The Red Road Home: Prologue

The Red Road Home: Part I

Nightmare dawn.

It was a phenomenon for which Valoc still had no analogy. His world's dawn and this world's dawn were exactly the same. The paradox: they were completely different.

The memory of the last sunrise he had witnessed on his own world was still vivid in his mind. On that morning the sky had worn a gossamer veil of cloud which had blazed golden when the first rays had soaked through it. This dawn was scarcely different, and yet this dawn clawed at Valoc's mind, the very sight of this dawn raped his soul like the monstrous vision of an insane god whose design is unfathomable to the fragile mind of man.

Here was a man who had survived the black horror of a world between worlds, where virile phantoms and demons beyond imagining lurked and hungered eternal. Here was a man reduced almost to the level of a beast, barely clinging to the last vestiges of humanity in his quest to reclaim the life and world he had lost. Now this same man huddled, screaming and mindless, in the shadowed branches of a tall aksea tree, because of the rising sun.

For almost half an hour he hid there. Gradually his madness passed and he lowered himself to the ground. Another day had begun.

***

He had been travelling for almost a week following nothing but instinct. Even now the road he trod was barely discernable; the ravages of time and neglect had left him only the rare cobble as a guide. He was following a ridge of coastal cliffs, with the broad expanse of the ocean to the east, and lowlands to the west. Further on there loomed a faded blue mountain range; a row of earthen fangs that dwarfed those of his world. The mark of civilization had never touched this land. Overhead, the sky was dazzling cerulean, flawless save for the grim thunderheads banking out to sea. A flock of birds that were similar to the gulls he knew wheeled in formation above him. Like sunrise, it was inexplicably surreal. A tide of nausea swelled up inside him and he felt the need to pause.

He walked across to the cliff's edge and closed his eyes, breathing deep. When he opened them he looked down, where waves crashed against rocks, throwing up a cloud of wide spray. Their thunder surged up to him, resonating inside him and filling him with a sense of tranquility. The sound beckoned.

One short step into cool oblivion. One short step and all his troubles were forgotten.

Valoc choked back a cry of rage and heaved himself away from the edge. His fists tightened, and the immortal words of Mandor Faid flooded his mind: life is cherished; cherish life. It was a code adhered to mind and soul by the men of his order. How would those men react if they knew of his heresy? He knew the answer. He could picture their silent stares, filled with a cosmos of hatred and disgust. They would not hesitate to revile him. Was it a weakness that he could not so easily despise himself? Slowly, and with an effort, he turned away from the sweetness of eternal night.

The cliffs soon shrunk and gave to a long beach, packed with soft white sand that glittered with quartz. The same gull-like birds nested here in their hundreds, and watched him pass with glassy black eyes. The water sighed a salty breeze, and the only vegetation able to endure it were a tall brown grass and a variety of thorny bush that dominated the ground. It was then that the hovel caught his attention. Nothing more than a shack made of driftwood, sand and rocks, it sat forlorn near the shore, like an old woman waiting for her seafaring children to return. The only opening was a broad, squat door that faced the ocean.

As he approached it, a young boy stepped out and regarded him solemnly; he was naked and his skin had been darkened by the sun. A crown of filthy black hair adorned his skull. Valoc comparatively was covered from head to toe in sombre whites and grays. Draped over him was a traveling cloak with the hood drawn, so that his face was obscured in darkness. Yet both man and boy moved with a certain bestial grace, the boy like a young panther and Valoc with the smooth but powerful efficiency of a wolf. A slender mace sat astride Valoc's hip, a promise of pain in its soft gleam, but the boy was stalwart.

Valoc came to a halt several steps away. He noticed now that the child was extremely thin, and though his skin was tan it bore the signs of ill health. "Ola, child."

"Ola, master," the boy replied. Valoc was not surprised when the child did not bow. "Are you well?"

"Very," Valoc said automatically. He did not bother returning the formality. "Do you live here alone?"

As if on cue a hunched shadow seperated itself from the gloom within the hovel. As it emerged into the daylight it became a wizened creature, a hag of a woman, clad in a rotten gown that did little to conceal her clammy gray flesh. Silver strands of web-like hair clung to her pale skull, and her single viable eye stared into the darkness of Valoc's hood.

"You've no business here, stranger."

He considered the hag for a moment. "You might be able to tell me the way to Carchoros."

The woman lifted a bony, gnarled hand and pointed south. Valoc expected her to elaborate, but no further response prevailed. A sudden instinct prompted him to continue the exchange.

"You are quite isolated here," he remarked.

"Be on your way," the hag said.

Valoc regarded her a moment longer before concluding any further conversation was in vain. Before taking his leave he spared another glance at the boy, and it was then that he noticed the feral desperation in the child's eyes. It was vague, but present nonetheless. He paused--and saw the marks. They were small, almost unrecognizable against the dark shade of the boy's skin, but they were unmistakable: a pair of puncture marks at the base of his throat.

A single, overwhelming conviction stormed Valoc's mind. His hand fell upon the shaft of his mace. "Strigoi," he whispered.

The hag's reaction was immediate. No denials, no theatrics; the strigoi were creatures of action. She seized the boy and tossed him into the hovel with the ease of a man in his prime. Her flesh turned black, as black as the depths of midnight, with no feature visible; like a shadow. The strigoi lunged.

Valoc struck the strigoi down with his mace while it was in mid-leap. There was no dull thunderclap of splintering skull, no spray of blood, only the silence and the sensation of rubbery, yielding flesh. Nevertheless, the strigoi howled and reeled, and Valoc assaulted it with furious passion, raining down a merciless hurricane of blows.

His onslaught was strengthening when the beast suddenly barged through the shield of his attack. He was cast away by the force of the charge. Then like a rabid animal it was upon him: clawing, hissing, its black maw spraying him with foul slaver. It knocked the mace from his hand and he struggled frantically with it, fending off talons and fangs, heaving ragged breaths as its weight crushed his chest. No longer did he desire death; not at the hands of this demon, not on its terms instead of his. He grappled desperately until he was defeated and bloody, the strigoi perched triumphantly upon him. He was pinned and helpless.

In a voice deep and cold like an echo within a tomb, the strigoi spoke to him. "Hundreds have preceded you: I drank of all of them. Let me see your face before I embrace you." The strigoi drew away Valoc's hood.

His face was featureless save for a red maw. A tense moment of silence followed as the strigoi made sense of what it saw. It cried out a single word of an unknown tongue and recoiled in horror.

Here was Valoc's opportunity: the red maw curled into an awful grin. He seized the strigoi and drew it to him, clamping his mouth around its throat. The strigoi briefly struggled before being reduced to a pathetic, dying sack of flesh. Valoc drank of the blood that sustained it as a normal man might drink a fine wine.

Shortly after the boy reared his head from within the hovel. Valoc was bent over, retrieving his mace. His hood was once more drawn over his head. The only evidence of the conflict was a strip of what looked like black cloth lying on the sand.

"She is dead?" the boy asked. Valoc nodded and turned to him.

"She said something," said the boy. "Just before you--"

Valoc's posture grew rigid. "It doesn't matter."

"The word means brother."