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"No.“ Dryle said from across the room, his silhouette one of crossed arms pitched up against the wall by the door. Even in the shadows Bailey could make out his smug smile and eye-roll. She glared at him over her shoulder and stuck her tongue out, setting down the idol she’d lifted off of his study.
"So, you’re telling me that you’re leaving for some ‘indefinite amount of time’ and won’t even let me play with your cool toys?” She asked, emphasizing his words with air quotes. Arms folded her arms under her breasts she gave him a sheepish grin. “Come on, don’t be such a hard ass.” Her voice carried a tease and there was a twinkle in her eye. She cocked her head playfully to the side.
He rolled his eyes again, this time wholly visible as he stepped into the light. She felt her chest catch, as it did nearly every time she saw him. A devilishly handsome man with a pointed face, accented black facial hair and white locks that cupped pale purple-hued skin. His fangs flashed as he spoke. “Look, I will be back soon, probably within the day. Find somewhere to sit down and stay out of trouble, ok? Kitchen, library, and lab are all on-limits for you.” He said, throwing a thumb at the door. “Anything below the main floor that leads down into the mill.” He paused, leaning in. “Off.”
She pouted, curling into her chest some and he gave her a level stare before shrugging and tucking his hands into his coat pockets.
“Well. See ya kiddo.” He said turning heel and stepping out of the door, onto the rails of the fourth floor catwalk, and then off into empty air.
Bailey rushed over and gripped those same rails, leaning over to watch his descent in a mixture of horror and awe. His form shrank before stopping abruptly in a whirlwind of cloaks. Gently the pile of cloth rose and started towards the door, leaving the windmill just as calmly as if he’d simply taken the stairs.
Show off.
For a moment the thought crossed her mind to call after him, beg him to stay with her or take her with him, but common sense and mild curiosity warded against it. After all, alone time wasn’t bad, right?
Yeah, she could deal with some alone time.
She looked around the structure and swallowed.
—
The interior of the windmill at Free Station was a massive feat of rural engineering. Down the center of the building was a huge shaft turned by the wind pushing the enormous wind-blades outside. As those blades made their rotation so did the shaft which let out a very low groan. Below the main floor the soft grinding sound of machinery rose like a distant ocean’s cry and in the air hung the strangely distinct smell of iron. Bailey had chalked that up to the stain of the combat that had been needed to take this place over, or rusty machinery from below the main-floor.
Either way it didn’t really matter to her.
She watched the lower floors and the creatures moving about them. Like motes of black, nearly ant-like at a distance, Dryle’s 'ghouls’ wandered the various floors from place to place looking for rooms to clean or boxes to move. They were mostly mindless, autonomous things that usually kept to themselves but on rare occasions one would show some personality. She reckoned they might be able to talk but when they did speak it was complete gibberish. Despite their general lax demeanor she had gotten one of them to play tic-tac-toe with her once, though the poor thing didn’t seem to grasp the rules very well and insisted on only ever playing circles because it found the 'X’ too confusing.
Four floors made up the 'upper level’ of the windmill, as Dryle called it, but she wasn’t really interested in exploring that since he’d made it clear she was welcome to.
Being allowed places often meant that there wasn’t anything of serious worth to be found there. Juicy secrets or otherwise.
Still, she figured she might as well- there was no harm in knowing what was available where you lived since she did live here now.
High above, through the patchwork roof and the openings near the blades, soft light from the day broke through in flickering shafts. The gentle luminescence painted the stairs dim gray and she climbed them before heading across the catwalk at their peak. On her way she passed one of the strange pitch black, shadowy ghouls. Its beady white specks of bright, blistering light, met her gaze before bustling past without a word.
Ahead, to the left, there was a door that was slightly ajar. The whole front of the thing was coated in a dense and overly-intricate gold filigree which Bailey had come to know as 'traditional Dryle’. The man had a penchant for the flashy and gaudy with everything he owned. Excessive was a default to him and she’d picked up on that very quickly as even the walkways were rare oaks and strange bog-woods possessing names she’d never before heard..
A peek into the room, door creaking slightly, had her eyes wide. A collection of books larger than any she’d ever seen.
The library.
