“The time it takes for an unconsecrated corpse to rise as a ghoul depends on several factors. But for the contents of this report, we’ll focus on three primary ones pertinent to most situations. First is the emotional distress a subject experiences in the period shortly before their death, with ugly, painful deaths often leading to reanimation within days or even hours in some extreme situations. Second, is the number of ghouls and similar undead in close proximity to the subject, as the concentration of low-necrotic class Aetheric resonance (i.e. miasma) has a catalytic effect on reanimation, speeding up and empowering the magic involved. Lastly for us to consider is the presence, or more importantly for us, the lack of, arcane protections, typically of the divine origin. As noted later in this document, bodies stored on hallowed ground will have reanimation delayed at a rate dependent on the concentration of ‘holy’ resonance when compared to local miasma.” - From the paper ‘Actionable Analysis on Corpse-Tides’ penned by the Concordian Ivory Tower’s department of thanatological research.
“Did… did he just…?” sputtered the dwarven constable as Natalie rushed to the edge of the wall. Peering over the battlement, the Vampire watched as the Paladin dropped ten meters and hit the cobblestones below with a loud crack. A plume of dust and fog swirled about Cole as he stumbled forward from the long fall. Recovering his balance, the Paladin pelted forward, heading deeper into the quarantined town without so much as a backward glance.
Before Natalie could call out after her reckless partner, one of the nearby militia-dwarves yelled something in dwerick, the language barrier doing little to hide the pure terror he felt. Pulling her gaze from Cole, Natalie saw the source of the dwarf’s fear, the giant skull was barreling towards the outer gate, its lumbering bulk gaining surprising speed with every thunderous footfall. Eyes flicking from the alabaster form bobbing through the air to where Cole had vanished down a side street, Natalie morbidly realized Azyge was about to witness a clash of giants; one made of faith and flesh, the other bones and shadow.
That thought knocked against another than another and a cascade of emotions started to flow through Natalie, few of them good. With a sigh of frustration, the vampire turned to the dwarven Constable and answered his earlier question. “Yes… yes, he did. I suggest you all follow his suggestion, on these matters, he’s usually right.”
Shutting her eyes, Natalie decided to ignore the annoyance she felt at Cole’s rashness and take her own advice. Reaching out mentally, she put the newly crafted psychic link between her and Yara to good use. Over the past few times, Natalie fed upon her thrall, she’d taken time to weave together a simple but sturdy bridge between them. Something Yara had welcomed along with the higher doses of Sting that Kit thought might help strengthen her growing abilities. While Natalie had her own qualms about all this, being able to communicate with Yara telepathically was simply too big a boon to pass up, especially with Cole refusing a similar connection.
Reaching out to the tightly woven rope binding Natalie to her thrall, she let a series of words and images pass through the link.
+ Yara, we’re under attack, alert the the others. +
As the message and accompanying memories of events on the wall reached their target a flare of surprise, mixed with nervous concern flowed back to Natalie. As Yara regained herself a string of enmeshed questions joined her emotions
+ Are you safe?/What can I do?/Who is attacking? +
Natalie winced at the jumbled thoughts, Yara didn’t have much experience or talent for this kind of magic and it showed. Something of the Alukah’s displeasure must have made its way through the link as a new tremble of distress and pleading abashment came from Yara.
+ I’msorry/Don’thateme/Pleasepunishmyfailures +
Clamping down on her emotions, Natalie managed to send a pulse of gentle reassurance to Yara, accompanying it with more detailed instructions.
+ I’m going to help in the town’s defense. Get Mina, Deborah, and whatever cure they’ve made so far to the walls. +
As a flutter of understanding mixed with submissive adoration reached Natalie a colossal boom and crack cut through the night air. Squatting down behind a merlon, fearing another thrown tree, Natalie peaked out beyond the wall and saw the truth. The giant skull had punted the steel gate right out of its structure, sending the grille hurtling down a main avenue like a discus. Wincing at the destruction caused, Natalie caught sight of a figure charging down that same avenue, heading right for the breached gate. Cole, it seemed, intended to take on an entire corpse-tide, by himself.
