#darknessmolten

@darknessmolten

Lestat growled, almost snapping the fragile iPhone in two. "The hell do you mean, you can't decide how you feel about birds singing, you idiotic fool--"

He sucked in a breath, then, looking down at the little device in his hands, where a link in the messages lead to a map. He tapped it, another app opening, like magic, to a location deep within a forest, several hundred miles north. It was going to take a miracle to get him there before dawn.

The flight was fast and cold, and he grunted as he landed and shook the icicles out of his hair, sparing a quick glance to the paling blue of the sky before scanning the forest floor, listening. It took a moment before he heard it.

A heartbeat. Slow, steady, familiar. Not in the way that a lover's is familiar, but the way that trauma is familiar. Comfortable like a coat whose seams have torn over time, like a monster whose snarl you know.

Nicolas.

Sprawled in the undergrowth, his skin far pinker than it ought to have been, his left hand clutching the useless cellular phone.

"You goddamn idiot. You stupid fool." Ignoring the angry mumblings from the other vampire, he hoisted him into a fireman's lift and closed his eyes, listening. In the distance, the sound of curved walls and shifting, bouncing echoes--a cave. He gave one more look at the impending dawn and took off.

Dawn would come and go, and Nicolas would see another night. Lestat tucked them both deeper within the walls of the cave, away from where any of the sun's rays might touch them.

Prague || Evening

In the thick of a city, everything seemed the same. Strip away the landmarks and the rhythm never truly changed. Chattering voices, honking car horns, flashing lights. Everyone moving off somewhere else at their own pace. Miller was heading on his own journey as well. In this case it was a hunt for cigarettes to replenish what he'd already blown through going over files all day.

The case tossed at him by his old Talamascan buddies was pretty cut and dry. Miller appreciated that the Order still had an abundance of wealth to arrange for his travel and his lodgings. His personal practice back in New Jersey didn't pay the same wages as his old employers. So the least he would do was try to do his best to deliver results.

It was pretty cut and dry. An active haunting. A previous investigator's note had already thrown the words 'potential demonic' into their observations. Which in Miller's mind coded for 'dangerous' and most likely chaotic. Yet the family at the heart of it needed resolution that the Talamasca's resources would no longer have the focus for.

A deep breath was drawn in as Miller raised his eyes to the signs above. There was a shop in the distance that he knew would be the perfect place for his fix. His fingers already twitched at his sides in the need for his dirty habit, anticipating the familiarity of a smoke in his grasp. The chaotic pattern he drummed against his legs halted when a different sound reached over the generic blend of everything else.

Violin. A siren's song. Miller stopped in his tracks as a familiar song snared his full attention. He recognized it. Of course he did. Those strains of notes had been a dabble of unorganized strings years ago in some rundown place that was laughably considered an apartment.

Miller adjusted his path. He pulled the folds of his jacket further around him as he headed in the direction of the melody. Lured like the world's most persistent moth. It coaxed him to where the violinist played, busking for a small crowd that had gathered.

Like a phantom that had just suddenly appeared among the other human faces, Miller did not interrupt the song. He let it play, for the delight of those around and for his own enjoyment. There was a softening of his features, touched by time and scruff, as the witch gained a wry, amused little smile.

(vc college au)

[text] Am I permitted to know the purpose?

Several years ago when she first rose from the earth deep beneath the catacombs to emerge in a world without religion or purpose, she had been told by her most trusted companion that she needed to take a journey of repentance and growth in order to shed the shackles she once proudly wore to keep herself together. Shackles that she had used to hang her loved ones along with her, so fervently believing that they were chains of protection against the perils of the world. Agonies suffered under her loving hands were merely wards against future ills, necessary evils of a monstrous mother of devils that was convinced of an enemy within the very walls of their minds as much as heavenly spirits in the morning light. In order to move forward, she needed purpose. She needed unwavering conviction and a restoration of soul.

She needed a relevant hobby.

That is how Allesandra found herself with her 53rd foster child that she had picked up from a backroom of a neon monstrosity of a club. At six years old, the little girl had obediently taken the hand of the radiant angel that came through a previously impregnable door in her scared mind. That hand had been cold but the eyes that greeted her were full of such emotions that she wouldn't have the words to express or evoke the image of later. Allesandra simply felt a wave of timid trust rush out from her followed by a tide of desperate hope.

Putting a simple yellow raincoat over the child, Allesandra led her out onto the busy night market streets to simply disappear into the crowd. After the following day, the child would be taken to the modest home she sponsored to be ready to take children without question or notice. There, they would wait and recover in the company of living adults with kind hearts and tight lips until she found a new life for them or had stabilized their home environment enough to return them to their original families.

The only ones that would ever see her face in all this were the children that found her to be nothing more than a momentary illusion, a fiercely divine hallucination that brought them out of their suffering only to disappear as if she never existed at all. If they were to ever see her face again, it would surely come as a shock to them...

A shock that she herself felt as she all too quickly stopped in her tracks in front of a relatively young vampire busking the streets with a tune that only the mad or drunk could truly understand. At first, she had thought little because most of the young simply avoided her when they felt her coming but the moment their eyes met, she was transported back to her final days before choosing the fire.

Was this the unfortunate boy she had once watched over in hell?

Maybe size simply does not matter.

[text] I need that back

[text] you can hit me with it if it'll get things out of your system

[text] mostly notebooks inside so it would be satisfying

[text] Do you know I moved out of the dorms since then?

[text] That business law paper we did together must have been the only good grade you have ever got

[text: Nicolas] ... you cheeky, vague thing.

The night was young on the smoggy streets of London and David had a spring in his step as he strode away from his most recent victim, still riding the blood-drunk high. Killing, he'd found, could be very difficult in some modern cities, but London was as much a death trap as it had always been, still insisting upon the use of ancient thoroughfares, hidden little back alleys and courtyards. It was a good city in which to be a vampire, even in this age of technology, but he didn't particularly like being there.

As the gateway to the United Kingdom, it was unfortunately difficult to avoid, even for their kind, but David always decided to make the most of it. Hunting at home could be difficult, especially when he enjoyed the ability he had to walk down into the village and peruse the bookstores and antique dealers with little suspicion or derision. Here, he could let his hair down a little more, as it were.

It wasn't so surprising then that he felt a little spark alight in his mind, like a pin prick on a map. There was another, not so far from here at all and curiosity was swiftly carrying him in their direction.

After roughly a block, just as his blood frenzy was beginning to fade, he was delighted to hear music on the air and with that as his new compass, he soon came upon the other vampire who had caught his attention.

He'd arrived with no real expectations but certainly hadn't imagined that he would be quite as surprised as he was. Strangely, it was the other vampire who was the source of the musical trail he'd followed and, stranger still was the way the mortals around them seemed to be ignoring him entirely.