No Mask to Wear

by AlastairGarvin

Summary:

What happens when an endgame Vampire Lord Dragonborn—a reality-warping demigod used to being the apex predator in a world of dragons and daedra—gets unceremoniously dumped into the World of Darkness by an Elder Scroll?

Notes:

The premise sounds like an easy solo, right? She's immune to the sun's curse on Cainites, stronger than their "Kindred," and no Beast within. She'll have this masquerade ball cleared out by dawn.

That's what I thought too, until I really dug deeper on both series' lore. This is not a Fist of the North Star-style "main character is fucking invincible" kind of story even though it does initially come across like that.

It is not that simple.

This is not a world of epic quests and clear evil. This is a world of silent, centuries-old wars, of rules written in fear, and of monsters who have perfected the art of being small. Stranded, furious, and horrifically powerful, Natalia of Volkihar must learn to navigate a labyrinth of politics, paranoia, and profound cosmic dread.

Molag Bal shaped her to be the apex predator. Then she met a bigger one.

Chapter 1: Arrival

The stone was wrong.

That was Natalia’s first coherent thought, cutting through the dregs of the disorientation spell that had clearly been cast upon her. She pushed herself up from the filthy ground, her palms scraping not on cool, familiar cobblestone or frost-rimed earth, but on a strange, unnervingly smooth black surface.

The stench was a complex assault: acrid fumes that burned the back of her throat, the cloying sweetness of rotting food from a nearby metal barrel, and beneath it all, the stale, coppery tang of human despair.

She was in an alley, but like no alley in Skyrim, or even in the Imperial City. Towers of glass and steel, impossibly high, stabbed into a fading indigo sky. Colored lights—not magical, but harsh and electric—flickered and moved on distant faces of the towers.

The garbled noise was a constant din: a deep, grinding roar, sharp bleats, and the rapid-fire cadence of languages she could not place. The mortals hurrying past the alley’s mouth wore clothing of bizarre, tight cuts and strange-looking fabrics.

A deeper instinct, older than her mortal memories, seized her.

The sun.

She could feel it, a terrible pressure on the horizon, a burning eye about to open. The primal fear of her kind, a gift from her Sire and Master, Molag Bal, flooded her veins with ice. The strange scents, the wrong architecture—it could be an illusion, a grand trick of the Psijic Order or some ambitious Conjurer. But the approaching dawn felt real.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” she hissed, the words in her tongue sounding small and pathetic against the city’s roar.

Panic, cold and sharp, overrode analysis. She had to find darkness. Now.

She exploded from the alley, a streak of red hair and pale skin in a slightly tattered garment. The mortals on the street yelped, stumbling back. A young man holding a small, glowing rectangle to his ear shouted something at her. She snarled, baring her fangs—not as a threat, but in pure, undiluted terror—and he scrambled away, his eyes wide.

She didn’t know this city’s layout, its safe holes, its crypts. She saw a recessed doorway and lunged for it, only to find it sealed by a solid, seamless wall of glass. She slammed a fist against it in frustration, leaving a spiderweb of cracks. A strange noise began to wail, a piercing, mechanical shriek that felt like a needle in her skull.

Now there were new sounds: uniformed voices shouting in that grating tongue, the squawk of a device, the heavy tread of boots.

Law enforcement. Guards.

She was making a spectacle, but the burning horizon was all that mattered. She fled deeper into the maze of concrete and steel, her preternatural strength sending dumpsters clanging, her speed a blur to mortal eyes. She shook them off, their clumsy, noisy pursuit easy to evade, but she was running out of time.

The sky was lightening to a sickly gray-pink.

Desperate, she spied a half-collapsed wooden fence behind one of the smaller stone structures. She tore through it, finding a tiny, enclosed space filled with refuse and the rusted skeletons of… things.

It was a dead end. Three walls of rough, stained brick, and the open sky above, growing brighter by the second.

She pressed herself into the corner, but it was useless. There was no overhang, no cellar door, no coffin.

The sun would find her here. It would creep down the eastern wall and touch her, and she would burn.

The frenzy of survival ebbed, replaced by a cold, weary clarity. If this was an illusion, a test of her will, then submitting to its ultimate threat would break it.

If it was not… then she had been banished by a power she did not understand, to a plane of Oblivion where she was to be executed in the worst manner. To die here, unmourned, unknown, her legacy as a Volkihar Lord erased. Her Sire’s disappointment would be eternal.

“So be it,” she whispered to the uncaring stones.

She forced her trembling body to kneel in the filth. She closed her eyes against the terrifying light, her teeth chattering from a primal instinct that screamed for her to run, to dig, to do anything but kneeling there.

She was an immortal Daughter of Coldharbour. She did not yield. And yet, she yielded.

The light hit her closed eyelids—a searing, orange-red flare.

This is it. An eternity in Molag Bal’s Coldharbour awaits.

She felt the warmth bloom across her skin, on her face, on her hands clenched in her lap. She braced for the pain, the smell of her own flesh charring, the agony of unmaking.

And… nothing.

Only warmth.

Her eyes flew open. A shaft of direct sunlight fell across her knees, brilliant and full of dancing motes of dust. She stared at her pale hand, turning it in the beam. It should be blackening, curling, turning to ash. It merely looked warm, the faint blue veins beneath the skin more visible.

No smoke. No pain. No holy fire.

For a long minute, Natalia did not move, did not breathe. Her mind, a razor-sharp instrument honed over centuries, scrabbled for purchase.

The sun no longer affects me?

A wild, impossible hope. But no—the fear was still there, deep in her marrow. The instinct remained. It was the sun itself that was different.

This was not Magnus. This was some other thing, a luminous impostor hanging in a foreign sky. Or perhaps her body, born of Nirn’s laws and Daedric pact, did not recognize this realm’s rules.

A slow, careful smile touched her lips, devoid of warmth. The panic was gone, burned away by the harmless sunlight. In its place was a profound, calculating curiosity.

She had made a mess. Those guards would be searching. Her appearance was… conspicuous.

The light was an advantage, not a threat. But old habits died hard. Let them hunt their phantom in the shadows. She would stay in this quiet, sun-drenched hole. She would wait, and watch, and listen to the strange rhythms of this world.

