When Life is a Prison (tbtp|closed|Berenice)

[Dracula]

"Is this death? Could this finally be the one."

Consciousness sitting alone in an endless oblivious void. At times, it encounters the flashes of lost memories. Times in the life it once had. The endless deaths that just never seemed to stick.

It was 1593, the winter was cold and the summer was wet. The region was on the precipice of finally escaping war, raids, and conquest. A man named Michael the Brave was taking the throne. He had joined the Christians and was looking to use allies and unity to push away the Turks once and for all. Among all of the warring powers and would be rulers of the area that you'll read about in the history books, there was one key power in the region that stood in the way of Michael truly commanding the hearts of his citizens. To the west of Craiova there stood a castle more than two hundreds old. It was kept by a family of European nobles that had died out by mysterious means. But something still dwelled within the halls of these ruins. A wraith, a revenant, a vampire. It encountered many stories and the myth began to muddle. Some called it a vengeful spirit of the family that once occupied the castle. Some simply called it an undead monster. While some called it the resurrected protector of the land; a king of the past still protecting the land he was sworn to. The name "Dracula" was the one that began to stick. For its association with the Christian devil, the dragons of myth, and the previous kings of the area. None alive today knew him by his true name and origin- Marius Ardeleanu, Quincy turned Bount.

After his transformation into a Bount, Marius spent decades dealing with his new condition. A Hollow's infection had left him a corpse with no soul. The infection became a sort of Hollow of its own that was now master over Marius's body. In the beginning, Marius maintained control while there was still the remnants of life still in his body. Then came the Hollow's turn. It made it clear that if Marius would not sustain them, then it would. It drained whatever life Marius still clung to and took control over the body. It gorged and fed in delight while ransacking villages. In its gluttonous abundance, Marius found his way back to consciousness and struggled once more for control. At the end of their confrontation, they came to negotiations. The Hollow maintained ego and agency as the Doll and the man maintained ego and agency as the Bount. The two were intrinsically linked with the man serving as Flesh and the Doll serving as Blood. Feeding would occur regularly but Marius would decide who was fed upon. Marius wanted to feed on other Hollow to maintain his identity as a Quincy or on Shinigami to sate his vengeance. It was regrettable that neither of the species were viable food sources for his affliction. The hole in his soul could only be sustained by human souls. So, it became decided that if he had to feed on the people of this nation, he would keep the nation safe from invaders.

Against Turks and Russians and the Ottomon Empire as a whole, Marius became Dracula. A demonic, soulless, protector of Wallachia. For their wars to continue, they had to take great lengths and measures to move around his territory. It was this fact that allowed the area to have the time and resources to regain stability. The grim horror of it though, that on occasion this Dracula would have to feed on the citizens, was something that most didn't want to talk about but everyone knew. They weren't being protected by an angel. They were under the charge of a devil. The Ottomans and the Christians regularly sent monster hunters, priests, and would-be heroes to try and slay this demon. He took a page from history and displayed these assassins on pikes through the forests. It was Michael the Brave that found the right man for the job; or rather the right woman...

[Sister Berenice]

Berenice checked her belt again. Crucifix, check. The blessed Latin printing of her personal Bible, check. Vials of holy water, check. Thurible, incense, charcoal, and flint, quadruple check. The rosary, a constant fixture on her wrist or her neck or her belt, the one thing she’d never be parted from… even that, she checked to make sure it was still there. It was the third time in the span of her hours-long caravan ride that she had gone through her inventory. She settled against the jostling wood frame and sighed in relief, also for the third time.

The bishops that came to the monastery looking for “spiritual assistance” were kind enough to get her into touch with the band of gifted Jesuits that made their home in the outskirts of Wallachia. They were (for now, at least) holding down the remnants of Catholicism in the face of the tidal wave that was Calvinism. And this, she learned from the surprisingly talkative Jesuits, would be just the thing to bolster the reputation of the Catholic clergy in Wallachia: ending the reign of the beast they simply called Dracula.

A peculiar name to address oneself by. Mayhap he takes the form of a serpent.

Berenice allowed her weary eyes to close for a second and picture some scale-clad monstrosity. Something that looked as terrifying as the behavior the Jesuit retinue told tales of—when they thought she wasn’t listening, that is. They said remarkably little about her quarry to her face, and whether they even knew what it looked like, she did not know. Trust your eyes, they warned her, eyes cast down. Trust your senses. You will know.

They spooked her more than what she had been told about Dracula, in all truth. The way they didn’t look at her too closely. How they forgot her name, even though she kept reminding them.

