November 1, 2023 • 30 mins
Season 03 - Episode 01.
Alaric von Beller is dead, but his work is not yet done. Now his thirst for vengeance is matched only by this thirst for blood.
Credits:
Alaric Von Beller - George Ledoux
Website: http://DeadhausSonata.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/XjUXa4v
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/DeadhausGame
Created by Apocalypse Studios
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
The third hour of the ninth day,
11th month, and two hundredtwenty years after the fall of Ustilia.
Now Thacea too is fallen, and Alaric von Beller is dead.
He failed in his duties, blinded by mortal pride.
(00:29):
All that remains of the Grand Inquisitor’s legacy is myself, and though I bear his name, I am not the same man…
I am no man at all. The last of my humanity was stripped from me
All that remains of the Grand Inquisitor’s legacy is myself, and though I bear his name, I am not the same man… I am no man at all. The last of my humanity was stripped from me
as I plunged the needle into my veinand delivered the curse of undeath onto my own flesh.
(00:51):
Its touch was molten led, surging up my arm and into my chest.
If even as my heart strangled on accursedblood, its flow was unhindered,
it seeped through the rest of me on its own power,searing blood vessels that spasmed at its passage
devoured me from within.
(01:12):
Every drop of methat was human, until only the inhuman remained.
I arrived in torment,
unable to scream for lungs,had drowned in roiling blood, seizing, convulsing,
maddeningly aware of every second, eachas long as a turning of seasons.
Then I saw her briefly pale as a moon that her stood atopa temple wreathed in flame.
(01:42):
And then there was only darkness.
Death settled upon me, draped me in its shadowed wings.
But it could not bear me from this world.
For that which I had spent most of my life hunting,I had now become.
The sounds of the city came to methen, as they never had in life.
(02:04):
A cacophony of fevered battle.
The timbers of houses groaned as they were consumed by flame.
Voices of the dead of great trees, long felled, straining,snapping,
splitting steel upon steel, desperate cries,
hopeless crashes ringing in the streets only to be drownedby the twisted veiling of those that mocked in the guise of men,
(02:32):
those with eyes that brimmedwith blood and long, splendid smiles.
Then came the bells.
The mighty bells.
The voice of Thacea herselfcrying out in defiance, echoing across history.
It was the last of their toes.
Did I rise from my ruin and stand a new Alaric the damned...
(02:58):
For a time I simply stood there, paralyzed by the realization
that I had succeeded in my final experimentsby the horror of what that meant.
Could it have been an illusion?
The twisted dream of a dying mind.
I looked upon my hands pallid and cold, pressed them to my face,to flesh that was stiff and without warmth.
(03:24):
I soon realized that it was not by any physiological processthat I moved.
No contraction or release of muscle fiber.
It was the blood within me. No longer human.
Simply by thinking of the movement I intended,
the blood would leap within compelling my dead limbs to obey.
(03:47):
I reached into my coat and clutched my chest.
No rhythm stirred beneath neither pulse nor breath.
I gasped in startlement, felt the air rush into me,held it there.
I awaited, but there came no urgency,no burning need to release the breath.
I suppose I could have held it indefinitely.
(04:10):
But it was such an unsettling sensation that I refused.
Even more unsettling was the factthat if I did not consciously make the effort
to breathe, my body no longer performs a process by reflex.
This was no dream.
I was devoid of life.
(04:30):
And yet my consciousness persisted.
Perhaps I could say my soul persisted,
but I doubt it.
As much as I wish to remain in my laboratory to experimentfurther upon my condition, I knew that I had to flee the city.
It was only a matter of time before the Awakened returned.
(04:51):
I glanced down at the wound they had given me, but it was gone.
Not even a scar left in its place.
Out of habit, I went to retrieve my satchel,but as I approached, my steps faltered.
The blood in my legs rebelled.
I would have been wiser to heed its warning,but much of what I was still clings to me.
(05:14):
The need to understand.
With great effort I was able to reachwith trembling hand and unfasten the satchel.
A terrible light poured out,burning the nerves that ran behind my eyes.
The blood turned me away, compelled me to flee.
But I forced myself to look again.
I realized then that the satchel was lost to me.
(05:38):
The light shone from an emblem.
An open hand with an eye on its palm,the badge of an Inquisitor.
It was made of silver.
No more badges. No more tools.
Only the blood.
The blood.
There were still so much in the vat where I was cultivating it.
(06:01):
It seemed too dangerous a thing to be left there.
Yet once again, as I approached,I felt the blood inside recoiled.
Then I saw and remembered the ring of saltI had placed around the vat.
This time I listened to the blood and drew no closer.
Instead, I opened the cabinets that contained my crossbow,loaded with damnable silver bolts.
(06:25):
I slammed the cabinet shut.
In retrospect, I could have found a way to break the vat.
Thrown something at that, perhaps.
But I heard footsteps falls in my estate. They were coming
While moving above ground would have been the fastest wayto escape the city.
It would mean direct confrontation with the awakened.
(06:46):
And I had no crossbow, satchel, no tools.
Nor did I know their capabilities.
I turned instead to the sewers.
Out of habit,I struck a torch, but the flame glared over bright.
It gave no pain, as the silver light did,but neither did it aid my sight, and so I doused it.
