Rhapsody in D. - Second Movement - Blood Hunt

Gone too far, have I? >=D

Let the carnage flow free! Rock on!
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Bloodthirsty. I want more!
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Total votes : 14

Rhapsody in D. - Second Movement - Blood Hunt

Postby Kobra » Tue May 06, 2003 3:58 pm

Shamiel Il Nocti drew his cloaks about himself as he lay within the dark. An elegant and beautiful creature; they called him the Angel of the Night.

How the women swooned in his arms; but that was merely a prelude to the pleasure he offered them before the end. Pain was the venom that laced the honey of his touch.

His preternatural senses were alerted to the soft squelch of fluids across the chamber from him; had he not fed copiously already this night, he might have been tempted to join Karissa in the feast that flowed from the veins of the mortal who lay ebbing beneath her writhing, luscious body.

But though the dance continued here in their subterranean lair, once a cavern frequented by poets and lovers alike, Shamiel knew that something had changed. There was an odd chill in the air.

Oh, they had not missed the 'war' declared against their kind - which had started in a day and ended in another - but most of the coven had scoffed at the thought.

Mortals...still convinced they could change their lot with bluster and show of arms. As if they could intimidate the immortal.

The conflagurations aboveground had not stopped them from feeding as they would. As they willed. The night belonged to them, after all.

But for their part, they had chosen to stay underground with their living larders until the bother died down. Too noisy.

Karissa lifted her fingers to her tongue and swirled a drop of vitae upon its surface.

"Leave the worm, Perfection, with a few breaths to his name." Shamiel spoke musically, "We must not use up our cattle too soon. Someone might talk."

She gave a low, pleasured hiss.

"Darling...don't concern yourself. There are foods aplenty above. For all of us...if there is one thing this failed war has proven, it is that they have no true will to resist us. They couldn't, if they tried."

Shamiel flicked his gaze about the room; besides these two Toreador there, by the door, sat the resident Gangrel; Legarth shifted faintly side to side, sharpening the knives that lay across his lap; many and varied. Whispering to himself amid guttural clicks; he seemed unconcerned with the presence of the others. For the moment.

"Karissa, where is Mikaen?"

"Here." Returned the Ventrue himself, stepping from the dark and brushing off his coat. A smile dressed his pale, perfect lips; raven hair curled about his cheeks, where it escaped the tie that drew it behind his collar. "I have news." He spoke - "The Prince has killed another guard. However, he did not fare so well in a battle with a new hunter."

"New hunter? Actually injured the Prince?" Karissa let the unconscious form slump beneath her and sat up, straddling him.

"Yes. He escaped, it is said, and spared the hunter his mighty wrath, but he took considerable damage. We should keep an eye out for this one, this flamboyant Frenchman. There is more to him than it seems."

"Bah." hissed Jahrvek, the group's much-disliked Tremere - "The Prince was merely playing with the fool, surely. I have yet to see a hunter in these parts worth his salt."

Several of the neonates clustered respectfully back from their elders murmured amongst themselves; Mikaen cast them a cold look, and their silence was swift in coming.

"Do you think we're actually afraid?" murmured Shamiel, arching a delicate brow. "Mikaen, you are the eldest among us. Do not tell me you fear some hunter."

The Ventrue was silent.

By the door, Legarth narrowed his eyes sharply. His nostrils began to twitch, and he turned his gaze swiftly to the room. One, two, three, four, five, six - there should be ten.

Eleven.

What he beheld standing behind the coven, hands clasped over its waist in patient calm, was one dark figure too many.
"Life is but a moment - Legends are forever."

C.D.F.F
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Massacre

Postby Kobra » Tue May 06, 2003 7:42 pm

"Good evening."

It was all the stranger said.

They caught a glimpse of a hard white face framed in silver curls; they saw his hawkish visage twisted into a ravenous smile and his eyes burning with crimson violence. To some of them came recognition, and with it, panic.

But it was only a glimpse.