Fangs bared in sudden exasperation, Natalie considered the options available. Her first thought was to just follow after Cole and help him hold back the ghouls but recent experiences engendered caution. Low on blood and in unfamiliar territory, Natalie couldn’t afford to mimic Cole’s recklessness. One bad injury could see her descend into a starved frenzy, in the middle of a besieged town filled with defenseless refugees. No, if Natalie was going to help she’d need to be smart about this and not fall into the same overconfidence that allowed Wolfgang to escape.
The clatter of wheels caught the Vampire’s attention and she looked over to see a trio of cart-carried ballistas being moved into place by nervous dwarven weapon teams. Bitterly noting how useful those bolt-throwers would have been before the skull creature smashed down the gate, Natalie looked out beyond the walls, trying to spot the monster. To her surprise, she saw no sign of it, with mounting worry, Natalie wondered if it lying on the ground, trying to fit an invisible arm through the broken gate.
Before any answer could be forthcoming, another crew of fast-working dwarves pushed past Natalie and started heaving a large cargo net over the wall. The Vampire’s momentary confusion fell away as she saw how the sturdy rope formed an improvised ladder. Anyone still strong enough to climb would have a way out of outer Azyge if Cole failed to stem the tide. Natalie caught sight then of the Constable staring at this newest development with a mix of fury and relief; the enterprising ladder-makers refusing to meet his gaze, their expressions oddly sheepish. If Natalie had to guess, a plan to rescue some of those in Outer Azyge had been in progress even before her group arrived; the fruits of which were now being put to good use.
Catching the Constable’s attention, Natalie gestured at the quickly preparing dwarves and said. “The first batch of the cure should be coming soon. Do you have a way to deliver it to those outside the walls?”
Nodding slowly the dwarven officer replied. “I think we’d be better served in finding ways to hoist the sick up here.”
Glad the dwarves were finally putting their pragmatism to a more proactive use, Natalie decided to follow their example. From her vantage atop the walls, the Alukah could see both the distant figure of Cole cutting his way through the onrushing tide and the far closer mass of frantic people hurrying towards the safety offered by the dwarven defenders. Natalie wasn’t needed by the latter and couldn’t afford the dangers of the former, so she should head for the third spot of interest her inhuman senses picked out of the chaotic night.
Faint screams and the scent of fresh blood reached the Alukah, her predatory instincts easily locating the source; something bad was happening where the giant skull’s javelin impacted. With Cole busy holding the gate, it would fall to Natalie to investigate and help. Checking over her much-patched leathers and other equipment in a pre-battle ritual she’d copied from her lover, Natalie put cold hands onto the wall and started to hoist herself up.
One of the nearby dwarven defenders noticed her then and asked in halting Western “You going to do what the paladin did?”
Peering over the battlement’s edge, Natalie debated if she could land uninjured. A flash of fear spiced with vertigo washed through her as the dizzying drop came into focus. Gripping tight onto the nearest merlon, Natalie muttered. “Kind of.”
Black blood flowed out from underneath Natalie’s nailbeds, covering the tips of each finger in short claws. Taking a shuddering breath, the Alukah slipped over the wall and let the blood-forged talons find purchase on the well-cut stone. Forcing herself to look at the masonry before her and not what lay below, Natalie started to shimmy down the wall like a child descending a favorite climbing tree. After a very tense thirty seconds, the Vampire reached the ground and nearly stepped onto a corpse. Wincing as she sidled around the rotten body, Natalie wondered if the wounds of this disaster, both inflicted by the enemy and by neighbors would ever heal.
A great rumbling crash from somewhere in the distance pulled Natalie from such musings and she got moving. Following the sounds and smells of mortal misery, the Alukah loped onward, cutting through empty streets as Azyge woke to a new nightmare. Moving between patches of darkness and over small buildings, Natalie blended into the night, becoming just another shadow, one that would hopefully go unnoticed by those first souls peeking out of their windows. As she headed deeper into the human section of town, Natalie’s ears detected more than distant screams and shouts; there was a fight happening somewhere nearby, an ugly one to boot judging by all the noise.
