The air in Sloth's demesne was a broth of decay, it clung to the back of the throat like a confession. Aamon, Ciel, and Arya moved through a landscape of profound surrender. Trees did not break… they sagged, bent like the spines of forgotten giants, weeping a foul black sap. The path beneath their feet seemed to resent their progress, sucking greedily at their boots with a wet, possessive insistence.
Aamon's hand drifted to his hip, fingers brushing against the cold weight resting there. Shattered Verse. The dragon bone hilt was an anchor in this sea of listlessness. With every step deeper into this suffocating realm, the sword seemed to grow heavier… not with physical mass… but with a grim purpose. It was a shard of absolute finality in a place that had chosen only eternal, slow motion dying. He could feel the faint pulse of its runes through the scabbard… a silent… hungry rhythm to the pervasive drone of decay. Kitty's warning echoed in his mind: It is not for killing monsters, Aamon. It is for erasing them.
For ninety years, his mother's story of Sir Aldric had been his guiding star. The noble knight… the gleaming sword… the act of mercy that saved the day. He had clutched that story in the dark. A desperate shield against the silence. He had dreamed of a sword just like Aldric's, a symbol of hope… a tool for heroism.
But the sword on his hip was not that.
This blade did not speak of hope. It spoke of silence. It did not promise redemption; it promised oblivion. The stories had never mentioned weight. Not the weight of the steel, but the weight of the choice. The stories never talked about what it felt like to carry a tool of absolute erasure… to know that your hand could unwrite a soul from existence. This was not the knight's tale from his cell. This was something darker, something way too real, and the responsibility of it settled on his still young shoulders like a hideous cloak. He had a sword like Sir Aldric… but he was finally understanding that the story was a beautiful and fragile lie… the reality was a cold, hard truth in a scabbard at his side.
A village slowly creeped into their view.
Houses leaned against one another not for companionship… rather from a weary inability to stand alone. Roofs had collapsed inward in a slow, gravitational surrender. Their thatch festered with fungi that pulsed a sickly green in the gloom. Windows were sightless… cobwebbed eyes.
In the doorway of one such hovel… they saw her. An old woman.she was so deeply woven into the rot that she seemed more fungus than flesh. Her skin was a web of cracks, an ancient parchment left to the elements… her hair clung to her scalp in greasy strands.
A single… out of tune string was plucked… a arrhythmic cadence. The old woman's mouth opened. A voice emerged, thin as a razor and just as lacerating, raspy and breathless. Weaving through the slothful air.
"Have you heard… the tired tale…
Of the boy… from worlds of grey?…
He loved a girl… he lost a girl…
And swore… he'd make the demons pay…
He swore… he'd make them pay…"
Aamon froze, his hand tightened around shattered verse. Ciel's staff grew cold against her palm, and Arya's sharp ears twitched. Her face is a mask of grim fascination. They stood, trapped as the wasted crone sang her dirge.
"He took a ghost… a weeping bride…
A cloak… to hide his scorn…
He gathered up… the broken things…
The lost… the cursed… the torn…
So… very… torn…"
The song was a poison… seeping into the very foundations of their quest. A story known as heroic legend. But here, in this place of defeat… it was stripped of all glory. Leaving only the bare ugly bones of the deed
"And the Earth Wounded… gathered 'round…
Eleven blades… to scar the ground…
The Lord… his Battle Maids…
They walked in shadow… served the light…
Or so… they said… served the light…"
The old woman continued, her voice a listless, delirious murmur, cataloging the legendary maids not as warriors, but as broken things.
"A poisoned rose… a dragon's rage…
A fae… trapped in her cage…
A jester… from the hells below…
A nun… to bless the page…
A prince… who loved the stage…
A shadow… turned a brand-new page…
A fox… so very sage…"
Each title was a stone dropped into a deep dark well… each echo fainter than the last. The chorus returned, she seemed to be trying to remember the glory… but could only muster exhaustion.
"And the Earth Wounded… gathered 'round…
Eleven blades… to scar the ground…
The lord… and his Maids…
They fought so hard… for what was right…
So… very… hard… for what was right…"
The pace slowed to a near halt. The singer took a labored shaky breath.
"They fought for years… a weary blur…
The details… are a stirring…
They killed the Nine… the Devils fell…
It's… too… much… to… tell…
A… very… long… and tiring… spell…"
And then, her voice dropped to a raw broken whisper, a secret shared at the edge of sleep.
