Life after death

Contessa wandered the chaotic crowd with the blood of a demonic immortal on her. Roedric's naked body lay motionless on the floor. People ran left and right in front of her eyes as they rammed into each other and some even got trampled to death.

There was a calm in her soul despite the chaos and evil permeated her with all the times he'd made love to her and roughly. She had no idea that evil had infected her too but she was glad to be rid of him.

All of a sudden she became painfully aware that things had changed for her. The people around her seemed to move slowly. they moved so slowly that when she moved through the crowd time seemed as if it would stop and then begin slowly again when she stopped.

She reached out and would circle men and women who ran with fear on their faces from some unknown terror that drove men mad. It wasn't the monster anymore because the monster was dead but rather the lack of monster that left good men to their own devices and left a void for a great evil that had to be filled.

She became painfully aware of the ground beneath her feet as she realized her shoes had melted off. Great cobblestones which should have hurt but the pads on her feet had grown thick and she began to realize that it was not her feet that she now walked with.

"Even in death, you plague me, Roedric," she mumbled.

A voice came from the dark recesses of her mind and spoke.

"You've invited me in sorcerer."

She instantly recognized Roedric's pet name and voice. They had been in the magicians guild together and she was no stranger to magic, however things were happening to her that were not in her normal repertoire.

"I killed you, monster."

There was a laughter in her skull as she felt her self moving away from the town at such incredible speed that the terrifying momentum became like a great vortex that tore her clothes from her.

In the spinning darkness, she saw something come through and run a gaunt gray finger up her naked side.

"You killed the possibility of good. For no man is an island once he's become what we are," said the dark creature in Roedric's voice.

"You see, Contessa, Man is given a second chance only so many times."

"I gave you second and third and fourth chances and you blew them all, Roedric!"

The great laughter reverberated through her again.

"Is that who you think I am?"

There was a silence as she was struck deaf.

"Roedric is dead. You killed him. All that's left is in your mind. You have a construct of what you remember about him but being infected with the disease he had, I am now you. I sound like Roedric because that is what you know to call this disease but your soul fights itself now."

There was a silence when she realized that she could no longer blame Roedric for the way she felt inside. The demon turned into a plague of fingers that crawled up her legs like thousands of spiders. They permeated her skin pours, they lapped at her sex. They caressed each sinew into growth as she began to rise a new.

The phoenix is said to rebirth from flames and the vampire sees each blossom of the night as if he were seeing heaven but this was neither. This was a rage that permeated her newly preternatural soul.

It writhed inside of her like a great snake that struck her heart with a fatal blow filling it with venom.

At twelve feet tall she was only a few feet above where Roedric stood but she was ten times as fierce. Her hunger for blood was fueled by what he had done to her and where she was once broken she filled the holes with rage.

The town stood quiet as a few kingsman went round picking up and fixing the destruction wrought from the earlier scene. It had been two days and there was still blood around the village that could not be scrubbed off.

"Out out damn spot..." sang a village custodian in bemused irony.

The royal blue and ashen flags were no longer waving but rather an eerie calm had struck the town at this moonless night.

There was a slight breeze but they only caressed the banners as much as a poor player whose jokes were told to a deaf crowd.

The giant doors that stood at the entrance to the town looked out into the woods like sentinels guarding a gold filled keep. From the woods, there were noises that befit the night and some that did not; however there was none like the explosion that came from a woman scorned and a demon born.

What thrust itself towards the great stocky doors was not, by any means an average Were. It had the body of a wolf but the wings of a bat and the head of a dragon. It was as if the changeling virus that permeated your average Were had mutated into what the scorned mind could make it.

Each transformation into Were was different as any hunter of them would tell you. That is why the legend varies from place to place but she was more dragon than wolf and as she slithered from the tall oaks, the doors seemed to cower in fear as the rocked back and forth with the wind that came from her movement.

There was first a loud crash as the bolt behind them fractured but held. Then the second crash blew them off their hinges and crushed half a house that stood not 10 feet away. Those inside were killed instantly not from rubble but from the shock wave which shook their nervous system loose and destroyed all life within them.

Her violence permeated the village as some ran from their houses and others simply stayed inside and prayed until they too were crushed from reverberations and falling debris.

Her siege lasted hours as she destroyed the village that failed to warn her. The people that failed to stop her from Roedric's charm.

As the siege ended and the town lay burning in rubble, all 12,000 souls who lived there lay dead in a barricade of rubble.

She sat at the center of the destruction and seemed taller than when the transformation first occurred. The fur burned off of her and the scales of the dragon formed underneath it to protect her from the flames.

By morning a full grown dragon sat atop the rubble and began to slowly shrink to a naked woman lying atop a pile of ashes. Not a soul had told so not a soul knew but as she lay atop the still warm heap of a life she had just burned to the ground, she felt alive again.

