With a flick of his thumb, Gaspar displaced the cork on the vial and held his nose. Scarlet fumes escaped from the neck, and something immaterial stirred within Prospero’s gut. The scent of iron was so powerful that it forced him to retch, to say nothing of his father, whose hands began to tremble. “D-Drink it…” he spoke through clenched teeth. “Drink it now, Prospero!”
There were few things Prospero had ever been less eager to do, but the animosity in his father’s tone enlightened him, however adolescent his understanding may have been, to the gravity of the situation. He took the vial and found it pleasantly warm to the touch, but refrained from peering down the neck to examine the hideous liquid bubbling up from within. Instead, he inhaled, closed his eyes, and brought the vial to his mouth. Acid sting flooded his gums and, near instantly, he wanted to spit the fluid out. He downed it like medicine, blocking his nose to eliminate the taste, and tried to recall better times. The viscous solution slid down his throat. He could feel it seething in the bowels of his stomach where it felt likely to tear a hole through him; but more than anything else, it was warm, and grew to a boiling head as if reacting to his flesh. Prospero felt nauseous, intoxicated, envenomed - worse than he had the words to describe, and yet he was also emboldened - strengthened - somehow, by the pain. When Gaspar took him by the hand, he could barely feel his father’s touch over the numbness spreading across his skin.
“Are you well, Prospero?” he wondered, the fear now evident in his tired eyes. “Speak to me, my son. Tell me you are alive.”
“I- urgh…” Prospero resisted the urge to vomit. “...I am alive, father. Do not worry.”
Gaspar tightened his lips, too proud to shed tears in front of his own child. “The Triumph has blessed me,” he tightened his grip on Prospero’s hand. “I have been snapped in cold sweats from nightmares of this day, but none of the tragedies seen in my dreams have come to pass. You are still here - still my son. That is worth more to me than all the treasures of the realms.”
With hurried movements, he unclasped his cloak and lowered it over Prospero’s shoulders. The fur-lined mantle tickled his cheeks. “I had plans for the day I would entrust you with this garment,” he said. “A festival in the hamlet, a grand feast in the manor… but plans so rarely turn out the way we want them to, my boy.”
He took the vial back from Prospero. “What are you going to do, father?”
“I must face my past,” Gaspar led him by the hand down the slope, where the lights of Innsworm’s homes were already beginning to flicker on. Prospero heard panicked voices from beyond the half-open windows. “The past I sought to escape, but which I knew would always haunt me. It shall be the end of me, however ashamed I am to admit it. And you, Prospero - you must escape from this place.”
He knew those words were coming, but refused to accept them. “I won’t,” he protested.
Gaspar smiled. “I so dearly wish you could stay,” he said. “These years have been the very best of my life. Every second I have spent with you is one I would trade the realm to live again. I only wish it could have lasted forever…”
A farewell? Prospero refused to accept it. He knew nothing of his father’s past, nor of the wicked creature who had barged into their home and so quickly sundered the peace of their family. As they spoke, the shadows lingered still around Baptista manor. He wondered if it was the last he would ever see of the old building.
“Come here…” Gaspar threw his arms open, and Prospero rushed forward to embrace him. “It is my fault this has happened,” he said, cradling the young man’s head. “I know not what the future holds in store, but we cannot go back to how things were. I have faith in you, my son. Know that I have always loved you, though not even a quarter as fiercely as your mother did.”
“Yes… I love you too.” Prospero’s voice wavered. “I’ve never said anything of the sort before, but-”
Something plummeted into the soil, and they fell. A few screams rattled the air, some of which Prospero recognised. His father rose as if possessed, his back now turned, as a trail of shadows followed from the windows of the manor right down to where he stood. Four figures were formed from the darkness, one of whom had revealed himself that night already. “Gaspar,” he began. “Run no further. Accept your fate.”
“Yes… my legs aren’t quite what they used to be,” Gaspar managed a smirk, though it was more for show than anything else. “You, on the other hand, Cyprian… you haven’t aged a day. Not that it’s done anything for your complexion.”
The monster’s arm waved in his direction. “End him. And be quick about it.”
Three hooded individuals, one of whom with hair longer than the others, stepped forward to exact their supposed master’s will. Prospero pulled himself up from the ground and convinced himself, reluctant to accept the reality unfolding before his eyes, that the speed with which his father moved was merely a trick of the moonlight. Gaspar stepped longer and farther than any man had the right to, closing the distance between himself and one of the assailants in a fraction of a second. Arm primed, he struck without grace or fancy, leveraging supreme momentum to send the hooded figure plummeting through the wall of a nearby home.
The second foe, with similar speed, manoeuvred behind him, only to be caught by a reversed elbow and exacting roundhouse before there was time to react. Gaspar placed one foot upon the felled opponent’s spine and turned his attention to the third, already halfway through a vicious haymaker aimed at the jaw. The scrapping mulch of bones breaking accompanied the clean hit, knocking the third onto their back. Gaspar lifted his foot and brought it down to shatter the vertebrae of the second, who was only just now recovering from the previous blow.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Magnificent…” the one named Cyprian observed with bulging eyes. “Tens of decades without blood, and yet your strength remains inhuman. The bloodline of the Apex is formidable indeed.”
“Fencing is more my speed these days,” Gaspar replied. “There are so many exquisite things to experience in this world, Cyprian. It is never too late for a man to change his ways.”
