This fanfic contains zero Remake spoilers, nor any elements of it for that matter.
♠
There was no sense of the preordained in their meeting.
“Can you help me, miss? I think they’re trying to kill me again.”
The pleading voice she could’ve ignored. It was one of the first things she had picked up while living on this side of the world to ignore the beggar, the vagrant, the fellow man in need - man, or often enough, as was the case here, child. She would see any number of them on her daily commute during her stay in London, back when she still had it in her to play the game of matching physiological similarities to speculate genetic relation or deliberate on a potential solution to her shortage of specimens. Nowadays, she imagined, she would just get vaguely annoyed.
No, it was the words it spoke that drew her attention. Not enough to divert her eyes from the road, a curving highway whose corner she dearly wished a taxi would soon emerge from, but outlandish enough to merit recognition. She reckoned she could use any opportunity to dust off her French anyhow.
“Shouldn’t you be with your parents then?”
“Um, well. That wouldn’t help. They hired them, you see.”
That got her to turn around.
The child before her couldn’t be more than ten years old.
At first glance she would describe it as an exemplary specimen of a well-to-do, well-cared-for young boy on the path of grooming bright blue eyes, roguish blonde hair and balanced facial features into a visage of effortless superiority, with which to greet the valet in a few years’ time as he left his car keys and headed off for a night’s entertainment. Definitely not the begging type - a native? Almost by reflex her mind leapt to the task, and it was then that the trail of thought halted.
The boy was smiling. It wasn’t all there - that she would never miss - but the apologetically hopeful expression directed at her drained all levity from her thoughts. Was that what people called a disarming smile? No, she knew that what gave her pause was not its earnestness but the unnerve she felt in that moment from a child who could speak those words with an expression like that on his face.
“Listen here. I can’t help you, but that man over there,” and here she pointed at the uniformed policeman who had fled the early afternoon sunlight and found a shaded perch a ways off to pass the time, although she wasn’t sure he hadn’t dozed off, “will protect you even if it kills him. It’s his job, so go talk to him.”
Experience had taught her the wisdom in walking away from trouble before ever finding out if there was any at all, and the short visit that she had intended had no margin for murder - her own or anyone else’s. Whether the strange boy was being pursued by assassins set on him by greedy guardians eyeing his inherited fortune or had merely discovered the amusement to be found in telling outrageous lies to strangers that compelled them to take him seriously was something she would rather have a policeman devote his time to finding out.
Never mind that, with how tiresome waiting under the summer sun for a taxi that might never come was she would probably need to talk to him herself for directions. Playing the lost tourist was a horrid but unavoidable prospect, and if the boy insisted she could always drag him there with her. That this lost child might not want to return to its parents - that this boy’s parents might want him dead - was truly no concern of hers.
When she was young, one of her first lessons was on the topic of human life. The point of it was to instill in her a certain understanding of its value, in a sense more pragmatic than moral. Although this episode in what she later came to think of as her ideological sublimation was in itself irrelevant, an anecdote mentioned in passing had stuck with her persistently into adulthood, which she supposed spoke of the effectiveness of its intended message.
In every passing minute humans die all over the world. There is no way to know the exact numbers, nor can anyone know all their identities. Some die in obscurity, remembered by no one, some die in secret, to be found by no one. Some deaths are a long time coming, some are sudden, incidental. Some caused by human hand, some not. The fact remains that in every minute humans die in great numbers, and nothing one does or does not do effects the slightest change to it.
It was an aphorism that several important lessons derived from. “A man’s life is the work he leaves behind”, “the common good is a waste of effort”, and “don’t sympathise with test subjects” to name a few. She in turn had chosen to distill from it a puerile determinism that did not survive its first impact with an appreciable social environment. It was rather shameful to look back to, but then again she had lived like a monk long enough to excuse her own social maladjustment in her moments of retrospection. Indifference towards the fate of people she did not care about, she found, made her all too human. Having no people to care about was another story entirely.
That was all to say that she didn’t believe in fate. Here, too, she would reiterate that there was no sense of the preordained - some machination of destiny at work. Any choice of hers would not affect the outcome, as the outcome in its starkest terms would not be determined by it. The siren call to adventure had long ceased to move her. No—a perfect chance meeting had come from nothing and would lead to nowhere.
And yet.
With a shake of his head, the boy dismissed the banality of both fate and chance.
“He can’t help like you can, miss magus.”
Ah, bugger. When had she stopped thinking like one?
“Alright kid, I’m listening.”
While the boy did the talking her mind, among other things, was racing. All the while replaying the previous minute in her head, the woman looked him up, down, and through, her findings annoyingly consistent.
No discernible effect. No lingering magical energy to speak of. So far, not too abnormal. But then there was the lack of ambient footprint, which indicated either some kind of containment or the absence of discharge altogether. No wonder she didn’t see him coming: he was indistinguishable from any other mundane passerby - just as she was, or so she had thought. Despite the fact that he was somehow able to identify her as a magus even with her circuits inactive, there was always the possibility that he was actually just a completely normal person with an uncanny ability to track down the supernatural. Stranger things had happened, eh?
“I’m a magus too, but I’m not very good at it. My parents are really upset about that, so, uhm…”
Well, that was that, then.