"And when the last one… was… no more…
He stood in silence… on the floor…
He heard a laugh… not his… not theirs…
An answer to… his… prayers…
It said… 'My love… your work is done…
The blood you've spilled… the wars you've won…
Were just the key… to let me in…
Your great revenge… was my… great… sin…'"
A profound horror, colder than any demon's blade. It settled over the three listeners. Arya's breath hitched. Ciel made the sign of her order self, her lips moving in a silent prayer. Aamon's face was a stone mask… but a muscle twitched in his jaw… a tiny fracture in the facade.
The final chorus was an epitaph. It sung with hollow… final understanding.
"So the victory…
Is the end… of all we see…
He killed the wolves… to let his lover in…
And his great war… was our… great… end.
His great war… was our… great… end."
The voice faded into a sigh… her final words barely audible.
"So rest your head… no more to fight…
The King's gone… and brought the night…
Just close your eyes… and sleep… so deep…
There's nothing left… to lose…
…or keep…
…nothing… left…
…to… keep…"
The dissonant note hung in the air, as it faded, swallowed by the resurgent… silence. The old woman did not move again. Her breath stilled. The dirge was done, its truth was now a part of them… a cancerous growth rooted deep in their souls.
The silence of the wasted meadow was a harsh presence, suffocating to your core. It was the kind of quiet that didn't signify peace… but a profound, terminal absence…the absence of life, of a struggle, even of decay.
Aamon, ever the beacon of misplaced concern slowly approached the woman slumped over the wooden till. Her body was a discarded marionette… strings cut in a final… graceless collapse.
"Are you fine, lady?"
he asked, voice a jarring saccharine chime in the crushing stillness. He reached out a clawed hand… intending a gentle poke to her shoulder.
Ciel's hand snapped forward, smacking his away with a sting that shattered the quiet.
"Do not touch."
Ciel stated, her voice the scrape of a crypt door closing.
"She is long gone."
There was no emotion in the declaration… only a forensic finality. She firmly pulled Aamon back, by his arm, steering him away from the grim tableau.
Arya, paced through the tall grass, her boots scuffing against the wasting bodies that lay like discarded luggage. A low… continuous growl rumbled in her chest, of pure impotent rage at this quiet…pathetic ending. Her focus snagged on a splash of impossible, violent vibrancy amidst the universal decay. A single perfect flower.
She bent down… her golden eyes narrowing to venomous slits. The sight of it made the blood drain from her face. Her tail erected into a thick furry bush of pure alarm… her ears pinned themselves flat against her skull as if struck by a guillotine.
"Sanguilium Lacrimae…"
Arya muttered, the name a stolen breath… a curse from a grandmother's darkest tale.
Aamon, drawn by her intensity… bent down cheerfully beside her.
"Oh, I never saw you as a herbalist!"
he said, his tone dripping with genuine and oblivious admiration. He reached out, captivated to touch the blasphemous blossom with its dark… onyx stem, ivory white leaves, and pulsing bloody crimson veins that throbbed with a sick… parasitic rhythm.
SMACK.
Ciel's hand intercepted his a second time.
"She is not, friend."
Ciel hissed, her gaze locked not on the flower, rather on the rigid terror in Arya's posture… on the way her tail was still expanding with every panicked heartbeat. She was trusting only the raw instinct of their fiercest fighter.
"We need to leave… NOW!"
Arya shot to her feet… spinning to face them. The command was strangled. Ripped from a throat tight with a primal fear. It was the fear of a bedtime nightmare clawing its way into the waking world.
"Wait, why?"
Aamon asked, his bewilderment a blunt instrument against their sharpening dread. He gestured vaguely around the silent field.
"There are no birds this way! It's quiet!"
"Friend…"
Ciel's voice was a hushed… and urgent blade. The closest she ever came to true alarm. Her pink sapphire eyes were fixed on the ground…
"Look. Down."
Aamon looked.
The earth beneath them was bleeding. Dark and silent rivers carved their channels through the soil… a phantom cartography of some unseen wound. These tides defied all law… they did not soak, they didn't stain. The crimson flow passed through their boots as if they were ghosts. It was a hemorrhage of reality itself. A horror they could witness and feel chilling their very spirits… yet were powerless to stop.
