Elfen High 2 (OOC 4, Closed, No Morals Allowed)

[Olthar]

The new thread will have 500 pages to do that.

Eh, I'll give you seventeen more pages to mock Ende before we move onto the 500 pages to do so.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Soooooooooo.......

Start reserving places for my Mecha RP in this Summer!
Beware, I'll still make it invite-only, because I'm such a dick.

I could still let you in if you beg on my feet and I trust you, though

What are "invitations"?

I just post wherever I want and nobody stops me.

Seriously speaking though, this reputation of mine is absurd.

Just goes to show that constant sex jokes will get you far.

[Agritum]

What are "invitations"?

I just post wherever I want and nobody stops me.

Seriously speaking though, this reputation of mine is absurd.

Just goes to show that constant sex jokes will get you far.

...

This isn't the Cafè....

Wat.

Anyways, http://www.boardgame-online.com/g/game.php?g=cIoq&k=2Y

JOIN!

EDIT: Match not happening, due to you being horrible, unfunny people

[Norvenia]

TAKE NOTE, especially AWBers: I will be in Thailand and out of internet contact from this Thursday until March 20 or so.

[AETEN II]

Hey Olthar, just joined the game.

[Zarkenis Ultima]

Seriously speaking though, this reputation of mine is absurd.

Just goes to show that constant sex jokes will get you far.

...

This isn't the Cafè....

Wat.

Anyways, http://www.boardgame-online.com/g/game.php?g=cIoq&k=2Y

JOIN!

EDIT: Match not happening, due to you being horrible, unfunny people

Aeten and I are in there. xD

[AETEN II]

http://www.boardgame-online.com/g/game.php?g=cIpx&k=b3J


New one.

[AETEN II]

There are adventures that test the mettle of a hero. There are quests that require the hero to save the world. And then, then there are EPICS.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Surprisingly for a brown person, I'm having difficulty writing the brutal deaths of the English Royal Family simply because I cannot give a damn about them.

So I'll do it some other time in a oneshot.

[AETEN II]

Surprisingly for a brown person, I'm having difficulty writing the brutal deaths of the English Royal Family simply because I cannot give a damn about them.

So I'll do it some other time in a oneshot.

Howbout you join Zark and I?

Expert mode, thousand spaces.

[Norvenia]

I'm trying to get the second part of my one-shot done today, before I have to start packing.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

I'm trying to get the second part of my one-shot done today, before I have to start packing.

No worries, take your time- this rp will be here when you get back.

[Mavorpen]

I'll have Eris create the Ultimate Dildo.

[Nationstatelandsville]

Magic didn't belong in something like this.

"Love you, too." - D

[Norvenia]

Făgăraș, Principality of Transylvania, December 1621. Friday night.

It was dark when Daniel made his way up to the old tower, dark as only a moonless night in winter can be. Far below, the lights of Făgăraș were solitary pinpricks of red and gold in an ocean of black. It was snowing harder, now, but Daniel could not see the flakes in the night sky. Invisible, the snow fell thick and heavy, covering his shoulders, soaking through his cloak, cold in his grey-white hair: soft and cool as a shroud.

Somewhere in the town below, a torch flickered, and went out.

Daniel hauled himself up the last scree slope, scrabbling and panting in the dark, and ducked behind a boulder. Here it was: the tower, perched on a rocky escarpment high above the town of Făgăraș. In the darkness, Daniel had lost the trail that led up the mountain a few hours before, and he saw the tower now for the first time. On three sides, its walls fell straight down into cliffs; there was no possibility of climbing them. On the fourth, there was a single door, heavy wood and banded iron, recessed into the stone.

For a moment, Daniel's stomach clenched. Perhaps I should have come in daylight. He will be stronger at night. He remembered Stefan Petrascu, scarred and grim. They have many advantages already, Stefan always said. If you start giving away the few advantages that you possess, you are asking for death.

But Stefan was a papist. God was not on his side. Daniel flexed his fingers. I am the shield of the Lord's elect. In Him, I shall fear no evil. I need no other advantages. Daniel thought for a moment of the priest swinging from a noose in the village below. I will kill this creature. I have to. Because otherwise...otherwise, what was the point in letting them kill that boy? In just...watching. There had been another priest, a lifetime ago. They will never stop hunting us.

Daniel stood. I am right. I have to be. He looked up at the tower. He must know that I am coming. Daniel stepped out from behind the tree, and walked toward the door of the tower, his strides long, boots crunching through the deepening snow. There was a long, low rasp as he drew his sword, metal on metal, and the Spanish steel was bright in his gloved fist. He paused, looked up at the darkened windows. It is time.

Daniel lashed out with a straight, hard kick. It caught the door just above the lock. Rotten wood splintered; rusting iron cracked. The door slammed open, and Daniel stepped without hesitation into the darkness within.

