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In the room ensconced in a darkness so deep and heavy it resembled the abyssal depths of the seas, two figures faced each other, matched in a battle of wills. Yet, one had reigned supreme even now, as was written by fate. The father towered over the son.
At the feet of the eddying blackness sat a man whose golden locks pooled around his knees, like so much twinkling thread. He looked up to the high above, to the nothingness that blanketed him, and roared,
"Sacred Ancestor! Sacred Ancestor! Explain yourself to me!" His voice ricocheted off the walls of inky darkness, yet failed to produce an echo. The words were fraught with an intense feeling. The man screamed, "You have betrayed me! You have brought me to heel with wretched hounds! Sacred Ancestor!" That he would admit such a thing as defeat spoke to the magnitude of his rage, or his sorrow.
And from the blackened heavens, and the ocean of shadow below, rang out a cold answer to his yell, in words that went unspoken and could yet be heard. You have grown too prideful, and too vicious. You have tread far past your bounds.
Glittering crimson rubies glared down from the darkness without feeling, as the voice that wasn't a voice boomed, You have trampled all traces of my power you could reach, and you have sought to satisfy a bloodlust which might rival even the cruellest of my enemies. What say you, Lawrence Valcua?
The words held no anger, nor mocking or scorn, but were soaked with something that made even the great Noble reproached by the black nothing shudder: disappointment. The tones of reprimand branded themselves against the vampire's soul.
"You have condemned me!" Shrieked the Ultimate Noble, clawing at the abyss below him. He stared into the red gaze with bright, crazed eyes, shining with something wet. "Sacred Ancestor, you have replaced me and doomed me to ruin! I, Lawrence Valcua! What was I to do? What could I have done but ensure my own survival? You have left me bereft!"
Contrary to what it seemed, the maddened pleas that streamed from the mouth of the Noble didn't fall on deaf ears. However, the alternative might have been worse. Looking down upon him harshly, the darkness considered Valcua with an unnamed emotion burrowing into its heart. When a child threw a tantrum, the role of the parent was to punish it; was that not the truth of the world? To let the child thrash and wail unimpeded, causing trouble as it pleased – that had been the failure of the abyssal darkness that drowned the room. Now, the child grew an ego that could not be controlled, and if allowed to continue it would only worsen.
In its mind's eye, the murky personage viewed the bastard son which it had put to bed in the dirt, another failure too late to rectify, and the silent infant that had newly been born to it, whose crying shadow it had severed from its back. The infant had been so deathly and cold for a moment the blackness had believed it stillborn, but instead a new knowledge had bloomed in its wake, of what could truly be called a lone success.
You shall be sentenced, said the shadows, among the stars you sought to manipulate. You will live in exile, unsightly as you are. For the child was to be taught the error of its ways, and if not it was to be used as a lesson. As the Noble's eyes widened, and his head fell, the shimmering tresses of his hair obscuring his expression, the infinite darkness was assailed by another emotion that too went unnamed.
"Sacred Ancestor," whispered the Noble, trembling. Then, "Sacred Ancestor! I swear it! I swear it on the enchanted sword Glencalibur and the domain with which I am driven off to the stars!"
The Noble's head shot up, his eyes now ablaze and burning with such a colour that it could be nothing less than the greatest heights of fury or the most immense profundity of despair. As the darkness somehow fought an impossible tremor, it realised that in equal magnitude, Valcua's glare was fueled by both.
"Sacred Ancestor!" The Noble howled, a hand shooting up to grip his heart as if pained by his own intensity. The other hand reached fruitlessly to the air, as if seeking to clutch the darkness by the throat. Instead, all it could clutch was the aforementioned sword. "I swear on the name of the Ultimate Noble! As sure as my name is Lawrence Valcua, third master of the house of Valcua, I will return! I will return, and from that moment forward, Nobles and humans alike will fear the night!"
Choked by something so powerful it could rob the pure abyss of its mettle, yet something that abyss could even still not name, the Sacred Ancestor didn't tell the broken man below him that he had just now sealed his own fate.