He flung his head back and threw open his long coat of black and crimson velvet; from within, as though the floodgates to the underworld had been opened, issued a thunderous tide of chittering shapes, of sharp teeth and glittering eyes and flapping, leathery wings. The mass of huge black bats filled the small cavern swiftly, and while their claws and fangs did very little damage to the preternatural flesh of the vampires therein they blocked vision, filled the air with cacophony and made it impossible to lock on their nameless assailant.

All hell broke loose.

The neonate Berel was the first to fall, as a tall black shape peeled smoothly out of the cloud of flapping chaos and rammed splayed white fingers into the base of his spine; a hand full of icy daggers - Mikaen gave a howl of rage as he saw the childer's back concave, his spine uprooted and wrenched free, skull still bloodily attached -

But the aggressor was gone - there! He melted out of the mass of bats as though their black wings were part of his attire - and Karissa was upon him, leaping with a blur of Celerity -

- a speed that the white-fleshed Other somehow matched, for as she struck him his body burst apart, becoming a cloud of cold white vapors, and as she leapt through him the black-coated form hissed back into solidity beneath her, tucked in a foetal position in midair - rolling onto his back, both of his feet kicking hard upward into her stomach and flinging her toward the ceiling -

The garbled cry signified her meeting with the stalagtite. It pierced her back and protruded from between her perfect breasts, thrust through her at an awkward angle.

Legarth hurled himself into the fray, slamming into the stranger's side - as Shamiel, his musical voice twisted into an ungodly howl at the desecration of his beautiful lover, flew forward with his long clothing trailing him like the tail of a comet -

Frenzy

Legarth found iron hands gripping him, and the enemy's vicious face - an aquiline mask twisted over the features of some monstrous beast unnameable - pressed close into his for a moment, before the stranger hefted him off his feet and swung him into the crazed Shamiel's path.

The Gangrel felt his ally's claws tear into his back, even as the stranger stretched out one of his arms and slammed his palm into it; bone cracked and sharp pain flared through him. Then he was swung like a broken doll by the ruined arm and slammed hard into the floor - while the stranger spun in a flare of blood and shadow to avoid Shamiel's frenzied claws and was swallowed by the wall of chiropterans once more -

Another of the neonates screamed, his fangs bared and his back arched - the very lifeblood torn from his ruptured, flapping veins by something unseen, a huge gout of it weaving through the air, its trail lost amid the fluttering hordes - now accompanied by a thick, pervasive soup of white mist.

"Legarth! Do something about these damned ba-" Mikaen was shouting, gathering his powers, when suddenly the rampaging monster appeared above him, coat spread about him like great wings of black and red, and descended; both feet slammed into the Ventrue's shoulders and drove him to the ground; the Gangrel snarled and dragged himself to his feet, too late to do anything but watch their assailant grapple both of Mikaen's arms and with both knees drop straight into the centre of his shoulders; a sickening crunch and moist tearing sound accompanied the leader's arms wrenched free of their sockets.

Legarth managed to control Frenzy by only a hair's breadth, and determined to fulfil Mikaen's demand he sought forth with Animalism to try to wrest command of the cursed bats from whatever force controlled them -

He found himself up against a wall of iron will; he found himself unable to tell apart which of the beasts were being controlled by the mystery vampire...and which of them were him.

The frenzied Shamiel flailed amid the beasts, screaming for the blood of the nameless foe; from the black-specked mist a deep, resonant chuckle spilled forth - of genuine amusement.

"Tremere! Do something!" Legarth shouted, his will to control the mad chiropterans faltering - his wild eyes scanning the darkness. He felt something hot splash over his body - blood, unmistakeably, the blood of another of the neonates by the smell - and he turned to see the young vampire Khassuth howling as he was pulled toward the ceiling by the black-shrouded murderer.

"Tremere!" Legarth roared, knowing now the mage was the only one who could conjure something to clear this mess - if Legarth could see the bastard, he'd have him.

"Where are you, you damned coward!"

