“Yess? We can arrange her a nisce cabin. And, her, erm…uncless? The bodyguardss, I asssume they will be coming, too.” Jesseth found the idea of trained assassins in the commune, ones who weren’t specifically on their side, a little uncomfortable. But he wasn’t sure if Neht’s partner, or Neht herself, would let his sister be unattended, considering everything.
"It would be ideal but I understand if there’s some...discomfort, given the situation. The sensibilities of Earth are very different from the sensibilities of Vampiru. This is hardly a bad thing,” Neht said, not sure if discomfort was too light a word or not. “If you would prefer them not to come into the commune, I’m sure we’ll figure out something suitable. Perhaps I can drag her father out from underground at long last.”
Stefano and Jaegeun would never win awards for being good people, but she trusted them with her daughter and rested comfortably with the knowledge that if they ever so much stepped out of line, she had so much blackmail on them that they’d be lucky if they spent the rest of their life running from Interpol. Perhaps to others it would seem strange that she would have faith in killers but Neht never kept clean hands herself, not even before infiltrating the cult.
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Blanca is just a little thing -all big eyes and oversized ears that she might never grow into and a fluffy white tail that she definitely won’t- and the outside is a vast, incomprehensible thing she’s rarely encountered so far in her young life. The ground is made of plants. There are creatures making sounds in the trees. The air is moving. Why is the air moving? It ruffles her hair and she immediately curls up into a little ball, tail shielding her face.
Nope. Scary. Bad. People are being mean to her on purpose by making her be out here instead of inside where the ground is made of tiles and carpet and there aren’t creatures and the air acts like it’s supposed to. Blanca doesn’t take to change very well, part of which may be attributed to the isolated environment she’s been raised in but most of which has entirely to do with the fact that she’s a very small child.
“Aw, c’mon,” Stefano says. “It’s not so bad out here.”
Her tail shifts out of place just enough to glare at him.
“No,” she says and then covers her face again.
Awful. Terrible. She wants to go back inside and play alchemist, which mostly consists of pouring different shampoos into her uncle’s cooking pots. He’s not really her uncle because her father pays him a lot of money to stay around (money, she knows, can be used to buy crayons) but that all seems really complicated and she doesn’t understand how you can have an uncle who isn’t an uncle or how boss-employee relationships work, so as far as she’s concerned, he’s her uncle.
“Inside. Now.”
Stefano does not take her inside. This is why her favorite uncle is Jaegeun. He’s boring and old (all uncles are old, just like all parents are old) and he sleeps all day but he has not made her look at grass and trees before.
Through the fluff on her tail, she sees a sudden flurry of color. Nope, this is tricks to make her touch plants and she’s too smart to fall for tricks...but then she thinks that maybe she’s tired of fluff in her face, so she uncurls, but only because fur is itchy on your nose, not because she wants to see his Papilio tricks.
He’s being butterflies. Oh, that’s a pretty fun Papilio trick, actually. When your uncle is butterflies, that means you can chase him. It’s allowed. The swarm of kaleidoscopic butterflies swarm around her head for a minute and then flit over to a patch of flowers.
If she wants to chase, she has to experience being outside. If she wants to be inside, then she can’t chase him. Tricks, tricks, tricks.
The desire to chase and pretend she’s a cat hunting prey, just like her sister, wins out. Blanca must stalk and conquer. The butterflies dart around and the little Sibyl follows.
---
“Had you failed the flower ceremony, you would have been taken from the tower and given to the Sisterhood to become a lay sister. This is no shameful thing. If you succeeded, you would be chosen for further training as a Harlan candidate. You would have no name but your title. This too is no shameful thing.”
Blanca kneels on a cushion before the low table while her father pours out hot apple cider she can’t quite taste. He keeps the bunker -the tower, he calls it, like he’s still in old Anachrom, still sequestered in his quarters at the top of sylphwood tower, not living underground, out of sight and out of mind of any regulators- as close as he can to the former glory of Vampiru but compromise is always necessary. Apples aren’t the same as saltdrops but sometimes you just have to compromise with close enough.
The Grand High Harlan never kneels on a cushion. Blanca doesn’t know how he does it because her knees and legs ache otherwise after a few minutes but her father kneels for hours at a time with his back rigid, unmoving except the motion of pouring tea or writing at his table. He’s old, very old. He has old man bones and old man knees. He’s going to die soon, probably. Blanca doesn’t like to think about that very much.
“Drink, child, and do not spill a drop.”
Her uncles and mother give her education on the world outside but her father trains her in old traditions long abandoned by most Egregor. There are proper ways to drink juices and blood and wine, proper postures, proper ways to put her cup down, proper expressions. It’s ceremony and Blanca likes ceremony.
