TIMESKIP.

[vrykolakas]

THE BRUCOLAC COURT Unseelie. TITLE Baron of Srathmarbh, Black Omen. OCCUPATION Baron, drugs manufacturer, political thinker gods help him, Umibōzu captain. ABLE TO FAST-TRAVEL Yes; puca. RESIDENCE IN 2,701 Srathmarbh. RESIDENCE IN 2,702 Srathmarbh. MAJOR EVENTS PUBLICATION OF THE REDDENED HILL Being a Personal Account of the Battle of An Carn Ban... [ ✖ ] ADOPTION DISCUSSION "There is no one I would want to do it more." [ ✖ ] COMPLETION OF THE SRATHMARBH SPIRE Description [ ✖ ] PUBLICATION OF THE GOVERNOR A brief meditation on what and what not to do while holding public office. [ ✖ ] BIRTH OF SHAMASH Description [ ✖ ] BIRTH OF ISHTAR Description [ ✖ ] RESCUE OF CHILDREN Description [ ✖ ]

PLANS By the time the timeskip ends, the Brucolac will be in a more stable position, his spire complete and the surrounding lands a buzzing centre of construction and commerce. He will have two children in the care of Alyosha Hazan. SUMMARY OF KNOWN DETAILS Beebins; daring rescue of beebins; becoming reluctantly published; stuff stuff stuff; seeing a scifi film and being the biggest nerd; building a wee town & preparing for ports & shipyards; maybe hunting cloudwhales; tsk'ing unhappily at the cult of the fox TIMELINE OF EVENTS SPRING IN 2,701 (Mar, Apr, May) MARCH - Publication of the Brucolac's The Reddened Hill: The Unseelie Triumph of An Càrn Bàn. Anonymous, though rumour suggests it was one of the Barons. MARCH - A long talk with Alyosha about adoption. APRIL 5TH - The Srathmarbh Spire is completed and the name 'Srathmarbh' finally begins to catch on. Construction workers are encouraged to stay and continue building on the town proper. Whispers abound of future, grander plans (the Brucolac himself ensures these whispers circulate). Various grants and start-up loans are offered to would-be business-owners. APRIL - Hunting cloudwhales for their precious floaty bones. MAY - Publication of The Governor. Anonymous/under penname. MAY - A run-down rural farmhouse west of Mair is chosen for the location at which to base the Brucolac & Dasha's growing drugs business. MAY - Aileas an Seabhac requests that the Brucolac act as her diplomat to help smoothe over tensions between the vampires and the elves. MAY - Those fucking swans. The Brucolac will scoop up a few and be seen to pour what wealth is gained from them straight back into Srathmarbh. SUMMER IN 2,701 (Jun, Jul, Aug) JUNE - Two vampire entrepreneurs take advantage of the Brucolac's offered start-up loans and begin to create a printing press in Srathmarbh. JUNE - The Brucolac participates in the Treun summer tourney, in the Melee category! Yseult comes to watch; the rumours which have long abounded about the Brucolac's kept woman in Mair become noisier. The event ends terribly for them when, during the daytime, Yseult is attacked by copycats of the fox cult for her association with shardbearers. JULY - Perhaps it's the rich heat of the summer sun which the slakemoths respond to? Or the blood in the air. They wrap themselves up in cocoons and emerge terrible, but are manageable. Don't ask how. JULY - An attempt is made to feed one Mr Bones to the slakemoths. AUGUST - The Festival of Shadow. FALL IN 2,701 (Sept, Oct, Nov) EARLY SEPTEMBER - The Brucolac is affected by the scrambling of the translation enchantment; he speaks some stilted Drabbish, and a whole heap of languages from his world, which are all totally useless to him. Expect terrible handwriting and a lot of gestures. Also expect one great big universally-understandable I TOLD YOU SO. SEPTEMBER - The Srathmarbh press is complete and ready for business! Grants for teachers and educators, or literate people wishing to become teachers and educators, are refined and more widely publicised. SEPTEMBER 29TH - Birth of Shamash, son of Verla. OCTOBER 3RD - Birth of Ishtar, daughter of Yseult. OCTOBER 5TH? - By the grace of the Unseelie monarchs, the children are returned, delivered safely to the arms of Alyosha Hazan. OCTOBER 25TH - 30TH - Samhain! An excuse to be naked with loved ones. NOVEMBER - Some of the escaped criminals are former employees of Mr Bones, out for vengeance or perhaps out for gainful employment now that Mr Bones is no longer quite the force he was. The Brucolac puts out feelers to ascertain various situations and deal with them appropriately. WINTER IN 2,701/2,702 (Dec, Jan, Feb) DECEMBER - The Brucolac stays far away from the White Hart. No thanks. Srathmarbh will hold a fervent Yule celebration, which promises to become a tradition. JANUARY - Fuck, what do you mean the slakemoths bred? Oh fuck. FEBRUARY - Yseult causes controversy at the Ostara Festival by anonymously submitting a work named Blindeye, a great abstract mural of wild colours meant to be touched and stroked and stared at with unease. It is torched by a traditionalist. The Brucolac tries to use this to distract from possible re-emergence of elf/vampir tensions caused by the assassinations of elven artists. SPRING IN 2,702 (Mar, Apr) DATE - Description DATE - Description DATE - Description