* * *

It is dark inside the little house, dark and warm. After his mother's husband died, she left his lonely tower and moved into a cottage in the village. She took Daniel with her, and so here he has grown up.

Tomorrow is his twelfth birthday. He knows that he must leave in the morning. He does not want to do so. It seems terribly soon. Tonight, laying beneath the furs in the warm dark, oblivious to the snow outside, Daniel wishes only to remain in this house forever.

The door slams open. He kicks it only once, the man outside: a single straight, hard blow, just above the lock. Rotten wood and rusting iron give way before that terrible strength. Daniel shrinks back, back into the corner, into the shadows, huddled wide-eyed beneath the furs, the horror rising in his throat like bile.

The man steps inside. He is pale, pale as a corpse; Daniel can see this even in the dead of night. The man's face reflects the moonlight, stark white above a long, lean body wrapped in peeling leather and rusted mail and mouldering furs. Around him, the cold wind howls into the little house, snow swirling through the air, and the warmth goes out of the room like a dying man's last breath.

* * *

Daniel stepped into the tower, and immediately jinked to his left, stepping out of the doorway. Never be seen, Stefan had said. Stefan the blasphemer, the reprobate. Never be caught in silhouette. Doorways and windows are your enemies. Walls and corners are your friends. The stone wall of the tower slammed Daniel's back as he slipped along it, always moving, his long sidesword a glimmer of steel in the shadows. Time. I just need a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The hackles on Daniel's neck stood up, every nerve stretched taut, his eyes wide as he sought the faintest clue of an unseen attack.

There was nothing. The room was still. Cobwebs hung from the roof, and old furniture was scattered everywhere. In one corner of the room, a stair led up to the roof of the tower. Daniel felt drawn toward it like iron to a lodestone, as if by some irresistible and nameless force. He drew his snaphance and cocked it, the snapping sound loud in the empty room. And slowly, boots clicking on the stone steps, he climbed the stairs.

The roof of the tower was exposed to the snowstorm, and the winds howled around Daniel as he emerged. It was a flat circle of stone that crowned this tower, about twenty feet in diameter, with a low stone rail around its edge. The darkness here was absolute, and the snow was cold and chokingly thick as it blew unseen into Daniel's face.

At the edge of the roof stood a single figure, tall and almost skeletally thin. He was pale as a corpse, and dressed in the rotting mail and leather and furs of a warrior from centuries ago, from a time before Luther and Calvin and the Turks changed the world beyond all recognition. He sighed, and Daniel heard it like the breath of the grave, audible even above the howling wind.

"Hello, Daniel."

* * *

Daniel's lips open, and he almost sobs with fear. "How do you know my name?" he whispers.

The man smiles, pallid lips pulling back from rotten teeth - and fangs like a serpent, shining like daggers in the dark. "Oh," he coos, turning to Daniel's mother. She flinches away, shrinks back on her bed, pulls the furs up to cover her thin nightshirt. She is still beautiful, this woman, still well shy of her thirtieth year. The thing steps toward her, moving with a spidery grace, jerky and precise. "You didn't tell him." He laughs, this man who is not a man. "Ohhhh. You didn't tell him how you gave thanks when I died, how you lit a candle to the Virgin for saving you from me." He steps closer. "You didn't tell him how you wed a farmer, a man not fit to lick horseshit from my boots." He kneels down beside her. "You didn't tell him how I came back, aye, twelve years ago now." The thing leans in, its fangs inches from his mother's pale throat, and Daniel cannot move: he is rooted, hypnotized. "You didn't tell him how I took you," the creature whispered. "On these very furs. And how you squealed as you came, when you felt my seed inside you." A low laugh. "No. You didn't tell him."

The young woman stares up into the creature's dead eyes, her face slack with unimaginable terror. Daniel does not know, will never know, what she sees there. But then she gives a tiny nod of understanding, and closes her eyes.

It is the work of a moment: a sharp movement of the head, like a dog tearing meat from a bone. Blood sprays from the creature's fangs, dark in the shadows of the cottage. The rupture in his mother's neck is not two little puncture marks: it is a ragged hole, a piece of flesh torn out, and the skin ends around it in frayed tatters like a ripped parchment. She slips to the ground, and Daniel runs to her, screaming, buries his head in the crook of her neck. Her blood runs down his cheek, warm and viscous. She does not smell like dark earth and fresh bread, not now, not ever again. She smells of iron, and salt, and death.

One pale, long-fingered hand lowers itself onto Daniel's shoulder, an albino spider, and squeezes like a vice. The creature's breath is cold as the grave on Daniel's face as it murmurs: "And now, my son, we have much to talk about."