Pale daylight leaked inside from tinted windows at the top of the room and dull candlelight flickered from oddly shaped, gothic-style chandeliers. Across the walls sat eight foot tall bookshelves that took up nearly every inch of available space around the room’s perimeter. Most of them were filled with tomes bearing unmarked spines, though there were some books that were well labeled. One corner of the room held a glass case that housed several worn journals and at the room’s heart sat two tables accompanied by six chairs each. The centerpiece on each one was made up of flowers, Dryle’s favorite, black roses.
Burnt wax, dust, and the smell of those flowers melded into an odd combination, but not something wholly detestable. Though she didn’t need warmth anymore, this space was several degrees warmer than the area outside. Probably because of the window panes.
She strode over to the shelves and ran a finger along the spines of the unmarked volumes, feeling the ridges of their binding.
After a moment she paused to read a bit of worn text on an old, brown-leather book: 'A History of Vampirism’.
With a grin she drew it from the shelf and took it to the nearest table, turning open the first few pages eagerly as she sat.
Inside were diagrams, remedies, and old curses that painted the image of 'classical vampirism’. With an amused expression she leaned into her palm, her elbow resting on the table, and turned the pages idly. If only the early scholars of this work had discovered their inaccuracies then perhaps her awful 'disease’ would have been cured.
Nearly forty minutes later she closed the tome, bookmarking a section for her next pass through, then stood up and bounced on her heels quickly leaving the room behind.
Farther down the walkway and higher up was the lab. Dim light broke through a series of small stained glass windows which illuminated the stuffy and densely packed room.
Paper, scrolls, books, beakers, test tubes, and nearly everything you’d expect to find in the workstation of a mad scientist had a home in this place. In one corner there was a mortar and pestle with some kind of thick congealed fluid in it and its adjacent company was a series of dense notes that Bailey couldn’t make sense of.
Wandering throughout the space she noticed an aquarium tucked away in the far corner of the room. She leaned over, poking at it and noted that it housed six small bats. They blinked awake and hissed, fluttering their discontent and she beamed, waving.
Every shelf and drawer visible was covered in tools, tests, or oddities and her eyes danced from spot to spot trying to take it all in.
One set of wooden shelves bore jars full of jelly that held, in some kind of artificial stasis, small creatures to be studied. Among them were lizards, a frog, and even a bird which she swore blinked at her.
Bailey would have never taken Dryle for the kind of person who cared about this stuff but to be fair most of her experience with the man thus far had been going on walks around the town and taking visits to Bloodcove for trade. Interesting as he was, curious as she was, he did like his secrets. That drew her in. Made her feel warm where she could only feel cold. Made her heart race when she’d sworn it’d frozen over years before.
A part of her worried that the attachment she felt was because of their shared condition and not based in any real emotion. A part of her would always run from the real question: Did she even feel emotion?
Cautiously she pressed two fingers to the soft of her neck where the bite wounds had scarred her dark skin.
No pulse.
She shook her head, closing the door behind her and starting across the catwalks again.
The end of the stairs stopped her ascent. Up here it was several ladders to get to the very top of the windmill which would take her up into a network very tightly packed, thin bridges. Those were used by the ghouls to work on the, currently, loud swinging blades outside. Nearby a set of perpendicular cogs rotated, spinning the shaft of the mill horizontally. The passing of those blades periodically let in the dim light of evening and kissed her with a gentle breeze. A breeze that could not be felt anywhere else in the structure. Instead it would be lost in the volume of the building, big as it was. But here? Right here? You could feel the wind.
She closed her eyes, chest rising and falling with breaths that had no purpose. A gentle gust pushed past her while the light of the falling sun faded and left the sky a cerulean-pitch, wind toying with her hair.
—
At some point in the day she found herself in the dining room inspecting a variety of odd looking dishes and harassing the ghouls for a snack. They brought her a ball made of chocolate and stuffed full of a blood she’d never before tasted. It was delicious and she munched idly, setting down the fine serving tray she’d been analyzing. Her attention instead had shifted to a glass case that sat on a shelf up against the wall. Too decorative, like nearly everything else Dryle owned, the case stood as a glistening beacon in the room, but its contents were modest. Inside it held a red gem. The cut of natural rock was almost identical to the one that Dryle wore on his chest, though this one was much smaller and had a wooden sign beneath that read 'pulse of the world’.
Quietly she popped the rest of her snack into her mouth, mopped her fingers off on her pants, and then opened the case. Setting the glass off to the side she gathered up the gem and chewed passively as she inspected it.