“You can’t be that bad. I was trying to not be found but you saw right through me.” She employed her most encouraging tone as bait for a child’s pride even as magical energy ran through her eyes into the liquid crystal lenses in an attempt to do the exact same thing. For a single disorienting moment the world exploded in a kaleidoscope of synesthetic perception, the flow of magical energy magnified thousandfold, and then the neural partitioning allowed her visual cortex to process the information without getting cooked.
Nothing. Not a single trace of circulation. Perhaps due to circuit composition, or maybe an extrasensory channel, but she would have to dig out any answers to her postulations with forceps and scalpel, and as much as the urge reared its inquiring head from time to time she had tried hard to break the habit of stuffing people in her suitcase merely to satisfy idle curiosity.
Though that didn’t mean less intrusive enquiries weren’t on the table.
“That’s not magecraft. It’s...just something I can do.”
“Finding other magi?”
“Seeing things they can’t see, I guess.”
Those…eyes. In that instant, as if something in her mind had just clicked, her gaze felt magnetised, sinking into depths that made her skin crawl with a vestigial emotion she had trained herself to parse as interest. A small twitch of her fingers slipped through her restraint of reaching in to pry them out. The time she took to peel her tongue from the roof of her mouth covered the effort to rein herself in.
“Can you tell me about it?” she finally asked. A slight sheen over her eyes was the only sign of her lenses increasing their reflectivity against these potential mystic eyes.
“...I don’t really understand it. I told you, it’s just something I can do.”
How delightfully vague. It was obvious from the way his face progressively fell with each response that the boy was troubled by this ability. His reticence to talk about it didn’t really smack of typical magus evasiveness. She had no idea if he had been trained as one, but previous experience with ten-year-old brats freshly unveiled as heirs to a crest and already picture-perfect representatives of Barthomeloi snobbery was unlikely to be of assistance in this case. As might have been apparent, the woman was woefully unequipped to deal with children.
“So, are you gonna help me?”
Especially children that expected unreasonable things out of her.
Despite her better judgment, she was interested. Old habits made up the core of a magus and hers were uniformly aligned towards examination, elucidation, and acquisition of the rare and unusual. That did not mean she had forgotten about today’s business plans, or the fact that freelance assassins would derail them spectacularly should she involve herself in theirs. But if the two just happened to align for the briefest of moments, that wouldn’t be too much of a setback, would it?
Hah, and here she’d thought she had grown a little wiser.
It must’ve shown on her face, as the boy’s own expression lit up in joy wholly at odds with the anxiety he must’ve felt being marked for death. Could have been a product of mental conditioning or just as well a defect; the two were often interchangeable. However, the excited ranting he broke into before she could slip a word in edgewise indicated the latter.
“Thank you! Your eyes are scary and your trace is masked but I knew you were nice! Your “it” is that of a good person! Or, uhm, not a bad person! And you look very pretty! Black hair suits you! And your shirt is cool! Woah, what’s in that suitcase? Are you a gambler? Is that why you’re in Monaco?”
Where to even begin with that. She was already starting to doubt the boy’s circumstances but the manner in which he casually talked about how he had seen through the precautions she had taken specially for this trip rankled in a visceral way. Much like a magician having her tricks exposed, tricks she could never perform again. It was a feeling every magus hated for very real and justifiable reasons.
More than worrying about the strength of her disguise or the fact that standing at the Gare de Monaco’s entrance made the two of them highly conspicuous targets to any would-be assassins, what she wanted most at that moment was for the boy to shut up - for his own good.
“Stop. Listen to me. You live here, don’t you? Then here’s the deal: you lead me to the harbour, I make sure you’re safe until we get there. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” he said not a heartbeat later, and she couldn’t keep a grasp on her irritation as she watched him dip his head in contrition. She was sure she’d done away with the cuteness instinct during her first forays into physiology, but it seemed she might have to revise.
“So!” Those uncanny eyes met her own as soon as the boy’s head snapped back up. “I’m Flat! Flat Escardos! Nice to meet you!”
A vaguely familiar name. Old. Second Owners of the city for as long as there had been one if memory served. One could only imagine the circumstances under which the family would resort to killing off its own heirs.
“I’m…Alice.”
“Alice what?”
“It’s a secret. You wouldn’t pronounce it correctly anyway. By the way, what do the people chasing you look like? Are they close by?”
Nod nod nod.
“Yep! Tattoo baldy and tall snake lady. They’re just around the corner.”
“You, why didn’t you say so?!”
Then again, as she dragged the boy by the hand into the crowd she could somewhat understand his parents’ reasons.
“Which way is it?” The woman tried to raise her voice above the din, following the sidewalk downhill. Given how Monaco was essentially built on a slope she could have followed a general sense of direction towards the sea, but she wasn’t sure about the layout of the streets, which formed a particularly roundabout, complex network to funnel the traffic through the vertical architecture of the city. Incidentally, that also made it a huge bother to walk them in heels, as she was being forced to do right now.
“Uhm, depends, which port do you mean?”
She threw a measured look his way.
“The one with a casino floating in it.”
“Oh, Fem’s Casa! That’s in Port Hercule. I’ve always wanted to go there. Do you think they’ll let me in if I go with you?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, young master Escardos.”
The boy made a curious face at being addressed as such, his boundless enthusiasm seeming to deflate for a moment, but only just. In the next heartbeat his smile bounced back into place like a rubber band and with a few quick steps he walked ahead of the woman, leading her by the hand across a pedestrian crossing to the opposite sidewalk. With Flat taking the lead the woman let herself be pulled along and focused her attention on spotting any pursuers; or at least that would have been the case if the boy didn’t insist on making small talk all the while.