(07:08):
But the sewers were not dark this time.
They were filled with grayish lightthat came from nowhere and everywhere.
The stream of human waste squelched and burbled in the visceralclarity, and though I could have chosen not to breathe,
I found that prospect more disturbing than the greasy warmththat struck by nostrils and slid down the back of my throat.
(07:32):
The scurrying of rats came to me from a distance, this creakingbreath so clear that I could seek them out by sound alone.
And further still,the kindness legs of roaches skittered and swarmed.
But there was one thing I did not hear as I moved among the creatures of the dark for no sound came at all from my own steps.
(07:55):
I knew of a series of winding tunnels.
There were several escape routes in case of siege.
I followed the ones that would place me furthest from the city.
As I walked, I could not shake the haunting thoughts.
I am dead.
I am as cold as a stone upon which I tread.
Shall I decay?
(08:17):
Shall I remain locked inside the corpse?
Forced to watch it molder and putrefy.
To feel my flesh rotting from its bones.
I had never observed a vampire closely.
Never learned how time affects them.
Whatever fate awaited me was a morbid secret,and so distilled my heart, it could not still, my dread.
(08:42):
Something drew me from my terrible thoughtsupon the arching walls and ceilings of the tunnels.
A sight unseen in all my life.
A visceral film coated the stones of the sewers.
A kind of growth.
As I stopped to examine the wall,I felt it to be slick and threaded with gently pulsing tendrils.
(09:07):
Some of the substance came away with my hand.
I could not discern its color in the strange gray light,but it smelled of reeking pus and something faintly chemical.
Something stirred had the faintest shifting in the shadowsindiscernible.
It lay along my path of escape.
(09:28):
Reflexively, I crouched, moving as I would in lifeto conceal my steps so this was no longer necessary.
As I drew closer the film along the walls and ceiling thickened,
now a resin interlaced with fleshy cordsthat post arrhythmically.
The tunnel through which I traveled sloped downinto a circular chamber where many other tunnels met.
(09:53):
Here the alien growth was thickestand the air was saturated with its sickly odor.
Here I found the Awakened.
12 of them stood together in the dark,facing away from me, swaying gently in naked silence.
Their bodies were crisscrossed
with bulging veinsand patterns, most unnatural to human circulation.
(10:18):
For a moment I was stricken still and only watched,but the 12 remained as they were.
As they had been forwho knows how long hidden beneath our very streets.
The tunnel I needed was near to them,so not within their line of sight.
I crept across the flesh floor, wholly expecting it to betray mewith some unnatural sound, but my movement was utterly silent.
(10:47):
Nearer to the Awakened,I could smell the same sickness emanating from their bodies.
The blood stirred in my legs, urging me to leap to run.
But I suppressed it, moving with utmost caution.
Yet, though ever soundless, even to my ownpreternatural hearing, one of the naked bodies spoke.
(11:08):
"He does not dream", it said.
And all at oncethey turned to face me with tilted heads and slanted smiles.
"Stay back", I shouted, but they did not, they movedcalmly forward, bare feet squishing under a living mat.
My eyes started in the dark, desperatelyseeking a path unbarred by my assailants and finding none.
(11:34):
The one closest to me, a fleshy woman of perhaps 60 years,reached with upturned palms, as if to embrace me smiling.
All the while the blood sprang into my armsand I cried out as I swung a blow at her head.
This sickness must have rendered themextremely brittle, for to my horror,
(11:55):
the woman's head broke in like a rotting pumpkin, tearingfree from her body, still wrapped around my hand.
This minor inconvenience did little to deter her,as her body still stepped forward, reaching for embrace.
From her neck,spindly tendrils erupted, twisting and whipping upward,
(12:17):
and from the gaping hole of her throatemanated a deep chittering.
I shrieked and lunged away from the othersso that my back pressed against the fleshy wall.
A strange sensation sank into my hands then, not quite pain,but a sort of pressure, a heightened awareness of the flesh.
(12:37):
I looked down to see the woman's head still attached, gnawingwith curved teeth that sprang from where her face ripped open.
Her eyes rolled back into her severed headas she gnawed as if in ecstasy.
In a frantic, jerking motion.
I was able to tap from me,but my hand went with her and as her head struck the ground,
(13:01):
the same spindly tendrils that had come from her body eruptedlike so many legs to carry it quickly away with its prize.
Again there was no pain at a loss of my hand,
but I did feel the blood recoil from the mangled woundclosing itself off from that path.
I had no time to consider thisbefore the awakened pressed upon me surrounding me.
(13:25):
Had I passed through the shadow of deathonly to be destroyed once more by these monstrosities,
the blood inside me surged,compelling me to turn upon of all at my back.
This time I heeded its command.
I filled and struck against the disease growth.
Driving through it to the stone beneath.
(13:45):
The wallsthere must have been deeply corroded for the stone broke inward,
as if from a great hammer through the paththat was opened, I fled.
Not daring to look back, and my flight was of a swiftnessunknown to me, even on horseback.
The tunnels rush past
in an unintelligible stream of gray,and the air buffeted my face like a storm's wind.
(14:12):
I raised my arms to shield my face for surely I would collidewith the walls at such speed and by flight was halted.