Natalie scrambled up the side of a nearby building hoping to get a better view of whatever mess she was about to wade into. Perching atop a roof ridge, the Vampire cursed as the full damage inflicted by the tree-javalin came into view. A three-meter wide and five-meter deep gouge had been put in the wall, creating a fissure of cracked bricks and barely settled debris interrupted by the surprisingly intact main trunk of the thrown tree. Resembling a giant cousin of those ballista bolts being loaded up on the inner wall, the stripped trunk sat at a forty-degree angle, its head punched into the cobblestone street, while the main bulk of it lay in the breach reminding Natalie of a fallen branch a squirrel might use as a bridge. An unfortunately accurate analogy as dozens of ghouls clambered up through the hole along the worn trunk and into Azyge.
Unlike the shuffling tide Cole now struggled against these undead were fast and concerningly agile, capable of scrambling up into the breach and then throwing themselves eagerly into the besieged town. But upon entering, these grinners weren’t met with the easy meat of sacred civilians and instead found a hastily assembled militia company desperately trying to hold them back with a staunch line of spears. As Natalie watched, one of the ghouls, a wiry young woman with a runner’s build leaped off the tree trunk with shocking alacrity, jaws snapping as she sailed towards the defenders, uncaring as three spears impaled her mid-air. Mouth split in a wide rigor-rictus smile the ghouls wriggled along the shafts piercing its torso, reaching out to the shocked militia spearmen with clawed hands until a burly-looking fellow smashed the ghoul’s skull in with a sledgehammer.
As the distracted soldiers tried to free their weapons from the now inanimate corpse, more of the grinners surged forward, some pouncing on overwhelmed defenders, others continuing past the spearmen seeking easier prey. The crash of breaking glass and barely muffled screams issuing from those buildings nearest the damaged wall spoke to these ghouls not being the first to evade the militia. Gods knew how many of the more opportunistic undead were already feasting on those townsfolk unlucky enough to live at Azyge’s outer edge. This was something Cole had warned her about on the road, how thick miasma empowered ghouls, with grinners often displaying worryingly predatory instincts while immersed in the metaphysical contamination. Apparently, the corruption in the Aether allowed for more ‘efficient’ reanimation of the dead, letting more complex behaviors surface in the more intact ghouls.
Letting fingers rest on the wolf skull attached to her belt, Natalie bared her fangs. She knew intimately the terror of one’s home being violated by the hungry dead. Dark memories of a night much like this one, where a monster’s jaws had snuffed out her mother’s life, seethed at the edge of Natalie’s mind. Reaching out to the magic bound to the skull, the Alukah Reborn set out to reverse an old trauma. Back then she’d lost so much to a werewolf ghoul, but now she was going to save people using a spectral wolfpack.
“Lupus. Lupus! LUPUS!”
A dozen howling shapes flowed out from around Natalie, congealing into snarling lupines that struck the cobblestones below and went on the hunt. Using bloody claws to slide down the building’s side, Natalie joined the familiars, letting their senses guide her. In only moments she’d already found her first tragedy to interrupt, a broken down door leading to a narrow staircase where a man tried to ward off a pair of ghouls with a fire-poker all while shouting for the woman at the top of the landing to take the children and hide. A quartet of wolves sank phantom fangs into the ghoul's legs, dragging them off their feet and to the ground where jaws capable of cracking bone tore into exposed necks.
As the ghouls went still, their spines snapped, the man who’d been a moment away from a grisly death stared at Natalie eyes wide in both wonder and terror. Looking upon her works and finding them good, the Alukah nodded and left, heading where the Lupus pack guided her. With a dozen wolf noses to help, finding and triangulating where blood both fresh and rotten was being spilled wasn’t hard.
Reaching her next target, Natalie growled in rage upon finding she’d been too slow, a trio of grinners squatted in the middle of the road, blood and gore dripping down their fronts as they feasted on what had once been a person. Flashes of what little remained of her mother after the Varcolac was done flared inside Natalie and she personally tore the ghouls apart, forgoing Barnabas’s gifted blade for the visceral power of bloody claws. Seething with trauma-born fury, Natalie pushed on, her pack scattering in hunting trios, each working to find and destroy those ghouls who’d evaded the defenders, while she personally went to join the fight for the breach.
