Chapter Text
Chapter 1: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
There was a slight chill in the air as the first wave of descending boots upon cobblestone echoed throughout the center square of Volterra. A rustling of heavy-lined cloaks joined the rising crescendo of scattered footsteps - all marching towards the high-walled castle just past the center fountain.
The Volturi and their Guard had returned home. The countless men and women did not speak a word to each other as one by one, they entered their stronghold - only the highest members given the distinct privilege of using the front doors. Everyone else filtered to the sides and towards the back - everyone had a place and everything was done with fastidious pride in that place and order.
The tidiness of their arrival and subsequent homecoming did nothing to betray their obvious thoughts: What exactly had just happened? They had followed Aro’s command. Listened when he said the Cullens were gathering forces to strike against them, against their own kind - that Irina had shared a most disgusting yet compelling story of an immortal child created, nurtured, and hidden by the Cullen coven. They had to be stopped - immediately.
Except- they weren’t. At the very last moment, Aro had decreed that there would be no fighting on the field today. The evidence that Alice and Jasper Cullen brought forth at the eleventh hour had seen to that - an immortal child was never created, but rather a new breed entirely was born and carried by a newborn prior to her vampiric conversion. It was insanity to say the least - nonetheless true. Everyone on that field that day had seen it with their own eyes and Aro himself commanded the end of the battle before it even began.
Something Caius could not believe for a moment. As they fled back to Volterra, Caius had tried on several occasions to wrestle the truth out of Aro’s sudden change of heart - yet nothing. He was met with an indifferent silence in some occasions or in others, pure disdain for his questions and direct dismissal.
Caius finally reached the last step of the entryway to his home - this fortress of ancient stone and mortar. If one looked closely, you could see remnants of generations of old blood bespeckled into the very foundation of every wall - you could smell it the moment you entered any room. It was a delicious reminder of memories filled with terrified screams, flesh tearing away from bone, and watching life flicker away from eyes once filled with life-long dreams. In his most bored moments, this was Caius’s favorite past time: remembering each kill and knowing that he was the reason each one would never laugh, smile, or hope again. It always made him feel better.
But not this night. Caius was certain no amount of ruminations will help him understand the decision made back in Forks, Washington that stripped him of satisfying his own bloodlust. Not to mention the fact that the trip gave him yet another opportunity to further destroy and add werewolf heads to his growing collection (he had quite the trophy room locked away in one of his many cellars only accessible within the castle by a select few). He had expected more from the travels - from the efforts put forth to ensure that they had every chess piece necessary in their favor to win. The entire affair was foolish - it made THEM the Volturi look foolish.
Which meant he looked foolish as well.
Caius sneered as his thoughts brought him down this path. He realized that he was standing quite still on the stairway landing, his wife Athenodora and Aro’s wife, Sulpicia, standing close together, side by side in front of him. Aro and Marcus were in front of them and entered the front doors unceremoniously without pausing to turn around. They entered and presumably went straight to their corridors.
Sulpicia followed but Athenodora stopped once she reached inside - Caius had not moved from his spot. Athenodora turned around, her expression stoic and void of emotion as she spoke to him. “Caius, we are finally home. Do you not wish to eat something?”. By something, she meant one of the many fresh humans they had at their disposal - either willingly offering themselves to their dining pleasure or, if one was in the mood for a little bit of fun, a selection of humans of all ages and backgrounds trapped in one of their many dungeons. Blood always tasted better with an infusion of fear, Caius liked to say.
But not tonight. Not for him.
Caius ignored his well-intentioned wife and noticed that the moon was full. This did not make his mood any better. Every full moon brought upon memories of his near fatal attack with a werewolf a century ago…an attack that sparked so many things, and yet…a moment in his life that if he could erase, he would do so without hesitation for reasons he never dared share with anyone. Not even Athenodora - and especially Aro. No...if they knew the entire situation...he stopped himself from continuing that thought. A twinge of gratefulness crept through his body as he remembered that Aro barely ever used his gifts on Marcus or himself.
Good. The more distance from that moment in his eternal life, the better.
“Go on ahead. Eat something…young for me. I will dine later”. Caius feigned a small smile and smirked at Athenodora when she furrowed her brows at him, “I want to spend some time alone”, he added with finality,
Athenodora needed to hear nothing further. She left, with the large wooden entrance doors closing behind her. Caius dropped his fake smile immediately, turned on his heel, and strode with resolute purpose around the left side of the fortified castle home. His eyes were steeled with determination, however, he occasionally would glance up at the full moon above him and feel the waves of anger permeate across his face.