I stood in stillness.
I listened to only silence.
I realized I wasn't breathingand resumed the process by conscious veil.
(14:33):
But where was I now?
I did not recognize these tunnels.
They must have been sealed away over the centuries.
Forgotten passageways left by our forbears.
There were no sounds of rats or insects here.
No flow of human filth.
Not even the air made any sign of stirring.
(14:53):
And the only smell was that of dust upon dust,the earthen scent of layered time.
I looked to my hands then, or the hand that remained to me.
My left arm now ended in a stump,as if there had never been a hand nor any wound.
There was no pain.
I drew a dagger from my coatand pressed its point against my left forearm.
(15:18):
Gently. At first, no pain.
I pressed harder, watching the blade pierced my pale flesh,but I felt only a dulled pressure.
Further still, I pushed the blade until it piercedthrough the other side of my arm, but still no pain.
Inside my arm the blood diverted its course around the metalso that when I withdrew it, no blood was spilled.
(15:44):
And within seconds the wound closed itself.
The sound of my own voice disrupted my fascination.
This was not the time for experiments.
Unsure of where to go other than follow from whence I came.
I move forward with no sense of direction.
I stocked the shadows of the hidden passages in silence, notas a living, breathing intruder, but a denizen befitting a tomb.
(16:12):
For that is what they were, I soon found
stretching hallways lined with bone-strewn alcoves, a catacombs.
And as I pass the timeless remains,I heard no, I felt faint whispers as if dancing behind my eyes.
I could not discern what the voices said, nor what languagethey used, but I could feel their eyeless gaze upon me.
(16:39):
The fate of ancient judgment.
The blood was in me, rippled against this malice,bringing me to a halt.
The whispers deepened.
"I do not mean to disturb your rest." Though the whispers feltas if within my mind, I addressed the timeless bones.
"I am a son of Thacea. In life, I served her and failed.
(17:03):
In death, I seek her vengeance." Hundreds of voiceless
words whirled around me, constricting meso that I could not have taken a step if I tried.
"Please, you must let me pass." Now,
I began to hear my name among the many whispers,many times, though I had not given it.
(17:27):
And the crushing pressureseized my entire form, rendering me unable to speak.
I felt
them seeping into me in ancient things slipped by time of allbut furious will.
The blood seized in violent resistance,but the whispers pushed back, innumerable, overwhelming.
(17:48):
Vertical consumed me
as if I was tumbling, reeling, plummeting inside myselfdeeper and deeper into the darkness of my own mind.
And the whispers gripped me even there.
Then two lights flickered from the blackness of my inner abyss.
A pair of eyes that burned as spectral flameswithin a lantern of desiccated flesh.
(18:13):
A deeper chills than death washed over meas I recognized the horrible face.
It was the liche.
As its presence rose, the whispers swarmed in terror,rushing up and out of me in a veiling stream.
They fled from me.
From their own bones that surrounded me.
(18:33):
From the darkness in which they lay for centuries.
And the catacombs that utterly silent.
Once more, I could control my limbs.
I was freed from the darkness of my inner self, fromthe spectral eyes that flickered there in watching, waiting.
I moved onward 13,951 pieces.
(18:57):
By the end to mortal eyes, I moved in total darkness.
To my sight, I moved through a twilight of gray,through an endless hallway lined with endless bones.
But no visitors dared rise to meet me.
Through many winding passageways, I wandered throughsplitting tunnels that slope to darkened depths.
(19:19):
I never knew so vast a structure lay beneath Thacea.
To whom did it once belong?
What secrets lay in those fathomless depths?
Those answers would elude me.
Always.
I took any passage inclined upward, ever seeking the surface.
And at last, I found a winding stairway leading up.
(19:42):
I could not help. A small laugh. It's a cruel irony.
In many sections, the ancient stairs had crumbled away,
leaving vast gaps the length of several menbetween traversable structures.
I moved along of all, beginning at the base of the stairs,until I reached the first gap
and stood gazing above to where the stairs continuedhigher than the house.
(20:08):
Then a thought occurred to me.
What would be the harm to me if I were to fall?
There was no pain at all when my hand was severed,no pain even punctured by a blade.
And it's not as if I'm incapable of feeling pain
for the silver in my laboratory hurt worseto look at than having my hand gnawed off at the wrist.
(20:30):
So I can be harmed, but only by some things.
Maybe it's blood.
Maybe that's the key.
Only that which can harm the blood can harm me.
That is why I feel no pain from blade or fang.
The blood does not fear them.
So that would mean that,
(20:52):
like my movement,neither is my pain driven by physiology process.
It is a message from the blood.
It is the blood that animates methat grants me sight and healing.
It is the blood that sustains me.
It repairs me this blood.
(21:12):
It is me.
All the rest is merely a vessel.
And if no harm can come to the blood by falling, thenthere would be no harm in a simple experiment in the stairwell.
I took a few steps back down the stairs, glancedonce more to those at least so far ahead and above.
(21:34):
The blood in my legs coiled, as I willed myself forward.
Three quick steps,and then I leapt, expecting to come crashing to the ground.
And yet I soared through the dark landingwithout a sound on the stairs above.
Incredible.
(21:54):
There is no telling what I am truly capable of now.