In the minute or less since she’d first caught sight of them the militia had lost half a dozen members and was being steadily pushed back, surrendering more ground to the eager ghouls, who were split between pressing their growing advantage and joining their rampaging brethren. This would not stand, the death, the butchery, the terror, it was going to end, Natalie was going to end it and woe to anything that stood in her way.
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Fangs bared, claws lengthening, Natalie squeezed every flicker of power she could from what meager drops of blood she allowed herself to spend. While her pretenses of pragmatism and caution were rapidly dwindling away, the Alukah refused to waste more of what Cole and Yara offered her on these vermin than she had to. Exploding forward, a pair of wolves at her heels, Natalie smashed into the grinner’s flank and began to kill. Long talon-like blades formed of sharp obsidian covered Natalie’s fingers and with every swipe or punch she tore flesh apart. Fast and agile as these up-jumped corpses were, they might as well be common ghouls in the face of the Alukah’s assault. Two dozen grinners died in a quarter that many heartbeats and the Vampire shrieked her fury, a cry answered by wolves all around, the entire pack eager to follow their mistress’s example and bring down more prey.
Hungry and angry as she was, Natalie found herself fighting with a feral intensity she’d never managed before. The dark instincts within her demanded blood and death; driving the Alukah into near-frenzy as the curse recognized the surroundings as a potential feast. Yet even as Natalie rode this blood-crazed beast she kept a firm grip on the reigns, driving it towards the weak meat that dared shed blood in her presence. While much of the Alukah wanted to turn upon the now panicked militia and sate her hunger, enough of Natalie remained in control to keep the maelstrom of violence she’d become on the right course.
Long ago, when her family had celebrated the first year of owning Stockings the cat, Natalie’s mother had sewn an odd little felt mouse packed with dried catmint and a repurposed rattle. The cat had adored mauling the little toy and managed to destroy it within just a few months; with Wilhelm refusing to allow a replacement to be made since the joy of hunting a fake mouse was keeping Stocking from pursuing the real thing. Now as Natalie cut through the ghouls and leapt up onto the tree trunk, she knew exactly how her left-behind feline felt. She’d need to sate her hunger eventually, but for now, the Vampire’s predatory drive could be tricked into doing some good.
Running up the worn trunk, Natalie ripped a pouncing ghoul in half, sinking talons into its chest and belly then simply yanking in either direction. Wiping away the shower of rotting blood and trying to not slip on the gore-slicked tree, Natalie moved towards the breach, ready to take apart any ghoul that tried its luck. Then as matters were ever to do, the situation changed and the trunk she stood upon shook violently and was yanked forward, nearly sending Natalie sprawling. Claws finding purchase on the improvised bridge, the Alukah regained her balance just as another great tug pulled the tree trunk towards the breach.
Wood groaned and stone cracked as the tree’s head came free of the cobblestones; something very strong was hauling the trunk through the hole it made, levering it to balance in the breach like a seesaw. Moving on all fours, Natalie scuttled along the wooden shaft as it started to bend side to side like a boat’s oar. Whatever had a grip on the tree, wasn’t just strong but also clever enough to try and widen the breach. Had the giant skull returned, was its phantom arm wrapped around the far end of the trunk?
Natalie didn’t have long to worry about the possibility of facing the colossal skull, as once she reached the growing hole, she caught sight of the newest attacker. Sucking in a breath of surprise, the Vampire muttered. “Jagged edges…”
A pair of grotesquely swollen corpses were gripping onto the danging roots of the thrown tree and working hard to wiggle it free. Each tall as Cole but many times as wide the ghouls were puffy, bloated things, their bodies layered in unnatural muscle and fat that jiggled and clenched as they worked. These were gorger ghouls, of the same kind she watched Cole cremate outside Glockmire at the very start of their connection. Back then four of these creatures had been part of Petar the Feeder’s army, and they’d been strong enough to nearly leave Cole in pieces.