A violent unnatural tug, and the three of them were thrown onto their backs… the breath slammed from their lungs in a strangled gasp. The rivers of blood were no longer passive, they had coalesced into unbreakable chains of pure blood, yanking them backward like puppets on a single, ghastly string.
"Shit, shit, SHIT!"
Arya snarled, a guttural thing ripped from a place of pure… primal panic. This was not a fight she could win with tooth and axe. She scrambled against the invisible pull… her claws gouging in frantic and useless furrows in the earth. Her powerful legs churning up a storm of soil and dead grass. It was a futile struggle against a riptide of hatred.
"What is this? The blood!"
Aamon yelled, his voice pitched high with bewilderment… not bravery. He tried to plant his feet, to push himself up and resist with all his demonic might… but his powerful limbs thrashed against the inexorable drag. A cold, clenching dread… a familiar and deeply humiliating cage, washed over him… it was a sickening, precise echo of the magical noose Queen Luna had used in her throne room. The same gut wrenching feeling of his immense strength being rendered a pathetic fiction. He was trapped, the helplessness was a venom in his veins, a taste of the cage he had torn his way out of.
Ciel did not scream or snarl. Her glacial staff was gone… torn from her grasp. Her hands were clenched into bloodless fists at her sides. Her nails draw half moons of blood in her palms. Her mind is a fortress of logic as it raced through possibilities of pure, desperate instinct Abyssal binding? Psychokinetic anchor? Spatial warp? finding no purchase… no solution… only the terrifying, accelerating certainty of their trajectory. The ground itself became a grinding enemy. Grass and sharp stone scoured their clothes and skin as they were hauled backward… faster and faster… a grotesque sled of flesh and fear.
Their destination was horrifyingly clear: the waiting, jagged maw of the D'Nocturne mansion. Its blackened spherical towers clawed at a sky now bruised a deep ominous purple… watching their helpless approach with cold, silent, and utterly ravenous anticipation. The house was no longer a passive monument. It was rather a predator… and it was reeling in its prey.
The wrought iron gates groaned open with an unseen command. Their screech punctuated by a high, piercing laugh that seemed to come from the house itself as they were dragged across the threshold. They found themselves not in a place of grotesque sights, but in an astonishingly elegant foyer… all dark wood and silvery damask.
Before a single word could be spoken, the blood chains diverged… yanking them down separate paths.
Aamon was harshly hurled sideways, crashing through a wall of polished mahogany. He hit the ground on the other side with a sickening thud… like a dropped corpse.
Behind him the splintered wall shimmered and healed… the wood knitting itself back together into an unbroken surface, leaving no trace of his passage.
"Compose yourself, my dear fellow. Such unseemly thrashing spoils the composition of our little... divertissement."
The voice was a melody that seemed to coil through the air… each syllable dripping with condescending amusement. From the shadows near the mansion's grand fireplace, a small girl emerged. She was a study in calculated delicacy… her frame so slight she seemed a porcelain figurine that a strong breath might shatter. Her face was the picture of a perfect unaging doll: round youthful cheeks, a small unassuming nose, and a faint knowing smirk gracing her bloodless lips. Her hair was an elaborate twin-tail drills, the curls falling as black as the inside of a bat's wing. Peeking out from the intricate strands were her ears… small and delicately pointed at the tip, hinting at an ancient and fey heritage.
She was a vision of gruesome luxury, adorned in a frilled Lolita dress… a symphony of black lace and rich… bloody red velvet. The outfit was completed with kneehigh buckled boots, and always pristine lace gloves… a single, striking piece of jewelry: a choker from which a single ruby pendant hung, glinting with a dark inner light like a crystallized drop of heart's blood.
"I have always found that a spirited opening movement makes the ensuing slowness of submission all the more profound."
she mused, her doll-like eyes sweeping over aamon with clinical disinterest.
"I must confess, for one of your esteemed profession, your vitae carries a rather... pedestrian bouquet... But do not despair. We shall refine it."
In a flash of blood and copper that flooded the opulent room a parasol formed in her small hand. It was a delicate display of black lace and red silk… a perfect match for her dress. With this unbearable sight Aamon attempted to push himself up from the floor… she just simply pressed the delicate, steel tip of the parasol against his chest. It was a deceptively gentle pressure that held the powerful demon down with effortless grace.
"So, demon."
She cooed, tilting her head as if examining a curious insect pinned to a board.