My instincts, my presuppositions,my habits from life are insufficient to guide me in this state.
The only way to know for sure is to experiment.
I left again and again, ever upward, noiselesslybound in greater lengths than any living thing without wings.
(22:18):
And what's more, I was untired by this.
My body both lifted itself and landed as if nearly weightless.
At the top of the stairwell,I found a metal grate, overgrown with rust.
Impassible, I would have said in life.
In death, I took hold of it and pulled.
(22:39):
The metal, groaned in the resistance, unmoved inwho knows how many centuries.
But more blood surged into my right arm and hand.
The grating tore free. And I held it in bewilderment.
Was this iron that yielded to me?
Surely not.
(23:00):
I dropped the grating down the darkness of the stairwelland with a final soundless leap,
rose out of the dead air of the forgotten passagesand into the first night of my eternity.
From all around the night called to me.
Its many voices coalesced in wordless song, and above them all,
(23:20):
sprawled the greatest beauty I have beheld in all my years.
The stars like never before.
They shone
scintillating shoals upon the soulless seas of the night.
And there always been so many of them.
By their light alone, I saw as clearly as by day,
(23:44):
I stood atop a crumbling tower amid the greater ruins.
Many such places lay strewn across Malorum,but where was this one?
Upon the horizon, distant flames glintedas if a reddish star had fallen from the heavens.
It was Thacea. I looked again to the stars.
(24:06):
The sign of the seed was rising
to the right of the embers of Thacea,which meant I had traveled far to the south.
That is when I first smelled it.
Hot and sweet on the night wind.
A scent unlike any I had experienced in life.
It poured itself down my throatand I felt the blood within begin to tremble.
(24:30):
My body moved by reflex,but I snapped out of the days as I realized
my legs were taking me straight off the edge of the tower,some 50 feet in the air.
As the wind renewed, so did the burning aroma, and my right legraised, perching my foot on the very edge of the tower.
"Let's look for a very down",I urge the blood, but there's no reasoning with it.
(24:55):
Under greater compulsion than that which repelled mefrom silver, I stepped off the tower, unable to stop myself.
Logically, I knew I was unlikely to be harmed.
But one does not shake.Instincts accumulated over 60 years in a single night.
I covered my face with my remaining hand crying out as I fell.
(25:17):
No pain, no impact.
I lowered my hand to find myself upon the ground.
The tower top far overhead.
I had landed soundless upon my feet without trying,without even looking.
As easy as it had been.
I still felt great relief for being on the ground once more.
(25:39):
Within moments, my legs were moving of their own accord,chasing down the irresistible fragrance.
How can I describe it?
I can say that it was sweet, hot,perhaps like honeyed vine and spices.
But this does not capture it, for it stirred something in me.
(26:00):
A yearning, an emptiness only realized in its presence.
It was as if I could sensea part of what I was across the distance.
Something I had lost and now strove to reclaim.
My journey took me to the outskirts of a decimated village.
Wooden barricades had been smashedin, bodies lay half sunken in the mud.
(26:23):
Those that had once been living in those that had not.
Deadhaus, it had struck this southern village.
But why?
Further in I found the sundered remains of a wight coreand stooped over it.
Whatever flesh once housedthe broken core was nowhere to be seen.
(26:43):
A single wight had not been enough to prevent this.
The sweet scent roused me to my feet once more.
It came from the tavern.
The feeble wooden door offered no resistance to my entry.
My instincts drew me downward towards the cellar.
As I descended the steps, I found some things that halted me.
(27:07):
Even in the presence of the enthralling aroma.
The stairs were slick with
fleshy growth, pale pink and streaked with reddish tendrils.
The Awakened, they were here too far from Thacea.
But how? They had never been reports of this.
(27:30):
I was torn between retreating in the faceof what might be waiting for me below
and the unbearable compulsion of the blood within.
In the end, the need was greater by far than fear.
I moved down the steps, making no noise and wondering,if that unnatural silence would even matter.
(27:51):
What I found was no threat to anything but my senses.
An orgy of dismembered limbsand mangled flesh was splattered across the cellar.
Whateverthe ravaged remains belong to was utterly unrecognizable.
Some of it was burned, reduced to cinder,some was withered as if I had been dead for years.
(28:14):
I cannot fathom what violence took place in that cellar.
But of the awakened, there was no signexcept a gentle rattling behind a green door.
I steeled myself, remembering that I was not as frailas my instincts told me I was.
Whatever lay on the other side of that door.
I could outrun it.
(28:35):
As I pushed it open, the rattling ceased.
A storage room full of shelves and barrels.
The sweet smell was maddeningly thick here.
My body took me to it. One of the barrels in the corner.
Its lid was unsealed.
Tentatively,I opened the barrel and the horrible truth was revealed to me.
(29:01):
A girl of maybe 12 yearshuddled inside the barrel, eyes, wild with terror.
She was the lone survivor of what happened here.
Clever enough to know to hide. Small enough to succeed.
I realized I could hear her heart beating.
Each pulse emanating so hot scent.
(29:25):
It was her blood.
That is what drew me through the night.
The pulse drowned our soundor thought suffused my consciousness with indomitable need.
The horror...