Glancing back at the haggard militia who were busy hacking apart the few straggling ghouls she’d missed, Natalie didn’t like the odds of them triumphing against the gorgers or anything else that squeezed its way through the widening breach. So while the presence of these two rotting hulks complicated things, they didn’t change the Alukah’s plans too terribly.
Slithering along the tree trunk until she was atop where it widened into roots, Natalie pounced for the nearest gorger, taking a note from Ametza Shohgard’s book and relying on the fact nobody ever looks up, undead included. Moving like a starving mountain lion, the Vampire struck the gorger, wrapping clawed hands around its neck, eager to separate its flabby head from its bulbous body. But as unliving strength and obsidian-sharp blades carved into dead flesh, Natalie learned about a concept she’d never before considered: ablative armor. While the gorger ghoul’s tissue wasn’t particularly durable, there was a lot of it and even as Natalie sank centimeter after centimeter of claw into its neck, she failed to pierce the layers of fetid blubber protecting its spinal cord.
Snarling in disgust as congealed fat and sour blood spilled out over her forearms, Natalie changed strategies and tried to get a good grip on the ghoul’s head as she clung to its slab shoulders. Yanking upward with all her considerable strength Natalie felt connective tissue snap like lyre strings as she tried to mimic a hangman’s noose with her bare hands. Something wet and ragged popped within the gorger’s flesh, but before Natalie could finish this grisly work fast movement from nearby pulled her attention.
Glancing up at what she assumed would be an opportunistic grinner, Natalie let out a surprised yelp as a giant spider scuttled towards her. Letting go of the gorger’s head and launching herself up and away from the ghoul, Natalie fought down sudden panic as memories of the Reaper of Sorrows’ attack on her psyche came bubbling up. Spider had never much bothered her until now, but nearly being eaten by a fell god taking the shape of one, wasn’t something you survived without side-effects.
Managing to land on her feet, Natalie realized she was now surrounded on all sides by shuffling ghouls, many of which hadn’t even noticed her presence. One of the nearest husks looked at Natalie and started to lunge for her but stopped near instantly, its ragged mouth letting out a gurgling groan as it turned away to join the others moving towards the gorgers and their crude work in widening the breach. Bitterly, Natalie understood that even if she could trick the living into thinking she was one of them, her fellow undead weren’t so easily fooled.
Finally drawing her shortsword, and calling three of her wolves to escort her, Natalie pushed through the stumbling ghouls, heading back for the gyring tree, eyes peeled for the spider. It didn’t take long to spot, as the scuttling horror was busy trying to climb up into the breach. Now getting a good look at what had scared her, Natalie realized her initial assessment had been both dead wrong and eerily accurate. What she’d taken for a person-sized spider was in fact some freakish variant of ghoul, being a jumbled mass of spindly limbs that moved with manic arachnoidal energy. At least five people or more had been mixed together creating what Natalie could only think of as an homage to the Reaper’s own manifestation.
Deciding she had no intention of letting the corpse spider continue existing, Natalie hurled herself towards one of the gorgers, using her speed and claws to clamber up its bulk and onto the tree trunk, where she viciously intercepted this new ghoul. Striking out with Barnabas’s gifted blade, Natalie drove the silver-coated tip in and out of the spider’s warped abdomen. Lacking any true symmetry, with limbs, organs, and other parts sticking randomly out of its bulbous, the corpse-spider didn’t present any easy targets for the Alukah’s fury but she didn’t mind; part of her relished being able to hack apart a stand-in for the fell god who’d tormented her so.
Thrashing madly the corpse-spider failed to ward off the Alukah’s assault and only managed to knock them both off the log and onto the gore-stained ground. Instantly the wolves set upon the creature, sinking teeth into spasming limbs and working to tear them off as Natalie ripped bloody chunks of the ghoul. Blade plunging into the spider’s body over and over, Natalie was bathed in rotting blood and bad memories. First, of the terror and desperation when the ‘Rabisu’ invaded her mindscape. Then the weeks of deep fear of what might be lurking inside her, and how she’d found a smidgeon of solace and safety with Isabelle. How she’d lost that intoxicating and infuriating woman to some cruel god’s scheme, leaving Natalie in a web of shadows, trapped in all her grief and misery as a spider wearing her mother’s face tried to set the Seventh Alukah free. Once the fiend was banished and the battle won, Natalie had kept it together, putting on a display of strength she certainly didn’t feel as Cole, Mina, and everyone else broke around her. Now it was her turn to crack, for the walls within to split and a tide of rage to come flooding out.