When night fell—this world’s night—Lady Natalia of the Volkihar would begin her exploration in earnest.

And this new, strange realm, with its weak sun and startled mortals, would have to explain itself to her.

---

The night sky was a bruised purple, stained by the glow from below. Natalia emerged from her alcove, the concrete still radiating the day's trapped warmth.

Darkness had been banished from the city, replaced by a wash of cold, constant fire. Lines of blazing white and lurid colored light outlined every street, every window, every moving carriage without horses. It was unnerving, this mockery of moonlight.

She moved through the throngs, a specter in archaic leathers. Her crimson eyes, wide and unblinking, scanned the dizzying spectacle: mortals staring into glowing handheld panes, roaring metal beasts exhaling foul breath, towering signs flashing with impossible moving pictures.

She was a ripple of wrongness in the stream, drawing stares, muttered words, and the occasional raised rectangle pointed in her direction.

Then, a scent on the air—wool, cheap dye, and a faint hint of mead. Her gaze snapped to a young man moving toward her with a hesitant smile. He wore a rough-spun tunic and leather bracers, poorly stitched but undeniably Skyrim in design. A "town guard," perhaps, or a farmer's idea of one.

He spoke, the language a rapid, alien buzz. But within it, a recurring phrase: "Cosplay convention." His tone was friendly, gesturing to her clothes, then to himself, and finally pointing down the street. He extended a hand, not in threat, but in offer.

He was soft. No warrior's calluses, no wary tension in his stance. He smelled of soap and excitement, not blood and iron. A child playing dress-up. Yet, his garb was a tether to a world she feared was lost. He was a clue.

She gave a single, regal nod.

He led her to a long, lit metal beast on rails. She followed him inside, ignoring the other passengers' stares, focusing on the vibrations through her feet as the thing shuddered and began to move with a deafening groan. It was a carriage within a nightmare, but it had a dreadful, powerful logic.

When it halted, they disembarked before a temple of light and noise. A colossal building pulsed with sound, its doors swallowing and disgorging a riot of colors and forms. Her senses were overwhelmed. Knights in polished plastic armor stood beside elves with pointed foam ears. Daedra worshippers in rubber masks laughed with mortals in garish, skimpy fabrics.

And there, moving through the crowd, she saw them: the unmistakable design of Volkihar robes and insignia. The silhouette of a vampire lord's armor. Her blood ran cold, then hot with fury.

Mortals. All mortals. Parading in the sacred vestments of her clan, treating her suffering, her eternal power, as a costume.

Her companion nudged her, his face a question. "First time?” he seemed to be asking, grinning. He gestured toward the entrance, where a large man in a dark uniform—a "security guard," a cousin to the law that had chased her—stood checking the flow of people.

The young man stepped forward and produced a small, glossy token from his pocket, flashing it at the guard like a minor noble presenting a seal. The guard glanced at it and waved him through. He turned, beckoning her to come, his attention already snared by the spectacle inside.

Now the guard looked at her, his hand out, expectant. He wanted her token, her permit. She had none. She had only her will.

She locked her crimson eyes with his. The glamour of mortal life fell away from her gaze, revealing the ancient predator beneath. She poured her command into him, not with words he would understand, but with the raw force of her presence, a psychic shove wrapped in the chill of the Void.

"Let me in. Now."

The man’s eyes glazed over for a second. A slight tremor went through him. He blinked, looked past her shoulder, and gave a curt, bored wave inward.

No fanfare. No struggle. Just obedience.

She swept past him, the faintest smirk on her lips. Her mortal guide was already lost in the crowd, gaping at a woman dressed as a winged Daedra. Good. No witnesses to her use of power.

Inside, the air was thick with sweat, artificial scents, and the roar of ten thousand conversations. She stood at the edge of the maelstrom, a true daughter of Coldharbour amid a sea of imitations. Here, she would not stand out. Here, she could observe, learn, and perhaps… hunt.

---

The cacophony of the convention hall was a useful cloak. Natalia moved through the throngs of costumed mortals, a hunter in plain sight. Their fascination with her "Vampire Royal Armor" attire was a mild annoyance, but a useful one.

When they raised their small, glowing windows and chattered at her, she merely stood still, her face an impassive mask. They would take their "pictures" and move on, satisfied, leaving her to her observations.

They saw a dedicated performer staying in character. She saw sheep offering their necks by way of distraction.

Then the air changed.

A figure slid through the crowd with a serpent's grace, and Natalia's senses tightened. The scent was wrong—cold, like old stone and dried roses, but devoid of the vital, pulsing heat of life. No heartbeat thrummed beneath the flimsy black silks and exposed skin.

A vampire.

But not like any she had known. This one carried none of the heavy, bestial dread of a Volkihar, nor the brittle majesty of a Cyrodilic dynast.

This was something... lighter. Softer. Decadent in a cheap, mortal way.

The golden-maned stranger approached with a knowing smile, her fingers reaching out to trace the line of Natalia's jaw. The touch was meant to be seductive, a prelude. Natalia remained still, allowing the fluttering gestures, the unintelligible, cooing words.

Let the mouse approach the cat, she thought.

The other vampire beckoned, leading her away from the bright lights and into a shadowed service corridor lined with stacked chairs and humming electrical boxes. The din of the crowd faded to a dull roar.

A trap. Predictable. But Natalia followed, her curiosity a sharper lure than any caution. She needed information, and a fellow predator, even a strange one, was a potential source. Or, failing that, a potential stress test for this new world's mettle.

In the relative quiet, the stranger turned, motioning Natalia closer with a crooked finger. Natalia took a step, her boots silent on the concrete. Their eyes met.

A pressure, subtle as a spider's thread, brushed against Natalia's mind. An attempt to cloud her will, to weave a veil of placid admiration. A paltry thing. Natalia felt the psychic intrusion dissolve against the iron weight of her centuries-old consciousness, a pebble dropped into the depths of the Void.

She nearly laughed. But she played along, letting her gaze soften just a fraction, feigning the vacant allure the other expected.

Emboldened, the stranger closed the final distance, her head tilting, her mouth parting to reveal sharp, delicate fangs aimed for the throat—a brazen, intimate claim.

Enough.

