Where We Fall 8/14 (Legacy of Kain, Janos Audron/Vorador, NC17)

[emerald_embers]

The flight was uneasy; he could not shake the feeling he was doing something wrong in leaving Vorador behind, but the human had insisted and moreover, was quite right to stay as far away from other vampires as possible.

Smoke still rose from the Citadel in steady peaks, the smoke of industry rather than accident, and Janos made to land in what had been his room after a careful look over the wards; while the Citadel might look normal, there was nothing to say he would still be safe or welcomed there. And while dropping his bags was a relief, he still kept an eye on his pike, ready to seize it should the presence he detected with instincts he'd learnt to trust better than his eyes opt to reveal itself.

Herself, rather, emerging from the shadows.

Sianne's talent with dark magic had survived their curse, it seemed. She raised one eyebrow, naturally elegant, corners of her lips twisted in amusement and making a grimace of the new scar across them. "You took your time coming back," she began. "I suppose I should thank you for keeping your promise. I'd have struggled finding a decent replacement General. Again." She tilted her head, frowning. "How did you survive?"

"A friend," Janos replied. "He assisted in my getting the hunger under control."

"Only you would consider yourself a threat," Sianne replied, smirking a little more, fangs flashing for a brief moment before she hid them away. Janos had the feeling those fangs had seen more usage than usual of recent. "How altruistic of this friend. What brought you back?"

"I'm still the guardian of the Reaver. And owed burials to my friends, if that was necessary."

"Most of the corpses have been dealt with, though I'm sure someone could bring you a shovel. I doubt any of the corpses will interest you given Samael is still alive. Making himself useful too, given the situation with the children."

Janos let out a breath he didn't recall holding, could not hide the slight swallow as he diverted the conversation away from his friend – and God, he had to know what happened to him, it was bad enough to have lost Shia – moved onto the other point of curiosity. "What situation would that be?"

"Well, we've had some… interesting developments," Sianne explained, scratching the back of her neck. "Those nine children who just coincidentally happened to be born moments after the Pillars were raised? They seem to be the last of our kind to be born. No new pregnancies – even in the Orlaith family, and their women usually get pregnant from being sneezed at. Not to mention the fact the children are growing up at an unnatural speed, or that one of the boys has started blazing light." Janos couldn't help the expression he pulled, incredulant. Blazing light? "I wish there were some other way to describe it. We have to swaddle him despite his age - despite the fact he's built like a seven-year old. It's near blinding, and no one has explained it yet; no way to control it has been found and all we're left to do is clothe him thickly and hope for the best. At least it doesn't seem to be doing him any harm."

"What of the other children?" Janos questioned, unable to hide his curiosity even if the urge to look for Samael was growing until he could almost taste the need to do so on his tongue. "Aging aside, are they also different?"

"It varies. Some of them seem normal but there's something… odd, about some of them. As if… it's almost as if they can see and understand more than they should despite being children. They communicate like babes, all squeals and sobbing, but their eyes are… strange."

Janos nodded, promised himself that he would look in on those children later; but for the time being, he had to know what had happened to Samael and Shianna.



For a guardian of death, one who would have known about the passing of any of his friends, Samael still seemed overjoyed when Janos finally came across him in the nursery of children who would never have been thought of as babes scarcely out of swaddling clothes. It didn't take much deduction to work out who amongst the children had been blazing light, given he was wrapped in robes thick as bandages and his face still seemed to glow through the small gap allowed for his eyes.

Even if the child looked more unusual than any he'd seen - all the children built unnaturally mature for their age - Janos couldn't help but scarcely notice; Samael's joy at the reunion was a shared emotion.

After the initial embrace Samael took Janos aside and sat him down. The hard news was not as hard as expected – Janos had thought the toll would be far worse, and while the list of their dead acquaintances was still far longer than that of their surviving friends, it was something to hold onto. Vorador had sparked hope, and the truth from Samael's lips seemed enough to rekindle it in full.

He had good news for once; all that was left was to reclaim the source of all original hope and to guard it with his life.



Shianna expected him. That was no surprise; she had long shown traits of her mother and Janos had suspected that as she blossomed into a woman her skills would develop with her.

"Good evening," he began on seeing her, unable to shake his own relief at her presence even if her stony expression removing any desire to placate her further with how are you or I'm glad you survived. "May I -"

"It's outside," Shianna cut across. "Move the rocking chair. There's a loose floorboard hiding it."

"Thank you." The air seemed close, uneasy inside the room, so he headed outside to retrieve the Reaver, fought the urge to sigh in relief on seeing it again. The handle still sat comfortably in his hand, gave him the sense of there being a point to the suffering his kind had gone through in recent times; he'd never stopped believing, but having a focus for the belief made life so much easier.