After a minute or maybe a millennium, a sound reached Natalie’s ears and she started, recognizing the ugly screech of someone in deep pain. Pausing in her grim work, she looked down at the butchered mass of dead flesh and torn-off limbs that once was the corpse-spider; only then did she realize the scream’s source: herself. It turned out a vampire could scream for a very long time, another unexpected gift of undeath. Forcing herself to stop, Natalie got up from the ruined ghoul noticing her two wolves sitting nearby gnawing on a shredded arm and leg respectively.
They looked at her, tails wagging, ready for the next hunt; uncaring of the human remains clenched in their jaws. Something about that sight, the simple eagerness of a predator in the face of what a person would instead find horrific, sent a jolt of recrimination through Natalie. Glancing at the ghoul she’d ruined and then the layer of gore covering her, Natalie felt deep shame. Destroying the hungry dead was the right thing to do, enjoying the act and indulging in such savagery was not. Each of the ghouls she’d torn apart had been a person once, and even now their souls lay trapped within their dead flesh, existing in a physical hell her actions certainly didn't lessen. Natalie had lost control, perhaps not in as devastating a way as she’d feared, but still; her actions weren’t of a person, but instead a monster.
To compound the shame of such mental weakness, Natalie realized she’d over-taxed herself, using up an excessive amount of blood in what amounted to little more than a messy skirmish. The slight gnawing thirst she’d been dealing with for a few days now had grown into a steady, unignorable pull at the edge of her mind. For the first time in perhaps months, Natalie was getting close to running out of blood. She’d been frustrated with Cole’s recklessness when he’d jumped off the wall and run into the middle of this disaster, but her own actions hadn’t been any better.
A loud crunch and clatter pulled Natalie’s roiling mind from self-recrimination as the reality around her snapped back into being. Finding the noise’s source, Natalie’s eyes went wide and a new wave of shock and shame filled her. While she’d been busy tearing apart the corpse-spider the gorgers had been hard at work and the cracked tree trunk was coming free of the wall, spilling a ton of bricks with it as the gouge in the wall widened. In fact, the cracked and crumbling rampart now sported a hole large enough that the two bloated ghouls were now struggling to fit through it, a whole mess of their lesser kin following after them.
Putting as much power into her legs as she dared, Natalie shot forward, leaping up onto the discarded tree and launching herself at the gorgers who were busy competing for the right to first enter Azyge. Aiming for the one she’d failed to dispatch earlier, Natalie landed hard, driving her shortsword into the gorger’s already damaged nape. Yet once again she missed the damn spinal cord, her now battle-dulled blade struggling to cut through ragged flaps of tissue. Letting out a furious snarl, Natalie wrapped herself around the gorger’s bulbous back and started carving, driving the sizzling silver tip deeper and deeper.
Jerking wildly, the gorger tried to knock her off, but its own bulk and the confines of the breach kept it from having much success. But unfortunately, the other ghoul, was willing to take advantage of its cousin’s predicament. Puffy fingers like rotten sausages grabbed onto the struggling gorger and shoved it back, with stone-breaking strength. Trapped and distracted the ghoul stumbled backward, tottering precariously as its elephantine feet caught on scattered debris. Focused on her grisly work, Natalie only realized the danger she was in when the gorger began to fall.
The Alukah tried to frantically pull free of the collapsing ghoul but physics and her own growing weakness conspired successfully to keep Natalie from escaping. What had to be several hundred kilos of dead weight struck the muddy ground with a horrid thump, landing with Natalie right beneath it. Pain shot across Natalie's body as everything went black and muffled. Frantically shoving out with increasingly jerky hands, the Vampire tried to dig free instead but found something hard jamming against her sternum, and as Natalie tried to shift it away the spikes of pain filling her torso spoke to broken ribs and crushed tissue. Feeling the first bits of panic starting to well up, Natalie used one of Isabelle’s lessons, and redirected her scant blood away from the useless but damaged organs inside her, dulling the pain and stopping any unnecessary regeneration.
