Cece surprises me with a blunt strike to the heart. “Leave the younger generation of Vampires to deal with your mistake? Listen… Just so you quit acting like you’re the age you look. Life shits on you.” I snort at her candid approach. “Even when you work so hard… Even when you think you’ve finally got it figured out. Sometimes you lose it all. But…I never felt like I’d figure things out in the first place, so…really, I don’t know what’s around the corner. Neither do you. Not even after a hundred years.”
“So…it seems,” I admit. Where this wisdom has been transplanted into her brain from, I have no idea. I should think to ask, so I can borrow it.
“Whether it’s twenty-three years, or a hundred…the story only seems like a massive failure until you get out of that part. How do you know the best section of yours isn’t right over the hill?” Cece demands. I stare at her, a little less blank than before. “How do you know, hmm?”
“I…” I don’t have a chance to answer before her lips slam into mine. Throughout the long kiss, her hands slide up and down my bac
k. I feel it all, as real as if she were here. And then, just like that, she isn’t. The walls return to their usual, stony gray. I’m alone in one sense, yet in another I’ve never had better company.
Cece,
The Kyrie Stronghold, Conference Room
I sit around the long, branchy table opposite my father. To his side hovers my mother, looking slightly less perturbed with him than usual. The table is filled with the faces of people important to me, alongside people who used to be my enemy. Some of them are scarred or still healing from the frenzy of the gray beasts. Most of them have saved my life at least once. Lee, River, Lucidous, Horace and Fey Rorelia fill the rest of the seats. Only one remains empty. At the center of the table, a detailed map of California and the states on every one of its borders is shown.
“The red pins mark the maulings,” Dorian announces. “Bodies torn apart, to the tiniest pieces. Most of them appear to have been done so fast, law enforcement can only label them as a pack attack by animals. The reason we believe these sites are directly correlated with the escape of those monsters is…”
“The correlation of a huge spike in new Vampire population around the attack radius... Survivors, from what I understand in interviews..” Lucidous jumps in, “Bodies show up in the wake of these attacks with the typical two-hole punctures in the neck. Just as the legends say. Everything the beast bites becomes a beast itself.”
“So what can we do about these beasts, short of burning the states to ashes?” Horace sighs. He’s answered by the creak of the door opening. A smile creeps across my lips.
“Fiends. The legends refer to them as Fiends. We…never believed they were real, but…” Bart announces as he rounds the table to his chair. “Being that they are, we can only assume other legends surrounding them hold some element of truth.”
“So…we read up?” Lee asks. Bart nods to him, then me. A hint of life has finally returned to that pale mug of his. It infects me, too.