Natalia’s front kick snapped out with the force of a warhorse. It connected solidly with the other vampire’s midsection, hurling her back into a stack of chairs with a crash of metal and a shocked gasp of air that hadn't been needed in decades.

The stranger scrambled to her feet, her pretty face twisted in fury and profound confusion.

The vitriol that spilled from her lips was still gibberish, but the tone was universal: How dare you?

Natalia settled into a ready stance, a smile touching her own lips. The other vampire mirrored her, claws extended, but Natalia saw the hesitation. A flicker of doubt. This wasn't going as planned.

Then, Natalia felt it—not an attack, but a shift. A different kind of power, one of perception and unraveling, washing over her. The stranger’s furious glare focused, her head cocking as if listening to a new frequency.

When she spoke again, the words were in a tongue Natalia understood, though the accent was strange, the phrasing archaic yet modern. “I ask again, who are you? Which generation are you? Which clan are you from? Are you Camarilla or Sabbat?”

The questions meant nothing. Generation? Clan? Camarilla? But the meaning behind them—the categorization, the politics—was chillingly familiar. This was a world with its own hierarchies of the night.

Natalia slowly lowered her hands, the tension draining from her shoulders. The immediate threat was gone, replaced by something far more valuable: a bridge.

“You,” Natalia said, her voice low and clear, cutting through the residual anger. “You can understand me now?”

The Toreador stared, her own combat stance relaxing into wary confusion.

“Yes. The gift of Auspex. But you… you resisted Presence. Your aura is like a wall of old ice. And you fight like a… a barbarian. I’ve never seen your like. You are Kindred, but you are not.”

She took a cautious step closer, her predatory allure replaced by keen curiosity. “Just what, exactly, are you?”

Natalia met her gaze, no longer feigning anything.

“I am Natalia, of the Volkihar. And I am very, very lost. You speak of clans and sects. Tell me of them. Tell me of this world. Start with the most important thing.”

She gestured vaguely upwards, toward the roof and the false, forgiving sun beyond.

“Start with that.”

Chapter 2: Elysium

The Toreador’s mind raced, a torrent of calculations behind her carefully composed mask. A direct fight was out.

The stranger—Natalia—had shrugged off Presence like a light mist and hit with the force of a freight train. That screamed immense age or a bloodline laced with raw, terrifying Disciplines. Yet, she carried none of the tell-tale aura of a Brujah brawler or a Gangrel war-beast.

She was something else. An unknown. And in the Camarilla, unknowns were either eliminated, controlled, or made into assets.

Survival, and ambition, dictated the path.

"Introductions, then," she said, her voice smoothing into a practiced, genteel tone. "I am Alicia. Toreador. Tenth generation. Camarilla." She watched Natalia's face closely, expecting a flicker of recognition at the Clan name or the Sect.

There was none. Only a flat, analytical stare. She truly doesn't know. The realization was more unnerving than any show of force.

"We should go," Alicia continued. "I know a place where we cannot be disturbed. My Elysium."

Natalia’s lip curled. “Am I to assume you seek to challenge me in a lair where you hold the advantage?”

Alicia allowed a small, genuine laugh. "Very funny, but no. It's a genuine gesture. You are as much a mystery to me as this world must seem to you. Perhaps even more."

Natalia considered this, her crimson eyes boring into Alicia’s. "Very well," she said finally. "Lead the way."

---

The Elysium was a converted penthouse atop a converted warehouse, a space of minimalist elegance and curated art. As they entered, Natalia’s senses immediately cataloged the other occupants. Four… no, five. Lingering in shadowed corners, admiring a sculpture, speaking in low tones.

All cold. All dead. But their presence was like faint, guttering candles next to the steady, cold flame of a Nord tomb-candle. Weaker than Alicia. Frail.

They greeted Alicia with murmured deference, their eyes sliding to Natalia with open curiosity and puzzlement. Whispers followed them. Alicia gave a slight, dismissive wave, a queen moving through her court.

"Doesn't take a mastery of the tongue to realize you are being treated as an oddity," Natalia observed dryly.

"Novelty is a form of power here," Alicia replied, leading her through a set of soundproofed doors into a private studio apartment.

The space was dominated by a large window overlooking the city's electric grid, a plush sectional, and walls lined with canvases—some modern splatters of color, others exquisitely detailed classical studies. The scent of oil paint and vitae hung in the air.

Alicia moved to a small bar fridge, extracting a clear bottle filled with a deep, viscous red liquid. She poured two generous measures into crystal wine glasses.

The scent that bloomed in the room was unmistakable: blood.

But it was a wrongness of blood, carrying the cloying, metallic tang of alchemical preservatives and a stale sweetness, like mead left to spoil in a sealed jug. Lifeless.

She handed a glass to Natalia, then raised her own. A universal gesture.

"Cheers."

Natalia took the glass, sniffed it once with a slight wrinkle of her nose, then met Alicia's toast with a silent tilt of her own. She drank.

The blood was… adequate. Lifeless, sterile, like eating salted meat after a lifetime of fresh hunt. But it was sustenance. She drained the glass without ceremony and set it down with a definitive click on a marble side table.

Alicia sipped her own, watching her guest over the rim. The stranger absorbed the blood, but showed none of the slight, pleasurable shudder, the subtle sharpening of the senses that came with feeding. She consumed it like water.

"Now," Natalia said, folding her hands in her lap, her posture erect and lordly even on the modern furniture.

"You have named your tribe and your standing. I am Natalia, of Clan Volkihar, Dragonborn, Daughter of Coldharbour. I am not of your ‘generations’ or your ‘Camarilla.’ I come from a world called Nirn, from the frozen north of Skyrim. I was cast here by a magic I do not comprehend."

She leaned forward, her red eyes gleaming in the low light. "Explain. Start with the sun. Why does it not burn? Then, explain what you are. And tell me of the powers you used in the hallway. Speak plainly. I have no patience for your local mysteries."

Alicia set her own glass down, her mind reeling. Clan Volkihar. Dragonborn. Daughter of Coldharbour. Nirn. It was the delusion of an ancient Malkavian, or… or something entirely beyond the scope of the Jyhad. She took a slow breath, choosing her words with the care of a mortal stepping between two arguing Elders.