“Still, you picked a weird time to go there, miss Alice. We’ll have to take the long way.”
“Really? Why is that?”
She muttered distractedly. The only weird thing was having to go there in the first place. She didn’t make a habit of hand-delivering her products, especially in places where she was unwelcome; but sometimes jobs came up when she didn’t expect them, and sometimes her client was the kind of person she couldn’t exactly mail a package to.
“Well, the roads around there are closed. Today’s the race day.”
As if to punctuate that statement, the roar of an engine rose from the lower reaches of the city and the crowd around them cheered in response. It was the simultaneous turning of their heads over the edge of the walkway in hopes of catching a glimpse of a racecar that allowed her to pick out the two that kept their eyes fixed on the pair.
That and the disturbance of their activated magic circuits, the tinge in the air around them visible to her augmented sight.
And then they were off, the woman’s right hand already tracing the first runic array on the back of the boy running in front of her. Among whispered words of magic, the woman spared a wry thought towards the coincidences that conspired to pass for fate.
Race day indeed.
♦
Four and a half thousand years ago he received the blood of the moon. Reflecting on that fact, he wondered if he had a reason to celebrate an existence born from chance that had persisted beyond the allotted limit of anything that could rightly be called life.
Fulfilling no purpose, pursuing no end, something that couldn’t even be called a phenomenon but rather a nothingness that resisted its own nature - a blight that insisted on inflicting itself on the world, a parasite only fit to carry out its titular function - was how he had viewed himself for a very long time. Nothing deserving of celebration, surely. But even as the full weight of eternity imprinted itself on an existence that was for no other purpose but to be and his consciousness aligned with the dark path that he would henceforth never stray from, he would still believe that what had exhausted the definition of humanity and yet refused to return to the backwater of history that had birthed it was in its current course as remoras and barnacles on the underside of a ship, slowing it down and dragging it to the bottom.
Four and a half thousand years. It was only his estimation, based on what little factual information complemented the lore surrounding the original ones, ancient among ancients. It was ironic that he, the subject of this mythology, had to resort to records and extrapolations, but the truth was that there was no recollection of his own he could trust as something more than wisps of faint remembrance - an impression that evoked recognition or a postulation that was halfway plausible - coalescing into a rough shape that might be mistaken for a memory.
For all its staggering capacity, the human mind was not resistant to time. It couldn’t be considered a functional limitation to what was inherently finite. Nature made no assurances for an existence that persisted beyond its end.
So it was that any vampire professing to the elder title who claimed to remember the years when the breath of the planet was rich and the children of the moon held the crown of primacy was either a liar or never human to begin with. The farthest reaches of his own recollection had frayed and tattered so that nothing concrete could be gleaned from where his mind had painted over the blank expanses, eroded by the sheer friction of time against memory, with echoes of shadows of thoughts and emotions that may or may not have once been his own. And even if it could, it would hold no meaning to the person that he was now.
“Person”, if the word might be allowed. It was a convenience he had stopped debating when he abandoned that line of thinking altogether. With the erosion of the essential foundations comprising the identifiable self, the core of an endless existence - whether defined as a will, a compulsion, or a necessity - was simply a substitute for that which was most indefinable, most precious, and most irrevocably lost to them. Some scholars posited that the transmissibility of the vampiric condition was a mechanism intended to impose a termination before that point, as child slew sire and brought an end to that which nature could not, but if one did not derive from that an understanding of some animalistic order, the cycle of creation and inheritance would be recognised as symptomatic of a single dominant trend. In other words, nothing less than the phantom pain of the human condition.
Rather than torpor itself, that which wore down the endless was a fatigue born of the world’s inadequacy to leave a lasting mark on them. Presiding over their kingdoms, waging war in the shadows, inviting enmity and hatred from both their ancestral enemies and their own kind - it was the closest they could come to the peril of the unknown and the promise of true death. By imposing uncertainty on their unending lives they sought to exorcise the spectre of futility, never allowing the weight of their existence to settle on their being. To fear was novel and to doubt was human, even as they themselves were embodiments of such fear and darkness in their entanglements with mortals. This desiderating, above all, bespoke life’s ineradicable yearning for a purpose greater than itself, where every end was a denouement and death one’s fated conclusion - for what was more human than the desire for meaning?
In truth, what vampires constructed their identity around was an act of imitation to which they were compelled by a lingering sense of former humanity. Life-in-death of a being-beyond death; a hollow impulse. Reproduced patterns of a simulated self. The life of the endless was the most transparent of simulacra.
It went without saying that he was a paradigm of that. The life lost to him had ceased to be a topic of even philological interest. As it did not matter whether a fire that burned down a forest had started from a tree or a bush, the flesh in which a vampire was born may very well have belonged to a prince or a peasant. When the human self expired, what took its place was an imprint - perhaps what might be considered the single approximation of a fragment of the original - which would sustain the being-beyond-death as a guidepost for the meaningless to persist in persistence itself.
Still, he mused as he surveyed his domain, he could not claim to understand his own nature completely even now. Even as his kind spent their time recreating the aspects of human experience that struck their fancy - in mockery or blitheness, with their appreciation of the rich irony ranging in between - his relentless fascination with the human subject differed from the predatory fixations one might have expected of a vastly superior species and its favoured prey. It was an interest that sustained him, a nectar that kept the poison of tedium at bay from a well which never ran dry; yet after thousands of years of drinking from it he was no closer to a certain answer on what primal drive underlay this pattern.
