XLIII - Dusktide Looms

  The nightmare did not last long. Though it felt like hours had passed while she dreamt, in reality, she had only been asleep for a few short minutes. Once awake, she sat up in her bedroll and looked across the fire where she saw Vlad, sitting in the sand and writing in his journal by the light of his blaze. When he realized that she was awake, he looked back at her and smiled.

  “An early one tonight, hm?” he said. “That is good. Best to get it over and done with now so you can hopefully enjoy the rest of the night in relative peace.”

  “That was my first one in a while,” Sybil said. She felt about as groggy as her voice made her sound, despite only having been asleep for such a short period of time. “It has been a week or two at least.”

  “Do you wish to discuss it?”

  Sybil considered his question for a moment. Sometimes she told Vlad about her nightmares, while other times she kept them to herself. Some of them were very repetitive, and Sybil usually decided to spare her mentor the details of the many near-identical dreams that her mind had conjured over the last several months.

  But this one was different. This one was new. She decided that it deserved to be discussed.

  “It was about Gareth this time,” Sybil said. She paused for a brief moment in order to decide if she should go on. She ultimately decided that she had no choice but to do so. “My elder brother.”

  Vlad frowned at this. “I was not aware that you had a sibling.”

  “I don’t,” Sybil said, “at least not any longer. He was killed while out hunting with our father many years ago. They had thought the deer had perished, but as Gareth went to grab the supposed carcass by its antlers, the thing suddenly reared its head, and… well, I suppose you can imagine what happened next.”

  Her gaze drifted from her mentor’s eyes down to the seat of the fire as she told her story. She watched as the blaze continued to squirm and twist with the force of its own searing heat. “It is difficult to believe that he was younger than I am now when he died. Just a boy, really. Our father never told me the details of that tragic day, and I am eternally grateful for that, but this left ample room for my own mind to fill in those gaps. I’ve often been able to resist these temptations during the waking hours, but night has always been a different matter. Suffice it to say that the nightmares I’ve been having since the day you and I met are hardly my first sleeping torments. It has been such a long time since I’ve dreamt about Gareth, though. I was not sure that I ever would again.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that such an upsetting event has returned to haunt your unconscious mind, my apprentice,” Vlad said after allowing a brief pause, during which the fire filled the silence between them. “Dreaming about a strigoi may have been preferable to being reminded of that terrible day.”

  “Oh, but I did dream about a strigoi,” Sybil said. “In my dream I watched the deer impale him, as I have and as it has so many times after I have drifted off to sleep. But this time… this time Gareth did not stay dead. This time he was back on his feet and taking our father to the ground before the man even understood what was happening. I awoke before Gareth could sink his fangs into our father’s throat, but I am certain that such a conclusion was imminent. The nightmare could not have ended any other way.” She allowed her gaze to drift from the fire back up to her mentor’s eyes. “My dreams have never combined both events before, but it is as you said to that strigoi in Bravana—I suppose there is a first for all things.”

  No words passed between them for close to a minute. They sat in silence listening to the sound of the fire until Sybil spoke again. “I’ve meant to tell you about Gareth for some time now, but I’ve never mustered the strength to do so until tonight. We hardly ever spoke of him after he died—to the extent that his name almost felt forbidden in our home. I suppose that same reluctance has a hold on me even now.”

  “It is your business what you share with me, Sybil,” Vlad said. “I may be your mentor, but you are still entitled to your own secrets, just as I am entitled to mine.”

  “I know,” she said, “but some secrets are meant to be shared, and I believe that this is one of them.” She allowed another brief pause before she went on. “My father began training me to be a hunter shortly after Gareth’s death, more out of necessity than for any other reason. With Gareth gone, he needed my assistance. And although my father would never have said as much, I could immediately tell how inferior I was to my brother. I was a much slower learner. I could not carry as much weight as he could, and I grew tired more quickly. I struggled with the concept of taking a life in a way that he never had. I loath to even admit this, but I had actually begun to resent my deceased brother for leaving me in a position where I could so easily compare myself to him. It was incredibly foolish for me to feel that way, but I could not help it. Those feelings were inescapable, and they continued to grow in their intensity the longer I saw myself as his inferior.

  “But then one day I grew to be older than him. A time came when I had trained under my father for longer than Gareth had, and I became a better shot with a crossbow than he had ever been. I thought this would finally relieve me of the inferiority that so terribly tortured my heart, but instead this feeling only became worse. For I knew that if Gareth was still alive—had he been allowed to mature into an adult—then he would have continued to outclass me in almost every conceivable way. It is only because of his premature death that I was ever able to surpass him. And I despite that fact. I hate it so very, very much.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Vlad sat thinking about her words for a long while. Sybil was not sure if he would ever speak, but then his words broke through silence and overpowered the gentle crackling of the fire. “You are burdened with so much torment for someone so young,” he said. “But I suppose it is quite common for us to compare ourselves to others during our youth.”

  “I would like to believe that these feelings have faded entirely,” she said, “and they largely have, but they still continue to make themselves known sometimes. Sometimes, when I lay in my bedroll unable to sleep, I find myself wondering if Gareth could have rescued our parents from Three-Fang. I find myself wondering if he could have succeeded where I failed.”

