The Darkness Thickens
By Will Krantz
One
The sky was boiling with the darkening clouds of a midsummer night, and the first cold drops had burst forth from the pregnant bellies of those gray spires, accented by the moon hanging behind them. The moonlight shafted through the clouds like sunlight through a canopy, displaying its brilliance against the parapets of the castle, where all was dark and eerie within. A slight wind blew, causing the trees to sway ominously in the dead of the night. Blackness descended as the clouds shifted to obscure the moon, and the land for miles around, visible from the stone ramparts, fell into a lull of quiet, even in the distant patter of the rain. The countryside was asleep, waiting for the next day to come, when they would continue their pathetic existence. Lumirre scowled.
He stood atop the utmost point of the parapets, his black cloak enveloping his body, and his formal, black shoes shining. On his bottom half he wore dark gray pants, which were contrasted by a white shirt that hung loosely beneath the cloak, which thrashed fitfully in the wind, despite its size. The collar of the cloak was upturned, its corners bent strangely, and the smile on Lumirre’s face could almost be considered crooked and wrong. His eyes were black, wholly consumed by his pupils, giving most of his minions the illusion that he was some sort of otherworldly demon, and they wouldn’t be exactly wrong. There were certain conditions that called for the darkened eyes, though. That was called bloodlust.
A sweet, savory aroma ascended from below into his nostrils, and a wave of bliss came over him as his eyes rolled back in his head and his body shuddered slightly. He had no doubt about it, tonight was the night. The stench of blood was thick in the air, most likely from the kill of either a hunter or another animal, but no matter which, that thick fragrance had warmed his blood, no matter how cold it had previously been, and caused his breathing to quicken in the warm summer night. His heart proceeded to beat rapidly and he licked the fangs that remained hidden behind his thin lips. The sounds of his father came, encouraging him.
Come on, it’s not so hard, is it? I thought you were like me. Tough as can be, am I right? This looks more like cowardice. They had it coming, son.
How long had he lived by those words?
It’s time, he thought, slightly echoing his father’s own words several years ago. He knew that if he didn’t complete this sweet satisfaction right now, he might lose interest and also lose the racing feeling. He couldn’t chance that. Thrusting out his chest slightly and parting his legs to gain better balance, he stretched his arms out behind him like some enthusiastic dance, and waited for the perfect moment, when the wind was just right, as well as the amount of noise.
Any second, it will just come to you. You’ll feel it, Lumirre. You’re a Rose, after all.
“Again?” The word was sharp and accusing, but Lumirre had expected as much from the speaker. “What has it been now, Lumirre? Seven times a month is your average, and I think you’re just about to pass the point of no return. Do you remember what happened to him?”
“Don’t mention him.” Lumirre had more than a difficult time dealing with the memories, and didn’t need his supposed beloved stirring them up. “It’s nothing. He couldn’t control it like I can. He was at least up to thirteen a month, and I’m only at eight now. You’ve got nothing to worry about, darling.” The last word came out flat and void of emotion.
“That’s what he said, according to that thing you call a mother.” Contempt laced Averill’s voice, and Lumirre now had no doubt that the woman who had given birth to him was nothing in the eyes of his forced bride. “She said that he wasn’t even at one of the previous stages. He was already teetering on the edge of frenzy, and it was only days after that he started his rampage.”
“I’m not my father.”
The words came out thick and were laced with a thousand emotions, but primarily there was contempt and revulsion. He could still remember his father as the moral core around which Lumirre had centered himself. He remembered the days when he would come back from the human villages, a gift in his hand such as a carving or the coat of some wild animal. Generosity and congeniality were now lost inside that shell of a man that was consumed with hatred for life itself.
Lumirre closed his eyes, attempted to clear his head, and decided that the time for argument was later. He felt as if the bloodlust would pass any moment, despite its notoriety for plaguing him for hours at a time. He repositioned himself, and took his normal stance, waiting for the opportune moment.
“Then you wish damnation upon yourself.” Averill whispered before retreating from the parapets into the darkness of the castle.
Lumirre could feel power surging through him. His eyes, which had previously returned to a calm state, his irises of blood red showing perfectly, were now consumed by black, and his fists flexed, clenching and unclenching, his claws digging into his palm. His mind was filled with thoughts of a banquet of blood, in which an entire village would be consumed, and their blood poured into wine glasses of rare metals. He imagined their livestock bellowing in an effort to escape their horrible fate, and suddenly, his face broke out in that crooked smile.
It’s time. His father’s voice echoed once more in his mind.