Existing as a part of human society, interfering with its affairs, changing the course of the ship called humanity down the river of history, however slightly, for so long, and Valery Fernand Vandelstam did not yet know whether he was a mockery of life idly toying with the living or an imitation of it seeking transubstantiation by immersing himself in the genuine article.
Having long left the headwaters behind, he could not help but wonder if his voyage even had a destination. The bright side was that he had stopped worrying about it anyway.
What he did worry about was the tingling sensation in the back of his head, a warning that somewhere on his ship someone was doing something they weren’t supposed to.
This ship being a casino, he had a likely guess as to what had tripped the bounded field. While mundane surveillance systems still had their uses in the game and table rooms that entertained thousands of visitors every week, Fem’s Casa was above all his court - his rendition of the royal charade that the Ancestors had perfected. A moment’s synchronisation with wards that were effectively extensions of his body, like a spider in its web, was enough to pinpoint the exact location of the disturbance: the slots.
Nothing unusual there. If not for the downtime that followed the mass relocation of the patrons to the ship’s decks - watching the ongoing race with binoculars in one hand and a drink in the other - he wouldn’t have bothered going there himself, but as it were it could provide a distraction from thoughts he’d long done away with. It just wouldn’t do for some two-bit spellcaster with a glorified swindler’s trick to get themselves killed by the wards just because they’d thought to peddle the projected coins they playtested in Monte Carlo here. Deaths were bad luck and worse publicity.
What was decidedly unusual was the empty hall that he found when he got there.
A false alarm? Out of the question. The bounded fields were calibrated to detect any kind of magical energy discharge or interference above that produced passively by a magus’s circuits, a margin calculated over a very long period of trial and error.
If someone attempted to activate their mystic eyes, he would know. If someone tried to tamper with the bounded field, he would feel it. If someone were to, say, bring a millennium-rank materialised soul on the ship, he’d get a headache the moment it stepped its foot on the boarding ramp. His unflinching confidence in the reliability of his creations was the product of constant refinement, such that once all explanations were exhausted he would sooner assume that someone had managed to outwit or work around them than entertain the possibility that they had malfunctioned.
As the owner of a world-renowned casino, Van-Fem absolutely did not believe in chance.
Scanning his eyes over the slot room he thought exactly that. And even while his examination turned up no suspects, something unusual did come under his notice.
The room was empty. While most of the visitors had perched themselves on the Casa’s outer railings, the few indifferent to motorsports and pack mentality alike still milled about the game halls, seemingly disoriented by the strange perception of spaces that were almost always brimming with people now appearing vast in their emptiness. The tables weren’t the same without a crowd, that he understood, but there wasn’t a single casino in Monaco - or indeed the entire world - where one wouldn’t find at least one person haunting the slot machines, the simplest and most accessible of mechanised thrills, at all times.
Just as he decided to have a look at the security cameras, the slot next to him sprang to life. Ten seconds later his shoes were buried under an onrushing pile of coins.
Most unusual.
The vampire stepped out of the pile to a symphony of clinking nickel, smoothed out his black hair with a sweep of his hand, adjusted the lapels of his red suit, and addressed the empty room.
“Won’t you collect your earnings?”
Silence met him, and he filled it with a sigh.
“I promise that there won’t be any trouble if you reveal yourself now."
“Promise you won’t eat me?”
The room itself asked him from nowhere and everywhere at once, taking a conscious effort on the man’s part to not let his surprise show on his face. Whatever manner of sorcery it was that could elude him in his domain, he hadn’t been prepared to associate the infiltrator with the hesitant voice of a young boy.
“I shall do no such thing. Do I really have that kind of reputation?”
“I don’t know, mister. Your “it” is just steeped in blood.”
Like a changeling returning from the land of fantasy, as if pulling back a curtain separating this side of the world from an unfathomable yonder, a fair-haired boy entered his sight. Appearing in the empty space between a moment and the next so that it seemed he might’ve been there all along, he sloughed off his unreality with the world rushing in to fill the void left behind him. Seamlessly, but not fast enough to deceive the vampire lord’s eyes.
“My “it”?”
“Your...nature, but that’s not exactly right. It’s hard to explain, but I can tell these things just by looking.”
Making such an extraordinary claim, the boy scuffed his shoes against the ornately patterned red carpet as though that, and not sneaking into a casino and being caught tampering with magecraft, was something to be apologetic for.
“Is that so? That is a valuable skill to enter priesthood with, if you weren’t already a magus. Being one, you understand what it means when I say that I’m a vampire, yes?”
The dead apostle spoke casually, but his crimson eyes were as daggers into the boy’s own blue. Any person with a sense of self-preservation would surely feel the pressure exerted by the man resonating with their primal understanding of danger, the dread of impending predation - any, but not that boy.
“Ooh, you’re a real vampire? I wasn’t sure but that makes sense with how old you are! I’ve always wanted to meet one! These wards are yours, right? Do you own the casino? What’s your name, sir? Is it Fem?”
In what he would rank as one of the strangest moments of his very, very long unlife, the vampire known in notorious circles as the dark lord of the business world, le grand marionnettiste, peer of the elder title and moonblooded Ancestor weathered a deluge of questions from the starry-eyed boy who, caring for none of those titles, had wandered into his castle and through his defences for no other reason than curiosity.
