as written by Ronin and Emperor Jester
"Caer..." Isabelle repeated the word lovingly. Coming from Nox's mouth, it sounded so beautiful ... so elegant. She gasped as his hand trailed from her cheek down to her neck, shivering all over with nervous excitement.
"I've heard rumors though, legends. People say they were a house of vampires but...I mean, thats just a superstition right?"
"They were ... real ..." Miranda blinked, struggling against the arcane drugs swimming through her system, "...House Caer was a great vampire house. Up to that time, the vampires kept their existence secret ... but Caer ..."
"They went crazy," Eric spat, "slaughtering. Killing indiscriminately." He blinked, thinking for a brief instant that Nox's teeth had appeared sharpened and filed, dripping with blood. It had to be a trick of the light...
Miranda nodded. "It was the last major open conflict the Monastic Order ever faced. We haven't been at open war with anyone since." Her brows furrowed, a question swimming through the slush of her thoughts. How was it that this man knew how the exact pronunciation and etymology of the word 'Caeruleum', yet asked questions about the specifics of the house's history? Hell, why was he harping on it at all? Something wasn't adding up.
Isabelle, however, didn't notice a thing. Even being the closest to Nox - and thus, the most apt to notice the brief lapses in his facade - did nothing to deter her attraction to the man. He had completely pushed passed her meager mental defenses. All she wanted was to be his. To be loved by him. To be touched again.
____
This was a rare treat. Three little doves all tweeting away, all affected by his charms differently. One struggling so hard to be brave, one uncomfortable and confused, and the other swimming in their long repressed lust. And they were smart. And young. They had their whole lives ahead of them, to become proud, powerful members of the church. A snicker escaped his lips while Nox placed his left hand on the smaller girl's shoulder, pulling her to his side, keeping her intimately close.
Maybe he should let the veil slip for the other girl as well as the boy. It was as simple as thinking it. As if the pheromones were ripped from Miranda's perception, replaced by a dark, black wave of ice and fear, much like how Eric was feeling. She too would begin to notice his changing. His jaw slowly unhinging. His perfectly manicured fingernails puncturing Isabelle's shoulder to the bone, and even through that, like a burning knife cutting through half-melted butter. Even through this, he'd only drug the poor girl more, sending his energy straight into her.
The others would notice her skin beginning to turn black with frostbite. The red stain spreading across her proselyte robes only getting so far before becoming a thin sheet of frozen sanguine, trailing down the girl's side. Why did everyone else in the street seem blind to this as well? How powerful was this man? What did he intend to do with them? "Oh, thats right. I never got your names." Still smooth talking, still unfathomably calm, chillingly so. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
____
The veil dropped slowly for Miranda - going from infatuated lust to repulsion was not an easy transition, and it took some time before the girl realized exactly what was happening. The impossibly charming, handsome gentleman had dissolved into a monster, piked teeth jutting out of his maw, eyes ripe with gleeful bloodlust. She watched in horror as his fingers dug into Isabelle, the girl moaning as his digits parted her flesh and embedded deep into her collarbone. The drugs swimming in her blood rendered her almost unintelligent to what was being done to her; she registered little more than Nox's presence.
Miranda looked to Eric. He was frozen in place. Hate had battled fear, and fear had won out. The proselyte watched dumbfounded, face bloodless as the monster ripped into a girl he'd known almost her whole life. She turned back to Nox, mind racing against the drugs leaving her body, struggling to make sense of everything that was happening. The beauty. The pale skin. The blood-stained teeth. His fixation with House Caer. His constant demands to know their names.
It clicked in an instant.
"Nosferatu..." The name left her lips on a shallow, shuddering breath.
____
His eyes would slowly meet Miranda's, a dark spark exploding violently outward. "We have a winner. Lets see what you've won, little dove." His fingers would drive into Isabelle, breaking her shoulder with a suddenly, violent -snap-, almost wet and organic in nature. At the same time, Nox would not only end his control over the gear, more abruptly than he had with Miranda, but also boot the young proselyte squarely in the spine with his fine, leather shoes, sending her sprawling forward.
The Caer had kept something though. Isabelle's entire arm and part of her shoulder joint as well remained firmly in his clutches. The sound of wet, living flesh being ripped apart like it was tissue paper would haunt their dreams, if any of them lived. And he did it all with a soft, almost condescending laughter, even as he began to ravenously feast down on the flesh, fully consuming it in its entirety quickly before the maimed girl hit the pavement, no longer covered in white. No, he was a red demon now, dripping sinew and sanguine, all except for the eyes. The baleful, powerful, cyan eyes.
Now he dropped the curtain for tall the random passerbys. Now he let them see what was happening to these three young adults, barely more than children. Thats when the screaming started.
____
The arm ripped from Isabelle's torso with a wet crunch, her body hitting the cobblestone just as Nox removed his presence from her mind. The young proselyte awakened from a dream of love and lust into a nightmare of pain and fear incomprehensible. She had a minute at best before she bled out into the street. That minute would be spent weeping into the stone, pleading with Selene in her mind for salvation even as the cold numb of death took hold of her with every frantic heartbeat. Eric watched, still as stone. He could not have moved even if he wanted to. Around him, people ran for their lives - scrambling over one another to get away from the monster. No one acted against Nox. No one raised their hand against him.