( codes by whambam )

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[fairyfoes]

It wasn't metal. Inspection proved it was more like shell, grown up around a living thing, with a blackly pearlescent sheen on the inside of the plates. And as soon as he began to put them on, they became his skin.

New senses flowered in him slowly. He could feel the weight of dustmotes whirling in a corner. The tread of feet through some knobby Dorchadan forest leagues away like a prickle at his shoulder. Sleeting rain falling on the healing ruin of Caer Scima like the twinge of some scabbed-over wound deep in his chest. And like a spider at the center of some unknowable web, he felt in faint twitches, uncanny knowing that curled through his mind like mist, the doings of Unseelie shardbearers. Breaths taken in sleep. Eyes aching pouring over books. The sweat and heat of copulation, the strain of panic, and if he focused just enough he could feel himself in their skin.

Until all that remained was the helm, seemingly lifeless, staring him down. Daring him, almost, to become an arbiter of the wrath of Dorchadas.

[vrykolakas]

For a few moments he closed his eyes and felt himself everywhere. A sensory voyeur living hundreds of different moments simultaneously. He ran with the panicked woman stealing through Seelie territory, feeling the cold sweat that prickled between her neck and her gorget; occupied the aching space behind the eyes of someone half-asleep in a private library. Felt Caer Scima's scars like his own.

Then he locked eyes with the helm's eyeless slit, and considered anger. He had stopped his wrath so far. Directed it inwards or simply caged it, afraid of what he might do if he were to start taking revenge. It wasn't like he had any right to turn this chance down. To muzzle his fury now when it might finally be useful would be pathetically wasteful.

And fuck if he didn't want to make the rivers run red around whatever place they'd taken those children.

He drew on the helm.

[fairyfoes]

The helmet hushed into place over the mass of his hair, the lines of his profile, infinitely cold, and became him. His sense of all things exploded outward still further; he could see magic like new colours, feel ley-lines of power that lead to other worlds, feel life and death and all the strange places in-between, a familiar-unfamiliar urgency, the want to live, vicious and darkly primal and defiant against that ris—

Something black and cold clawed into his mind, trained it by force and pain to focus on the room and the remaining sense of his body. It spoke to him, in no voice he recognised, piercing, white-hot.


Beyond light and knowledge go you now to your enemy, through fire and abyss.

Not to Mair, but to some eldritch, ancient place well beneath it. The knowing lapped over him coldly. Mair was a new thing, built on the bones of a place of great lamentation and suffering. Casinos and brothels were just a shallow growth, a coat of paint, covering a place where in the ages before time men had given up their dreams, their hearts, their lives, in pursuit of gilt-edged fantasy. Where like betrayed like, and where in the far beginning the first seeds of greed and deceit had been made to grow and take form... which for ever sprout anew, and bears dark fruit even unto the last days.

It was not a mortal thing, that dealt in dreams and children.