"The sun does not burn you because you are not here by the natural order. You are an anomaly. For us—for Kindred, which is what we call ourselves—the sun is the absolute enemy. It is holy fire. Final Death. Your immunity marks you as either impossibly powerful, or impossibly foreign. Given your… lack of basic knowledge, I suspect the latter."

She gestured with a slender hand. "As for what we are… we are Cursed. The Damned. We drink blood to survive. We sleep by day and walk by night. We are born from the blood of others of our kind, in a lineage that stretches back to… well, to Caine. The First Murderer. Each 'generation' is a step removed from that source, weaker in power. I am Tenth. You… I cannot place."

She met Natalia's gaze. "The power I used first was Presence. To influence emotion, to enthrall. You broke it. The second was Auspex. Heightened senses, the piercing of veils. It allowed me to understand your tongue. We wield other Disciplines: Celerity's speed, Potence's might, Fortitude's endurance, and clan-specific gifts like Obfuscate or Thaumaturgy.”

Alicia leaned back, a new, intense curiosity burning in her own eyes. "You called yourself ‘Dragonborn.’ You spoke of a ‘Clan.’ What are your powers, Natalia of Volkihar? How do you survive?"

The silence thickened, heavy as congealing blood, as Alicia listened. Natalia spoke of a world of gods and mortals, of Daedric Princes and a curse from Molag Bal himself. She described the Volkihar as masters of ice and shadow, of bending mortal wills, of a physical might that could sunder stone.

And then she spoke of the transformation—the Vampire Lord form, a winged, gargoyle-like terror of fang and claw. It was mythic, epic, a creature of folktale rather than the gritty, secretive curse of Caine that Alicia knew. It sounded… bombastic.

But one word snagged in Alicia’s mind, a hook thrown from the depths of her own long memory. Skyrim.

It was a whisper, a piece of trivia picked up from a neonate decades ago, a mention on a mortal’s computer screen she’d glimpsed while hunting. A mortal fantasy. A game.

It couldn’t be. And yet, the absurdity of this situation demanded absurd investigation.

“Stay here,” Alicia said, rising with a fluid motion. “Do not touch anything. I will return.”

She swept back into the main Elysium chamber, the low conversations dying instantly. All eyes turned to her, expectant, wary.

“A question,” Alicia announced, her voice cool. “Does anyone here have familiarity with… Skyrim?”

A beat of confused silence. Then, from a shadowed alcove where a neonate was surreptitiously scrolling on a phone, a young male Kindred—David, she recalled, embraced barely a decade ago for his usefulness with digital systems—slowly raised a hand. He looked like he’d been caught feeding in a sanctuary.

“I… I do, Alicia. It’s a video game.”

Alicia, he’d called her.

Not ‘my lady’ or ‘madam.’ The informality grated—a relic of his neonate crudeness and lingering mortal habits. She felt a flash of disdain. To be reduced to consulting a child obsessed with pixelated fantasies was a new low. But the neonate’s eyes held a flicker of genuine, unvarnished knowledge.

“Come,” she commanded, the word leaving no room for refusal.

David scrambled to his feet, tucking his phone away, and followed her back to her private doors under the weight of the room’s collective curiosity. Entering her sanctuary was a rare privilege, usually reserved for intimate conversation or severe reprimand.

His wide eyes took in Natalia, still seated like a carved statue of some ancient queen, her archaic garb and piercing gaze utterly alien.

“David, this is our… guest,” Alicia said, the word tasting strange. “She speaks a language I have translated. You will listen to her, and you will tell me if anything she says corresponds to this… game of yours.”

She looked at Natalia. “Speak to him of your home. Of Skyrim. Of the Volkihar.”

Natalia’s gaze shifted from Alicia to David, assessing him with a dismissive flicker. He was even weaker than the others, a sapling next to gnarled oaks. But she had asked for understanding.

She began again, more succinctly this time. “I hail from the province of Skyrim, a land of mountains, snow, and Nords. My clan, the Volkihar, dwells in an ancient castle buried within the ice of the Sea of Ghosts. We are vampires, blessed and cursed by Molag Bal, the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement. We command frost, we can summon gargoyles, we walk as mist, and we take to the sky in our true, dread form.” She described the civil war, the dragons, the Greybeards, the College of Winterhold.

David’s initial nervousness melted away, replaced by a dawning, incredulous awe. He listened, his mouth slightly agape.

When Natalia finished, Alicia turned to him. “Well?”

David swallowed, looking between the terrifying, anachronistic woman and his formidable Sire.

“Alicia… she’s… she’s describing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Almost exactly. The Volkihar are a vampire clan in the game. Castle Volkihar is in the far north. Molag Bal is a Daedric Prince. The civil war, the dragons… all of it. It’s a one-to-one match.”

He paused, a wild theory forming. “She’s not just from there, she’s describing it like… like she lived it. The level of detail…”

He turned to Natalia, forgetting protocol in his excitement, testing her further. “You mentioned the Soul Cairn. Who rules there?”

“The Ideal Masters,” Natalia replied instantly, a hint of impatience. “Foolish liches who bargain for souls.”

David let out a shaky breath. “Okay. Yeah. That’s… that’s right.”

He looked back at Alicia, his face pale with something that wasn’t fear, but a kind of cosmic shock. “She’s not just a weird cryptid or an amnesia case. Alicia… she’s talking about a fictional universe as if it’s her biography.”

The implications hung in the air, heavier than any threat of violence. Alicia stared at Natalia, her Toreador mind, trained to see patterns and meanings in art and existence, grappling with a canvas that defied all frame of reference.

A fictional character. A being from a story. Sitting in her apartment, drinking bagged blood.

Natalia, watching their exchange, understood the core of their conclusion.

“You deem me a fabrication,” she stated, her voice dangerously calm. “A tale for children. You believe my reality is less than yours because your mortals scribble stories of it?”

Alicia met her gaze, the last of her suspicion crumbling into a vast, unsettling wonder.

“No,” she said softly. “I believe you are proof that somewhere, in some layer of reality or possibility, those stories are true. And you have fallen, like a torn page from a book, into our world.”

She gestured to David. “He is not a scholar of your world. He is a… a reader of its legend. And according to this legend, you are a being of immense power.”

She leaned forward, a new, sharp intensity in her eyes.