Groping around in her stinking, tomb of iron-rich mud and rotting fat, Natalie found what was hitting her sternum, it was the hilt of her shortsword, now jammed deep into the gorger ghoul and judging by the lack of movement by the creature, had finally cut its damn spinal cord. A tiny victory that Natalie took no solace in as it meant she’d need to escape only under her own power, which was quickly running out judging by the growing surge of hunger that had her fingers spasming in the beginnings of rigor-mortis.
As rational thoughts slipped away, and panic took their place, Natalie thrashed against the imprisoning bulk atop her, trying to wriggle free but to little avail. She lacked the strength, leverage, or time to escape before a true frenzy set in. Already, the Alukah could feel the horrid, unrelenting need of her curse, how her body ached for blood, how her mind interpreted this hunger as every desire she’d felt in life mixed into an unrelenting yearning that would drive her to unspeakable acts to quench. Memories of another cramped, terrible prison joined the wild storm in the starving Vampire’s head, and with grim certainty, Natalie knew if she shared this new oubliette with another they’d meet the same fate Cole had at her fangs.
Frantically, Natalie scrabbled at her belt, trying to find the pouch containing the yew amulet she’d carved for herself. Dry lips babbled in a silent prayer to the Tenth God as uncooperative hands refused to collect the item that might seal her away before she could risk repeating her worst crime. Fangs bared, a choked scream unable to form thanks to her damaged lungs, Natalie needed blood and knew her only release from this mind-breaking desire was the blackness of torpor.
Then a sudden truth struck like a hammer blow and Natalie’s twitching fingers stopped. She had blood, lots of it, the only question was would it do her any good? Words spoken to Cole flashed through her mind, how she’d sworn to drink a rotting corpse before hurting him like that again. Now, now it was time to stick to her word.
Lunging up, Natalie bit into the gorger’s flesh and let spoiled, disgusting ichor fill her mouth. Ignoring the rancid taste, she drank it down, hoping against hope she’d find a smidgen of power within it. As she sucked on the wound, Natalie’s mind found itself occupied with more than foul sensations and deep fear; the empty ocean inside her came into the focus of her inner eye. The great basalt basin large enough to hold nations' worth of blood stretched out beneath a red sky. Before when she’d visited this place while feeding, a faint trickle of red rain had fallen, but now in its place was a dripping splatter of brown noxious gunk. Yet, foul as this was, it buoyed Natalie’s mind just that little much, if it was in her cistern, then maybe she could use it.
Reaching out, Natalie let her mind settle at the bottom of the basin, ready to channel this rotten blood into her over-taxed muscles; but before she could, something caught her attention and sent a deep chill of uncertainty down the Vampire’s spine. The smooth black basalt of her basin had changed, there was a thin crack in the stone, stretching maybe a meter along the very bottom of her empty ocean. Near where the puddle of brown sludge waited, the crack widened into a handspan-sized hole where even now some of the rotten blood dripped into.
Confused and frightened, Natalie approached the hole, finding the reddish stains of long used-up ichor surrounding the crack. Until now, what she’d taken from Cole and Yara was enough to hide this new imperfection, but starved as Natalie was, it lay exposed like a cave at low tide. Driving by the type of irresistible curiosity found only in nightmares, the type that made one open a door you knew the worst the unconscious mind could summon lay behind, Natalie kneeled before the crack and looked into it.
Darkness peered out, but not a mundane lack of light, this was a hungry, unbearable presence, this blackness didn’t speak to absent illumination, but of something that consumed all that dared its approach. Natalie knew this darkness, she’d seen it’s like before peering out from a different crack in different stone; the sarcophagus of Annoch the Binder. Driven by that same dream-like compulsion, Natalie followed her grandsire’s example and slowly stuck a hand into the crack, expecting sharp teeth or caustic shadows to tear into her. Instead, a hand gripped onto hers, its cold fingers wrapping about Natalie’s own with bony strength.
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