His steps grew faster until he reached a grassy hill that lead to a drop off towards the back of the castle. It was here where Caius dipped his gloved hand into one of the deep pockets of his black cloak and withdrew a very long sliver key that looked as ancient as the fortress itself. He sidestepped next to the old, moss-ridden stone - with each step, he descended with the castle and with each step, there appeared to be no insight into anything that resembled a door for the key to fit into.
Suddenly, Caius stopped in front of a very bare looking patch of stone wall - it resembled every other area of slightly cracked sediment with caked on dirt and areas of plant overgrowth climbing up its walls. However, for Caius, this was exactly what he was looking for. He placed his right hand on an undiscerning stone and pushed. It gave in completely without further necessary force and a small click could be heard once done locking into its new place. The stone right below jutted out in the complete opposite direction, unveiling a very small keyhole on the right hand side. It was so tiny that you had to know exactly where it was in order to locate it - especially in darkness.
Caius smiled his half crooked sneer and inserted the key and turned all the way right and then pushed the key upward and inward before taking it out completely. The mechanical puzzle of simply using the keyhole in the exact order of operations needed was perfect for a small line to start appearing at the top and sides of the stone wall that was about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide - the perfect size for someone to push through it and enter.
Which was exactly what Caius did. As he pushed his way in, he made sure to look to his right and left before doing so. No one. He locked into his sharp hearing skills and heard - nothing. All was as it should be - everyone dining and fretting around himself. He knew Aro and Marcus were already wondering where he was. He walked completely inside and closed the door behind him. The moon was full - he always felt the need to come here when the moon was full. And after the most recent events - he couldn’t help but feel an even stronger urge to come.
He would have to make this time very quick indeed.
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“Please ensure to keep your seatbelts fastened and your tray tables in an upright position. We are beginning our descent into Volterra, Florence. Welcome to Italy.
“Assicurati di mantenere le cinture di sicurezza allacciate e i tavolini in posizione verticale. Stiamo iniziando la nostra discesa a Volterra, Firenze. Benvenuto in Italia.”
Luz Cordero shifted in her seat as the voice of the flight attendant rang through the airplane. It wasn’t that it was an unpleasant sound - just startling. Luz rubbed her eyes, willing to shift the vivid images of her dream - or rather, nightmare- away from her mind. A few times a month, ever since she was a little girl, she would have the same kinds of dreams - of snarling beasts with different colored hair, or was it fur? Of men and women with teeth so sharp they could pierce through metal chasing her. Of houses - no, old-style villages- burning, with the smell of cooked flesh mingling with the oaken ash of wood creating dancing plumes of smoke in the air.
But mainly there was a woman. A woman she felt like she knew but didn’t. And a man - a very young looking man with shoulder length, crisp, soft yellow hair and eyes as red as rubies. In these dreams, he would always be with the woman - standing behind her, caressing her light olive brown skin - so similar to Luz’s in real life - and whispering things in her ear with a sneer on his face. Her cheeks would blush at his words and her eyes would close - until she would snap them wide open as if sensing Luz was there. As if knowing Luz was watching their interactions. The woman opened her mouth and screamed “CORRE!” Run!
This was the last thing Luz remembered before being abruptly awakened by the news. She was just about finished rubbing the last remnants of sleep from her eyes when a poke to her right elbow made her turn around.
“Thought you might have wanted to see the pretty lights of the city as we descended.” Manny St. John was many things, but subtle was not one of them. Ever since their first day together as interns with the International Archaeological Federation, Manny had made it very clear to Luz of his interest in her.
On the very second day of them knowing each other, as well as residing in the co-ed single studio apartments that adjoined the federation’s privately owned offices outside of the Universidad Europea - Real Madrid where they were enrolled in their graduate program, he had asked her for dinner and drinks, followed by a “stroll” down the plazita since, as he put it, this was her first time ever in Spain.
It was true - Luz was in Spain, pursuing her childhood dream of excavating, cave spelunking, and digging into the history of the world’s past. Ever since she was a little girl, Luz wanted to be an explorer. She never understood why but she was the kind of girl that used to ask her parents to hide her toys in their park sandbox whenever they would visit one of the Chicago Park Districts in the summertime just for her to excavate it with her toy shovel and pale blue bucket. She would sift through the sand at the beach in hopes to discover new mineral products and have them displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry. Her ultimate dream was to discover something so old, ancient, and historically relevant that would help solve some of the world’s worst illnesses - some old texts with instructions or fossilized plants that could be studied and brought back to germification. (Her major may be anthropology but her double minors in archaeology and botany played quite nicely with one another in pursuit of these goals).