"Anything else, while you're here?"

Janos thought, trying to think of something to say. He'd not seen her since her mother's death, not seen her move in here, and it was still difficult to think of her entirely as an adult. "I'm sorry for what happened to your mother."

Something shifted in her face; not quite a softening, more an understanding than anything else. "I can not deny that I thought about throwing the damned sword into the ravine more than once," she began, glaring at the focus of her frustrations. "But it was her decision to die for it."

Janos knew better than to take that as forgiveness, but it was a step in the right direction.



As the children grew, and they did grow so eerily fast, it became more and more evident that their abilities paralleled those of the Pillars; new magic grew with them, magic that only they seemed able to wield, powers that would not ordinarily have been imagined. But for all it should have been frightening, there was a hope blossoming now at long last, the same hope that had seemed stolen when their victory over the Hylden was tainted by their curse. God might not be speaking but for all his anger at the curse, his pleasure at having the Hylden swept from the land could be seen in the very earth itself; there was life now where there had been barren wastelands and desert, lush greenery outside the sickly heat of the forests; wildlife seemed to be blooming and those who had survived to see all this were at last starting to feel something close to victory, something close to justification of their suffering. They could not bear children to share the slowly rising feeling of relief and happiness, but the sense of new life was there regardless.

The children of the Pillars appeared to have more to do with this than anyone had expected. Their happiness seemed tied into the land itself, a blessing when the time and dimension-oriented children grew close, a curse whenever the energist's distress at his condition heightened. They were all different from other vampires, but the energist in particular was physically marked as different.



Rebuilding the Citadel was an easier task than one might have expected given the human village had been cleared out and abandoned; rather than stripping the forest or quarry, wood and stone could be obtained pre-prepared by dismantling the emptied houses.

And while rebuilding was a damn sight better than waging war, Janos still found himself wishing once in a while to return to books and studies; maybe even learn a little more about how the ritual to raise the Pillars had worked, or to start identifying the root cause of their curse. It was a long shot, but if it was the right sort of curse – and how bizarre, to be thinking of curses in terms of right and wrong – then it could be remedied, perhaps even lifted with the right sacrifices. The elders had mostly died in the original massacres, leaving the Citadel under something close to martial law, so it would be up to Janos and Sianne to organise any official research into the curse; if somehow the Hylden had persuaded God to damn them, there had to be a way to appease him once more.

Even if his priorities lay in helping with the repairs and restoration of the Citadel, assisting in the restoration of sanctity to the abandoned forges of their elders and to the temple before its sealing, Janos still found himself making time to study the curse. Stolen minutes at the end of a day's labour, looking over scraps of prophecy and what little notes on Hylden magic they had. Without the Hylden to question or watch, tracking what they had done was nigh-on impossible, but finding a place to start was a task in and of itself, especially given the way night seemed to demand a wandering imagination rather than something logical and structured.

It was strange to think of his home in Uschtenheim as occupied, whenever his mind strayed to ice and fire and something other than the settling dust of the Citadel. His thoughts often casually wandered in that direction, though he'd scarcely given thought to how Vorador was doing – not out of callousness or because he didn't care, but purely because he had assumed Vorador could take care of himself. When he thought of Vorador in Uschtenheim he pictured the human hunting deer in the surrounding forests, or mountain goats, perhaps even retrieving frozen meat from Janos' stores if he'd discovered them. The possibility of disaster simply didn't occur to him, perhaps because his thoughts would only normally wander over to Vorador when a more obscene side of his nature craved satisfaction shortly before he drifted off to sleep.



It was likely this thinking of Vorador as quite safe and secure in Uschtenheim that made it such an alarming if pleasant surprise when the human made an abrupt return to his life. Janos had frowned at the out of place stone on his balcony floor, kneeling to pick it up before turning it over in his hands, recognising the colour and structure quickly; this was rock from Uschtenheim's springs. But where had it -

Guessing quickly how the rock had ended up there, Janos straightened up and looked out over the balcony's edge. No signs of life yet, but he knew different, kept his eyes locked on the forest before biting his tongue and smiling. The human village might have been abandoned and left to ruin, but it had never been fully demolished; with a quick leap and flap of his wings, Janos took to the skies and headed for a too familiar, long unvisited hill.

Vorador wasn't exactly stealthy but didn't need to be; there were strict regulations about attacking humans visiting the area because as much as repercussions were bound to happen over feeding, setting out a no-go area would outright provoke another war. Still, not everyone obeyed the rules, and Janos could not help feeling a little unsettled at the human's lack of subtlety.

