The Scion Cycle XLIX: The Hollow Man (Part 4)

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Suggested Listening: Tommy Tallorico feat. Charlotte Martin - Muse

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Saturday August 26th, 2006
Scion Investigations
Downtown Seattle

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Charissma Starr was dead.

Scion had to keep reminding himself of that simple, seemingly obvious fact, one that for once was the very key to her existence. No living creature could have survived what she had.

He set the woman's corpse down on the patchwork comforter-covered bed in the basement haven beneath the brownstone that served as a PI firm. Scion handled her body so gently that in the mirror opposite the bed, which cast no reflection of him at all, the descent to the low bed was slow, unreal, as if her body were floating like a feather into a grave.

Scion remembered her moving away from him in the old cabin to rest on the cot when he had first stumbled into Seattle, his memories lost - his heart feeling as if it might somehow move again. He remembered Cordelia's face on her hospital bed in Los Angeles, drawn and pale, the ghostly green of the hospital's monitoring equipment flatlining as he cried out over her bed and began to tear the intravenous tubes from her fragile mortal body. He remembered Gunn's grey, rictus face as Scion had lowered the torpored vampire, his friend, into the black clay earth of the Deadlands, perhaps forever.

Gunn...

He began to unwrap the matted, blood stained sheets from Charissma's body, taking care around the massive cut that seperated her torso from her shoulder to her hip.

[glow=white,2,300]Do thy eyes offend thee son?[/glow]
To Scion's eyes, she had already moldered into a decayed sack of putrefying organs and rotting skin, so he closed them, let his hands find her face. He brushed his hands over her brow and closed eyelids, her cheek and neck gently, as much to remember her as to comfort her, and himself.

Yet even with his eyes closed he could not escape the rot that had become of his vision. In his minds-eye, the sliver of light that came through his eyelids became a grim horizon, and he remembered his time in the lands of the dead once more.

The ghostly city had stood in decaying majesty against the booming, crackling backdrop of the end of all storms. There he and the other warriors had stood sentry in the shadow land, the dead land, the grey and lost land at Oblivion's edge.

Four warriors stood sentry against a horde of wraiths that were roaring toward them with every torn emotion that they had left in their pale forms. The rage of the lost was poised to fall upon them, as it had on Charissma Starr.

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Suggested Listening: Tommy Tallorico - Koroem

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Saturday July 29th
The Shadowlands

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"Protect the Priest!" shouted Albrecht Massovia. The old Ventrue crusader's blade was held at the ready. He stood in front of the wild-eyed street preacher like a wall. His eyes were brands, and his long jacket cracked and whipped around him in the raging winds. "Everything depends on his survival!"
Gunn and Scion stood to the preacher's right, Gregor to his left. Massovia was dead center.

"You heard him! We're on the defensive people!" Scion shouted.

Scion took his stance, his faith-imbued broadsword humming in dissonant cadence with the storm. Gregor's Saracen blade was out, pointing toward the army of screeching on comers in a grim challenge. Gunn cracked his neck with a roll of his head and shouted a battle cry.

The ghosts rolled forward like a screeching tide, blades and claws milky white and hungering for the crimson blood of the holy man. One of the wraiths in the rear smiled, vampire fangs clearly visible in his mouth, one of the Founders directing the charge. A lake of fire opened in front of the party, purple black flames roaring up toward the storm.

"Time to face God's justice." said Albrecht to no one, almost too softly for Scion to hear it above the storm.

The first wave struck, passing through the flames like the parting of a waterfall. Wraiths roared in like rampaging horses, ten at a time. The warriors' blades swam through them like sturgeons knifing through a tide. Gunn was a juggernaught, an immovable force, flipping and turning the full moon of his battleaxe as expertly as a fencer. Scion became the Blade of the Defender, turning the dead aside. Croneweath's blade was an ender of souls, brutal, efficient, by far the best swordsmen among them scything the dead apart like wheat.

Albrecht was a pillar of deadly justice. They crawled and swarmed over him like locusts trying to bring him down and still he fought. Ghost after ghost threw themselves against them. Albrecht’s body caught fire and he screamed in defiance. Gregor’s body almost folded in on itself with some unseen force. Scion and Gunn began to see visions, the dead prying at the edges of their vision making it hard for them to concentrate. Throughout it all the priest shouted a prayer, his body shaking with the force of his words and his faith.

The priest's prayer completed in a rising crescendo of verse and his body once again created what felt to the kindred like the striking of a great bell - a tone, but this time one that rang out in a death knell of white light, flattening all. There was a sound like a tearing of the world, and the storm dipped down like a black funnel. The warriors turned to the door where Charissma had stepped out, made as if to beat it down, but the dead world warped and twisted around them and the vortex tore them from their feet and flung them into the darkness.

Albrecht fell to hell like a burning star.