In the fresh cool of the starry Urmlaspyr night, a small warrior lifted the fighting stick she had selected into the air. Grabbing its rough center with hands whose palms were cut, but not bleeding, she swatted down twice, spun around, then swung at her imagined assailant's side, which brought the back half of the stick against the trunk of her body.
Initiate Kennig, otherwise known as Ironfeather, panted miserably as he lay on his back, straining under Vhalan's stony grasp.
"This," Vhalan said, breathing heavily himself. "This is unacceptable. Were I still less than myself, you'd be a thrall by now."
The young man closed his eyes momentarily, which had the unfortunate side effect of allowing sweat to roll down into their inner corners.
Vhalan stood up, wiped his hands on his loose fitting breeches, and turned away from his student.
"Up, and ready yourself," he demanded. "You will suffer charges and pins until you learn to stop them."
"That'll never happen," Ironfeather lamented quietly.
Beneath the earthy salt sweat and the sharp red wine smell of the acolyte's frustration, some other scent swelled and contracted. Vhalan narrowed his red-streaked eyes and looked over his shoulder.
"What did you say?" he asked, every consonant popping and sparking like lightning between his fanged jaws.
"I..." Ironfeather began, terribly intimidated in spite of himself.
"First of all, I told you to get up," Vhalan growled threateningly. "You're training to be a warrior initiate, not a prostitute."
Ironfeather rolled over, punched down at the sand to pop himself to his feet, and whirled around on Vhalan.
"Now, pup, speak," the vampire lord said in a lofty tone. He turned all the way around and crossed his arms over his bare chest expectantly. "And if you think I won't know if you don't really repeat yourself, you are very, very wrong."
Ironfeather needlessly cleared his dry throat, unconsciously rubbing at the spots on the sides of his neck that would soon be bruises. "That... will... never happen. Because I'm slow. Mortal, you know. Just a meat bag, heh heh. Y'know, slow."
The vampire arched an eyebrow, aware that the initiate's weak attempt at turning self-deprecation into a "joke" didn't even strike the normally credulous Shanna, who was a ball of concern some scant few feet away, as funny. The scent of the young man's repressed emotion irked Vhalan mightily, and his lips hardened into a straight line of disapproval.
"You won't get any better by refusing to practice," he finally managed, not sure how not to diffuse whatever darkness had lodged itself in the initiate's mind.
The two looked at each other quietly for a few seconds. And then the careful pretenses fell away.
"Elder, this is a waste of time," Ironfeather argued, figuring he may as well state his opinion firmly. "I'll never get fast enough to stop one of your charges; you've been doing that longer than I've even been alive, and I'm just... it's not going to work. Maybe we should just let it-"
"Whose time do you think you're wasting?" Vhalan sliced in, as smoothly and deadly as a keen sword. "It behooves me to become a creature of patience; unless I completely abandon common sense, I will exist for millenia to come. Can you so much as fathom that, pup? That I have the rest of your meager mortal life to make you a warrior worthy to be killed?"
Ironfeather made little noises that should have been chuckles, but weren't. Vhalan inhaled the mixed scent of holly and hemlock, and a flash of realization lit up his eyes. Ironfeather, seeing it, stopped making the noises and bit the backs of his lips.
The small warrior lifted her button nose into the air. A deep intake of breath brought her the smell of rat poison, and she nearly growled at herself. Instead, she wrinkled her nose and picked the large stick back up.
"Do you think I am dull?" Vhalan asked viciously. "That I can be confused or misled by your pathetic dissimulation?"
Beyond him, Shanna began quietly packing her study materials into her sachels, not wanting to draw attention.
Ironfeather's eyes went wide and glassy, and he said nothing.
"Come here to me, pup," Vhalan said, voice low and firm.
With his hand tightly gripping his staff, but his eyes glittering, Ironfeather did as he was told. As soon as he stepped within Vhalan's reach, the vampire grabbed the young man by the hair at the back of his neck, bringing him close enough to bite.
Shanna jumped up immediately, but Vashte deftly flew over to her, alighting as gently as she could on her shoulder. Of course, the claws were excruciating, and Shanna pressed both hands over her mouth to keep from hollering out.
Vhalan lowered his lips to Ironfeather's ear and whispered, "I am quite capable of determining whether or not some part of these, or any, lessons are a waste of my time; you have no right to do that for me. When you despair in yourself on my behalf, not only do you insult my intelligence as an instructor, you doom the improvement of your abilities as a student. I will NOT allow that; I will NEVER allow that. Do you understand me?"
Ironfeather nodded, straining against Vhalan's powerful hold to do so.