A rush of flame told him - he saw Jahrvek, his hands wide, hissing vile incantations, spewing flame in the direction of the black-coated vampire - he saw the other leap like a thunderbolt over the blast, striking a shaft of moonlight piercing down through the gloom of their lair - and seeming to melt instantaneously into tiny motes of dust, shot past the Tremere's back and reformed behind him, leering with that bloodthirsty face - Legarth shrugged off the pain in his arm and lunged, shouting to warn Jahrvek - but that only gave him time to turn and see the white hands that pushed him forward into the release of his own flames.

The Tremere's screams were magnificent; his robes caught alight instantly and his limbs flailed madly, setting many of the bats alight as he ran for the exit as swiftly as he could.

He didn't make it.

Legarth felt a sudden grasp upon his collar, hauling him away from the black-coated form as the eyes fell upon him - as he stared into heartless oceans of crimson. Legarth shrieked in fury as Shamiel - the maddened bastard - threw him bodily out of the chamber, bats slapping heavily into him as he smashed through the door and was sent tumbling out into the night.

The door to their lair was shattered, the support beam snapping; he saw Shamiel rushing toward the stoic and proudly-arched form of their foe just before the deluge of bats escaping into the night sky blotted it out - and just before the entryway collapsed, burying their home beneath blocks of stone.

He was not there to see Shamiel's fate - he was not there to see the other dance gracefully away from his strikes, with an elegant motion much akin to a bullfighter evading maddened horns - and then, to catch his shredding claws in a grip of steel and force them back with imperious strength.

He was not there to see the black-clad vampire crack through Shamiel's ribcage and impale the Toreador upon his fist - nor to see the enigmatic foe's flesh writhe and become rats, squelching and gnawing in rabid frenzy to match Shamiel's own, writhing through the organs of the once-beautiful vampire; pushing in fat bulges beneath his skin; scrabbling their claws upon raw flesh as they stretched the membranes of his face, bursting their rodent heads through his magnificent visage.

No, the Gangrel clawed futilely at the stone for a time, before he heard the howling of the wolves - and he knew very well that there was something wrong with the way they cried, a hollow echo unnatural and easily picked out by his ears. Legarth turned; he ran into the woods and did not stop until he had left the whisper of padded feet and the lolling of red tongues far behind. Tonight, all his world had been inverted; tonight, the moon held no comfort for him.

Long ago, as a mortal child, Legarth had known what it was to fear the night. Many years later, that fear had been taken from him by a tainted kiss - forever, he thought.

But now, once again, he knew.
"Life is but a moment - Legends are forever."

C.D.F.F
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Suffering

Postby Kobra » Wed May 07, 2003 1:00 am

Upon the roof of the Broken Dagger, the Toreador Shamiel Il Nocti stirred his way out of torpor, his blighted heart awakening within his chest; he became aware of a multitude of hideous wounds scarring and destroying his perfection. He became aware of the pain. And he became aware of memory; of how this had come to happen to him. He recalled the discussion among the coven; how Mikaen had warned them of the hunter who had brutally injured the Prince himself; how they had laughed him off, how even Jahrvek had snorted his disdain. But they'd not had long to laugh.

Something had found them.

He became aware of that something, crouched a short distance away, about the same time he became aware of the length of iron thrust through his body, of the cold steel spike upon which he rested; he could feel its shaft entering him between his buttocks and its sharpened point snagged in bone, somewhere at the bottom of his ribcage. Pain; indescribable pain. He became aware of the other, crouched upon the tavern's...
... rooftop, and of the silhouettes of the other forms up there in the dark, placed against the backdrop of the sky; eight iron poles....eight bodies spitted upon them like boars fit to roast. Like macabre flag-poles.

The wind rustled silver-white ringlets away from the angular cheekbones of the vampire coven's assailant; for the first time, Shamiel's ruined vision caught through its haze a good look at the face of their destroyer. It was a hard face; seeming sculpted of pristine ice, its brows harsh lines over the eyes of frost, the nose hawkish and sharp, the lips thick, rubicund and cruel beneath the flowing moustache. His long coat was drawn about him, his hands folded about his knees; spidery white fingers splayed upon them. The coat trailed upon the rooftop as though its velvet tails were the pinions of ebony wings.