Almost immediately it began to glow a subtle, dim crimson.
“Huh.” She muttered, stepping towards the door. It was pretty, deep red with a golden chain wrapped around it. The filigree that embellished it near the clasp curled down into hooks which she assumed would have allowed it to be mounted on something. Exactly like Dryle’s. She’d never thought it pressing to ask about the gem before, but with this as some kind of mimic she-
Her foot hit a snag in the rug and she toppled forward, chin slamming into the wooden floor. Stars flooded her vision and she blinked in time to see her open palm spread out towards the catwalk and the golden glitter of the amulet’s chain vanishing over the guard rails.
“Shit, no! No no no!” She shouted. Her palms smacked the floor and she sprang forward, snatching at empty air as the charm rolled out of reach and fell.
It hit a lower catwalk with a loud crack and rolled away, several ghouls watched it as it teetered on the edge of that walkway, between two rails, before toppling off and plummeting a few hundred more feet to the ground floor, encircling the bowl at the base of the mill shaft.
It circled once. Twice. Then vanished down, into the darkness.
Bailey knelt, aghast, holding two bars with her head craned between them, body locked in silent terror.
Realization began to flood her as the ghouls that had been watching resumed their silent work.
Oh.
Oh no.
“Oh no!” She shouted, hands flying to her hair, knotting into the mess of strands and pulling at her scalp. “Oh no, no no!” She barked, standing up and rushing to the stairway. Her clamor nearly threw a ghoul off the catwalks and she shoved another one into the wall, turning every corner as rapidly as she could. Only now did she realize how far the object had fallen.
As she hit the bottom floor she dropped her body into a slide, knees scraping the wood, small darts of pain flashing up through them. With a grunt of effort her palms stopped her momentum and she peered over the edge of the bowl and down into the small space between the shaft and the darkness beyond. Could it have even survived that fall?
Even if it had, where would it end up? Lost in the mill?
Bailey stood up and paced for a minute, mind racing. A thousand possibilities coursed through her head until her eyes eventually fell on the hatch that lead to the floors below.
The place Dryle had specifically told her not to go.
Shit.
—
She blinked, eyes adjusting to the new pitch-black of the lower windmill. Her hand came free of the handle she’d used to pull the hatch closed and she scrunched her nose as the scent she’d largely ignored up until now hit her like a rolling cart.
Down here that pungent smell of iron was much worse and was accompanied by a humidity that clung to her skin and clothes. Instinct told her what that smell was now, as strong as it was, and she felt her vision coil and tighten like a starving predator. Her mouth fell open, breath steaming in the air. All senses became starkly aware of how alone she was in that damp dark before she shook it and came back to reality. Monochrome as darkvision was, she was able to see the stairs before her and descend.
—
Two flights down the groan of the windmill’s grinders went from a distant wail to a roar. Thunder rolled on each passing that came near the stairway and the smell of iron was growing impossibly stronger.
Another small series of steps and a turn around a stone wall opened the milling room before her. It was like a silo with huge blades that turned and rolled over each other, between them thick chunks of meat were being pressed and squeezed by the weight of the iron. Active as they were the wall near the stairs was painted red with the debris.
“Gross.” She muttered, hurrying down further, noting the shaft exit at the bottom of the grinder. An indicator that there was an even deeper level. One that, as she saw it, caused a moment of frozen terror.
Lining every inch of available wall space in the following room were cages where hundreds of people sat in a haze. Hunched over in some kind of languid stasis they bore their arms forward, lacerations across them oozing blood. Grooves in the bottom of the cages led down like some kind of spiral and funneled together with a steady drip of coppery-red fluid from the turning shaft above. Some kind of pressure mechanism must have existed in the bowl where this foul stew collected because, occasionally, when the weight built up enough, something would make a clatter and open to drain the blood.
Bailey was frozen on the stairway and didn’t notice the distant rooms against the back wall full of cots with people idly eating and drinking. They spoke, though their eyes seemed distant and entranced. Around the room ghouls roamed and would stop to check on them with their strange chatter-language.
Nearby one such ghoul was taking people out of the cages and letting them get some food and rest before turning to a growing line, lightly cutting a waiting individual, and putting them inside.
Bailey shook her head. What purpose this served she could only guess but she decided not to dwell on it and instead went further into the windmill.