* * *

"I did not come here to talk," Daniel said grimly.

"I know, boy." The dark creature at the edge of the roof turned, and Daniel's breath caught in his throat. That face. The pale terror of a thousand nightmares, the raw agony of a child's scream - all rushed back, and Daniel almost staggered. That face.

The vampire's eyes were bright, shining reflectively, knowingly, in the dark. "I never said that you came to talk. I only said hello."

Daniel walked forward slowly, until he stood at the center of the roof. "You killed her," he said. His voice sounded distant in his own ears. "I never understood that. Twelve years later. Why then, after all that time?"

There was a pause, and then the skeletal figure shook its head, and laughed - a long, creaking sound like old leather. "After all this time," whispered Daniel's father, "you still don't understand us at all, boy." The vampire stepped forward as well. It raised its eyebrows, black caterpillars crawling against its corpse-skin. "I killed your mother," the creature said slowly, "because on that particular night, I wanted to smell her fear. Taste her blood." Rusty mail rattled as the vampire shrugged its shoulders. "That's all it was, boy. Nothing more. The pleasure of the kill."

Blood pounded in Daniel's head. He raised his snaphance and aimed it at his father's heart. "She is with God now," he whispered, voice raw.

The creature sneered. "Oh, spare me your delusions. You're my son, boy." Steel rasped on steel as the vampire drew its sword, an ancient medieval weapon black with age. "I am in you." The bright, dead eyes stared deep into Daniel's own. "You would have loved it just as much as me."

There was a flash of fire and a deafening boom as Daniel fired his pistol; the sound rolled out across the sleeping town below. The vampire twisted, impossibly fast yet still too slow, and shrieked as the heavy ball tore through its shoulder. And Daniel stepped forward, his sword blurring in silver arcs through the moonless night, and attacked.

* * *

The stick of cordwood cracks into the skeletal creature's ankles, and the impact tears it from Daniel's hands. His father shrieks with fury. "You think you can hurt me, boy? You think you can fight me?" Its rotting fingers clench around Daniel's throat, and the boy scrabbles at them, nails peeling back as he tears at the iron grip. Those dark, reflective eyes stare into Daniel's face, encompassing all that he can see. "I will break you," the creature whispers. Daniel tries to scream, and finds that he has no air left with which to do so.

* * *

The ancient longsword and the Spanish rapier met, and Daniel staggered backwards. A blow swept in at head height, and the Sabbatanos ducked, feeling the breeze as the honed iron slashed through the air above his head. "Remember this?" snarled his father. He vanished, abruptly, and there was a thunderclap as the air rushed in to fill the void where he had been.

Daniel spun, without hesitation, and the two blades met again - in a shower of sparks, smashing away a disembowling thrust by the vampire who had abruptly reappeared in the darkness behind the Sabbatanos. "I'm not a child anymore," Daniel hissed. "Now in God's name, die!"

* * *

Daniel gives a wheezing gasp as the creature loosens its grip on his throat just enough for the boy to move his head - and then Daniel lunges forward, and catches the monster's hand in his teeth. The vampire snarls in fury and wrenches away, but Daniel hangs on like a dog with a bone, and bites down with all his strength. He tastes dead flesh, feels the abrupt crack of bone, and two of the creature's fingers come away in his mouth. It flings back its head and howls with rage and pain -

* * *

- and lashed out, a flurry of blows, inhumanly swift and powerful. But Daniel did not step back - he stepped forward, his rapier blurring as it deflected each blow. More sparks sprayed in the night, amidst the falling snow, and Daniel's mind narrowed to a single blinding point of focus as he parried high and low, right and left.

It was not enough. The vampire feinted high, then lashed out at Daniel's gut. The Sabbatanos saw the triumphant grin upon his father's face, and then he gasped sharply as the broadsword's edge ripped through his stomach. Blood spurted onto the snowy stone, dark in the night. Daniel staggered back, and felt a pitch-black moral terror gather around him. No. Not now. Not after all I've done, not before I do this much, at least, at last. Not yet, please God, I don't want to burn. Not now!

* * *

The creature hurls Daniel to the ground, and steps hard onto his throat. The boy's legs flail, kicking, as he chokes; slowly, his face turns red. The creature smiles, fangs dark with the blood of Daniel's mother.

"Time to break you, boy," it whispers. One booted foot raises, and stamps down on Daniel's knee. Bone snaps: it is loud as a gunshot, and Daniel screams, choked and sobbing, tears and snot running down his face -

* * *

"No!" Daniel screamed, and his sword was a silver blur once more, smashing aside his father's blade, thrusting high, low, parry, riposte - and then the monster was retreating, step by step, sparks spraying from its blade at every blow, its face contorted with fury as Daniel's became utterly calm. Blood pumped steadily from the Sabbatanos' stomach, leaving a dark trail in the snow on the tower roof as he drove his father, inch by inch, toward the roof's edge.

