History According to Aegon Nightshade
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- "Dreams of Darkness are but reflections of reality." -- Aegon
Prelude: Berlin -- December 21st, 2042
I had barely spoken the words and reality was rent asunder by a darkness older than creation. I felt humbled to be granted a momentary sight of the unknowable and limitless Abyss. It reaffirmed my dark faith and inflamed my need to fully understand the dark truth that served as the underpins of creation itself. Please understand, I am not a monster, I just understand that the Abyss existed before creation as we know it. It exists now and without question, it will exist when creation finally burns. These are incontrovertible truths that I would be happy to discuss with you, save that they are also holy secrets, and thereafter I would either have to Embrace you or kill you. Its simply a matter of orthodoxy, after all the Abyss is my calling, my quest and my god.
Momentarily, my eyes stung from the brightness of the German night. With a few blinks, my sight adjusted and I found myself in a winter wonderland. Berlin. The very name conjures so many images and memories for me. Obviously, like everyone born in the twentieth century it makes one think of World War II and the Third Reich. But there is so much more to this amazing city than that and to make so much of so short a period in history is a disservice to Germany in general and more specifically, Berlin.
Nyx
I could paint a fanciful scene and relay to you the might of a Titan's strike and what that might feel like, but then I didn't feel a thing.
It all happened so fast, I was lucky to catch a glimpse of something larger than a man as it closed with me. I would swear that the giant appeared, literally, from nowhere. And even as he closed with me, I knew it was too late. Then...nothing, the absence of sensation. As a mortal youth, I had a similar experience with a skittish gelding and had awakened seconds later and a good fifty feet away. This was far more terrifying.
They say in that moment before you die that your life flashes before your eyes, but that isn't true because all I saw was darkness...for the longest time. Then, at first at the edges of my peripheral vision, and slowly sliding into my primary line of sight came the images of other people's lives lived in reverse. Ghost-like flickerings of 21st century Berlin, then other locations appeared with people all rushing backwards, undoing... everything. As the days and nights sped backward into months and then years, I understood that I was watching history unwind itself. Not something one expects to see when one has died.
It is indescribable and awe inspiring to watch all of history played backwards, as if I stood like one of the angels upon the edge of creation as God worked his will, a master artisan at the easel and I alone his sole audience. From the darkness beyond the ghost-light came the voice of a woman, at first the voice was unplaceable and yet hauntingly familiar, like something half remembered from a dream. Her words only subliminally audible as if felt rather than heard. More disturbing than the vibration of whispers was its unseen source which teased that primal human instinct to see what could only be heard.
Feverish with the need to know the unknowable, I called upon that most basic ability of Abyss Mysticism and inverted my sight. And it was if a veil had pulled from my eyes, the darkness gave way to sublime illumination. As I gazed about myself I perceived that I hung suspended at the heart of a storm beyond measure, like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the storm could likely have consumed Berlin in an instant and shortly thereafter all of Germany. In truth it was a tempest, a funnel cloud of infinite rainbow hues cycling counterclockwise at unfathomable speeds wherein piceous lightening arched between cloud layers of cerise pink, cadmium blue and dark tangerine.
As I glanced about myself, I saw that a swarm of ignis fatuus clung to me and upheld me above the towering top of the tempest. A look down produced intense vertigo, fear and gratitude. The churning vertigo made me want to vomit, but all I experienced was dry heaves for I was already empty. The fear was visceral, but there was no escape, only an infinite down into the heart of the storm. Raising my eyes to regain my balance, I felt only gratitude to the minute will-o'-the-wisps who upheld me from a fatal fall into the storm of history.
As I raised my eyes, it was as if I looked into the heart of the sun. Its brilliance so intense it left a palinopsia of afterimages that would remain forever. Unable to bear the pain of what I had seen, I returned my sight to the mortal spectrum and was granted the respite of darkness. The woman's laughter came to me not from the storm, but from utter darkness that exited above it. And while it was clear to me that the source was that Stygian dark which spoke to me, it did so through the shadow-motes which buoyed me.
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Alexandria 1097
Paris (April 1097)
I woke in my tent. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I wasn't alone. It was an undefinable feeling, something primal, instinct coded at the genetic level informing humanity that a predator is close. Without opening my eyes, I spoke to my visitor, the one who watched me in utter silence.
"My Lord? Forgive me if I do not rise. I do not believe I am capable. Have I been sick long? I have vague memories of something going wrong in Alexandria and then indistinct recollections of illness and nightmare."
{Theodoric} "Salivius, you were poisoned outside the Memory City, or so I am told, by a giant albino scorpion. Were it not for my Vitae, you would have died. Still, you have been abed for more than fourteen days. But, do not worry, my other servant has been looking after your duties while you have rested."