Lumirre slightly bowed his legs, and felt the blood rushing through his body like a thundering river, and his mind was cleared of everything save for his father’s ever constant voice in his mind. What small portion of reason and morality had inhabited Lumirre’s body was replaced with a never ending hunger. Darkness fell like a veil over his heart.
Lumirre took in a deep, filling breath, and stepped from the parapets.
The second the firmness beneath his feet was left behind, the night began, filled with a thrilling sense of dread and foreboding coupled with adventure. The fall started as it always did, with that moment when space and gravity hesitated to dance, and Lumirre felt an empty nothingness, as if he were floating in some bottomless body of water. The fall itself, however, was completely different.
The fall was not simply pleasant, or satisfying. It was pure ecstasy entwined with the rush of speed paralleled by no other experience. His cloak tossed and turned behind him, and his hair blew back, exposing the sharp jaw line, firm and determined in the face of the pain caused by the bullets of liquid striking his face. To Lumirre, however, this was just another part of the experience.
Below, Lumirre watched as the mouth of the large canyon surrounding the castle, its jagged edges and jutting columns of stone long corroded and fallen from the weathered sides of the glorious edifice, grew closer and closer, seemingly wishing to swallow him in a ghastly scene of gore. He grimaced against eht cutting wind, its whipping motion threatening to send Lumirre into a tumbling frenzy from which he would never recover. The teeth of stone would claim him.
The pines littered about on the other side of the stone bridge leading into the castle grounds seemed so close and yet so very far, and for a moment, Lumirre believed sincerely that he was in a dream in which he was falling, or perhaps a nightmare, in which he would lose the air current that would bring him safely to the ground. There was always that fear, but that was what made it so thrilling.
He felt his cloak billow behind him in the roar of the passing air, his body creating a pocket of force in the air, its thick force field shifting the rain around him until he had become a sort of missile on a collision course with the vast darkness of the canyon. He waited for the exact moment, where he would feel the air calm, known only as the tranquility zone to his family. His eyes closed, and he waited.
He could remember his first drop from the parapets at the age of sixteen, when curiosity had given way to obsession with the method in which the drop was done. He could no longer be answered by his father at the dinner table when the discussion of the feelings accompanying the experience arose. He chose to see it himself, and so Lumirre had climbed the tower steps to the parapets, and looked into that black nothingness on a moonlit night. His eyes had searched for sight of any sentries that might have decided to check the outer walls of the castle on the rare occasion that some valiant young man might attempt to scale their rough surface. He had leapt, and could almost feel his father watching him as he plummeted, observing with cool indifference as his son dove into the darkness of the night, silhouetted by the moon and accented by the rays of its brilliance. He had felt the tranquility zone like an unseen force all around him, and had landed safely. Now, he felt it once more.
Suddenly, the rain and wind ceased their endless howl, and serenity fell over Lumirre like a tidal wave of relief. His eyes opened suddenly, and his brow filled with creases. His arms extended to either side of him, and as he cocked one leg while keeping the other straight, he could feel that there was something in the air. A calling, it seemed to be, bidding him seek out fresh blood. His cloak caught the wind perfectly, and his dive slowed to a steady glide. As usual, his feet touched the grass only several feet from the edge of the canyon, where inevitable doom awaited all who dared walk to it.
Lumirre, who had fallen on one knee, slowly raised, his black cloak ascending from the dark pool it had created, and his eyes gleamed brightly. His breath was short and raspy, like that of a dying man. A brief look into the forest was all that he needed, and he impulsively had the notion of safety. The night was free of any dangerous creature that might find Lumirre to its taste, and all was well despite the thundering waves of rain that descended from the heavens. A crack of lightning accented Lumirre as he took his first step, his boots leaving temporary marks in the murky pools of water, ripples that would dance for several seconds before completing their short-lived existences.
Lumirre stared into the endless rows of pines standing like soldiers of some battalion, their outstretched branches threatening to impale him should he move an inch. He waited for the power to build as it always had. The steady hum in his legs grew to a roar slowly, and he could see the veins in his body rising to the surface and creating trails up his arms and legs. With a grunt, he started his run.
What had once taken him several hours now took him only several seconds. As a child he had been trained in the very forest that he now charged through, and during that training, he had not truly understood the premise of charging, and had run blindly into the pines. His reward had been that he had to hike through the forest unaided by the gifts given to him as an infant, and that night he had collapsed in his bed.
He smiled for a moment, and then rushed through the trees, feeling their branches nearing his face as he ducked, weaved, and slid through the obstructions, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, as he had been trained. His heart beat slowly, controlled through years of practice, and he found the event soothing, as taking a warm bath or walking in the sunlight was soothing to the day walkers.
