Nominus Inferni
The moment I stepped off the private jet, I felt alive again. A surge of life, like electricity, buzzed through my spine and as the limo rolled down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. And at the thousands of lights lining the rue as it led to the Arc de Triomphe, I felt tears spring to my eyes from a happiness that I had left here when I was instructed to go to America. Only Sydney would share in my private moment, mesmerized as well by the intoxicating song of of the city, my city, Paris. Unlike what I would have you believe, I have very few attachments in my unlife, there is nothing I truly need from this material world, if I were to speak honestly, but this city…yes, this city, it is as much a life force to me as is the vitae I consume. Sydney chuckles when I tell him that I could be a better monster here, as this place brightens up my disposition considerably. It is like taking the waters--cleansing and soothing. "Arrêté. Arrêté!" I demand of the driver, getting out in the middle of the street to walk. Sydney trails behind me slowly, hands in pocket, watching the transformation of the woman in front of him. The laurels of hidden sadness fall away, a genuine smile beams somewhere from within her soul. Genuine. At home. At peace. My arms lightly sway at my sides, splayed open to feel the caress of the breeze. Quickly, I dab away the tinted tear from the corner of my mind. Concentrated happiness.
But then Sydney sees my arms drop back to my sides like lead weights. Turning over my shoulder to him, he sees hard eyes and understands them. I closed myself off from feeling anything. "We must hurry. There is work to do and we haven't much time."
Marc, should I even be blest by a glimpse of him if he is even here and not in Vienna, would be pleased by my haste. After all, if he wanted nothing from me than there was no point in entertaining me. Indeed, he keeps me overseas, I believe, because he has realized that his prodigal Childe was taking measures of the size of his crown for herself. A barded smirk crowns my features instead. He was not wrong. He hardly ever was.
By the time that I reached Les Invalides, I have tried the patience of my Louboutin's. Still, I press on, for there is precious little time to be wasted. Heels echoing down the corridor, I blow a chaste sarcastic kiss at Napoleon's tomb. "Mwwwah." They had once said that if we had lost WWII, we would have all been speaking German. I am not without my biases, my own fleeting thoughts were amused to think that much of the world still had tendrils of French curled around it even before the Germans drove their beastly military might to the heart of France. Quickly now, I push open a solid marble door craved into the wall in such a design as not to be noticed and delve down a corridor into the bowels of the building. Sydney and my other ghouls watch the building, my magic cloaks me as to be invisible. For this, right here, is a dangerous game.
Down the corridor into the deep earth I travel until the air grows dense and the sound of my heels is dampened by a ground gone soft. My heart thuds in my chest as the marble gives away to concrete, the pristine walls give away to dirt, rot and decay. Another door is closed in front of me. Its guard still dressed in the military fashions of yesteryear, festering with mold that similarly melded into its skin and its face a map of damnation and the absence of God's pity. Andreas. Nosferatu.
"Bonsoir, let me pass." I say haughty, digging in my purse for his boon and tuning off my sense of smell for my own benefit. "It has been a while since you have come this way." It said slowly, trying to get used to its own voice and still cringing at how loud my own had sounded even though I had been kind enough to half-whisper this time. "Twenty years. A mere drop in the river of immortality."
"Have you a token for me?" His voice was deceiving, I heard it in the undertones. He only wished to appear frail and senile like an old man. I unfurl my hand, the petite vial dipped in gold with a gold foil seal lay against my palm. I kept my hand as taunt and straight as possible, like a child feeding a horse that was scared to get her hand bitten by its snapping jaw. Here I was simply offended by his long claw-like nails which saw decades of dried dirt and blood compressed like the strata of the earth within them.
The gold vial seemed so out of place, but I always showed him preference for he was bound to the door that led to my secrets. "It is from America." That interested him. He who had not seen beyond these walls for decades but who somehow knew of the world. "Los Angeles."
He opened the door, the key composed from the length and size and pattern of his nails as they plugged this lock and then that one. The audible clicks chimed like a hideous song that only he enjoyed. Walking through the door without hesitating, I look over my shoulder only to glance at the vial and add, "She was the most beautiful woman there." I asked no questions for I was certain that I would not get an answer.
It was nearly a mile that I walked in that darkness, using only my knowledge to guide me toward the dim light at the end of the journey. Another door opened, guarded by my hideous demon bound "children". "Close the door." I instructed shortly, before I corrected myself and repeated it in French. The mud-like chamber was lit by torch light, but the safes in the stone were craved into the very foundation of Paris, where the energy from the heart of the city pulsated down as if through an artery and into this rock. I channeled that energy into a spell that protected the safes that I had installed. It was a beautiful ode to something borne from the earth, natural stone, chiseled into a beautiful keepsake boxes by ingenuity and twenty some-odd Toreador, whose skulls sadly do not line the molding like a lovely border for they ashed instead.