She drinks and then waits for further instruction.
"Your education would begin in earnest. You would spend every waking hour in training. Many of your siblings and fellow candidates would be unable to keep up with the pace. Many would succumb to earthly temptations when they became older. This too is not shameful. A Harlan is the voice of Mother Herself to outsiders. Few are fit for such things. One must learn to give up oneself and become a weapon.”
He drinks and his cup is mixed with blood.
“You are the daughter of the Grand High Harlan but I speak for no one but a dead temple and myself, least of all Mother. You, Sibyl-born, would never be permitted in Anachrom. Your sister would have been allowed to exist, perhaps, but she would be no candidate. My marriages were for the sake of ceremony only and bore no affection. I have no other children and we have not taken in others to train. We have killed tradition but we will fashion something from her remains. I permit you to unwrap the parcel before you, child. Be careful.”
It’s wrapped with old, old cloth and a length of leather unlike anything on Earth, and inside...
“This is the heart-sword given to me upon my ascension to the next level of candidacy. My amaranthine sword give upon becoming Harlan is symbol of my office but this is the true weapon of a Harlan. I give this to you now. We begin your martial education tomorrow night.”
(Wow, he’s trusting her with a weapon? That’s probably a terrible idea.)
He does not say anything further, so she takes this as opening to speak.
“And this is the sword that you killed your father with?”
He does not nod because such overt gestures are considered uncouth for his station (of course, he’s no longer the stoic, silent Harlan of old but is instead a paranoid, acerbic man thoroughly corrupted by Neht that does a hell of a lot of things that would’ve ended in his head severed from his neck in the old days) but instead he gestures for her to hand him the sword. He unsheathes it, and as old as it might be, the treated bone of the blade is still just as sharp as the day it was crafted.
“Yes,” he says, “and my siblings who still remained as candidates. This was not a shameful thing. The final trial to become Harlan is to kill the one who came before with one blow through the heart and the first act upon ascension is funerary rites. I was not yet nineteen when it was done, younger than most. I sired no children in Anachrom because I did not wish to die. I did not want my children to live with death on their hands. I missed my siblings. This level of sentimentality was not permitted of my station. I give you this sword not out of tradition but out of secret rebellion. You will draw it on no one if you can help it.”
Blanca wonders if the spirits of the dead linger around. She sits a little straighter.
“Then I will not kill you,” she says.
“Good,” he says and he does not smile because he rarely does but she can tell that he’s pleased. “I would hate to be killed.”
---
“Please, Blanca, we mustn’t do this.”
Jaegeun is really not as excited to be drawn into her dreamworld as he ought to be, which is really very rude of him because she’s put a lot of thought into the eternal war and he really ought to be grateful for the opportunity to join in on her now nightly conquests. Shouldn’t he be proud of her for figuring out this at such a young age? Why is everyone always telling her no when it comes to her powers? Why can’t they just be happy about things? She’s traveled out of her body to all sorts of cool places! Her dream is so detailed, so accurate, so good. She spends so much time every day practicicing this stuff and no one thinks it’s as cool as they should.
“I am God-Empress and my word is law,” she says imperiously. “You are my general and you will lead the troops to battle against the Dawnlord or else your blood shall spill against the ground at my feet. We march at dusk, general.”
In her dreams, she’s not a small, awkward teenager with too-big ears and unruly hair. In her dreams, she is stately, she is glorious, she is everything she could have been if she were born in another time and not here where she can’t do anything she wants because regulators might snatch her up for weird experiments again.
“I am very tired, Blanca,” he says. “I love you but please let me sleep in peace.”
Jaegeun’s voice is gentle because it always is with her. Blanca knows there’s another side of him but it’s hard to reconcile the brutal assassin with the withdrawn, perpetually tired man who does math worksheets with her and sneaks LPs he thinks she’ll like into her record box when he thinks she isn’t looking.
“The war will not win itself, general, and the enemy must be defeated before they take the city by force. They do not rest and we will not either,” she says.
Also, how can he possibly be tired? Uncle Jae sleeps more than anyone else she knows. He’s getting a good ten hours of sleep in every day at least.
"I’d prefer not to dream about death,” he says. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t either. It’s not a good thing.”
Oh. Right.
Blanca’s often inconsiderate but she has enough self-awareness not to poke at major wounds that won’t heal. His armor and weapons fade away to be replaced by his pajamas, her armies dissipate into nothing, and she’s thirteen again. She keeps the elaborate empress dress though. It is her dream, after all.