"Did you know a dead man's blood could be so... taxing? It's really quite entertaining, watching you struggle against a ghost's anchor."
Aamon looked up at the girl slowly, her skin so pale it seemed to reflect the very light from the room. A rage seemed to boil within him… a pure, unexpected fury eclipsing even the pupa's words. This was different. This was a violation… a mockery…
"Who are you?"
Aamon's voice dropped into a guttural voice of a demon's register that made the fine crystal in the room vibrate. With a surge of power, he finally shoved the parasol away and stood to his full height… his shadow engulfing her tiny form, wings flaring to block out the hellish etched glass.
"Where are they?! I'll kill you if I have to!"
Aamon's shadow cast by the hellish glow of the glass, engulfed the tiny girl… Out of intimidation from one of his mother's stories, he stretched wings to their full span, their tips brushing the vaulted ceiling. The porcelain and velvet that had surrounded them felt absurd… a stage set for a play that had just been torn in half.
The girl did not flinch. Her knowing smirk only deepened… a tiny… bloodless crescent of absolute condescension. Her parasol held loosely at her side, seemed less a fashion accessory and now a conductor's baton waiting to direct a symphony of pain.
"Such volume, my dear."
The small girl's silken voice is a stark contrast to his guttural snarl.
"It does so little to change the composition. The overture is already written. You are merely a note in it."
"I won't ask again."
Aamon growled, the sound vibrating through the floorboards. His ruby eyes were slits of incandescent fury.
"Where. Are. They?"
She let out a small tinkling laugh in response to Aamon's fury.
"So single minded! So… direct. It lacks artistry… But very well. A name for a name is only fair play. You may call me Charlotte."
With a roar that was more demon than him, Aamon lunged. It was a clumsy charge… his claws aimed to shred the delicate lace at her throat. But Charlotte was no longer there. She dissolved into a cloud of crimson mist… reforming instantly perched firmly on the back of a velvet chaise lounge as if she weighed no more than a sparrow.
"Tut tut."
she chided.
"No foreplay? I had hoped for a more… cultured exchange."
She flicked her wrist. The rivers of blood that had dragged them into the mansion suddenly surged up from the floorboards… no longer chains but grasping hands. They seized Aamon's ankles and locked, he let out a pained roar again, his demonic strength straining against them.
A measure of coldness began to spread from the points of contact… a lethargy that felt like lead being poured into his veins. It was the dead man's blood, a poison tailored to cripple a being of life and fire like him. His vibrant ruby eyes flickered, their light dimming. The magnificent span of his wings sagged… the leathery membranes suddenly feeling like sacks of stone.
"You see?"
Charlotte's voice was a purr from her perch.
"The vitality of the living is so… strenuous. But the final surrender of the dead? It is a weight that crushes all ambition. It is the ultimate peace, is it not? The peace of giving up."
Aamon stumbled to one knee… his breath coming in gasps. The opulent room began to swim at the edges of his vision.
The weight of the dragon bone hilt pressed against his hip… a silent temptation. Shattered Verse. Kitty's warning was a distant echo: Only when you know you will lose. Was this that moment? To draw it was to unleash an age of ruin? to give voice to the screams locked in its blade? It was an admission that he, the son of Abyss was not enough.
No.
The thought was a spark in the suffocating darkness. His mother's voice… not the kind storyteller… but the Tyrant Abyss, whispered from a place deeper than memory. "Power is not a river to be dammed, my shadow. It is the ocean. You do not beg for it. You command it."
Blurry with weakness, his gaze locked onto Charlotte. She was smiling… savoring his defeat. His clawed hand fell away from the seductive promise of the hilt and instead curled into a fist. He looked down, to the bone rings of his mother.
He would not beg. He would not unleash the sword. He would command.
When it came, his voice was ragged, stripped of its usual tone and spoken in the guttural ancient tongue of his kind. The language of Abyss, the language of unmaking.
"Sanguis… vinculum… rumpatur!"
It was not a shout, but a wave of pure, black negation erupted from him… a silent expanding sphere of energy... The crimson hands of blood holding him just let go, dissolving into nothingness with a sound like a hundred sighs extinguished at once. The spell holding Ciel and Arya shattered a second later… the solidified gore around them vanishing into motes of dissipating red light.