“Which means, Natalia of Volkihar, in this world without dragons or jarls or a sun that burns you… you are a sovereign power without a kingdom. And that makes you either the most dangerous, or the most valuable, creature in this city.”

Chapter 3: Severance

A slow, imperious smile spread across Natalia’s face. It was the expression of a queen who has just been shown a map of a defenseless kingdom. Her immortal arrogance, honed in a world of dragons and Daedric horrors, swelled within her.

"So," she said, her voice a low purr of triumph.

"You are saying this world is filled with creatures of the night with powers akin to my own, yet I surpass them all by a single, fundamental decree: I walk in the sun they fear. If the Elder Scrolls have banished me here, never to return to my own world... then it seems they have delivered me a world to rule."

Alicia laughed. A sharp, brittle sound that held no amusement, only weary, centuries-old irony.

"What is so funny?" Natalia demanded, the smile vanishing.

"It is not that easy," Alicia said, shaking her head. "You think we haven't dreamed the same? Us, shadows for millennia? That a single, unstoppable power could simply take dominion?" She gestured dismissively.

"I, by myself, could slaughter every mortal in that convention hall. Strength is a currency here, but it is not the only one. There are organizations. There are rules. A Masquerade that hides our kind from the mortals, not out of mere caution, but out of existential necessity. Break it, and you invite the Inquisition—not torch-wielding peasants, but coordinated, technological hunters who have made an art of our extermination."

She leaned forward, her gaze intense.

"And we are not alone. There are other factions of our own kind—the Sabbat, frenzied cultists who would see you as a prize or a sacrifice. There are whispers of Gehenna, the end of all things. And vampires are not the only monsters in the dark. Not even the eldest among us would relish a chance encounter with a Garou—a werewolf. Their fury makes your… gargoyles seem like stone dolls."

Natalia’s eyes narrowed at the mention of werewolf. "Spawns of the Hunt Lord are here as well?"

David, unable to contain himself, piped up. “Uh, way different league. Orders of magnitude stronger. They're not just furry thugs—they're walking apocalypses. They rip reality apart.”

Alicia silenced him with a look before continuing.

"You have already drawn attention. The local Sheriff—our enforcer—is investigating reports of an unknown Kindred, presumed to be a Toreador using Celerity, causing a disruptive panic at dawn. Most dismissed it as a Childe being executed by sunlight, a messy but effective punishment. But the Sheriff is looking, because such a spectacle risks the Masquerade. The punishment for that is not exile or imprisonment, Natalia. It is Final Death, delivered personally and without mercy."

She let the weight of that settle.

"You think your strength makes you a ruler. I am telling you it merely makes you a valuable piece, or a significant threat, on a board you do not understand. You would not survive a single night of reckless action here. Not because you are weak, but because you are ignorant. And in our world, ignorance is a faster killer than the sun."

Natalia’s pride warred with a cold, pragmatic instinct she had cultivated over centuries.

This "Masquerade" was a form of herd management, a survival strategy. The existence of rival sects and other predators was no surprise; it was the natural state of any world. But the scale, the entrenched order of it all… that demanded respect.

"What, then, is your proposal?" Natalia asked, her tone still haughty, but with a new note of calculation.

"There is only one safe option," Alicia stated, her voice firm.

"For you, for me, for the peace of this city. A proper introduction to the Prince. He is the ruler of this domain. You will present yourself, explain your… unique circumstances, and petition for acknowledgment and protection within the structure of the Camarilla. It is the only way to move from being a hunted anomaly to being a recognized asset. A piece with a place on the board."

She met Natalia's crimson gaze. "It is not submission. It is strategy. Even a would-be empress must learn the layout of the palace before she seizes the throne."

A queen does not bow to a mere prince.

The very proposition curdled in Natalia's blood, a fresh insult atop the profound disorientation of her exile.

She, who had shattered Lord Harkon's tyranny and claimed the ice-locked throne of Volkihar Keep, reduced to a supplicant?

Her titles—Daughter of Coldharbour, Dragonborn, Lord of the Volkihar—were meaningless syllables here. Her reality was a child's fantasy.

The arrogance that had sustained her for centuries warred with a colder, more pragmatic truth: she was a weapon without a war, a crown without a kingdom.

Her pride screamed refusal. Her survival instinct, honed in the unforgiving snows of Skyrim and the treacherous courts of her own kind, whispered caution.

"Very well," she said, the words tasting of ash. "When do we begin this... audience?"

"Not now," Alicia replied, her gaze drifting to the large window where the indigo night was beginning to soften at its edges. "It is almost sunrise. You may be immune, but the rest of the city's Kindred are not. The Prince holds Court at night. You will stay here until then."

Natalia gave a curt nod. The Toreador's sanctuary was secure, and her own body, while no longer screaming in panic at the dawn, still held a deep-seated, ancestral preference for the dark.

Alicia did not dismiss David. Instead, she settled back into her chair, a strange, captivated light in her eyes.

The Toreador curse—the hyperfixation, the obsessive fascination with beauty and novelty—had clearly found a new subject: Natalia herself. Here was a living paradox, a work of art that had stepped bleeding from its frame. The potential for scandal, for power, for sheer story was intoxicating.

David, for his part, could barely contain a tremulous excitement. The neonate looked at Natalia not with the fear due to a predator, but with the awe reserved for a miracle.

A video game character, made flesh.

Or, his mind raced with the wilder, more terrifying theory: what if it was the other way around?

What if the Elder Scrolls was real, a parallel reality glimpsed through some cosmic crack by mortal developers who, by infinitesimal chance, captured its truth in code and texture?

In a world with Mages who could rewrite reality with will and paradox, it seemed almost plausible.

So, they talked.

---

As the false sun rose over the city, they passed the hours in the shielded dark of the penthouse.

It was an improper situation by any standard—a displaced Vampire Lord and a Toreador Primogen playing translator for a giddy neonate. Protocol and decorum frayed and snapped under the weight of sheer, unparalleled novelty.

For Natalia, it was a tactical debrief. She learned of the Camarilla's pillars, the threat of the Sabbat's fanaticism, the shadowy menace of the Second Inquisition with their satellites and DNA sequencers.

