《Resurrectionists》


 Chapter I

    I


    Benighted specters stalked the air in stillborn twilight. The man gripped his steel, both his pistol & rapier, as the breadth of eventide choked the scattered groans of the looming hour. A woman¡¯s promising shape bared fleet inspiration from the shimmering veils of bilious mist. A gorgon moon stood watch even as it¡¯s pale stone form fell to a gaunt sneer over nauseous umbrage. The business of the gallows and the waning law trotted in each carriage passing down the far lanes. Colossal swathes of the city, Gorgotha, were chewed in the bowels of the doldrums. What stagnation and smog did not claim, only murderous froth & violent ambitions moved in the murk that pervaded each alley and abandoned market square. Passions, misgivings, antipathies, and sweetling delusions were in that far traveled murk. Fattened, ripened, for blade or bullet.


    They were to meet at dawn at the crossroads between the garden district of Illyria and the blighted slums of Salloden & Duskford street. At that cloven mound where lampposts and lifepaths leered mocking contrast Arden Harrow was set to duel for honor and a heart worth holding to. The young but weathered gentlemen, of upstart caste and smoldering alchemies, marched down the gravel of the dusky filaments where the city¡¯s belly spilled into its heights.


    ¡°Lucilla.¡± He whispered her name and affirmed all pride & shame through the stark sound. ¡°Lo, my muse.¡± Ceaseless chanting furrowed beneath each breath, reminding himself of the soul of the hour. ¡°Blood for your flower. Red to bloom. Lucilla, my star.¡±


    People passed by as gulps in the gnarled thickets of gloom. Their expressions were tucked under cloudbeds that hovered over strained soil and padded streets that hid no filth. Old Windshire wood moaned as he passed. The elegant architecture ahead ¨C gnashing with the fens of lower castes - seemed to furl their brick & granite brows at his coming. His fingers clenched his holster while the other hand gripped a bottle, strangling thought with spirits and the imminent reflex of this day¡¯s challenge. The dawn: inclement and bleeding frayed drops, captured by fibrous industrial nets and night fog. Sleeplessness, anxiety, and determination moved him. His own sins clutched the cold instrument of the grave as much as his passion, driving his iron to feverish spasms.


    The anointed hour approached heavy in the present¡¯s prospects, shimmering through the billows and the smog, pulling heavy on his head, wrapping his pulse to new threads of secret gravity. Here, now, the beams of the sun through the industrious mists were but mocking dreams. Silvery effulgence slid through the chutes, fills, and charnel rivers. The bloom of lampposts against dying fires and a moon who¡¯d grown shy fed seeds of delirium in the bed of his impatience and the spurious ecstasy of his hope.


    Past the yards & spire-mounds of Gorgotha and the town¡¯s chest where chimneys and forges spat fresh fumes into the gray sea of ether, bedimmed congresses perspired in their toil and fulfilled their tolls. Church knells droned through the slumbering glow of pre-dawn, but eventide¡¯s sway denied their full echo. Plague chimes and shrill cries still ruled the voice of the dying night. Mournful pockets of gloom and their groaning shapes parted clouds to allow the dark¡¯s foul creature¡¯s to prepare a rest for their work. The resurrection men and kindred ghouls who haunted the wake of blight & murder (those spells that split the once immaculate city) sulked in the breadth of deathless dusk. The carts of the dead rolled down cobbled streets some distance. Even from the outskirts of the finer districts, the signs of eldritch imminence and the wider region¡¯s anguish crept into courtyards.


    Ill ringing & the vespers of many wakes bled into the chittering wind and the croaking of old solace. Each stone and branch bellowed with the foul chorus on those gales. Yet despite the power and strangling pressure which might suggest the coming of a great storm, no rain came, no tempest arrived. Only the tension building in the temples of citizens and in the ether lingered with the ceaseless gray. The fog grew gluttonous in its reach, the sulfurous fumes of legions of forges fed on the listless prayers of the moaning populace. All who were awake were sworn to their terrors, their sins, or else bulwarked into their misery by fears of what the day would bring.


    Onward, to the steps of the Duskmont property - the third, in location, count, & luxury, estate owned by the proud line whose daughter inspired the morning¡¯s conflict. Here, fellow insomniacs and rival shapes gained ground. Faces wove their flesh from the half-light (of aurum, ebony, and solemn silver-threads). As familiar as foreboding, these phantoms of a day that would neither perish nor arrive glissaded by lantern glow. The young domina of the House was there too, resplendent even under such sallow lighting. She was pure ivory against the grotesquely opulent furnishings of the manor¡¯s fa?ade.


    Even being the reason why his blood simmered to boiling tempests, the man could not besmirch any aspect of her beauty and her radiance unto his heart. Yet Lucilla¡¯s ageless iridescence did burn the pits of his being, stoking his pith with reminders of his sin & ghoulish habits. How far his soul was from hers, the breadth of the gulf between them. Alchemy surpassing his dabbling means (and carnal distractions) would be asked of him to splint that nascent abyss.


    ¡°Ah, both parties are arrived.¡± Croaked a manservant, in a tone of indifference coated in affability. Stepped from his charge, the man looked to be composed of as much withered sinew as sculpted thew; a living statue of a Greek hero whose demigod visage had been chipped away to a servile, haunted, mien. ¡°Our Lady is most disturbed. This errant show keeps us all from sleep. So, let us conclude the grim business posthaste. I shall serve as secretary.¡±


    The helot of aquiline alabaster bid the fresh visitant enter through the iron maw of the gates into the little glade in the estate yard. The umbral proportion of the rival duelist fluttered from the threshold stair to the catered reeds of the Duskmont grove. For the rich hand & nobler heart of that house¡¯s heiress would he bleed or be bled. He killed the last swill of his bottle in a bitter deluge and tossed the feckless glass vestiges onto the street, where they hissed an acrid cadence to be shattered. Then the man, called to this private battle, chafed for the handle of his iron.


    ¡°Master Gale.¡± The servant bowed to the graven face of Vincent Gale. Etched in idolatry of a mortal Dionysus melded to an imperious mold, Gale emerged into the pale-silver glow of thinned moonlight. He was as much like a young Lucius Sulla in feature as he was fat of treasure like a weary Crassus. ¡°Master Harrow.¡± The helot then nodded to the rival of the hour.


    ¡°Well then, Arden, our scribe enlists all legality to our quarrel.¡± Gale¡¯s voice was cold, flickering through his tongue with fanciful inflections that scraped the air with forceful clarity and a stern dearth of compassion. ¡°You¡¯ve spoilt our night & this dawn, so let us brush away your offense. At least, you seem in good haste to meet this end. You will cease harrying us.¡±


    ¡°You have your arms?¡± Asked the servant, his voice swallowed by the lugubrious sweat.


    Arden draped the wings of his coat to the side, showing splintered sheens from his sword & pistol. ¡°You certain you wouldn¡¯t prefer to draw swords to first blood? For fairer showmanship?¡± A gravelly laugh crackled through his weary cords as he studied his challenger. ¡°This could be fatal.¡±


    ¡°This will clear our hearts quicker. Chase down your smog.¡± Vincent revealed the fang of his gun, poking from the holster at his grinning hip. The steel in his arm matched the veneer of his simper. ¡°It must be so. Do not dither, lest you confess fear.¡±


    Lady Lucilla averted her eyes from both warring suitors. They made themselves into blind belligerents, waiving her will for animosity that blistered over what affections they held for her. Her sapphire glint turned from Arden and all luster in the world drowned in wan miasma. Those few stars capable of piercing the veil of plague mist and industry¡¯s billows failed to shine long in the mire. The dilapidated moon took her repose as gauzy threads wrapped about her body.


    ¡°Besides, blaggard, you have no skill by either means to surpass me in this contest. By sword or smolder-powder, you will find bane. My hand will smite the fiend in you. For the laws of our Queen and the honor of the goddess.¡± Gale¡¯s head tilted to appraise the waxen glory of the Duskmont woman. Then the full furor in his eye returned to his hobbling opponent.


    ¡°Our goddess.¡± Sharp breaths rattled the man¡¯s cage as Arden lunged into the light. By the reach of flambeaus and moonless sconces those inebriated clouds fleeing from him were illumed; those wisps that leached from his spirit and curled out the corners of his mouth. ¡°For what great crime, what glorious offense, must our antipathy for one another turn lethal? I curse not Queen Caoimhe¡¯s name. Will we not wound our Lady so by maiming each other? What shall become of her eyes & spirit to have blood and sinew given for her ¡®honor¡¯ by our ill will?¡±


    ¡°You dance about as a craven? I will not let you share space in her heart.¡± Vincent growled. Restless curses seeped from his lungs to slither in the air. The harrowed breeze returned to the courtyard, tossing gilt strands about the nobleman¡¯s mane that showered his marbled shoulders. ¡°This pagan aberration by which we know each other pollutes what should be simple & pure. Your presence perverts what is ordained by nature, the grace of good blood & standing law.¡±


    A drunken eyebrow jerked up, raising a sardonic angle over Arden¡¯s temple. ¡°Oh, you aren¡¯t threatened by any other aspect of my rising star? You haven¡¯t asked our Venus, our Helen, in Lucilla if elevating this spite between us to mortal measures is to her liking.¡±


    Gale blessed his arm with a spiritual gesture, an evocation of hallowed aegis against the evil that stood before him in the shape ¨C the mockery - of a man. ¡°You ascend only through witchcraft. Your studies, the work you¡¯ve bled new fortune from are forgeries, stolen from the veins of prouder lines. By devilry, more than real charm, you blind pious eyes. Your blood is a threat to all Gorgotha. Your presence stains our court-¡±


    ¡°Confess the truth of your reason, man. My stain, my ¡®sin¡¯, to you is the threat of my warming the good lady¡¯s bedchamber.¡± Arden paced in his boots, weathered from so many excursions to pluck exotic reagents by his own mettle.


    ¡°Vile cretin! Impudent wretch! I shall bleed those words from your mouth till you confess your evil. I will sever it with steel.¡± Vincent¡¯s countenance, forged by the graceful hands of all noble unions that blessed his sculpting, writhed with spouts of rancor that made molten spasms of his erstwhile composure. Shudders stole his poise, itching at the grip of his gun. ¡°You hath hexed uncounted maidens already, despoiled them. I know it. Foul truths of you are whispered in the highest house. The same horrors are affirmed in the lowest hearths, beneath which you belong.¡±


    ¡°And yet, Lucilla¡¯s noble father blessed the prospect of my hand in hers.¡± Arden¡¯s steep libations on the steps to this square engorged their influence over his affect, glossing his shine with a gross confidence. ¡°We should ¨C and shall ¨C have our prosperous appointment.¡± Yet that mercurial aplomb of his fell to scoria when his gaze met the waning fires in Lucilla¡¯s. ¡°That is, if it is still the Lady¡¯s want.¡±


    ¡°You hexed his judgement, warlock. I know your sorcerous ways, demon. Only by mischief and impish cunning have you risen from the dirt of your birth.¡± Bemoaning gusts carried the shared cadence of Gale¡¯s acrimony. Winds scratched the stone of each neighboring estate and upset the seals of recent burials upon the nearby mounds devoted to the (growing) dead. ¡°Oh, but you shan¡¯t smear her hand with those pauper¡¯s paws. You shan¡¯t crawl into nobility through her virtue.¡±


    ¡°None of this passion in me is drawn to her dowry! But of course, your conceit shrouds all else. Tis lust & greed with you.¡± Growled Arden. ¡°You scions of old houses and degenerate lines are always so caught up in the murk of your own decadence.¡±


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    ¡°Silence, lout. No more filth from that tongue. We know this must be. Take count, scribe.¡± Tremors caved all stoic granite from the young lordling¡¯s mask. Loathsome certainty furrowed through his sockets where sat the effigies of two hoary candles. ¡°Unless you recant your preposterous proposition to this woman of immaculate feature & supernal moral sinew? Beg my forgiveness for this insult now, and you may get your odious presence from here.¡±


    ¡°Or be bound to the barrow?¡± Arden chuckled, but no feigned wit helped along by the potent spirits swimming in his liver obscured the sweat of pained reticence from his brow. A ghost of fear swept torrents through his husk, feeling now so shallow and naked before the eyes of Venus in Lucilla. ¡°Mayhap we should ask our Lady. What insight will you share, our star?¡±


    ¡°You hath decided it already.¡± Lucilla sighed. The wind perished a short breath before returning to swathe her defeated words in solemn vapors to match her knell. ¡°Regardless of my wants or misgivings, you each have burnt all else but this bridge. This brutishness is chosen by the both of you. I shan¡¯t halt you for my sake.¡±


    The elegance & appeal of the Duskmont heritage in Lucilla leached into the drifting brume. Stark exhales sent her spirit winnowing through her course, exorcising all vixen aspects of her form that had made fools of men who could have been fair lovers once. ¡°I¡¯ve a mind to cast you both aside. For you each pull upon me without hearing a word I have spoken since you discovered my fondness for the other. I am beginning to fear you only want me for warm whispers and soft skin, and that neither here shall possess the heart to listen to mine. We must hearken the sirens of our souls, even as they draw gulches between us. It ¡®must be¡¯, by the law of our beating hearts. I will not turn my face and hide in ignorance. I will see what cold truths your hatred wins this baleful morn.¡±


    Her servant fetched a wary look for her, but Lucilla frowned in answer as she cursed the fools who sought to bleed for a competition she¡¯d not endorsed. ¡°Gods, the sun is dead to me already. As you two shall be by your own belligerence.¡±


    In the moans of the breeze the echoes of her voice were buried. Acrimony hastened to blister in the duelists. Arden fastened his shivering fingers to the grip, showing his weapon to the scribe and his foe. ¡°One shot?¡± He inquired with an open palm, ready to receive the ammunition prepared for their spar.


    ¡°Two.¡± Declared his lordly adversary with wretched fervency. Vincent loaded his first and spat a bullet of spite. ¡°Bronze casing for the first. I¡¯ve no round made of fetid soil fit for you, so it shall serve. Silver for the next, should you prove a true fiend.¡± His glance entombed Arden in guilt to justify all else.


    ¡°Please sir, show chivalry.¡± Groaned the helot, refusing to shiver from his vigil in the frigid breath on the breeze. ¡°Is it agreed? To your marks then.¡±


    ¡°Very well.¡± Arden spattered a globule thick with liquor & fearful regret. He shed this spittle as impolite but necessary means of replacing the water that begged to leak from his ducts.


    A brief entreaty through prayer, as sparse as the few breaths that chased its utterance, was ushered by the scribe. A shorter bow and three long strides. Then the rivals turned at their heels and faced the enmity readied for each other.


    Arden¡¯s arm lingered on Gale¡¯s torrential glare for half a strained heartbeat. He recalled ¨C and prophesized ¨C what horrid affirmations would be made of his ancestry and living kin were he to prove his mettle and skewer this challenger. His heart made a martyr of itself, splayed in his chest where it ached on the rack of persecution, arraigned by his besmirched spirit. His handle wavered. Weighted as much by sin as with concern for how he might split Lucilla¡¯s soul (and her consideration of his) by playing the callous victor. With a smoking flare his shot rang impotently, striking the trunk of a courtyard tree.


    ¡°Do not mock, warlock.¡± With this Vincent Gale unleashed the acrid hammer in his hand, sending the bullet with a taunt to gnaw & burrow into the ground near Arden¡¯s sole.


    ¡°Make peace, gentlemen. Or else make this one count.¡± Spoke the sallow sentinel.


    Ripe rounds were shuffled into their prospective chambers. In the span of a protracted sigh, Arden glanced to the sky and sang a silent vesper. Some supernal terror in the glare of the sun, now rising to its ascendant throne over the yet begrimed horizon, pierced his inner eye. Confounding obeisance to its rays, the prime sphere churned sulfur in the man¡¯s intestines and froze all sight & sense in the rime of that dawning star. Listlessly, he fired into the welkin.


    In that same distance of time, Gale lunged two paces and fired. Ignition scorched the aether as the silver-crusted shell lanced Arden¡¯s chest. That stare which had gazed numbly into the promethean fire of heaven¡¯s star drooped with the plunging of his body to the bed of the courtyard garden. The last flutter before his lids were sealed by that self-avenging fury fell upon Lady Duskmont. A fleet glimpse of life¡¯s pale warmth and vital fire before the Lethean wakes of black ether pulled shut his view. Shadows cascaded over his essence while vitae watered the soil.


    Lucilla leapt from the garden hedge, dreary wings flapping from her coattails enfolded the dying challenger. Her horror expunged all hue but the blush of heated emotion. Then incensed color was brushed by numbness; repainted a ghastly pallor, beyond the powdered anemia of her well-born caste. Cerulean glints in her exasperated glare absorbed the parting gloss in Arden¡¯s gaze. She saw the veil crash upon his eye, smothering the gasping cinders in his skull.


    ...


    ¡°My Lady, I must restate my discomfort with this insistence.¡± Legions of infinitesimal ghosts fled from the helot¡¯s hushed & hurried breaths. ¡°Ghouls prowl this hour. The constables are overworked. Whatever words you might lay upon your¡­ friend¡¯s grave can surely wait till morn.¡±


    ¡°Mr. Tidwell,¡± Lucilla spoke in a whisper that was neither feeble nor denigrative, ¡°I do not doubt your willingness & ability to assure my safety in the wake of any scavengers. I cannot trace the why of this feeling just yet, but I know that he is calling to me in the dark. I may never hear the answers, but these questions press upon me. I must speak these concerns which afflict me.¡±


    ¡°Speak them to the deaf, the dead? No offense, noble Domina, but he will not hear you better for lack of light-¡±


    A forlorn wisp took form from the dew & mist of the Lady¡¯s lungs. ¡°Mock not this feeling that ails me so deeply already. I must make ash of my woe, even if only by giving breath to this phantom plaguing me.¡±


    She clasped a vase of fresh flowers and the yellowed parchment of an old letter to her chest while her servant chased back the engorged dusk with his lantern. Dressed in threads of eventide herself, Lucilla¡¯s pale mien seemed a disembodied spirit in her passing; levitating through the rows of Gorgotha¡¯s buried mounds as a bodiless head, draped in twilight save her bare face. ¡°Ah, Hels!¡± Lucilla muttered to the wind, then veered into the glow of Tidwell¡¯s lantern. ¡°Another aspect vexes me¡­ do you recall that¡­ uncanny woman? The one who came from the depth of evening as the rites perished. She had a courtesan¡¯s affect, if not an actor¡¯s.¡±


    ¡°I believe she was indeed a lady of the night. Perhaps she knew mister Harrow in life. In certain circ-¡±


    ¡°Perhaps.¡± Lucilla chastised the firmament with her stare, squinting against the drifting halos of the stars to sieve impossible answers from their vacuous crowns. ¡°But remind me, who allowed her appointment to speak in eulogy?¡±


    ¡°Hmm.¡± Mr. Tidwell¡¯s lip curled to a sunken scowl for a brief flash. ¡°I don¡¯t believe anyone allowed it. She came, spoke, and went of her own ill accord.¡±


    ¡°Odd.¡± Lucilla¡¯s utterance died rapidly, yet her ponderance lived on past the word to pursue greater angles of disgust & confusion.


    ¡°Not so, if I might say. I need not perspire to repeat how much expense was given for the ceremony from your own estate, Domina. The Harrows have never been much loved here. Thin is their line remaining in exiled Waldengrot. Most attendants, I fear, only came out of morbid interest in the show of-¡±


    ¡°-That ¡®sorcerer¡¯s demise¡¯.¡± The Lady bit down on her servant¡¯s tongue. She strolled on, trespassing into wider gloom. ¡°And yet that lawyer, Mr. Conwell, said my Arden¡¯s estate, by his hastily scrawled Will, is to be split threefold; between my House, a certain cousin who¡¯s ought to have never set foot outside his Den, and the liking of some woman whose name bears no recognition to any court.¡±


    ¡°I do not seek to maim your grief further, Lady.¡± Tidwell stared on into the dark, surveying grumbling thickets and chafing headstones. ¡°But on the latter matter¡­ Well, that could well be evidence of his, hm, misplaced faith?¡±


    ¡°Faithlessness in me, you mean. Do not be bashful for my sake. Yet what greater faith would he have had in this strange woman, this potential night-spouse, compared to¡­. To the one he died for.¡±


    ¡°I mean no offense, great patroness.¡±


    ¡°Then do not leaven my pain to something wicked, old friend. Leave me to mourn and the means I might cast off this damnable shroud.¡± Lucilla siphoned dread vapors from the air as their steps neared Arden¡¯s alcove in the sepulchral village of burial fetishes. Deep into the belly of the city, this hallowed soil to honor the fallen drew her thoughts into the lures of the funereal mist from the stones & their elegies for those, among the voiceless & the slain, they heralded. ¡°Let me say my words to him, then let us part from this ghoul-yard faster for it.¡±


    Tidwell nodded, gulping down the slight tremors of dejection, and began to pace a guarding circle about his charge. His Lady strewed her honorary, if tormented, petals for the man inlaid beneath this burrow, while he spread salts to stave off the damned and a lantern to ward the cumbersome dark.


    The longer Lucilla¡¯s stare fixated on the headstone marking the eternal rest of one ¡®Arden Harrow¡¯, the greater the throes and lashes of fevered imagination gripped her. Eternities bristled, spawning epochs for each word she spent her breath conjuring. ¡°Should I dare even ask for more time with you? I fear we did not know one another as intimately as suspicion now derides me as keeping to. Your thoughts were never fully shared, you kept much from me. You¡­ refused to bleed another. I know you did not strike him for my sake; you did not wish to maim my heart by wounding him. And yet¡­ was it a farce? A mere ruse of some stage, some play I was not privy to and yet thrown upon¡­ like that actress of eventide¡­ the ghost at your wake¡­¡±


    ¡°You did wound me. Scoundrel!¡± Lady Duskmont merged the acrid spittle of a curse with the wet font of her tears. She eschewed all longing that still throbbed in her core, hissing a private inquisition of the interred. ¡°Not solely by your departure. Oh, you played the chivalric - yet your spite still brought you to Vincent before me. Besides, you hid whole elements and histories within you from me. What horrid secrets did you bury in the dark!?¡±


    ¡°Did you die for me?¡± She tossed the last flower to the pit wherein the stranger she once called to the cradle of her embrace and had asked to suckle on the nectar of mortal affections. With it she dampened the ground, shearing what should be a few last tears for her Arden. ¡°No. By all that is astral and immemorial, no. I know now of other specters in your heart. Though yours ceases to beat, these shadows wander past your burial. What passage was their course for you, o lambent adventurer?¡±


    ¡°You died for vanity! Or else for some reason ¨C among legions more - you refused to inform me of. When we shared our essence, warmed our horizons by the hearth, you hid so much that I can no longer tell what was rehearsed refrain and what was real.¡± Lucilla banished the final deluges of sorrow with the wings of her sleeve. ¡°Selfish rogue! Oh, what was I to you? Another maiden among the rows of dalliances to pluck and wither for fleet pleasure? Just some passing warmth, a comfort in the rays of false days before you leapt into the night ¨C where you were called?¡±


    ¡°She spoke to me, that stranger¡­ But was she a thief of your heart or a consort to some conspiracy you kept from me? Her shroud was worse than your pall.¡± She felt those skeletal words creep back into her consciousness, that unspoken whisper reverberated in her frayed psyche. ¡°That woman seemed a natural suitor to evenfall. What was it she said? Whether warning or words of warming, she spoke that I should see your face again in more than dreams. That your spirit would not perish with Hell¡¯s immurement, but that I should shirk your shadow evermore. I will ask no answer from that heathen actress, nor pry more water from my soul for your grave. Speak now, Arden, or turn your forever from all my tomorrows.¡±


    ¡°Will you speak solely to me?¡± She swore she heard a turning in the depths, a gurgling moan from the casket buried at a length at least twice the breadth of her own body. The plagues of want and fearful perception transpired in the width of the silk of bilious harvestmen. Those spectral weavers threaded her thoughts into a net to catch her despair and snare her hopes for a brighter morrow. From the fibers Lucilla¡¯s soul faced the fangs of phantom conceit, churning impossible sounds from the matter behind her ears and inventing sounds that could not be sourced from where they seemed to call. ¡°If not now, keep your shade from me evermore.¡±


    Only the autumn wind filled her inquiry, billowing in the emptiness after her mourning ritual. The evening begat pale sermons of her shivering vespers, chaunting hymns by the whistle of each stubborn leaf and the mouth of every funeral mound. The creaking of chapel doors; the groans of sepulcher statues; the chirps of vermin & the hoots of strix in hunting flight; all adjoined in prowling circumference of the night gales and the howling dead they conjoined in chorus. Enfevered hallucinations conceived a woman in a bleak coat crossing through columns of buried heads before dispersing in the sigh of a dusky gale.


    A set of ghoulish eyes set upon Lucilla from endarkened banks of grave shrouds. The faint gloss of preying spheres, the gauzy light of nocturnal hunters, shined contrast in the realm of dusk. One glare multiplied into manifold throngs, fastening their voiceless fangs on her rising pulse.


    ¡°Let us disembark from this black sea, my lady.¡± Tidwell ushered the heiress from the umbral choir, flailing his flare to frighten evil, and dared impose over manners to grasp his Lady¡¯s arm. ¡°No beat of this hour avails us, no mirth lies there. Only ticks and carrion-mongers haunt here.¡±

 Chapter II

    II


    All knowledge of self, time, and position bled dry in the gray twilight that claimed him. The unquiet corpse awoke in its coffin, the lifeless womb that was to bear it¡¯s occupant to the next and final shore. Rancor roused with the brine of trepidation. A bloodless frame rose to berate its walls, blunting bone against this carriage to the nether. But what rage could upset this hovel when cold talons scraped a cage that cracked his proportions? What ears might strain to hear the scratching from one already given to the ground?


    Ruinous cords dragged the Buried¡¯s sinew into farcical animation, wrenching life past the dearth of a heartbeat. Confined to a contorted pose in this shrine of wood in offering to the dark country, the awoken shade did not wish to tarry in putrefaction. He flailed against the fetid efforts encroaching on his carcass. Those scurrying insects that lapped the pit of his being and spun him toward profane renewal did not deign to chip & gnaw at the casket nor the chains that snaked its body. He was abandoned to this end yet would not perish. Entwined in oak, the resurgence of sensation from the dreamless void sent him howling against the agony inside. All too lucid in awareness of the worm tunneling through his wretched vessel, snaking his tissue to rife perversions.


    The haste with which the shuddering cadaver was inlaid in coffin refinement belied the perilous nature of the ignorance which left him in this plight. His body lacked the poison juice of formaldehyde and other aspects of a proper embalming. They had not cared to wager many prayers for the man they shoveled into a crypt to match his length. Nor did they expect the horrible chance of the rogue¡¯s return to the lot of Gorgotha, ambling but ailing as his city.


    Rot leached into his flesh, clumsily pressed against the asphyxiating walls of his coffin. The harrowed shape knew himself a leper; undergoing torturous surgery to reclaim what digits and strips had flayed from his skin by half-hearted finality. Perdition refused him, belching the spirit impaled & munched by the teeth of that infernal gate. Envenomed saliva from this trip to hell¡¯s borders slathered Harrow¡¯s remnants, coating him in bile from the throat of Styx.


    A fanged pestilence kept him from serving the full course of the maggots, pinning him in its jaws. Cells slaved to thwart the advance of decay. A week¡¯s worth of corrosion was strangled by quickening labor of an alien malice. Sweltering perfume from befoulment and the force which proscribed it invaded his nasal flumes. Abyssal lightning sprang to lick him with balefire tongues; with cloven thunder to rally his tissue to its chime, reclaiming what was pillaged by immurement.


    The man, condemned by life and yet not by the Fates, lashed his skin to feral purpose. He tried to scream his wrath but had lost his tongue. His lungs were trapped with the bloat of death¡¯s feast. Breathless spirit choked his screeching chords, denying the flight of his cries and yet allowing him to sieve unearthly matter from his joints, bones, and tissue. Through these channels that remained to the frightened soul, he furrowed all thew and divvied feckless doubts from needful instinct. He wrenched and wrung that passing strength to batter his hurried tomb until that delirious virtue of desperation undid all method of defying this starvation; this becoming of the death which had not yet drunk his inner basin.