Not forgetting, her eyes opened as the cart rollicked to a stop. Ignoring, rejecting. It will ease the burden of surviving upon their souls, should I…

She patted her belt down again, swallowing the lump in her throat. A small Jesuit man climbed down from the back of the wagon and extended a hand to Berenice. Her hand shook just slightly as it slipped into his. A brisk hop was all it took to unite her feet with the cold, damp earth of the forest. Leaves crinkled underneath her soles, but the noise only served to highlight the silence in the dark trees before her. Berenice turned her head to the kindly Jesuit staring in the same direction as her and smiled. She would not allow herself to leave the world like this, if it was truly her last night alive upon this Earth.

“Tis wise to acknowledge such fearsome existences, but not so much to allow it to prevent your duty in vanquishing them. My duty. Pray await my return at the village nearby, and as ever, God bless you, my brothers.”

The rosary around Berenice’s wrist rose to meet the call. A divine light spilled out like the rays of sun behind summer boughs. The oppressive darkness resigned itself to lurk on the edges of the warm yellow glow around her form and the forest's aura of fear sulked alongside it. She lit the charcoal in her thurible with a few quick motions of her small slender fingers and strode ahead. Behind her, the brothers made the sign of the Cross upon their breast. No words sounded between them, yet they were united in their thoughts. Godspeed, sister, and may you yet live to see dawn.

The warm, woody smoke produced by the myrrh, mixed with the earthy frankincense it burned alongside, preceded Berenice in her careful treading of the forest undergrowth. Holy scents, purifying scents, that would dispel this woodland of its misery. Failing that, each lungful Berenice inhaled would at least dispel the fear while she walked. The farther in she got, the less navigable the terrain became, but a presence guided her like a north star: a dark north star, something filled with… with hunger, with pride, with… regret. What kind of monster reeked of such regret? None she had fought. The grip on her rosary tightened.

Her feet broke upon the misted wildflowers of a dark clearing before she could fully realize that the trees had parted. Berenice knelt to pluck one, just one. Spotted orchid. The spots, one sister had told her ages ago, were meant to be the blood of—

The moon emerged from its billowing gray cloak. The silvery light brought the clearing into perfect clarity; it was impossible not to notice from her peripheral vision. Berenice looked up and dropped the small blossom.

What must’ve been some twenty bodies dotted the landscape before her. Thick pikes displaced their flesh, their bones, the jaws of their skulls as the wooden tips emerged from under fear-filled and long-dead eyes. The piteous moon limned each drop of blood and each glassy fly-ridden iris in silvery light. Wet, red rosaries dangled from their wrists, their necks, twinkling like stars in the dark.

The presence from earlier stood somewhere at the far edge of the clearing, behind the grisly court of corpses. Berenice stood up slowly. The Jesuits were right. Surely, that presence was him. That man—whatever wore the skin of that man—was him.

“Lord Dracula of Wallachia,” her voice carried across the clearing, clear as the moonlight, “will you not repent for your crimes against the world? Will you continue to walk this bloody path?” It was formality. She knew the answers to the questions, and her curt intonation allowed for no response. But her next question did. Her stoic voice cracked under confusion and pain.

“Why?"

[Dracula]

“Lord Dracula of Wallachia,” A voice carried through the clearing of his house and into the walls of the castle. A very bored and tired man rose from his chair by the fire place and fetched his cape. Though his heart wasn't in it, his blood began to boil in anticipation for the next meal. More muffled words were making there way in. Something of redemption and sin and atrocities. He couldn't hear them all but this wasn't the first monster hunter or Christian or general that had come to challenge the great and terrible beast of the castle. He thought the corpses would let them all know what was going to happen; that's why he put them there in the first place. When he started this crusade he thought that reputation and fear would be enough to command some silence, but no. Everyone thinks they're the one. God has chosen them and by the Herculean leap in logic that only blind faith can provide, they know in their heart that their righteous pious conviction will see them through the night. Out on his terrace, over looking the grounds and seeing the Sister of a demon slayer, Dracula was unimpressed.

Small and dainty. Nearly half Dracula's nine foot tall stature. Not so skinny for the time but still close to half Dracula's weight. Her typical nun clothing flapped in the wind of the forest. The smell of the corpses didn't do her justice. All-in-all he'd say she didn't belong on this field of death. She was well equipped though. Bags and belts of materials, likely superstitious and unproven in nature. He could make out the flasks and various glass bottles of roots and antiquities even from across the field. The cross around her neck was particularly insulting. He wore one as well; a Quincy cross around his left wrist like a rosary. It reminded him of the intrusion and slaughter of his people. His family that once lived in this castle. And instead of honoring their sacrifice, the people just moved on to their new God.

"Why, little girl?" He waved a hand to gesture to it all. "Do I come to your church and ask why you pray to a God that does not speak? Do I walk through your streets and ask why you war over lines drawn in sand? Yet you come to my home and ask why I stake murders, thieves, looters, and rapists. Why? Because this is my home and I shall protect it as any creature would. Now, though you have not yet shown me courtesy, allow me to be the gentleman. Leave here and never return, lest I carve a pike for you as well."