—
Farther down were more rooms including one that had a sign in crudely written scrawl, Dryle’s, that read: 'Trap room ain’t finished, servant exit, sixth brick, unlit sconce. Don’t fuck up my trap.’ She snorted but followed the instructions to the sconce and located the switch. A hard click revealed a stairway in the wall after a door slid open and she pushed down it to the bottom floor.
Bailey looked around in a mixture of confusion and awe. As far as she could tell, this was a throne room with an enormous, red, antique looking chair against the far wall on a raised platform. Brick shelving rose off the perimeter of the walls and on their lip sat eight hour glasses. Four on each side with tubes dripping blood into them from above.
So this is where it was going?
Her eyes followed the tubes into the roof and she watched it for a moment before sense of dense panic began to claim her.
Where was that amulet?
This was the last room, there were no more- so if it wasn’t here and wasn’t in the mill or the cage room…
Bailey idly chewed her nails, staring at the ground for a moment. In her mind the lie was forming. She couldn’t tell him the truth, obviously, so she’d have to fib.
One of the ghouls stole it, yes, and they wanted to show her the secret underground torture rooms and shitty trap construction so they used it as leverage to-
A soft slapping sound echoed nearby. Her head spun.
A ghoul stood with a mop cleaning up spilled blood from a recently replaced hourglass. Bits of that shattered glass lay strewn about the ground with thin crimson coating them.
But there, in the middle!
She clapped and rushed over, shooing the ghoul away to retrieve the amulet from the mess. With a quick flourish she dabbed the gore off of it. Good enough. Pocketing the amulet she looked around, searching for the stairs back out.
Her scan caused her to freeze.
Against the far wall, nearly hidden behind some well placed shelving was a door.
A leviathan door. Covered in inscriptions and images. Along the crease she counted six locks, two huge handles shaped like fangs laced symbols of blood and sorrow. Her heart fought to roar a beat of dread and her head pounded in response to the phantom thrum. This was what she had not been meant to see. She could feel it.
Not the rooms of people, mill, or throne-
But this.
And she noticed, biting her lip, that the locks were not closed.
—
The interior was an old wooden room, probably some cellar the vampire had repurposed for storage at first. Over time that had changed and the room had become a display of sorts. Or at least that’s what it seemed.
Against the right wall were two shelves full of memorabilia from Dryle’s youth, based on a journal she picked through, and with them sat a set of rusted shackles, a crown of twisted gold, and an old pair of well used daggers. They were iron. Peasant’s iron.
Her eyes flitted across the relics. Had those shackles been his?
She set the journal down and lifted those iron clasps. They were no larger than the size of a child’s wrists. Scratches on the cuff and chains, the lip of the iron worn by sweat.
A story in the lost object.
She had to look away, the intensity of their meaning too much. Instead her eyes turned to the center of the room.
Laid present was an ancient map where spots were marked with pins and bits of scrap paper had been tethered down with notes in a shorthand she couldn’t interpret. To the right of the map was a table that held a pile of loose leather spines, the contents of the books they had held together in separate piles nearby. Sections were missing from the pages. Sometimes a name or an event.
Notes nearby indicated that was what he was looking for.
But why?
She found herself moving, noting the walls and the beautiful old art they were covered in. Most of it seemed strange and abstract; but common themes existed. A five-headed dragon, a fire elemental, ships in empty space or gargantuan beasts holding lanterns in the dark. The renderings were marked with dates that covered a span of time longer than she’d been alive. Some of them seemed even older than Dryle, but that couldn’t be right. They depicted him, though it was usually with simple shapes and hard lines. As if his image was hard to capture or nearly forgotten.
She moved onward and lost herself for a moment.
More rows of stories, more rows of memories.
And for a moment she could hear his voice.
“This is where we walked when- That’s who gave me- This is how I made it out of-”
An echo.
A memory?
Why would that exist.
Her eyes dripped warm blood, chin lined in a thin red trail.
A reminder that she did feel.
But why was it that the only thing she ever felt, pain?
In the back of the room, set up against the wall, was a stand that held a suit of white and gold armor. It was shapely, in some places, where the combat leathers had been set to fit a more feminine figure.
And for a moment she might have considered it Dryle’s if not for the colors.
In one hand her fingers were coiled around the amulet and the other was extended, fingers touching the perfectly polished surface of the plate. She traced the spires and ridges. The peaks and valleys and imagined for a moment the woman that must have worn this armor.