The sphere of abyssal negation did not stop with the blood magic. The nearest tapestry, depicting a galaxy being devoured by a void, was instantly aged a thousand years, its threads crumbling to a dust. Marble busts and some forgotten woman's statue cracks disintegrating into fine powder. The very air itself seemed to thin… as if reality had taken its step.
Charlotte's smirk vanished, replaced by a flicker of shock.
"Oh? Now that is a note with some character!"
Aamon surged to his feet, the dead man's blood was still in his system, still a lingering poison, but the active channel had been severed. He was weakened… but he was free. And he was furious…
The fight truly began.
Charlotte became a blur of red and black, her parasol a tornado of deadly strikes. The steel tip was a needle seeking his heart… his eyes… the joints in his wings. Aamon met her with raw, demonic force. He didn't have the finesse for a duel; he was a force of his own nature. He swiped at her with claws that could rend steel, each miss gouging deep gashes in the now aged mahogany paneling. He kicked out, his boot connecting with a marble column that cracked from floor to ceiling with a sound like a skull splitting.
"Ignis Globus!"
He chanted, a sphere of black fire erupted from his palm. Charlotte dematerialized into red mist, the fireball passing through her, impacting the far wall. She reformed behind him, her parasol lancing toward his spine. He sensed her… spinning and catching the shaft in his bare hand. The reinforced steel groaned, bending in his grip. He tore it from her hands and hurled it away. It spun like a thrown axe, embedding itself deep in the opposite wall… its lace canopy shredded.
"You break my toys?"
Charlotte hissed, her doll-like face twisting into something ancient and ugly. Her speed redoubled. She was now a phantom, her fists and feet striking with the force of a ram, impacts that Aamon felt shudder through his bones. He was stronger… but she was a vortex of motion… an untouchable storm.
He backed her toward the grand fireplace, a monstrosity of blacked marble.
"Ventus Procella!"
A concussive blast of abyssal wind shot from his hands… not aimed at her… at the fireplace itself. The entire structure, weighing several tons tore free from the wall. Charlotte leaped upward, a flutter of lace and velvet, as the massive hearth crashed down where she had been standing… sending a wave of stone and dust billowing across the room.
She landed on the wobbling chandelier, sending it swinging, its crystal teardrops chiming a discordant melody.
"You are ruining the decor!"
she shrieked… her composure finally cracking.
"Fractura Terrae!"
Aamon slammed his fists into the floor. The black marble tiles erupted upward in a shockwave of a force that raced toward the central support of the room. The chandelier's chain snapped. Charlotte dropped, and Aamon was already there.
This time he was faster. As she fell, he lunged… not with a claw, with a closed fist, putting all his remaining strength into a single, brutal punch to her midsection.
It connected.
The air left Charlotte's lungs in a pained gasp. She was thrown backward like a discarded doll… crashing through what was left of the velvet couch and skidding to a halt against the base of the grand staircase. For a moment, she laid still… the wind knocked out of her.
Aamon stood panting, the dead man's blood still sapping his strength. His body aching from a dozen impacts. Dust rained from the cracked ceiling. The walls were scarred and broken. The opulent furniture was kindling. The mansion's heart had been torn out.
He stalked toward her slowly, his intent clear. He would end this.
Charlotte slowly pushed herself up on her elbows. A thin trickle of blood too dark to be human seeped from the corner of her mouth. A slow, wide… rapturous smile crept back on her face.
Her eyes were locked on Aamon's left hand. During the final exchange, one of her razor sharp strikes had left deep gash running across his knuckles, his own blood… thick and black, shimmering with a faint inner light like liquid obsidian and embers… welled from the wound and dripped onto the ruined aging carpet.
Without a word, her movements slow… Charlotte brought her lace gloved finger to the cut on her lip, tasting the drop of her own blood. Then… her eyes never leaving his, she reached out and dragged her finger through the droplet of his blood on the floor.
She brought her fingertip to her lips.
Her entire body went rigid. Her eyes, a moment ago full of malicious amusement… flew wide open… the pupils dilating into black, bottomless pools. A fullbody shudder wracked her tiny frame. A convulsion of pure ecstasy. A small, choked sound escaped her.
She looked at Aamon as if seeing him for the very first time. The vampire, the master of this domain completely disarmed.
"What…"
She whispered, her voice trembling, stripped of all its silken condescension.
"It's you?"