I cut into my palm, pressing it into the lock and watched as it dripped down into the seal. The earth groaned sleepily and moaned with the first taste of a libation that came less frequently with my absence. Stone and gold clicked and clacked as I stepped away, watching artwork in motion, the lines of rock rolling and moving as the delicate looking gold patterns encased it. A smaller chamber opened and I stepped within that, heart in my chest now as I felt the pull of the item I sought out. Opening up the wooden gold inlaid doors to a smaller room that was the size of several walk-in closets, I stepped into one last room and glanced at the rows of forbidden books lost to time and promised to others. Slowly, my eyes glowed as they looked toward the end of the row to a book encased in glass, gold and a haze of my dried blood. Should anyone other than myself touch it, they would burn for the book from the inside out. No one had touched it. It was lost to the world. Slowly, with the reverence of a thousand saints, I walked toward it, knowing that it lived and breathed as any human. The taint of its pages nearly making me reel from the heady power contained within. The book knew what was in my heart and therefore, it liked me little from keeping me from its master.
Finally, my eyes looked down at it and lifted the glass lid. A blast of air from an ethereal roar nearly sent me sprawling into the wall. But I show no fear. Only awe. Respect.
The Nominus Inferni.
Should Aidan ever come to know that I have found the book that I promised him centuries ago in return for his help to lift myself back onto the pyramid after my shaming at the feet of the Tremere (nay, I was lower than that--perhaps as low as the excrement that would fertilize the earth would our physiology had allowed them to retain that unclean mortal quality), I am certain he would not hesitate to kill me. Not even the lengths of what I had to go through to attain this book, finally finding it and snatching it out of the fires during a Nazi book burning "party" after infiltrating the Third Reich and soiling my body with the stolen uniform of the Nazi's, would soften his resolve to end my unlife.
I hid it.
From him.
My fingers caressed the pages, it nearly burned the tips of my fingers with its pulsating infernal evil.
Should he ever attain this book, I knew that he would have what he needed to complete his transformation. And while I am not a moral woman, while I do not care for the humans of this world or its destruction, I fear that with this last piece, Aidan would be lost to himself completely, but more importantly, he would be lost to me. He invokes the highest demon unto himself and then what? The world ends and then what? Infernalists are so short sighted, forgetting to see trouble as trouble instead of risk. I am much more grounded. I would follow him to hell, if there was a throne to sit on, but I am certain that his time has not come yet. Not with Marc watching so closely. Not with the Council's eyes cast upon him from the shadows. Not with my uncertainties still abounding. Not when I have not secured my own place among the victors, yet. I want him to rise to his laurels, but only when the path is clear and only when he will not leave me to the devices of the world. The world of the Tremere. For unlike the blood I feast on, he is really the only soul that keeps me alive in Marc's inner sanctum where unlife is devoid of any 'life'.
I thumb through the pages, swearing that the book hisses at me in some foreign tongue I do not understand. The page I try to lift suddenly feels heavy as if it weighs several tons and does not want me to see it. "Stop it. It is for him that I seek knowledge." I said the same thing once. Then I had been lying and it did not let me lift its page although it granted me a boon for my sin. This time, it swore into my depths and saw that I told the truth. The page became feather light again and I turned it, eyes flickering across the words.
Reading the arcane text, it led my finger to the passage I needed, to the True Name of the beast we sought. It's picture made me shudder with delight, making warm some places which were better reserved for other pursuits. A jagged smile edged along my lips as I committed it to memory, the letters rising off the pages like incense smoke and into my brain. Ooof. But that weighed heavily on my shoulders. Dark and slick, its name coated my soul. But for my mentor, it was a worthy pursuit.
I thought of Tommy and felt light on my feet again in my darkness. To kill one with the energy of a god and having him reamed of his pulp like some spent fruit for our purposes, was also a worthy pursuit.
I placed the hood over the book again, coating the glass with more of my blood and uttering the incantations that would protect it. I dared not turn my back to it, but walked backwards slowly, watching as I broke the fine ebb of dark power that surrounded it like a mist or some wispy embryonic sack and shut the door. Its infernal protecter gazed at me, I kissed its forehead fondly. Bones surrounded it on the ground in piles. It was a very efficient hunter, this infernal being of mine.