It was because of her ambition and future that Luz politely declined. She just could not have anyone get in the way of her 3.8 GPA and her chance of finally being in Volterra to actually put in some real work - besides, she had another reason why she wanted to come on this specific dig. When the university had partnered with the Federation to provide this hands-on internship program, she was the first one to sign up. Persuading her father to allow her to go even further into Europe, especially Italy given what happened in their familial past, and being even more thousands of miles from Chicago, did not sit well with him. However, all she had to do was state that her mother would have wanted her to visit any country that she had the chance to and Diego Cordero sighed one of his infamous deep and heavy signs and gave his blessing (and credit card number for program sign-up) over the phone.
“Hey, I take that as a no? No lights?”Manny snapped her back out of her reverie. She blinked several times and then smiled slightly at him. “Of course! Sorry.. I was still just waking up. Thanks for offering”, Luz responded. He smiled at her and leaned back as she very carefully and very slightly leaned over him from her middle seat to stare out of the airplane window.
Volterra. Florence. Italy. It was pitch black save for the glistening moonlight sparkling in the pools of water that were scattered in different pockets below. Here and there, the night lamps of the ancient city overpowered the moon in its glory as the plane got lower and lower and closer to the city proper where the airport was housed. The swirling ambers and golds against old stone and wood houses, streets, and buildings beautifully illuminated the rich, green ivy plants that seemed to be intimately woven into the fabric of almost every single establishment.
The city looked like it could be alive, the vines twisting and turning up walls and terraces aided by the sweltering sun of the afternoons and the ice cold showers of the mornings that was part of the normal weather patterns of this region of the country. Even at night, it was beautiful but with an air of hostile mystery that could even be felt thousands of feet into the air and separated by metal.
“Never been, huh?”
Luz stopped politely leaning over Manny and turned to address the other side of her and rolled her eyes while smiling. Her best friend Vivian Xi yawned widely back at her. Vivian and Luz had been as thick as thieves since they sat next to each other 5 years ago on their first day as freshman in ANTH 101 - General Anthropology. Dr. Forrester used to drone on and on for the straight hour and a half while Vivian and Luz would giggle whenever little dribbles of spit would drop ever so delicately from his chin to his maroon sweater. He always wore a maroon sweater - to the point that the class always speculated on the exact number of maroon sweaters a man can own.
If it wasn’t for Dr. Forrester’s forceful spittle one day landing like a torpedo on Vivian’s notes (she audibly shrieked which made Dr. Forrester feel very confused as he refused to acknowledge his role in the moisture now very apparent on her notebook) and Luz giving her a spare notebook plus her own notes for her to copy from, they probably would never have discovered their mutual interest in both anthropology and archaeology (however Vivian’s double minor was coupled with chemistry as well), they would not have found the exciting opportunity within this program that led them to where they were now.
As Vivian had stated when they had started filling out their applications, “I think it’s time to infuse some more estrogen into this field, don’t you?”
Luz smiled at her best friend. “You know I have never been here. Stop playing”. Luz snapped the packet of complimentary pretzels from Vivian’s hand, reached in - and nothing. The bag was empty. Vivian laughed as Luz rolled her eyes.
“Hey! You were sleeping and the cart went by for one last time. I didn’t want to wake you.” Vivian laughed heartily as Luz started smiling again. “Perish the thought of you not being able to get an extra bag of pretzels - oh what luck you seem to have, Viv”.
Both girls laughed but were interrupted suddenly by Manny’s not-so-hidden stares and slurry of questions. “Have YOU ever been to Volterra, Viv? You seem pretty whatever about it”. His voice was curious and not disrespectful in the slightest.
“No, I have never been either - but Luz has a much more vested interest to be here than I do beyond just the program. She has ties to the place.”, said Vivian with an air of intentional mystery to the last words of her sentence. She giggled as well.
Vivian rolled her eyes as Manny stared blankly - he clearly was not only confused by the statement but also by the lack of no one offering up a further explanation. Guess he was the kind of guy things just came so easily to him, judged Luz. She signed and then slowly unbuttoned the top half of her jacket, revealing a very old, slim bronze necklace with a hanging metal piece at the end of it. The pendant was made of the same material as the antiquated chain but had a crack down the middle that made the pendant look like it was missing another half - in fact, it was cut so roughly down the middle that the part of the words were completely missing - on the left-hand side the letters “Vocatus” were plainly etched into the metal but whatever the beginning half of the statement was, was lost to time. On the back side there was a raised notch that had no apparent reasoning for being there as well.
“My mother’s family is originally from Spain. My father is mixed with lots of things and is from the States. Legend has it that this pendant was passed down my mother’s side - and that my family has a history in Volterra. But I have no idea what - all of that was lost to time and immigration, I guess”.