* * *

The vampire gives Daniel time to scream, to weep, to beg. He lets him lie there, and realize what comes next. The fixed, fanged smile never leaves its face. And then it lifts its foot again, and brings it down on Daniel's other leg. For a moment, the boy cannot see; agony overpowers his senses, and he screams as he has never screamed before or since.

* * *

There was a thunderclap as the vampire blink-teleported to Daniel's left - and the instant that it reappeared, the Sabattanos sank a foot of razor-edged Spanish steel into its chest. The creature screamed, then, in shock and horror. Daniel's right hand forced his sword in another six inches, while his left went to his belt and drew a dirk: eighteen inches of gleaming metal. And then Daniel slammed that, too, into his father's chest, stepping in close and hammering the blade in up to the hilt. He stood a moment like that, inches away from the creature, face to face with his father - his father, impaled upon two blades driven cleanly through his chest. The pale face was twisted with pain, and a dark trickle of blood ran from its mouth. The ancient medieval broadsword clattered from nerveless fingers to the ground. And with a grunt of effort, Daniel raised his sword and his dirk, lifting his father into the air by the blades forced through his chest, and walked to the edge of the tower. Below, the cliffs fell away in a sheer drop - an abyss of darkness down to the faint pinpricks of light that marked the town far below. Silently, Daniel extended his arms, holding his blades - and the figure hanging from them - out over the abyss.

* * *

Daniel howled in agony as his father lifted him, cradling the boy in his arms like a baby. Daniel's fists beat helplessly on the dead man's chest, and the vampire carried the child to the fireplace. The creature looked down into Daniel's agonized face. It smiled. "Are you ready to burn, boy?"

Daniel whimpered, gasped, and felt some last reserve of courage well up within him. He locked one small fist around his father's shirtfront, and stared up into the dead man's eyes. "I will never stop hunting you," the boy whispered. "And one day, I will kill you, and smile."

The vampire laughed. "That's my son," he chuckled. And he threw the boy, both legs broken, into the brightly burning fire.

* * *

Hanging from Daniel's blades over the sheer drop, the vampire opened its eyes, and smiled. "You are my son after all," it whispered. "You see? I kill your mother. You kill me. This is what we are. You call it vengeance. You call it justice. You call it serving God. But when the blood is on the blade, it's all the same. It's the joy of the kill. That's all there is." The vampire coughed, and blood ran down its chin. "You've killed me, boy. Smile."

Daniel tried. He tried to feel God's pleasure in his work, God's wrath at the monster whose life he was ending. But all he could think of was his mother, her throat ripped open like torn parchment, and the priest sobbing as the soldiers put the noose around his neck in the village below. The Sabbatanos closed his eyes. His arms were steady, hard as stone as he held his father impaled and suspended. But he wept nonetheless, silently, tears freezing unseen on his cheeks in the winter night.

For a moment, there was silence. And then the vampire laughed, gurgling, blood spraying from its lips. "Oh," it sputtered, "oh, you poor fool. You can't, can you? You can't smile, not even now." The thing howled with laughter, twisting on the blades that held it suspended. "Not even now! Oh, you're not my son at all. And you worship God?" Daniel felt his blades grind against his father's ribs as the vampire leaned toward him. "You are God's cruellest joke, Daniel. The perfect killer - who hates to kill!" The creature convulsed with laughter, feet kicking over the abyss. "Live long, my son," it cried, its voice shrill and unearthly. "Live long and suffer!"

Daniel felt no joy, no anger - just a gnawing sickness in his stomach, and a sudden sad certainty. It is time.

"Goodbye, Father," Daniel said quietly. And he kicked his father off the blades of his sword and his dirk, and watched him fall amidst the billowing snowflakes until he vanished into the darkness below.

* * *

Slowly, Daniel sank to his knees. His weapons clattered to the ground, and he touched his rent stomach, feeling the wound pump blood into his sodden clothing. "I am...the shield," Daniel muttered. There was a kind of desperation to his words, an aching need. "The shield...of God's...elect." Daniel collapsed onto his side, the snowy stone of the roof cold against his face. He brought his hands up to his face, and they were warm and sticky with blood.

"I am the shield!" Daniel screamed. He howled it to the universe, to God, to anyone who would listen. To himself, most of all. And from none of them did there come a reply. Nothing changed.

Daniel lay upon the roof of the tower, and he wept like a heartbroken child for all that he had been, and done, and would yet be and do, in all the centuries stretching away unto the last syllable of recorded time.

Distantly, from the town far below, he heard a sound. Out above the body of the priest, swinging gently from the gibbet, church bells were beginning to ring for Christmas morn.