"Thank you my lord for your generosity, I am unworthy and will seek in vain to repay your kindness."
In the darkness of the tent's interior, I could not precisely see Theodoric, but I could see his shadow. His dark form came closer until it stood directly over me and then I saw the flash of a blade. In that second, so many possibilities passed through my mind, my liege could well have decided I was no longer worth his effort and waited until I was conscious just to kill me. But then there was the sound of flesh being sliced and cold, viscus blood spattered my face and I instinctively opened my mouth to receive this gift.
The feeding session seemed to go on forever and its took all my willpower to gag the vile black blood down and to swallow it. Then Theodoric was simply gone. I lay there patiently counting out sixty seconds against the beating of my heart and then leaned over the edge of the cot and barely found the chamber pot as all of Theodoric's black blood, bile and whatever they had most recently fed me came up in a rush. It was a noisy and unpleasant business, in my original mortal life, I had always hated vomiting more than any other symptom of sickness. This time however, it was much easier and afterwards, I felt a distinct sense of relief. I rummaged around near my cot until I found a wine-skin and washed the taste from my mouth. With effort, I nudged the chamber pot under the camp table and lay back to think.
If Theodoric ever realized that my body was rejecting his vampiric blood, he would almost certainly kill me. I would need to dispose of the chamber pot's contents personally as I could not afford one of the camp followers being a spy and reporting this back to the vampire.
It had not always been so. In the nights immediately after joining the pageant, I had been able to ingest the elder's vitae without difficulty. But over the weeks following, the black blood seemed to slowly sicken me and finally my body began to expel it. In all my years as a vampire, I had never seen or heard of such a thing and it produced such sheer unreasoning terror in me that when the blood would leave me, thereafter I would collapse in shivering terror.
To stem the fear, in my mind, I tried to reorder the events leading up to the attack on the temple of Ereshkigal. Despite my efforts, those memories seemed hazy as if I were remembering the events from more than one perspective. It made me uneasy with the thought that such a long convalescence could have been due to a brain damaging fever. I quickly dismissed the possibility, for if I did have brain damage, I probably wouldn't have had the wits to notice anything out of the ordinary.
My sickbed stank of old sweat, nightmares and vomit. And I could tolerate it no more. Sitting up made my head spin and I broke out in a sweat. Getting to my feet took a great deal more effort as my muscles felt like gelatin. But I managed with a bit of difficulty. Thereafter, I retrieved a cleaner set of clothing from the chest at the foot of my cot, a bar of soap I had bought in Alexandria and a towel and headed outside.
As I emerged from the tent, I turned to see the eastern horizon fully aflame. It burned with bands of gold, ruby, and opalescent orange. It would be dawn within just a few minutes. Somewhere within the encampment, the vampires of the pageant were hiding away in dark places to wait out the day. Like cockroaches they scurried for the shadows and for reasons I couldn't name, that made me smile.
But I immediately noticed something was not completely as I recollected. The humid, almost tropical breezes of Alexandria and the city itself were just...gone. We were somewhere else. Looking up at the fading night sky, I spotted several constellations and calculated that we had traveled several degrees of latitude northward and many degrees of longitude westward. We were somewhere in western Europe. And it was cold.
Returning to my tent, I retrieved a cloak and sought out someone within the camp who could answer my questions. As I worked my way through the slowly awakening pageant, the first individual I ran across was Frater Eadweard. The good brother had just come through the double wall of canvas even as I sought egress. Coming face to face, we exchanged the morning greeting and I asked after the pageant's current whereabouts. He replied that we were in the Frankish lands, just outside the walls of Paris. I thanked him for his information and lightly brushed past him in my haste to dispose of my pot of night-soil and spoiling vampiric vitae.
To be honest, I had never really paid much attention to the fat monk with his greasy pitch of religious righteousness sold like a snake-oil-salesman. But when he grabbed me by the arm, he spun me around like little girl. Startled, I dropped my burdens and by reflex my sword blade slid free of the scabbard. As we confronted each other in the dark gray twilight, I realized the monk was far stronger than he looked. Fat and tonsured, the good brother looked soft, but clearly that was far from the truth and like an accountant, I noted it down in my invisible record book. As we stared at each other, he must have sensed something was different about me, because he suddenly released my arm and mentioned that there was a killer loose outside of Paris and that I should be careful. I nodded my understanding, but I did not thank him this time, we both knew he was not warning me so much as trying to scare me. When I offered nothing further and did not sheath my sword, he backed away and resumed his walk towards the House of the Profligate.