“My kingdom is not one entirely of war,” she says. “Would you like to see my spider garden before I send you back? I have every variety of arachnid that has ever existed.”
She’s very proud of the research that’s gone into this particular garden.
“Will they touch me with their awful legs?” he asks warily.
“Yes!”
“...What if we simply visit the palace kitchens instead?”
Blanca does not tell him that the main livestock around the Twilight-Soaked Bay is giant spiders but just this once, she’ll dream that they eat pasta instead of arachnids.
Sometimes the things his mother said only made a little sense to him, but Jesseth didn’t always like to press. Sometimes you could come up with too insightful a question and trigger thoughts his mother had purposefully safeguarded herself from, perspectives she was deliberately avoiding. One had to be careful.
That, and she was entitled to her privacy. He’d dug often as a curious little hatchling, but he was old enough now to only dig as deep as she’d let him.
“I’ll be careful.” He found a little weed and carefully extricated it with as much of the roots as possible, deftly and slowly pulling it out from between more prized plants. “For everyone’s sake.”
There were other questions he could ask, though, and this one felt important. “Do you think she remembers me?” His Sybil sister had last met him so long ago, he truly wondered.
Jesseth was so careful. That was hardly a bad quality to have but it was certainly one not shared with his sisters. Neht worried about Jodie and Blanca, albeit for very different reasons, but of course, Neht always worried. That was not a good quality to have but then again, her constant fretting over worst case scenarios paid off sometimes when she needed it to.
“I know that it has been such a long time but yes. She does. She asks after you. She would like to see you again.”
More leaves snipped, more leaves carefully put away.
“It’d do her good, I think, to come up more. Trees and open skies are good for the soul and other people are even more so."
Neht’s circle of trusted people did not extend far but she trusted her son and she trusted her wife.
Jess considered what she had to say, his focus on taking care of the Basil less intense than his mothers. He’d managed only a single snip in the entirety of the conversation.
He picked gently through the words and, ever curious, asked, “Iss it becausse you’re Egregori that you cannot dream with her?” He knew from Rush and…and Cori (it still hurt to think about her) that one did not need to be Sibyl to walk in dreams. But his mother was unique in many ways, and he did not know if she was as safe to be around in dreams as she was in reality.
A snip here, a snap there, leaves piled up in a basket. One might not be able to control everything in one’s life but you could, at least, control a garden.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said. “We’re something that was never meant to exist and it goes down so far beyond the body. There’s something very spiritual about dreaming together. I don’t know if my presence in dreams would be enough to corrupt her but it’s best not to risk it. It’s an awful thing. Most Egregori don’t dream -I suppose the initial taboo must have been put into place to prevent corruption of Sibyl- but I wasn’t always Egregori.”
Snip.
“Of course, if anyone ever asks, you never heard anything so silly as that and I’m just the last of some little Egregori farming village.”
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I’ve recently been approached about the possibility of writing a historical romance set in the high days of Vampiru's kingdoms. Monarchist romances are, of course, very popular among humans and otherwise, and of course there’s been a great demand among the vampiric sect for anything set in the glory days before they had to contend with sun screen, Famazon, and presidential elections. Bless their souls, completely unfamiliar with the full body of my work. Well then, if they want a royal romance, they’re get such a royal romance. Poor dears, to want Austen and receive only Brontë instead. How many times must I beat people over the head with a proverbial fish until that I’m hardly joking about my political leanings? Twits, the whole lot of them. I think I shall scream. If you happen to walk in the woods at night and hear what you imagine to be a banshee, fear not: it’s only me. If you happen to walk into the grocery store at mid-afternoon and you hear what you imagine to be a banshee, fear not: it’s either a toddler or else it’s only me. If you would instead prefer to fear, by all means, be afraid all that you like, I’ll hardly stop you. I’ve been told that I’m quite frightening when I set my mind to it: for instance, when guarding a bowl of frosting so that grubby little paws don’t snatch it all up.
Once Neht had started, Jess carefully removed the rubber tips off his natural claws so he could snip herps where directed, putting them in his own apron pocket.
“What should I tell them about you, and Blanca?” Jess asked, ready to commit it all to memory. “Or, what do you want me to assk, exsactly?”
The basil grew lush and thick thanks to plenty of care, proper fertilization and irrigation, and a persistent belief that nothing less than an act of god could kill these godforsaken plants. Neht loved basil. Neht used it in so many recipes she couldn’t actually taste. Neht consistently had so much basil she wanted to scream. It was an entirely self-made problem.
She knelt in the dirt and if she got muddy, well, clothes washed.