I reeked of the power of the Nominus Inferni. It tainted my aura, my soul, my heart. It tainted me so much that I could not simply get on the jet and go back to the hell of LA. Aidan would know the moment that I set foot on the tarmac that I had found the book. No, I had to wait for the taint to leave. I had to lay low as not to gain the attention of my clan. No one had known that I have come. And so, what better way to cleanse myself than by losing myself in the sparkle of the city, whose gleaming aura brushes off on every soul? With the True Name of the demon in mind, I left the catacombs and made my way back to La Ville-Lumière.
But then Sydney sees my arms drop back to my sides like lead weights. Turning over my shoulder to him, he sees hard eyes and understands them. I closed myself off from feeling anything. "We must hurry. There is work to do and we haven't much time."
Marc, should I even be blest by a glimpse of him if he is even here and not in Vienna, would be pleased by my haste. After all, if he wanted nothing from me than there was no point in entertaining me. Indeed, he keeps me overseas, I believe, because he has realized that his prodigal Childe was taking measures of the size of his crown for herself. A barded smirk crowns my features instead. He was not wrong. He hardly ever was.
By the time that I reached Les Invalides, I have tried the patience of my Louboutin's. Still, I press on, for there is precious little time to be wasted. Heels echoing down the corridor, I blow a chaste sarcastic kiss at Napoleon's tomb. "Mwwwah." They had once said that if we had lost WWII, we would have all been speaking German. I am not without my biases, my own fleeting thoughts were amused to think that much of the world still had tendrils of French curled around it even before the Germans drove their beastly military might to the heart of France. Quickly now, I push open a solid marble door craved into the wall in such a design as not to be noticed and delve down a corridor into the bowels of the building. Sydney and my other ghouls watch the building, my magic cloaks me as to be invisible. For this, right here, is a dangerous game.
Down the corridor into the deep earth I travel until the air grows dense and the sound of my heels is dampened by a ground gone soft. My heart thuds in my chest as the marble gives away to concrete, the pristine walls give away to dirt, rot and decay. Another door is closed in front of me. Its guard still dressed in the military fashions of yesteryear, festering with mold that similarly melded into its skin and its face a map of damnation and the absence of God's pity. Andreas. Nosferatu.
"Bonsoir, let me pass." I say haughty, digging in my purse for his boon and tuning off my sense of smell for my own benefit. "It has been a while since you have come this way." It said slowly, trying to get used to its own voice and still cringing at how loud my own had sounded even though I had been kind enough to half-whisper this time. "Twenty years. A mere drop in the river of immortality."
"Have you a token for me?" His voice was deceiving, I heard it in the undertones. He only wished to appear frail and senile like an old man. I unfurl my hand, the petite vial dipped in gold with a gold foil seal lay against my palm. I kept my hand as taunt and straight as possible, like a child feeding a horse that was scared to get her hand bitten by its snapping jaw. Here I was simply offended by his long claw-like nails which saw decades of dried dirt and blood compressed like the strata of the earth within them.
The gold vial seemed so out of place, but I always showed him preference for he was bound to the door that led to my secrets. "It is from America." That interested him. He who had not seen beyond these walls for decades but who somehow knew of the world. "Los Angeles."
He opened the door, the key composed from the length and size and pattern of his nails as they plugged this lock and then that one. The audible clicks chimed like a hideous song that only he enjoyed. Walking through the door without hesitating, I look over my shoulder only to glance at the vial and add, "She was the most beautiful woman there." I asked no questions for I was certain that I would not get an answer.
It was nearly a mile that I walked in that darkness, using only my knowledge to guide me toward the dim light at the end of the journey. Another door opened, guarded by my hideous demon bound "children". "Close the door." I instructed shortly, before I corrected myself and repeated it in French. The mud-like chamber was lit by torch light, but the safes in the stone were craved into the very foundation of Paris, where the energy from the heart of the city pulsated down as if through an artery and into this rock. I channeled that energy into a spell that protected the safes that I had installed. It was a beautiful ode to something borne from the earth, natural stone, chiseled into a beautiful keepsake boxes by ingenuity and twenty some-odd Toreador, whose skulls sadly do not line the molding like a lovely border for they ashed instead.