Gathering my fallen items from the snow covered ground, I kept my sword in my hand and passed through the first lay of yellowing canvas. The space between the two canvas layers was only about four or five feet wide, but it created a strange corridor in the twilight that seemed to stretch away into darkness to both the right and left. I did not tarry and even as I was pushing my way through the outer canvas, I heard the whisper of a woman's voice calling my name. As I turned to look in that direction, I beheld a beautiful woman with hair like living flame and iridescent green eyes that seem to gather the light like those of a cat. She was no more than five feet tall and could not have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet and yet she radiated age and power like an elder vampire might.
"Lady Astarte, I take it?" She offered a polite curtsy in reply and I set aside my bundles to bow in return. As I straightened, I noticed for the first time the elegantly pointed ears that were only partially hidden by her glorious mane of hair. As if she had read my mind, she smiled and nodded in answer to my unspoken question. "My lady, please forgive my appearance, I have been ill for a fortnight or more and I was making my way to the Seine to bathe." Despite myself, I found it difficult not to stare at this fae woman. Her feminine attributes where not lost on me as my body began to involuntarily respond to her proximity, but there was so much more to it than mere mortal lust. The air around her seemed to crackle with unseen electricity and I could feel it crawling across the backs of my hands and down my spine. I was in the presence of something far greater, older and eldritch, a fey princess.
I knelt there before her and recalled the three things my old mentor had to say about the fay: creatures of faerie are not to be trifled with, pure iron can kill them, but one must never ever make a deal with them. For the fay are more clever than mankind, subtle and worst of all, fickle.
Trier - Duchy of Upper Lorraine - Germany near Luxembourg (late April 1097)
All along the wagon-train, men and draft animals shivered in the cold dim twilight following dawn. The snowstorm had only partially abated as the sun rose in in the east tinting the gray horizon there with rose and amber. Flakes of icy crystals still fell thick on the left bank of the Seine where the pageant prepared to depart Paris on its eastward trek. Beautiful as the dawn might have been, my eyes were turned to the south where the last vestiges of Bolverk's Army vanished over a low series of hills. As I turned back to look at Paris, I could see that despite the sudden and heavy spring snowstorm, some buildings still smoldered after the fires and riots of the most recent chaos. As the line of wagons and riders began moving towards the dawn, my mind drifted over the events of the preceding nights and the part we had played in them. There was a sense of destiny in all that had transpired and as the only living man to witness such momentous events, the responsibility fell to me to record what I knew of this new history.
Less than a Roman mile from the walls of Paris, the pageant encountered thickening snow and fog. Visibility became so labored that riders like myself were obliged to tie our horses to the rear of the closest wagon and walk afoot through the knee deep snow. Most lit torches and called back and forth to one another so that individuals might avoid getting lost in the foggy blizzard. I tied a length of rope to the nearest wagon, then about myself and had each of my men do so at three foot intervals. In such conditions, it would be all too easy to lose one's footing or get turned around and separation from the pageant would almost certainly mean a long freezing death. Before the blizzard caught us unawares the pageant had been moving along the Roman track the Franks now called the Eastern road. Fairly early on, I lost track of time and a sense of plodding continuity took its place. It seemed forever that we wandered through that freezing white storm, not that I questioned this, rather it seemed only natural. But somewhere along the way, the pageant had left behind the fallow snow covered fields of the Left Bank with its numerous peasant hovels and occasional aristocratic manses for a single snowy track through a twilit forest.
I shook my head as if to clear it of too much drink or too little sleep, an indiscriminate fugue that in future days I would come to anticipate each time the pageant moved in that peculiar way wherein it traveled impossible distances in only hours or days. Later, I would with difficulty remember something of the terrors the pageant had passed through on its journey from Paris to wherever we were now. As if in a half-remembered dream, I recalled the pageant's passage through a blasted arctic landscape. Snow still fell in thickening gusts and eerily the fog clung to the wagon-train in spite of the freezing wind. So cold was the air that my breath smoked like Argont's forge and I felt the first tinges of numbness that would eventually become hypothermia. But as I looked up, I beheld a cold blue sun many times the size of the golden Eye of Horus and its azure radiance gave the icy landscape an alien ambience. The icy plain seemed to stretch as far as I could see, but the plain was anything but flat and periodically whorled pillars of ice would rise from the surface, carved by the wind into fractal shapes that shattered the cerulean light into a kaleidoscope of rainbow hues like a prism. Further interspersed, sometimes by miles, were barren hills and ridges of black volcanic rock rising from the icy surface. Although it did not touch the pageant, the wind shrieked like a banshee and beneath its icy keen I heard something else - a low rumble that was omnipresent and felt deep in the bones. The sound was that of massive ice sheets grinding together for the surface of this world was composed of endless glaciers.