“That I need to know what she might expect roaming because I cannot join her. That I need to know what dangers she might face because I cannot protect her. That I would very much appreciate very specific examples of why you shouldn’t trust anyone you meet across the universe because she is young and she has a rebel’s heart and she is, most importantly, thirteen. I’ve met about three thirteen year olds total that wouldn’t summon demons if given half the chance. And if they should happen to know someone Sibyl-friendly who can provide glamours off the radar, that would be lovely. And as for me, I do not think there is any way around it, they need to know that I am an Egregori nun before they make the decision on whether or not to answer any questions. We’re like radios that can never fully be turned off, sending and transmitting information. I can shut off the sending but were I in their position, I wouldn’t trust me.”
A sigh.
“The rest...I must think. I must talk to her father and her uncles before anything else. Living in secret forever is neither feasible nor good for anyone but she has no legal identity, I have no legal tie to her, and everything is, forgive my language dear, so damnably complicated.“
An aggressive snip of a stalk of basil.
“I had hoped there wouldn’t be any need of rebellion after Vampiru but clearly I set my expectations too high.”
Would love to see what you're translating! Give us a call sometime, we're always looking to publish historical romances from Vampiru!
Thank you kindly for the message; I do appreciate it immensely. I'm not as of yet completely satisfied with my translations but when I approach a higher level of completion, my agent shall contact you. Have a wonderful night.
Over the past few months, I have temporarily set aside my own work (there is no harm in this as I have a stockpile of material that shall last me quite awhile; moreover, one really must take extended breaks every now and then or you’re liable to tear your hair out. I have an excess of hair but I’m not taking any chances.) to work in earnest on translation of what works of Vampiru literature I remember. I suppose I must finally thank an early education of rote memorization for something, although I hardly recommend it. I have a library of ancient verse in my head and yet I can’t do simple arithmetic. I must note that what I am translating is largely bodies of work of my area of origin; it was, after all, a big planet.
Thus far, I have been exclusively translating romances. This is because I am of the opinion that they are more accessible to modern day vampires lacking the cultural context necessary to really dig into old histories and -I consider this more important- if I have to recount dry accounts of old battles that no one really gives a d*mn about anymore, I will scream.
Thus far, what I have translated largely aligns into these categories:
Our Love Is Not To Be Because You Are Poor and I Am Rich (This Is Sad For Me)
Our Love Is Not To Be Because You Are Poor and I Am Rich (But What’s This? You Are A Secret Noble)
Our Love Is Not To Be Because You Are Rich And I AM Poor (I Shall Pine Away and Die Nobly)
You Have Died And Now I Shall Languish (Alas For Me)
The Fiend Assassin Has Killed My Betrothed and Ruined My Life (And Yet Is So Strangely Charming)
I Am A Rock Who Cannot Be Moved (However, The Bastienn Detects Stirrings of Soft Emotion)
We Are Gladiators And Our Lives Are Short But We Find Comfort Within Each Other (The Shirtlessness is Implied)
The Fiend Egregori Nuns Are Seducing My Virtuous Love and This Cannot Be (This Is Not Religiously Accurate In the Least)
I Am Torn Between A Charming Rogue and a Polite Noble And My Heart Hurts For This (But Behold, They Are the Same Facechanger)
The Sibyl Has Brought Something Back (Positive)
The Sibyl Has Brought Something Back (Derogative)
Oh No, the Ocularis Is Watching My Every Move, What Shall I Do (The Answer Isn’t Surprising)
My Soulmate Is A Scoundrel (This Can Go Many Ways)
I Am Suffering Beautifully (I Will Die In Your Arms)
I Will Make a Devilish Deal to Bring You Back (This is a Cautionary Tale)
I Am Hardworking and Steadfast And I Will Win the Fair Maiden’s Heart (This is Always Boring)
Our Servants Are Setting Us Up Secretly (Also They Will Wed Each Other)
I Am Torn Between Two Loves (I Will Die Tragically So I Don’t Have to Choose)
I am Torn Between Two Loves (I Will Wed Both)
I Am Torn Between Two Loves (Alas, They Have Wed Each Other)
I Have Sworn to Never Love Again (I Will Love Again)
There Has Been a Misunderstanding and We Detest Each Other (We Will Wed Come The Warm Season)
You Are Cruel and Terrible (I Triumph Over You And You Are Devoted to Me and Me Only)
Your Spouses Have All Mysteriously Died (This Does Not Deter Me)
We Are Both Wicked and Terrible (We Become More Wicked and Terrible)
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Jesseth took his mother back outside, back to her garden where they’d started. He listened attentively, knowing that his poor mother needed at least one child who was, for the most part, uninteresting but interested. Jess had somehow come out so mundane compared to his siblings that he thought it a bit ironic, considering he shouldn’t exist at all.