Harsh. Regal. In his own way, thought Shamiel, he is exquisitely beautiful.

Only a Toreador would, at such a time as this, spare a thought for it.

There, behind him, lay the remains of the coven. There was Mikaen, their leader, his arms torn from their sockets; the ragged flesh dripping precious vitae from open, starving preternatural veins. He had been the first to be Impaled; his head thrust backwards, the point of the spike emerging from his open mouth, distorting into purple, bulbous bruises the Ventrue's throat. Beside him was Karissa; oh, beautiful Karissa, Shamiel's love...her luscious body splayed, arms back; Shamiel gritted his fangs at the defilement the stranger had inflicted upon her, choosing a different entry point to the male vampires he had Impaled...

And splaying her arms back as though she were a crucified virgin martyr to some uncaring god; her belly, as Mikaen's, had been slit open, and her entrails separated and uncoiled, stretched onto the roof-tiles; it was plain the macabre artwork of this butcher was as yet unfinished. Shamiel became aware with sudden horror that both Mikaen and Karissa were still alive...and still conscious.

Blood. It trickled down the tiles of the Broken Dagger's roof in intricate patterns; it slithered in moist writing upon the slate above the heads of those who fed below.

Oh, the irony; as one new unlife is created, nine others are slowly bled away;

Shamiel could see the cuts upon Karissa's wrists. He had left just enough blood within them to keep them from slipping into Torpor. He knew them too well. Shamiel's eyes flicked - wrenched - from the brutalised image of his lover and his mentor and to the face of their murderer; a face as impassive as a statue of a saint. He could do little else.

Then his vision swiveled to see a newcomer; a scrabbling shape with terrible claws. A vision of Hell brought to life; surely such agony could exist in no other place.


For there was indeed something else on the roof - something that, at first glance, seemed nothing more than a hulking statue perched precariously on the shingle slats. At the sight and scent of so much carnage, however, the statue, as if suddenly given the breath of life, moved, shifted, muscle tensing in thick thighs and arms, a tail uncoiling from its bracing position around the weathervane.

Slick, dark, meathook claws gouged deeply into the wood, scoring marks into the aged timbers. Toward the defilement and into the light, dim though it be, it leaned. Its face, a strange, fierce but solemn visage seeming carven of marble, almost a mixture between the features of a man, a goat, and a draconic entity. From its temples flowed backward a pair of horns, arcing nobly for the sky. The creature paused, tensed, and waited.


Not even the movement of the winged beast, however, stirred the master of this desecration.

Only when Jahrvek, the Tremere, stirred upon his grisly 'seat' - a spike not yet thrust completely through his wretched body - that the face of the stranger turned slightly.

Jahrvek...his flesh peeled and blackened, ruby-raw beneath and slick with congealed blood; caught in his own fire-spell, a fitting end for a magus such as he; but now, his ruined throat formed the word - "Pleaahhhse...p-pleahhse...."

And with a rustle of coat the stranger stood, and turned his cruel face unto the sightless eyes of the burned Tremere. "Please?" He questioned, his thick, clear accent ringing forth into the night air. As if the question justified itself.

Attempting to clear his throat, his tongue flickering over broken, flaking lips, Jahrvek spoke again; "Lehht...lehht meh go...kill the othersss..." Shamiel's heart, what remained of it, froze with bitter hatred. "Buth...sspahre...me...let mhe..." A fit of harsh, hacking coughs spilled reeking bile over the lips of the Tremere ..."...beahr your wohrd...your messs...message...to the Prince." Cunning, to the end.

For a moment the face of the nameless murderer was frozen in a strange expression; a mingling of puzzlement and something else; something stirring below the human mask so sculpted in its vicious angularity; it belonged upon the bust of some barbarian prince, such as in life he must surely have been. It seemed as though his great passions were warring between confusion and thunderous fury.

But impressions were deceptive, for when he finally let fly his feeling it burst out as hard, rich laughter; the sound echoed and rang about the cold, empty fields of the darkness before dawn. Hearty, baritone, but possessed of a cold and mocking quality.