[Sister Berenice]

It would be years, decades, before Berenice would learn to veil her emotions from the world. Youth and purpose flowed in her veins and in her aura. She had no reason, back in that field, to protect her heart—she had strength, power, and divine righteousness in the palm of her hands. But even worse, to her rising resentment, she could not deny what he put forth. And they said demons always lied. Idiots.

The finality of his dismissal pushed her into a blaze. The divine light anchored to wrist unfurled, curling into violent whisps whipping in some unknown wind. An inferno of rage.

“My lord,” Berenice spit the honorific, her tone corrosive, “I cannot return if my hands do not come to bear the stains of your blood upon my hands ere this night’s end. That comes part and parcel with the vow. My promise. Even men that shun the light of heaven make promises, no?”

She questioned his dismissal through the slow walk closer to where he stood. The grass thrived here, absorbing the steady beat of her soles. Two mounted bodies stood at her sides where she came to a stop. The light licked at them, dissolving the lifeless skin and bone into faint motes of luminescence. Even back then, she consumed: not with tooth and nail, but with radiant fire.

“Your death is writ in mine, but do not misunderstand. I did not make my promise in the name of any king. Men seeking to profit off your death might have sent calls for aid, but I do not serve them.”

Her words didn’t seek his approval. He seemed like the type to value the truth, but it made no difference whether he cast it aside or took it into his awareness.

“I made my promise to the begging bishops afraid of a lord that comes and picks through his citizenry like one might pick between cattle for one’s dinner. That is the crime I desire to rectify.” Berenice’s causticness dissolved, revealing the bones of her anger. Pure, unbroken. It would take more than minor insult and an air of dismissal to crush the purpose within her. That purpose reasserted itself not just emotionally, but visually; the writhing and glowing flames of anger receded into the translucent field of light around her. The searing warmth grew stronger.

“What you have done to the bodies here counts as a crime too, but I foster no doubt in your justifications for doing so. Depriving these souls of a proper rest does naught but bolster your reputation outside of Wallachia. Add me to your grim court—” she smirked a little bit, “provided I fall to your hands, that is—” the smirk hardened into a thin-lipped line, “and more will only come. You must know that.” The thought didn't sit well in her head. For a man that wanted to chase her off, a man of truth drenched in sorrow, why did he throw himself into such contrarian displays? Those in the immediate territory might be terrified, but the forces across river and mountain wouldn’t allow him to get away with it for long.

Given, that’s why Berenice had been sent. She needed to end this before armies were sent to die against the unwilling conscripts of Wallachia, bound by his absurd perversion of lordship. The acute awareness of how many more would die for him, by him, seized her soul. The revelation reflected itself in her eyes.

Whether I die this night bears no consequence. What matters is that you die with me.

“Your field grows bloodier while your flock shrinks, and of all people, at their own lord’s hand. If this is what the extent of your protection looks like, I cannot help but find it extremely lacking.”

Berenice held up the rosary around her wrist. The wood glowed from within, then erupted. White flames sporting innermost cores of metallic gold coursed around her body. They flickered out from her eyes, her nails, from underneath the habit she wore. Long tendrils of hair, evenloped by the flames, escaped the cloth and wavered like a bonfire about her form.

“Come at me, demon.”

[Dracula]

This one had spirit much unlike those that had come before her. It wasn't something so external as esoteric beliefs or charges from a lord that she'd never met. She didn't place the value she had for herself in the care of someone else. This was a person that placed value in their own being. Her own beliefs guided her. She bit at his land with a fire manifested from her own conviction and cut as his morals with her wit. This sister made mockery of everything around him. His charge, his hypocrisy, his murder, his very unlife. It slashed at what little life he had left in these parts. It shamed him to hear the truth of it put so plainly before him. It infuriated his long lost soul to know she was right but have nothing to do about it. A shattered and animated husk of the man he once was; puppeted by a demonic beast from the afterlife. It was all he could do to live a life as close to his morals.

What did she know though? Were it not for him, this country would've been sacked three time over. He was a dark protector but a protector nonetheless. She was just a puppet of the Christians. Christians and Turks alike, they just wanted to have this land for themselves. To have bigger circles cut out from the sand than the next person. From his fingers grew talons. His fangs grew out at his breath snarled out. His eyes turned blood red and his blood began to circulate quickly under his flesh as he prepared to meet her invitation.

"Would you, by chance, be a Quincy?" She declined, having heard the name and met some in the past, not knowing the significance of the question.

"Time to feed!" Another voice shrieked out as Dracula hurled himself into the air. His caped wrapped around his body, twisted and contorted before it vanished into its self. The Shadow technique of the Quincy- or as near to it as he could replicate in his current state. From behind the nun, from the shadows her flames cast, the man emerged with a clawed right hand reaching out to pierce her heart.