She learned further of the other supernaturals: the Garou, whose rage made them sound like the werebears of Solstheim but infinitely worse; the Mages, who wielded reality itself like clay and whose power dwarfed even the most ambitious Telvanni wizard; the Wraiths and Fae and God-knew-what-else lurking in the cracks.

For Alicia and David, it was an unraveling of an enigma. They learned of the Thu'um, the dragon-shouts that bent reality with words of power. They learned of the intricate, often hostile pantheon of Aedra and Daedra. They learned of the Volkihar's specific gifts: the command of frost that went beyond simple temperature control into a soul-numbing void, the summoning of beings from a plane of dead souls, the potent, physical domination of the Vampire Lord form.

Each detail was cross-referenced by David against his encyclopedic game knowledge, his murmured confirmations—"That's exactly how the Call of Valor shout works," or "The Soul Cairn is just like that!"—both validating and deeply unsettling them.

David, emboldened by the surreal détente and the flow of impossible knowledge, finally worked up the nerve. His voice was small in the plush quiet of the sanctuary.

"I know it's... probably rude to ask. But... can you? Demonstrate? Like, from the game?"

Alicia's head snapped toward him, her aura flaring with immediate, protective fury.

"David! You do not make demands of a guest! Of an Elder! Apologize at once!" The words were a venomous hiss, the threat of Final Death implicit. It was an unforgivable breach.

Natalia, observing Alicia's sudden rage through the filter of her passive Auspex—which translated the tone, if not the specific meaning—understood the gist: the child had overstepped.

But the question itself intrigued her.

Did her powers remain? The thought had been a gnawing phantom in her mind since awakening in this bizarre world. This was as good a time as any to inventory her arsenal.

She raised a hand toward Alicia, a queen staying an executioner. "Peace," she interjected. "The boy wishes to witness my powers, I presume? I, too, am curious."

She focused first on the arcane. In Skyrim, she had been a competent spellsword, favoring frost and conjuration. She extended a hand, whispering the incantation for a simple Frostbite spell, visualizing the flow of magicka from the world around her into her palm.

Nothing.

Not a wisp of cold, not a flicker of light. The connection to Aetherius, the font of all magicka, was severed.

This world had no stars she recognized. It was magically barren, or operated on principles utterly alien to her.

Next, she tried a minor summoning—Conjure Familiar. The gesture was flawless, the will focused.

The air remained empty.

No connection to the planes of Oblivion. No whisper from the Soul Cairn. A deeper chill settled in her gut. Her most versatile tools were gone.

Perhaps the gifts of her blood were more intrinsic. She focused inward, on the core of her vampiric being.

Her form began to shift, bones cracking and elongating, skin hardening to a leathery hide, powerful wings erupting from her back. In moments, the majestic, terrifying form of a Vampire Lord dominated the studio, towering over the furniture.

Alicia gasped, falling back a step. "By Caine... a Tzimisce zulo war-form. But... more refined. Regal."

Natalia dismissed the form, shrinking back to her usual appearance. She then let her body dissolve into a swirling, semi-corporeal mist, flowing around a marble statue before coalescing once more.

That, too, worked flawlessly.

Her vampiric disciplines—the enhanced strength, the fortitude, the predatory senses—all felt present and correct, fueled by her own vitae rather than any external wellspring.

She attempted to summon a Gargoyle from the ranks of her Volkihar thralls, focusing on the ritual that normally tore a hole between worlds.

Again, nothing. No answer from the other side.

So. The arcane was closed to her. The summoning arts, null. But the inherent powers of her Daedric-touched bloodline remained. They were part of her, not loans from distant realms.

One final test loomed in her mind.

The Thu'um.

A power not of magic, but of the soul, of mythic truth shaped into sound. It required no external magicka, only the understanding of a Word and the will to force it upon reality.

She drew a slow, unnecessary breath, feeling the power coalesce in her chest. 

She could unleash it, see if the Unrelenting Force would still scatter reality before her like leaves.

But she stopped. The risk was immense. The Shout would not be subtle. It would shatter every window in the penthouse, likely bring the mortal authorities, and violate this "Masquerade" Alicia had stressed with terrifying urgency.

She let the power dissipate unspoken, a rumble of thunder felt only in her own bones.

David, who had been watching with rapt, terrified attention, saw the subtle gathering of focus, the slight tightening of her posture.

His eyes went wide. "You were... you were about to use Fus Ro Dah," he whispered, equal parts horrified and thrilled. He was deeply relieved she hadn't.

His Sire might have survived the political fallout. He certainly would not have.

Natalia met his gaze, understanding his meaning from his tone and the familiar syllables. She gave a single, slight nod. The confirmation hung in the air, more terrifying than any transformation.

Her magic was gone. But the Voice... the Voice might still be hers to command.

She turned back to Alicia, her expression unreadable. "My arsenal is... curtailed. But not disarmed." She glanced at the darkening window. "Enough distractions. The night is here. Introduce me to your Prince."

Alicia moved to a sleek, floor-to-ceiling wardrobe, sliding it open to reveal a curated selection of modern garments. "Protocol," she stated simply. "And walking the streets in your current attire will only draw the wrong kind of attention. Again."

Natalia glanced down at her worn garment and gave a curt nod. "Fine."

She began to undress without ceremony, there in the center of the room.

The layers of Skyrim’s craftsmanship—the sturdy boots, the insignia of Clan Volkihar, the intricately designed garment—fell to the plush carpet in a heap.

Centuries of immortality stripped away the mortal flutter of modesty; the body was a tool, a vessel. And this was Alicia’s private sanctuary.

To demand privacy would imply a vulnerability, a concession to mortal shame she did not feel.

David, however, was still present.

As a neonate, embraced perhaps a decade ago, his connection to the rhythms and hungers of the flesh still a fresh, aching ghost in his dead nerves.

Kindred lust was a faded echo—the Beast hungered for blood, not fleeting flesh.

To simulate such mortal frailties required a conscious effort, the use of the Blush of Life, a parlor trick most elders considered gauche.

Why mimic a pale shadow of life when the Kiss of the vein offered a consummation more profound than any mortal pleasure?

But David was young. The Embrace had not yet fully scoured the mortal boy from his psyche.

His fixation on digital fantasies was proof of that lingering attachment. And now, presented with the spectacle of Natalia’s form—not the curated, airbrushed fantasy of a screen, but the real, unadorned presence of a warrior-queen from another world—his dead physiology reacted with a traitorous, remembered echo.