I tried to scream, but as if in a nightmare.
(29:46):
No sound escaped me.
I sank to my knees nearer to her and bowed my head.
And for the first time in my life and death, I prayed.
Alaric the damned.
The third hour of the ninth day,
11th month, and two hundredtwenty years after the fall of Ustilia.
Now Thacea too is fallen, and Alaric von Beller is dead.
He failed in his duties, blinded by mortal pride.
(00:29):
All that remains of the Grand Inquisitor’s legacy is myself, and though I bear his name, I am not the same man…
I am no man at all. The last of my humanity was stripped from me
All that remains of the Grand Inquisitor’s legacy is myself, and though I bear his name, I am not the same man… I am no man at all. The last of my humanity was stripped from me
as I plunged the needle into my veinand delivered the curse of undeath onto my own flesh.
(00:51):
Its touch was molten led, surging up my arm and into my chest.
If even as my heart strangled on accursedblood, its flow was unhindered,
it seeped through the rest of me on its own power,searing blood vessels that spasmed at its passage
devoured me from within.
(01:12):
Every drop of methat was human, until only the inhuman remained.
I arrived in torment,
unable to scream for lungs,had drowned in roiling blood, seizing, convulsing,
maddeningly aware of every second, eachas long as a turning of seasons.
Then I saw her briefly pale as a moon that her stood atopa temple wreathed in flame.
(01:42):
And then there was only darkness.
Death settled upon me, draped me in its shadowed wings.
But it could not bear me from this world.
For that which I had spent most of my life hunting,I had now become.
The sounds of the city came to methen, as they never had in life.
(02:04):
A cacophony of fevered battle.
The timbers of houses groaned as they were consumed by flame.
Voices of the dead of great trees, long felled, straining,snapping,
splitting steel upon steel, desperate cries,
hopeless crashes ringing in the streets only to be drownedby the twisted veiling of those that mocked in the guise of men,
(02:32):
those with eyes that brimmedwith blood and long, splendid smiles.
Then came the bells.
The mighty bells.
The voice of Thacea herselfcrying out in defiance, echoing across history.
It was the last of their toes.
Did I rise from my ruin and stand a new Alaric the damned...
(02:58):
For a time I simply stood there, paralyzed by the realization
that I had succeeded in my final experimentsby the horror of what that meant.
Could it have been an illusion?
The twisted dream of a dying mind.
I looked upon my hands pallid and cold, pressed them to my face,to flesh that was stiff and without warmth.
(03:24):
I soon realized that it was not by any physiological processthat I moved.
No contraction or release of muscle fiber.
It was the blood within me. No longer human.
Simply by thinking of the movement I intended,
the blood would leap within compelling my dead limbs to obey.
(03:47):
I reached into my coat and clutched my chest.
No rhythm stirred beneath neither pulse nor breath.
I gasped in startlement, felt the air rush into me,held it there.
I awaited, but there came no urgency,no burning need to release the breath.
I suppose I could have held it indefinitely.
(04:10):
But it was such an unsettling sensation that I refused.
Even more unsettling was the factthat if I did not consciously make the effort
to breathe, my body no longer performs a process by reflex.
This was no dream.
I was devoid of life.
(04:30):
And yet my consciousness persisted.
Perhaps I could say my soul persisted,
but I doubt it.
As much as I wish to remain in my laboratory to experimentfurther upon my condition, I knew that I had to flee the city.
It was only a matter of time before the Awakened returned.
(04:51):
I glanced down at the wound they had given me, but it was gone.
Not even a scar left in its place.
Out of habit, I went to retrieve my satchel,but as I approached, my steps faltered.
The blood in my legs rebelled.
I would have been wiser to heed its warning,but much of what I was still clings to me.
(05:14):
The need to understand.
With great effort I was able to reachwith trembling hand and unfasten the satchel.
A terrible light poured out,burning the nerves that ran behind my eyes.
The blood turned me away, compelled me to flee.
But I forced myself to look again.
I realized then that the satchel was lost to me.
(05:38):
The light shone from an emblem.
An open hand with an eye on its palm,the badge of an Inquisitor.
It was made of silver.
No more badges. No more tools.
Only the blood.
The blood.
There were still so much in the vat where I was cultivating it.
(06:01):
It seemed too dangerous a thing to be left there.
Yet once again, as I approached,I felt the blood inside recoiled.
Then I saw and remembered the ring of saltI had placed around the vat.
This time I listened to the blood and drew no closer.
Instead, I opened the cabinets that contained my crossbow,loaded with damnable silver bolts.
(06:25):
I slammed the cabinet shut.
In retrospect, I could have found a way to break the vat.
Thrown something at that, perhaps.
But I heard footsteps falls in my estate. They were coming
While moving above ground would have been the fastest wayto escape the city.
It would mean direct confrontation with the awakened.
(06:46):
And I had no crossbow, satchel, no tools.
Nor did I know their capabilities.
I turned instead to the sewers.
Out of habit,I struck a torch, but the flame glared over bright.
It gave no pain, as the silver light did,but neither did it aid my sight, and so I doused it.
(07:08):
But the sewers were not dark this time.
They were filled with grayish lightthat came from nowhere and everywhere.