    Fingers broke and bent to inversions as the buried soul flailed against his cage. Damning his immurement with brute clashes against shackles and splinters, he flayed his nails and what lay beneath to grind the wooden belly. This mewling aspect of carrion wailed in heaving whimpers, bruising what sound and strength had returned to it to break those black palisades that encroached on his eye. What agony was in his mouth. Aberrations of his mold jutted fresh bone from his dying maw, rending gums and splashing bile to poke out with elongated measure of his hunger for life. Rows of teeth jostled anguished fervor, like tombstones unearthed. A fading glimmer in his sockets spat fire for envy of the sun. Yet sight could chase nothing outside the enclosing shadow, growling back and binding retinas to black, stitching fibrous ether over seams.


    But for all rebellion left in that shape, natural force still reigned supreme over stars, streams, and soil. The roaring rattle from the discontent corpse only burrowed it deeper, rustling the crust of the earth to amass in worming legions to oppose his effort. A meek jangling of the chains over his casket answered his gormless labor. All his fevered entreaty availed him was the puncturing of oaken splinters and the seething caress of his casket¡¯s silver lining. From that thin crack vermin crawled to seek a hearth in him. Slobbering, skittering migrations of pests sought the promise of his stubborn corpse; powerless to evict them. The centipede might scurry into his eye, but the flesh it tested would push back with a dull ache that yearned for renewal. This purgatory would be his evermore; eaten by the insects and splinted as endless supper for them; coiled in a gnawing eternity as an estate for their nests.


    Exasperation seeped into the broken and spent shape. Desiccation siphoned veins which death should¡¯ve severed. The writhing thing struck a fetal pose, falling into a numb and dreadful torpor.


    High above the spectral battle, where the wretched soul met again with the formless specter that pursues each & every living breath, only ghouls & night-gaunts inhaled the midnight air. In the gloom of predation those visitants of morbid might & minds of mint stalked umbral prospects from the ripe fruit of perished branches and noble roots. All who crawled from the womb were bid by forces beyond to suffer and decay. And yet why should the living who still had their time on earth play stoic and deny the riches given to the honored dead? Even in the murk of many wakes and the ebb of fair fortunes by the flow of biting plagues, a profit must be had. What were gilded fetishes and silver totems lining caskets worth when those buried sat in their sunken limbos. None! No worth lay beyond the pale rites that cast them down. No nectar to sap, save to those brash and serious few. Riches were inlaid for those who made it their toil to break open earth & oak to wring gold from carcasses; both freshly mourned and those forgotten.


    One such scavenger, grown as bold as fat from the wealth of the damned, sliced through the moonless drapery. Glissading like an eel under the docks of gilt shipments, the fiend anchored his eye on presumptuous plunder. Cloaked in threads of midnight, with a blas¨¦ grin fit only for a hangman¡¯s grip, the vulture swam casually through his fond haunt. Two burrowing sockets set upon the trove of deathless delight, spotting then the grave which might earn him a flight from the walls of Gorgotha through a mere night¡¯s despoilment of Galloden.


    The lone prowler¡¯s darkling glare fingered the stay of a newly dead man, one ¡®Arden Harrow¡¯. Gibbous glints birthed promises of eternal renewal and security in the market yet unknown to him to espy the grave of the affluent sorcerer. Palms grubbed together, a mixture of slovenly elements and the might by which a ravenous pauper could fine purchase. The ghoul diverted a vein of false manner, though none were around, to forfeit the urge to rub its own manhood at the hysterical promise of soon cracking open this coffer. For in that sullen mound where lay the bloated vestiges of that scion of loathsome lineage winked the aurum of finery and wicked secrets. Such recompense would be awarded for divining the treasure and stealing the lifeless jewels that packed the oaken husk therein. If no hoard was entombed with his game the resurrection man would fetch his coin from the sorcerous corpse ¨C on the promise of the fallen warlock¡¯s use to men of blasphemous science.


    Copulating frenzy was in the hum and chatter of that dusk-fiend¡¯s jaw. He knew no citizens¡¯ militia would patrol the barrow of a reviled warlock & charmer of women. The only competition and guarded watch he needed to fear was that of his fellows in the business. He¡¯d waited long enough before setting out on the prize. He only prayed that those others who¡¯d cut their teeth on the work of breaking chained coffins were still arrested by superstitions surrounding the host of such rife wealth. Yet this ghoul held as little favor for the laws of man and heaven as he did for any whispers of curses. He was a man of the soil, sculpted of that mold, after all.


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    So boastful and unafraid of the witlessly occupied constables was the grave-monger that he began to lilt a grave tune. His song, a mockery of hallowed procedure and the palls of good sense.


    ¡°The fever sets, our skin turns sallow.


    The lords turn their sight, their hearts too shallow.


    O! Pay me for a tune or sing me to the gallows!


    This toil is the hammer of our time.


    You are but rot, yet we are of earth, and we must feed.


    Don¡¯t leash me to this plot but grant me my fallows!


    Woe to the buried, who can¡¯t hear the day¡¯s chime.


    Joy to the bold, who walk through ruin and barrows.


    We shovel blight, till soil, cut coin from the grime!


    Against our efforts, guarded & afeared were even the pharaohs!


    But by dark my hour is paid & these debts recede.


    Or else take this heart & let your slave bleed.¡±


    Through thin, caked, and pursed lips the ghoul sang. His whistling work-tune fended off his nerves more than it blared any sign of mirth in his base pith. With his spade, ties, rope, vice, and mallet did the wretch gash the iron fetters and pry the beauteous coffin. Smash! Clip! Crack! Then the trove he¡¯d roped up from the demimonde garden unleashed the glory of its contents before him. Smack! Thwhiissshhh!


    Once the cold surface of closure was peeled and the irons shed, instinct awoke. A hunter¡¯s intuition combined with carnal pacts in the buried man, whose gangrenous black iris stabbed at the unwitting savior. Vermillion lightning burst from the black. Molten light from the pits beneath the world frothed an effulgence that slew the gross confidence of the ghoul in an instant.


    The thing that was once Harrow leapt from his incarceration in the crypt. Pouncing from the shattered abyss, the famished beast went right for the carotid. Elongated bones from his maw plunged through muscle, cord, and exquisite crimson. That rotted corpse reformed its body on the promise of the shivering draught generously offered by the robber. Fingers like daggers pierced pressure points and slashed sinew. New fangled claws and a hex in the gleam of the broken grave stifled the screams of the fiend in a flurry of vile motion. To subvert death, the body ¨C the Other; the non-Self; the lamb - must be slaughtered, and the blood must be siphoned. What yet untapped majesty thrived now in his chasmal shape under the slumbering welkin.


    Euphoria to surpass all human joys and divine ecstasies took wing on the gaps between clenching flesh. Among the viscera he chewed and the slurping gulps of another¡¯s dying cadence a resurgence of intellect awash his conscious. A parasite of ageless decadence transfused power from the tips of fangs, sapping incarnadine spirits through the deathless course of his gullet. The interred then thrust the gaunt creature of opportunity into the chipped casket. Hurrying to replant the odious dirt, with halfhearted chains, the ghastly vestiges of the scavenger were left to take Harrow¡¯s place. Defenseless (yet complacent enough for a corpse) against the leaching of sully & vermin. Crudely it was done and without sweat ¨C for that faculty of body would not be known again, even by any serious effort.


    Arden¡¯s ghost commandeered his vessel. This form that was still nameless & opaque to him, the wielder, usurped a power foreign to earth and his former toil. Stringent laws of nature and her once inevitable festering transformations were now repealed. Stygian rivers, charnel streams, ran the course through his marrow. He awoke now to find himself a beast of prey and higher order. By the changeling bliss & agonized acquisition of stolen vitae tendons & features rewove themselves. Renewed unto unfathomed muscle, a force surpassing the matter which confined its imperious power, the strigoi pounced from the shoddy hill that had caged its hellion terror.


    That first sampling of life, the supernal draught of a torn throat, bled the way to the gulf of greater hunger. Among the eerie tailoring of the night-mists and the starless curtain of eventide pulsating auras beckoned to the Leech¡¯s leering eye. Those seals, thrashing simultaneous torrents of midnight spheres & sallow lacerations that emulated cold stars in entropic voids, refracted ephemeral joys & the wasteful vitality of distant shapes. A hundred heartbeats lashed back at the cavern in his chest, howling back to call them to his nectarine feast. Flares of mortal insomniacs, crumbling worriers snagged in wretched prayers, and those neurotics who professed their studies with cerebral need glistened in his skull. Though they were uncounted meters from him, the blooded fiend sensed that their deliverance could be his to claim with a few meagre strides.


    In the scoria of what might be wrongfully claimed a ¡®soul¡¯, resplendent flames licked the shadows that had congealed upon breathless muscle. The lacuna lanced by ire¡¯s powder fed on fresh sinew. Kindling in that quarry, borne by animosity that recalled a life no longer of him, bore up the dancing sprites that cohabited the hateful wax. An irksome name swept over the morass in his wit. The cloven tongue within his distended jaw traced gorgon ire from feelers on its length to scry that murderous name. It was not his own, this phantom moniker, yet so intimately, so fatally, entwined with the one still lost to this cancerous shape. ¡°Vince-Ent!¡±


    Imaginations from the inebriated gulf inside his mind spat a mien to match the name. ¡°Gaaale!¡± The ridged aplomb and wanton handsomeness of that lordling¡¯s face swept up into the dreary cloudbeds, projected on the translucent anonymity of those nymphs of murk. Yet no pulse attached to the murderer¡¯s effigy sang the presence of the hated one to the hunter¡¯s detection. No. He was not here to be reminded of his transgressions and dined on for them. Yet the feral majesty of the thing¡¯s fledgling appetite drew his urge to a glowing vein that was no less delectable for being encased in a bulwark of marble, glass, and superstitious signs.


    Erected by the gates of Galloden¡¯s plots to remain tall in its vigil, the chapel of St. Ardway loomed above grey rows and stern walls. There, in the study below the belfry, flickering like a candle, the sleepless ripple of a chaplain¡¯s pacing drew up the awoken one¡¯s glare. The off-beat thump & scattered thunder of the old heart¡¯s rhythm engrossed the eye of the scourge, seeming to the lurker like a vixen stripped bare before the nude moon she was clad in. Instinct, though lacking in knowledge of what attrition this fresh ghoulish form could suffer past, declared that steward of the spire as prey. No matter locks or warded doors, the vibrancy in that torch would be its to know through wet fangs.


    Anchored to this uncanny thew, the gravity of this bloodless frame dragged low the hunter¡¯s limbs. It prowled below the ashen halos of chthonic wisps and listless fog creeping in from mankind¡¯s affronts to the earth in the name of industry. A scourge ambling with quadrupedal frenzy, the blight clawed hallowed turf with clumsy speed. Each bounding stride wracked its paws with quakes to feel the measure of its own ability.


    This appetizing delicacy of aged red was not his to know this night. As a mane, a midnight lion, he chased after the draught, sprinting on all fours in haste. Approaching the little garden segmented & protected from the toothsome reeds of Galloden¡¯s plains it was not the laughable second gate which denied the plague-hound but a baleful hiss occupying the lungs of the night winds.


    A seraphic apparition descended from the celestial mounds which hung above the grove of mankind. An angel of anemia stepped down the formless stairs of aether, wearing a foreboding veil and blades of aethereal burning within her stare. A wingless Valkyrie was she. The woman, adorned in the armor of nocturne¡¯s warrior-priests, waltzed along each unseen step, coming down from the air. By the ivory of her visage and those silver stars centering her stare was the moon resurrected, beaming with the authority of a celestial crown. Her eyes chased his shape and sang his withered name, bidding him to contort his animalistic farce back to human resemblance.


    Arden bowed to her coming, quivering at the arrival of this ageless hierophant who broached the kiss of her goddess on those down-curled lips. Lucidity surged into the hollow place inside the scourge, knowing this alabaster priestess etched in envy of Venus and ornamented with selenic grace as the mother of his rebirth. Borrowed blood in his vessel brought a pale imitation of blush to his visage, immured in deathless marble and the writhing palls of the eternity she bore.


    Ivory sailed the ether on her trail. Cloaked under a shimmering parasol, she was only a mere specter among her siblings of the dusk to all eyes but his own. In her lived the gleaming promise of kinship to the regents and mysteries of the oldest nights, wielding timeless insights that swam tirelessly beside & within her gorgeous sculpture. A flutter of phantom pinions across her membranous span ushered an end to her levitation. The woman¡¯s heel effortlessly stamped the ground, appearing before the risen corpseling. Crescent lips cast the bridge of the trifold look she met him with. The glint there was far from longing yet wore a face of bonfire & a warming moon. Crepuscular, her mien; burning with a flame unlike the dawn. In her passion joined with purpose, pursed and damp with dreams outside the body - which for her was a thing of cadaverous stone, keen diamond & perilous proposition.

 Chapter III

    III


    ¡°You know me.¡± The woman¡¯s whisper was a bolt of abyssal thunder laden in melted silk.


    ¡°I do?¡± A specter of Arden¡¯s past blushed through his brain, recalling a maelstrom of emotions. Her glare cauterized the frayed weavings lingering from a dead yesterday, stitching threads of a bygone self with the smoldering needle of the fire she lent. ¡°I do.¡±


    From the ash he was reborn to Arden sifted for a shard of his former mind. Recollection stoked immolation of the remnants of his heart. Graven guilt reflected from her gorgeous countenance, her contours illuming the edges of his anguish. Verilla, was it? The name felt illusory, tasting of shadow & threads of a farce - a thing akin to her transformation upon the stage. She¡¯d been a boon to that pagan play in the moonlit amphitheater, incarnate in her role; embodied. Yet the furor of his fascination then, though tempted by her talent, paled in comparison to the impious blossom her later audience had birthed for him. The shame of that bedside performance, that betrayal of Lucilla excused by his weakness when he feared her already too far across the gulf to know, bled his sorrow. Yet no matter the ounces, the leagues, of torment tapped from his basin not one tear could be given. His pain merely chipped the solemn granite of his face and etched droughted rivulets, stretching tendrils that wriggled thunder under rimy tissue.


    ¡°You remember aspects but coat much in confusion.¡± Her autumnal voice lilted with wind, bidding the breeze to soften & bristle by her hushed inflections. ¡°You have made a burial of your own. For me. I am immured under¡­ jealousy, is it? Your eyes hide much in passing limelight¡­¡±


    ¡°Did I know you? I thought I know what you were¡­ a-¡±


    ¡°Night-spouse? A courtesan for an evening? One you paid for with delirious study and shuddered so steeply when in her arms?¡± The arching of her brow compelled lacerations in the gelled mud within her quarry.


    ¡°But you are of the evening, are you not? I knew the wonder of your shadow on the proscenium, the shivering triumph of your touch, but never saw how you looked in the day.¡±


    ¡°You never will. Nor should you pray to know the face of the sun again. There was a time before this continent returned from the depths when we could stomach the day with slumber, but our creed is in drought. That star is now your destroyer. As mine is your-¡±


    ¡°Maker?¡± Arden bellowed a mewling groan replete with a certainty that sullied his question.


    The pale woman veered close and clasped a palm to his cheek. As wintry as her pallor was, her measured stroke placed a balmy pressure upon him. By perdition¡¯s heat or the passion guiding her feeling, an echo of a pulse traveled through her touch. Her anchoring affirmation sank beneath the hoary waves that carried the black fire in her voice. ¡°I am your mother in Death. My kiss bears you to Resurrection. The breath I gave grants wings beyond the entropy of the body and the rot of the soul.¡±


    Arden¡¯s breathless marrow shuddered under a spell of mania. Gibbous radiance slithered from slits in the woman¡¯s pupils to coil about this reality. He was not a murderous neurotic but a thrall of this hungering hell. ¡°You made me a bloodless gaunt¡­ that breath is stolen by another. I¡¯ve tasted death already. Some rogue¡¯s mortal ink bleeding into my gums.¡±


    ¡°I saw. Thought to see how you¡¯d fair alone. I can¡¯t blame you for acting on rabid impulse, but you must learn courtesy. You were after another taste, yes? Observe that pulse once more.¡± The gorgon¡¯s rimy lilt blew into his lobes with her biting instruction. ¡°Do you not see the echoes of all hearts bound to that lone steward? You must know what fruit is ripe from the bites which will turn foul ¨C lest you make dust of your mouth.¡±


    Auras & imprints of connective threads wound lace through the eye that perused the withered sentry. No deeply entwined affections perfumed the man¡¯s scent. The cold glow of pathways emanating from his orbit were of faint iron, bonds of duty more than any familial or matrimonial pursuits. ¡°His star is long faded; no one would mourn. He¡¯s not so far from that fiend who I lent my bed. That creature would¡¯ve been hung for vampirism if caught for his crime. This old hound is kin to the ghoulyard ¡®imself, simply on the other side of the gate. Why-?¡±


    ¡°The steel lightning that swells through his bonds is of the law. Those with duties and responsibilities will be more than missed. They¡¯ll be searched for, and, if the winds are so foul, turn to discovery of our own kinship¡­¡± Her head tilted in disappointment and the air begged to follow her motion, drifting on solemn echoes. ¡°Observe those Vestal barriers that divide us from them. Our hearth is not of earth, and the customs of old gods ¨C even in death ¨C linger on. Their rituals of hospitality have ways of denying us evermore. Though they abide in what seem to us as plains of rot, where love & toil are entangled with¨C their hateful kin ¨C their inversions, we are forbidden to trespass. For our own code, all the same, we must not act as wanton beasts.¡±


    ¡°Do not stoop to the part of a hapless daimon. All filaments strung from the life before your burial must be severed, but it must not be the knell of the soul¡¯s death.¡± An immaculate yet weathered nymph, a sylvan goddess, contorted within the icy diamond of her image. ¡°Draw to humanity, nurture a trace within or fall beneath the well where all sanguine bounties pool.¡±


    ¡°Slash all ties?¡± In the emanations of his scourge-ridden sockets a baleful silhouette in effigy of that siren he¡¯d betrayed seized that glow. Lucilla¡¯s likeness, the memory & hope of her adorations, peeled shade until her harsh brilliance poured over Harrow¡¯s wintry lake. ¡°What duty are we bound to then? What passion - past a ruse ¨C what reason is there to pretend!?¡±


    ¡°The longing we are now cast to transcends that of our mortal lives. And those were oft painful enough to carry in the hours we had.¡± Stern compassion oozed & blistered Arden¡¯s eyes to abrade then with those of his matron of undeath. The confluence of her sweltering rivers and the frost of their shared realm bore her morbid prodigy to seas of rekindled feeling. An undertow of alien sensation, the currents that swept through the phantom left in her, ripped him back into her arms. ¡°You are gone from the halls of the living. No kin nor lover can know you again as you are. Yet hate or it¡¯s cousin in apathy make poor companions; in slumber & wake.¡±


    ¡°Why? Wherefore reinvent my body to ghastly proportion? A thing of evening¡¯s shade and a-aberration.¡± Arden reared back, clawing at his temple while holding it in wriggling hands. ¡°For what higher plan should I be raised from oblivion to walk the night beside a-?¡±


    ¡°A concubine of many passing suitors? Or a striga? I shall forgive the insult and not press the point that your lust sought me out for more than art or science. Let us move fast from the fact ¡­. For that main part I played to the ogling & leers of Gorgotha society: we must subsist among the unseen castes. Harken to the vice in that need, of a supply uncounted by the arms of the Watch. Or else perform as nobles, in the courts where heavy inquiry is taxed and disavowed from perceived ¡®lessers¡¯ ¨C and tastes can be bent to the liking of a treasury. Play ¨C and prey ¨C upon the expectations of the living world. Pay heed of its changeling fancies & fears.¡±


    ¡°Sever those former threads and weave a new face. We must be transient to them to walk safely on into forever.¡±


    ¡°My fate is to subsist alongside and for some harlot of the night?!¡±


    She struck him. Searing thunder berated her errant pupil with the back of her stone claw.


    What would this unfathomed eternity matter if it cost the denial of all that made his pulse thunder in life? Away with this impossible eternity, he thought, this hex upon passion. The only warmth Arden could know now would be the maw of the inferno which had spat back the fumes of his consciousness into this parasitic hovel of a corpse. ¡°Apologies¡­ I have you to thank for this¡­ condition. O, mother of my ripe limbo. But what law rules your mind? Who lies beneath the ageless fa?ade and the spurious blush of rose prepared for so many eyes?¡±


    Arden pursued derision, feeding it with the stings striking on through his pain. He refused to be numbed by brute thunder or quell any storm in himself until she showered him with some truth worth latching on to. ¡°The name you gave then, was it an alias? Another mask for the actress?¡±


    ¡°Truly? That is what you ask! My maiden name,¡± she sighed, and the sky moaned a foul alto timbre, ¡°like asking rain from a sewer grate. Trying to figure how my history fits into the shape of your guilt instead of searching out what you now are?¡±


    ¡°The stage¡­Our¡­ embrace?¡± Arden¡¯s ribs heaved and scraped his cage to try his voice. Yet he could not keep the rambling gusts penned but let them rain. ¡°That cursed maiden you asked me to care to? What else is there to you but those opaque shards, jagged flashes?¡±


    ¡°How wretchedly disappointing. What¡¯s next? Will you beg to know if I enjoyed your enflamed affections? Still shuddering to ask how it felt, how satisfied you could make me, when your blood was so doused in libation and drenched in pity for your desires even as you gave to them.¡± With her laugh the bleak winds over midnight¡¯s crest chortled raucous squalls.


    The horizontal crescent of her lips returned its shape to an imitation of a smile. That arch a look to bruise craters in his hope, concaving under the scrutiny of her gaze. Ardency gleaming above her taunting gesture snared his tongue & sight, asking nothing more until she waived her abrasions of his soul & measure. ¡°The film of false finality is gauze over all old pleasures. Yet we can still know feeling without motion in our veins. Though it shall be dissonant and faint at first ¨C then spout like a deluge - it can be a purer art we are elevated to. If only you abide by my light and not chase after the moths of that fluttered before your casket. I recapture my humanity from the fleet miracles and joyous illusions under the proscenium arch. Play acting recalls me to empathy & inner wellspring, as does the practice of understanding the suffering they display.¡±


    ¡°And wherefore shall I abide this phantom calling, when my specter hears no angel, sees no art, past what is already lost to me? No glory can be mine. A terror is all I might be to those bared of this affliction.¡± A sickening metamorphosis occurred of Arden¡¯s mind, flailing to splay a sardonic simper that harried rather than humor. ¡°Shall I rechristen myself after Sisyphus? Syphilis, mayhap? Proudly wear the ensign of futility or the standard of pestilence I walk under by your grace. Make mockery of what I can¡¯t know my-¡±


    ¡°Calm yourself, childe. Do not make a mockery of yourself. Do not avaunt from the kiss of my chance and our sunless orbit for pettiness and frailty.¡± She softened her approach, courting him with claws retracted. ¡°What moves through us is no pestilence. A curse? To some, surely, and yet it can be a boon. A blessing to supplant heaven¡¯s darling and be honed to combat strife & plagues. We arise to break stagnation and harness wisdom lost to all but aelders¡­¡±


    ¡°I should know my guardian of eternity. Who is this woman hanging over my grave?¡± Asked Arden insistently. ¡°You won¡¯t offer me the knowledge of your true name. Yet I am expected to rejoice to find wisdom which cannot be lauded to the waking planes and those I cannot be known to.¡±


    ¡°The names, the masks, the shapes we stride with are as passing as the children of dust who know them. Still, solemnity is earned for them.¡± The night maiden lifted a dreary palm to the city beyond the walls before clasping it to her face. ¡°Keys to our identity, tools for our persistence. I¡¯ve been Verilla; danced as Serenity; sang with the title of Marena; commanded courts in disguise of noble Eryie; bled warfronts as the mercenary Vyle; I¡¯ve been known as different maidens and shapes from myriad families. If a name is so integral to you, so essential in quelling your tumult, then you may know me as Hialeah. Tis as close to the truth of the one sown under my breast, cradled for my comfort alone. If you agree to know the higher plane offered through this dream I share.¡±


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    ¡°Well then, Hialeah,¡± began Arden with sour recompense, ¡°burn through this dream. Illume this grove of smoke & stone is still rife with suffering & replete with tumors in the overgrowth. What calling in my former soul links the man - who was Arden ¨C you sired into deathless hunger to a high plain? What vestige of eternity might we stroll to?¡±


    ¡°My need of you then was tethered to my nature. To our dawnless tide and the tithe you still must pay.¡± Hialeah tailored her pitch & warble to weave solace. Stitching a verdant cradle through the flowery needle on her tongue to fit revelations of the grave¡¯s denial; seeding blooming ardor under a tone to twine gentle faith & the thew of her command as one sound. ¡°You must return to the stage you set for yourself¡­ go to where I found your inquisitive talent bathed in the limelight of alchemical concoctions, improvising with fellow players in medical tragedies, and curtained by pincers from an apparatus. The true dance we shared and the need for resurrection. As the prime mover of your animation, you must hear the season I wish to sow.¡±


    ¡°Your wish?¡± Arden quaked to whisper back, furrowing into her the folds of her embrace. He traced Hialeah¡¯s neck with a lover¡¯s gentle yet testing inquiry of touch, appraising the curves of her breathing thought. ¡°Do you mean that odd girl? You¡­ asked no tribute to your ¡®profession¡¯ to know you-¡±


    ¡°If only you did not inform your cohort, the genteel doctor Halloway. Yes. Though perhaps his treatment might¡¯ve been more mercy than my frayed hope for her in your care.¡± Hialeah dammed the shadow of a tear, casting down the stillborn drop before it winked through an effervescent pustule from her pane. ¡°She suffered, my daughter, from the mare that scours my dreams for a boundless evening.¡±


    ¡°Was she¡­ one of us? I ¨C nearly drowned myself in entropic elixiris of my own to stomach the shock,¡± exaggerated shame crossed Arden¡¯s face, distorting the semblance of the self-disgust he oft wore in life with his gross pallor in half-death. ¡°She had no pulse. Yet she was in anguish.¡±


    ¡°If only my prayers and deeper efforts had made it so. Alas, no. Not fully. I came to her side too late. The reaper of all seasons and his hand in the scourged had stolen too much from her marrow when I gave her my kiss. I revived her unto a fate I would wish on none. Save a few old enemies. You saw-!¡±


    Arden nodded, dipping his head beneath the gloom. ¡°The boils? The necrotic waves? Her cancerous regeneration? Aye, I saw. Although I glimpsed her through a sodden veil of halfborn sorrow and the fear of greater ailment poking past the warding herbs in the mask of my vocation.¡± He relived the horror and impotent flares of inspiration; those fragments that had nearly sunk into the mire where all stimuli and self was thrust to in a villain¡¯s burial. ¡°She was¡­ so replete with pain ¨C and pustules. Only to burst it all away and begin again from what should have been the final ro-¡±


    ¡°Aye, alas, I know. Gouge me, ye Fates! O Furies, claim my flesh for what I did to hers. Tear talons into this dead soul to match how I marred hers. Leaving her to tumorous purgatory, to iad! To Naiba, a Sheol of her own by my dumb choosing.¡± Hialeah¡¯s grip tensed and gained claws to stake Arden to her hold. She snarled curses and frothed a short vesper in the span of a winged strix. ¡°Did you at least discover something from her suffering?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C ahem. I was too fascinated and far afraid, by the method of her illness and the miraculous grant, the quality, of her endurance. Persisting without a heartbeat, in so icy a clime despite the ailing tempest of what looked the foulest fever & spiteful.¡±


    ¡°No need to rub the symptoms. She is passed from this. I made up for my mistake ¨C and yours, in making a martyr to passion of yourself ¨C when you were resting in Abis. At least tell me you awoke with a mind for science and the talent to redeem our failure with your art?¡± Hialeah clutched her nocturnal progeny by the throat and brought his mouth to feel her spectral breath, enfevered. ¡°At least now you shan¡¯t need to fear catching any blight of the body from your study.¡±


    ¡°I swear to pursue what recompense the worm in my can offer for my return to the earth. If I must slave to know & conquer this plague for all eternity, I shall.¡± Vowed Harrow, fearing the severity of this oath keenly driven into his temple with Hialeah¡¯s talons.