Vhalan stood to his full height and glared Ironfeather into stillness for a moment. Then he bent slightly on the young man's other side to whisper in his other ear. "Further, I demand that you confess to either Svaentok or Aric whatever foreign emotions you're harbouring in some dark back corner of your being. Most of the time, you keep your various doubts and regrets quiet, but tonight, the commingled stench of them is unbearable. Get out of my sight, and know I will expect that you will have thoroughly dealt with both soul and spirit when you return. Not if, pup. When. Understood?"
Ironfeather nodded again, with markedly less strength.
Vhalan let the young man go, stepped back, and looked him over with a feigned distaste. Ironfeather swallowed hard, tightened his grip on his staff, and stood straighter.
"Take Shanna and go," Vhalan commanded sharply. Vashte cawed her agreement and took flight, leaving Shanna to give a short grunt of discomfort behind her clasped hands. Once she had absorbed the pain, she grabbed up her belongings and hurried across the distance between herself and the two men.
"Do you need-" Shanna dutifully began as soon as she was confident that she could be heard over the lapping of waves down the shore.
"No; I neither need nor desire anything from either of you save your absence," Vhalan interrupted, his voice as hard and cold as steel in midwinter.
Too stung to continue trying to stand firm, Ironfeather turned and began walking away from Vhalan without Shanna. She, for her part, merely looked after him. When she was sure that she could whisper safely, she turned back to Vhalan to do so, but a sharp glare from him froze her words in her mouth.
"The pup is weak this night... very weak," the vampire said quietly, knowing why Shanna had delayed. "Go and ensure that he goes straight to Svaentok, or Aric, without any opportunity to... do anything else... I... am at a loss for what might be possible. But something within him is... hmmm. 'Unsettled' seems too gentle a word for it."
"I'll make sure he gets to the Shepherd right away, Elder," Shanna soothed. She turned and left immediately, and Vhalan inhaled the familiar scent of fresh cut pine that she left in her wake. There were undertones of crushed roses, which were new, but not entirely unexpected.
Good, he thought, with only the faintest hint of bitterness. There are no silly coven strictures that prevent them from being lonely together, at least.
In the quietness that reigned after his assistant and his student had departed, Vhalan listened intently to small noises that came from farther up the shore, on the unstable ground where some old lord had commanded trees from Cormyr's Hullack Forest to be planted, so that the ground would learn to be strong enough to withstand the placement of a road.
That lord was mad, his family revealed some time just prior to his death. The trees he had commanded to be planted struggled miserably to survive in the mix of sand and clay, producing lamentably misshapen trunks and gangly branches. The townsfolk of that time, just slightly more superstitious and fearful than the current population, felt that the health of the trees indicated the nefarious nature of the area, and the Eastern Quarter as a whole. The ground changed not one bit, of course, since earth could not learn such a trick as resisting the tides that had licked at it for centuries. The closest "road" to the burial ground was Witchrun, a few minutes' walk to the northeast. Common talk was that Lord Erantun intended to extend the pathway so that it did in fact cut south of the burial ground and connect with the southernmost pathway from the docks, but he was mad in his own way, and no one actually expected anything to come of his intentions.
With these thoughts, Vhalan reclaimed his spiked chain and hiked up from the sand, to the clay sand mix, and up to the area where the small warrior was working. Vashte had discovered her before the vampire did, and was flapping about menacingly, her sharp talons occasionally managing to get hold of the top of the stick.
"If you can't manage to chase off a bird, you've got a lot of work to do to learn to get rid of any two-legged opponents, mortal or no," Vhalan commented lightly. "Is your lord training you to be a fighter?"
"No," Tirabet grunted, allowing Vashte to simply have the large stick. The raven cawed victoriously and flew out of sight for a few moments, dragging the stick behind her. "Papa Lucien says that there's no point in teaching me to fight, since I'm so young and small. I have to learn magic and be cute so that I can trick people into letting me feed."
"Hmm, I suppose compulsion spells," Vhalan mused. "I can't remember to which domain... or school, I suppose I mean... that type of magic would belong. I was never much for magic myself."
Tirabet shrugged. "Me neither. I'd rather thwack boys over the head and then feed on them before they get back up."
"You can't go around thwacking people over the head," Vhalan chuckled lightly. "For one thing, you'd leave marks. Lucien would never have survived all his hundreds of years leaving marks on the mortals. They'd have found him out and staked him before you or I were even glimmers in our parents' eyes."
With those words, the older male vampire turned his back on the little girl and began walking back toward the beach. Predictably, he had only put two feet between them before she scampered to catch up.
"Are you going hunting? I wanna come," Tirabet said as she hustled.
"Why, did your lord charge you with making sure I do not starve myself?" Vhalan smiled grimly.