The stream of human waste squelched and burbled in the visceralclarity, and though I could have chosen not to breathe,
I found that prospect more disturbing than the greasy warmththat struck by nostrils and slid down the back of my throat.
(07:32):
The scurrying of rats came to me from a distance, this creakingbreath so clear that I could seek them out by sound alone.
And further still,the kindness legs of roaches skittered and swarmed.
But there was one thing I did not hear as I moved among the creatures of the dark for no sound came at all from my own steps.
(07:55):
I knew of a series of winding tunnels.
There were several escape routes in case of siege.
I followed the ones that would place me furthest from the city.
As I walked, I could not shake the haunting thoughts.
I am dead.
I am as cold as a stone upon which I tread.
Shall I decay?
(08:17):
Shall I remain locked inside the corpse?
Forced to watch it molder and putrefy.
To feel my flesh rotting from its bones.
I had never observed a vampire closely.
Never learned how time affects them.
Whatever fate awaited me was a morbid secret,and so distilled my heart, it could not still, my dread.
(08:42):
Something drew me from my terrible thoughtsupon the arching walls and ceilings of the tunnels.
A sight unseen in all my life.
A visceral film coated the stones of the sewers.
A kind of growth.
As I stopped to examine the wall,I felt it to be slick and threaded with gently pulsing tendrils.
(09:07):
Some of the substance came away with my hand.
I could not discern its color in the strange gray light,but it smelled of reeking pus and something faintly chemical.
Something stirred had the faintest shifting in the shadowsindiscernible.
It lay along my path of escape.
(09:28):
Reflexively, I crouched, moving as I would in lifeto conceal my steps so this was no longer necessary.
As I drew closer the film along the walls and ceiling thickened,
now a resin interlaced with fleshy cordsthat post arrhythmically.
The tunnel through which I traveled sloped downinto a circular chamber where many other tunnels met.
(09:53):
Here the alien growth was thickestand the air was saturated with its sickly odor.
Here I found the Awakened.
12 of them stood together in the dark,facing away from me, swaying gently in naked silence.
Their bodies were crisscrossed
with bulging veinsand patterns, most unnatural to human circulation.
(10:18):
For a moment I was stricken still and only watched,but the 12 remained as they were.
As they had been forwho knows how long hidden beneath our very streets.
The tunnel I needed was near to them,so not within their line of sight.
I crept across the flesh floor, wholly expecting it to betray mewith some unnatural sound, but my movement was utterly silent.
(10:47):
Nearer to the Awakened,I could smell the same sickness emanating from their bodies.
The blood stirred in my legs, urging me to leap to run.
But I suppressed it, moving with utmost caution.
Yet, though ever soundless, even to my ownpreternatural hearing, one of the naked bodies spoke.
(11:08):
"He does not dream", it said.
And all at oncethey turned to face me with tilted heads and slanted smiles.
"Stay back", I shouted, but they did not, they movedcalmly forward, bare feet squishing under a living mat.
My eyes started in the dark, desperatelyseeking a path unbarred by my assailants and finding none.
(11:34):
The one closest to me, a fleshy woman of perhaps 60 years,reached with upturned palms, as if to embrace me smiling.
All the while the blood sprang into my armsand I cried out as I swung a blow at her head.
This sickness must have rendered themextremely brittle, for to my horror,
(11:55):
the woman's head broke in like a rotting pumpkin, tearingfree from her body, still wrapped around my hand.
This minor inconvenience did little to deter her,as her body still stepped forward, reaching for embrace.
From her neck,spindly tendrils erupted, twisting and whipping upward,
(12:17):
and from the gaping hole of her throatemanated a deep chittering.
I shrieked and lunged away from the othersso that my back pressed against the fleshy wall.
A strange sensation sank into my hands then, not quite pain,but a sort of pressure, a heightened awareness of the flesh.
(12:37):
I looked down to see the woman's head still attached, gnawingwith curved teeth that sprang from where her face ripped open.
Her eyes rolled back into her severed headas she gnawed as if in ecstasy.
In a frantic, jerking motion.
I was able to tap from me,but my hand went with her and as her head struck the ground,
(13:01):
the same spindly tendrils that had come from her body eruptedlike so many legs to carry it quickly away with its prize.
Again there was no pain at a loss of my hand,
but I did feel the blood recoil from the mangled woundclosing itself off from that path.
I had no time to consider thisbefore the awakened pressed upon me surrounding me.
(13:25):
Had I passed through the shadow of deathonly to be destroyed once more by these monstrosities,
the blood inside me surged,compelling me to turn upon of all at my back.
This time I heeded its command.
I filled and struck against the disease growth.
Driving through it to the stone beneath.
(13:45):
The wallsthere must have been deeply corroded for the stone broke inward,
as if from a great hammer through the paththat was opened, I fled.
Not daring to look back, and my flight was of a swiftnessunknown to me, even on horseback.
The tunnels rush past
in an unintelligible stream of gray,and the air buffeted my face like a storm's wind.
(14:12):
I raised my arms to shield my face for surely I would collidewith the walls at such speed and by flight was halted.
I stood in stillness.
I listened to only silence.
I realized I wasn't breathingand resumed the process by conscious veil.
(14:33):
But where was I now?
I did not recognize these tunnels.