Not every fairytale has a happy ending

Royal blue sigils on ashen black cloth sighed atop wooden thatched houses around a stone square.  The worst kind of animals shouted from the open windows and around the circle of buildings hungry for the blood of the creature that was now dragged through the crowd and tied to two posts with thick rope.  The thick smell of the animal fat on the torches and in the fire pits around Eden permeated the air and his face looked just like any of theirs except frightened.  He wasn't afraid of the fight he might have.  He wasn't afraid of the people, but the hatred burned him to his core and made his skin shiver.

A hooded man walked out with a whip.  The magistrate stood on the stone alter that he was tied to and read off his crimes.  They were but dissonance among the jeering of the crowd and when he was done reading, there was a deathly silence that ensued.

"One!...."

A sharp pain tore into his back and rippled through him as Roedric cried out in pain.  His face stretched forward, morphing into the demon he kept inside and ripples of the wolf within him permeated his skin.

"Two!..."

The pain shot through him again and he saw their faces. His body transformed into a 10 foot tall beast that crossed man with wolf and he looked on the crowd through a red tinted hue.

"Three!..."

The faces of the virgins he had consumed flashed before his eyes and the lust for their bodies and flesh stunk like rotten meat between his teeth.  His memories of all those he had consumed and the absent pleasure it had given him ate away at his soul as that lash reverberated through his body like a knife.

"Four!..."

He saw his dearest Contessa in the crowd and heard her cries from the night she had caught him attacking a young girl of seventeen and though his eyes were that of the Were, she knew who he was and went to run.

"Five!..."

He watched her running from him and he could smell her blood through his nostrils and it drove him mad with lust and pain and shame that he desperately tried to end by grabbing her to show her that there was two inside of him; including the one she loved.  It was not him who attacked those girls...

"Six!..."

The pain shot through him and the anger arose within him that he could be so stupid as to not seek a cure earlier for the condition he had been in; if for nothing else than for Contessa.  For his love who his lust for blood could have been cured by her love if he had let it.

"Seven!..."

He swore that he would not be the beast anymore.  He swore that he could control the Were within him if he was just given another chance.  If he could just be given the time and means to seek Necromancy or any of the cures that could bring these girls back and reverse the damage he had already done.

"Eight!..."

God! if it would only end, he thought.  Roaring out in pain and tears towards the crowd.  His soul sank and he submitted to the death happening within him as he realized no one could see his tears from the wolf's eyes and he could think of nothing more; save the pain from a broken heart as she stared at him with a cold gaze.

"Nine!..."

It would appear that depression was where he would live for now as his world faced him and spat at him and threw literal jibes and rotteness at him.  He fell to the platform and thought of nothing as...

"Ten!..."

"Eleven..."

"Twelve!..."

Half the crowd thought the thirteenth lash would kill him as a demonic creature of magic and evil but he was laying there on the slab not moving and gathering a storm of darkness that could break with...

"Thirteen!...."

The ropes snapped free and he arose on his hind legs as his giant claws hung at his sides and a pair of wings erupted from his back to fill the square.  He grabbed the rope and threw it down and howled at the crowd who understandably assumed their deaths were imminent.

A silence fell over them and people literally froze with terror mixed with his force of will that forbade their bodies of movement.  Before any of this had happened he had been a skilled magician and that power to captivate people into freezing was apparently only amplified by the Were within him.

He threw the whip down and concentrated.  He concentrated harder than he ever had before till his form began to change again.

Standing before the crowd was a naked man whose clothes had ripped from the transformation.  He looked out on them and wanted to hate them but he had accepted who he had become.

"You have hunters among you who could hunt me.  You have those among you who will still hate me once you learn what I have to say.  I am an immortal.  You cannot kill me thought you can wound and capture and enslave me.  You can torture me and throw me in a pit and I wouldn't fight you because I have accepted what I did to your town and..."

He turned to Contessa.

"and... a.. and to you, my love.  Ropes and chains can bind me and I would allow you to hold me accountable for what I have done but I am not the monster inside of me.  I will not let it define me no matter how powerful it is."

He sighed and sat down as the holding spell took a lot out of him and he began to lose a grip on the crowd as he let some of them go.  They stood still and listened to him.

"I have the power to fight the monster and it took thirteen lashes for me to even try.  I've been with it longer than many of you have been alive and though years of loneliness and monstrosity commanded my soul, for 5 of those 700 years, I have been happy."

He turned away from Contessa and to the crowd as more of them began to drop from his spell.

"There has always been a monster within me but for a moment in all my years there has been a light and for that, I am ready to kill the demon to live among you as any of you are."

"There is not a man who is without his demons and not a woman who has seen the torment of the soul.  I beg of you only mercy and love and forgiveness.  Should you seek to have a way to hold me accountable for my testament, I stand ready to submit."

The crowd fell deathly silent and he too fell the same way to look into their eyes as he dropped his hold of everyone including Contessa.  That was the moment she took the magistrate's blade and cut off his head.