  “Almost certainly not,” Vlad said matter-of-factly, without a moment’s hesitation. “Your survival alone was an incredibly gracious gift from the Mother—one that you fought so desperately hard to earn. And in fact, had he been with your parents when that strigoi came for them, it is likely that your grief for him would be far more fresh than it currently is. Whether by deer or by vampyre, your brother would have met his end. Of this, you can be certain.”

  His words were blunt and maybe even a bit harsh on Sybil’s ears, but they brought her an odd sense of comfort. She smiled. “Well, then I suppose that settles it, does it not?”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “nothing is truly settled until your heart allows it to be so. So do not think too poorly of yourself if these feelings of yours continue to persist—and do not be afraid to voice them to me, should you ever wish to do so.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Albescu,” she said. “I shall do my best to remember that.”

  “See to it that you do,” he said, “just as you should see to it that you manage to find some decent sleep tonight. We’ve a long day in store tomorrow, and we both need our rest for what lies ahead.”

  She nodded. “Indeed we do. Something tells me that it will be a far longer day than I’d care for.”

  “Were that we could enjoy this coastal visit of ours in a state of carefree leisure,” he said. “Unfortunately, we are on an errand for the Goddess—and She will not allow us a moment’s peace until Her task is seen to its very end.”

  ___

  Sybil was not yet used to the acrid stench of that horrible, deathly smoke. It was the first city that she and her mentor had been to together where Plague was rampant enough to warrant an ever-burning pyre of victims in its center. When the smell struck her, it took all of her willpower to hold onto Elpis’ reins and not leap out of the coach so she could vomit into the sand. She and Vlad pulled their Plague masks over their faces in response to the worsening smoke. The barrier helped to block out some of the odor, but its pungent suggestion continued to linger well within reach of her nostrils. She did not know if she would ever be able to adjust to such a horrible smell; she did not know if she would ever want to.

  As they drew closer to Dusktide, its details came more into view. A half-crumbled arch, devoid of its portcullis, was all that remained of what used to be a stone wall surrounding the city. The lack of a barrier allowed Sybil to see past this decaying structure and into the heart of the city beyond. Dusktide existed as a series of crude, messily placed buildings that dotted a dusty, neglected street made of packed earth and sand. There appeared to be little rhyme or reason to the layout of the structures, which looked to be largely constructed of old, faded lumber. A steep cliff rose up in the rear of the city, which looked to be traversable via a series of winding steps leading up to an old lighthouse. The lighthouse, like much of the city, looked to be in a state of abandonment and slow decay, its tower crumbling from years of neglect after it was left to suffer the repeated lashes of the salty wind. Smoke from the city’s pyre billowed up toward the lighthouse and reached the heavens beyond it, not dissipating until it had stretched well into the floating clouds.

  As they approached the ruinous gate, Sybil noticed that the space in front of it was devoid of any guards. Nobody blocked the way in or out of the city; nobody was concerned about who came and went. The earthen, sandy road leading up to the gate was infested by creeping beachgrass and thick patches of saltbush which made their journey into the city that much more difficult as long blades of grass and reaching hands of bramble got caught in the coach’s wheels. Twisting stretches of ivy grew along the crumbling archway, which suggested that nobody had bothered to rid the thing of the overgrowth in quite some time.

  Sybil brought the coach to a stop just outside of the gate and shared a glance with her mentor. Had they not been wearing their masks, he would have witnessed her disconcerted frown. “It looks as though a rapture struck here years ago,” she said. “I struggle to believe that anybody could still live in this city—even the undead.”

  “It is certainly one of the worst that I have seen,” Vlad said. “Is it not a marvel how easily our advanced societies can crumble away to nothing just as soon as the drive to maintain them is gone?”

  “I dislike the notion of staying in this city for very long,” she said. “I hope that we can find this Ludovich and be finished with him quickly so that we never have to see this sorry place again.”

  “Speaking of which,” Vlad said as he studied the abandoned gate, “I am more than a bit concerned by the lack of sentries here to greet us. Even the most deplorable of cities typically have somebody on duty at the gate. It is often the city guard who I task with bringing me the physician that I need to speak with. Without their presence, I suppose we will just have to search for the physician on our own.”

  “Assuming there is one here in the first place.”

  The Plague doctor nodded. “Aye. We must consider that this city is in a miserable enough state that it no longer even possesses a practitioner of medicine. That said, there is at the very least enough infrastructure here to maintain a burning pyre of Plague victims, so perhaps this city is not as apocalyptic as it appears to be.”

  “I suppose there is only one way to know for sure,” Sybil said as she looked ahead of them at the looming arch. She felt compelled to urge Elpis through the ruined gate, despite no walls blocking any route into the city that she could have otherwise chosen to take. Part of her wondered if the arch, finally surrendering to its neglect, would collapse on top of them as they passed through it. At least then they would have been spared encountering the unknowable horrors that certainly awaited them on the other side.

  Sybil shared one last glance with her mentor before she turned her gaze forward and willed Elpis toward the arch. Together the three of them took their first steps into the waiting city of Dusktide.