    Lamenting strains filled the breadth of Hialeah¡¯s breath, pushing sorrow from her lungs with piercing tenor. Then that shrill breath fell to tethers, vanquishing all but its echo, among nauseous shrouds. ¡°You must. Recover that spark of talent you drowned in debauched distraction. You were almost brilliant when I first found you. Fail, prove me a fool for believing any intellect in you, and you will want for the death that boy¡¯s pistol would¡¯ve lanced you with.¡±


    Hialeah pressed off from Arden and lifted herself onto a tenebrous stairwell above the swaying fog. ¡°Come see the sprawl & toil of the landless and the unloved. Let us elope from this ¡®ghoulyard¡¯. Fly to a purview where we can see the caste of laborers & noble sufferers, those whose backs have been broken for generations to build the plinths if our opulent atrocities. Tis them who you must slave to save.¡±


    ¡°Fly?¡±


    ¡°Yes, child. Tether yourself to the winds. The breeze from the gulf and the tides of aether will provide wings.¡± Spoke Hialeah, rising higher in the air. Gauzy claws carved the winds her hands swam, arcing between her umbral membranes she flew on.


    Arden followed, unsurely at first. His limbs shuffled awkwardly, splinting with newfound tendons that extended out past his mass. Soon membranous folds sprouted of his changeling matter, granting motion and power that inverted the atmosphere into an ocean. He swam after her, elongating tissue to adjoin the midnight sea, as Hialeah¡¯s lilt charted the course. ¡°We are invisible among the perennial fog of fresh industry. Travel as mist and no living should be the wiser to our presence.¡±


    Sailing over the palisades, towering estates, walls of smog, and iron maws that divided the districts, the pair of fanged, shimmering threads rested on a perch many terraces down. Looking over the plodding streets beyond the toothsome bulwark that kept the floods of the impoverished at bay, symptoms of the blight found avatars in the souls there. Vorpal insights flittered through Arden¡¯s skull, scanning the boils of people wallowing & enduring in squalor. Revulsion trickled through his heartless body before any remnants of empathy, yet Hialeah gripped his head to guide his eyes on. Bidding him to absorb the signs and seek their causes.


    The stagnancy of these quarters fed beasts of corrosion. Sickness and the humans it festered in founded new, verminous forms from. What was first a dissonant whisper blossomed to grotesque symphony; brass sections clamored in violent eruptions and torrid coughs; wailing sopranos filled the lulls in the cancerous cadence, hailing swansongs of murder, violation, and new life damned to the caste of their mothers. Necrotic specters, hobbling lepers, and fiends borne on by opium ambled through the blasted commonwealth. Variants of endemic and rousing malignancies stole through the alleys, nooks, and peeling abodes in many shapes, all in mockery of civilization¡¯s false promise.


    A wringing thought doused Arden¡¯s initial consignment to loathing. As hated as his family were for their eccentricities, they still had their means to indulge those fancies & bloodied histories while still subsisting. Had he been born to a more soured lot, like these damned souls, he likely would have made no more of himself than another shade of senseless misery. These folk held no hopes but those they could claw from the mold; no legacy to yearn for save the meagre scraps their labor could scavenge to pass on to their siblings & spawn.


    All signs of the stars were for them forbade by the brumal sweat from the steam districts congealing into a brooding ceiling. Ashen mist seeping from maws of industrial spires cast a concrete film to block the firmament¡¯s glow with bilious wreaths. Whole bloodlines, from grandfathers to the youngest, were offered to the furnaces whose engines were the hearts of modernity¡¯s dreadful gods. The blood & toil of the canned workers, with their families & limbs minced by the grinding intestines of factories, leached from infernal orifices to join the wan-ebony spirits snatching the horizon. Tumorous smoke rose to heights once only known to avians, where machines now flew in mockery of wings. Electric eels and mishappen canoes with grinning propellers sailed the rivers of the sky, sharing their eyeline with only the most grossly regal of vistas. The bellies of these fliers were fed by the mislaid organs of laborers, fattening the bellows & granting red oxygen to the fuel which allowed merchants & martial lords to soar to ever higher markets and fronts.


    Hialeah caught a wince from Harrow, causing her to wonder if the buried poet inside him possessed an ounce of incendiary compassion for the betrodden. If passion served his purpose, she would allow it. But for Harrow his look and the bristling mask reflecting it was soured for the emergence of his taste. He frowned upon the districts immured in fog and fens of miasma, disdaining how harried the hopeless vessels below were. He spat sulfurous venom onto the street, a globule rife with anathemas against the Many whose blood was thick with poison. Kyphotic lesions dictated their evolution; those workers & their children: bent to contorted frames by grim assemblies in the guts of mankind¡¯s churning ascension. The thought of consuming the sludge of their draught seized the fresh revenant¡¯s innards with a windfall of spasms. He swore then to hunt richer sustenance in blood not despoiled by virulent conditions. To feed on those who gained nobler prospects from the profits fired by the forges and the flesh of lower castes.


    Arden titled his eyes to scan the spires of Windshire and, higher still, those royal estates mounted atop Gorgotha¡¯s proudest crests. Profane emulations of pagan ceremonies fired there, illuming chaunting choruses of decadent courtiers and priests playing at cleansing themselves of impurities through excess so deep that purging only burrowed the spirits further. His ire chased those balcony pyres, searching out a singularly loathsome silhouette among the revelers. Harrow¡¯s curse blooded the gales that berated those grand perches. Flames of acrimony were in his glare, flicking tendrils at lights borne by synthetic elements. His scowl shot toward the beacons bearing down on the sinuous cords of smog to mark the route of industry. How they granted tendons to the slithering breath that sank the city just as the roar of infernal chords from the bowels of the factories gave voice to the wounds that razed the nightsky¡¯s palls.


    When her fateful progeny had gorged enough on the horrors Hialeah emphasized her reason. ¡°We do not get sick. We cannot know death of the body again once woken to the night. And yet afflictions dilute the blood. Though it brings me no joy to feed on the abused we must answer to our own need, as they do. Our need for their draught has grown; we are harried by it. But what ails them will trickle to us as crippled desiccation. You must continue your studies, reappear as a man of medicine, alms, and means, to combat the buboes & blots. Lest we be chased back into the starving wilds when the cruel face of ¡®civilization¡¯ crumbles to show a harsher world. We mustn¡¯t be driven off by drought, lest we are to bury ourselves from the damming rays in some foxhole in the fens or a sturdy ditch in the warrens.¡±


    The facets of humanity refracting into Arden twisted his aspect. A gnarled union of a sneer & a baubling grin crossed his face. ¡°I¡¯ve an inkling that you¡¯d ask this Augean task of me, even were our resources not so pestered by their sickness. You retain more compassion for them in your cursed state than I knew in mortal awareness.¡± The humor of a freshly defied burial slithered from between bouts of odd chuckling. ¡°You can be sure of my ardency in this. I honored my obligations in life, to a fatal fault.¡±


    ¡°Oh, my sulfurous son,¡± the mist of Hialeah¡¯s scrutiny enshrouded Arden, ¡°your jests are soured. Those obligations you died for were mere romantic fancies of an idle soul. This promise to me is wound by deeper binds; not such a fleeting thing as a few moons of honey with a lover before one is torn from the tapestry of life or else grows weary of your company.¡±


    ¡°I know, I know. We are eternal. By your teeth to my throat, your hoary blood in my veins, I am immutably bound to the night.¡± Arden suppressed a shiver beyond any arctic wind. For Hialeah¡¯s form contorted and grew possess all breath within his bones as she enfolded. He knew then a grinding fear of this forever. ¡°And yet-¡±


    Asphyxiations from Hialeah¡¯s coiling hold silenced his speech. If this gesture was to temper his doubts, Arden found them now so terribly enthralling as her talons traced his shoulders and the black breath of the wolven hour sang her whispers. ¡°Pull your puddy up, sculpt it anew, or be nothing more than the black rust between the stars. Do not turn to nihil and whither. Seek not to make offerings to blind predation or else find yourself a mere shadow among countless more in the void beneath & beyond the spinning world.¡±


    ¡°I made you what you are. Betray us both by acting errant and revealing our nature to the sleepers, and I shall sever your wings and let you fall in solitude.¡±


    With this warning Hialeah leapt into the welkin chimneys, stealing away with Arden in her clutches. Her wings split the gulf of the city, wrenching the thew of her raw creation to show him to the stone basin beneath the bowels of Gorgotha¡¯s languid gut. Her lips made no motion, enclosed as gorgon iron, yet the winds of her storm boasted a firm sermon. Like sweat from the forge, Hialeah¡¯s soul blistered and bled into her pupil until each word in her commandment pressed & shaped his soul to match her temper.


    ¡°We are the dragon¡¯s teeth and the breath of that flame. Imperishable by the march of time¡¯s force, yet denied all creation save to mirror our aberration. We are interlopers; denizens of a veil between; vagrants, without an age to call a hearth and be buried in.¡± Hialeah dipped beneath pavement, passing through the cobbled streets and the stains of sufferance. Past stone, under bridges and altars to opulence; into roaring waters forgotten to all but those who chart the borders and note their flow; flying through the veil betwixt the city¡¯s fibers they plummeted. She showed him to where the water gasped and the bones of Gorgotha¡¯s predecessor subsisted as skeletal plinths beneath her lavish and wounded pith.


    ¡°We have our beds in the necropolis wherein the old lords are inlaid. Where their monuments lay immured in rest and the obscurity of a new day reaching past their time. This is how it is: by night we hold court in the sky ¨C recusants to the laws of earth ¨C and by day we must plunge beneath. Or else find a fitting lair that can conceal its nature and hide our own.¡±

 Chapter IV

    IV


    The House of Harrow knew him as its own, as its prodigal scion. He strode in with aplomb to rival elder & immodest pantheons. Though unlike the gods of Uruk under Enlil, cowering behind the walls of heaven at the flood of their own evocation, this lord strolled unshaken by fear; unconcerned by any tides roused by his wanton powers. His confidence should ease the delegation of servants and the restoration of his estate into his hands under a new name. The old manor of his callow line groaned tenor jubilees through each granite contour and graven glass. It bowed to his desire as would those helots, who¡¯d renew their contracts under fresh face & premise. Arden was eager to order the first steps of the grand transformation he envisioned. For this estate was his stair to ascend and stretch the wings of a nascent dream over all he beheld.


    ¡°Sir?¡± The sentinel-lieutenant among his servile flock inquired of Arden¡¯s presence with an eyebrow rising like a stalagmite from the floor of his temple.


    ¡°Aldred Harrow. Cousin to your former charge. Owner of his estates by the manner of his Will, and proud partner to your service, if you would have me.¡± The crypt fiend introduced himself with affected chivalry. The mien of his prime servant was familiar, though shrouded by chthonian drapes. This face had changed as well in the severe span of nights past his petty entombment. The man had weathered years in the uncounted days which divided him from his master, now returned & rechristened from his dip in baptismal dirt.


    ¡°Ah yes, sir. Well met, sir. Raykin Moldren, at your service ¨C if you should seek it.¡± Moldren bowed low and grasped a firm handshake. The trained custodian possessed an elegant command over his own expressions, a talent which the most ravenous of courtiers most assuredly were in envy of. For he concealed all spasms of surprise when his hand caught the rimy & bloodless branch of his master. Even as a windfall of pulsations lashed wintry gusts from the veins tucked in that proud forearm, the servant¡¯s pulpy grip remained politely devoted to the motion. ¡°You look so stunningly like your¡­. Cousin, our master Arden. The stamped papers are here, somewhere. Apologies again, we did not expect your company at such a late hour.¡±


    ¡°What better time to roll into town then when the most tiresome of the lot are tucked in slumber?¡± Aldred chuckled a biting chill, grinning with spurious moonlight. ¡°If only it were not on the heels of tragedy, this news of my kin¡¯s passing.¡± He tapped his traveler¡¯s cane and gestured to the candle-less halls that basked in dark. ¡°At least I gleaned enough through our letters to know the nature of poor Arden¡¯s work ¨C it¡¯s importance. The evolution of disease and our means against it seems more pressing now than the excavations into our history I once led.¡±


    ¡°Well, sir, his work is yours to continue. Master Harrow.¡± The coarsened grace of Raykin¡¯s gray countenance dipped then to another half-bow, and no aspect of age hindered the fluidity of his motions. ¡°As is this house now yours, by blood. Barren as it may seem, the relics of your ancestral coat remain, untampered by the taxing scythes of tithe-harvesters. And-¡±


    ¡°And you, the keepers of this house, what shall become of you?¡± Aldred broadened his smile and gestured to the glinting eyes of Moldren¡¯s fellows lurking in the far corridor. ¡°You are the arisen signet of our young branch, our arms if you will. But only if it still is so by the ink on your soul¡¯s quill.¡±


    ¡°Our contracts expired with¡­ well, tragically. With your cousin¡¯s rude fortune, I fear. Beyond the overseeing of this transference our fate is harried by the choice of the winds. I am tied longer than the rest by rank and mention in the will. As for my want,¡± new moons nestled twilight in the servant¡¯s hollows, Raykin¡¯s pupils eclipsing his iris, ¡°it is no matter.¡±


    ¡°You are each unbound once more. Your choice alone shall decide which wind you ride on, which lord you keep to.¡± Aldred had embraced him with a balmy hug so distant from the feel of his breathless flesh. ¡°We will not repeat the steps of senseless bondage, no. I am simply a doctor of mine own school and given this luxury by relation. If it displeases you to serve, you may leave.¡± He stepped forth, with a pouch of coin older than his fortune in life gelled to his palm ¨C hiding this measure of persuasion with a gleam in his eye. ¡°Yet if it is your will, I would delight in your company to assist me. Perhaps you could curtail the symptoms of my insomniac habits, of slaving for inspiration in the ebony hours, by keeping hold of daylight affairs. You would be rewarded more than my cousin¡¯s contract offered. To live & dine well, for our accord.¡±


    Mr. Moldren ushered out a troubled cough from his airs before confessing his doubt. ¡°Sir, my former employer¡¯s work was rather ghastly at times. Quite wearisome at times, in fact. Necessary, I suppose. At least it was an honorable pursuit.¡± The proposed successor to his employer heard the shuffled of Raykin¡¯s thought beneath his coldly genial manners: ¡®for a rake of a man, that is.¡¯ But the man quickly gulped down any derision in his mind and pressed on. ¡°I was afeared of the sickness he mined to combat, to speak true.¡±


    ¡°And the more hermetic pursuits?¡± Harrow¡¯s eye nipped the helot¡¯s vital sheen.


    ¡°Nay. Not me, at least. Perhaps others here have had their senses tarnished with the fear of odd lights and broiled concoctions. Some called his purpose wretched. I, myself, own some reverence for alchemy and the occult, despite my lack of talent. The warlock painted by whispers of my master¡¯s superstitious peers was not known to me. Though my host¡¯s intellectual labors effects on his manner were on occasion disturbing. Yet, if you¡¯ll forgive my rashness, I ponder if he was drawn by passions and instincts ¨C that destroyed him ¨C more than that rare science.¡±


    ¡°Shall you stay then, Mr. Moldren? You shall be handsomely paid, yet the wretched work must continue.¡± Aldred placed the coin purse in Raykin¡¯s palm, beaming smiles multiplied by the unwaning gleam of elder tender. The mint he offered was a relic from the buried tombs he¡¯d so recently slept in, having borrowed some untended gold. A visage that made the regal mien of Queen Caoimhe on the coinage of the day look rusted and infantile compared to its deep mineral brow. ¡°This mint was mined from ruins, yet we will begin enterprises to excavate troves pressed with our Queen¡¯s eminence. For Arden¡¯s legacy, we shall install precautions enough to complement his stalled efforts. May you be a partner and a friend, to bridge House Harrow to Moldren, in this delicate work. Though I still must confess to odd habits.¡±


    ¡°Well, sir, I believe we can come to a rich & fruitful agreement.¡±


    Thus began Harrow¡¯s bid, casting his few servants as masons to alter the estate¡¯s shape to his liking. They were to deny the sun it¡¯s oppressive reign through stone shutters and obsidian slabs befitting an archaeologist. How fair this bed was for his resurrection, far preferable to the mysteries in the dank catacombs beneath the putrid terraces of grand Gorgotha. The laboratories would be refurbished and spread throughout the wings. The kinder facets of Arden¡¯s work could pad the rising floors, while the heart of his toil & refrain would now take root in the basement crypt. He cushioned his plinth here, where the wisest of his forebears ¨C and those most reviled by the memories of storied courts ¨C slept through eternity in stone, under epitaphs honored by their House. Let them wake to see my glories shake stone and supplant graves. I shan¡¯t be the least of the stars hung upon our bower. The hateful order that seals you here shall be soon deposed.


    ...


    Arden, or Aldred as he was now to be known, made a show of seeking a cure. Under assumption of his cousin¡¯s personhood and cloven will he¡¯d become the legal heir once more. Yet the galley of servants he could rely upon dwindled; he¡¯d only a few willing to submit themselves to the changeling order of his House, and he was far from any shore that bore fruitful arbor. Still, the dearth of additional eyes was to his liking. For even voiceless helots could prove a nuisance when his work redoubled past dealing with necrotic patients into evermore grievous means. They¡¯d complained before, chittering black whispers about the conditions they were subjected to by mere proximity of the ill & infected. Even with the beaked masks their reformed lord provided them, they dipped their noses in spite, more than protective oils, and veered away from any useful function when so deep in the throes of their fear. A few loyal savants & tastefully neurotic eccentrics served his need for darkness and discretion.


    He made overtures to the mission of his mistress, his maker. For Hialeah, Harrow prowled the sectors of Gorgotha where the fecundity of the masses blistered against their stagnant corners to bloom into buboes. Free to analyze the symptoms of the impoverished without need of an herbal mask, he kept to one to conceal his lack of requirement. The feverish pace of his task adjoined his evening delights in snatching barely living bodies for medical purposes, and robust subjects to sup. Still, veiled embers simmered in his chasmal chest, crackling phantom fingers past this distracted ambition to tear through the cracks in his sunless state. Oh, he swore the means of resurrection against the plague, but for no reason he could trace outside that arraigning promise. Though he¡¯d begun to believe he¡¯d lean into full lunacy should he pry too far beyond his means, he tested his thew as much as he tried reckless serums. But his heart was hampered by other matters, abraded by aspects too close to his old life that engraved his restless pith.


    Those ole & lasting rumors of his family¡¯s sorcerous ways were overblown to his knowledge. Though that mystery & fear had been a useful lever & pulley to navigate the power plays of the court, to ward off the most gullible & hateful among them. Yet now, true blooded magick now cascaded through his sinew, surges of the supernal to replace & reinvent the animating course of mortal red within. A nascent madness grew talons from his heated embrace of ghoulish method and spectral cunning. He tore at layers within, unburying old fancies that had not been dined on properly in his young years, and lapped up the splashings of morbidity aroused from the blood required of his study. Aldred dove into plots, furrowing under the present tasks. While he held meteoric jubilees in his cavernous soul when the act of medicinal wonder asked for the disposal of subjects who¡¯d failed to respond to the praxis of his theorems & recipes, greater reveries were cast in shadowed vestibules within. Seeking after winding corridors that led back to the court of the living, he delegated hypogeal districts of his consciousness to chart alternative roads with which this power could allow him to travel.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    As for Hialeah¡¯s pact to become a savior to ailing Gorgotha (who even in her prime was far from benign), Arden felt no solution of man¡¯s make nor nature¡¯s allowance would suffice. In the catacombs that made her bed, both the city¡¯s and his nocturnal matron¡¯s, he conspired a use for the neighboring denizens of a caste happily unseen. Sacrificing a troubled rest in the day, tucked behind seamless walls that denied the burning rays, he crept into the dayless mansions where the dead and the hunters of night feared no wayward eye from the sun and her strangers.


    Through the Cascades, the water walls where caverns interlinked the middle district to the lower, he sought the buried dens. He slid past the streaming maw into the labyrinthine tunnels where the city¡¯s stone was stitched & tailored into the mountain which held up the highest courts upon the shoulders of the earth, overlooking the great river. Impossible dimensions bore the breadth of the unwaning catacombs forgotten by Gorgotha¡¯s children as her founding base. Here, Harrow pursued the legends his pale mother¡¯s tribe had passed to her in life; seeking that species which endured the fell star that blackened skies and the wroth return of the sun which scorched the continent by shifting their ancestral homes into the barrows & their diets to consuming flesh.


    Harrow passed the cairns that marked the fiends¡¯ hearths. He renounced fascination with the deposits of minerals, their beds of allure scintillating with impish forms and the gloss of Fae to step sprightly. No time yet to marvel at the elements, both wondrous & appalling, of this swollen gorge beneath the grounds of living knowledge. Between the palls of a dead palace bared of names & inscriptions Arden could make sense of, skittering paws traipsed. Slobbering vitriol seeped from the lurker¡¯s mewling cry. A shrill bark bounded from its snout between cyclopean pillars. The sound funneled through withered, humanoid cords and echoed in imitation of a lupine choir through snarling throats sulking in surrounding tunnels. A vagrant pack of vermin, sprouted from a tortured branch from humanity¡¯s boughs, yowled vigils to one another. Shuffling blind, roaming through the warbling ripples of their brethren chords and by the wormy tongues flitting from their nostrils, one of those vorpal creatures crept upon their guest.


    This ruinous denizen smelt the filched blood in Harrow¡¯s body. It pounced to test the interloper for a feast, only to be preyed upon by him. He knew its fear of him from its eyeless stare, sulking back as he sauntered to study this hound of the umbral halls. This thing, with its siblings, burrowed tunnels through mountainous crypts and burst into caskets to gnaw on fetid mead and dew-claimed bone. Those tribal kin yipped, chattered, and hissed a baleful hail to hear how swiftly the bones of their brother were dashed and broken; the cilia laden lungs of their fellow gurgling as the revenant impaled him upon a column below their lairs.


    A swift trial of his own sinew and the fabled resilience of the canine scavengers brought Arden to belligerent glee. His wolven howl burst the bowels of the chthonic pits, cackling as his claws severed the barghest¡¯s paws and split the thing¡¯s vertical mouth till no gangrenous yelps could spill into the dissonant symphony of his crimson toil. What Triumph would be won of tampering aberration? What miracles could this alchemy produce, to mix the ghoul¡¯s restorative properties into a balm for living beings?


    With night¡¯s drapery unfurled, the greater predator scurried up with its limbless game. Before those maimed stubs he¡¯d made of the (overcurious) beast¡¯s ambling faculties regrew Harrow carried it back to his manor. Strapped down, staked, yet quivering with stubborn unlife and festering to regrow its wounded form, the ghoul was rendered for perpetual tests. Ceaseless dissections became its lot, to extract, rend, and drain for the discovery of its regenerative means. Soon, the profane alchemist discovered easy means of dealing with deceased mortal subjects and keeping this ghastly subject fed. Carrion granted sustenance to it, as did the dead ease & exceed the rate of regeneration. Fangs & arms regrew at a pace which would be appalling to most eyes, though those means were soon severed by its caretaker. The thing seemed in no worse shape for having made of meal of afflicted flesh. Besides the wounds & contortions prescribed by its steward the creature kept to the shape & shade he¡¯d first found it in.


    The burgeoning scientist siphoned silence from the carrion-thing¡¯s veins, drawing the materia that halted illness (but refused life & death as it was known to the waking world) into his syringe. Could aberrations beneath earth be gainful against the blights that swept her surface & scraped the sky on demon wings? He aimed to see it so. Curiosity and that damned promise to Hialeah beat back the whispering winds of caution, doubt, and warning. Diluting the serum with additional aspects to the formula, he then injected this dark miracle into the dying. To placate plague and shiver away the fatal symptoms with rejuvenation he tried this hand.


    This gaunt surgeon diverted his concentration from dwelling on the possibility that he¡¯d merely cure a mortal condition by delivering his subjects into a preternatural curse, an affliction deeper than the wan mold their illness leered to make of them. Indeed, his measure seemed hardy enough in halting the boils, forcing them into cessation, yet the state which replaced their warbling cries was a cadaverous half-sleep. These half-successes were shortly celebrated until the torrid face of his failures soon proved themselves more difficult to dispose of. The minds of the subjects perished in agony, but the purgatorial film in their vessels refused the laws of rot & entropy. These deathless, soulless, patients Arden offered to the primal power of immolation. Thus, the forges of House Harrow blemished the nightsky with baleful fumes. Through the coming nights the chimneys spat the refuse of those horrors given to their furnaces. Each billow, a salient emission of unnatural ruin combined with the persistent breath of corruption.


    Again, the madness which leached his focus and bled into his dubious progress seized the ageless man¡¯s head. Abyssal chutes charted the dams of his consciousness, pressing Lethean surges upon his memory that hampered true introspection. The protean plasma that awoke in Arden and the enraptured genius of his will was breached by the presence of gross headmates. Phantasms burst from each reflected glow. A face burned in the mirror. This likeness shining back was not the glass mocking him by illuming the awful angles under his expression, which held stoic, even beatific shape that erased the little injuries which life¡¯s woes and the stress of passion marred his visage with. What grinned back, above his head, was a medley of faces; not ghosts but living figures as starkly distant from him. These tulpas combined their shapes to bridle raw emotions in each sewn effigy.


    Twin lunes of divergent sheen glared dual spheres, entwined in the spectral sockets hovering there. One eye shone with such hubris & hate, bearing back the glean of a loathed rival. Vinsss-sseent. Bestial aspects embraced Harrow till a brighter muse bestowed on him a grander orbit. Her celestial caliber sheared the dual half of the phantom¡¯s face to bathe his own. A feline, feminine grace lined the brow and reared from her luminous spheres. He knew her, that haunting beacon of bliss & the one noble lady who lived true to her acclaimed blood in society ¨C as an ethereal being worthy of all heaven¡¯s affections. Luuus-ssillaa.


    There were other shapes among the choral specters and decayed jeers from beyond. Among these two might¡¯ve been his mother & father, yet what were they but ghosts. No, the prime movers of his purpose ¨C surpassing the scientific servitude to his eternal Lady ¨C were enough to spur the wheels of his being to a fateful course. No, these two showed him to the rivers he might seek a more intimate reason to abide in the night for. They were saints of reckoning and carnal currents. Through them he returned to a semblance of who he¡¯d been before the fatal shot, his subsequent rebirth as a revenant, and the thirst that chased the drought of his wellspring. A coal within Arden¡¯s receding pyre fed on the tinder of those smoldering envoys of inspiration.


    Assuming the written pose of Aldred Harrow, the spurious cousin to the deceased exercised his hand and the legs of his servants (and the hooves of their steeds). He penned gestures of passion & intrigue, reaching out to the respective members of the Duskmont & Gentwind estates. With ardency cloaked in gentleman¡¯s gallantry, he re-introduced himself to his murderer and the woman whose smile he¡¯d suffered the lance & powder for. His insinuations were there but he refrained from being overly blunt or revealing himself, caged by a hope that he impressed enough through the letters to earn their interest and thus his avenue.


    For all his efforts neither party returned a pledge of curiosity. For nights innumerable he waited on the word of either, peering back from his grotesque work ¨C that unnatural science he aimed to perfect ¨C to no avail. Inquiries as to his person and the nature of his stay in his ¡®cousin¡¯s¡¯ newly possessed manor came only from the elden city¡¯s loudest gossips. He depleted the resources of his helots further, driving them to fruitless missions to shovel & scratch more information on his newfound mother, in case her young in him might need means of true liberation from her blooded chains. Yet this too was a farcical attempt. He was dead to this town and its folk, no matter the hue of their blood. That was until a dawning evening when, on the cusp of night, a courtier arrived at his threshold bearing news of opportunity that set his lunatic glee alight evermore.