[vrykolakas]

Perhaps he cried out at the sudden outward flowering of his senses. It was lost to him, carried on Northern winds and drowned out by the wanting souls of the dead and the living. And then something hauled on the reins of his mind, brought in skidding back to his body, where he found himself stooped, hands at his head. Gauntlets at his helm. How cold it was.

I knew it, he thought, distantly surprised to find a part of himself which sounded like himself inside his skull—and distantly not surprised at all. With a jolt, he realised the double-feedback he was getting where the armour or whatever it was met his shard. He spied on himself spying on himself and there was the awful potential to telescope too far out.

He hauled himself straight. (O'Treoraí. They won't lose their way. Neither will you.) I knew it, he said, his voice not moving through the black magic carapace.

Slowly, he took an experimental step. Reached for that old place, aimed to take leagues in his stride.

[fairyfoes]

He left lightning-clad and to a sound like thunder, like the earth cracking. In his wake, workers fled scaffolding and soldiers scrambled in fear of an attack which never came.

Shadows parted for him, revealing the spaces between.

And he was welcomed there, beyond substance and form, felt more at home in what writhed and tested the boundaries of reality than when given hard flesh—

Was spat out again under a sky that was no sky, but a collection of light-filled eyes burned redly beneath the bedrock of the world. His children were not alone here; set on a great sacrificial altar made of the compressed and mortared remains of other children. They squirmed and cried and screamed with dozens of others, who had been taken in a short stretch of time— all left to die. Some of them were close to dying, not even enough energy to shiver in their swaddling, round faces sallow.

Around the high altar crashed a black sea of deathless spirits, clawing and biting and battling each other, both more and less than shadows. Victors would slither, long-limbed and sharp-taloned, atop the bones, pour themselves into the weakest bodies, those just on the cusp of death.... and be gone.

Armor-clad, the Brucolac crashed into place among them like a meteor, scattering shades and spirits in cold fire that flared and died. They ignored him in their frenzy, clambered over him like animals, shrieking banshee wails, wanting to be real. It was flesh they needed, not to consume, but to crawl inside like parasites.

By right and ritual, and by all laws, he'd sworn, to give up his own. The fell power in his hands now, to break those laws, to undo some horror, some magic so ancient that the span of his life was no more than a mote of dust against it. He could break them.

But only twice. And there was a horde to cross.

[vrykolakas]

By right and ritual, and by all laws. That tired old despairing thought, oh gods show mercy for what I've done, was too well-rehearsed to shake him as it should have. He curled gauntleted fingers in towards his armoured palm. Wide awake to the terror, but unafraid.

He had done his petitioning; this was the mercy he had been shown. He was coldly grateful for it.

A shade-thing, momentarily beetle-bodied before it diffused and stretched into something greater and stranger, scuttled past and over him, and with a sudden, armour-silenced hiss of defiance he opened his palm, reached into the darkness and pulled, and all the shadows—the real true shadows, cast by the weird, blood-thick light from above—opened their mouths. And sought (with great, rolling black tongues, the darkness suddenly the consistency of sucking tar) to swallow down the shades which crowded nearest them, opening a path for the Brucolac.

[fairyfoes]

Shadows fed on the numbers of fears and horrors, gnashing shifting-shaped teeth through spindle-thin limbs. There was a space, for a short while— before they massed, buzzing toward him like angry ants at an interrupted feast. Tried to pry into the joints of his armour.

(He could see it, how these grown so strong; threads of old magic blue-purple on his vision, these terrors, made themselves more than flickering shapes feeding on the first fears of the very children they fought to corrupt, keep, consume, inhabit. He could feed on it too, if he wanted, draw the coldness into himself like blood—)

[vrykolakas]

How this place reeked. Death and fear and wet earth. It barely touched him. The armour and his anger froze him inside and out. He could feel the spirit-things trying to suck out fear from him, but it was like suckling on an emptied corpse. He felt the space where fear should be, scraped dry, little more.

He reached out and grabbed one of the things by what was, in a sense, its neck. It shouldn't have been possible; yet, the armour was real and not-real enough to clamp tight around the thing's ghostly abflesh. It squirmed in his hold.

He could feed on their prey, if he wanted to. Or he could feed on them, and throw their barely-existing corpses to the shadows which still slavered silently. It was a thought so pleasant it almost struck him as peaceful.

