by Ian Grey (Vampire: The Dark Ages | Fiction)
My sisters looked on with dead eyes, their faces frozen in fear, stretched as they were across the bridal bed. Yusef had skinned their soft flesh from their bodies and sewn them together � a horrifying patchwork quilt filled with the familiar scent of home."Drink with me and live forever. Refuse me and I shall drink you, use your flesh to finish adorning my home." Yusef said lightly, a candid smile showing a mouth of sharp, uneven teeth. His egg-shaped head and bristle-brush beard changed, his skin reddening and his head elongating. He still stood hunched, but his body had grown, taking the dimensions of a naked, malformed bear.
With a singularly deft and nimble claw he gestured at a tray by the bed, whereon rested a gold-wrought goblet. Fresh blood filled it (fresh from his swift-healing wrist).
"You are Blautsauger", I said in a cold, flat voice, "Vampire."
Hair sprouting across his body in a wave, like wind blowing across a field of wheat, Yusef smiled.
I have told you, gentle readers, of how Yusef had come to my family�s farm in the guise of an ugly little man in the early evening hours. Of how he had persuaded my mother to part with each of her daughters, first by the ruse of marriage without dowery, then by claiming first one then the second had fallen ill. My sisters were fragile creatures, in their way.
I had followed Yusef to care for them, across the bog beyond our home. Half the night we had traveled, through the woods, until our path led into a cave below the hills. Wary though I was, he assured me it was a necessary shortcut to his home. And so I followed.
Now I stood, praying silently to God for my salvation, lost to the world above behind a labyrinth of tunnels. Yusef stood revealed to me, a devil incarnate, offering me a choice � bitter death or damnation. I could see what choices my sweet sisters had made.
Struggling to breathe, to keep my fear from him, to grant him that entertainment, I took his cup and drank.
The blood (for there was no doubt now) was rich, salty, yet somehow sweet as well. I gritted my teeth and swallowed back the bile that threatened to push it back forth. Perhaps I even managed a smile.
Yusef was dumfounded. He grinned, showing blackened gums and yellowed teeth. "At last" he almost wept, "one strong enough to be my wife, to take this loneliness from me." He shambled towards me, embraced me in his hairy arms as I would a sheep from my own flock, and savaging my body with his teeth he swept across me like a hungry storm. My clothes fell to shreds about me, and my blood was let free. Swift as night came a bliss unimagined and a sleep akin to death�
For three nights, the cycle repeated. I would awaken alone, cold and weak, filled with a nameless hunger, the faintly warm flesh of my sisters my only comfort. I was helpless but determined to find my way out � only there were no exits to his chambers, only a few locked closets and chests of ancient treasures made meaningless by my imprisonment. I was a defiled maiden waiting for my dragon to return.
Twice he returned, fattened and red and monstrous, gorged on blood like a tick. Twice he came to me with his cup filled with unholy sacrament, and gave me the choice. And each time thereafter he would fall upon me and ravage my body and suckle me to his breast. Bliss was my reward, though sweet sleep � nightmare laden though it was � was the bride-price I prized above all others.
Night followed endless night in those black caverns and I changed. My hunger grew for him, my Fiend, my husband. My thirst for him grew in his absence, uncontrollable. My sisters tried to console me, in their mindless, gibbering way, weeping and licking up my blood-stained tears when they fell upon their soft sheets.
Soon his stories entered our brutal routine. The tales of Cain, cursed by god, of his succor by Lilith and the gifts she bestowed on him in the land of Nod, of how he left, how he wandered amongst the children of Adam. Yusef told me of the rise and fall of the First City, the Flood, and the rise and fall of the Second. He told me of how Cain�s children had been scattered, how they banded together in their eternal strife, following or rebelling against Cain�s tenets, of the great game of the Jyhad, the war Cain�s grandchildren fought using their own descendants as proxy. Hungry for knowledge of my husband, of who and what we were, I begged him to tell me more.
He was eager to please so willing a pupil.
He taught me of our kin amongst the deathless, the Tzimice, of the great gift our Antediluvian ancestor had wrested from the spirit-world, the power to reshape life we call Vicissitude. He taught me as well the Arts to speak with the beasts and see what cannot be seen with the naked eye. He warned me as well of those curses upon our heritage � of the hate the sun bears for us, of the fear fire holds for us, of the hunger of the beast within us (though this last was a creature I already had come to know well). He told me of how we were tied to the land that birthed us, and how it was our bloodright to tame and to rule it.
Ever willing, I listened, I learned, I waited, I mastered myself and rebuilt the sense of self that was Adelaithe, not the blood-soaked fetish that Yusef ravaged each night.
And with time I learned a simple truth. Each closet was a door into the Labyrinth that surrounded us. After my rape, as I lay feigning sleep, Yusef would slip away through these doors to another hiding place to sleep away the day in safety. Thus, when I felt I had learned enough from my lover, my monstrous husband, I left him while he slept, taking a door at random and fleeing naked into the darkness.
I navigated that maze like a bat, my hearing enhanced by the curse Yusef had shared with me. I despaired of ever finding my way out of that fathomless abyss, and with each step I feared he might overtake me. Once I thought I could hear his inhuman screams raging after me. But the sound of his voice was distant, distorted, and the only part of him that reached me during my escape.
A wisp of a wind, a scent of a leaf, a word from a bat, these hints I divined and with God�s providence, I found my way free. The cave I left was not the one I entered. I found myself in an unfamiliar wood, the full moon shining luminescent and showing me standing in a glade.
Laughing at the moon I began to dance�
Next Month: How Adelaithe survived the woods, and what found her there...