    ¡°What is it?¡± Aldred inquired of his servant.


    ¡°A most curious invitation. You are asked to attend a masquerade ball-¡±


    ¡°Oh? What makes it so uncanny to your sense?¡±


    ¡°That it arrives on the eve of the sabbath. To be held then; on our hallowed morrow¡¯s dusk.¡±


    ¡°Where is to be held?¡±


    ¡°The old Gentwind place. Per the manner of the coming hour¡¯s host: lord Vincent Ga-¡±


    ¡°Ah, excellent.¡± Harrow clasped his palms into a triangular pose, directing his thought and pressing it to his lips as a whisper escaped him. ¡°I wonder if he feels an inkling of guilt over my,¡± a pregnant pause littered his words when Arden then remembered himself, ¡°-cousin¡¯s passing. Perhaps he wishes to court the opinions of the high public and win back affection from the Duskmont heiress he so desired to take as his own.¡±


    ¡°Good sir, you have immaculate knowledge of Arden¡¯s affairs, and his enemies.¡± Said Raykin flatly.


    ¡°We were ¨C we are ¨C closer than brothers, even in death.¡± Harrow waived his servant¡¯s suspicions, should any be hidden beneath the bland bed of his tone. Again, the joy of frenzy lilted into his voice. ¡°Well, friend, the god¡¯s day of rest shapes the perfect hourglass to contain all sin, all vice of this event. Let him who fathered the world sleep happy in the gulf above without seeing how we gyrate and copulate in the garden his marvel has left us.¡±

 Chapter V

    Chapter V


    ¡®Old money flies far and has seedbeds to land in every brook.¡¯ So spoke the old saying. A fitting aphorism when it came to the wealth and presentation of the Gentwind manor. The opulent fortress jutted up to claim the horizon. Though the familial tree was now wholly entwined with the young branch of Gale, the house presented its veneer as a monolith of ancient pride. Unstained by the passing of so many scions and modern tastes, it stood as a marvel of alabaster and graven masonry. Of all the arisen boughs in the stone garden of Gorgotha only the great cathedrals, the royal palace, and a couple older lines with roots stretching into the wings of industry could compare in glory. A ring of towering gates lined with vigilant gargoyles and ancestral totems welcomed faceless throngs of nobles into its dominion.


    Those hearths & lanterns beneath the mountainous terrace seemed nearly microscopic by their distance. In the shadow of fanged spires, the destitute slept; blanketed by cold Night on their beds of rust, sleet, and refuse lathered ditches. Here, only the firmament itself held greater court, and yet the stranger peered past the procession into the maw with the incandescence of a fell star peeking through his false countenance. He clutched to impish vows of his own make, swearing to see the ruin of the host¡¯s line and to see all other parasites uprooted & flung down into scoria. By cunning or claw he would see to that roguish Gale which¡¯d flown into the house of Gentwind, whose existence begged excision by his estimate.


    The stranger immured his noxious feelings in the walls of his mask, playing his part as a welcome guest among the rows of chattering nobility & industry leaders. He dashed alongside the lines as a jolly courtier. For his facial attire he wore a mask with the equal resemblance to a devil and a jester. Bells and horns hung above his brow in contorting shape, dangling chimes and thorny spines impaling the air, with a devious simper etched along the gap of his filigree metal face.


    Approaching the guard standing vigil at the threshold, the stranger pulled out his signet letter. ¡°Will you invite me in?¡± Congenial charm echoed from beneath his mask, though it rang hollowness to linger. The household warden curled a sneer through his granite until he eyed the official sigil of his lord¡¯s request and heard the man¡¯s announcement. ¡°Aldred Harrow.¡±


    Ushered in through the antechamber, shuffling down endless halls after pompous pigeons and gibbering porcine puffed up in their impersonations of gods & beasts, he found entry to the grand ballroom. A fanciful game of whispers congealed around each corner, where gathered pustules of people partook in allotted festivities; fingering plates on tables & jabbing velvet threats while churning their interests around guessing the names & natures of every other costumed reveler. Yet for Arden titillation thrived in his hunt. His game: to unveil the lordling of the House & sever the branch of Gale; to discover and dismember the unworthy heir of the Gentwind estate.


    What shape would he find the mind of his old enemy Vincent in? Was this pomp true to his spirit or a method to hide the deterioration of his mind? Could guilt even touch such a callow soul?


    Among the attendants with their enigmatic dress & farcical expressions etched on metal fronts, one face pronounced a clear memory. The mask worn by this man, whose history he now recalled through the wax-like features he adorned, was a near perfect replica of his face beneath it as Arden remembered. A likeness in porcelain to mock all ivory, the look belonged to an old doctor of immense ethic who he¡¯d labored with at times: Valdred Halloway. The aquiline nose and equine length of the pale jaw had been exaggerated, yet that mold with its heavy brows and tall forehead was unmistakable.


    ¡°Sir, what possesses you to wear such an honest expression to this masquerade?¡± Asked Aldred, extending his hand and sleeve in the posture of a handshake.


    ¡°You know me, sir?¡± The grey doctor¡¯s rigid mien moved no brow yet tilted to attend him. His hand struck a strong grip with the one offered then slid to his pillared cane.


    ¡°Doctor Halloway, yes? Mayhap I hath seen your icon in some publishing here and there. I believe you had business with kin of mine.¡±


    A low emission escaped the rim of the elder man¡¯s fa?ade, perhaps a sigh or a gleeful whistle. ¡°Valdred Hallo, at your leisure. You¡¯ll have to remind me of these publications.¡± Silver eyes cast a heightened study of the stranger through the veiled holes of his arduous replica. ¡°We shouldn¡¯t sully the revelry by announcing each other to the gossips. Still, shall I hazard a guess as to who you are beneath that costume?¡±


    ¡°Please do. If your estimate is right, it shall save me some breath.¡±


    ¡°Are you the infamous cousin of one Arden Harrow?¡± Valdred stretched tall on his heels, striking up a gentleman¡¯s poise and acting as though surveying the ballroom floor where waltzes blended into a blur of motion and glassy expressions to hide all carnal threads twining their steps. ¡°You could well be the same man whose arrival has summoned up a storm of rumor.¡±


    ¡°I am he. Aldred Harrow.¡± Admitted Arden with ease. ¡°I mean no offense to the court by coming forth as a stranger. Only, costumes & starling myths are the fashion of our evening.¡±


    ¡°You delight in intrigue enough to have assumed the nature of this show, I suspect. But remember that it would be too much trouble to be known here as anything more than a rumor.¡± Dr Halloway gave a meek gesture to the crowd, sensing legions of eyes lighting glares to divine the stranger¡¯s nature, more than his name. ¡°As for my appearance, well: all masks reveal the same creature underneath. These vultures, peacocks, and preying hawks are no less themselves for shying from their faces. & the many little gods here embody their hubris.¡±


    Aldred¡¯s knowing smirk stretched his dubious mien, cackling a peal from the bells that draped his hair. ¡°What would a court be without such iconic creatures? One bare of intrigue and proud facades is hardly a stage for noble courtiers to flock.¡±


    ¡°And your mask, Mr. Harrow? What do you embody by wearing this: a fool or a devil?¡±


    ¡°Perhaps, sir, I come to show how the devil is a fool.¡± Aldred offered a grainy chuckle.


    ¡°Oh, but a Fool is a miraculous thing to be. For the Fool is a being capable of great transformation, an omen of adventure and what change might be brought through it. Yet the Devil¡­ well, a fool remains one to cling to infernal horns and make a monster of himself.¡±


    ¡°Well, I should say then that this Fool reminds himself of what he might become. Only to know the devil¡¯s shadow and fly from it.¡±


    ¡°A Fool is a fine role to play as, for a time.¡± Said Valdred, taking a swig from his chalice. Though his cup brimmed with cold water alone, he acted as though it were a potent libation of spirits that caused him quite a stagger. ¡°Yet that state should be fleeting, just an opening part to earn a place on the stage ¨C to earn another in the next act, if his will, his truth through performance, earns it. Pretend overlong at horns & bells and you may find yourself the devil¡¯s fool, dancing the way to perdition to bedlam¡¯s lilt.¡±


    The glint through Arden¡¯s slits prowled the throngs of dancers for the creature of his desire, seeking her scent & aura through whatever mien she hid behind. He veiled his intentions with passing discourse, pushing nearer to the doctor with splayed curiosity. ¡°Are you still practicing, kind doctor? Beyond what beasts we may be, there is a need in this heart to fulfill a pact of my kindred¡¯s unfinished work. That purpose to preserve Gorgotha¡¯s marrow.¡±


    ¡°And your kin, you have a predilection for his work?¡± Valdred¡¯s vulpine grin pushed up his mask ever so slightly, impressing the folds of his true face. ¡°I surmise a great similarity between yourself and your unfortunate cousin, all the same.¡± He paused, perhaps fishing for a reaction from his strange peer.


    ¡°My kin & friend, Arden, was brilliant. I am told he-¡±


    ¡°He was brilliant in some ways sure, but troubled. A man of as much emotion ¨C and perhaps more ¨C as scientific intellect.¡± Said the doctor with hoary affectation, tapping his cane as a priest of elder liturgies might wield his scepter to knell ceremonies. ¡°Had he been ruled less by hapless passions and his heart¡¯s base ambitions, he might well be among the living. Then your presence here would be uncalled for by tragic circumstance. By the fate he chose in contending with our host of the hour he is gone. Yet you?¡±


    ¡°Regardless of his passing, and the man you claim he was, I still aim to complete the wonders of his work. And yours.¡±


    ¡°I am many things myself, yet always a man. Until I am dust. The vocation you ask of me: the labor of an alienist, alchemist, or a pathologist?¡± Inquired Valdred with withered tone, belying the shine of disturbed concern under performative disinterest.


    ¡°Do I appear so foul of mind to be in need of an alienist?¡± Arden¡¯s shrill guffaw did a poor job of cloaking the wince aroused from his chasmal muscle. ¡°Mayhap ¡®tis our host in need of a stay in an asylum, under the scalpel and scrutiny of science. Alas, nay. Tis the toil of defeating the pale blight of this palace of wonders and tormented flesh that calls me to you. If you are willing, I would seek it so that we ally ourselves in this desperate matter.¡±


    ¡°You harbor malice for your kin¡¯s sudden rest? For the wroth justice in your soul would you seek to see the hand responsible buried under boils and belligerent gales? Such would only be human. That instinct is always there, passed from the sins of our prehistories to our dwelling hour.¡± Once more Valdred let his iron whisper temper the air between them for a piece, until he snagged no telling sign from the impish jester. ¡°Or do you honor the fallen by burrowing your pith into the work he left? Should you have chivalry in the part of honorable stoic, more than a fool, well then, we might yet have business. Although I can promise little of myself and my tired attempts at medicinal wonder. Mayhap, we¡¯ve some kinship in being labelled ¨C wrongfully so, I hope to imagine ¨C as charlatans and warlocks by the eyes of high society.¡±


    ¡°They are oft blinded by the gilt that sews their sockets.¡± Declared Harrow, leering at a muse upon the ballroom¡¯s glistening reflections. ¡°Little love, little art, lives through them. The palls that mark their Triumph are built to outlast us all, yet they forget the hands that sculpted them; they forego all warmth for cold proscriptions.¡±


    ¡°Yet still I bear no contempt for this court. While I respect the firmness of purpose in your voice, I have matters of a more personal scourge to attend first. Fear not that I shall forget your quarry, sir.¡± Valdred leaned on his winding stave & toasted his dry libation. ¡°Yet this old man¡¯s presence distracts you from more lively guests. I shan¡¯t shirk you for seeking happier prospects here.¡±


    ¡°Ah, of course not.¡± Aldred struggled to retain his repose at the rim of the ballroom, for his longing lashed to the heart of lethal passion nearing the floor. A regal woman, an aspect of earthly heaven, who his deathless affections named Lucilla, trotted toward the circle of dancers. He offered a swift dismissal from Valdred¡¯s company. ¡°I understand. Yet I pray this private issue warrants mirth for you soon after. One day mayhap, we will invent an immunity for that fervent vein of passion which eclipsed my good cousin¡¯s mind in dusk. Fare thee well, for now.¡±


    ¡°& may you keep your heart & head thoroughly balanced, Mister Harrow.¡± Dr Halloway patted the ¡®good cousin¡¯ on the shoulder before vanishing into anonymity with a murky trail echoing his breath and knelling scepter. ¡°Walk not in Arden¡¯s shadow.¡±


    Lucilla - for surely, it must be her - curtained her immaculate visage in a feathered mask befitting a phoenix. Winged pinions of flaming hue flapped about the corners of her sleek, incarnadine mask, curling, and braiding into the raven mane which flowed effortlessly behind her head. Even half-hidden under that avian mold, there dwelt such ethereal shimmer in every motion of her stride. She angled about, a solitary bird, seeming tentative to join the celebration.


    Another partygoer affirmed her identity and his own by way of his recognition & subsequent stride towards her. His fetish-mask, which had been formed & emblazoned in embodiment of Bacchus with braided metal for his beard to assist the shape of pagan joy, wore thin. Vincent¡¯s desperate leap to acclaim Lucilla as his partner revealed himself. What perspired from his airs beneath his ram horns and heathen form was far from merry, verging on the neurotic. Replete with desires he was ravenous to cling to, his hurried pace confessed his fear of pride¡¯s despoilment. Panic traveled with the jaunt-affecting strides, shimmering hysteria coiling his motion. Though the Lady accepted the hand of her host, her reticence, and the cautious sway she offered him through their dance gleamed to the looming watcher. Arden gleaned delectable hope in that sign, sensing the rift between them, and gnashed fangs under his horned-belled helm to rend it fully.


    The couple¡¯s stilted ruse of a dance did not go unheeded by the orbiting rings of so many veiled faces. Servants tamely navigated the tables & guests hid their heads in deeper shame for fear of the contagion of anguished embarrassment. A chorus of searing whispers began amongst the courtly revelers, sharing sentiments that pondered the loss of grace and heart in the once darling Vincent. The musicians carried on, preserving the joyous lilt of their strings, drums, and panpipes, pretending not to notice the shambling staccato between their host and his chosen woman.


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    When the troubadours concluded one suite, breaking unsurely before reconvening for another jaunt, Arden seized the opportunity and stole the floor. Strutting forth with confidence to upset all measure of station & mortality, the cloaked son of Harrow lunged an elegant intrusion, disrupting the pairing of Vincent & Lucilla. The wan & sublime phoenix of the Duskmont line separated from her suitor with a gasp. She stood stupefied before this rapturously familiar stranger who now bowed to offer his hand.


    ¡°May I have this dance?¡± Arden¡¯s eye twinkled through the holes in his jester¡¯s fa?ade, baring a glint as devilish as handsome. He draped his voice in the seductive silk he¡¯d shared with her before, in an evening that now trespassed leagues past the hour they¡¯d tasted in his old life.


    Lucilla knew him by the timbre of his cords and the touch of their hands adjoined. Yet she trembled all the same, knowing him a ghost. Accepting his offer with a weary palm, the Lady leapt to hypnotic trance; exploring his soul through his keen smile, ambling steps, and the gentle hand he cupped her waist with as they twirled. Her shuddering wonder, that initial disavowal of who this stranger could be, evaporated in the gently lascivious friction of their lavish tango. By their spiraling steps all others recoiled into opaque anonymity, forgotten for the gravity of this eternity winding through them. Groans and hateful beams from the crowd dwindled in the dark, obscured. The pitch laid by the passion of the talented minstrels became nothing more than the manifestation of the music reverberating between both partner¡¯s pitter-pattering rhythm.


    ¡°You know me.¡± Arden dipped Lucilla low, per the sweltering request burgeoning through her chest, then brought her up. He heard the purr of her mortal engine, offered the sweet hiss of his breath upon her ear, and dared a revelatory word in the hushed heat under the splendid waves of music. ¡°I am still and forever yours. If only your heart speaks it so.¡±


    They danced and pivoted and pressed against each other. Even so, as her breast rose & fell to test the weight of his, there was a gulch between them ¨C one deepened by the dearth of the forgone grave and the fickle pacing of his pulse. Lucilla¡¯s intuition was struck by thunder, alight by the lure of infernal delight, sensing his hunger without guessing the broader nature of it. ¡°Is that so? I know your shape, beneath that disguise, but I know it impossible. You cannot be.¡±


    ¡°Yet I am. Here we are. Basking in impossible chance.¡± A spectral vesper bathed in the sheen of a warming moon licked the essentia within her head. A devious promise, strung betwixt abyssal force and kindling gristle, dipped the ink of his words onto her brain. ¡°If you hold need of me, only speak to the moonlight and I shall be yours. To serve your whims and bear the sun upon any night, no matter how moribund. Whatever you dream ¨C of me - can be.¡±


    The dreamy veil that cradled them was so suddenly alit by tempting flames yet washed by a tap in the dark under their grazing matter. The caress of his hand through Lucilla¡¯s feathered mane strummed chords of memory. Those strings of her lute and the keys of her piano resurged from songs shared with Arden before baring more in bygone harmonies between their instruments. Resonant aspects of their blend became odious for their abrupt return after a lifetime¡¯s immurement; his fingers plucking buried notes sent her to shivers. ¡°Dreams often become naught but dew and dust by the streams of day.¡± Lucilla swung about in Aldred¡¯s arms, creating a wider berth from him when she landed gracefully on her heel. ¡°Visions that visit our heads in the night can bring as many black mares as delights. Are you a prodigal lover, or a mist of longing that should have been buried?¡±


    Aldred wheeled Lucilla in all her selenic sumptuousness back toward his chest with another measured twirl. ¡°I am more than what I was. I can be any shade of infinity that you so desire.¡±


    ¡°To bind your essence to the liking of another denies the truth of it.¡± Warned Lucilla, nearly biting her partner¡¯s ear when stretching tall to meet his embrace. ¡°Could you be whole when serving the image of someone else¡¯s fancy alone? I fear not. Such fancy would immure us both. And as for your shape, your face,¡± she gripped the lining of his mask, ¡°I have not seen the seams of it by the sun¡¯s glow.¡± She suppressed an icy spell at the fancy that the mold beneath might be just as cold as that metal-mach¨¦.


    ¡°Let it be illumed by your light alone.¡± Proposed Harrow. He did not utter the next thought which crossed his lust yet, by Lucilla¡¯s narrowing glare and the subsequent concern docked in her silver-blue sea, she felt the terrible meaning. ¡®I would die for you again, if it must be.¡¯


    Triplet lunes from three-fold stares divvied the prime square, pushing aside the sentries among the circling throngs. Petrified confusion from Lucilla froze her under the study of her strange dancing partner. Arden¡¯s own look bled fear of losing both her and his renewed pulse aroused by this fleeting chance. But the greatest glare in that moment, as the troupe of jugglers, flutists, and fiddlers abandoned their song, came then from the evil eye of their host¡¯s envy.


    Vincent Gale, in all his Pan-esque splendor and jealous sweat behind it, stomped up to the couple. Ire flooded back into his vital rivers, having been dragged by an undertow of shock for too long as his woman humored the advances of this stranger. His temper bristled until it burst into a tempest of thorns, uncaring how his erraticism might embarrass him further. After all, what could be more humiliating than this potential coupling of his lady and a rogue ¨C or any one else?


    ¡°Wanton rake! Enough!¡± The lordling¡¯s cry split the dome of his grandiose hall. Vincent slammed his knuckles into this impudent patron of Lucilla¡¯s hand. Just as swiftly as the first blow, he shoved the rogue back several meters. ¡°This angel is beyond your paws, whatever beast you be!¡±


    The force of the blow did not shake Aldred off his feet, but he bowed into the motion of it. He played up the brutish gesture and brushed away the giddy smirk it struck him with. A second fresh pulse battered his shallow veins with a surge of life and the vengeful emotions on offer. If he couldn¡¯t win Lucilla back with ease, he could still allow his fatal enemy to destroy himself ¨C starting with his repute. ¡°Sir? This hardly seems in kind taste-¡±


    ¡°Satyr of mud! Thou, carnal slime, seek to slither as a lech into the loins of my Lady!¡± Vincent¡¯s inclement rage towered above his heritably blessed height. Chasing after the ¡®beast¡¯, he clutched his foe by the folds of his coat and the flesh beneath his frilled neck. ¡°Under our roof? Nay. One more step, one more verminous word to her and I will bury thee to let the worms have fresh burrows. Let them bite and burrow into thee as thou would try of my moonlight!¡±


    Lucilla, however, refused to be quartered before so many eyes as the object of a bitter dispute any further. ¡°Thou art a brute!¡± She plunged far from the pair of them, diving toward the crowd in wary hope of disappearing. Crimson flush upon her cheeks mirrored the blazing feathers that winged her mask. One slight glance back was all she offered before chasing after solitude. That look hovered on Arden for only a moment, but he heard her eyes speak all the same. ¡°& thou: I know not!¡±


    The wounded party suffered the shame lancing him from Lucilla¡¯s parting glare, diverting the pain to serve his performance. Vermillion tendrils lashed the eyes of both, incarnadine pyres resplendent in refractions of the marrow they¡¯d briefly shared with one another.


    Harrow shoveled his hurt to hone his gaze on vengeful meed. ¡°What grace & manners for such a prominent host. How curious an instruction.¡± His enemy¡¯s hands clamped around his throat, and Arden made a fine show of struggling to breathe while battering Vincent with the curse from his dead lungs. ¡°If thou seek contest, is it not more polite to strike me with the gauntlet and throw it down? Ah -! So desperate¡­ to cross our swords, are we? What prior loss do you mar me for?¡±


    ¡°Deviant. I have thee fingered as a fiend!¡± Again, the thunder of lord Gale¡¯s fists brought blows to his unkind guest. ¡°I should have this pernicious lech clipped for his grubbing.¡± Half of Vincent addressed the fascinated crowd, many of whom seemed over eager for such unplanned excitement, with spurious explanation. Yet his talons never ceded their conflict with his foe, gripping and tearing all parts he reached for. ¡°This is not how we behave-¡±


    ¡°-sure, s-ure.¡± Harrow evoked the harshest cough he could, praying to embody a convincing plight, in anguish under the hands of the party¡¯s wroth master. ¡°Brutality is surely the best example to set for such events. Keep them ¨C agh! ¨C enter-tained. Let them see¡­ what you are. Show them the way of your kin. Public brawls are so adored. But where is your -ahck! ¨C merit?¡±


    ¡°I will have thee sing of my chivalry as a castrati. Thou hath forfeited the right to all carnal organs and must beg forgiveness through soprano pitch of prayer.¡± Lord Gale clung to this loathsome adversary as though his entire world were wreathed by the furious halo, he crowned the mocking visage with. ¡°Should we not turn this lascivious rogue into a choir boy, as penance for the sin he sought?!¡±


    ¡°Such phallic fascination drips from thy tongue, lord.¡± Spat Arden through dubious meekness and crimson¡¯s foaming spite.


    ¡°Aghh!¡± Vincent thrust his gentleman¡¯s thew into Aldred¡¯s gut. Such was his fury and the aplomb of his belief that he was assured his blows had brought this wretch to keel. While he paced away from the reeling joker, the lord of the gorged manor did not retreat from his anger. Instead, he sought new angles to unleash it ¨C with no deference to optics. ¡°O, bloated goat!¡± He trotted up to a dining guest with the graven face of a laughing satyr and the glutted paunch to match. ¡°Hand me that carving blade! I shall cut this swine and let it be done.¡±


    The gourmand ¡®goat¡¯ at the nearest table trembled with fork & knife in hand. The man forfeited the cutter. To the awful snickers & shrill gulps of fellow onlookers, the blade fell into the equally tremulous grasp of Vincent¡¯s ire. Marching back to the offender, who veered about breathlessly, he flashed the carver and hurtled the edge through the frills of his enemy¡¯s shirt. ¡°Unrepentant coveter, taste the only mercy thy tongue has won.¡±


    At the edge of a blade, Harrow coughed a ghastly chuckle before whistling a jagged taunt through gritted teeth. ¡°My lord, your words would be better wielded against a mirror.¡±


    The attendant¡¯s viscous moans and copulating gurgles were windfall. Aspersions flitted at the frazzled lord from myriad spectators crouched in their regalia.


    ¡°Just who is this fool who comes into my house to gyrate with the woman who is to be my wife? What shape hides under this dumb mien?¡± Growled Gale. Enthralled by the spectacle of verdant anger and how close he was to the face of hatred, Vincent grappled with the urge to peel back the rude stranger¡¯s mask. Even knowing what such an act would signify ¨C for the removal of a mask by the host spelled the end of ceremony ¨C the frivolity of the hour had long since been slain for him. The attempted conquest of his imminent, yet torturously distant, spouse was too biting an insult to bear on the cheek.


    ¡°Your would-be wife appears to have discovered a justified disgust of you, my good man. Perhaps she will be in better humour after a needed purg-¡±


    ¡°Who dares?!¡± Gale had consumed his fill of insults. In a stormy flash, he struck down the face of the jocular demon who was in his power. An all too familiar specter grinned back. Arden¡¯s spotless face shined upon Vincent and his court, all ridden with abrupt and thunderous cries. The petty knife tumbled from his hands. He quivered against the arctic illumination of an old enemy.


    The sallow ghost answered the looming question with assumed civility. ¡°I, brazen lord, am Aldred Harrow. Kin to the man thou slew for lack of chivalry and wit.¡±


    ¡°Wraith of the Wyrm!¡± Vincent wailed. His own pagan deception fell from his face, helped by a hexed gale spurred by a vulpine sign from Harrow¡¯s hand. The host¡¯s face was naked before his less than adoring audience; blubbering slop, flustered colour and pronounced veins across his temple affirming his loss of lucidity. ¡°So, thou hast come to steal from me? To plunder and ravage what is mine over some wrong thy heathen mind scries? How pathetic this vengeance¡­. I-I¡­ cannot stomach any more sorcerers of thy line.¡±


    ¡°So, what now?¡± Inquired Aldred with a boyish ruse of na?ve wonder. What reservation of spirit it required of him not to lunge for that bulging carotid! Those lashing tendrils of blue & red, scarring lightning across Vincent¡¯s folds, flicked temptations of eager blood to dine upon. But no. Besides the eyes of present company, this vermin¡¯s blood was poisoned by his heart. No, a festering destiny was far more deserved for this prey who thought himself the archon of fate.


    ¡°Now,¡± intruded a head of the helots with a froggy throat, ¡°the event is concluded. All masks must be surrendered. We must ask the good people to forgive this brashness and depart with courtesy.¡±


    ¡°Nay. Clasp him in fetters!¡± Groveled Vincent in deafening stupor. No soul among the crowd, who swiftly stripped away their intricate facades to wear blustered faces, was pleased with his lunacy. Such abject vice was unbecoming of nobility, and more than that it had spoiled their delights for what should have been a decadent evening free of any grievance but the prospect of a hangover. ¡°Arrest this fiend! It professes to witchery by way of its bloodline. We cannot suffer another Harrow here; they are a blister upon all good features of our crown. Chase this leech to the stockades!¡±


    ¡°For what crime, lord? You forget your manners, if I might be so bold as to address what is evident to all.¡± So spoke Valdred. The doctor emerged from the mindless throngs to advise peace in the wake of the night¡¯s ruin, it¡¯s hewn vestiges receding in discomfiture. ¡°He hath not struck your noble person, even as your fingers drew duress to his gullet.¡±


    ¡°This beast, ¡®Aldred¡¯, murdered all good sense. He sought to rape my betrothed; to carry this grace we gave the good public into debaucherous squalor! Is this not a fair sign of his ill character?¡±


    ¡°I believe you have done all that I am accused of - o glorious host.¡± Teased Aldred, stepping back without a hint of bruised pain. He gestured to the carving blade on the ballroom floor. ¡°Try not to step on your manhood.¡± Starting toward the moaning gate, he dropped his mask, the crown of the devil¡¯s fool, onto the floor. With this he muttered: ¡°this likeness befits you more, my lord.¡±


    Gale, still flailing in the grip of his vengeful storm, stalked up to a pair of guests who dithered by the threshold. By their build and the sculpting of their brows he knew them as men of military means. To them he whipped a forked a whisper and the promise of his fecund coffers. Yet these two refused the role on offer of mercenary assassins, pouring the coin purse onto the tile.


