Change is sweeping through the world, as humanity fights for autonomy, discord tears apart the foundations of the vampire order, and dhampirs return to the world after centuries of war between two powerful peoples. Dhampirs, creatures known to heral...
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The Arcs waited for nightfall before they moved in on the void, and Ghost hadn't had much chance to see it prior. The castle had been noisy all day to his sensitive hearing, and it was nice to lounge atop the stout three story building in downtown. The cool wind caressed his back and droned out the sporadic noises of the city. Having spent most his life invisible, he was used to silence and anonymity. The Arc castle gave him neither. This was best, leaning off the top of the world, alone.
Through some sheer miracle, they'd managed to keep prying human eyes away from the alley where the void had opened. It was dark with the sun already dipped past the horizon, and Vincent Arc and Falz Aurion stood sentry at its gate. Ghost wished he could rip the face off of the skinny, white-haired beast that had torn Neil's life apart, but the man was dead and fighting such was pointless. Aside from Silvia's mention, this was the first time he was seeing Falz Aurion. The dead mage couldn't stand Vincent and kept his shoulders squared and angled toward him, but his eyes cast into the ground. It was how a mage faced their aggressor, at the ready but avoiding the allure in a vampire's eyes.
The bright golden hair of the Aurions stood starkly in the dim corridor, and those blue eyes rolled with a promise of death to any vampire who drew near. Falz had yet to move on from his death, adorned in tattered clothes with a wound in his side where a blade or claw had felled him. A tattered crescent moon adorned the front of the rich, dark Aurion attire, but much of the rest had faded with time. The sword Falz wielded was as tall as the man and near as broad as his chest, strapped to his back to keep to at the ready. Ghost imagined it was as sharp as the Aurions' deadly reputation.
Unfortunately, Vincent had passed on going about with a hole ripped up through his chin and into his skull, but Ghost couldn't blame the man. It was hard to be functional with only part of his half a brain. Vincent had never had a full one to begin with. Madness had driven him to change his son before his time and destroy everything around him. That had led to his people turning on him, his son Neil included, and Meredith Aurion had skewered him. Everyone had hoped that'd be the last of him, but fate was always cruel.
As it was to him.
Undead magic blocked the void with dark over light in a net that restricted the passage of the dead, but Ghost could feel the specters strengthening. The more that gathered, the harder it would be to hold them at bay. The dam would burst, taking everything in its path with it. It was irrational, but Ghost wanted to pry the seal open himself, to see if Stone might be waiting on the other side. Ghost would throw himself into the void if it would save his other half, but Ghost was of the living and the void would tear him asunder.
Stone was of the dead, as he had been the day Ghost had bound their souls together. Their minds were currently split, but Ghost felt him here, the presence of his brother just beyond that barrier, and that was why he was still sitting atop the building. Even a whisper of his former self was enough to keep him chained in desperation for more. While likely a poor emotional practice, it put him in place to see the vampires' advance.