They must have been sealed away over the centuries.
Forgotten passageways left by our forbears.
There were no sounds of rats or insects here.
No flow of human filth.
Not even the air made any sign of stirring.
(14:53):
And the only smell was that of dust upon dust,the earthen scent of layered time.
I looked to my hands then, or the hand that remained to me.
My left arm now ended in a stump,as if there had never been a hand nor any wound.
There was no pain.
I drew a dagger from my coatand pressed its point against my left forearm.
(15:18):
Gently. At first, no pain.
I pressed harder, watching the blade pierced my pale flesh,but I felt only a dulled pressure.
Further still, I pushed the blade until it piercedthrough the other side of my arm, but still no pain.
Inside my arm the blood diverted its course around the metalso that when I withdrew it, no blood was spilled.
(15:44):
And within seconds the wound closed itself.
The sound of my own voice disrupted my fascination.
This was not the time for experiments.
Unsure of where to go other than follow from whence I came.
I move forward with no sense of direction.
I stocked the shadows of the hidden passages in silence, notas a living, breathing intruder, but a denizen befitting a tomb.
(16:12):
For that is what they were, I soon found
stretching hallways lined with bone-strewn alcoves, a catacombs.
And as I pass the timeless remains,I heard no, I felt faint whispers as if dancing behind my eyes.
I could not discern what the voices said, nor what languagethey used, but I could feel their eyeless gaze upon me.
(16:39):
The fate of ancient judgment.
The blood was in me, rippled against this malice,bringing me to a halt.
The whispers deepened.
"I do not mean to disturb your rest." Though the whispers feltas if within my mind, I addressed the timeless bones.
"I am a son of Thacea. In life, I served her and failed.
(17:03):
In death, I seek her vengeance." Hundreds of voiceless
words whirled around me, constricting meso that I could not have taken a step if I tried.
"Please, you must let me pass." Now,
I began to hear my name among the many whispers,many times, though I had not given it.
(17:27):
And the crushing pressureseized my entire form, rendering me unable to speak.
I felt
them seeping into me in ancient things slipped by time of allbut furious will.
The blood seized in violent resistance,but the whispers pushed back, innumerable, overwhelming.
(17:48):
Vertical consumed me
as if I was tumbling, reeling, plummeting inside myselfdeeper and deeper into the darkness of my own mind.
And the whispers gripped me even there.
Then two lights flickered from the blackness of my inner abyss.
A pair of eyes that burned as spectral flameswithin a lantern of desiccated flesh.
(18:13):
A deeper chills than death washed over meas I recognized the horrible face.
It was the liche.
As its presence rose, the whispers swarmed in terror,rushing up and out of me in a veiling stream.
They fled from me.
From their own bones that surrounded me.
(18:33):
From the darkness in which they lay for centuries.
And the catacombs that utterly silent.
Once more, I could control my limbs.
I was freed from the darkness of my inner self, fromthe spectral eyes that flickered there in watching, waiting.
I moved onward 13,951 pieces.
(18:57):
By the end to mortal eyes, I moved in total darkness.
To my sight, I moved through a twilight of gray,through an endless hallway lined with endless bones.
But no visitors dared rise to meet me.
Through many winding passageways, I wandered throughsplitting tunnels that slope to darkened depths.
(19:19):
I never knew so vast a structure lay beneath Thacea.
To whom did it once belong?
What secrets lay in those fathomless depths?
Those answers would elude me.
Always.
I took any passage inclined upward, ever seeking the surface.
And at last, I found a winding stairway leading up.
(19:42):
I could not help. A small laugh. It's a cruel irony.
In many sections, the ancient stairs had crumbled away,
leaving vast gaps the length of several menbetween traversable structures.
I moved along of all, beginning at the base of the stairs,until I reached the first gap
and stood gazing above to where the stairs continuedhigher than the house.
(20:08):
Then a thought occurred to me.
What would be the harm to me if I were to fall?
There was no pain at all when my hand was severed,no pain even punctured by a blade.
And it's not as if I'm incapable of feeling pain
for the silver in my laboratory hurt worseto look at than having my hand gnawed off at the wrist.
(20:30):
So I can be harmed, but only by some things.
Maybe it's blood.
Maybe that's the key.
Only that which can harm the blood can harm me.
That is why I feel no pain from blade or fang.
The blood does not fear them.
So that would mean that,
(20:52):
like my movement,neither is my pain driven by physiology process.
It is a message from the blood.
It is the blood that animates methat grants me sight and healing.
It is the blood that sustains me.
It repairs me this blood.
(21:12):
It is me.
All the rest is merely a vessel.
And if no harm can come to the blood by falling, thenthere would be no harm in a simple experiment in the stairwell.
I took a few steps back down the stairs, glancedonce more to those at least so far ahead and above.
(21:34):
The blood in my legs coiled, as I willed myself forward.
Three quick steps,and then I leapt, expecting to come crashing to the ground.
And yet I soared through the dark landingwithout a sound on the stairs above.
Incredible.
(21:54):
There is no telling what I am truly capable of now.
My instincts, my presuppositions,my habits from life are insufficient to guide me in this state.
The only way to know for sure is to experiment.