Miranda did.
Pushing past her fear, the proselyte hoisted a chair from a nearby table, charging the beast and swinging the wire furniture at his head like a club. Her jaw tightened, her teeth clenched tight enough to shatter. Her brows were furrowed above her emerald eyes which glowed with terror and anger and indignation. They were the eyes of a paladin.
____
He'd catch her arm, bending it backwards with ease, turning her around with her own momentum to face Eric. "Brave girl." His voice was no longer honeyed or suave. No, this was the voice of a predator, some kind of living nightmare, mocking all of her beliefs by simply existing. "If I'd given you another twenty years, you might be able to actually hurt me. Its a shame that'll never happen." Before the young man, even as the girl inevitably struggled, his jaw seemed to slack all the way down to his stomach, impossibly wide, before taking her head clean off of her shoulders with a sound much like a frozen watermelon being shattered. Swift, brutal, and blood.
The pavement would be a mosaic of blood, bone, and scraps by now. And despite the panic, almost no time had passed at all. Less than twenty seconds, even as Nox tossed the body through a nearby building, disgusted with the taste of righteousness all these doves seemed to carry in their blood. If it wasn't for the fact he was almost guaranteed the red life wine of virgins, Nox wouldn't even bother with these frail little children.
"Tell me boy. If you live, what will you do with my gift? Will you swear revenge? Will you promise to destroy me? Will you weep run and hide? Tell me child!" Nox closed the distance impossibly fast. Is this what a vampire, a real vampire lord could do? This is what they were expected to fight, to kill? His breath reeked of blood and seemed to almost exude a black mist, though that wasn't really him breathing. His lungs were long dormant. Only death inhabited Nox, death that wished to spread to everything else like a plague. "Answer wisely."
____
Miranda died before she even knew that Nox had retaliated, her head simply slipping off her shoulders and thunking to the pavement where it bounced twice. Eric watched as Nox threw her body into one of the nearby windows, recoiling as the monster rushed upon him. The mist of his breath choked him and tears welled in his eyes. Years of training and martial instinct abandoned him as the fear of death and the grief of lost family reamed into his soul and crushed his dormant fighting spirit. In that moment, he was a boy - a child left to stand against an abomination beyond human reckoning. He could not even meet his eye.
"I.. I..." he sobbed openly, tears streaming down his cheeks. He tried to back step - only to slip on a puddle of blood leftover from Isabelle's body. He fell to the ground, soaking in it, before throwing his hands into his arms and cowering.
He would do nothing. Nothing at all.
____
"Good. You recognize the natural order of things." Roughly, he'd lift the boy, keeping him eye level with him, forcing him to stare into his eyes, sinking his fingers deep into the muscle of his cheeks, almost puncturing into Eric's mouth entirely. "The weak should fear the strong. Those below should except the iron heeled boot steps of those above. There is no mercy, no peace, no light in this world. You'd do well to remember that. Because right now, when you needed it most, your gods abandon you to me."
He'd have to be quick. Nox was arrogant and he knew how powerful he was, but he wasn't stupid. Once word got out what he had done, who he was, the Church would move, fast. They'd be here before too long. Without letting the one living proselyte down, he'd bend, scooping up a handful of Isabelle's blood from below them, wrenching Eric's jaw open, breaking it if he resisted.
Pouring the blood down his throat, holding his mouth closed like one might do to a dog if they were trying to get it to take its medicine. He'd do this several times, at least a pint of sanguine being forced into Eric's stomach. Then, Nox would drop him, as well as a dagger made of the purest white gold at his feet. The pommel was set in sky blue sapphires and the blade had a single streak of obsidian running through it. Purely ceremonial, but that was the point. It was one of his brother Titus's knives. He'd found it in a Caer safe house.
The last thing he'd do before running into the night, is implant a simple command into Eric's mind, using his dark powers to only put the idea there. No force behind it but the overwhelming, natural fear he'd left in his wake. An image of the Caer house sigil and the words "Carve..."
____
Eric yelped as he was lifted, doing his best to avoid Nox's glare. It was unavoidable - his cyan blues piercing through his eyeballs into his very soul. The proselyte looked deep into this eyes ... deep into the epitome of hatred and horror itself.
The first batch of blood he choked on. The second he tried to spit out, but the pressure on his jaw was too great. After a pleading yelp, he relented - accepting the next half dozen handfuls of blood with petrified obedience.
He fell to the floor. He gagged. His eyes shifted to the knife as it clattered to the floor. He heard the whispers in head, eyelids shutting tight - a weeping, broken boy with no defense against the malicious commands of the ancient abomination. Without even thinking he reached for the knife.
---
The square was abandoned when the police arrived - the shops closed, the patrons fled. They would find rivers of blood seeped into the cobblestone pathways like aqueducts of wine. They would find a severed arm and the body of a young girl, her last remaining hand thrust into the midst of an old leathery book. They would find a girl's head, brows still drawn with terrified will, and the body impaled on a coat rack at a nearby tailors.
Last of all they would find a boy, naked, bloodsoaked, rocking back and forth on the pavement ... the symbol of House Caer etched with calligraphic grace in the center of his chest.