    Valdred Halloway abandoned his mask and faux mane, then hobbled over to his distraught host. Beyond the dimmed metal sheen that had dressed his feature, the resemblance was largely unchanged. His much-pronounced nose, that bent & ridged beak protruded over his gaunt lips and that long chin suited for a demigod¡¯s icon in marble. His high brows and overarching temple seemed to pace up to heaven with its elegant, lengthy span. Gray eyes, to match the hue of the cold replica he¡¯d worn, traced the contours of others¡¯ aspects, diving their thought with a cunning swam out from his misty orbs. ¡°I would advise, as a practitioner of medicine and some passing sense, against pursuing this ¡®beast¡¯ in anger.¡±


    ¡°Press a man who is not yet declawed with the option of force alone, and you are wont to taste the talons of his instinct.¡± The doctor pressed on. The weathered but spotlessly spirited Valdred affixed his cap to his head and took a few strides past Gale¡¯s reach, as if to say: ¡®the rest of this affair is yours to attend.¡¯ Silver hair, not quite short nor excessively long, pulled back behind, sprang about in wiry tufts when the hat pressured those locks to conform. ¡°Best to reform your own house, lest it crumble to the entropy to follow funneling any hateful obsession.¡±


    ¡°Can you not confine him in an asylum? Have him stay to serve your hobby as an alienist?¡± The master of the Gentwind manor slipped into a puddy of feature. ¡°No, he is gone. I am felled.¡± Mewling spouts of breathy vitriol became Vincent¡¯s tongue. ¡°I have lost her, my betrothed. I shall lose the governorship which so recently was to be mine, for this, my temper. I am waylaid. What can I hope for ¨C seek to ¨C save the Furies? Who am I, with so little left?¡±


    ¡°Study the glass and seal yourself in the chambers of your mind for some time, and you may divine an answer.¡± Valdred¡¯s words flicked Vincent¡¯s skull while his sight grazed the heap of relics & fineries about the hall. Then his boots & cane scraped the enamel below as he departed.

 Chapter VI

    Chapter VI


    Vincent pried the warped image of himself in the glass, observing the doctor¡¯s passing advice. Vascular feelers slithered without rest through so many angles. Gaunt was his shape, withered by a penitent¡¯s diet. He could hardly stomach food when his gut fed a furnace that charred all substance; seasoned with rancor. The flaked aurum in his hair resembled a sickly grain of tarnished yellow; the crop ruffled with mange; scythed by a hand of grey that reaved his wheat to ashen strands. The stranger ogling him back was a foreigner. From the mirror in his study an alien mien ambled into what was once the country of his own body. What unholy animation compelled this fetid creature to still roam? What gleamed into his soul from those languid orbs ringed with weary sickles was a dead star, imploding from within rather than bursting in plumes of rays. How could this thing be so unaware that it trespassed the natural hour, rotting away in a pasquinade that carried no spirit of its own?


    Rapping at the aperture of his study wracked Vincent¡¯s embattled poise. Choking down the quakes of his nerves in another goblet of gin, he crept to the window. Lingering fires in his emerald eyes lanced the gloom, hunting from where hung his sweat-addled brows, drenched in belligerence. A rival glint in air drew him to yet another angle of his eye, shined back from the opulent body of his bladed heirloom. His fingers ached to draw the sheath and greet the vandal with fury bared. What jesting hellion had come to mock him by tossing stones and meet his death for penance?


    Another hailstone from the rainless gulf smacked his window. The moribund umbrage outside the stained glass proved too formidable to pierce. Rapt by starving need to curse this mischief, Gale split the latch open. Stygian bays roused revelry for their welcome, leaching the welkin as they cascaded down her wings. A midnight torrent swept in to burst the aperture wide, spitting Vincent several paces back. As quickly as he¡¯d ushered in the foul breath he banished it, fumbling to seal the howling rivers.


    A beam of moonlight refused to flee from where the wind had planted its spotlight. The curtains were drawn, denying the moon & her shadows entry, yet that stream of effulgence remained. The uncanny eye rested perfectly in the corner, granting ephemeral visage to an irksome silhouette that lingered between the oil lamps and that roaming pall. Something more material than ether swam in the rustled air of his tower study.


    Upon his desk, illumed by that enigmatic blush, a mask now rested with flat but simpering gall. Filigree metal bore eerie recall through Vincent¡¯s pseudo-amnesiac* sleeplessness, for the face of lattice and the horns & bells crowning it evoked his enemy of the ballroom spat. Fingers dug into his palms, preparing a fist to hammer this hexing visage. Before his weary force could muster adrenaline from anger to splinter the joker¡¯s face Gale glimpsed a ribbon of parchment poking through the eyeless sockets.


    Vincent snatched up the thread, spotting a flutter of faint scrawl on the unassuming yet terribly odd paper. Nothing obvious was on its thin body but when he held it under lamplight a mercurial note shimmered clear letters. ¡®this befits your person more, lord¡¯.


    Howling fever answered the mocking scrap. Gale swung about; knocked glass; spilled shards across the floor, in pursuit of the devious prankster in every approach. This trickster¡¯s message vanished amid the turbulence Vincent roused, peeling through the aperture, and immolating in the waxing dew of the night¡¯s eyes. He shrieked after his servants, reciting murmurs and scathing interrogation of their lot. Yet, after his rabid frenzy expunged the brunt of its rebirth, no one appeared. He¡¯d no help to count on even under the banners of his own House. Even so, he knew there was an enemy in the miasma intruding into his chamber which refused to avaunt.


    As Gale patrolled his enclosure his periphery snagged on a darkling flare and, tilting his head to the glass from whence it stalked, he faced a presence in the mirror*. An impish other beamed through the space reserved for his reflection, with a fouler mien than his own could shine. The pall visage of Harrow towered above the echo Vincent¡¯s own, stretching its body over and across his image. He swiveled back, ready to bash a bottle on this interloper¡¯s skull, but found no such vagrant. Only the dross of his jagged hysteria and the whine of the wind¡¯s scraping the pane answered his challenge.


    Turning back toward the newcomer in the mirror, Vincent endured tremors resembling an alcoholic bereft of his daily dosage of poison for his liver. Madly he tapped the on the silver casing and planted his knuckles to the surface as though he could abrade the phantom image trapped within. ¡°How in all hells of our conceit - and those we are yet to know - are you here, demon?¡±


    For several protracted beats only the creaking of his fingers against the glass trappings and the restless night winds spoke reply. Then the sallow specter arose before him, from no angle Vincent could grasp him from, and gleamed an answer through gibbous eyes. Arden¡¯s distorted shape satisfied his bothered plea with a hex that traveled into the marrow of his mind. Yet though the shade spoke, no corner of that bastard¡¯s grin changed position or flexed a muscle. ¡°You welcomed spite into your house with your hand. You¡¯ll find no respite behind these walls.¡±


    ¡°No. I speak with a shadow.¡± Vincent tried clinging to sanity by cupping his forehead and affirming this visitant as no more than a booze addled delusion. ¡°A fool¡¯s ghost.¡±


    ¡°I remain.¡± Spoke the shadow. ¡°A ghost of your wrongdoing that continues, unburied, no matter your trifling attempts.¡±


    That blasphemous countenance persevered, ever smiling. The fiend¡¯s visage cast itself upon each corner that Vincent¡¯s eye chased through his crepuscular haze. How could he sleep when that face hovered over his bed, taunting his thoughts, and promising to return to reign over his dreams? The petulant crowing of newspaper fiends and the mongering of courtiers during daylight was enough to deprive him of rest through those hours. Now, the ghost of the infernal longing came out of the air, traveling into this mirror, to fetter him to gnawing fury.


    ¡°What? Can you not rest until you are granted the solace of hearing from ¡®your¡¯ woman again?¡± The apparition¡¯s voice wove its sound through Vincent¡¯s thought, hewing and restitching cavernous cords through his jittering cranium.


    ¡°Devil! Rake! May the gulch eat your eyes!¡± Gale snarled with impotent rancor. ¡°I will outlast your hate. I shall become the honored son again. I can-¡±


    ¡°Keep acting the rabid beast, frothing at the maw.¡± Horrendous laughter burrowed into his brain, layering the phantom chatterer¡¯s accusations. ¡°I will be with you till the last. The deathless portend of your guilt. Unless you confess your crimes to those masses you would lord over.¡±


    ¡°Wherefore? What crimes?¡± Vincent spat into the mirror. The dewy foam of his spirited venom congealed over his face in the glass. ¡°I have acted in my power, observed the law and all kind customs. All that I am held merit till your ghost swept the stage from me. I acted in my right!¡±


    ¡°Your right to act the fool, that is. Oh, how you have embodied that part. Made a show of your lack of humility by exposing that infantile hubris before the crowd you so hopelessly wish to court.¡± The semblance of flesh across the ghost¡¯s countenance harrowed, flaying its mask until bone & sinew ambled in the glass. It soon retained only a fragment of humanity in its bony smirk, while it persisted in speaking through the worm in Vincent¡¯s head. ¡°Fool wyrm, you observed the law only when you yourself were observed. In all other aspects, you played the rogue.¡±


    ¡°Moaning over being beaten fairly? Even now, when you should be resting in the grave by my hand of mercy ¨C that brought you to a peace your warlock¡¯s soul could never earn.¡±


    ¡°Must I read you the fresh red history of your own House?¡±


    ¡°Nay. I must read for you the last rites of a reluctant shade who refuses to meet his judgement past the threshold!¡± Cried Vincent. ¡°Halting for fear of the abyss your sins earn¡­¡±


    ¡°Say it. Speak what we both know and let these other haunters be freed unto the death you craved.¡±


    ¡°I will speak no lie though I talk with a liar. The wrong you wish to place upon me is only the marring of your own envy, o piteous mane.¡±


    ¡°O impious poisoner! We shall speak it for you: the fortune you were awarded came at the cost of your sire¡¯s life. We know you contaminated his meals, dropped ounces of deathly chemicals ¨C the nature of which you could hardly understand outside their murderous element ¨C into your own father¡¯s drink. As is tradition, we know. Your progenitor, the prestigious charlatan Daryon Gale, came to his part in the Gentwind fortune by marriage into the maternal line. And what fate befell her, that woman who was cursed by callous appetite to be your mother? She was tossed from her horse when jaunting with her husband, your vaunting father, by no cruel circumstance or blind misfortune but by thy villainous herald¡¯s push.¡¯


    The unhallowed prophet stormed about Vincent¡¯s consciousness, giddy in the reaving of horrid truth. Its soundless call then exchanged its vaporous parade to dress in the timber of the lordling¡¯s own pitch. Reprimanding Vincent with an echo of his own tongue that lashed his dome. ¡°Yes, that bloodthirst ¡®earned¡¯ you the ambition to prance about as though it were your birthright. Each step you steal, every breath you pillage from the world, continues the legacy of your filching line.¡±


    Vincent recoiled for a flicker of a pulse before crashing a fist against the silvery wall in front of him. ¡°Envious mare! Accusing me!? For the envy of what you could not accomplish in all your sorcerous existence?! My blood is pure. My faith is unscathed. My order, my kingdom, is yet to be!¡±


    Something in the afflicted gentleman¡¯s rejection belied a smattering confession. The chaunting specter preyed upon Vincent¡¯s flaring subconscious, lapping that draught with delirious patois through bursting neurons. ¡°Is treason now the height which your branch seeks to grasp for? Ha, ha.¡± The shadows chortled with their envoy. ¡°Alas, tis all been for naught and shall become nothing more than gibbering disgrace. You acted the wastrel in the tide of crimson opportunity and now you drown. Flotsam from the withering tree, this despoiled star in you aches to be immured under the waves.¡±


    ¡°Arden? Aldred? Who ¨C what ¨C is this wraith creeping upon me? Speaking chimeras from thinning air. I shan¡¯t stomach it!¡± Vincent bent all his fury into the lunge of his arm and the bottle it clung to in liquid comfort through the face in the mirror. ¡°ah ¨C no matter.¡±


    Glass splintered into hundredfold pieces, poking back through shattered teeth at the fist that carried its echoing visage into hasty erosion. The effigy of the assailant sprang to swallow itself alongside the angular fangs of so many shards. Vincent: awash in raw red alongside an engulfing gasp of spirits unleashed from the sacrificed bottle. Tearing lace from under his languishing sleeve, he wound the fabric about the fresh wounds his feckless anger incurred.


    Arden¡¯s apparition decanted itself from the cracked debris, manifesting behind the accoster of its image. Sallow fingers, like vulture¡¯s hooks clamped onto Vincent¡¯s shoulders; the shade impressed such chthonic gristle unto the fickle mass its claws sank into. ¡°Come forth from these wasting hallways and combat me upon ground that serves no hearth for either of us. Test your teeth on this ghost.¡±


    Vincent stewed beneath the grip of phantom talons, pleading against mercy & lucidity by thrashing bloodied hands. He sought to strangle and pierce this fiend of entangling fortune with splinters of the mirror imbedded in palm and interdigit. Dread vapors threaded his clutches, Arden¡¯s matter decomposed in transient gas, leaving Gale to stumble toward the wreckage of his study floor in pursuit of a body to strike. ¡°Face me in the flesh, that I may hammer it. Show me to your corpse and I will see it to finality. Grant mass to your taunts, these hexes, and meet your destroyer. I shan¡¯t let my dreams, my being, be dammed by your wake, stubborn ghost. I shall bury your form in scoria and grant the ash of your envious soul to the nethermost winds!¡±


    ¡°I do envy you, in one manner. I remember when I thought my dreams were important. By the muses of night and the hammer of day did I dream; and met the soil beneath my soul in seeking their lures, those ephemeral irons.¡± Arden reappeared by the entry to the study, reformed in likeness of a man again. Casually he stepped through the door and meandered down the halls. His call prevailed in Vincent¡¯s brine. As did the scraping of boots against tile, fingers to stone, echo proudly in mockery of the manor¡¯s owner, its masonry, and each bas relief the fiend transpired to upset. ¡°That naivety of ego, to claim those dreams are real and becoming of you, must be such a fine comfort. Surely, one of the last remaining to you. The rest you made slag of.¡±


    As the resentful visitant hoped, Vincent rallied all bitterness in his sinew and abdicated from all reason to seek the sword. He hunted after a fanged heirloom hanging on the wall beside his desk, unhooked the sheath, and drew the naked blade. A scene from his honored ancestry was engraved on the flat of the sabre. Depicted there, flowing with the backsword¡¯s curve: the silhouetted impression of his great grandfather Gale¡¯s victory. A section of history, like a bas-relief in silverite steel, reminding the descendant of his forebear¡¯s battle which won him the glory that allowed his descendants entry into the wider court, and soon after a branch entwined to the Gentwind line. The man there on the flat grinned over his triumph, gazing toward the point and the faint stares that streamed along the edge. Even smiling and embodied by a smith¡¯s art (for lack of living form) a saturnine umbra ringed the stare of the weapon¡¯s eldest master.


    With the familial sabre in his fevered grip, Vincent chased after the wanton interloper. Leprosy of the mind shed the bark of sense & virtue within him. The surge of ire compelled his soles down the winding staircase and through the manor¡¯s sprawling corridors the floor beneath.


    No hint of the haunter winked at the pursuer, save for the stench of spectral decay and the sweat boiled by Vincent¡¯s fuming temper. How hollow his hearth, how bare its stomach, with no soul there to call upon for aid. No guardian among his kin dwelt here nor their spirits to watch over him. He was alone with his blistering wrath, except for his grandfather Gale¡¯s visage on the sabre; grinning like a leviathan and waving him onward in this fury-bound sea.


    At the cross of the next corridor a servant wavered. The emaciated shape slaved to carry on the pretense of fastidious cleaning & inspecting, an attempt to avoid the unhinged and bounding eye of his master. Young lord Gale cared little for this want for solitude, nor whether his poise was ruse or real toil. A maniacal smirk glinted from the sabre as the wailing man leapt from the corner of lunacy. In the frayed span of a few seconds Vincent was upon the helot, clamping to the scruff of his neck. The blinding force plunged into the servant, who latched onto a nearby vase to steady himself only for it and the budding flowers to collapse on the tile.


    ¡°Where is he? Where did the ghoul go?! Aldred was here! Have you let him flee without protest?!¡± Vincent screamed. He kicked shattered pieces of the spilt vase while reeling the helot about, budging him against the ornamented wall.


    After reeling in his breath, the flustered servant spoke; a response which flew faster than the portion of his mind reserved for politeness. ¡°Sir, you are unwell? There is nobody here save us.¡±


    ¡°Did you not hear him batter my window? Flapping jowls with horrible speech and breaking glass with black ire? Tis Arden!¡± The rasping scion forced his inquiry. ¡°He comes for slaughter!¡±


    By the darting flares in the servants eye and the cloven tridents of confusion through his iris, Vincent knew that the man had only heard the frazzled yowls of his master. ¡°My fair lord, the man is deceased. That soul is flown from the earth. His cousin would find it no less difficult to be here. The gate is guarded, the garden rifled, per your orders.¡±


    ¡°Feckless mongrels, all of ye!¡± Gale released his inclement hold from the helot¡¯s throat. The servant was content enough to keep his eyes downcast while shuffling to clean up the soil & debris, so long as it kept him from the scrutiny of the mad tyrant of the manor. Vincent¡¯s shrieking thundered through the hallways, dinning the walls to shrink back for fear of his lunacy¡¯s contagion. ¡°Hels! I was to be the military governor of Tulsine! To rule with arms and the aegis of our queen. Now I waste under the boughs of evil specters¡­ confined from all corners by the stupid and the wretched!¡±


    Derision from the revenant whose tongue was in his head beckoned Vincent to abandon even more. ¡°Put that fetish of war to use if you have the thew. I tire of this gaudy cell.¡±


    Another pair among frightful caste of gaunt helots conspired behind a cabinet, veiling themselves from their lord who acted in exile of lucidity. ¡°He drags hell with his heels!¡± Whispered the one. ¡°We are in need of a sedative from the doctor¡¯s catalogue.¡±


    ¡°Our patron,¡± began the second with cautious scorn, ¡°is as tireless as restless in this hex. I am not overeager to risk his teeth and what froths from behind by holding him back long enough to administer any such option. Safer now to let his mad spell burn itself-¡±


    ¡°He will engulf all of us in that flame before it dims! Damn the world, I might ask opium for myself to endure this mad issue.¡±


    Vincent stole down another flight and pierced the hall. Wicked luminance peeked through the main door. The refulgence permeated from an astral body but was not of the moon. By that sickening sheen the way out was bathed in a sulky halo that cast the threshold as a gate to an otherworldly hearth; a realm that subverted the supernal to belch out a glow which only empowered the gloom to birth ripe apparitions. ¡°Away, hellion! Lest this blade rend those lurking eyes.¡±


    ¡°Step forth from this gilt travesty. Meet me with that mettle and let it be your Augean toil. Slay this dragon in me which stands in the way of your resplendence. Otherwise, plunge that heirloom into your belly. Submit yourself to the biting truth that you cannot reach the glory you froth to bite. Admit that the one fiend halting your dreamt up fate claims its lair inside you.¡±


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    Gale donned a brooding coat over his pleated nightshirt and fingered the sheath now tied to his snaking belt. ¡°We shall hear you speak your true name in defeat, demon. You are that same shade, the jealous Lemure upset from the outcome of our contest. Here, a chance to cross claws and give your ruin to the finality you cravenly refuse.¡±


    ¡°I await you in the alleys outside, if only you dare true boldness for once and face the power of real risk.¡± Hissed the breath of the gulf beyond the door. In the angst-worn silk of nocturne, threaded with gnawing worms and bilious fragrance to belie the fusion of lovers¡¯ sweat and erosion of skin, the breadth of the hour brought Vincent to its bosom. Arden¡¯s pitch tempered keen licks through the depths of the excited noble¡¯s lobes. ¡°Come, patricide. You forces are indisposed. Those indignant brutes found for your employ cannot harm me. They are subjects of my House evermore. Only your arm remains to you.¡±


    The wraith fled from its form, burrowing a haven in the murk between lamps, sconces, and vagabond beams that split from their mother, the moon, to seek ground they could claim as their own. But Vincent sensed his enemy among the throned mist, prowling as a gangrenous shimmer in the din of Gorgotha¡¯s broad streets. When the outline of Aldred¡¯s visage did summon an inkling in the heaving fog he just as soon swept back through alleys, guiding Gale with singed eyes past the high terrace toward the commercial district. Sweeping the way to the houses of squalor between each curse they spat under glum drapery. ¡°Here, killer, my body is further along.¡±


    ¡°How can this hound of air accuse me? How this blaggard claim I poisoned my father?¡±


    Caterwauling families of felines arched their backs atop pews, gates, and roof tiles, scratching their threnodies and adding toe choir of peasants and constables parading their rounds. Tenebrous fog swept back barricades, swallowing blockades of sullen sergeants and their grumbling underlings in obscuring maws. Through each miasmal palisade Vincent found his feet replanted on the other side, deeper into the ailing sectors. With each steep foot down the terrace, the harrowing chorus of those souls who found glee in the dark ascended in clamor. So too did the bodiless accuser¡¯s voice enfold with greater vibrance, becoming richer in its taunts.


    ¡°Good sir, my little murderer, you procured those spurious reagents from one of my cohorts. From a fellow conspirator, if you will, in the scheme of advancing medicine.¡±


    ¡°Then you, fleshless fiend, deserve shame for your part! My heart is as spotless as the gloss of my blood. Only this barghest in you mars my mind. Snarling, ceaselessly! Where are your fangs! To tear at me with malformed threats that are as groundless as the spirit which refuses to come down from the court of chimeras and meet me as a man.¡±


    His spectral assailant chuckled with the groan of nearby billows, spilling over to engulf the streets. ¡°My part in what? Will you not confess and cleanse this haar over your heart?¡± Each step showed Vincent along the decay of Gorgotha¡¯s brilliance, luring him into the gutty-works where the entrails of humanity coiled and sprang about themselves. ¡°Of course, you would not have recognized my proxy in Raykin. What is any servant to you, besides more dressing for your luxury, your gloating convenience? As for us scientists,¡± wind & smog merged to boom that hateful voice through their ashen lungs, ¡°without fast results for our valorous endeavors, we alchemists must still turn a coin to sustain our stomachs.¡±


    ¡°Your stomach should have spilt into the soil by now. Your legacy should be confined to that casket.¡± Gale hexed the air with his own, spouting acid from his esophagus. Changeling patterns of Gorgotha¡¯s span reformed the labyrinthine paths, spitting Vincent into organs of the city he¡¯d never deigned to affiliate with. Chamber pots seeped onto the street from quarters above, splashing boiling revulsion in his core for the creatures that carelessly sent filth & urine angling by his boots. The only constant remaining was the wild variable of the specter¡¯s visage and tongue, forked with the billows¡¯ cadence. ¡°I know not how you subsist, but I know you. Arden. End this game and become mine, by the blade you asked to cross.¡±


    An ambling moonbeam chased Vincent, staking him with the wan eye and the gravity of its stare. Arden¡¯s venomous smirk wove itself from seams in the gaseous aura sent from an alien sphere in the welkin above. ¡°Did you redouble your effort to chain me in a coffin for my professional understanding of your character, your virulent past?¡±


    ¡°I put a feral hound out of his misery. My hand acted in lawful mercy. Yet you so love anguish and ambition beyond your torn means that you shuffle back as a bargeist to nip the ankles of your betters.¡±


    ¡°No.¡± A skeletal tree bore aspects of Arden on the tendrils it twined from the shadows leaching the light which fed its seeds. ¡°You were so confounded by the bountiful vision ¨C striking through your odium ¨C of lust for our Luci that you forwent all other reasons for pulling that hammer.¡± The ambling bower of gibbous eyes shuffled forward. ¡°O! Bereft of that blood thou would hold even less and know what thou deserve as a dredge. Padded by fortune of birth, thou art sworn to be the last of thy line; to leave it in ignominy. Thy distant kin of the Gentwind branch have seen their boughs tipped by a rogue gale, delivering them unto pestilence. Thou wouldst be a worm now, if not for the writhing of thy mother.¡±


    ¡°O! If only thou wert born of blooded blue. Had thou been reared in the school deserving of the vocation and rank thou falsely aspire to - I would have soldered the beast in thee. Pressed sense & humility into this errant harrower to have him know proper etiquette. Thou would still be a man, not this mutinous specter.¡± Vincent furled his fury around the grip of his sabre, guarding the cringe which struck his face with an offensive lunge. His foe ripened into sinew from the convergence of dusk & glow. The trunk of Arden¡¯s neck begged the blade to fell its bark. With the precision in his point, upon which his hatred perched, Gale swung his ancestral arm and cut the malcontent¡¯s head from what should be bone, apple, fiber, & cord.


    Wounded marrow elicited the sound of glass being scraped & splattered, parallel to the hum of silver rending meat. Arden¡¯s head leapt up from the blow, stretching upon stilts of stubborn strings that refused to snap with the rest. Dangling feelers, reft by Gale¡¯s hand, withered as they sprang to bind the animated muscle of the fiend¡¯s mind to its greater berth. Bottled urine and sulfurous mist erupted from the maimed tubes. Rancid spurts surged out of the bisulcate injury onto Vincent¡¯s gaping buds. Wellsprings of gore cascaded as the malicious sprite in the aether whistled through the gurgling spray to conduct the breeze to its tenor. A hydra¡¯s serpentine laughter hissed through the decapitated tunnel, freed of stolen form.


    Wings from the inlets above, where starlight decayed in the bellows of modernity¡¯s grandeur, stole away with Arden¡¯s mop. Mist seethed, like mercury, from the maimed font. Only the eye of Gale¡¯s adversary lingered, bursting from the beheaded funnel; darting to observe with delight. Yet though Vincent had struck body with blade, the visitant¡¯s mask dissipated from the mold he¡¯d excised with militant haste. A severed porter slammed down against the nearest door, tripped back on the slight burrowing indent into the residence. His collection of captured urine and a few other signifiers of his filth-farming vocation spilled into the mixture of his mortal rivers.


    The Enemy¡¯s eyeball popped from the watery viscera of the mistaken porter, who¡¯d been so unwise to be snagged by the fiend¡¯s shade in the projections of Gale¡¯s wrath. That foe bled out as oozing serpents from the man whose matter he¡¯d borrowed as a screen, evaporating with the worker¡¯s array of oiled spirits (of a sort). Jagged wounds from the lantern the victim held were loosed on Vincent¡¯s feet with the cinders of their collapse. Stamping out the warlike fumes, Vincent patted the wroth stone and the smoldering grime with the headless coat of the poor animal. Joints creaking, swaying with the brunt of realization, the stunned killer took off on instinct; hurling his body away from the scene down whichever way his legs were pointed to.


    Sprinting through the accursed hour, past domiciles and teeny chapels on corners devoted to a desiccated power, he fled. Errant gales, bent by lawless contortions, decanted gauze & webbed fog to bind Vincent¡¯s path. He was thrust into a breathless monotony of direction, each street expanding only to be banded back into an identical shape. All roads he could fly upon were ironed into one, while breaking into thousandfold more by each spilling step.


    By mercy or malice, the Styx of mist & matter he was thrown along poured Gale out of its bulbous maze into the green of a square where a night market bustled. The hub of black hour commerce blistered the scion¡¯s eye, shirking this courtyard where all too many gathered for the fix of profit, pleasure, or less than legal necessity. Rogue militias enforced the order of these night markets, where all was permitted if the toll could be matched. But the killer could permit none to catch a glance of him and sulked to the rim of the bazars, sinking lower in posture than the tails of his coat. He felt, in simultaneous tumult, as trivially small as he was ubiquitously seen; hunted; hated.