[Hardened Pyrokinetics]

I'll post eventually, currently busy helping my roommate unlock things in a game and trying to convince Night not to perform unnecessary regicide.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Făgăraș, Principality of Transylvania, December 1621. Friday night.

It was dark when Daniel made his way up to the old tower, dark as only a moonless night in winter can be. Far below, the lights of Făgăraș were solitary pinpricks of red and gold in an ocean of black. It was snowing harder, now, but Daniel could not see the flakes in the night sky. Invisible, the snow fell thick and heavy, covering his shoulders, soaking through his cloak, cold in his grey-white hair: soft and cool as a shroud.

Somewhere in the town below, a torch flickered, and went out.

Daniel hauled himself up the last scree slope, scrabbling and panting in the dark, and ducked behind a boulder. Here it was: the tower, perched on a rocky escarpment high above the town of Făgăraș. In the darkness, Daniel had lost the trail that led up the mountain a few hours before, and he saw the tower now for the first time. On three sides, its walls fell straight down into cliffs; there was no possibility of climbing them. On the fourth, there was a single door, heavy wood and banded iron, recessed into the stone.

For a moment, Daniel's stomach clenched. Perhaps I should have come in daylight. He will be stronger at night. He remembered Stefan Petrascu, scarred and grim. They have many advantages already, Stefan always said. If you start giving away the few advantages that you possess, you are asking for death.

But Stefan was a papist. God was not on his side. Daniel flexed his fingers. I am the shield of the Lord's elect. In Him, I shall fear no evil. I need no other advantages. Daniel thought for a moment of the priest swinging from a noose in the village below. I will kill this creature. I have to. Because otherwise...otherwise, what was the point in letting them kill that boy? In just...watching. There had been another priest, a lifetime ago. They will never stop hunting us.

Daniel stood. I am right. I have to be. He looked up at the tower. He must know that I am coming. Daniel stepped out from behind the tree, and walked toward the door of the tower, his strides long, boots crunching through the deepening snow. There was a long, low rasp as he drew his sword, metal on metal, and the Spanish steel was bright in his gloved fist. He paused, looked up at the darkened windows. It is time.

Daniel lashed out with a straight, hard kick. It caught the door just above the lock. Rotten wood splintered; rusting iron cracked. The door slammed open, and Daniel stepped without hesitation into the darkness within.

* * *

It is dark inside the little house, dark and warm. After his mother's husband died, she left his lonely tower and moved into a cottage in the village. She took Daniel with her, and so here he has grown up.

Tomorrow is his twelfth birthday. He knows that he must leave in the morning. He does not want to do so. It seems terribly soon. Tonight, laying beneath the furs in the warm dark, oblivious to the snow outside, Daniel wishes only to remain in this house forever.

The door slams open. He kicks it only once, the man outside: a single straight, hard blow, just above the lock. Rotten wood and rusting iron give way before that terrible strength. Daniel shrinks back, back into the corner, into the shadows, huddled wide-eyed beneath the furs, the horror rising in his throat like bile.

The man steps inside. He is pale, pale as a corpse; Daniel can see this even in the dead of night. The man's face reflects the moonlight, stark white above a long, lean body wrapped in peeling leather and rusted mail and mouldering furs. Around him, the cold wind howls into the little house, snow swirling through the air, and the warmth goes out of the room like a dying man's last breath.

* * *

Daniel stepped into the tower, and immediately jinked to his left, stepping out of the doorway. Never be seen, Stefan had said. Stefan the blasphemer, the reprobate. Never be caught in silhouette. Doorways and windows are your enemies. Walls and corners are your friends. The stone wall of the tower slammed Daniel's back as he slipped along it, always moving, his long sidesword a glimmer of steel in the shadows. Time. I just need a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The hackles on Daniel's neck stood up, every nerve stretched taut, his eyes wide as he sought the faintest clue of an unseen attack.

There was nothing. The room was still. Cobwebs hung from the roof, and old furniture was scattered everywhere. In one corner of the room, a stair led up to the roof of the tower. Daniel felt drawn toward it like iron to a lodestone, as if by some irresistible and nameless force. He drew his snaphance and cocked it, the snapping sound loud in the empty room. And slowly, boots clicking on the stone steps, he climbed the stairs.

The roof of the tower was exposed to the snowstorm, and the winds howled around Daniel as he emerged. It was a flat circle of stone that crowned this tower, about twenty feet in diameter, with a low stone rail around its edge. The darkness here was absolute, and the snow was cold and chokingly thick as it blew unseen into Daniel's face.