The distant screams dwindled in number. Those three followers were not the only ones who had descended upon the hamlet, Prospero realised. He was transfixed by the sight of his father’s expertise, never once expecting that the man who had treated him with such love and care could be capable of such violence.
“Exquisite, perhaps. But where do the arts fit in this wasting world?” Cyprian took a step forward. “Your solution to the vacuum left in the Founder’s wake was to retreat into the wild realms like a coward. But our duty is not yet done, Gaspar. Chaotic dreams fester in this new dawn beyond the rule of darkness. A responsibility to unite the Incandescence has been thrust upon us, and only I have answered its call - not you, and not the others, so content with your well-earned lives to consider that more work is yet to be done.”
“We cannot oppose the darkness in men’s hearts,” Gaspar shook his head. “We can only create peace where we may, and even that may be fleeting. Coming here, attacking my home, threatening my life… is this how you would enforce the way of peace? Through violence?”
“If you had only handed the Blood to me, this could have been avoided!” Cyprian’s temper crumbled, and he snapped like a viper. “But now… now you would damn me with the duty of bloodying my own hands!? Have you no heart!?”
“I should ask you the same! You cannot see it, but the bloodthirst has consumed you!”
“I am only as powerful as my needs demand! You have abandoned the Incandescence to centuries of conflict!” Cyprian crossed his wrists and pounced. “Die, and find your peace in the Great Dream, Gaspar Baptista!”
They clashed - a moment imperceptible to Prospero, who could only glimpse the battle in mirages conjured after the fact. The air protested their rabid swings, every missed blow likely to topple a mountain. The acrid scent of smoke danced in the whistling winds, and Prospero could spot, rising between the studs of light against the night sky, plumes of smoke which were now rising above and around the manor.
He needed to run. To escape from the cruel and fantastic world in front of him. But there was nowhere to turn; not while his father and the abomination named Cyprian were waltzing through the mud, tugging for control between wicked chains of sways and parries. The buffeting gales threatened to push him down.
Then it happened; a flourish of claws caught Gaspar clean in the eyes, and in that short, exploitable instant, Cyprian lunged jaw-first to latch onto his neck, retreating only a second later with a ribbon of blood connecting his serpentine teeth to the man’s neck. The claws upon Cyprian’s hands lengthened and grew as he lapped the stains free from his lips. What little humanity could be glimpsed through his eyes seemed to vanish altogether. “Die, Gaspar!”
Striking with both hands, he gouged a lattice of wounds across Gaspar’s chest. His claws parted skin and bone like water, sharp beyond the realm of imagination. Prospero saw very little of the fight beforehand, but that decisive blow he witnessed in all of its terrible glory. “Father!” he screamed.
Cyprian slipped a hand under his coat and tore the buttons free, exposing the pale and emaciated physique hidden beneath. From a pocket within, he retrieved a stake of carved wood. “To think I would ever put this terrible weapon to use once again!” he yelled. “You were my brother once! But I will not abide your cowardice in the face of the world’s annihilation!”
Just as Gaspar collapsed onto his back, Cyprian brought the stake down to pierce his heart. There was a sound, a kind of ear-popping explosion, as something burst in the cavity of Gaspar’s chest, and in the next moment, he was still. Like fleeting dust, there was suddenly nothing of Prospero’s father to remember; his body turned to ash in the next moment and vanished on the forceful winds, leaving behind only the garments he wore in life
“Father…,” Prospero fell to his knees. “No… No!”
Cyprian paid the lad no mind. His attention was focused solely on the vial hidden beneath the pile of clothing, which he plucked from the remains and lifted towards the moon. “Finally…” he muttered. “The Founder’s Blood… with this, the tragedy of men will be-”
He tilted the vial and noticed that the cork was missing. “...What?”
Lowering himself to a pitiable hunch, Cyprian stared down the length of the iron tube. “No! Where is it!?” his eyes became fevered and desperate. “What have you done!?”
The pieces fell together in his head like snowdrops, and soon his gaze was directed towards Prospero. “You!” he screamed. “He couldn’t have… he wouldn’t dare!”
“Stay away from me!” Prospero scrambled to his feet and retreated as quickly as his legs could carry him. “You killed my father! How could you!? You’re a monster in the guise of a man!”
“The- the Beastblood…” his words were now careful, almost pathetic. “You know not of the curse you carry, lad! Your father has betrayed you - transformed you into a scapegoat to spite my long journey! You mustn’t run… you mustn’t run from me! Only offer yourself willingly, and I will spare you the agony of death!”
Blood regurgitated from his mouth - a reflex that predated some unwanted event, judging by his desperate pleas. “D-Damn this Apex purity… my body cannot…”
And then he fell, face-first and comatose - or perhaps worse, into the mud. Prospero didn’t waste a second of the opportunity before he was off and running, tears streaming from his face, down the layers of burning Innsworm and towards the old road leading towards the fores, past the wailing faces and silhouettes of his kinsmen being slaughtered in the dark. He sprinted with such surprising speed that the world appeared to be moving twice as fast, though he dared not stop and peer over his shoulder for fear of glimpsing another nightborne menace.
His father dead, his home destroyed, his blood seething like acid, he vanished into the darkness of the woods where the slightest ray of hope promised him another moment of life.