Magic the colour of violent afterimages and bruises and the inside of eyelids poured from a maw in the thing's sort-of face, crackled against the black-pearl armour and into him.

As he gulped down old terror, the ground beneath his feet twitched.

Weeds raised their fingers, brilliant black-and-purple-and-green-and-blue tendrils of life which burst irrepressibly forwards; impossible conjunctions of plants he had seen and heard of, things which only grew in other worlds or never grew at all. Most of them didn't flower, were leafy, probing things which smothered quick and with a malicious glee in their movements. The ones that bloomed bloomed wild. A vine on which teeth grew like grapes gnashed and spat corroding venom. Purplish seaweed grew without sea, heaving with unnatural strength. Things that shouldn't be carnivorous were: poppies chewed on shadowy gristle, many-petalled white carnations bristled razorsharp as they wound about spindly black limbs. At the top of one blackish stem waved a rose, petals thick and pink-red. Made of heartmuscle. It shuddered, squeezed itself into a tight fist, and came down upon an encroaching spirit with all the force of a mace.

Where they struck, they, like the Brucolac, sucked power from their prey.

[fairyfoes]

He filled the red vastness with a killing forest that waved as if current-touched; bent and bowed to him when he passed over the blood-wet earth. Defeated terrors had no power; and dissipated like smoke. But as he advanced through the churning sea of their number like a lion through gazelles, that other in his mind clawed it again. A warning.

The great redly-glowing eyes overhead began to focus on him.

The darkness they sat in began to ebb slowly forward, to form two great hands each as great as he was tall; the likeness of a crocodillian head in which all those red eyes sat, hundreds pressed into the span of a broad, flat face which seemed designed to add room for its maw.

It poured itself to the ground, shadow moulding sluggishly into a many-legged shape on the opposite side of the great bone-fashioned altar. Loomed forward over it, a massive, man-sized claw-hand lowering to mash against one edge of it, nails clicking against the side. Blood ran between and under black fingers.

It had the bizarre quality of a man leaning one-handed over a desk, and its leer was like a challenging smile.

COME TO GAMBLE AGAIN?

The voiceless words shook the stone, curled out from between great teeth like mist, and for a moment the shadow-creatures stiffened, still, all heads turned to this creature...

... and then they flooded toward its hand, their attacker forgotten, lapping and sucking the blood, trying to use the hand as better leverage by which to climb up.

[vrykolakas]

The other thing which nudged him was greeted, again, with no surprise. He hadn't thought it would be so easy. This new old creature before him only made him...angry, though very coldly so. That cold proud anger lasted until it slammed its great dark claw down, bones crunching oh gods and the sudden stench of fresh blood which he couldn't help but enjoy—and then the Brucolac howled with fury, quite silenced by the helm.

Hot defiance rose up like the taste of blood in his mouth. He ripped shades apart as he moved like a knife through the darkness, grappling his way to the altar. It was taller than he was; well, and? Without looking at what he was climbing, what he was using for handholds, he grabbed and hauled himself up. Don't think on it. Don't think on it. Something crumbled, beneath his hand. He shuddered, and kept going. The cruel forest of weeds he had dragged into being scuttling further upwards towards his many-eyed taunter, coated the side of the altar, made footholds and handholds and rope. Where the blood streaming down watered them, they whipped up taller and worse, opening impossible mouths and winding spiked, muscly stems around the fingers of the Leaning Man, of Management.

The Brucolac heaved himself up onto the altar's top. And fuck you, actually, he added, with sudden irrational carelessness, you thieving cunt.

It felt good to say.

The blood-drinking plants were blooming anew. Here, in a pale, fleshy blossom, was born something else. Some last vestige of shape and thought from the blood it had guzzled. It looked a little like a newborn, save that it didn't; it had terrible teeth, and it was one of many.

A child's cry; the Brucolac was foolish enough, then, to look across, and right by the huge creature there they were. The girl lay quiet and wide-eyed, staring frightedly around. He knew her scent. The boy he had never seen, but knew, from the look of his eyes and how his cries were joined by tiny puffs of fire.

