Descending Star

AUDIENCE

A flushed and fragrant, olive skinned woman stutter-stepped down a broad corridor, with furtive Victor in tow. Her high heels clicked sharply on the polished red tiles. Enormous fragments of frescoes on stone were embedded in the marble walls, periodically supported by columns of solid basalt, topaz and quartz. They passed intersecting corridors, similarly spacious, giving way to turrets containing cluttered bookshelves that ascended in helixes up the interior walls and out of sight.

"I am Gianna, you know."

"So you've said," Victor acknowledged, near-paralyzed with fear and trembling.

"I am betrothed," she explained.

He grunted inarticulately. She had said that, too, as though to explain her presence in such a place, or perhaps to explain why she had survived for so long.

They entered a courtyard, open to the late evening stars, now waning. Here in this late Etruscan city, the night was failing and giving way to a bright, temperate morning. From the bottom of the courtyard, an open-air tiled piazza, they could discern only a deep octagonal section of the nighttime sky, because towering buttresses arose on all sides and vaulted away, high above, with black marble gargoyles on each pinnacle, to support rose windows of granite and leaded glass, each one as great in diameter as a hot air balloon. Each of the eight walls of the courtyard featured a towering, ornate door, no two the same.

Gianna confided, "I was told, on my first day here, that each of these eight doors opens to an ever greater horror. But that is not true, at all. This is a place of miracles. It is only something that they tell us, when we are still at liberty to fly away, to identify the devout."

"By we, do you mean, you are not the first betrothed?"

"Goodness, no."

Two women looked down upon them from a promenade above. They wore diaphanous silk gowns, each dyed in the hue of bile and leukocytes. They were no older than fourteen, to superficial appearances. Each wore on her forehead a diadem larger than a robin's egg, to match her hair.

The taller of the two admonished, "Tut, tut, Gianna. What have I said about your tongue?"

"That it is expendable, Athenodora."

The young women said no more and disappeared from view.

Gianna soberly whispered, "She means it."

She took him through another score of halls and rooms, some containing books, some containing horrors, until they came to a halt at the center of a circular rotunda with a tricolor marble floor patterned in the fashion of tiled, interlocked birds.

Black columns, each one a meter wide, arose and expanded with boughs and branching tendrils, like trees, to join high above, a forest bowery of stone, forming great arches that admitted the light of the waning stars. High upon each column, thirty feet off the floor, jutted ornate gold plinths, and each one bore a human man or woman, trapped in the throes of some agony, and their blood dripped slowly down the columns to collect in gutters that filled refrigerated cisterns beneath the floor, cunningly laced with tasteless anticoagulants.

Vampires idled and mingled in twos and threes throughout the circular room, and Victor shuddered to look at them, yet all of them seemed to focus upon the dais before him, on which were set three great thrones. Each throne bore a signet above its stone headrest: on one a fresh rose artfully set in a cut crystal vase; on the second a cross-section of polished obsidian, large as a discus, whose spectra danced like refraction across an oil slick, and on the third a gleaming equilateral triangle of metallic hydrogen, which hovered in space at the Lagrange Point within its hollow frame, as though it were an interposition of the outermost tip of some vast alien artifact into this dreary universe.