    Each face in the all too hustling square belonged to a ghoul. Vincent knew them by their pallor, their shallow smiles as they ogled him as much as their treasured novelties. Assassins lurked among them, only waiting to count the bounty on his scalp and for him to stumble onto their knives. Convulsions rattled under his coat, looking like a fiend of booze¡¯s induction. His bowels craved release, or else to obey the garrot in his intestines and loose the knot by hurling out his innards. He could stomach no eyes; his soul could not digest being sieved by another¡¯s fancy.


    A discipline he¡¯d long forgone reemerged in Vincent during this rupturing hour. Constraining his noxious tremors and the ache for swift escape with what remained of his unfurling will, he checked his pace. Jittering paranoias, that gnawed every person around until their presence was threaded with bone and sallow remnants of hunger death, could not be acted on lest they be affirmed as true. His eyeline anchored to the steps ahead, feigning absence of interest & recognition though the garland of the benighted festival and the clutter of bazars squirmed with auguries of destitution. Only when he circled back to the peripheral did Vincent tap the draught of urgency to jolt away to the first corner where no jovial lanterns or sentinel torches could burn his retinas.


    In the furor of his flight Vincent sought the solace of recognizing a sign, a street-post, a house, anything that showed he was nearing the estate where this insipid trek had begun. He hadn¡¯t even noticed the absence of his rowdy ghost that first spurred his mission. That purpose had been beheaded with the porter; left where the sod¡¯s jaw bit the ground. But no prayer, no blind compulsion, nor angel in the night sky peering through the veil of sin and progress could grant his heart a compass by which to steer his wheeling soles. The weepy lunatic gnashed curses against gods, governance, and general humanity with each turn of the warren that sent him back to a nameless street, bearing fronts like any other of its kind.


    Inevitably, the maze conquered the wayward noble, grinding his mind to dusty putty that spewed tears through each pore ¨C but not his eyes, where frigid cataracts formed to deny all but miasma. Defeated, damned ¨C oh, he knew it. The peak tide of evenfall bloomed, benighted in the ruinous splendor that drowned Vincent under the fallen sea from above the earth. Awash, the lone man gasped for breaths which his caged lungs would not permit. He sank low, against any part of earth and mankind¡¯s construct of it able to bear his sallow weight. Propped up for a petty rest by whatever wall happened to catch him, the vanquished spirit waited for¡­whatever the Fates and the Fiend among their harvestmen thralls would spin for him.


    Gale brooded blankly, allowing that film of apathy to stretch over one eye while apparitions of grief pooled in his other. An unfortunate vagrant skittered up and down the same stretch of soiled cobblestone. At first this strange conversationalist was of no consequence to the slumping gentleman. Engaged in a dialogue with himself that heaved weight of muttering thoughtfulness and enflamed passions, the roaming philosopher continued to lap around Vincent¡¯s person. Each round the man inched closer as he passed him.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know you, sir. I ¨C I ¨C did not mean to offend. It¡¯s just that the world weaves itself through us. It wove me a rug of filth-ridden tailoring, heh heh. The wool, cut from some dead species. Yes! ¨C gone from the earth before she spat it out from her womb!¡± The vermin¡¯s boastful neurosis ascended with his volume. ¡°Yes, sir! Tis the way of the world, sir!¡±


    Too many rambling loops snagged Vincent¡¯s attention. As gently as he could (in his not all too dissimilar condition) he watched the man, paying greater heed to his gait and scourging whimpers. With a yelp the scurrying pest halted his trail. The man froze over, crippled by a gale only he served witness to. Though those juggling eyes gawked at the presence which spoke to them, Vincent felt ¨C he knew ¨C that those overlarge eggs nocked an angle back to him.


    The figure turned, jerking itself a few meters back without stretching its head to match the steps. Lumbering up to Vincent, the mumbling gaunt greeted him with a fair view of its countenance. Cephalopod orbs encroached over the rest of his skull. Flakes of petrified mass trickled from his fingers, now shaking up to its receding humanity then reaching to the eyes that witnessed him. Cephaloid buboes conquered much of the derelict¡¯s scalp, displaying pews of surplus heads over his scourged one; happy to replace the last shreds of follicles.


    ¡°You ¨C you! Did not see you! Oh, I apologize.¡± The leper thrashed about as though puppeteered by drunken goblins; animated by the inebriated geists of plague. Mildew mold between his grin and a lake of lichen harbored in his brain, the disaffected animal belched its desire. Depreciated bones, absent of tissue and glove, shook as fingers loomed over the huddled stranger. ¡°He says it, he saw! We need that coat, mister red. Or is it blue? We need his coat, to curtain the shade. It¡¯s not yours, it¡¯s ours! Give us here. Let us hide. We need to cover it, what you have done!¡±


    Three chimes from the high cathedral tower. Thrice the thread of the hour rang. In the knell all sirens were conjoined to a murderer¡¯s key, begging death in a shrill soprano that soared over the bass of the pale drum. What was time but a trick? What else was here for him, the witness, but this vagabond fiend without a hearth but the hell he trapped in his chest and nurtured through those bulbous scars. The alarum lacerated its grand proportions, shredding its signal by the dead thew that forced its hollow hand and bid it shout. Within that stern mouth, lips smacked against the clapper, but the evocation butchered all meaning of sound by the din of emptiness which consumed it.


    As the third peal sang its lament, it announced a hex for Vincent¡¯s arm. The strike congealed and burst in unison with the echo¡¯s demise. Gale ran the wretch through. Blade bit past shreds of cloth, clumps of mesh, and the tender nausea of a split gut to impale the ridden creature.


    ¡°As he said.¡± Sibilated the wound of the leper, oozing gargled speech as blood rushed from intestines to mouth. ¡°Peace has come. A piece for a pound.¡±


    The beast of disease tumbled down, another soul to Vincent¡¯s claim. Again, the symphony of bells began. The belfry gaped with the voice of false hours, yapping on repeat, past any scheduling man would account for. He felt many ages older by the torturous span between each evil ring. Sanity crumbled as the boisterous siren bleated for the end of time, by her incessant recurrence of clamor. Gale reached for the sabre rooted in the fallen, pustuled, trunk but although the fatal hole remained, the blade fulminated against retrieval and disappeared.


    ...


    The shadow, victorious, swept back to the lair of the man it had inlaid in madness. Though the shape¡¯s ire had bled sanity dry from the ersatz gentleman¡¯s skull, it had not fed on the blighted veins. Triumph¡¯s taste was evermore nourishing than the fatal bite. Spring heeled, spry with demoniac gaiety, he leapt over chapel spires, barbed gates, and broken bulwarks, to fulfill the last task of his evening goal. Sabre tucked betwixt his smirk, the gleeful demon took wing here and there for intermittent meters on bouts of abyssal gales.


    Descending from the atmosphere, the hunter sought the joyful fruit of its mission. A working woman of the late hours stepped into the street to ignite her come-down torch of tobacco. In the flare of stamped embers, the woman was carried up to a roof. The vengeful Fury plunged fang into throat, suckled the soul from marrow, then went about the work of ripping. Grim labors began on her body. The fiend struck artwork from the subversion of beauty; by wielding the sabre as a chisel, knife, and scalpel; cutting cords and restitching tendons in places they did not naturally belong. Predation perfected! A glorious culling and the most beauteous framing he could demand from the waning night. Now: a gripping of one corpse and the seizing of another!


    Sweetling libations, drawn from a basin heated by carnal friction and mortal need, sloshed about in the dusk fiend¡¯s gullet. With the torso bundled in a repossessed trunk, the saurian revenant strode as a man. He approached another proprietor of fleeting passion in the night, disguising his meaning as a business position. The lamprey eased the woman¡¯s coat from her delectable neck, wriggling feigned warmth through to her as the tongue lashed her ear with promises of liberation. Daggers jutted from his rows, displaying pre-Cambrian incisors that punctured through immurement of reptilian nature to siphon her hope. He made good on the offer to free the lass from her prison, doing so by unleashing her pulse into his digestion. The rest of her vitae, he chivalrously lent to the ground by way of the sabre¡¯s carving rivers.


    The parting throes of consciousness, the thrashings of vertebrae and the bubbles in the veins, danced on his fangs. A few late additions to his conquests and the art was affected, nascent until canvased as spectacle for a wide-eyed audience. A deep-rooted mark from sword sheathed in flesh up to the hilt; a couple of organs extracted, a liver here, a heart there; some serrated markings of the blade enacting wroth gales with surgical mockery unto the twin corpses. Among the stolen pieces of the women, a portion would be used to barter with the hypogeal packs within the castes of the catacombs, as fleshy tax to repay his prior snatchings of their kin. The rest would be placed to imply the macabre puzzle he dreamt designs of.


    Like a woodsman¡¯s haul of timber for fire & forge, the nightcomer lifted his incarnadine art into the court above the rooftops with muscled practiced. Bereft of sweat even if those ravines could still be wet, the winged umbra parted the rime of the atmosphere, descending to drop the artful carcasses on his enemy¡¯s doorstep. The Gentwind garden looked a ripe bed to plant these pale flowers. Iridescence through the gulf glinted in shadowed foxholes, gleaming prescience of discovery. How the jury of public assumption & simple proximity would perjure the murderous Gale with a few more corpses to his count. They¡¯d assign these girls and their ends to the lethal insanity that had grown a tumor in the golden child of the genteel courts. How they¡¯d gloat in gossip and gorge on the delicacy of a noble¡¯s self-wrought ruination. Vincent, the slayer, would be illustrated as a paragon of descent, an icon of warning to the rest of the courtiers, while his breaths were constricted by lead from an asylum ward or fungus from an interment hold.


    As he went to retire, Arden glanced back to the pal masks of the dead. Unmarred, above the slashed neckline (and ghastly eviscerations below), their faces blurred to a silver chorus; sharing features and portends in their lightless stares. In one courtesan¡¯s face others were framed: an exhibit of an archetype. The mien of Hialeah, Lucilla, and his own mother calcified over the hoary palette. Each with raven locks and wan hue - once livelier than the moon. The tearing and draining was done, and though the fatal crimson quenched his dehydration, remorse wrapped him under wing. Their beheaded parade hovered at his flanks. With shame, Aldred slumped back to his hearth, sullen in Triumph; surrounded by refractions of the hydra, marching in broken stride with serpentine menagerie of the slain.


    Cold scale and a coat of sulfur did a fair job of warding harm from him. But though the man¡¯s heart had surceased from pumping, unless commanded to the ruse by manipulations of stolen life through his arteries, wounds of the psyche festered from the lashings he flailed. Labors of the mind were better relied on to shirk the needless guilt. He still had an hour perhaps to armor himself in mental strain before he must plunge into the barrow beneath the Harrow manor.


    He had but a shred of time before Dawn¡¯s rumor would be affirmed by the masses and her rose-crown over the horizon. Eos, goddess, would be realized. Her appearance would distort the happenstance of her sister in evening until all that occurred in her domain would be shed as falsity or revealed for the ugly state it chafed in. By the illumination which rose with her stare, some width of the cold would be banished; nightmares & dreams would be separated from cherubs & imps of phantasy¡¯s reign; and the stain of vice would burn to show the virtues of horrors accomplished in the dark, now splayed in spectacle before the eyes that begged for sun.


    Harrow possessed enough means within this hour to dabble with early theorems and new patients. Those thugs of Gale¡¯s employ were strapped comfortably in Aldred¡¯s basement, his shrine to imperfected but progressing medicine. They were arrayed as unwilling, yet content enough, subjects in uncanny experiments, sedated with nearly copious amounts of morphine to quiet them until their need appeared. He frowned at the loss of such a pristine substance. That messenger of bilious harmony still winked hope of pale euphoria and her piercing kiss. How he longed for the noxiously sweet embrace that raptured soul and its sickness from vein. Proscribed, denying enjoyment, from his roaming carcass.


    Arden¡¯s mind infracted unbiased method to linger on the morphine: could he not know it again? He had not tried, only assumed that it would bear no effect to an ambling corpse. Besides, the carrion appetite in his husk sought a richer daughter in mortal red. That wine, perfectly aged as to keep himself ageless. His new diet of kings and worms. Oh, but he had not yet dined on the crimson of a truly regal being. What power would be siphoned from that stream? The aftertaste of murder only had him craving the next throat. For this thirst, he entreated with time¡¯s saturnine father to allow him another draft before waiting out the eternity bridging him to another dusk.

 Chapter VII

    Chapter VII


    A gray shape dithered outside Lucilla¡¯s chambers, looming like incense smoke for a baleful ceremony yet to be announced. Dull light from the Lady¡¯s window slunk underneath the door, yet even without the bulwark the daylight was too beleaguered to shine any charm. For imminent storm benighted the sky, and the mood inside the Duskmont manor was lusterless without their patron¡¯s song to assure beauty & order.


    ¡°Thank you for coming doctor. We would have ¨C should have ¨C sought your presence earlier, but the Lady spoke no accord. These last few, we truly have become her keepers. I pray this curse does not last.¡± Tidwell teetered around, pricking his thumbs, and shyly peeking toward the threshold. ¡°She peaks nil and has slept even less.¡±


    ¡°Hence your request for a sleeping agent?¡± Doctor Halloway studied his caller with eyes as gray as the light remaining to the prime sphere¡¯s reign. ¡°The woes of the mind are as fascinating to me as finding balms for the terrors of the body. I only pray her ailment responds to curative means.¡±


    ¡°Our lady will not eat. She refuses to attend even the shortest services or even amble through the courtyard. Confined herself to the bed, she has. Fettered by an evil malaise. Some spell.¡±


    Valdred¡¯s furled brow rolled new creases atop his temple. ¡°A depressive spell? Is it kinder company she requires then, I wonder, to have her woes heard. If a spiritual agent is upon her, or we have dallied overlong and true malignance is there, mayhap a priest would be better to call for. If it is of the mind, well, we can try. But the owner of a mind must reach out to receive help from within its dimension, broker a pact from within. Her will must lie in the desire to weave the heart together.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes, that is all well and fine. Alas, tis the peace of sleep which should restore her pith.¡± Tidwell poured his supplications to divinity & the power of passions for his patroness into his palm, cupping a half-prayer from his plinth while muttering enlightened reasons for her despair. ¡°Tis these recent happenings that fray her heart. What with whispers of war and, of course, her formerly betrothed¡­¡±


    ¡°I read what became of Vincent. Yet I believe your Lady¡¯s heart is stronger than a premature plunge following one suitor¡¯s stay in hell.¡± Valdred poked his aquiline nose against the door and asked permission with a sign from his hand. ¡°I must hear from Lady Duskmont herself.¡±


    ¡°You can knock but she will not answer.¡± Huffed Tidwell, stepping astride the doctor to unbar the chamber with a swift key.


    Lucilla lay curled on an odd angle of the bed, gripping her skin as though a blanket. She clumped herself in poise of an unborn in the womb; a piteous sight for a grown woman who had no right to be in such spiritual health (by the purview of her caste). Halloway peeled the curtains bare and peered long at her stupefied and pestered response. His silvery stare lingered on her, peering awhile as if expecting her to burst aflame with boils or some pox. But her eyes only turned form the tortured sun, being so recently unaccustomed to it. She found the cover of clouds not bleak enough to block the most adamant rays of the darling star, seeking quiet of color to match her mood.


    ¡°My lady,¡± Valdred tipped his hat and let flow his frost tipped locks in a gallant bow, ¡°your friends have asked for insight on what keeps your ridden. If you would permit me the indiscretion of applying my vocation?¡±


    Lucilla¡¯s blue spheres ignited with tides that broke her sea, lulled by grieving sirens, by the thunder of discontent. A faint lark fluttered through her lips. ¡°Your habit as an alienist, Mister Hallo, or an alchemist-physic? If the latter, I beg you to have brought mercury. That should work a wonder. Or perhaps formaldehyde is suitable for the ignoble pose you find me? The wrappings of my bed should suffice for the gauze of my sarcophagus. Only, free my ¡®friends¡¯ from their service first so that they may elope from my burial.¡±


    The doctor chuckled woefully as he leaned to appraise her pulse. The cadence of her primal chamber seemed slowed only by despondency. Tilting his ear to study her rhythm, Dr Halloway glanced toward the aperture in anticipation. But it was far too early, and no symptoms of his worry blared from heaven¡¯s trumpets. ¡°& if I do come as the former, Lady? For a matter of the mind?¡±


    ¡°You may find all suspicions thrust upon my womanly nature by worldly men ¨C our hysterics, our brooding, our insatiable appetites for mysticism ¨C confirmed by your bias. Your enlightened wisdom should seek me as a victim to my wilding lure, the curse of our mother Eve.¡± Lucilla was at least spirited enough to whittle her tongue to sardonic appeal. ¡°Only, prithee, do not fetter me to the fool who tried to bind my hand. Bury me far from his asylum.¡±


    Valdred smiled, knowing her vibrant scathing as a portend of lucidity which would¡¯ve been pilfered by any great plague, and the one he most feared. ¡°Fair spirit, do not disserve your nature by casting it in the mold designed by dead men and their heirs. You are more than any mania or sanguine melancholy.¡± He retreated from his observation of Lucilla to pull a vial & tongue from his coat, relying now on his elegant cane for support. He tapped the serum and its needle and offered Lucilla the subtlest of winks, one which might be interpreted more as a spasm of age. ¡°Master Tidwell claims to know you well enough to surmise a mere sleep may restore you. I shan¡¯t intercede without your permission, though we would observe only a taste of medicinal repose. Is this sedative kind enough to your eye?¡±


    ¡°I will try anything to shush their prattling.¡± Lucilla sighed and the winds encroached on the window with weepy tears through the armada of welkin vessels. ¡°Whatever repose is in that thread, I insist tis more than necessary. Let it be enough to ease my way across the glaring threshold.¡±


    Gravel jostled in his humor as Valdred shook his head. ¡°That would be breaking a great contract with my oath. As much as it pains me to refuse a lady, I cannot indulge this fevered want to fly into death.¡± He propelled himself up with his staff, his wounded smile towering over Lucilla. Her eyes flittered with a greater fear of being jabbed with his protracted nose than the translucence in his serum. ¡°That being said, none of us our immune to mistakes. If chance and fallibility conspire. Our age of reason (and the glory of progress from vagabond fens to high walls & bright towers) is only so ¡®enlightened¡¯ as to see one corner of our quarters. We illume what we wish to believe and chase all else back to the shadow of old fears, and those instincts we long to deny.¡±


    ¡°Then, I shan¡¯t deny my longing for rest.¡± Lucilla tucked back the frilled lace along her forearm then reclined in cadaverous pose. ¡°I need not maim breath to speak the reason.¡±


    Valdred nodded. With the tourniquet clamped to her, the gentleman¡¯s solution quickened in her vein. ¡°Gird yourself for the phantasms that stalk our rest.¡±


    The fang breached Lucilla¡¯s skin, dripping its venom into her rivers. Arctic tremors followed the needle¡¯s bite, yet a summer¡¯s darkness soon pursued and washed the cold. The jaw of this current holding her by the nape subverted sound as it bathed her in languid broth. Storm-light broke as the sky¡¯s navy brought bolt & black sails to conquer the waning day. She sank into the dusk within. Drowned in infinity, wreathed not by dreamless seas but a writhing nadir.


    ...


    True dark persevered as the boisterous tempest spent the bulk of its fury. The brunt of the assault passed on, satisfied with besieging Gorgotha¡¯s heights with a few inches of rain, though reserves remained to herald triumph. The howling scavengers of the air were aplenty. Even without the gloating ballistae of lightning, the profaners of peace & slumber ravished the scoria of starlight and snuffed all stubborn luminance of man¡¯s make. Any insomniac fool, drunk sod, or startled resident who dared their eyes to survey the night would find no aurum glow from lampposts or the dangling torches of street wardens. Only the gloss reflective from nocturnal hunters and the lucidum layered the black gulf. Pews of teeth packed the midnight corridors, inching toward the skin of tortured dreams and bleeding hearts with every groaning pulse.


    In the apex of fell hours and the court of gloom, the hunter grinned at the proud curves & wet pores of the Duskmont manor. Wraiths whipped the building as they did all bodies caught outside the comfort of a proper stone hearth, but their lashings only teased him, the prowler. Bloodlessly the windlassing currents offered the pale shadow a smattering of slaps and licks to spur his ascent. As mist & claw he scaled the wall, leaping onto a dreary garden bough that shook off heaven¡¯s excess tears but not the thirsting body of predation perched on its limbs. Eyes akin to a strix chased entry into this home where his heart slept yet no avian hoot offered accompaniment. The odorous saliva outflowing from the corners of that snout belonged to a beast that was as saurian as lupine.


    Breathy gales resuscitated grievous liturgies, carrying the banner of the storm through chittering arms. Each branch, an instrument; every stone, a drum to hammer; all banshees snared in the necrotic filaments, sopranos to lead the choir, caroling bane. Centered in their sway, the shape ¨C in wan tragedy of human likeness ¨C hung from its brief roost and hummed the prime part of the night¡¯s hungering melody. With moonlight banished to a memory and the sordid dew of passing storms whose absence was threaded by yet more fog, unhallowed light sprang in the gulches. Vespers hemmed the dark with the glow of salivating eyes and lunate lilt. Earth¡¯s unguarded creatures were lulled to their cradles, pretending innocence to shiver off the lion¡¯s roar woven into the burgeoning brass in the hunter¡¯s serenade.


    With a basilisk¡¯s eye, Harrow stripped each stone and muscle with a command in his glare. Under the hum of his longing, he surveyed the ambling obstacles inside the manor. The servile case was stripped of their muscle to reveal their auras and the weakness he would call to. A splayed tongue slipped through the alabaster halls and beckoned the loitering heads to hear his hex forced upon them. Sleep¡­ Suggested the gorgon glance, peering past stone and mortar. The eye washed the marrow of those it set upon. Dream.


    Thus, the souls his heightened sense uncovered were sundered by the craving for a Lethean rest. With a wave of the fiend¡¯s talons the wind¡¯s evanescent repose was broken and reprised by impish lullabies, plucked from the bushels of the sleepers¡¯ subconscious. Though their arteries felt the violations of a lurking strigoi¡¯s study, the enraptured servants fell to the cravings that conquered them and those dreams they ached to embrace. Forgetting their vigil, the faulty sentinels allowed that perverse eye to persist. Fixations of that preternatural predation gravitated to their mistress, shorn of her heart¡¯s unrest by an unnatural solution, drooling through sallow orbs that replaced the crippled lune.


    Awake, my heart!


    ...


    A power surpassing the sweetling drip of her doctor¡¯s venomous needle lured Lucilla from her synthetic coma. Even in the dreams before her awakening, visions of a friend ¨C and far more through the glint in that buried face ¨C given to the grave for her in waking existence found furrows into her sunken canvas. Ectoplasmic threads conned her into memories unfulfilled. Though Luci humored these phantasms of the heart, the pulse they traveled bore an unnatural cadence. She was drawn to these feelings by hands of ether, and yet, unsealing her eyes against the pressure of the residing sedative, Lucilla was greeted by her forlorn lover¡¯s face winking at her. From every corner and gross umbra cast from the furniture in her bedchamber, Arden¡¯s visage congealed and procreated; springing from one angle into the next until she swam in that basin of blending features. Fingers from the bower beyond the pane scratched glass, inviting her into a dream of wanton lucidity should only she answer the rap at her door to the undying world.


    Darts landed in the lady¡¯s pressure points. Ephemeral lesions jabbed fresh hairs from her spine, propelling each fiber to the window. Bristled feelers, from ankle to cerebellum, sang for the embrace of what looked like moonlight behind those foul curtains. What longing was this, tilting her heels for the company of the dead? By her gait and those hobbling footsteps, our Lucilla might¡¯ve been confused for an unsteady member of the undead, were there any living archons to grind their stares in judgement against her. Yet salvation bloomed for the maiden, taking shape in a sliver through the drapes.


    A dead moon hung in darkness between the covetous stars and the envious dark between them. But beyond that dearth of celestial light, an incarnadine iridescence devoured the pitch of twilight in its witchery. Luminescence emerged from the sunless shawl, reborn by the waxen beams of Arden¡¯s mien. Was it Arden? Could it be? Yet, he looked like a hanged man; suspended as a blind creature in the cavernous maw of that black hour. Against all plausibility, Lucilla lunged toward belief in that inverted crescent of his smile, knowing his fervor as true.


    The beacon in his welcoming smirk summoned her even as his figure hung from the branch. The din of far-off thunder and delayed flares of sliver-blue shattered the awoken woman¡¯s eye. In the splintering of gloss and dread, his shape inverted. A waking precision in the thread of night¡¯s hand sewed his likeness into form, misting the door into her hearth. Arden, pronounced by mist and thimble of silver, appeared all too human in the parched gloom just past her sill¡­


    Ritual breaths and the symbols of nature¡¯s flow snagged on the waylaying eyes that gripped Lucilla. Those dreams that borrowed into her bosom orbited toward this specter of Arden, smiling at her from the stairs of her arbor and offering a life surpassing all decadence, sorrow, and splendor through the vow his lips hissed to say. A gibbous will, that was not her own ¨C yet made do of it through her frail thew ¨C swelled up inside her. She swayed under the burning itch that ravaged her pulse until compulsion bid her nails to tackle the glass and break it through the softest welcome in the storm. Twirling before the unconscious ceremony that was asked of her, Lucilla let in the stream of moonlight beaming from a lover¡¯s silhouette.


    Adrenaline, and that spectral appeal to her core, washed her sinew of lethargy. Lucilla¡¯s eyes, once yearling crescents dragged by lines of spiritual exhaustion, bloomed to engorged moons. Terror distended her pupils; a caress across her nerves widened her iris. New hues radiated brilliance that meshed regret with desire, flickering through her marrow, splintering her course until she was staked before Arden¡¯s changeling glow. His apparition eclipsed her breath. Her lungs tested their cages, squeezing melancholy to make way for flight ¨C or else to recede and cease.


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    ¡°Will you let some moonlight in?¡± Asked the apparition.


    To Lucilla, Arden looked immeasurably more beautiful in this half-ghost phase than he had in her earthly knowledge of him in life. The withering effects of his spirits (and the other ointments for the soul & liver) had been polished away. No creases of age, stress, want, folded his luminance. He was taller than ever, as handsome as a mountain and offered just as steep a climb. To journey along the heights his hand promised ¨C what impossible dreams, what fields to find above the air ¨C hinted also at the chasms and the gnawing gulf, more certain than the summit.


    ¡°What are you?¡± A hoary whisper inquired for her.