How confounding. How novel. There truly was no end to his entertainment.
“Young man, it is rude to ask so much without offering something in return. You know you’re not supposed to even be here, right?”
“Right! Er, I mean, I know that. But I just wanted to take a look, and the lady agreed to help me sneak in.”
“Lady?”
“Uhm. I’m not supposed to tell you, I think. But she made me this!”
The boy twirled on the spot, nearly losing his balance and sprawling on the floor in the process. Inscribed on the back of his velvet vest in fine silver filigree, runic arrays of illusion and protection from prying eyes caught the vampire’s keen gaze under the gleaming lights of the game hall. Immediately two thoughts sprung to the forefront of his mind.
One was the simple fact that this historically well-attested bind rune known as the journeyman’s boon was not nearly enough to fool the detection capabilities of the automata posted as bouncers in the casino’s ramp, never mind to slip under the notice of the network operating in the interior of the Casa. If that was all there was to the boy’s trick he would have to radically revise just about every magically operated measure to allay his concerns - that, however, he did not yet consider a serious possibility.
The other was that this scant information had already turned up a hit in the black book of unwelcome visitors that occupied a special place in the vampire’s memory. It appeared that simply thinking of the devil could be taken as an invitation.
“Did this lady make you keep secret about her?” With a single thought he set his guard units to a sweeping patrol without even waiting for the answer.
“She said it would be better if I forgot about her. She didn’t make me promise or anything but I got her in trouble with those assassins, and she did so much for me with the runes and the body double and that thing she did with her eyes that froze the crowd and made the cars crash, so…”
The boy shrugged his shoulders. It’s the right thing to do, his gesture seemed to say, and that childish confidentiality was something the vampire lord didn’t feel like forcing him to break.
“It sounds like a long story, then. Alright, I won’t ask about her,” he conceded. “I would, however, like to know your name.”
As though the mere act of introducing himself to a stranger was a great pleasure, the young boy took the blood-soaked fiend’s proffered hand and shook it with as much vigor as his small frame allowed.
“Of course, mister vampire, sir! I’m Flat Escardos, a magus from right here, Monaco!”
For a single moment, something like surprise registered on Valery Fernand Vandelstam’s ageless face.
Then, as if he was regarding the boy with a new light, it was replaced with a genial smile.
“Well met, monsieur Escardos. I am indeed the proud proprietor of the Casa, Van-Fem. Since, through one way or the other, you are here, would you like me to show you around?”
Placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder like an old friend, the dead apostle Ancestor ushered him into the grand hall.
The uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking that, for all its pomp, Fem’s Casa was ultimately yet another casino among many, putting on a show for its visitors that stayed in one's memory for a single night and then faded away with dawn. Only a very select few knew different.
Past the game halls where the rabble of Monaco - that is to say, high-rollers by any other casino’s standards - spent their dubiously earned coin, through heavy doors fit for a temple of worship rather than an altar of excess, was where the facade ended and something else entirely began.
Where the red carpet unfurled lay a different world - a different time.
There was no one thing that people noticed upon entry. Rather, what was impressed upon them was the singular nature of everything within it, such that the eye couldn't help but be drawn from one feature to the next, where even familiar objects seemed to take on a different life under the lights of the great chandelier. From the fine marmorino stucco on the walls giving no indication of a vessel at sea and the columns of porphyry said to have been looted from an emperor’s palace during the Fourth Crusade, to the sculpted nymphs forming the shafts of the balustrade holding up the upper floor and the frieze fitted with brilliant pietra dura, the grand chamber bore all the marks of royalty not with the artifice of a Las Vegas establishment, projecting its novelty with exaggerated pretense, but with a class that instead lent verisimilitude. Indeed, the decor itself shaped its atmosphere - and what an atmosphere it was.
Ambling in the hall through game tables that were pieces of art equal to any sculpture were the members of this anachronistic court, their picturesque finery capped by elaborate masks, the sole requisite of their presence in that chamber, which marked their status as the Casa’s inner circle, the privileged few permitted to take part in the masquerade. They milled about with the aimless purpose of nobility, gambling away fortunes with the same ease as they exchanged pleasantries, utterly beyond care of the world they had left behind and their names before they put on the mask. Gold flowed freely, the wine was sweet, and the nights seemed to last forever. Here was the pleasure-dome of distant recollection, where the games were timeless and revelry was its royal decree. Such an arena of passions could be found nowhere else.
A casino allowed its patrons the illusion of timeless splendor in a space divorced from the outside world, where for one night the law of consequences is lifted and man is free to pursue his pleasures like there is no tomorrow. The Casa’s patrons knew little of consequence, but they too craved illusions. In this masquerade they could live out a life only found in paintings and in the tales of their forefathers, in a time they felt they belonged but were born too late for, wound back even if just for a while.
Within the grand hall of Fem’s Casa was a piece of the Old World spirited away and perfectly preserved as it was in the days of Europe’s golden age - a melding of commemorative grandeur and bustling, if exclusive, enterprise. In that chamber one truly felt unbound by time. Perhaps, in this pleasurable haze, they even felt immortal.