"No, I just wanna see how you do it," Tirabet admitted. "I don't get to go hunting yet; I just feed on whoever the hunters bring back for me and everybody else who doesn't get to hunt."
Vhalan stopped and sat down in the sand, which the night air had made chilly. He began digging his pale fingers into it, and as Tirabet watched, he began to form the beginnings of a small solid disk.
"I can't say I agree with your not being permitted to hunt," Vhalan said thoughtfully, leveling off the disk and scooping up more sand to shape on top of it. "But Lucien has a court, and I don't. He must have come to the decision for some reason."
"You do so have a court," Tirabet argued. She understood what Vhalan was doing, and began to scoop sand for him to work with.
"Do I?" Vhalan asked, not thinking much of the charge.
"Yes, silly; your boy and ladyfriend, who come out here with you almost every night," Tirabet said incredulously. "You ought to turn them too, I think. Otherwise, they'll get old and die and leave you, isn't that true?"
Vhalan made a small noise and stopped moving. Tirabet scooped up enough sand to fill both her hands, and after holding it above Vhalan's hands for a moment, simply dumped it on them. Vhalan gave a puff of surprise, then chuckled.
"Those mortals are not mine per se, although I suppose I can see why you would think they were. And I won't be turning them. Or anyone."
Tirabet, who had gotten another massive scoop of sand, unceremoniously dumped all of it back onto the ground and sat flat on her butt.
"Have I made you that angry?" Vhalan asked.
"No, it's my stupid, stupid nose," Tirabet complained.
Her pouting was so cute that the older vampire had to turn his attentions back to his childish craft in order to keep himself from laughing at what, for the little girl next to him, was clearly not a laughing matter.
"What about it?" he asked, summoning his claws on his right hand and using one of them to make details in the sand castle that was rapidly becoming a replica of the Merchant Council's fortress.
"Sometimes I smell things that are nowhere around," Tirabet replied. "I can smell normal things from really far away, and that's okay, I don't care about that. But it's the stuff that's nowhere that's annoying."
"So what are you smelling that's nowhere?" Vhalan asked, suspicious of what the answer would be.
"Beer puke," Tirabet spat.
Vhalan simply looked at her with undisguised surprise. Her level of frustration at picking up the phantom smell had actually overpowered the level of her disgust with the smell itself, and left him bereft of even the words to ask where she would have smelled such a thing before. Fortunately, Tirabet was of a mood to explain herself without having to be asked.
"One time, Logan found a big keg of beer in the cellar, and he tapped it and drank a whole bunch, and then he puked all over, even on himself, and just fell asleep like that. And that smells like now. Or now smells like then. But it's not, though; there isn't any beer vomit anywhere. It's my stupid nose, just smelling things that are nowhere- ugh."
The older vampire hummed to himself, and turned his attentions back to the sand castle. "No; what you smell is most definitely there."
"Huh?" Tirabet asked simply. "Where? Not here."
"When I was training just a little while ago," Vhalan began as he scooped some sand from the pile that Tirabet had dumped. "Wasn't there a different scent here then?"
"Uh huh, the rat poison jar," Tirabet nodded slowly. She began scooping up more sand as she continued, "One time, when the house had a hole in the wall to the outside, there were these rats, and they were big and fat, and they bit sometimes if you got too close. I didn't get bit, but Logan did. And then my gramma got bit, and papa got really mad, and went to the apothecary and bought a whole bunch of poison special mixed for rats only. He opened the jar to dip some rags in it, and it stunk so bad, everybody's eyes all got full of tears. And he smelled like then. Your boy. Smelled like then. But not all the time, though. Sometimes it went away, and then it came back, and then it went away again, while he was still there. I thought maybe your hole where you all live has rats in it; I was gonna ask you, but I forgot until you just asked."
Vhalan nodded. "Since we live underground, as you know, I'm sure there are rats, but that's not the point. What you're smelling are emotions. It's a useful sense, for a future hunter. You know which blood is healthy and fresh, and which blood carries a few too many foul humours to be good for consumption."
"Ooooohhhh," Tirabet said, despite not at all understanding what Vhalan meant. "So I can smell people's blood now, and they smell bad like puke and poison?"
"All emotions shouldn't smell badly, no," Vhalan laughed. "But some do. I suppose it was my... regret, as little of that as there ever is, that smelled of vomit a few moments ago. I wasn't aware I could still be scented at all, as I... heh... have never smelled my own feelings."
"Have you ever smelled mine?" Tirabet asked, beginning to gather sand again.
"Oh yes," Vhalan chuckled as he put the finishing touches on the top layer of the castle. "I smelled your shyness before I saw you, the first time we met. And then you told me all about Logan- that was quite a stench indeed. Here, should we dig a moat?"