    ¡°Your friend, of course. Your servant if you wish. Yet so much more.¡±


    ¡°Will you answer how you have come, and why? This hour is most unchaste.¡±


    ¡°I come to adore¡­you & your virtue. To abjure my faults as well¡­ What better hour than midnight and this new moon to reinvent ourselves. To be naked of old vices and the fetters of our day.¡± A gentleman¡¯s affected charm blended with a rakish element in the tilt of Arden¡¯s voice. His words rumbled low but rose over the trailing sirens in the resurgent winds. A tone richer than aurum and smoother than eastern silks dressed Lucilla¡¯s ear. ¡°Allow me to illuminate a hope beyond the mystery I must arrive in. Only, let me speak these revelations to your lips. At least without this glass and your fear between us.¡±


    ¡°You renounce the grave? You truly are a sorcerer then? Yet¡­ there was never an Aldred. You are Arden, the same man who-¡±


    ¡°Died for you? Yes.¡±


    ¡°Do not place the anchor of your coffin on me. You died for boisterous ¡®chivalry¡¯ in a dispute more fit for a schoolyard than any court. You bloodied your heart by offering it the wound. For your pride, not for me.¡± Lucilla¡¯s scowl fell, her spite shambled. Erosion conquered what maimed her heart, replaced by the impossible light now smiling at her. ¡°You admit you died! How is it I converse with the dead? By what power does your shade appear?¡±


    ¡°A miracle, of course. One that can be shared.¡± Arden pressed closer to his lovely, shivering inquisitor. The curtain between his face and hers was thinner than its fabric, more transient than an insect¡¯s life. Lightning, siphoned from the retreating horizon, flushed his eyes. Electric vines stemmed from his hue and shuffled a nest of fireflies in his pupils, reaching in their dance to shine for and into Lucilla. ¡°A brilliant ¡®shade¡¯, am I not?¡±


    When she did not answer, this spectral caller folded velvet into his smile. ¡°I am not of death. She is a whisper in the dark before she opens wide to scream all silence. I bring light. I bear inoculation against old shadows. Let me honor your art. Let it last and grow beyond the boundaries of any hour. Let them pass before us and be freed! We can have wings to span forever. We can shed all shackles, all sickness.¡± The captured traces of welkin fire leapt from his eye into hers. Nocturnal gloss waxed animal intent and a lust deeper than soul. ¡°Be more than a witness to this wonder. May I enter? Might I kiss your ear with this word? Come, put your palm to my breast and know what vitality - what vision - courses still. Bright with a heart to shine the way.¡±


    ¡°Perhaps I would tarry with this phantom until drawn breaks the storm wall.¡± Lucilla let out a hail of half-spirits, borne from the bed of nightmares coupling in her lungs & festering through her faint silk. In her sigh a windfall of tremulous vespers misted the aperture, catching the dew of longings, fears, and prayers for this cursed fate to pass. ¡°Would I then see this friend¡¯s true mien in the ruling star? Nay, I think I should see how this falseness is exiled by the sun¡¯s Triumph.¡±


    ¡°I would be with you even then. Yet our ghosts would both prove restless.¡± Arden whispered his refrain. Stars plummeted, splashing verdant fire, through the darkling depths of his iris. ¡°Let longing lie and let me in. We will dream without burying our heads under Night''s flightless feathers.¡±


    His eye asked entry for the rest of him. A gentle if reticent nod from Lucilla, wearier than firm in the motion, granted passage. Fibrous mist devoured the handsome revenant then hissed his essence through the cracked aperture. A fully hemmed & muscled Arden reemerged beside the chamber¡¯s host. Incandescence rippled along his form as the fogling spray dispersed. A faint, quasi-mechanical pulse thumped an off-beat march while his chest imposed on her. Harrow crossed the gap between her sleepy materia and the gulf that evoked him. ¡°Thank you, lady of majesty. Let this light you¡¯ve allowed burnish wisdom to defeat the dourness of our day.¡±


    The shadows over the moon saturated their claim. The umbral conquest pronounced a growling fever from gestations in the lunar womb, where legions of stillborn fiends skittered to scrape open the wounds in the aether and burrow into new hosts. Lucilla could suffer no more tremors; could summon no shock from her nearly vanquished arteries. She stood her ground, renouncing shivers, though perhaps her poise was more from paralysis than pure-hearted defiance.


    Frozen by the rime coating Arden¡¯s arrival, Lucilla¡¯s eyes traversed the visitant¡¯s trek while her body remained in statuesque vigil. The breath aroused with his words came forth from no natural lung, yet the astral wind beckoned to ferment wine in her veins. With its kiss came the ripe splash of dreams she never called to before but now bathed her in longing to defeat any borne from thunder in her breast. A fount of vibrations cascaded from her cerebellum, through her core, down to her thighs to her toes, then took wing on rapture that leashed her sensation to threads reverberating beyond what the body should know.


    ¡°Speak clear. For I am perched upon a bed of exhaustion.¡± Ectoplasm trailed the Lady¡¯s voice. Cessations of sound swallowed all but the creaking of bone & gale-tempered stone in the undertow beneath her curt but fumbled breath.


    But Arden¡¯s answer was not so brisk and easy. He loomed near, scintillations over his glassy stars, screening her temper. ¡°Oh, is it the bed? Exhaustion alone?¡± A presumptuous talon nicked her chin, bringing her brooding mien to face his ¨C where promethean torches pitched excitable embers. ¡°They have you ¡®medicated¡¯. For what affliction? The ills of not being able to rest, to know comfort, in their world of dreamless obligation and callow ambitions?¡±


    Bulbous lunes glared back at him, though she did not yet recoil. Arden stepped further. ¡°They would poison you to befit their wants, their ideal place in their mausoleum ¨C where they can scratch an epitaph for their perfect dove. Mourned & misplaced! O, let them have their drowsy, mundane, claims to dust. Won¡¯t you embrace me? Taste nectar from the night¡¯s basin. Let our dreams, our passions, carry us to the sky. Be borne up past trifling fetters by our own power.¡±


    ¡°How can you claim to know my dreams? - or my sorrows?¡± Lucilla stepped away from this strange house guest. In her meagre flight, she stumbled on clutter by her headboard, and Arden caught her with fluid ease. Looking up, startled by her drop and its prompt end by his hands, she heard flushed questions escape her. ¡°Would you chain my wings ¨C this sky you offer ¨C to where you wish to fly?¡± A torturous beat, languishing & melting in the now broiling touch, before the next. ¡°What is the price, the tithe?¡±


    ¡°Turn your head from me and you will see naught but shadows. Sure, you can weave little illusions from the dark, but they will bring you no lasting light. All I ask is one kiss. Taste passion; freedom. I shan¡¯t press you, tis your choice alone.¡±


    A lion¡¯s strength was in his grasp, yet careful precision and what might be confused for gallantry gently lifted Lucilla up with feline grace. By her own willpower Luci refrained from falling forward with her nocturnal guide¡¯s propulsion, hanging there half between. ¡°How should I know my own heart anymore, when all this death, all this decay of mind & spirit abounds in every face ¨C every angle of the world? Why trust even a taste-?¡±


    Rogue waves from the visitant¡¯s oceanic Will swept Lucilla¡¯s thought from her tongue. Hypnotic flambeaus burst melodies from the winding contractions & expansions of those deep-set eyes. She slipped along an abyssal incline. Though the plunge was bottomless, the bridge of infinity inverted and sent her soul to a plane above the welkin crown. The lacerations and triumphs of existence threaded her pit with black, resplendent symphonies. The immolating deluge of worlds, surpassing the little garden of the one she¡¯d been rooted to, fed nourished seeds to become forests before ripping them from the earth. All this while she remained afoot, hobbling in that purgatory of the moment, standing -floating - where she was before. She floated above herself while the words of this fallen envoy offered ascendance through his passions alone.


    ¡°Trussst the flow of that pulse, your heart¡¯s angle. Know a taste of freedom from death & pain.¡±


    Was it Arden¡¯s push or her own abrupt yearning, enflamed by a whisp that blushed stark need, that lured her to accept? By a force invisible to her, Lucilla¡¯s lips leapt to meet his. In that kiss, and the bite it bloomed to, she tasted sweetling iron and the warm wetness of blood. Her own?


    Arden¡¯s hand across her back drew adumbrations of daemons and avatars of unborn pleasures from the silt of the chamber¡¯s dusk. The carmine wind serving as his breath, tracing her rhythm, and winding along her neck, banished the doldrums. A rapturous promise curled around her with his tongue, leaning to offer hers & entwine. Yet an infinitude of shadows rustled under the blanketing joys on offer through this pulseless epiphany, belying what shape she could become should she indulge this kiss. The blood shared between their lips pooled into her pith, implying the cost in that tender iron: to make a martyr of her flesh & sear the soul to swim the eternal river.


    Perdition & paradise dwelt as one within him. The deathless suitor showed Lucilla to vistas in the glare where his hope thrived. A continent of verdant wonders; vast mysteries beckoning to be explored beyond; misty seams between land & air, where ether joined the void; a brush of glories & gore that sprouted bushels of miracles across the palette. But she knew the toll demanded to cross through the window. The scale supplanted her conception, and she wavered at the threshold of fathoms uncharted by the human mind. Yet, to flee these limitations?


    ¡°To follow you,¡± Lucilla warned herself, faintly pushing against Arden, ¡°is to renounce the earth. Another kiss and Gaia will declare me a vagrant, an exiled-¡±


    ¡°An interloper? No, no.¡± Honeyed lunes dripped from this interloper¡¯s sight. His sheen suggested a realm above what flesh could not touch, one which would never wane. An invitation curled on his lips: ¡°All Gaia¡¯s corners will be yours to explore. All heaven will be yours to draw down into your art. Artful beauty that needs no audience to be known, to manifest from every sumptuous fold. We can watch the stars die and bear their incandescence back through affection that can last, without being passed to some heir. Why lay down and surrender to the soil? No, the air is yours to win. With just one draught of the depth that outlasts these winds.¡±


    Were it not for the serpentine crack in the lightning of Arden¡¯s iris, Lucilla might¡¯ve been fooled by so grandiose a proposition. But bitter was that glint. The chasms between his radiant confidence fallowed flumes that drenched the trenches lying under the heights he promised. Sulfur soiled that lasting taste of red iron. ¡°Can you cease drawing on my breath? The wyrm writhes in your eye. I am so¡­ vexed already. Please, but a moment to consider.¡±


    He allowed no such reprieve. His passion would not lie dormant, harrowing her yield.


    The dewdrops of their kiss congealed; crimson pleating airs and teasing pores till they pled for more nourishment. Lucilla¡¯s palate lapped venom from the loving wounds, pouring the trace of blood. That test of affections, that blip of judgement which brought bliss & poison, trickled serenades onto her tongue. Threads from that bite ached to solidify as one. Her veins craved for the fangs to liberate them; to bleed their rain. ¡°You are an outlaw to earth. How can one even bear the hubris to deny the goddess?¡± Confusion pushed from her mouth, pressing down her rushing pace. ¡°Only horror can outlast the hours nature has given her children for their-¡±


    ¡°To wait is to rot. To be forever latent until that potential is eaten by the grave, or else despoiled to serve idle phantasy of ¡®modernity¡¯. Be witness to miracles unknown to civilization¡¯s cycles, their faiths, their sciences.¡± Arden entangled his hand in hers, resting together over Luci¡¯s bosom. ¡°You shall be your own goddess. Let heaven adore you! Tear all illusions away. Bare your brilliance, show that luster more tireless than the moon. Let the sky be clad in you.¡±


    Arden¡¯s finger became a talon, tearing through the threads of her nightgown. Lace and silk slipped low, stabbed by desire¡¯s thorn, exposing her shoulder. ¡°You need no ornaments for your beauty.¡± Enflamed claws removed more ribbons over Lucilla¡¯s waxing beauty. Wellsprings fizzled through the unveiling course of her naked virtue. Worship shimmered in his eyes to behold her. He windlassed the threads of her night-skirt, tearing away cumbersome cloth to bathe the pristine warmth hidden along her legs & hips in his reverence. ¡°Do not drape that moonlight in murk.¡±


    Arden¡¯s conjured luminance brought knives to the shadows of the chamber. Slits & serrations from his aura tailored the stifled dusk inside to serve as wings. Lucilla felt the membranous pinions wrap behind her, reeling her closer to this irradiated angel. She lunged, half to leap from the slithering abrasions of that umbral mesh. Reaching up to wrench plumes from his unfurling spread, her arms punctured only a gauzy haze. Then gravity, and an inclement force to rival it, bid her claws to sink low. Her grip faltered, rending nothing palatable. Keen nails, among the last of her defenses, plunged into the sorcerer¡¯s shoulders. A feckless motion. Doubling back then only to slip forward. A sharp hold clenched her waist, eliciting a gasp, the phantom pulled her in.


    ¡°Stop. This is evil. Tis- Madness in your eye¡­ I cannot endure another hour with you¡­ let alone an endless night¡­ You¡­ and Vinc-ent¡­ you are perjurers of love. Woe to my House. I¡¯ve not met the one I can trul-¡± Lucilla¡¯s final fervor to fight ¨C to remain untarnished ¨C arrived too late. Her ardency was to no avail at the end, futile against the plunging of his elongating canines through her glistening skin and the spirit he sought. The threshold ruptured. With the deluge of her essence, decanted for the lamprey, demoniac delight adjoined with gnawing pain. Soul afire, immolations of her cells brushed the wake of her hollowing tide.


    What was wan became cherry, then bled all hue to pallor. Euphoria churned in the burning anguish of a rapturous hell. Luci¡¯s fingers flailed, calling to him and repelling him in tortuous motion. Her body curved, arching to indulge simmering ardor. Her limbs were not her own, possessed by more than lunacy. Her hands; her shivers; her moans; all corners of her form, peeking from her sheared gown, summoned his head to her breast. Leaching her soul from the wound rose flushing the paleness over her heart. From those glaring craters where sat the basilisk stars the creature¡¯s sway asked more of her.


    ¡°You will taste ash only a moment. Then you will be born again unto your own star. What wonder you would hide from this world. Do not keep it wretched by shunning your true form for ¡®modesty¡¯, o gorgeous star.¡± Arden voiced effulgence through the streams still left to Lucilla.


    Her mouth, agape, made silent entreaty for more. Arden sealed her lips with his, seeping libations back to her gullet. The draft of their bloody kiss exhumed the woman¡¯s vitality and altered her organs. A velvet breeze rode in on the torrent through her arteries, offering a balm of elation atop the changeling miasma burning up her inner tissue.


    Lucilla hung on the tip of the harrower¡¯s teeth. Suspended in his maw, she dangled betwixt the trenches of being. Her rose turned sallow, awaiting resurrection by sanguine miracle. Arden suckled animation from her fiber, relishing the skin of her spirit as it succumbed to his ravenous power.


    The protracted gasp, that gulch between knowledge of being and the alien country beyond the air, widened. In the serpent¡¯s unhinged maw, Luci¡¯s essence fled and forgot. Lethean waves; opaque tides of Limbo; she was strewn before the gates (of the realm forbidden to mortal conceit). Ignited libido had led the way, yet that force too now soaked the envoy¡¯s fangs along the tide to entropy. All suspicion, all quarrels, all grievances & exultations of bodily mind: mutilated by gusts of the dwelling void.


    His snared star stretched out in courtship with the abyss, Arden fulfilled his pact. Reveries in flesh, her substance he gorged. Harrow had crossed that threshold where she now dwelt, where she now died. A new epoch pronounced itself through fresh perforations ¨C the first in his age of resurrection. The essential brine surged back for her, ripping her from the basin between and washing her in the salts of undying seas. An intoxicated beam broke loose from him. Frost shivered before incandescence burst. Oblivion lashed tendrils from this hecatomb within him, yet the revenant smiled glee. For the sacrifice of vitae and the enfeeblement which followed was a passing pittance compared to the pursuit of resplendent eternity. To rend his tendons and bleed his power was but the joy of creation, and worth all pain to bring her to this place, this seat beside him within his deathless chasm.


    The void yawned. The shadows hardened. Twilight reigned. Ashen billows, the mist of a soul¡¯s conflagration, allowed the only light. The heiress of the manor groaned vapors, relinquishing her earthen clime to the grasp of Fury¡¯s nails at her thighs and by her nape.


    Rain showered trinkets through the window, but silence had been ordained. Droplets of sorrow burst from the firmament, weeping for her children; deaf to all but stygian undertows. From weakness to sinew to supplant the grave¡¯s dominion. Saturn smiled. The old Father, ringed by malice, churned revolutions that upset seas and drowned the sundered manor with his eye. His glare professed omens to prevail over the tortured dark, piercing air to count & observe any outlaws to His withering declaration.

 Chapter VIII

    Chapter VIII


    Three chimes. Perhaps there¡¯d been a fourth. If there had been another, the gray man did not mark it. The witching knell battered his drums, Gorgotha¡¯s ritual alarum jeering until the echo of the hour decayed.  The figure of solitude ironed his focus, unwounded by the derision of the deepening night. That once scholarly ear, subsumed by the scorn of the small hours, checked his arms. With that assuring clink he steeled himself against the enfevered entropies hailed above.


    Doctor Halloway marched on through the dank streets. The dourness of his task was etched on his face. Gallows¡¯ knots under his eyes and the furrows of stress clenched his granite, knowing his desperation. His work this night had been fruitless thus far. The storm staggered his progress. He¡¯d nothing to show for his pursuit and overlong absence from his vigil here, save for a new wound. The dull ache of that laceration had been kept from growing worse by treatment more rapid & searing than the sore¡¯s potential spread. Still the fresh scar festered as a sign of his recklessness and the sentient gloom that endangered so many of the blissfully unaware.


    The silver-maned shade gritted his canines and vowed his purpose. He¡¯d no time to brood on his inability to divine & destroy the hydra¡¯s heart. The forces of old night were recruiting; he could not stomach allowing another soul to fall to the coven¡¯s hypogeal lure. Yet their song layered malefic seeds in the lull of the wind. Had he arrived too late? No. He could not humor such a defeating thought when battle called him, and one siren assuredly remained ahead.


    Old Tidwell had not been fleet enough with the key-mold he¡¯d offered, so Valdred made do with his own means. He tapped his cane, shook rain from his hat, ruffled dampness from his coat, and drew tools of precision to allow discreet entry into the benighted manor.


    Sleep, akin to interment, constricted upon the helots of the mansion. Each servant, posed as cadavers, draped furniture and even floors across the corners of the Duskmont estate. The help having fallen prey to a domineering slumber. No snores or penitent aches of poor dreams were emitted from any one of them. Their caste remained muffled in contrast to the groans of the old foundations they abided in, encased in solemn quietude with what may become their tomb if it was not already. Mummified in repose at their posts; denied semblance of breath. He had no time to peruse their ailment. The source of their pale and breathless hex (and the shadow over their patron) must be staked and splayed before attending to this confounding affliction.


    Folding his mind to meditations, each step emptied Valdred of thought. He moved with purpose, though he draped it in the silken darkness beneath his being. He allowed himself no traceable echo, engaged in the practice of death. An active meditation, where the infinite quaked through the absence of any feeling which would chain him. His heart still beat, and his breath flowed, but to the eye of malice he was just another backdrop on this little stage of being. Cloaked from the sanguine beast, his own reflections, & the fears they may betray, the weathered master navigated on unconscious understanding of the layout until his feet carried him to the Lady¡¯s threshold.


    Valdred tapped the heel of his stave against hollowed tile. His heartbeat burst with the sound, announcing himself gently enough. The chamber door was sealed yet Lucilla was not alone. He knew she was attended by company, for the foul suitor glared at him with eyes that chastised. Orbs of ire seared him through the wood & its ornaments. The shadow behind shuffled with unease, sending vermin skittering in a lunatic hysteria through forgotten pathways; in haste to flee or to burrow through. Throngs of unseen pests poked out tails & antennae and grubbed their feelers in wicked applause for the meal they might scavenge from this greater fiend¡¯s claim.


    The thing¡¯s reaction was troubled. Slowed, perhaps, by a heavy gauze of confusion and ¨C Valdred prayed ¨C that one last defense he¡¯d planted. That somber medicine which he¡¯d sown into the rivers which the dusk-fiend was drawn here for could yield something besides guilt.


    The door remained shut, even as the thing inside approached. Encumbered boots dragged down the hall behind. Sulfurous mist wafted from this entrance, dispersing with a pace more rabid and deteriorating than the rats below the cellars. Valdred adopted the ruse of surprise, allowing the splash of genuine unnerve to water his expression. As a bewildered old doctor, stammering in the wake of uneasy quiet, he turned to face his fellow actor in this drama. Prepared for a duel of facades, and burning at the crossroads of rival animism, the pruned guest awaited his cue.


    A stubborn ghost, adamant in conforming its phantasmal thew to a body replete with the carrion of others, stalked the way to his crux. Pupils whittled their glints to daggers; the fiend¡¯s eyes bore the rapture of all unclean spaces, the chained torrents which would devour pain & beauty in indiscriminate maw.


    Valdred anchored his weight with his cane, swaying meekly, as the visitant stepped forth. A sconce between them reared up with incendiary glow. By the flare he recognized the face that swam through the alley of ornate midnight. With concerted effort, Val pulled relevant knowledge of what the figure once was as a man from the annals of memory. Guarding the most toothsome of these features he recalled with the din & rush of a natural, if awkward, attempt to place a name with a face.


    The vessel the shadow seized had once been a sorcerer among aspirant physics. One who¡¯d been hampered by a nauseous need for less than medicinal supplements to his diet. That urge for bounding spirits may well have endured the man¡¯s profaned rebirth. His longing for blooded libations may outpour past the ghoulish needs of his pilfered body, to seek ever more draft from the wells on tap from whichever vein his sight may tackle.


    Valdred sheathed his solution and coughed into a handkerchief. ¡°Sir? Are you a servant of our lady?¡±


    ¡°I have served her more than any other. Alas, our bright host is yet recovering.¡± Spoke the pale dusk. The man shined his face for this intruder¡¯s perusal. He was paler than the northern star but vital. Handsome rigor ran from his ageless bust through the lean muscle preserved under a midnight cloak. All creases of mortal stress and the maimed aether that ruled their mother city were exiled from his countenance. Opulent was his voice, a militant whisper that rumbled with the veteran authority of an anointed member of the house of lords. Molten gold surged from the color of his stare. ¡°Just who goes here, asking after her?¡±


    ¡°Just an old physic. Doctor Halloway. A new servant to the health of Duskmont propriety. Come to assure the Lady¡¯s safety from her sullen spell.¡± Valdred stumbled as he lifted a hand from his cane to shake this noble shadow¡¯s bough. A keen grip snagged the pulse about his wrist, catching him.


    ¡°You should look after your own health all the same, doctor. These nights are driven with quite the pox ¨C and worse elements in the air.¡± The night¡¯s chamberlain tested the mettle of the man as his claw-fingered branch wrapped about the forearm. ¡°I recognize you, doctor. Even sent letters to see if we might conjoin our minds in effort to trap and abolish Gorgotha¡¯s sickness. Forgive this strange meeting.¡±


    ¡°Strange indeed.¡± Valdred pulled back from the hunter¡¯s clasp, meeting no resistance. Each were assured by the broken farce of a shake that neither had arms hidden under sleeve, nor secret coif bearing the ensign of war upon the other. Yet this pale courtier before him needed no armor nor steel when his tools were in his teeth and spear-tips served his hand. ¡°And you, gentleman? Just who is this guest of Lucilla¡¯s patronage?¡±


    ¡°Ar-Ah.¡± The shadow stumbled, splintering its verbal gait. ¡°Aldred Hallow.¡±


    ¡°A strange name. Fitting, for such uncanny company. Still, I fear I¡¯ve met with thee before. Perhaps in more than one life.¡± The doctor fiddled with a bottle of solution, letting the pause in the air slurp up tension and douse any more belligerent assumption from his posturing. ¡°Aldred? The provocateur from the ball. Yet what can your reason be for remaining here at the devil¡¯s hour?¡±


    For all the luster he leeched, Arden¡¯s countenance blistered with befuddlement. He was flustered, not as quick as the sustenance a pure feast should have made him. ¡°Like you, I am here to assure Lucilla¡¯s wellbeing. As I am under her roof she is blanketed by my aegis, my knightly vow.¡±


    ¡°Is that so? How queer to hear of a Harrow being christened by any order of chivalry. No offense, I merely jest at the repute of your kin ¨C though I am certain your house has been unfairly befouled before the ears of the courts.¡± Valdred shrugged. For a flash he seemed almost senescent, as forgetful as forgiving. Yet the silver in his eye spoke contrary to him owning only a dull wit. ¡°Have you kept her pure against your own gallantry? From what noble vices hunger under that protection?¡±


    Silence. A moribund compulsion invaded the air. The wordless breath from Aldred gained a dreadful proponent in the gorgon eye that towered over his offender. That cyclopean star glared monolithic fire, freezing any insult the old man could insist. The specter leapt from the craters it lodged in, furrowing into the physic¡¯s cognition till the order appeared to be woven by his own unconscious. The cascades of alien intent were undeniable however, for the thrust of this order blared draconic lurs to this surplus guest, watching himself awash by the will.


    When recognition returned to Valdred it was jagged and unkind. His meditations fumbled, the stoicism he pretended to wield had shattered in his hand, showing splinters. The fiend was not so depleted as the doctor¡¯s haste had relied upon. He bit down on his pride, bleeding a small lesson from the lesion. He could not let his resentment for how this night had gone ¨C nor those bled in the past - maim his caution. Once the square drawn for dueling facades dissolved, he¡¯d need to be steel to face the claws this foe would whet for his weapon.


    ¡°O!¡± The imposter in Harrow bloated the vapors between them with tremulous odes to his good nature. ¡°I am doing great work, my reverent peer. Supernal progress on the inversion of our city¡¯s suffering. I could still use your hand in penning the miasma if your mind is keen enough to aid this task. Yet the knell of ambition has summoned me forth. Why cure one blight when you banish death forever? Aberrations that are unbending before the black breath, returning to its shape ¨C though we might find it distasteful¡­ They can be utilized to provide a synthesis, an equilibrium. A cure for poison from the serpent¡¯s own fangs. Let them be inoculated from all pains the earth can conjure.¡±


    ¡°I wonder how our means may stray. Perhaps too distant though our goals appear near. Alas,¡± the withered scholar wheezed a faint conjecture, ¡°the Lady¡¯s health is my immediate concern.¡±


    ¡°She is kept from the knowledge of Death. My life is in this oath, the fervor I speak is true and lasting.¡± Harrow dismissed such cumbersome discourse, pointing down the hall. ¡°If you are not bereaved of rest enough, allow us awhile to discuss these endeavors we might share.¡±


    And is she defended against your carnal knowledge? Halloway nearly inquired. ¡°¡¯Twas something our lady said last that spurned my professional complacency.¡± Valdred persisted, digging nails into his arching temple to draw clarity to douse an elder¡¯s puzzlement. ¡°Her zeal at the prospect of the medicinal dose I offered not ¡®being enough to carry her across the threshold¡¯. I feared her sickness is of the soul. Infested with a grievous craving for-¡±


    ¡°Surely you can trust a gentleman¡¯s promise, sir. You must hear my pledge as a fellow healer. Her spirit is free of all harm.¡± Insisted the spite through Harrow¡¯s smile.


    ¡°Ah, I can barely trust my own eyes anymore. A grievance of age more than illness, I would wager.¡± Valdred tinkered with a case of bifocals from his coat. His hands trembled as if kindling friction amid an arctic bout while fiddling with them. ¡°You do place your heart and hers on the same altar, I¡¯ve no doubt. Sadly, time¡¯s talons hath stripped me of my ability to decipher chivalry from chagrin. Forgive me this. Only, I fear any ill minded night comers leeching her despondency. The afflictions of our day have legs as well as wings. Sickness oft brings corruption to be sorrow¡¯s bedfellow.¡±


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°Sir, this hour finds you most regrettably mad! You tread laps around an aimless base, slipping into rime with each step directed toward plague phantoms. Let¡¯s cleanse these dread vapors with a round, shall we?¡±


    ¡°Mad? Oh yes, perhaps. I try not to degrade myself more with drink, reserving spirits for worthy celebrations or as a mourning coat. But, well, on nights like these¡­¡± He hobbled forward. Then his cane impaled the floor, halting firmly to pivot and return to Lucilla¡¯s guarded chamber. ¡°But I¡¯d prefer to hammer my liver after having reasons for some small revelry. Just to see her breathing. To know my oath upheld.¡±


    Harrow refused Val this gesture. Errant tails from his bleak coat lashed mist to obscure the door.


    ¡°My lord, you are wounded!¡± The basilisk¡¯s iris licked the sown, odiously colored patch of skin beneath Valdred¡¯s tunic. A pale claw pressed over the sight, in pose of compassion & medical curiosity yet placed as if to impose the threat of tearing those threads open and allowing the ache to gorge on release.