It was said that the proprietor had chosen this decor out of sentimentality, wishing to carry the memory of old Venice, the Casa’s previous home port, with him wherever he might roam. And perhaps in imitation of the doge’s fabled palazzo, though some hesitate to make this claim, the wandering eye would finally come to rest on a composition that seemed at once to celebrate and immortalise this courtly yet carousing masquerade.
Overlooking all from the panels of the gilt coffered ceiling was a polyptych of frescoes depicting scenes from some esoteric mythology, a tale of royal ascendancy from ignominious birth to rebellion and bloody triumph which resonated with the hearts of those who laid eyes upon it and felt some kinship with its message, if not its symbolism. Those with an eye for art swore up and down that such boldness of colour and liveliness of expression could only be ascribed to the great Veronese, but the only mark the nameless master had left was a blue rose in an obscure corner, whose significance was as unknown as the subjects of their art. And yet, a story no living soul could know found purchase in the courtiers’ minds - perhaps seeing something of themselves in those scenes, as though looking up to a dark mirror projecting their lives on a timeless scale. Unbeknownst to them, this was but a glimpse of the worldview of those for whom life was an eternal reverie where the night could truly last forever.
Yet tonight held surprises for nobles and pretenders alike, for two figures roaming in their midst wore no mask. And though it was the prerogative of the carnevale’s king to show his face even on a night of masquerade, the boy who accompanied him was a rare curiosity to the eminent guests, drawing attention wherever he went. The mask was a symbol of the proprietor’s good graces, very much the mark of one’s belonging in that elite company. To wear none was either a sign of exceptional favour or the flouting of his hospitality. After all, the last person to show their face in that chamber had caused qute a stir, and stories of the scarlet devil were exchanged under the clinks of champagne crystals to this day.
“Then, they are dealt two cards. The number ranks from one to nine are worth their face value, while the ten and the royals are worth zero. You add their value up, and if the sum has two digits you drop the left one. See, that hand is worth four points, so he has to draw a third card. Oho, it’s a four, not bad at all. The highest single digit score wins, so eight is a very good total - we call that a “natural”. Now the banker, who also has four, can draw his own third card...a five! What a draw! That’s the highest possible score, which means the bank wins, and now those who bet on that result get it back and win almost as much as what they put in.”
“Woaaah! I don’t really get it but it looks so fun, mister Fem!”
“Isn’t it? I think watching the game being played is entertaining in itself.”
To the onlookers, the unlikely duo could be confused for a gentleman entertaining his favourite grandchild, indulging the boy’s merry chatter about anything that caught his eye - which in the grand hall where every step brought one before fresh marvels seemed to be just about everything, judging from the wide-eyed wonder with which he would regard both a priceless antique craps table and a comparatively ordinary potted plant with no fluctuation in his excitement. They roamed from table to table, the elder patiently answering Flat’s questions, however strange, to which the boy would share a sliver of his own to satisfy the vampire’s curiosity. Though patrons wished to catch Van-Fem’s attention as they did every other night, this time the proprietor’s bodyguards, eminently tall and wearing masks that veered towards the ceremonial with their animalistic likeness - the beak of an eagle and the maw of a lion in sharp contrast to the patrons’ conventional motifs - hovered around the pair to steer any interlopers away through the mere suggestion of their presence.
“Now then, Flat. You were going to tell me about the body double.”
“Oh, right! We’d lost those two in a stairway at the back entrance of the museum for a moment and miss A—uhm...she was all like, ’this is getting annoying’ and pulled some hairs from my head and, you know, it hurt a bit but she told me to keep quiet and opened her suitcase - you wouldn’t believe how much bigger it was on the inside! - pulled out a whole blob of ether, stuck the hair in and then told me to pour magical energy into it. I didn’t think it would do anything - father says ether clumps are completely useless - but it was like it grew and grew and began to take shape as I put in magical energy, and before I knew it the blob looked exactly like me!”
And then she sent it out as bait and it got eaten by the snakes, Flat added with a slightly queasy look. For his part, Van-Fem offered his own commentary on how strange it must’ve been to watch oneself being eaten alive, while internally he rechecked the calibrations he had made to his wards with a very specific invader in mind.
The timing was unfortunate, but he was prepared to give that woman a death memorable enough to keep her away for a few hundred years at least.
“Your turn again. What would you like to know?”
Entertaining dark thoughts he would spare his young friend from knowing, Van-Fem ceded the word to his partner in their little game of secrets.
“I’m not sure,” Flat began, and the vampire did not for a second believe that the indefatigable boy had run out of things to say; more likely was that he couldn’t settle on any one of the topics he was itching to talk about - as proved the case. “How about that bounded field in the other room? When I touched it, it felt familiar. Like the feeling that some spells deep in my crest give...I think.”
“Hmm. That was actually something I wanted to know as well. But first, your question. You see, your name is not unfamiliar to me. I knew one of your ancestors, long ago, well enough to call him my friend, and he made a few...contributions to the construction of the Casa that I believe may have resonated with the magic crest that you possess.”
Still, that would not result in a harmonic overlap sufficient to fool the ward into believing a foreign intrusion bore the magical signature of its creator. The magus had offered to weave his own spells into the construct but this was fundamentally Van-Fem’s domain - what was effectively an extension of himself. Such a domain was not easily wrested from his control.
“My ancestor?” Flat’s eyes were positively shining as he looked up to the vampire. “That’s amazing! That means you’re a family friend! How long ago was that?”