He did not look away. He savored it. Her pale skin, untouched by any true sun, bore faint silvery scars from ancient battles.

Muscle corded her shoulders and back—functional, powerful—while her fiery hair cascaded like a war banner down her spine.

His mind painted the vivid, detailed picture his eyes consumed, a flush of borrowed warmth attempting to rise in cheeks that could no longer truly blush.

A faint, almost imperceptible tremor ran through him, a phantom pulse quickening in a still heart.

Natalia, pulling on a pair of sleek, black trousers Alicia offered, noticed. Her crimson eyes flicked to him, then back to her task.

A low, throaty laugh escaped her—a sound of genuine, dark amusement.

"Your minion seems to enjoy the spectacle."

Alicia, handing over a simple but elegant dark silk blouse, followed Natalia’s gaze to David’s transfixed, reverent stare.

She scoffed, a dismissive click of her tongue. "Let the boy have his reward, I suppose. He has been... quite helpful."

She said it with the distant affection one might show a useful hound. David barely registered the words, caught in his silent, stunned appreciation.

Once Natalia was dressed, the modern garments transforming her from a time-lost warlord into a strikingly severe and anachronistic figure—the ancient eyes and regal bearing clashing with the simple elegance of the clothes—Alicia turned her attention back to the neonate.

"David. Return to your duties. Speak of this to no one. If your peers ask, you assisted me with a... sensitive matter of aesthetics."

David blinked, the spell broken. He nodded jerkily, scrambling to his feet. "Yes, Alicia. Of course."

He cast one last, wide-eyed look at Natalia before practically fleeing the sanctuary.

He emerged into the main Elysium to a circle of curious, predatory stares.

They had expected him to return bruised, mentally scarred, or at the very least, cowed. Instead, he looked… dazed.

Radiant with a secret, profound wonder. He ignored their silent questions, moving to his corner with a distracted smile.

His mind was elsewhere, in a castle of ice and a realm of gods, and the impossible woman who had walked out of both.

Back in the sanctuary, Alicia gave Natalia a final, assessing look.

The modern clothes could not hide what she was, but they would allow her to pass through the mortal world without causing a riot. It would have to do.

"Come," Alicia said, her voice all business once more. "The Prince holds Court at the old opera house. Remember, you are a petitioning anomaly. Let me do the talking until you are addressed directly."

The pair left the neonate’s bewildered envy behind, stepping out into the city's true night. The electric glow was no substitute for moons and stars, but it was a darkness Natalia understood.

Now, to meet the local power.

To see if this "Prince" was a fellow ruler to be treated with… or merely the first obstacle on her path to claiming a new throne.

Chapter 4: Presentation

The opera house air hung cold and still, thick with old dust, faded perfume, and the metallic tang of ancient blood strains.

It was a tomb masquerading as a palace of the arts. Velvet curtains, worn thin in places, hung like funeral drapes. Gilded balconies overlooked the empty seats where the orchestra pit yawned like an open grave.

The only illumination came from carefully placed electric scones, their light dimmed to a faint, amber glow that deepened the shadows in the high corners.

On the stage, where tenors and sopranos once poured out mortal passions, a court of the dead held its silent parliament.

Natalia observed with a familiar, detached scorn.

The trappings were different—no stone thrones, no banners of captured souls—but the rhythm was the same. Petitioners approached the figure seated in a grand, if threadbare, director’s chair at center stage.

They spoke in hushed, urgent tones of Masquerade breaches: a feeding gone too public, a security camera that needed to disappear.

They begged for the right to Embrace a promising mortal artist, a talented hacker, a beautiful socialite. They bickered over domains—who controlled the nightclubs in the warehouse district, who had claim to the blood banks at the university hospital.

It was the petty governance of predation.

At Volkihar Keep, she'd delegated such drudgery to her seneschal and the more politically-minded of her brood. Her personal involvement was reserved for threats that required her direct, overwhelming force: a rival clan probing her borders, a Dawnguard incursion, a dragon foolish enough to nest in her territory. Then, she would descend not as a bureaucrat, but as a beast unleashed, a blizzard given fangs.

Now, she was the one being presented. Alicia led her down the central aisle, a path that felt like walking into the jaws of a very polite, very ancient beast.

Every pair of eyes in the shadowed boxes and along the stage’s wings tracked them. She felt the weight of their gazes—curious, hostile, calculating. She caught a Brujah's perpetual sneer, a Ventrue radiating inherited authority, a Malkavian's eyes glittering with madness, and a Nosferatu's pale form lurking in the pit.

At the foot of the stage, the Sheriff materialized from the shadows. He was massive, his scarred face a map of old violence, exuding the quiet lethality of the Prince's enforcer. His cold eyes swept over Natalia, noting the modern clothes that did nothing to hide the way she moved—like a predator in a cage.

He fell into step beside Alicia, a silent, armed escort.

They mounted the steps to the stage. The current petitioner, a trembling neonate, scurried away with a fearful glance. All conversation ceased.

The Prince was an older man, his features sharp and ascetic, framed by silver hair. He wore a suit that was impeccably tailored and decades out of date. He did not look powerful; he looked like a retired professor. But his eyes, when they settled on Natalia, held the chill of a lightless abyss.

This was no jarl playing at kingship. This was a creature who had survived by being the most dangerous thing in the room for longer than most nations had existed.

“Alicia,” the Prince said, his voice a dry rustle of parchment. “You bring a stranger to my Court. Unannounced.” It was not a question. It was an indictment.

Alicia offered a deep, respectful curtsy. “My Prince. Forgive the intrusion. The circumstance is… unprecedented. I present Natalia, of Clan…” She hesitated, infinitesimally. “…of an unknown lineage. She arrived in our city only last night. Her nature is Kindred, yet it defies our conventions. She is the source of the… dawn disturbance your Sheriff investigated.”

The Sheriff grunted, his eyes never leaving Natalia. “The one who darts like Celerity's got her, but smashes through walls like a Potence-fueled battering ram. Yeah. Figures.”

The Prince’s gaze intensified, probing. Natalia felt the subtle pressure of his will, an attempt to take her measure, to impose his dominance. She met his stare without flinching, her own will, forged in the soul-crushing presence of Molag Bal, a wall of glacial iron.