At the edge of the roof stood a single figure, tall and almost skeletally thin. He was pale as a corpse, and dressed in the rotting mail and leather and furs of a warrior from centuries ago, from a time before Luther and Calvin and the Turks changed the world beyond all recognition. He sighed, and Daniel heard it like the breath of the grave, audible even above the howling wind.

"Hello, Daniel."

* * *

Daniel's lips open, and he almost sobs with fear. "How do you know my name?" he whispers.

The man smiles, pallid lips pulling back from rotten teeth - and fangs like a serpent, shining like daggers in the dark. "Oh," he coos, turning to Daniel's mother. She flinches away, shrinks back on her bed, pulls the furs up to cover her thin nightshirt. She is still beautiful, this woman, still well shy of her thirtieth year. The thing steps toward her, moving with a spidery grace, jerky and precise. "You didn't tell him." He laughs, this man who is not a man. "Ohhhh. You didn't tell him how you gave thanks when I died, how you lit a candle to the Virgin for saving you from me." He steps closer. "You didn't tell him how you wed a farmer, a man not fit to lick horseshit from my boots." He kneels down beside her. "You didn't tell him how I came back, aye, twelve years ago now." The thing leans in, its fangs inches from his mother's pale throat, and Daniel cannot move: he is rooted, hypnotized. "You didn't tell him how I took you," the creature whispered. "On these very furs. And how you squealed as you came, when you felt my seed inside you." A low laugh. "No. You didn't tell him."

The young woman stares up into the creature's dead eyes, her face slack with unimaginable terror. Daniel does not know, will never know, what she sees there. But then she gives a tiny nod of understanding, and closes her eyes.

It is the work of a moment: a sharp movement of the head, like a dog tearing meat from a bone. Blood sprays from the creature's fangs, dark in the shadows of the cottage. The rupture in his mother's neck is not two little puncture marks: it is a ragged hole, a piece of flesh torn out, and the skin ends around it in frayed tatters like a ripped parchment. She slips to the ground, and Daniel runs to her, screaming, buries his head in the crook of her neck. Her blood runs down his cheek, warm and viscous. She does not smell like dark earth and fresh bread, not now, not ever again. She smells of iron, and salt, and death.

One pale, long-fingered hand lowers itself onto Daniel's shoulder, an albino spider, and squeezes like a vice. The creature's breath is cold as the grave on Daniel's face as it murmurs: "And now, my son, we have much to talk about."

* * *

"I did not come here to talk," Daniel said grimly.

"I know, boy." The dark creature at the edge of the roof turned, and Daniel's breath caught in his throat. That face. The pale terror of a thousand nightmares, the raw agony of a child's scream - all rushed back, and Daniel almost staggered. That face.

The vampire's eyes were bright, shining reflectively, knowingly, in the dark. "I never said that you came to talk. I only said hello."

Daniel walked forward slowly, until he stood at the center of the roof. "You killed her," he said. His voice sounded distant in his own ears. "I never understood that. Twelve years later. Why then, after all that time?"

There was a pause, and then the skeletal figure shook its head, and laughed - a long, creaking sound like old leather. "After all this time," whispered Daniel's father, "you still don't understand us at all, boy." The vampire stepped forward as well. It raised its eyebrows, black caterpillars crawling against its corpse-skin. "I killed your mother," the creature said slowly, "because on that particular night, I wanted to smell her fear. Taste her blood." Rusty mail rattled as the vampire shrugged its shoulders. "That's all it was, boy. Nothing more. The pleasure of the kill."

Blood pounded in Daniel's head. He raised his snaphance and aimed it at his father's heart. "She is with God now," he whispered, voice raw.

The creature sneered. "Oh, spare me your delusions. You're my son, boy." Steel rasped on steel as the vampire drew its sword, an ancient medieval weapon black with age. "I am in you." The bright, dead eyes stared deep into Daniel's own. "You would have loved it just as much as me."

There was a flash of fire and a deafening boom as Daniel fired his pistol; the sound rolled out across the sleeping town below. The vampire twisted, impossibly fast yet still too slow, and shrieked as the heavy ball tore through its shoulder. And Daniel stepped forward, his sword blurring in silver arcs through the moonless night, and attacked.

* * *

The stick of cordwood cracks into the skeletal creature's ankles, and the impact tears it from Daniel's hands. His father shrieks with fury. "You think you can hurt me, boy? You think you can fight me?" Its rotting fingers clench around Daniel's throat, and the boy scrabbles at them, nails peeling back as he tears at the iron grip. Those dark, reflective eyes stare into Daniel's face, encompassing all that he can see. "I will break you," the creature whispers. Daniel tries to scream, and finds that he has no air left with which to do so.

* * *

The ancient longsword and the Spanish rapier met, and Daniel staggered backwards. A blow swept in at head height, and the Sabbatanos ducked, feeling the breeze as the honed iron slashed through the air above his head. "Remember this?" snarled his father. He vanished, abruptly, and there was a thunderclap as the air rushed in to fill the void where he had been.