"I did not think Uschtenheim could have a winter," Vorador announced, enough furs scattered across the floor that Janos suspected he must have looked like a bizarre wild animal when wearing them for his travels. "I think I have the right to call you insane for living there voluntarily."

Janos smirked, unable to hide the slightly smug pleasure of being able to cope with the cold where his human friend could not, before settling down on the fur-covered floor given the bench had long been removed for repairs in the Citadel. "Only if I can share the right, given you decided against moving back to an area occupied by humans."

Vorador snorted in turn before joining Janos on the floor and, forgoing any attempts at seduction, shoving him back to lie down on the furs. "I'm not moving in yet. Don't think I've missed the fact the rest of your kind could care less about whose necks they sink their fangs into." What had been a relatively stony expression turned into a grin as Vorador nipped at Janos' lips. "It's been too long since I slept in a bed you warmed."

Janos laughed despite himself, fidgeting to get his wings comfortable before spreading his legs, tensing his thighs against Vorador's waist as the human moved to lie on top of him. "I thought you would have found others in my absence."

"That I did," Vorador replied, voice level and honest, lips travelling down the nape of Janos' neck as clever fingers parted robes and drew down trousers. "Even so. A warm body is not always enough."

There were words hidden in that sentence and Vorador's eyes that could not be spoken with ease, and Janos let them pass by, replied with a press of his lips once Vorador's own were again within range. Vorador was not his; he was not Vorador's; but for all the lack of possessiveness, they still needed one another. He could spend the night here.



No one commented on his absence.

As no one wished to discuss feeding.



Vorador's visit could only be brief, a stop on the way to Freeport where for all the wet weather at least it was consistent in mildness, but it helped secure the feeling that the world was settling down around him. Regardless of their unfortunate position as prey humans seemed to be thriving, traffic between Freeport and Meridian a near constant and all the more protected for it, human guards lining the tracks. And that was an education in and of itself; watching trade expand the range of foodstuffs humans ate, leading Janos to wonder when he had last cooked anything; last tasted anything other than blood. It was strange to know what other foods tasted like and still not miss them, even those that had been his favourites.

Turning his thoughts towards blood and the thirst did return his thoughts to the curse and its study; given its nature, the way it ran through and through with a crippling effect normal hunger never managed, it felt like a physical force. He had to find out somehow.



Samael disagreed; likely because he had always been deeply rooted in reality and the present, though perhaps his concerns were also fired by their surroundings, the memories associated with them. He had not asked for him to come here, wondered to himself why his friend had followed; the Pillars were a symbol of hope but their raising still held a great feeling of loss and he knew full well who felt it worse. "You should not go."

"I've read Kylian's notes until they turned transparent. It had nothing to do with us, and Meridian is inaccessible. There has to be something left behind."

"And the danger?"

Janos shook his head. "We heal faster than ever before. I'm not afraid of the corruption underneath."

"That is not what I meant," Samael corrected, raising an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want to know what the Hylden did to us?"

"I have to," Janos replied, turning his back to the cliff's edge and looking at the view. Nothing conspicuous stood out, but he knew full well the direction he was facing and what laid in its path.

He could not head off yet; had responsibilities here still. But Avernus waited.



While near every waking moment was devoted to helping in the general running of the Citadel, be it through construction work or helping the nine learn to use magic, the burning urge to leave, to look for the cause of their problems grew with each passing day. It itched beneath his skin, the desire to do something; itched more every time he saw someone coming in with the subtle signs of a hunt. No one wore blood stains with pride, and even those who managed to stay clean always had something haunted in their eyes to counter the flush in their skin.

The fact that adult vampires were struggling with the hunt only made the children worse, unable to cope with their own thirsts when it was so clear that their elders disapproved despite the necessity of satiating the hunger.

In retrospect, the eventual outcome was inevitable; still, when the energy guardian tired of his constant burning, of his status as an outcast in his own mind even amongst his siblings by circumstance, and threw himself on his spear, there was no one who could have claimed to expect it. Worse still, it was not an adult who discovered the suicide first, but Samael's protégé, the death guardian.

Janos wished with all his might he could recall the fallen energy guardian's name, wished he knew anything of the boy aside from his role and talents, but he did not; all he knew was that he'd finally stopped blazing light.



Whatever depression had hit the boy seemed to have spread thickly amongst the other guardians, each child seeming affected by something even deeper than mourning; it was as if his death was near contagious, every mentor struggling to prevent their protégés from following in his example, and not all as successful as one might wish.