"You see?" He turned, gestured - whether to the winged beast or the poor Shamiel is uncertain - "The true nature of your kind." He brushed closer to the Tremere with a click of a tall boot, reaching forth his strong white fingers to grasp the layers of burned, dead flesh that made up Jahrvek's chin; "In the end, it cannot be denied." He leaned closer, glancing back once more to Shamiel as if he were about to ask approval for the next.

"But it is too late for you, my friend..." He murmured, cold breath brushing the shattered cheek of the other,

"You see, as I am sure your Toreador friend would agree...Art speaks so much louder than words."

And as Shamiel grit his teeth, the stranger forcefully bent back Jahrvek's head, fingers yanking his jaw open; his horrid scream became a wet, hacking gurgle as the butcher pushed his body down, sliding the spike deeper into him with a sickening squelch; it slithered through his organs, missed his heart - deliberately -...
... by mere inches, and tore asunder his tongue as it split his jaws and emerged from his open gullet, glistening in the cold night air; faint wisps of steam rising from the hot blood bared from within.

Both hands gripping the base of the iron spike, the Bloody Prince hefted the pole upward, into a full vertical position, and slammed his foot down upon the buckle that bolted it firmly to the rooftop's surface; Jahrvek took his place alongside the others, the Judas of their group stillborn in his betrayal; immortality denied him. Kneeling, the stranger tightened the bolts; there was no passionate glee within his act of violence; far more chilling was the clinical precision and detachment with which he so brutally butchered the others; now waiting callously until Jahrvek had slid down the pole into his reach before with nails - suddenly claws - he slashed the Tremere's belly and drew forth his intestines; Jahrvek twitched and spasmed upon the pole; choking, tiny sounds that meant nothing.
"Life is but a moment - Legends are forever."

C.D.F.F
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Release

Postby Kobra » Wed May 07, 2003 1:05 am

The stone-fleshed watcher turned its head to regard the entire scene with its blue eye, the unscarred one, and released a low thunderclap of a growl, curling its toes into the roof slats with another grating, shrieking crunch of talon against wood.

Shoving itself up into a digitigrade position, wings flapping in rushing, leathery swoops, it freed its arms, curling three-fingered hands ever so slightly. "So the leech dogs have finally met their end," came the low rumble, a voice that sounded more like a staccato thrum than any human intonations, like a rush of air echoing through hollow stone.

Its oddly shaped lips were wreathed backward over the long teeth and pale gums in a macabre, grimacing grin. The beast padded up the slant of the roof, taking care to remain out of reach of the one doing the impaling, before it took up a perch on the very pinnacle of the building.
"A shame I will not be awake to see their burning demise in the sun's rays..."


"It is a pity," came the devil in black's reply, "Perhaps, in time, I shall describe them to you." He watched the back of the gargoylish beast as it passesd forth to sit - so suitably - a gothic adornment to a building that had known so much violence in its lifespan.

The wind again caught his hair; there he stood, tall and proud, his cape caught over one arm, rustling about the coat it adjoined to; black and crimson, the dual colours of malevolence; of blood and darkness born, as was he. Then, he turned, at the words rasped forth from Shamiel, the once-beautiful, whose face and body was torn by the rats that had wriggled through his flesh...


"My appreciation would be profound," the horned monster rumbled in return, half-lidded eyes that seem more like views into misty, sulphurous oblivion than actual soul-windows focusing now upon D and his work.

Oh, but it knew that it must sleep soon, feeling the drowsiness entering its flesh and fogging its mind. It gathered itself up into a braced, stable position, drawing in one long, deep breath of the atmosphere, reeking as it does with blood. Then, with a pulsing, bellowing roar, it flared its wings wide and threw its upper body-weight forward, balanced in a three point crouch; its face was a picture of fierce monstrosity even now.

A whitish-gray had begun to claim its frame, beginning at its curled toes and migrating upward in a flash over the muscled demi-humanoid structure. The snarling reverberation of rage echoed forth across the expanses, though now the lips from which it was borne are stilled, encased in stone...