I cut into my palm, pressing it into the lock and watched as it dripped down into the seal. The earth groaned sleepily and moaned with the first taste of a libation that came less frequently with my absence. Stone and gold clicked and clacked as I stepped away, watching artwork in motion, the lines of rock rolling and moving as the delicate looking gold patterns encased it. A smaller chamber opened and I stepped within that, heart in my chest now as I felt the pull of the item I sought out. Opening up the wooden gold inlaid doors to a smaller room that was the size of several walk-in closets, I stepped into one last room and glanced at the rows of forbidden books lost to time and promised to others. Slowly, my eyes glowed as they looked toward the end of the row to a book encased in glass, gold and a haze of my dried blood. Should anyone other than myself touch it, they would burn for the book from the inside out. No one had touched it. It was lost to the world. Slowly, with the reverence of a thousand saints, I walked toward it, knowing that it lived and breathed as any human. The taint of its pages nearly making me reel from the heady power contained within. The book knew what was in my heart and therefore, it liked me little from keeping me from its master.
Finally, my eyes looked down at it and lifted the glass lid. A blast of air from an ethereal roar nearly sent me sprawling into the wall. But I show no fear. Only awe. Respect.
The Nominus Inferni.
Should Aidan ever come to know that I have found the book that I promised him centuries ago in return for his help to lift myself back onto the pyramid after my shaming at the feet of the Tremere (nay, I was lower than that--perhaps as low as the excrement that would fertilize the earth would our physiology had allowed them to retain that unclean mortal quality), I am certain he would not hesitate to kill me. Not even the lengths of what I had to go through to attain this book, finally finding it and snatching it out of the fires during a Nazi book burning "party" after infiltrating the Third Reich and soiling my body with the stolen uniform of the Nazi's, would soften his resolve to end my unlife.
I hid it.
From him.
My fingers caressed the pages, it nearly burned the tips of my fingers with its pulsating infernal evil.
Should he ever attain this book, I knew that he would have what he needed to complete his transformation. And while I am not a moral woman, while I do not care for the humans of this world or its destruction, I fear that with this last piece, Aidan would be lost to himself completely, but more importantly, he would be lost to me. He invokes the highest demon unto himself and then what? The world ends and then what? Infernalists are so short sighted, forgetting to see trouble as trouble instead of risk. I am much more grounded. I would follow him to hell, if there was a throne to sit on, but I am certain that his time has not come yet. Not with Marc watching so closely. Not with the Council's eyes cast upon him from the shadows. Not with my uncertainties still abounding. Not when I have not secured my own place among the victors, yet. I want him to rise to his laurels, but only when the path is clear and only when he will not leave me to the devices of the world. The world of the Tremere. For unlike the blood I feast on, he is really the only soul that keeps me alive in Marc's inner sanctum where unlife is devoid of any 'life'.
I thumb through the pages, swearing that the book hisses at me in some foreign tongue I do not understand. The page I try to lift suddenly feels heavy as if it weighs several tons and does not want me to see it. "Stop it. It is for him that I seek knowledge." I said the same thing once. Then I had been lying and it did not let me lift its page although it granted me a boon for my sin. This time, it swore into my depths and saw that I told the truth. The page became feather light again and I turned it, eyes flickering across the words.
Reading the arcane text, it led my finger to the passage I needed, to the True Name of the beast we sought. It's picture made me shudder with delight, making warm some places which were better reserved for other pursuits. A jagged smile edged along my lips as I committed it to memory, the letters rising off the pages like incense smoke and into my brain. Ooof. But that weighed heavily on my shoulders. Dark and slick, its name coated my soul. But for my mentor, it was a worthy pursuit.
I thought of Tommy and felt light on my feet again in my darkness. To kill one with the energy of a god and having him reamed of his pulp like some spent fruit for our purposes, was also a worthy pursuit.
I placed the hood over the book again, coating the glass with more of my blood and uttering the incantations that would protect it. I dared not turn my back to it, but walked backwards slowly, watching as I broke the fine ebb of dark power that surrounded it like a mist or some wispy embryonic sack and shut the door. Its infernal protecter gazed at me, I kissed its forehead fondly. Bones surrounded it on the ground in piles. It was a very efficient hunter, this infernal being of mine.
I reeked of the power of the Nominus Inferni. It tainted my aura, my soul, my heart. It tainted me so much that I could not simply get on the jet and go back to the hell of LA. Aidan would know the moment that I set foot on the tarmac that I had found the book. No, I had to wait for the taint to leave. I had to lay low as not to gain the attention of my clan. No one had known that I have come. And so, what better way to cleanse myself than by losing myself in the sparkle of the city, whose gleaming aura brushes off on every soul? With the True Name of the demon in mind, I left the catacombs and made my way back to La Ville-Lumière.