Daniel spun, without hesitation, and the two blades met again - in a shower of sparks, smashing away a disembowling thrust by the vampire who had abruptly reappeared in the darkness behind the Sabbatanos. "I'm not a child anymore," Daniel hissed. "Now in God's name, die!"

* * *

Daniel gives a wheezing gasp as the creature loosens its grip on his throat just enough for the boy to move his head - and then Daniel lunges forward, and catches the monster's hand in his teeth. The vampire snarls in fury and wrenches away, but Daniel hangs on like a dog with a bone, and bites down with all his strength. He tastes dead flesh, feels the abrupt crack of bone, and two of the creature's fingers come away in his mouth. It flings back its head and howls with rage and pain -

* * *

- and lashed out, a flurry of blows, inhumanly swift and powerful. But Daniel did not step back - he stepped forward, his rapier blurring as it deflected each blow. More sparks sprayed in the night, amidst the falling snow, and Daniel's mind narrowed to a single blinding point of focus as he parried high and low, right and left.

It was not enough. The vampire feinted high, then lashed out at Daniel's gut. The Sabbatanos saw the triumphant grin upon his father's face, and then he gasped sharply as the broadsword's edge ripped through his stomach. Blood spurted onto the snowy stone, dark in the night. Daniel staggered back, and felt a pitch-black moral terror gather around him. No. Not now. Not after all I've done, not before I do this much, at least, at last. Not yet, please God, I don't want to burn. Not now!

* * *

The creature hurls Daniel to the ground, and steps hard onto his throat. The boy's legs flail, kicking, as he chokes; slowly, his face turns red. The creature smiles, fangs dark with the blood of Daniel's mother.

"Time to break you, boy," it whispers. One booted foot raises, and stamps down on Daniel's knee. Bone snaps: it is loud as a gunshot, and Daniel screams, choked and sobbing, tears and snot running down his face -

* * *

"No!" Daniel screamed, and his sword was a silver blur once more, smashing aside his father's blade, thrusting high, low, parry, riposte - and then the monster was retreating, step by step, sparks spraying from its blade at every blow, its face contorted with fury as Daniel's became utterly calm. Blood pumped steadily from the Sabbatanos' stomach, leaving a dark trail in the snow on the tower roof as he drove his father, inch by inch, toward the roof's edge.

* * *

The vampire gives Daniel time to scream, to weep, to beg. He lets him lie there, and realize what comes next. The fixed, fanged smile never leaves its face. And then it lifts its foot again, and brings it down on Daniel's other leg. For a moment, the boy cannot see; agony overpowers his senses, and he screams as he has never screamed before or since.

* * *

There was a thunderclap as the vampire blink-teleported to Daniel's left - and the instant that it reappeared, the Sabattanos sank a foot of razor-edged Spanish steel into its chest. The creature screamed, then, in shock and horror. Daniel's right hand forced his sword in another six inches, while his left went to his belt and drew a dirk: eighteen inches of gleaming metal. And then Daniel slammed that, too, into his father's chest, stepping in close and hammering the blade in up to the hilt. He stood a moment like that, inches away from the creature, face to face with his father - his father, impaled upon two blades driven cleanly through his chest. The pale face was twisted with pain, and a dark trickle of blood ran from its mouth. The ancient medieval broadsword clattered from nerveless fingers to the ground. And with a grunt of effort, Daniel raised his sword and his dirk, lifting his father into the air by the blades forced through his chest, and walked to the edge of the tower. Below, the cliffs fell away in a sheer drop - an abyss of darkness down to the faint pinpricks of light that marked the town far below. Silently, Daniel extended his arms, holding his blades - and the figure hanging from them - out over the abyss.

* * *

Daniel howled in agony as his father lifted him, cradling the boy in his arms like a baby. Daniel's fists beat helplessly on the dead man's chest, and the vampire carried the child to the fireplace. The creature looked down into Daniel's agonized face. It smiled. "Are you ready to burn, boy?"

Daniel whimpered, gasped, and felt some last reserve of courage well up within him. He locked one small fist around his father's shirtfront, and stared up into the dead man's eyes. "I will never stop hunting you," the boy whispered. "And one day, I will kill you, and smile."

The vampire laughed. "That's my son," he chuckled. And he threw the boy, both legs broken, into the brightly burning fire.

* * *

Hanging from Daniel's blades over the sheer drop, the vampire opened its eyes, and smiled. "You are my son after all," it whispered. "You see? I kill your mother. You kill me. This is what we are. You call it vengeance. You call it justice. You call it serving God. But when the blood is on the blade, it's all the same. It's the joy of the kill. That's all there is." The vampire coughed, and blood ran down its chin. "You've killed me, boy. Smile."