“It took me years to find it.” Dryle said, softly. His voice traveling the span of the room.
She closed her eyes, turning slowly to face him before opening them again.
His form was laden with shadow, hunched in the dark near the door. He stood from where he leaned, hands in his pockets, and crossed the room.
She watched wordlessly as he adjusted the journal, fixed the angle of the shackles, and drew his fingers slowly over the edge of the map where she’d rest her palms while gazing.
“You’ve been crying.” He said, extending a hand and sending a flick of arcane energy to pick up the blood on the ground, but not her cheeks or chin.
“How long were you there?” She asked, quietly.
She’d expected him to be mad, furious even- but… there was a calm in his eyes. A serenity. A relief.
“Long enough.” He said, stopping even with her and reaching out to touch the armor as well. Following the same path her hand had taken, stopping where she’d stopped.
An eternity passed before he spoke. The distance between them a near chasm and Bailey’s dead heart begging to rush into action, to fill the silence.
But that was the curse of the dead.
Eternal patience.
Eternal quiet.
When he finally spoke it seemed as if it was coming from some distant tunnel or far-away land. Perhaps one of the forgotten places on the map?
“I have a good memory, Bailey. Flawless almost.” He said. “I remember my time in the Shelves, I remember who I was before all this started; but I don’t remember them.” He said, eyes fixated on the armor. “I can’t remember their names, faces, or what they sounded like. Art I find is broken or scarred. Stories are missing pages; something happened.” He said softly.
His hand coiled into a fist and he turned to her, eyes like slits of black coal in the darkness. Eyes that could consume. Inside him lied a passionate rage that boiled unfulfilled, questions unanswered. And now, she could see for the first time, a burden shared.
“A lot of what I remember from back then was fuzzy when I showed back up- you know? And ever since I returned I’ve been spending weeks and months and years trying to figure out if those vague memories I have were even real. If any of it really happened at all.” He said, uncurling his coiled fist.
“My friends, the people we saved, the journey we shared, and even her.” He said, looking to the helmet of the armor.
Bailey followed his gaze and stepped closer to him. “Who was she?” She asked.
“My mother.” He said.
And that silence came again.
“I’m sorry.” She said, finally.
“Don’t be.” He said, pulling his hand away and gently reaching for hers.
Bailey nervously let him grab it and he carefully guided it back to the metal.
“Flatten your palm, Bailey. I want to show you something.” He insisted. She nodded.
After a second or two she could feel something.
A soft thrumming.
Familiar, distant.
A heartbeat.
She turned to him with wide eyes and he smiled at her playfully.
“Interesting isn’t it? I wondered for years why I could always feel a beating in that little trinket she’d given me.” He said, pointing to the crystal in her hand. “Found out that she’d imbued her heartbeat into it and into this armor.”
“But isn’t she dead?” Bailey asked, drawing her hand off of the metal.
“Yeah, but the world isn’t- and that was how she was Bailey. She always had the pulse of the world in her veins.” He said opening his palm towards her.
Bailey glanced down to the gem in her hands and Dryle nodded.
She handed it over and followed his motions as he reached up and wrapped it around the neck of the armor, letting it settle on the breastplate.
“I kept it upstairs because I couldn’t stand to leave the only memories I have of her, solid inarguable ones, in this dungeon.” He said, then turned to her with a grin. “But something tells me you won’t let me forget her, will you?” He said.
“Or yourself.” Bailey said softly, reaching up to wipe away a bloody tear.
Dryle softened. Posture visibly shaken, but he recomposed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He said, stern.
“You can’t leave who you were down here to rot, Dryle. You’re not dead.”
“Honey.” Dryle said, lifting her chin and beaming. “I’m a vampire. I’ve been dead for a long time now.”
She opened her mouth to debate but he winked and pushed her jaw closed.
“Come on, kiddo.” He said, grabbing her hand and moving her towards the door.
Running, even this slowly, that’s what it was.
The feelings, the emotions she wished she had were buried here with his.
Locked away behind a large door with too many rules to be viewed by the silence of the dead.
She wouldn’t let him run.
They’d be back.
Because, even as he closed the door behind them and locked it up, she felt something had changed.
He’d shared something.
He’d felt again, felt possibly for the first time in thousands of years.
And so had she.
And she’d never let that die.
No matter how many locks he tried to use.