Lair of Beasts [Book I in the Curse Of Blood Saga]

Chapter XXXVIII - Valdyr (Lucian's POV)

October, 1370 AD

The darkness was thick and cloying as I stirred gradually, passing from insensibility to consciousness in painstaking stages. My face lay atop the cold cobblestone floor of Niflheim's vaulted atrium — within our killing grounds. That darkness sheathed me completely in its damp and insidious embrace the while I lay prostrate and gasping.

It was some minutes longer ere I bestirred myself onto unsteady legs. My bones and sinews were yet reintegrating and regenerating themselves — altering my transfigured moon-possessed shell back into a recognizable form. Although, I would still only ever be a mimicry of humanity.

An acute ache throbbed and oscillated through my brain like white-hot shards, yet fortunately it would not last much longer. The dizziness would pass, but I was in desperate wont of water to slake the aridity from my parched tongue now that the thirst for blood had been satiated. I walked to the very edge of the vault's perimeter wall whither I knew the basin of cool water to be. It was fed into the underground of our netherworld by an old aqueduct that conveyed it hither from one of the multitudinous springs that populated the Drakkentörn Ranges.

I had no need of a rushlight to guide me thence, besides which there was none to be had. I observed my surroundings with a jaw clenched in agony. My otherworldly organ of sight readily filtered out the shrouding gloom into a dim green hue through which I pierced the dense obscurity that might otherwise have enveloped, and hindered, a mere mortal eye. It was in this way that I could discern shapes and shadows in verdant clarity, but for the life of me I retained not a single memory nor recalled even a fleeting glimpse of the night before... when my mind was so much altered. I never recollected the beast's memories; it had none to offer me, only vague perceptions that seemed more like hallucinations than corporeal images.

Gripping the edge of the stone basin with white knuckles, my skull feeling as though it had been riven in twain by a bolt of lightning, I submerged my head in the spring water and held it immersed for some time as I dispatched deep gulps of purifying liquid. The coolness alleviated my palpitating temples. When I had sufficiently drank my weight in water I emerged revitalized and returned to the center of the chamber. I noticed another pair of glowing, green fluorescence advancing purposefully toward me. Carac's shoulder brushed mine as he made his way drunkenly to the stone ewer which I had just occupied.

I surveyed the green-hued expanse of the vault and, spying my father's quiescent form near the same spot I had earlier vacated, I strode toward my sire with a much steadier gait. I heard the lock turning in the trapdoor afore it opened to reveal my brother's eerie, green luminescent orbs as he emerged from the black pit below.

"Did you have a good night, brother?" I poked, "however did you occupy yourself... down there?" He evidently did not appreciate my bawdy satire for he only scowled at the supercilious smirk I wore.

"As you well know," he spat, "there was naught but myself to play with this night! I thank you for your concern!" He was too easy to rile, was Caine.

I chortled heartily at him, Carac joining in from the other side of the chamber. My father rolled his weary eyes into the pitch black ceiling above, our double entendre's not amusing him in the least. My brother pulled himself weakly from the vault's belly and wobbled, as if on new-born legs, to where Carac yet drank. 

Caine had been relegated to the likes of a lowly guard dog down in the pit, lest any stragglers escape; we, none of us, sought that position, but the obligation was nonetheless a requirement and thus we alternated it betwixt ourselves. 'Twas a wholly unsatisfying experience and my brother would hence be surly the rest of the moon cycle — as I would have been had it been my turn.