Daniel tried. He tried to feel God's pleasure in his work, God's wrath at the monster whose life he was ending. But all he could think of was his mother, her throat ripped open like torn parchment, and the priest sobbing as the soldiers put the noose around his neck in the village below. The Sabbatanos closed his eyes. His arms were steady, hard as stone as he held his father impaled and suspended. But he wept nonetheless, silently, tears freezing unseen on his cheeks in the winter night.

For a moment, there was silence. And then the vampire laughed, gurgling, blood spraying from its lips. "Oh," it sputtered, "oh, you poor fool. You can't, can you? You can't smile, not even now." The thing howled with laughter, twisting on the blades that held it suspended. "Not even now! Oh, you're not my son at all. And you worship God?" Daniel felt his blades grind against his father's ribs as the vampire leaned toward him. "You are God's cruellest joke, Daniel. The perfect killer - who hates to kill!" The creature convulsed with laughter, feet kicking over the abyss. "Live long, my son," it cried, its voice shrill and unearthly. "Live long and suffer!"

Daniel felt no joy, no anger - just a gnawing sickness in his stomach, and a sudden sad certainty. It is time.

"Goodbye, Father," Daniel said quietly. And he kicked his father off the blades of his sword and his dirk, and watched him fall amidst the billowing snowflakes until he vanished into the darkness below.

* * *

Slowly, Daniel sank to his knees. His weapons clattered to the ground, and he touched his rent stomach, feeling the wound pump blood into his sodden clothing. "I am...the shield," Daniel muttered. There was a kind of desperation to his words, an aching need. "The shield...of God's...elect." Daniel collapsed onto his side, the snowy stone of the roof cold against his face. He brought his hands up to his face, and they were warm and sticky with blood.

"I am the shield!" Daniel screamed. He howled it to the universe, to God, to anyone who would listen. To himself, most of all. And from none of them did there come a reply. Nothing changed.

Daniel lay upon the roof of the tower, and he wept like a heartbroken child for all that he had been, and done, and would yet be and do, in all the centuries stretching away unto the last syllable of recorded time.

Distantly, from the town far below, he heard a sound. Out above the body of the priest, swinging gently from the gibbet, church bells were beginning to ring for Christmas morn.

I like Daniel. A lot.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Hugo Chavez is dead.

I know this because a few of my socialist friends have now cluttered up my Facebook in memorial.

[Zarkenis Ultima]

Hugo Chavez is dead.

I know this because a few of my socialist friends have now cluttered up my Facebook in memorial.

I know it because my dad mentioned it during lunch.

[Nationstatelandsville]

Hugo Chavez is dead.

I know this because a few of my socialist friends have now cluttered up my Facebook in memorial.

There goes my hopes for Pope Butimasocialist I.

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Hugo Chavez is dead.

I know this because a few of my socialist friends have now cluttered up my Facebook in memorial.

There goes my hopes for Pope Butimasocialist I.

I have mixed feelings on his death, really.

Like his mentor Castro, Chavez is- was- not the saint socialists made him out to be, but he was not the Satanic figure Americans liked to believe.

But eh, that was an unrelated note. Pope Castro still exists as a backup plan.

[Olthar]

There goes my hopes for Pope Butimasocialist I.

I have mixed feelings on his death, really.

Like his mentor Castro, Chavez is- was- not the saint socialists made him out to be, but he was not the Satanic figure Americans liked to believe.

But eh, that was an unrelated note. Pope Castro still exists as a backup plan.

Is Castro even Catholic?

[Nightkill the Emperor]

I have mixed feelings on his death, really.

Like his mentor Castro, Chavez is- was- not the saint socialists made him out to be, but he was not the Satanic figure Americans liked to believe.

But eh, that was an unrelated note. Pope Castro still exists as a backup plan.

Is Castro even Catholic?

Exactly why he'd be a perfect Pope.

[Nationstatelandsville]

There goes my hopes for Pope Butimasocialist I.

I have mixed feelings on his death, really.

Like his mentor Castro, Chavez is- was- not the saint socialists made him out to be, but he was not the Satanic figure Americans liked to believe.

But eh, that was an unrelated note. Pope Castro still exists as a backup plan.

The thing with these guys is that socialism's just an economic theory, right? Who gives a single shit if they use it?

And yet, they still feel the need to be utterly manipulative bastards with no sense of freedom of information. And that is all different kinds of catastrophic.

That said, we're no better off without him. Someone will just replace him.

[Olthar]

Is Castro even Catholic?

Exactly why he'd be a perfect Pope.

If Castro becomes Pope, would America launch an embargo on the Vatican?