“I am honoured that you would think of me as one, but I must say I hadn’t spoken with anyone from your family for a very long time before I met you. The time I spent with that dear friend of mine is so distant I cannot think of a way to relate it to you, young man.”
“That’s fine!”
With a determined look the boy sought to dispel the melancholy feeling that the vampire’s words had stirred, imagining the other man felt much the same.
“Don’t worry, mister Fem! Just being my friend is enough!”
Completely unguarded, without a shade of doubt, the boy declared the vampire he had only known for half an hour his friend. At this declaration the ancient Ancestor did not laugh. For what was there to mock in that purity of spirit, and on what grounds would he, the shadow of man, deride it?
No, there was more nobility in a child’s offer of friendship than was to be found anywhere in humanity’s ceaseless entanglements or the moonlit world where he stood astride.
“My thoughts exactly, Flat.”
The smile the two of them shared lasted only a moment. A streak of pain lanced through the vampire’s head and drew a wince from him - a sign that a spiritual presence of significant magnitude had entered the perimeter of his bounded fields; that was, the ship itself. Hastily he excused himself from Flat, sending his guards off to investigate with a nod and leaving the boy to watch a tense game of blackjack with rapt attention while he crossed the hall to the bifurcated staircase that led to the upper level, where the pit manager was stationed to observe the proceedings below. A truly imposing man, garbed in a flamboyant costume and a grotesque mask that beguiled the eye with its spiral patterns, he wordlessly inclined his head towards Van-Fem; wasting no time, the vampire took hold of his hand and activated the master terminal of his network.
In an instant, the vampire lord saw through the eyes of every single employee of the Casa.
For a man who had won renown as the premier puppet master of the Old World, that much was natural. The dealers, the waiters, the floormen, the supervisors, the guards, the maids, the crew; all of them bore the semblance of humanity and carried out their designated tasks with individual intellect, yet all of them were puppets crafted by the hand and eye of a celebrated flesh architect - perfect in their likeness, though the man himself would dismiss them as nothing more than a necessity. His true talents, and the creations most dear to him, lay elsewhere.
---Report.
---Ongoing investigation first.
---Absence of proof does not offset the weight of evidence.
---Unlikely, keep searching.
---Now the primary alarm.
---What? Her?
---There is no obvious connection...yet.
---She is not banned from the grounds, but if they meet…
---Just inform her that she’s paying for everything she breaks.
---Is that all?
---.............................................
---Where is he?
---...court adjourned.
Dragged from the mindscape by a touch on the arm, heavy with meaning, the crimson king opened his eyes and surveyed the pit below from the balcony.
There, wearing his intent openly on his face, the white knight encroaching on his domain caught the stare over his shoulder, inclined his head in a mocking salute, and turned to the unaware Flat Escardos once more.
It took considerable effort for Van-Fem to make a restrained approach when the cold emotion pooling in his chest compelled him to sprint down the flight of stairs and tear the man’s head off with his bare hands. It would not do, however much he wanted it. Unfortunately the damned leech had seen to that.
“Valery, how nice of you to join us. This young man was just telling me how you’ve become friends. A fine catch, if I might say. I’ve always thought you could use some human company.”
Spider-like fingers had perched on Flat’s head, lightly caressing his blonde locks and straying perilously close to his eyes. Under the vampire’s touch the boy was rapidly wilting - a brush against his eyelids forced them shut in fear. Surely he had seen through the man’s nature as easily as he had with Van-Fem, which meant the boy had picked up on his intentions even if he didn’t understand them. It would almost reassure the vampire lord that Flat did not display unreserved trust towards every stranger that he met if he wasn’t preoccupied with getting the other man as far away from Flat as possible.
Even if that meant offering a handshake to that disgusting worm, so that he might remove his claws from his prey.
“Vlad. I wish I could say it’s a pleasure, but I wouldn’t lie to you like that.”
Taking what meagre enjoyment he could from the tightening of the vampire’s fingers and jaw at the casual address repaid twofold, Van-Fem let go of his hand to step in and position himself between the white-clad man and Flat without a single care for subtlety.
“Now, if you can relay that message of yours, I will spare you the consequences that I had promised if you ever set foot in my territory again.”
He could barely stomach exchanging pleasantries with the Ancestor in the best of circumstances; Van-Fem's tone made it clear that this was not of them. Predictably, Svelten’s good cheer rebounded at this open display of hostility.
“Tut-tut, how boorish. You wish to make a scene here? What will our young friend think?”
I’m not your friend, was what Flat wanted to shout out, but all he could do under the man’s unpleasant gaze was shrink at Van-Fem’s back. As for the Ancestor…
The clink of chips and rumbling of pills, the cheers of the winners and the sighs of the losers, had all of a sudden ceased. In the grand hall of the Casa, where the interplay of passion and fortune never ceased, not a single thing moved. Roulettes halted while spinning, dice froze mid-roll, cards stopped sliding on felt, and the hall’s occupants, automata and regular patrons alike, had ceased their activities. The game floor had become a garden of statues.
Inert puppets hanging from strings.
Then, the puppeteer’s fingers tugged.
Four hundred heads turned as one.
And pinned under four hundred and two pairs of eyes, Count Svelten’s lips twisted in an unsightly perversion of a smile. He placed a palm over his unbeating heart, sketched a courtier’s bow, and recited the message he had been tasked to deliver.