The death guardian had seen his friend leave the world and followed scarce moments after, the balance guardian seeming to sense this and joining him. After that it had been hellish and all the children had to be put under constant watch, the dimension and time guardians in particular given both had attempted and both had been caught before they could fall on their spears.

But it was the conflict guardian that Janos had not seen coming, and felt uneasiest on discovering; there were people born to mourn their losses, and those who seemed immune to sorrow.

"Hannah killed herself," Sianne stated, quite plainly and simply. "That selfish, selfish little girl killed herself." Her shoulders stiffened and Janos did not follow, feeling her grief was for herself to express as she wished, and if she had no interest in showing it around him he would not make her do so.

It had not escaped Janos' notice that Hannah had been almost a daughter to Sianne; he knew his fellow General had taken the girl's training to heart even if she had been subtle in hiding her feelings. Sianne had shown no interest in men even before the curse rendered her sterile and likely would never have been a mother by choice, but after being forced to take the girl under her wing due to the need for a conflict guardian to carry the skills her Pillar desired, she had grown attached.



Stopping just short of being abrupt, Janos made it clear to Sianne that he could not and would not be detained any longer; with the Hylden gone and the increased durability their curse offered, Avernus did not pose the same threat it had in years past. He knew he would not be away long; he had to look, had to know. With so few children left and no signs of any more to follow, and the knowledge that despite their increased ability to heal and apparent immunity to disease they could still die, the outlook was dark.

Packing light and resisting the urge to overload on weaponry, the instinct to avoid Avernus ingrained into his system from the years of it having been lost, Janos gathered himself and headed for the long lost city.



The humans had yet to reclaim this part of the world for themselves, and Janos was unsurprised; the western reaches of Nosgoth had been ravaged by the war and Hylden presence, and while several battles had focused on the attempted reclaiming of Avernus during the war, it would have been an outright lie to claim that anyone had wanted to possess the cathedral built there. Avernus was certainly strong against outside attacks, but something wrong had brewed within that place long before it ever became a strategic point for vampires or Hylden. Originally constructed by humans for their own god or gods on ground no vampire would have flown near voluntarily, even before war had ravaged the area and left it temporarily abandoned there had been a sinister air to the place.

Typical that the Hylden had thrived within, and Janos set to exploring the ruins, ever mindful of falling masonry regardless of his apparent invulnerability, seeking out what little had been left behind by Hylden scribes and artists and trying to concentrate despite the dark magic of the place feeling like a physical taint on his skin.

Most was as he'd expected; exaggerations and lies, with some uncomfortable truths hidden in between the propaganda, murals often depicting violence against his race with an unhealthy joy, but there were few new facts hidden here. Most were retellings of the war, which while interesting to see from the other side's point of view, were not what he was looking for.



He had to dig long and dig deep, searching through subterranean tunnels he'd never, ever have visited by choice, before he finally came across the newest set of murals; largely unfinished, rushed works, left for history at the request of their own seers. After the initial panic he made himself study the images again before rereading the script printed along the bottom of the mural, and rereading once more when he refused to believe his eyes or his gut telling him it had to be the truth.

He managed to return to the surface at least before swearing aloud and sobbing as he rested against one of the fractured columns, slamming his fist uselessly into the floor.

Any bodily curse could be lifted; any area, any physical source could be purged and cleansed in the end, regardless of difficulty. Sometimes it was impractical, but never impossible.

A soul curse was rooted in a world where time did not exist. It was eternal.

The Hylden had struck at something they did not truly believe in and they'd struck with force. The only way to undo it would require undoing part of time itself, and with the time guardian still unsettled by the actions of his brethren, he had only one other person to go to who might have some concept of how one could undo time without destroying it.



Shianna's answer was swift enough, her eyes already showing she expected to be unsettled by his question before he opened his mouth, as if she'd almost seen his future and did not wish to look any further, and on being asked about the curse her eyes widened for a moment before she stepped back away from him, her hands balling into fists at her sides.

"Shianna -" he began, wanting to explain, to apologise somehow for the pressure he had put her under as he used to apologise to her mother.

"I'm sorry," she interrupted, almost shaking with a fear that similarly affected him - seers did not fear, they knew, and they regretted, but they did not fear - before walking to the shack's entrance, her hand gripping its frame tightly as if to steady herself. "I can't help you."

"Then there is no cure?"

"Not yet," she said before stiffening again, demanding, "Do not ask me again," and closing the door behind her tight, waving Janos off with a gesture he hadn't seen since Shia's death; a Hylden gesture.

Janos fought the turn in his stomach at the realisation it was a gesture he missed.



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