The fury bled from Charlotte's form… her defensive stance dissolving into a posture of rapt, unholy reverence. She rose slowly, her movements no longer predatory. She took a hesitant step toward him, before another… her gaze locked on the welling wound on his hand as if it were a crack in the firmament leaking divinity.
"I am Charlotte D'Nocturne."
Charlotte's voice a whisper of stunned revelation… stripped of all its former venom.
"In three centuries, I have tasted the blood of kings and saints. Of heroes and monsters. I have consumed vintages of life you could not fathom."
Her eyes, wide with a kind of terrifying epiphany… lifted to his.
"But that… that is not blood. It is a symphony composed before time. It is the primordial chaos and the first dawn, distilled into a single… perfect note. It is… perfection made fluid."
She stopped mere feet from him… all hostility extinguished, replaced by a ravenous wonder. The battle was over. The shattered and aged mansion was irrelevant. For the ancient vampire… the cosmos had just collapsed to a single point: this demon and the abyssal nectar weeping from his veins.
Aamon's own rage evaporated, replaced by a cold… creeping dread. He looked at the cut on his hand… at the bruises painting his flesh. The familiar tingle of accelerated healing was absent. The wounds remained.
"Why… why am I not healing?"
he asked, the panic in his voice stripping away the last of his anger.
Charlotte's lips curved into a knowing smile.
"Because, little demon, I am immortal. And so, it seems, are you."
"Immortal?"
Aamon's head twisted in confusion as he leaned heavily on Shattered Verse for support… the blade glinting softly against his palm.
"Our natures expel one another."
She explained her tone as that of a scholar lecturing a promising, if ignorant student.
"Your demonic flesh rejects my vampiric essence, and mine, yours. It creates a… stasis. A wound from me is as permanent on you as one from you would be on me."
Her eyes drifted back to his hand, an addict's hunger rekindling in their depths.
"Though your essence is rather… exquisite."
In a movement too swift to track. She closed the distance and captured his wounded hand. Aamon winced once as she brought it to her lips… her tongue, cold like grave shroud, tracing the cut. A single, shuddering moan of sated avarice escaped her.
"Vampire?"
Aamon murmured, his mind struggling to recontextualize the stories he knew.
"My mother… she said vampires were luxurious creatures. She spoke often of one… a child-like one. Are you… are you possibly not a child?"
Charlotte released his hand with an annoyed scuff. The reverence on her face shattered, replaced by a flash of ancient offense. Her fangs were bared, not in threat, in raw historical pique.
"No."
She hissed, the word sharp enough to draw blood on its own.
"I am over three hundred years old. I am no child."
Aamon recoiled at the intensity, his demonic pride wilting under the weight of his social clumsiness.
"Sorry! You look… old? In a dignified way! A very… ancient way."
He fumbled, making it worse. He grasped for the one thing that mattered.
"Now, please. Release my friends."
Charlotte smoothed her dress… the momentary fury passing like a storm cloud. She gestured a languid hand toward the unseen chambers where Ciel and Arya were held.
"It is already done. The moment my blood ceased its active hold, the bindings dissolved. They are free."
Charlotte smoothed her dress… the momentary fury passing like a storm cloud. She gestured a languid hand toward the unseen chambers where Ciel and Arya were held.
"It is already done. The moment my blood ceased its active hold, the bindings dissolved. They are free."
Aamon didn't wait. He turned from the stunned vampire and tore through the ruins of the aging mansion, ignoring the architecture of this prison. Rapidly rotting doorframes gave way before his shoulders; he vaulted over collapsed bookcases, crushing the powdered remains of what was once a priceless rug.
Charlotte followed, her steps were slow… almost dazed, her wide eyes not on his path of destruction, rather on him. She moved as if in a dream… her delicate fingers occasionally brushing against a collapsing wall, a wistful sadness on her face as the mansion she had inhabited for centuries groaned and settled into its final form around them.
He found a heavy, iron banded door hanging from a single hinge. From behind it, he heard them… muffled grunts of effort and the wet, struggling sound of someone trying to breathe through liquid. He slammed his shoulder into the center of the door, instantly the ancient wood exploded inward, revealing a flight of stone steps descending into darkness.
Without hesitation he pulled his wings in, practically running down the stairs.
An ankle deep pool of dark, viscous blood stretched from wall to wall, an undisturbed scab of crimson that didn't flow or ripple, just … existed. It was a solid lake of gore… swallowing the faint light from a single torch in oily, distorted shimmers.