“Hurry up and finish it, Fem. If you don’t pick a side you’ll be swept away.”
With a tilt of his head, a scarlet sickle of an eye glared through the blonde curtain.
“If I might add to my lady’s words? Don’t get too caught up in your puppet play with this cattle, Valery. As you might recall, there is no castle that can protect you from me.”
The words solemnly repeated as royal mandate gave way to cruelty as the funeral rites preceded the nail in the coffin. With a sneer that radiated malice, the white knight immortalised in legend gave a promise of annihilation to a reluctant conspirator that had tarried for too long undecided.
Even so.
The crimson king would not abide by an envoy’s ultimatum. Not in his own court, and not from a wretch such as that.
“You have delivered your message, cur. Be mindful of a single word more while you’re in my presence. Now get out.”
The command seemed to reverberate within and beyond the hall. The entire structure gave a great groan like a beast stirring in the depths, within whose stomach the wicked messenger would be crushed and dissolved for his impudence. In response, keen fangs were bared under razor-thin lips. A smile like a wound, relishing the words that took shape within it and the misery they would inflict upon his fellow Ancestor.
“Oh, but my duty is not yet done. My lady wishes for me to impart not only words, but a lesson to you.”
“I do not care what your lady wishes. Your immunity as a messenger is wearing thin. Begone, or perish.”
“I told her you would say that. I also told her you’d need some incentive. As luck would have it I found just the thing.”
It was said that a terrible premonition beckoned a terrible reality. Valery Fernand Vandelstam did not believe in chance and put little stock in omens, but he knew all too well that it was the nature of coincidences to align in a confluence more auspicious than fate itself.
Flat Escardos had met a woman that should not have been there, entered a place he would never have been able to, made an impossible acquaintance, and was now being used as a bargaining chip against him. The law of the supernatural, the attraction of like to like, had conspired to set the stage for a farcical act.
Van-Fem did not look back at the boy. There was no need to alarm him, as there was nothing he could do in the first place - nothing but to accept the challenge. Swift as a snake’s bite and torturous as its venom, the mark of the Count on his victims was not something that could be removed in any other way without exacting a terrible price in the process.
He could resent this vagary. He could curse his own impotence. But his pride was nothing that flimsy: it ran deep, unyielding, a colossus of aeons that would slowly and surely grind down to dust those that would toy with it. Sparking a war among the Ancestors at the cusp of their bid for primacy was an acceptable outcome.
The puppet master did not speak. The puppets did not stir. Svelten could force him into the gamble but he couldn’t make him put that concession to words.
Indulgently, as if bemused by the elder’s obstinacy, the white knight broke the stalemate.
“I take it that I was right. Good. I’ve always wanted to challenge you at your own game. Will you prove worthy of your title this time, I wonder?”
With a jeer and a turn of his heels the Count exited the stage to await the climax.
“And bring the boy. I promised I would show him a real ship.”
His parting shot pierced through the grand hall’s reverie, which shattered in his wake. Roulettes resumed their spinning, dice completed their rolls, cards slid into position, bets were taken and winnings were dispensed, and the din of the crowd washed over the hall like a flood breaking through a dam, the frozen moment promptly resuming with its seams glossed over, unnoticeable to the mind that did not spare a thought to them. In a complete reversal, the only things not in motion in the hall were the proprietor of the casino and his newly acquired charge. Or rather, his responsibility.
“...I believe it is my turn to ask, monsieur Escardos.”
“...what is it, mister Fem?”
Two voices, one timid and the other betraying nothing, broke the stillness.
“How did you circumvent my bounded fields? What did you do that fooled them?”
“I just...touched them. Put my own magical energy in them, I mean. I can do that with all kinds of spells. Then I thought I could attune the runes I had on me with the wards and it kind of...worked.”
Flat shrugged his shoulders as if to say that there wasn’t much to it. Van-Fem, having refined that spellwork for thousands of years, knew better. Hearing the boy casually describe such outrageous feats that would make a magus tear their hair out in frustration, a scene dredged itself from the abyss of his recollections. Not quite a memory but memorable nonetheless, a moment of singular quality that could persist untarnished by time even as it resisted the pressure of accumulated experience that piled up on itself and crushed the bedrock beneath it to nothingness under its weight.
A magus transcending the confines of foundations.
A mind that bent the world itself around it.
An eye that saw “it” through the illusion of common sense.
Long ago, a man had dreamt of such things.
An incomparable , absolute universal , a path to unmitigated disaster
immeasurable fortune
To cast a skeleton key for the door to truth itself - such a wish could only be fulfilled long after it had been lost from memory. Looking at the young man who embodied a thesis eighteen hundred years in the making, Van-Fem sincerely congratulated his old friend, whose goal even he had forgotten.
Saving his descendant from a horrible fate would be a good start to his atonement.
“Thank you for indulging an old man for so long, Flat. Now, let me return the favour. I’m sure you still have many questions for me, and I dearly wish to show you the Casa’s upper decks.”
“It’s a pleasure, mister Fem! I’m glad you’re not angry that I messed with your boat. So, uhm, who was that creepy man? He was a vampire too, right? But he was all twisted up, not at all like you. Do you know him? Who’s that ‘m’lady’ he was talking about?”
Three hours to the Casa’s weekly challenge. He couldn’t be sure, but they felt like the longest three hours of his four and a half thousand year long existence.
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Originally Posted by Arashi_Leonhart