She held up the pendant to the light. Vivian stared at it as if she had seen it a thousand times before but Manny seemed thoroughly invested in understanding more.
“It says something…Vocatus….that’s Latin”, he shared.
Luz responded, “I know. It just means something like called, or invoked…something like that. My Latin proficiency rests solely on my Spanish fluency”. She smiled and Manny smiled back. Despite her better judgment, she felt her cheeks flush and held his gaze as she played with the pendant with her left hand.
Manny kept smiling while speaking to her. “ So, I am guessing you came on this trip not just for some hands-on experience but rather to do some family history digging of your own, I take it?”
Luz’s smile faded and she looked past Manny and out the airplane window as she spoke. They were descending rapidly now…they would be landing any minute.
“My mother died in Volterra a few months after I was born.” Luz snapped her eyes back to Manny as she spoke and could feel Vivian’s own eyes burning holes into the back of her neck - she of course already knew this and more but Luz knew Vivian well enough to know that she would not be sharing any of Luz’s business with Manny. She was probably surprised she shared as much as she had. So was Luz - but the fact that she was here, she was in this ancient city of mysteries, of riddles lost to time…the final resting place of her mother. A death that, 28 years later, she still did not have answers to - and the minimal answers her father did share with her were just not enough.
Manny whispered an apology and started speaking in hushed tones about grief and not knowing how she felt. Luz tuned him out and kept staring out of the window. The flight attendant had shared they were making their final descent into the airport and as the lights dimmed in the cabin and the wheels hit the tarmac, a weird feeling began to surface at the pit of her stomach - almost like a shadow passed through her. She closed her eyes and saw the tall, skinny, pale, blonde, red-eyed man again from her most recent dream in her mind’s eye- but this time he was not whispering into a woman’s ear…. He was just standing there and staring directly at Luz.
Her eyes snapped open.
******
Caius had made it a habit to ensure to have many different hiding places - both inside and outside of the castle walls. He took advantage of the fact that Aro barely ever used his gifts on his own brothers, Marcus and Caius respectively, and that through the power of Corin’s magical gift of keeping everyone content all of the time (for some reason, her gifts on him had been fading steadily but he kept that knowledge private to himself for the past 28 years), he was able to visit them whenever he wanted. Each place held different artifacts from lifetimes ago… books, documents, even ancient artifacts that humans were still out there looking for.
This particular hidden cellar room was lined with small idols of different time periods and religions, some made of gold, others of silver and iron. Shelves from floor to ceiling with books and bits of parchment encased in glass that were so brittle, that one touch would dissolve them. Caius was an avid reader indeed and a collector of all things beautiful and unique - in a way, he was much like Aro but he preferred physical objects rather to people.
People he just liked disposing of. What use could they possibly have beyond the very delectable liquid pumping through their veins next to the written words of the supernatural and immortal? For that is what he prized above all else - works written by beings like himself and others.
However, today he would not be perusing another invaluable tome. He walked over to the farthest corner of the dank room and pulled out a wooden chest that was hidden behind the bust of what appeared to be Medusa and her head of snakes. Unlike many of the objects in the room, the chest was in perfect condition with not a hint of dust on it - a very clear sign that the box was handled much more frequently than its roommates in the cellar.
Caius gleamed down at the chest and took out the same key in which he had used to open up the secret stone door to get into the room in the first place. This time, it worked like a regular key by inserting it in the plain lock in the front of the box - it opened and as Caius peered down at its contents, his face flickered ever so quickly between many emotions at once before settling on complete stoicism.
He brushed his pale yet beautifully long fingertips over a bronze chain necklace that was clearly older than one would expect something to be housed in a red velvet cushioned box to be. He slowly worked his fingers down to the bottom of the necklace, to the hanging pendant at its end. The pendant was made of the same material as the bronze chain and had a crack down the middle that clearly showed the pendant was broken- and missing its other half. The middle was crudely cut down the right-hand side, with the letters “Sanguis” plainly visible. A notch jutting out from the back, with no clear purpose to its intent rested on the lower end of the pendant.
Caius stroked the words over and over and whispered, “Sanguis” a few times before placing the pendant back into the box.
“The Del Sol line will never return to Volterra, let alone this earth, Amada….do you understand me?” Silence. He spoke directly to the pendent.
“DO YOU HEAR ME?” He screamed and dust particles fell from the ceiling.
No response.
Caius in a swift move grabbed the wooden box, removed the key and put it back in its hiding place before leaving the cellar completely - as if it never existed and no one was there in the first place. The cold air wafting in through the tracks and sanitizing the air of the real frost that was just behind in the hidden room’s wake, waiting for his return once again the next full moon.
For no full moon could ever keep Caius away.
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