Post by Barnaby Cuthbert on Dec 28, 2013 3:14:54 GMT -8
Seattle, WA
Saturday, December 7th, 2013
Outside the former haven of Luthias
I think I heard Durante Giovanni die. You don't have ears exactly, when you're made of stone and spirit. Therefore, how I heard the howling winds of the soul-swallowing, purple lightening-wracked, whirling, black Maelstrom for a moment that seemed to cut across the tissue thin fabric between worlds is anybody's guess. I was sure too that I had heard the crunch of bone and meat when the Volkswagon Beetle pulverized a body standing in the Shadowlands from the skull down through every vertebrae of the spinal column, through the hips and leg bones, down to the feet through the Shroud with warlock-runed wards, but I couldn't have actually heard that, could I? I mean logically speaking, the Freemont Troll, standing outside of Luthias' house, imbued with my tarnished spirit, packing a VW with a tattered, warded jacket duct-taped to it ought to have made one hell of a racket, but it hadn't made a real sound that anybody could have heard so, I reasoned, I must have imagined it. I had imagined impossible things, was standing in an impossible thing, wielding a weapon that harmed those in an impossible place, and someone who had been the catalyst for the ravage and rape and almost Pompeii-like destruction of Her had died the Final Death.
For a moment I considered bellowing a victory from within the monolithic quasi-historical statue I was mystically imbuing, but then thought better of it. I thought for a moment that I ought to be overjoyed, that it ought to be a victorious and fortuitous consequence of all of my good planning that I was gleefully celebrating just then, but the concept simply couldn't survive in my head, dissipating like wisps of cigarette smoke as soon as I recognized that what I was actually feeling was merely tentative relief from utterly harrowing fear. I was pretty sure Durante Giovanni had friends, and that they were going to hear about this, and maybe soon, and regardless of the Elder Gangrel-monstrosity-thing and the Werewolves and the Sorcerers and the Giovanni and the sort-of-Brujah on Path of Dumpster Kicking that had wounded Durante, because I'd gotten the last shot in, whomever Durante had been friends with was going to come for me, and probably kill me a lot, and worse than that, possibly steal my soul and hang it on a leash in a mausoleum parlor while they smoked gangster stogies and talked about the stock market in pinstripe suits while sitting on thrones of dead babies. That's what they do, right? I asked myself. And then there's the ritual unlawful use of corpses and cousins, right?
And then I saw the faces of all of those Kindred assembled at the gates of Luthias' mansion. I recognized the same fear-turned-relief in their eyes as they fumbled to understand that it was over, that Durante was really gone, and perhaps not entirely certain that the massive thing that I was at the moment wasn't coming to kill them. I moved toward them, a lumbering giant, the VW Bug all smooshed and bent in one of my massive stone hands while the garden statuary outside of the dead Tremere's mansion rattled and shook. I spoke through the massive troll carving, my voice a thundering warble, saying;
"Hey Boss," to the Prince, "We good here?" The Prince blinked, his façade of Ventrue control wavering for perhaps the slightest instant as he looked up, and up, and up at me, any number of questions I probably couldn't answer spinning and glittering in his pragmatic eyes while I crossed my giant stone troll feet sheepishly and hid behind my giant troll hair.
"Yeah," he said, with just the slightest smile, "We're good Tom."