He threw himself straight at the many-eyed visage, cold blue fire sparking along the ridges and barbs of his armour. Each toothed flowerchild took a disparate eye, sucking and gnawing. The Brucolac ran for the thing's great maw. In front of it, Ishtar began to cry in tandem with her brother.

[fairyfoes]

The choking seaweed and vines grew in fast-forward, not just to make places for the Brucolac's hands and feet to grip, to propel himself upward at speed; they grew to bind the hand where it rest, winding between fingers, teeth biting down—

The creature pulled its hand up, the vines stetched, groaned like storm-stretched rope, held. Lips peeled back from teeth, vines winding up its torso, growing into the red of its eyes like a statue overgrown by ivy and moss, it bared its teeth.

Swept its other claw down through more bodies; he could see his children as if they were outlined in red, Ishtar screaming hard, face just a flash between clawed hands, scraped and trapped, mashed between other screaming, larvae-pale bodies, being pulled to the edge and toward the mass of antlike terrors that had flooded up and over the side of the altar, long arms pulling infants towards themselves as they shrieked in terrible cacophany. And his son, untouched as yet, his squirms more like death-throes as fire-flashed screaming poured the last of his warmth into the air, frail, wasted down. How many days and nights had gone by, to make him look so weak.

But the Brucolac's own fear was fed upon, and even his fell vision shifted, warped, made strange by the foes he fought: and all at once, they all looked like his sons and daughters, and he could not tell them apart.

[vrykolakas]

No, he screeched, no you fucking—

More terror. More fear. Ishtar Shamash Ishtar Shamash, fresh-given names echoing over and over in his head as panic licked up him like witch-burning flames. The shades drank it down—he could see how they guzzled that bruise-purple magic from him—

Urged himself to get over it get over it think push it down get it away don't fucking stumble now and ran on towards where he had last seen Ishtar, Ishtar as was and not the other baby girls who looked like her. Something crunched under his boot. He didn't stop to look. Fresh vines snaked up from fresh blood. High above, the flowers with faces squawked and bit and spat and burrowed in.

The whole red-glowing chasm looked like some hellish mockery of a garden. He swallowed his own fear and wrenched back what power he could from the shades which crowded about him.

if you're not quick enough if you're not sharp enough if you don't do this just right, no shut up shut up you fearful cunt what fucking right do you have to be more afraid than any of these squalling bairns

His practicality came slamming down iron-fisted on his panic, left him for a few moment clear-headed. It wouldn't last, he knew. He had a few seconds to do something to stop his fear. How to stop being afraid? He was tearing through shadows, casting desperately about for a child who looked more like Ishtar than Ishtar, terrified for Shamash. Why've I chosen her, have I chosen her, should I have chosen him, is it a choice at all?

[fairyfoes]

That sense of other in the primitive back of his mind slashed again, frantically, and there was an alien sense of—

Won't lose again can't lose again lost too much in those teeth, old ally-enemy, don't lose them don't—

His panic faded while his senses sharpened, hunting not by vision but taste-scent-hearing as if he were blind, picking out the cries that had etched themselves into his mind in that one reeling moment of recognition, the same olfactory sensitivity by which beasts knew their own kits and cubs and fawns and foals. They became outlined to him as if in red.

Cut through the cage of claws for Ishtar before she was cast to the hungry shades? Scoop up fading Shamash before one of the creatures prowling the edge poured its darkness into him and took him, sure and certain as death? They were so far from each other.

[vrykolakas]

He was closest to Ishtar; had seen her clearest, had seen her closest to the slavering shades.

He ran for her. As he ran he raised one hand, nicked at his own armoured wrist with a curved black gauntlet-claw, trusting that the only thing that could cut through the armour would be the armour itself. It healed almost immediately, skin and shell snapping together. Black blood spattered across the altar. Leaves sprung up from it, wildflowers, succulent and thriving, and they raced not for the great, vine-caged creature which bent over the altar but for Shamash.

If they got to him, they'd wrap thick stems about him, squeeze tight, and one great carnivorous-mawed flower would bend its neck with clumsy gentleness to drop his father's blood onto his screwed-up face, into his mouth.