I left again and again, ever upward, noiselesslybound in greater lengths than any living thing without wings.
(22:18):
And what's more, I was untired by this.
My body both lifted itself and landed as if nearly weightless.
At the top of the stairwell,I found a metal grate, overgrown with rust.
Impassible, I would have said in life.
In death, I took hold of it and pulled.
(22:39):
The metal, groaned in the resistance, unmoved inwho knows how many centuries.
But more blood surged into my right arm and hand.
The grating tore free. And I held it in bewilderment.
Was this iron that yielded to me?
Surely not.
(23:00):
I dropped the grating down the darkness of the stairwelland with a final soundless leap,
rose out of the dead air of the forgotten passagesand into the first night of my eternity.
From all around the night called to me.
Its many voices coalesced in wordless song, and above them all,
(23:20):
sprawled the greatest beauty I have beheld in all my years.
The stars like never before.
They shone
scintillating shoals upon the soulless seas of the night.
And there always been so many of them.
By their light alone, I saw as clearly as by day,
(23:44):
I stood atop a crumbling tower amid the greater ruins.
Many such places lay strewn across Malorum,but where was this one?
Upon the horizon, distant flames glintedas if a reddish star had fallen from the heavens.
It was Thacea. I looked again to the stars.
(24:06):
The sign of the seed was rising
to the right of the embers of Thacea,which meant I had traveled far to the south.
That is when I first smelled it.
Hot and sweet on the night wind.
A scent unlike any I had experienced in life.
It poured itself down my throatand I felt the blood within begin to tremble.
(24:30):
My body moved by reflex,but I snapped out of the days as I realized
my legs were taking me straight off the edge of the tower,some 50 feet in the air.
As the wind renewed, so did the burning aroma, and my right legraised, perching my foot on the very edge of the tower.
"Let's look for a very down",I urge the blood, but there's no reasoning with it.
(24:55):
Under greater compulsion than that which repelled mefrom silver, I stepped off the tower, unable to stop myself.
Logically, I knew I was unlikely to be harmed.
But one does not shake.Instincts accumulated over 60 years in a single night.
I covered my face with my remaining hand crying out as I fell.
(25:17):
No pain, no impact.
I lowered my hand to find myself upon the ground.
The tower top far overhead.
I had landed soundless upon my feet without trying,without even looking.
As easy as it had been.
I still felt great relief for being on the ground once more.
(25:39):
Within moments, my legs were moving of their own accord,chasing down the irresistible fragrance.
How can I describe it?
I can say that it was sweet, hot,perhaps like honeyed vine and spices.
But this does not capture it, for it stirred something in me.
(26:00):
A yearning, an emptiness only realized in its presence.
It was as if I could sensea part of what I was across the distance.
Something I had lost and now strove to reclaim.
My journey took me to the outskirts of a decimated village.
Wooden barricades had been smashedin, bodies lay half sunken in the mud.
(26:23):
Those that had once been living in those that had not.
Deadhaus, it had struck this southern village.
But why?
Further in I found the sundered remains of a wight coreand stooped over it.
Whatever flesh once housedthe broken core was nowhere to be seen.
(26:43):
A single wight had not been enough to prevent this.
The sweet scent roused me to my feet once more.
It came from the tavern.
The feeble wooden door offered no resistance to my entry.
My instincts drew me downward towards the cellar.
As I descended the steps, I found some things that halted me.
(27:07):
Even in the presence of the enthralling aroma.
The stairs were slick with
fleshy growth, pale pink and streaked with reddish tendrils.
The Awakened, they were here too far from Thacea.
But how? They had never been reports of this.
(27:30):
I was torn between retreating in the faceof what might be waiting for me below
and the unbearable compulsion of the blood within.
In the end, the need was greater by far than fear.
I moved down the steps, making no noise and wondering,if that unnatural silence would even matter.
(27:51):
What I found was no threat to anything but my senses.
An orgy of dismembered limbsand mangled flesh was splattered across the cellar.
Whateverthe ravaged remains belong to was utterly unrecognizable.
Some of it was burned, reduced to cinder,some was withered as if I had been dead for years.
(28:14):
I cannot fathom what violence took place in that cellar.
But of the awakened, there was no signexcept a gentle rattling behind a green door.
I steeled myself, remembering that I was not as frailas my instincts told me I was.
Whatever lay on the other side of that door.
I could outrun it.
(28:35):
As I pushed it open, the rattling ceased.
A storage room full of shelves and barrels.
The sweet smell was maddeningly thick here.
My body took me to it. One of the barrels in the corner.
Its lid was unsealed.
Tentatively,I opened the barrel and the horrible truth was revealed to me.
(29:01):
A girl of maybe 12 yearshuddled inside the barrel, eyes, wild with terror.
She was the lone survivor of what happened here.
Clever enough to know to hide. Small enough to succeed.
I realized I could hear her heart beating.
Each pulse emanating so hot scent.
(29:25):
It was her blood.
That is what drew me through the night.
The pulse drowned our soundor thought suffused my consciousness with indomitable need.
The horror...
I tried to scream, but as if in a nightmare.
(29:46):
No sound escaped me.
I sank to my knees nearer to her and bowed my head.
And for the first time in my life and death, I prayed.
Alaric the damned.
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