    ¡°Ah, yes. Just some ruffian who forgot his wits ¨C but was sure to remember the knife he used to garner my attention.¡± The doctor¡¯s groaning laugh embellished the pain with a charred cough. ¡°Another symptom of our queen¡¯s great city in her ill turn, I fear. Though I do pity them more than any of these scratches that their fallen condition has caused them to turn on me. We are among those who have failed them, in our pretense of stewardship.¡±


    ¡°Do not tire yourself, doctor. Waste no more of your heart by walking these mad circles. Come,¡± the fiend gestured toward the regal solar some meters away from Lucilla¡¯s chamber, yet the rays of his intent never left Valdred. A lure, cast by belligerent gravity and tethered to that grave which refused to rot, hooked the man¡¯s eye with its commanding gleam. Sit¡­ Moonbeams burst from the study door, ajar. Though the space between the hinge and the stopper was slim, the room gaped at the pair, bidding company to shatter its fearful solitude. Rest.


    Vile incandescence brandished a path toward the chair through the solar. The specter of suggestion gained lungs from that scathing illumination. Valdred evaded meeting the ambling ray head on, tilting his eyes from the glow but bowing to the hovering order woven by it. He confessed to an abrupt weariness and asked his host to sit in good comfort.


    ¡°Please, after you. I am old and there is too little light here.¡± Valdred spoke in tired huffs, leaning heavy on his walking staff. ¡°Besides, my good knight, you seem to know your way around this house as though it were your own.¡±


    ¡°Tis just up there.¡± Harrow¡¯s bony index pointed the way with the light to chase the sconces. ¡°I will guard you from any fall your weariness may afford.¡± Vaporous gloom gained muscle to insist.


    The curious alienist slouched in the seat demanded of him, assuming the posture of defeat. A spurious oblivion siphoned all memories & doubtful fears for the lady from his stare. His eyes sat blankly, misted by the spirits splashing in his glass. His foe humored him with chatter in the black hour.


    Perhaps Harrow did not have the insatiable need to stomach another meal, or otherwise saw no worthy sustenance in this pruned doctor diluting his essence further with nervous libations. Lucidity returned to the elder. He condemned the gloom with an herbal cigar and the candlelight used to burn it. Emerald smoke stretched fingers from the corner of Valdred¡¯s lips, scratching at Harrow¡¯s cold mien and eclipsing his prattling maw.


    ¡°Have you any notes, theorems, or passing thoughts on the matter of our pale plague? I have toiled in my cousin¡¯s estate for nights that splay to seem like years.¡± The shadow rambled. ¡°I may have found some fruit but first wish your wisdom to set eyes and affirm it.¡±


    Valdred flicked ash from his wyrd embers. Planting bifocals to rest on the bridge of his nose, he made a show of stumbling through scattered notes from his coat. Charcoal chords flitted from his throat through the fog on his breath. ¡°I know not your exact means, yet I already have a quarrel with your founding theory. You implied before that you wish to immure death as much as banish one blight. But, although as men of medicine we should strive to ease the woes of our fellow men, death is only natural. It cannot be denied.¡±


    ¡°You would limit your talent, your horizons, to the chain pulled over the womb? Death is only revered as a law of the earth because we have yet to empower our knowledge & mettle to grow beyond its cage. But though our species was bred in the garden of the world, borne up from wild fens, we are not as meagre beasts. The will of mankind reflects nature, embodies it, yet we can evolve her through our efforts. We need not be slaves to suffering.¡±


    ¡°Ignoring the how of this gross proposition, let us tear back the why. Suffering is as vital a component to our existence, our needs, as oxygen or water. Without the net of death to catch our souls in her ordained force we would wish for the scythe to sever what is left. Our eyes would forever know suffering, only it would be bereft of meaning. No dreams would endure; all would be stagnation without the rite to degrade in rot and nourish the soil of a new bloom. What should we shape of ourselves and the pains that merit transformation without the blessing of the winding thread that connects us to generations beyond our passing? Hmm. No. I just don¡¯t see-¡±


    ¡°No, you don¡¯t see.¡± Harrow derided. Mockery & gloat were one in his guffaw and the oozing stream which came shortly after. ¡°But I know. The soul ¨C the shell of consciousness ¨C can subsist without proxy. Vitality can be borrowed, repurposed, distributed to the noblest of minds who can court paradise from the darkness of our squandered earth.¡±


    ¡°& when Earth is bled? When there is no nourishment to be stolen from her marrow and the children who you would proscribe from knowing life & death. How shall these noble few make merry with the atrophy their deathless triumph has won?¡±


    ¡°I thought you a worldly man. One of virtue in his affinity for insight & invention. Alas, you mock the miracles ¨C the science ¨C which you refuse to understand.¡± Growled Harrow.


    ¡°Ah, here!¡± Dissonant glee aroused from Valdred. He presented a grayed sheet of parchment to this adamant defender of undeath, seated across the decanter table with eyes wider than the Gulf.


    ¡°Research notes?¡± Grumbled Harrow as he snatched the scrawl. His brows crumbled from their meteoric arch, crashing down to read the notes of mourning. Sunless loathing from those buried stars slithered from his face, which could fade to no less sallow hue. The flares of Hell¡¯s radiance chased Valdred¡¯s accusing eyes, shielded by the reddening glint of his scholar¡¯s glasses.


    ¡°Reports of one who has eluded death. After the masquerade stunt, I asked a cohort to seek out light on one Aldred Harrow. In the seaside hovel that is Waldengrot, news was found. An obituary for your cousin. Read on, see what became of the man whose name you walk with. A little gravedigging. Poor fellow, so written off by the world, so uncounted and unloved, that days passed before his fall was discovered. His departure was barely a whisper, one his sorcerous kin did not even heed.¡±


    Gruesome chuckles harried the cords of each, glaring at the other through miasmal huffs. Valdred sighed a murmur. ¡°Should I even ask what you are?¡±


    Harrow leashed the dusk beyond the window and the threads between the candles and sconces to his hand. Serrations of bone burst claws through his fingertips while his sign wove shadows to his wing. Gaunt was his smile and terrible in the wan sickness it wore with honor. ¡°I am of Christ, arisen. A Lazarus of my own make, by blood. As I am of Eden¡¯s bane. She perished, while I remain.¡±


    The scorpion in Harrow¡¯s glare lashed its venom. Rend your gut. Split your head. Commanded the basilisk¡¯s eyes with a hex to break all cords of choice. A chimera¡¯s hiss and the bite of its tail struck through the mind¡¯s tender matter to rend all it could not bend to its poison. Gore yourself.


    Valdred pinched his bifocals as he stooped to catch his tumbling cigar. The waxen sheen coveted his eyes prepared a mirror for the malevolent pair fixed upon him. The glassy lunes refracted the dusk-fiend¡¯s gleaming intent.


    For a flash, Harrow was transfixed by the disfigurement of his visage sprouting from the diamond shields. Lost to the lake of rotting image, unable to retrieve a soul from the sulfurous basin that gulped breath, the strigoi flailed against the skeletal likeness. Arden renounced the snare of reflection, bashing wings against the solar and flying for Val¡¯s gullet with fanged rows.


    Valdred¡¯s stub died as cinders, yet the billows of verdant haze poured from the end of its burn. Lurching to relight it, he struck another with flint. Flaring wick and sparks spat another smoggy bundle. Murky censer bellowed odorous veil to shroud the fiend. The hellish gleam of the leech¡¯s stare diminished in a sea of nymphs evoked from bilious fire.


    In the rousing of churning brume, the doctor cast aside the apparent weariness of his age. His cane honed its tongue against the lunging carrion-beast. A click of powder and belligerent ignition funneled fury¡¯s harpoon to catch the apparition before it sundered flesh for sumptuous possession. Bestial predation sang the woes of its maimed conceit. Marble orifices of the manor ran with the agony & humiliation of that sapient horror. Discordant gusts from the fiend¡¯s split lungs thundered ruinous cords that whipped spite upon stone and quivering furnishing.


    A crystalline void howled in the cavernous pits of Harrow¡¯s center mass. Lanced through the chest, pinned to the back of the chair, the fiend¡¯s wroth despair supplanted the wounds. Sulfurous brume poured where blood had been exiled. Writhing penumbras usurped his heart as the torso peeled off its encumbering sinew. Limbs tore his upper half from the splayed strands of flesh, like gum in the mouth of hell. Horrors from the deep wailed a choir through the wyrm¡¯s channels while it crawled up from the seat it had been staked to. Ambling up with bulbous tentacles rasped from the wound it split, threads of perversion became the thing¡¯s legs. Gnashing its maw and fibrous talons at his assailant, the vestiges of Harrow pounced through scoria & seeping gales.


    Valdred spoke his prayer through the silver of his blade. His grin lacerated the shade, torrid saliva a gnat¡¯s span from his carotid. The wyrm sailed on momentum, undeterred by a gash from the carver; a third eye gawked from the roaring jaw, glistening carmine at the capillaries it would slather in seconds. But the doctor¡¯s faithful aegis lay not in that argent fang but the handheld crossbow in his left claw. Mechanized propulsion thrust the bolt from the little maw through the gorgon¡¯s yawning cave. The thunderbolt from Valdred¡¯s hand impaled where once stalactites lurched with grinding hunger. Another (deceptively fearsome) javelin launched in succession pierced the Infernal¡¯s forehead. Affixed to the wall, the mutilated specter¡¯s talons drooped limb with its arms. Erratic twitching from its effort to rebind its muscle and spur fresh thew yielded only feckless spasms; gasping for blood to burst its regeneration.


    ¡°Pre-Cambrian parasite, thou art.¡± Valdred spat; his acidic globule melted on the simmering floor of the solar. He reattached his arms to his cane, concealing the bow and lance, and downed his gin. Relighting his cigar, the doctor reveled in the broiling fumes through his cage. His breath rumbled with exultations, chiding the dismembered scourge with gravel in his throat and thorns in his palm. ¡°Thou, least among the first of the pre-dawn vermin who refuse the earth and bleed her children. Thy kin burrow into rot to make hearths of our corpses. But no more for thee.¡±


    Harrow¡¯s hateful orbs pursued the offender of the skull they were lodged in. Coals of perdition, loathing fireflies, flickered ire from their gangrenous aurum. Staked to the stone in the temple and maw, the wriggling head squeezed the mercurial mist to stretch infantile legs from the changeling mass oozing from its disembodiment. But as one simmering pinion was plucked from the chasmal mouth a lethal ensign burned terror in its place.


    Gloved hands and the mesh under his sleeve dared press the searing talisman through the severed gullet. ¡°Behold, the sign of the Star!¡± Metal seethed to erupt pustules in the froth. The fetish evoked the ruling light of heaven, emulating that celestial body which all other regents of the welkin must orbit and obey. A mercurial sun-flare was born by the sweltering charm, bursting rays through the hanging skull.


    On the floor where Harrow¡¯s abandoned chair had been tossed down, tendrils from the separated legs protested the anguish his animating presence was now sundered by. Shorn of his roots, cut from his ardent materia, the profaning specter reeled in terror to be proscribed from the promised eternity it had only just dragged another down into. Riptides of radiance cleansed his essence, while the victor chaunted a liturgy as sullen as confident.


    ¡°By the winds over Gethsemane & the light on the crest of Golgotha, be banished! By the eyes of the sky and the resurrection of Osiris, be burnt! Get thee to ash. Back, to the abyss between the night stars thou prowl under. Seek no soul, yowling leech. All heaven is turned on thee. Hell & Tartarus find thee wanting. Be hunted by the shine of Eos and chased by Apollo¡¯s chariot!¡±


    Adjusting the incarnadine goggles settled on his aquiline nose, Valdred waived the murderous furies splintering from the fiend¡¯s pupils. Halos of smoke enthroned the alchemist¡¯s stony mien, consecrating his claim to the air over the fiery wisps that begged for a chance to gleam wrath from their slivers and coagulate once more for their vanquished host. "A soul is absent from thy carcass, famished for flesh to sate the pain of occupying a hearth in the pale inferno beyond the void. Hel & Hades are thy masters & betrayers. The father of the world and the mother of our sun bar thy name from their honored halls. Be bound to the flame, be thee engulfed in the jaw of the threshold between the stars. That forked thirst which becomes thee shall taste no spirits from us, we who abide in days and wane for their passing.¡±


    Soft vespers trailed his solitary procession. That the rapacious carcass would roam no longer brought no great glee, but the old hymn offered some comfort at least. Valdred cleaved and salted the segments of the twice fallen thrall of night and brought them to the balcony. He toiled under the horns of draconic constellations, rearing their forms from the drapery as the remnants of tempest which¡¯d doused it fled for the hills & far fens. The divided limbs were posed in a pentacle formation, then coated with emerald sap & caustic powder. Incense staved the pattern as the alchemical residue ignited. Plumes arose to bury the nether wind where flew the spirit¡¯s mast. The smoldering ruin of the vampire banished the unquiet ghost to less than mist in the dew of dawn¡¯s roust.

 Chapter IX

    Chapter IX


    With the violet-cherry blush of the sun¡¯s imminence striking past the embankment of dwindling clouds, Dr Halloway returned to the manor¡¯s interior. No groans from slumbering servants greeted him. Although freed of the hex by that warlock¡¯s departure they did not wake. Perhaps more of the leech¡¯s debris lingered on, yet he docked the rest of his concern on the matter of the Duskmont heir.


    Lucilla¡¯s gaze stabbed forward, harboring an arctic film to drown all evident thought in hoarfrost. As Valdred entered and cautiously approached her eyes remaining fixed on darting molecules in the air. ¡°He is dead.¡± The flat bed of her tone dressed no mourning. If a thread of that curtain of her whisper was needled with turmoil it was wound seamlessly in the fabric.


    Valdred nodded, set his half-emptied draught on the board, then appraised her condition. Her pulse: withering, yet faintly present. Tortured contortions fettered the rhythm of her vitality. Leagues within a minute drew on without the sounding of her drum. Rime from her breath brushed his cheek, and when he turned to observe her stare he saw a crack in her iris, separating color. Her light splintered and forked, yearning to leap from color into an encroaching abyss.


    ¡°Doctor?¡± Pallor crystallized over Lucilla¡¯s mien. Though her tone was naked of grief, her eye professed a cognizance of the soul¡¯s winter creeping neath her marrow. ¡°His blood is in me¡­ the ills he brought with him are visited upon me. You know the nature of it?¡±


    ¡°No greater hazard will come from you guessing at what he was. Our myths of primeval horrors bear too many shades into reality.¡± Valdred renounced his tinted bifocals, revealing somber eyes of silver. ¡°The fiend¡¯s blood will not sate you long. He shared his pestilence, and the need for fresh red will find you. I cannot ask forgiveness for my failure. I should not have offered you sleep ¨C or at least not left this vigil - when the shadow sought prey.¡±


    ¡°Death is finer company than he ever was.¡± Lucilla hauled herself up from a cadaver¡¯s pose, tearing away the ligatures that the profaner¡¯s accord wrought upon her. ¡°How did this come to be? What wraith of pestilence possessed him that now feeds off me?¡±


    Valdred glanced out into the dying night slinking through the aperture, half expecting Harrow¡¯s reinventor to be glaring back through the ether. ¡°I suspect Harrow indulged many visits to his night-spouse before she became his patroness. He was pledged to her, his siren, before his burial whether he knew it or not. It was not this night alone that you were bled by his betrayal.¡± Mangled compassion traced its way back to her. ¡°He forced the illness upon you, without practiced tenure. The change will come sooner for you and with more terrible sway.¡±


    ¡°You knew what he was. So, you have dealt with his kin before?¡±


    ¡°Aye. I contended with one other.¡± There¡¯d been another, of course, but Valdred could not count her name among the damned. It had just been the one fiend, the arch terror, he told himself. Not his Ciarra. ¡°I learned their ruinous proportion firsthand. Thought I¡¯d bested it, only to meet that same devil again until the means to destroy them arrived. Failure finds me lacking, in being unable to divine the plague-bearer who brought this curse into our circle¡­ Vying against the other carrion-creatures their kind so oft employ has not mended my own frailty, it seems.¡±


    ¡°Soon to be my kind. I will not shy from it.¡± Lucilla¡¯s stare, aloof yet piercing, shuttered no deceit in the cold worry crossing into Valdred¡¯s windows. ¡°Is there a cure?¡±


    She read the answer in his wounded eyes before his baritone affirmed it. ¡°Nay, no cure. Not one you could live to know.¡± Hurt lay in his look; dismay contorted his feature; years of fruitless attempts to have found a better answer were written into the scarred creases of his gray.


    Lucilla¡¯s next inquiry felt achingly hollow even to speak. ¡°Is there no faith that can offer a miracle? Any sun to shield this devil¡¯s breath?¡±


    ¡°Not one I know or possess. The soul is sapped, the wyrm burrows through the seal.¡± Valdred expelled a morose cloud that hung in his airs. ¡°Humor an old fool, dear Duskmont: did you abide in any real fervor of faith before? Did you repeat your daily prayers to the god of our Queen¡¯s church? Have you held communion with your parents¡¯ lord or their forefathers¡¯ gods?¡±


    Lucilla¡¯s sigh sank her back into the bed. Mummified in the red spattered sheets, she hailed the grave with her tongue. ¡°I should tear all icons of tired faith from these walls. This world poisoned my heart before the fangs ever neared my throat¡­ No sanctum in our city ever brought me to the divine, only by the customs of the court did I humor the ceremonies.¡±


    ¡°You lose no virtue for not following one state-steeple¡¯s savior or any for that matter. Our city so loves to block the glow of the supernal.¡± As the doctor pressed on, his scourged patient pondered if he spoke more to distract from a critical matter in his mind than to illume her condition as it was. Even so, a part of her that shriveled at his diagnosis bid her to listen, not to rush her pale fate. ¡°Many cling to faith for comfort. Our need is organic, but no less tarnished for pouring from our hearts. Most pleas ring hollow. We¡¯ve not kept the faith; forgotten all dawns for our umbras; the stars of our forebears are immured. Even idols may have power. But few are left among us who can say they know divinity; few who can summon a flame in their breast for a prayer beyond preserving their muscle and retaining some pleasure while it lasts.¡±


    ¡°This country casts a Lethean haze in the draught we breathe here.¡± Lucilla scorned the stars. ¡°Our history converges with mist, threaded by spurious memory. Tis no wonder we should falter in seeking ardency against the¡­ against what has come upon me from stygian sorcery.¡±


    ¡°I am inclined to share that fearful notion.¡± Valdred¡¯s eyes wandered a moment, all paeans in his argent soul churning with laments and denial of the world¡¯s ambrosia. ¡°Hels, the reigning powers believe themselves to have ruled over aeons despite the crests & consortiums here being infants compared this lost realm they levied with their claims. Though I suppose that is not so different from the royals of the old world.¡±


    ¡°And so, we have forgotten our hope? Thus, we are waylaid onto the dawnless tide, never to know what sins & withered glories sailed us here.¡± Lucilla groaned derision, cursing herself for a moment of frailty that cost her immortal hope. Contortions of a harried soul writhed beneath her changeling flesh. Where threads were clawed to ribbons, though hastily redressed, she bared wan beauty bound to torturous ripples (transforming skin to pulpy scale) through her course.


    ¡°Do not asper yourself all guilt.¡± Wizard-white strands stole the silver shading the man¡¯s beard, already pushing past its trimming to twirl a few years¡¯ stress into the twine of the hour. ¡°I did not honor you nor the order of my mother & father¡¯s faith. Nor did I act on my suspicions soon enough to illume Harrow in fire.¡±


    ¡°But you banished him! The shade is gone¡­ I no longer feel his call tuning my strings.¡± Lucilla¡¯s insistence forged the first fire from her lungs since the cold first bit her. Valdred¡¯s eye lingering urged her to confess further, for she twitched with revulsion at the vermin¡¯s kiss furrowing through her. ¡°Though corrosion is there. This wyrm of rot.¡±


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    ¡°By science, coiled fortune, and the fiend¡¯s own faults did I exile him from this veil. There are elements in this plane which the father of phantoms was unaware. Weapons in nature and alchemy that he did not grant his aegis for; alien to them.¡± There was no triumph in his sound, no trumpet. Instead, he bore the rumble of misery¡¯s chord, a minor tone, deep as a cathedral organ with funereal resonance in its bass. ¡°Yet no wonder of art, science, or belief can I offer you now.¡±


    What was alight in Lucilla just as swiftly froze over. A bleak gust spelled her resignation from the world, carrying off with her mauled spirit. ¡°Then I shall. It is decided for me. Let it be so¡­ I must tear these veins to be rid of the poison. If you would deny me that rite, let me fade. I will reject the siren¡¯s call so it shall eat only me. I will waste away and drag this tumor alone.¡±


    A brutalist construct of a frown altered the architecture of the doctor¡¯s face. Dark folds stripped his iron grey to barren angles, seeming a man sculpted of marble, hinting sorrow with his shrunken curl. ¡°I fear I cannot allow that, fair lady.¡± He planted his hat back atop his hair, now mangier a mane than the scavenger he¡¯d slain, then stepped up for a pace. The brim of his cap kept all but his nose and some stray locks under a thin shroud, but the glint of hurt quaked to burn past the small shadow. ¡°No matter your character, the iron of your will, the demon will speak through newfound instinct. You will thirst for mortal life. You will not know one wellspring from another in the desperation you¡¯d try to see through. Could we stomach chaining you to the bed and praying you simply wither in utmost famine?¡±


    Gaunt as she was, an unseen gale lifted Lucilla, standing up effortlessly to face the doctor. A few wayward nose hairs of his brushed her eyes, blazing rimy stars from depths past those her skin could carry. ¡°What sourced the fiends? From whence did our pilfering, perjuring Harrow find this ¡®gift¡¯ he visited upon me? What legion now moves upon me, recruiting a killer from this corpse? Let me know this much at least.¡±


    ¡°I only know so much, more their symptoms and effects than their true history. Mere fragments of legend that bear some truth in their bane. But I have my weird whims and suspicions.¡± Valdred reached back for his glass of spirits on the headboard. He swirled postulations and lore with his deep sip. Sifting in a moment¡¯s haze to contemplate an adjacent aspect to the lurking harvester on the road ahead. ¡°For one, there is an ancient fable. The goddess, Ishtar, in her means of demanding the bull of heaven once more, threatened to tear the gates between. To bring up the dead to whelm the living for their feast. Perhaps her gesture went further, a few geists of the gulf did leach away. As only some strays escaped, their hosts are yet to outnumber us.¡±


    ¡°Before these restless spirits and their fellows came from the netherworld to be blooded on our earth, they made a friend and father in the void. A sanguine daimon discovered the fugitives of the realm below and fostered their nature to its liking. An aspect of Abis, a demon, lured more souls to his pact. They struck a covenant to retain dominion over their demimonde spheres and still stalk as shades on our planet. They fell into the bones of the buried, thirsting for richer embodiment in the vitae of our grove¡¯s fallen children.¡± Halloway¡¯s drink swirled with the shared twinkle of his stare; a translucent beam of melted silver, forging a river through their tunneling flumes. ¡°This curse trespasses matter & spirit; it will mold you to the sunless wings of an undying worm. With one tap to quench it, you will not know yourself. You will be gone to corruption. To know no will but the avarice of the abyss.¡±


    A long break from their somber instruments befell. The wind played coy, restraining its whimpers from the passing of the storm. ¡°What shall we do now? What is left to us next?¡±


    ¡°I can offer only this cross.¡± Valdred, though claiming no faith, clasped his breath to a stifling prayer as he gazed long into Lucilla¡¯s twilight bonfires. ¡°As uncouth as this might sound, good lady, I must ask: how do you wish to die?¡±


    The lady took no offense. Lucilla delegated half her mind to serious estimations and threw the rest to a humor stretched for the gallows. ¡°On an isle far from here. Surrounded by salt and summer skies where I can forget the stone & smog of this retching purgatory. On ground earned by mine own merit and not my line¡¯s.¡± She stifled a stream inside that broached effervescence with viscous baubles in her arteries. ¡°But paradise is too exotic, beyond my lot. I suppose that window is not open to me, is it?¡±


    ¡°No.¡± Said Valdred. ¡°Not unless you can summon a ship and chart those waters before sunrise.¡± The dour man savored the burn of his smoke in the throes of extinguishment, before tossing the corpse of it out the window. ¡°I must ask again: how would you like to die?¡±


    ¡°In the sun¡­ without nauseous factories or plague fumes. Just the open sky. Away from this dusk for once.¡±


    ¡°It will be beyond pain. You will decay from within for every ray that brushes your face. To soak will scorch you. Even then you will need my assistance to fully fly on wings of ash. Lest you be a gorgon statue of innermost rot.¡±


    ¡°Then let me face the scorch of a final dawn. Let it be my choosing, my own place. One hour away from this farce before the perennial gloom. If heaven should seek me, I will answer. But I¡¯ll insist on nothing save for recanting the revenant shadow. If only to claim some shape to this soul before it is lifted from me.¡±


    Eviscerations of empathy wracked Halloway¡¯s eye. The curious doctor twined awe & anguish in his study of the proud noblewoman. A windfall of bubbling ridges sprouted under his sleeve, hailing chilled mounds of flesh along his arms like cairns across the barrows.


    ¡°You will suffer the pains of hell and I would be remiss to promise you the boon of heaven.¡±


    ¡°I shall still seek heaven in the heart of hell. Let me burn in that star¡¯s vigil until the air singes wings to rush me beyond this curse.¡± Defiance sprang from Lucilla¡¯s cords, speaking with confidence so far unfounded in one whose house underwent charnel reformation.


    ¡°Would you like another shot of something? A sedative, or anything else, to quell mortal nerves and impulse while it is still yours?¡±


    ¡°No. I will face the end sober. As pure as I still may be.¡±


    ¡°That is more than I could manage, were I in your place.¡± Valdred pondered his dwindling spirits, sloshing the glass about and eying the splash with shameful lust. From a latch on his belt, he pulled out a shimmering vial. Some uncanny solution danced within the glass. An amateur¡¯s try at a grim jest steered his proposal. ¡°Since an old physic¡¯s leeching will not do¡­ you may want to drink this at least.¡±


    ¡°This?¡± Suspicions of cruel mercy jostled Lucilla¡¯s brow. ¡°Surely, this is not something to ease the pain. Since I have refused that term.¡±


    ¡°Quite the antithesis. To the contrary of sweeping pain away, this will assure it for infernal proportion.¡± The doctor scratched the brim of his bridge as he ¡°This flask captures an element to burn the worm inside you. Sunrise will wield the reins to drive it. But the parasite will not flee to exile softly before it can make a thrall of you. Immolation of the infecti-¡±


    ¡°Good.¡± Lucilla¡¯s burgeoning smile blistered the gloom around her. She gazed past Valdred, snatching the concoction, letting her expression be painted by the vista brushed over the horizon. Purplish clouds melded their nebulous tendrils with orange fire from above their shorn rims. ¡°I will share empathy with the sun, then. Burn by my own star, before ever being kin to that beast. If it¡¯s only dark beyond there, at least I shall be warm.¡±


    She glid across the floor, a familiar phantom in her own house. Tilting her back to study this scholar of the damned while the incendiary element in the vial assailed her gullet. Liquid wrath seared her innards. For a sharp beat, Lucilla sealed her eyes; observing the dragon¡¯s river spread through tissue and inlet. Swallowing fire, she grasped what molten steel she could to steady her speech. ¡°What shall you do next?¡±


    Valdred answered with a forlorn sigh. He could not claim to know what should become of her soul, nor his own even. The crux weighed heavy, and he was anchored to yet more gruesome labors before the city would be done with him. His wound still called to be redressed, soaked with saline, but the fiery brume from Lucilla¡¯s essential broth grasping for air through her shell demanded he whet his focus. Admiration made it no less Augean to ensure her end.


    Then she looked away and marched forward. Chthonic spouts roused spasms she fought to suppress, rattling her with every step. Lucilla vowed to redeem some grace in herself when her wraith peeled vessels and burst with dread vapors. Soon, the agony would demand her yield of tears and frightful tremors, simmering as her form felt the denial of its rebirth.


    A shred of sorrow spilt from Valdred¡¯s eye, dripping into the glass to be gulped in the same flash. Knocking back the last of his draught, diluted by a tear, he bathed in the briny aftertaste. Then he followed his host through the threshold to the garden courtyard, into the dawn and what it delivered.