In the center of this slaughterhouse stood Ciel and Arya.
They were not struggling. There were no chains. no visible bonds. The blood was not actively holding them. It merely kissed their boots, a sentient moat in a dungeon of Charlotte's design.
The blood around Ciel and Arya's feet gave a soft, almost deferential noise and receded. It didn't splash or drain; it pulled back with a smooth motion of a living thing, as if withdrawing before a recognized authority.
Arya let out a low, guttural snarl… shaking one boot with a violent jerking motion as if she could fling the blood off.
"Tch. About time, pup."
The words were sharp, but the underlying current was one of undeniable relief.
Ciel's gaze lifted from her survey of the room to Aamon. She stepped forward, leaving small bloody prints on the suddenly dry stone.
"Friend, you beat the puppeteer?…"
Ciel asked, tapped with something new…
They stood together on the dry stone ledge at the base of the stairs, smeared with the basement's foul essence. Arya scraped at the fur on her tail with a frantic intensity… her lips peeled back in a snarl. Ciel simply looked at the glistening stains soaking into the black silk of her gloves… her head tilted in response.
"It smells like old coins… ciel doesn't like it, reminds her of the cages…"
She observed the basement silence… all quiet but for the sputtering torch.
It was then that the mansion gave its final… dying groan. A great crack shot across the ceiling of the basement, its entire structure was coming apart at the seams… aging centuries in seconds.
They scrambled up the steps and back into the main hall…. now a skeleton of its former self. The etched glass windows were all shattered, the tapestries were dust… and the grand staircase leaned at a perilous angle.
Charlotte stood amidst the ruins… her parasol gone… her elaborate dress smudged with blood and dust. She looked small and strangely vulnerable. She stopped looking at her destroyed home with a sigh, before meeting Aamon's eyes.
"Well."
Charlotte said, losing her silken malice, being replaced by a flat tone.
"It would seem you have rather conclusively canceled our previous arrangement."
She gestured vaguely at the collapsing walls around them.
"And you've left me… homeless."
Aamon, seemed worried for a second… but seeing the blood still on their clothes brought back the reality.
"That's your problem."
"Precisely, And I have decided to make it your problem."
Charlotte said with a calculated smile returning to her lips… though it was different now… sharper, more opportunistic.
She took a deliberate step toward them… ignoring the way Arya's hand went to her axe.
"You owe me a new residence. And since you are on a quest and I am now… through your actions… a dispossessed party with a vested interest in your… unique vintage… it seems the most logical solution is for me to accompany you."
Arya let out a furious growl.
"Like hell!"
"You tried to kill us!"
Aamon said, his fists clenching.
"A minor misunderstanding."
Charlotte waved a dismissive hand.
"Theatrics. I was evaluating your mettle. And I must say, the results were… enlightening."
Her gaze flickered to the blood still drying on his knuckles… a flicker of that ravenous hunger in her eyes before she masked it.
"Besides, you are heading into perilous lands. You have a fighter."
she nodded at Arya.
"an elf."
Her eyes fell on Ciel.
"and a source of immense, untamed power."
She finished, looking at Aamon.
"But you lack a connoisseur of the arcane. A guide to the darker corners of this world. I am over three centuries old. I have seen things that would curdle mortal souls. I can be… useful."
She took another step, now standing directly before Aamon… completely unafraid.
"My house is dust because of you, little demon. The least you can do is provide me with new entertainment. Consider it restitution."
Aamon looked at Ciel, who gave a slight nod. She might be dangerous, but her power could be valuable. He looked at Arya, who looked ready to carve the vampire into pieces… but she also knew a losing battle when she saw one. They were weakened… and this ancient creature was offering a truce.
Aamon looked back at Charlotte. He didn't trust her. Not for a second…. But a part of him, the part that was still a lonely boy in a cell, saw a strange… twisted reflection of his mother in her ancient eyes. A being of immense power and inscrutable motives. And she was right. They needed all the help they could get.
"You try anything."
Aamon's voice was low and almost deadly serious… if it wasn't for the slightest wag of his tail.
"I'll use the sword Kitty gave me."
Charlotte's smile was a victorious and bloodless.
"Oh, I would expect nothing less, my dear. Nothing less."
And as the last walls of the D'Nocturne mansion crumbled into a pile of forgotten history behind them.., a new… far more dangerous and volatile alliance was born under the bruised… uncaring sky.