“…I know ssome Ssibyl.” Jess told Neht slowly, each syllable bearing some weight. To admit it at all, even to someone like his mother, who knew and loved and protected them, felt like a breach of trust. “I could sspeak with them. Ssee if they would like to connect, or ssimply…ferry messsagess through me.”
But Neht also understood this game of careful, cautious steps. Sibyl were in danger the moment they were outed, for all some of his friends felt very free in his personal company. It was always a delight to see them bouncing from one joy to the next, and always disheartening when they had to curl inward.
Uninteresting, he might call himself, but Neht, always the contrarian, would argue otherwise. As far as she was concerned, he carried the spark of something grand inside every inch of him: in his scales, in his heart, in the softness of his voice and the shape of his signs, in his patience, in his kindness.
Neht kept many things in her apron pockets: little prayer beads, thimbles, old notes, hard candy, cat treats. She retrieved a pair of thick leather gloves and then scissors. The witch didn’t much care for handling blades of any sort around other people without some protection. Too risky.
“...If they should not like to talk in any capacity, I understand. It is smart of them, I think, if they do not,” she said.as she knelt down in the dirt to harvest her herbs. “The stakes are higher for them than there are for most and I am of a bloodline that is not to be trusted. We who are as I am are...”
She mulled over the word.
“Aberrations. Hazardous. And most Egregor are very fond of regulators, you see.”
Jesseth knew that his mother would never run out of Basil, even if the deer did get to them, but he also wasn’t the sort to argue with a parent. He got to his feet and offered Neht his hand to help her back out of the house.
“I’ll help with that, too. What elsse hass happened around here? Have you heard from any of my other ssiblingss lately?” His metal fingers curled delicately around his mother’s palm, the control much better since working with Rodger. “How iss Blanca?”
What a good son. It amazed her sometimes that she had anything to do with the creation of someone so polite, so responsible, so good. If you had told the silly little singer back on Vampiru what life would’ve been like, he wouldn’t believe it for a lot of reasons but especially not the children.
Neht took his hand carefully and considered how to answer the Blanca question.
"Oh, Jodie’s popped in and out. She’s always going every which way. The last I heard, she was going to explore Nevada for a bit but she does so like to roam as it suits her,” she said.
“Blanca is...”
Doing everything in her power to throw herself into the strange and unknown, which was all well and good when she wasn’t trying to throw her soul at each and every strange place she could. Being far too interested in Egregori rituals and rites for anyone’s good. Doing her damnedest to test the limits of her powers at all costs.
So, all in all, far too much like a little temple singer who’d one day turn into a heretic woods witch.
“She’s well,” she says instead. “As well as can be, considering the...situation.”
Namely that she had bodyguards at all times in the very likely event that regulators received a hint to the whereabouts of their former “property,” Neht couldn’t even take care of her own children the way she wanted because she’d warp everything around her given enough time thanks to a stupid cult (she loved the Egregori because she had to but god, stupid, stupid, stupid), and that she couldn’t just go down the street to chat with other Sibyl about what to expect because a bunch of jumped-up little egotists ruined everything.
(Neht was angry about a lot of things.)
“...Well, if I must be entirely honest, I hardly know the first thing to do when a Sibyl child is manifesting their powers. When I was her age, the most I could do was flip a coin and have it land head’s up most of the time. Sibyl can simply go off to Pluto if they want. Pluto. I don’t even go to the grocery store if I can help it.”
“Oh! Yes. I would appreciate that, actually. I have had this coat since arriving here. They don’t really make coats like this anymore.” He reached up to smooth his hair back, once more as calm as if his walk had never been interrupted. “It’s good to meet you, Neht. No real harm was done after all.”
“Likewise.”
Since arriving here...? Hm. He might’ve meant Maroa perhaps but the Vespillo lived long lives. It was an increasingly rare thing these days to run into another who remembered Vampiru in all of its terrible splendor. Neht, lacking nostalgia, held little love for the planet but there was a certain kind of loneliness living life amongst others who lacked context, who had never walked under its moon and stars. Of course, those who remembered had their own preconceptions, their own notions for how things should be and how things should’ve been, which rarely aligned with Neht.
"No, I suppose they don’t. Nothing lasts nowadays and it’s thrice as expensive as it ought to be,” she said. “Do you mean here as in Maroa or perhaps the broader sense? From...before. I really do hate making assumptions.”
Neht’s cottage and the sewing kit within wouldn’t be a long walk at all from here. She knew these woods like the back of her hand; possibly better than that, actually, given her penchant for wearing gloves unglamoured to cover up prison tattoos.
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