Lurid, hideous and grim, the gargoyle now stood as a terrible guardian sculpted not by the hands of man but conceived in the most warped of imaginations.


"Why?" was all Shamiel could ask.

For a long moment the cold voice of the butcher was stilled; for a moment, he considered, before he chose to give the vampiric artist at least the cordial duty of knowing why he met the Final Death this day - "Someone had to. I had hoped the good Kanashia would take care of such matters for me; but he has proved a disappointment. Unwilling to stand firm to his resolutions." Offered, with a lift of his shoulder, then a pause.

He changed subjects, somewhat, strolling toward his prey. "When a lion comes into a new territory, what does he do? He challenges the head of the pride; he battles him. He drives him out or kills him, and then he devours his rival's children, and subjugates his mates. He rubs out all trace of that which was, and makes all of it his." A calm smile; the hawkish face approached the dying Toreador - "Are we, too, not predators?"

To this, Shamiel had no response. After a time the other continued - "Tell me. What do they call you?" The Toreador's head tilted in defiance; his fading eyes spoke of a pride he would not relinquish, not even now in humiliation and death.

"I...i am Shamiel Il Nocti. Angel of the Night."

His show of dignity seemed to impress his murderer, for the other's eyes softened and his face thawed slightly. A smile creased the fold of his sensuous mouth. "Angel of the Night...so be it. You shall be an angel, indeed, and we shall sit together, and watch the dawn."

His gaze flicked away from Shamiel, to see the change of flesh to stone; the gargoyle's transformation as sure as sign as cock-crow that the time had come.

Almost in a caress, he touched the face of Shamiel; then he drove him down onto the spike, which it pierced just behind his heart and locked against his bone; he did not pierce him through as he had the others. He swiveled then the spike of iron; to face East, to face Shamiel past the mighty angel of stone, to face the rising Sun.

And as the heavens began to warm, as the pale fingers of gold and blood began to writhe their path, Sol's harbingers, Shamiel's eyes were turned unto a sight he had long since forgotten; and in the face of such perfect, celestial beauty, the Toreador could not help but shed his tears; freely they ran down his cheeks, and so enraptured was he that he scarcely felt the stranger's talons opening his back, snapping his ribcage, pulling it wide....barely felt his own lungs being pulled from his back and splayed wetly into the air...

Shamiel, the Angel of the Night, wept at the beauty of a dawn that turned his eyes to milky hues and burned them away forever; consuming his vision - the last sight he saw, the sun rising in a vast, perfect sphere over the slow curve of the horizon.

For a moment it truly appeared he did have wings, for he burst into flames that spread along the entrails that thread in an intricate network between the nine slain vampires; forming a complex sigil, a true artwork crafted of flesh and blood and suffering.

Suffering ended.
"Life is but a moment - Legends are forever."

C.D.F.F
- The Kobra
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Aftermath

Postby Kobra » Wed May 07, 2003 1:24 am

Upon the roof he sat, sliding half-moon spectacles up the bridge of his nose; as the sun came up, so too did he seem to change; the grim majesty of his form lessening, somehow, becoming muted by a weakness entering into it; for while he did not burn, as the others did, while he showed little discomfort whatsoever from the blinding sunlight that now assaulted his senses, the dark power with which he had so elegantly dispatched the others was undeniably lessened.

Let them know.

The time for subtleties was over. Waiting for their flesh to cease sizzling, he stood, at last, and slipped from the rooftop, awkwardly, in the manner that any other man might; his boots clicked upon the boards of the porch and he glanced into the tavern, through the open door.

A smile touched his cruel, sensuous mouth.

Turning away, he surveyed his artwork; the opening masterpiece of an exhibition he was sure to continue.

Here, then, was the Gauntlet he had promised to throw down. He had stepped into the war between Myrken's authorities and these Vampires - he had made it clear that there were no longer two sides to the conflict.

Now, there were three.

And now, it was up to them to respond.

A whistle, utterly chilling for its merry dissonance, carried from his lips as he walked away.
"Life is but a moment - Legends are forever."

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