Ishtar, Ishtar! The cold bright fire of the Brucolac's armour clanged, burned, hissed as he lashed out at the huge, black fingers separating him from his daughter.

[fairyfoes]

He ran, cutting through shades, fears, terrors; they had some sense that he had cut through the mesmer they all had made, and cast themselves before him. Wore the faces of his dead, of other fears, when they weren't scrabbling to pour themselves into the vessels they all trod upon.

The Brucolac's bootprints left a red wake. His claws slashed, a rain of white-and-blue fire that made the shadows recoil in a fit of fire-crackle hissing, like cats back from water. Two fingers severed through, clean as necks on the executioner's block, and faded like smoke whisked away on a hard wind. The hand snatched back as if burned by the cold fire, raked through the vining plants that bound its face instead, shredding them in a bellow of pain that quaked the earth.

Ishtar seemed almost to reach for him; a violent thicket seemed to have sprung tightly about Shamash, unseen through its darkness. The garden muffled the thin-voiced cries which proved him still living.

[vrykolakas]

Shadows gurned and twisted. One cried out for his attention, the youngest of his kin, the first to die in the Dry Fallen mutiny. One lumbered towards him, one-fanged and starving, in the shape of the thing which had sired him centuries ago. The dragon of Redgate raised its great and awful head, one-eyed and snorting false fire. He didn't look at who it held clamped between its teeth.

Ishtar had heat left in her. For some reason it startled him. He hadn't expected her to be warm. He scooped her up and clutched her tight as she screamed, and swung to find Shamash, where leaves and stems and flowers cradled him close.

More blood. More plants. They were thinner now, less lush, more utilitarian. Spiked and cruel-looking, drained of colour, they launched themselves like harpoons into the body of the leaning thing which overlooked the whole cave. Ishtar's cries reached a whining, breathless pitch. Struggling towards Shamash felt like running through treacle. The air was hot and stinking. The vines which held him stretched out and out and one-handedly, half-blind, the Brucolac groped in the dark to find him...

[fairyfoes]

His hand curved around a shoulder too small even to fill his palm. It was easy to gather the small body close, and the plants parted to admit him, possessed of a dim cunning. The great many-eyed creature that loomed over the Brucolac as he collected his son tore the last of vines from its face, their fleshy leaves and spines and flowers falling upon him like some hellish rain.

It reared back, neck stretching, serpentlike now, the darkness all about him growing thick, the only light now the red radiance of its hundreds of eyes. All around the Brucolac shadows had frothed over the altar, drowning it under their darkness like a stone under rising tide, and as infant voices were snuffed out en masse, a great silence rose like a cresting wave.

It struck down for him, open-mouthed.

[vrykolakas]

They were both too light in his arms, like nothing at all, their chests rising as spasmodically as butterfly wing-beats in between thin cries. He clutched them close and was fool enough to look up.

The hundreds of eyes coming crashing down towards him looked like a city at night hurtling nonsensically through the black air. He gave a soundless cry, wraiths gulping down his terror with hissing delight. Shamash was shivering and thrashing. He snatched the children closer and and made himself step backwards with no idea where to go but elsewhere. Take miles in his stride. Cut his losses and run.

[fairyfoes]

Darkness swallowed him, and the massive maw crashed down on empty air, on bones and dead bodies. Leagues above, the streets of Mair trembled finely with the force of it. Those magically sensitive paused, had to shake off vague seconds of dread before returning to the routine of their lives.


The Brucolac, with his burden, found himself in the garden of Redgate. Stone-carven statues, grim-featured guardians, flanked red stone walls along which hardy soft-colored tea roses had been encouraged to vine. Several blooms still clustered here and there, defiant to the cooling weather. Raised planters grew thick with practical, medicinal plants. Evergreen shrubs encouraged the illusion of privacy, but the benches, the small seats beside small tables, were all empty at this hour.

Further away on the high walls of the fortress, the torches of guards at their watches moved at leisurely paces. A trick of the cleaner air made the stars seem very close, brightening the night, painting the sky a spectrum of blues rather than an ominous black. The strange light glinted off the ranks of snow-capped mountains in the distance.