After no more than half a minute or so, Lumirre emerged and came to a halt, only to overlook a small town that sat at the base of the hill on which he stood. His cloak fluttered in the breeze, and his stance, for all who saw him, looked as if he were some swordsman from a future era, come to bring peace to a town ridden with grievances. His eyes, however, suggested something different. The hour was not right, though.
I must wait, he thought, and did.
His eyes glinted, reflecting the moon poised in the sky like some great medallion, and waited for the precise moment. Below, he could see several houses, and a small guards’ post where anyone accused of a crime could be held until proper authorities came. In that particularly small town lived only seventy residents, but to Lumirre the hunt was the same, regardless of the number of people inhabiting an area. He was more than a man in the night, where his powers came to a peak. He was a god among men, as is his father had put it at one time.
They’re insects, boy, insects, and you are like some towering figure that can crush them all with a single step. His father had looked at him with undying belief, and had not so much as blinked as he spoke these powerful words. Never forget that you are superior, and they are weak.
He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth more against the memory of the man he had once called his father than the cold and pouring rain which found its way into his cloak and started to freeze him slowly, although he could feel nothing. His mind was somewhere in that chaotic zone hidden deep within the chambers of his brain. It was like some passage to bliss that he had crossed many times in his efforts to assuage his urges, although nothing seemed to be successful. He could still feel the burn of temptation in his heart, and found it both satisfying and terrible.
When Lumirre reopened his eyes, the few people which had been rushing to and fro about the town had returned to their homes, and he smiled villainously, taking in the full joys of the hunt. Without thinking, his body shifted and he began the trek down the hill to the town, his very person intimidating and terrifying as his steps were accented by claps of thunder amidst the roar of rain on earth.
The first house was almost fifty feet from Lumirre when he leapt to its roof without effort. His eyes narrowed, and his heart pounded as he crept about atop the incline, teeth bared in savage anger at nothing in particular. His fist clenched as he jumped from the roof and into what was apparently the town plaza, a pitiful sight in the midst of the rain, which held only several benches and a pathetic fountain, mostly weathered by the elements.
The street was dirt, with several flat stones littered about for what was supposed to be a touch of ancient style. The homes that surrounded Lumirre brought poverty to his mind as his eyes flitted from each decrepit house to the next, checking windows for signs of movement. He snorted with disgust and shifted into the shadows of a nearby alley, if it could be called that, for it was so wide. He saw that to his right there stood a window, which looked into a room obscured by a curtain. The only feature that made this clear was a tattered piece of the cloth which revealed a rocking chair in the corner, as well as one of the posts on an old bed. From within, all was silent, but Lumirre could feel his blood begin to race and thought very seriously of taking the one who was asleep. It would simple, painless, and completely stealthy.
No, both his mother and father had said on his first hunt, his father more enthusiastic than his mother about the hunt, to make prey out of one who is asleep and unable to defend themselves is not only cowardly, but is also merciless. We are creatures of the night, but we are anything but cowards.
Lumirre, as deeply as their memory burned him, found that he had to obey their commands, for fear of eternal damnation. He had once been told that one of the greatest keys to attaining a place in the afterlife was the respect of one’s parents. Lumirre scowled at the rules laid down by his parents, and moved swiftly down the alley, not taking care to reduce noise, yet making none. Years of practice had perfected his methods.
A small tower, lost in the haze of the storm that threatened to blow some of the homes in the area down, stood at the edge of town, unoccupied even by sentries, who usually kept a trained eye on the borders of the town to halt any unwanted intruders. An iron door rested on rusty hinges at the base of the tower, its metallic gray dull and lifeless. Lumirre wandered past it and hooked his claws into one of the gaps where a stray brick had fallen from the uniformity of the masonry. He clambered up, hand over hand, until the top, only fifty feet or so above the ground, came into clear view. No true tip showed, and for this Lumirre was grateful. He hauled his light body over the edge of the tower’s top, and rested on the flat stone, which ran almost forty feet in diameter. A trapdoor had been set into the stone leading below, but Lumirre had no fear of interruptions during his process.
His cold gaze roamed across the landscape before him, and the outline of what appeared to be a barn could be made out in the distance, camouflaged by darkened trees behind it. Fields of grass rolled towards the settlement, and Lumirre knew that the place he had seen would be his place of satisfaction. He would find what was needed to cause his heart to flourish with dark joy, and fulfill his urges. He would find his prey there.
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