"Yes," Tirabet enthused. "But let's not put any water; ocean water hurts."
"That'll fade in time," Vhalan comforted. "Your skin is simply tender, at the moment. In a year or two, you could go swim in the ocean, if you wanted to."
"I miss swimming," Tirabet admitted. "I miss the sun, too."
"The moons will become like the sun to you," Vhalan breathed, sitting back and admiring the sand castle, "and in the same measure, the sun will become much too hot and bright. Only took a few months for that change to happen, for me. I can walk by day, but it's so painful that noth- hmmm. Very few situations are worth the trouble."
The self-correction wasn't lost on Tirabet, who looked up from the half-dug dry moat to Vhalan's thoughtful face at once.
"How come you don't want to turn anyone?" she asked quietly. "Do you think they'll be angry with you?"
Vhalan looked down at Tirabet and sighed. "What would I do with you and a bunch of broodlings?" he asked, deciding not to venture anywhere near the actual reason for his decision. "I would be a poor caretaker to some one, or all of you, and that wouldn't be fair."
"You take care of your ladyfriend and your boy just fine," Tirabet resisted, crossing her arms over her chest. "Do you think they'll be angry if they're not mortal any more? If they had to get used to all the stuff we do, do you think they would hate you? Papa Lucien says he worried that I would hate him, but I don't. I was kind of mad and scared at first, but. Not any more. And your boy and ladyfriend really like you, I can tell."
Vhalan sat back in a position that should have allowed him to admire the sandcastle that was mostly his handiwork. Instead, he gazed past it into his sire's lair.
"We're both counting on you to win, you see." But had I won, Xavier, had I truly won, wouldn't my bones would be there, next to yours, having breathed my last over seventy years ago?
An extremely harsh caw pierced through Vhalan's thought like a freshly sharpened javelin, and he turned his red streaked copper brown eyes upward.
Vashte returned with a long stick that Vhalan didn't quite believe was Tirabet's original fighting stick. There were no jutting pieces of dry bark, for one thing. For another, it was a bit shorter. The large raven dropped the thing to the sandy ground and lit upon it, fluffing her feathers importantly.
"Well?" Tirabet urged, reminding Vhalan of her question. Vhalan gave a single breathless chuckle.
"My lord was to be the last of his kind, but instead, I am now the last of our kind. I... believe that... out of respect for him, I must keep it that way. I've... had some time to think about it, but... my original thoughts on the matter haven't changed, and... it's been a rather long time. To have the same opinion about something... I daresay it's a permanent choice, as few of those as there will be in my... heh... many years to come."
Tirabet's nose visibly twitched, and Vhalan chose not to notice it, not wanting to know what the emotion that he wasn't sure that he himself could name might smell like to her. After a few seconds of silent thought, the little girl scooted back far enough so as to not do the castle or moat any damage, and then got up to her knees in order to gently wrap as much of Vhalan's chest as she could get her arms around in a hug. She simply bonked his left arm with her forehead, because it was in the way of her head, until he picked it up. Immediately, she snuggled her head closely to him as well, and smiled when she could hear his heart.
Vhalan looked down at the little fledgeling vampire. After surprise gave way to both a strange paternal warmth and a powerful wistfulness, he began stroking her hair, pulling it back over her ears, smoothing it over her head, and pulling the small tangles out of the ends of it.
"Thank you," he said simply, wondering if no one in all of Lucien's court knew how to properly trim long hair.
And Tirabet, without moving anything else, nodded.
In Letherna, the Raven Queen watched with a weary smirk as the white dire wolf groomed the puffy brown wolf cub at his side. She waved an immaculate, but bone thin hand over her cauldron, and the image disappeared. Almost as a continuation of the movement, her hand lit upon the handles of a pair of perfect silvery cloth shears. She raised them up and away from her other cutting and slicing implements, looking upon them almost lovingly as they gleamed in the regal purples and deep sapphire blues of the dark firelight of her preferred enchanting area.
"Now, to that beautiful business for which I am so very soundly cursed."
Her court, a vast flock of large ravens, screamed and cried out their encouragement, spreading wide their obsidian black wings and hopping about on cold, bare branches. Such was the racket that Shar, far on the other side of the plane the goddesses peacefully shared, looked away from her own workings for just a moment.
"I say get to it and enjoy it, Rayvie-baby," Shar smiled, her thick, wet voice curdling pleasantly in her throat. Her rot black shark teeth caught the meager light her followers' collective dream vision afforded, and the scent of their terror tickled her sharp nose. "I wish I had time to watch- I do so love the fallout your little, ah... hmhmhm... ribbon cutting ceremonies invariably cause."
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