“You are not of the Blood of Caine as we know it,” the Prince stated, a flicker of genuine curiosity piercing his glacial demeanor. “Your aura is alien. And yet, you are here. Explain.”

All eyes were upon her. The Court waited, a jury of monsters. Alicia gave her a slight, almost imperceptible nod.

Natalia did not bow. She inclined her head, the barest acknowledgement one sovereign might grant another when meeting on neutral ground. Her voice, when it came, was clear and carried in the dead air, devoid of fear or supplication.

“I am Natalia, Queen of the Volkihar, Lord of Castle Volkihar, Daughter of Coldharbour, Dragonborn. I was ruler of my own domain, in a world called Nirn, far from this one. I was cast here by powers I do not comprehend, into your city, under your… false sun.”

She let the title ‘Queen’ hang in the air, a challenge and a statement of fact. “I seek to understand the laws of this land. Alicia has spoken of your Masquerade, and your… Court. I am here to learn them.”

A murmur rippled through the assembled Kindred. Daughter of Coldharbour. False sun. Whispers of “Malkavian” were quickly silenced by the intensity of her presence and the wary confirmation in the Sheriff’s stance.

The Prince leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “A ruler from another world,” he mused, the concept neither accepted nor dismissed.

“You speak of laws. The first law is that you are in my domain with no regards to its customs. Your strength is evident. Your ignorance is a danger. The dawn panic you caused risked exposure. That alone merits a blood hunt.”

He let the threat hang, a naked test.

Natalia’s smile was thin and sharp. “If you wished me dead, your hunter would have tried by now,” she said, flicking a glance at the Sheriff. “You did not. You are curious. As am I. I have no wish to break your Masquerade. In my world, we also knew the value of secrecy from the cattle. But I will not live as a beggar in the shadows.”

The audacity of it silenced the room. To speak to the Prince not as a petitioner, but as a visiting dignitary laying out terms.

The Prince studied her for a long, silent moment. Then, he gave a slow, deliberate nod.

“Curiosity,” he echoed. “A dangerous indulgence for our kind. But occasionally a profitable one. You will be granted provisional recognition. Alicia will be your sponsor and tutor in our ways. You will abide by my decrees, the Traditions, and the Masquerade. In return, you will have the protection of the domain, and… latitude to satisfy our mutual curiosity about your unique nature.”

His eyes glinted. “A blood bond, of course, will be required to ensure your… good faith.”

Alicia stiffened slightly. The blood bond—the thralldom created by drinking a Kindred’s vitae three times—was the ultimate shackle.

Natalia knew of bonds. The Volkihar used them. For blood cattle. To be bound to this ancient, cunning creature would be to trade one form of subjugation for another. Her pride revolted.

“I will drink no blood that is not taken in combat or offered in tribute,” she stated flatly.

“That is the law of my blood. I will offer my oath, sworn on the name of my Sire, Molag Bal, and on the power that courses in my veins. It is a stronger bond than you know.”

The mention of the Daedric Prince’s name sent another, colder whisper through the Court. To some, it was blasphemy. To others, it was a terrifying credential.

The Prince considered. He saw not a desperate neonate, but a landed noble who had lost her land. An asset of unknown potential and unknown danger. An oath on a foreign god might be as binding as any vitae, if the believer held it so.

“Very well,” he said at last, a decision made. “Your oath. And a demonstration. The Sheriff will test your claim of strength. A controlled bout. Here. Now. Let the Court witness what a ‘Lord of Volkihar’ can do.”

He was not just testing her power. He was either showcasing a new weapon to his Court, or breaking her in front of them all at the same time.

Natalia’s smile widened, showing the tips of her fangs. Finally, a language she understood perfectly.

She turned to face the Sheriff, rolling her shoulders. “As you wish.”

A faint, scornful smile touched Natalia’s lips as the Prince issued his challenge. She held up a hand, not in surrender, but in request.

“A word,” she said, her voice cutting through the anticipatory silence.

“Do you wish for me to fight at my full strength, or not? If so, I require my blades. Umbra and Penumbra.” The names were spoken with a lover’s reverence. “Daedric artifacts, kissed by the void. Without them, this…” she gestured dismissively at the waiting Sheriff, “…is no test. Merely a brawl. You will not comprehend what I am.”

The Prince’s expression was unreadable. “We have no ‘Daedric artifacts.’ But we are not without resources.”

He gave a slight nod to a shadowed figure near the wings.

Moments later, a subordinate emerged, bearing two long, unadorned practice blades—functional steel, honed sharp, but inert. Mortal weapons.

Natalia took them, weighing one in each hand. They were dead weight compared to the singing malice of her true swords, but they would serve.

“Very well. It is said the eagle hides its talons. I prefer to show them.” She turned her crimson gaze fully on the Sheriff. “If you want any semblance of a chance, be prepared to survive the first blow.”

The Court cleared the stage, retreating to the balconies and wings, a silent, hungry audience. The Sheriff cracked his neck, his expression one of grim professional interest. This wasn’t a duel of honor; it was pest control, and he was the exterminator.

The Prince gave a single, slow nod.

The Sheriff moved first—a burst of shocking speed that would have blurred to mortal eyes, closing the distance in a heartbeat, a heavy fist aimed to crush Natalia’s throat. Celerity, fortified by the raw, hydraulic power of Potence.

Natalia didn’t blur. She flowed. She sidestepped the blow not with a frantic dodge, but with the casual ease of one avoiding a clumsy child, the steel in her hands licking out in a simultaneous, vicious cross-slash aimed at his ribs.

He was forced to abort his attack, twisting away, the fabric of his coat parting with a sharp tear.

“You are definitely nothing like Alicia,” Natalia mused, her tone conversational as she circled him, blades held low. The words were in her native tongue, meaningless to him, but the mocking lilt was universal.

He grunted, feinting high before dropping into a leg sweep empowered by Potence, strong enough to shatter concrete.

She simply leaped, not with Celerity’s zip, but with a powerful, unhurried spring, and came down with both points aimed at his spine.

He rolled, the blades scoring the wooden stage.

“Heh,” he spat, regaining his feet. “Sounds like you’re underestimating me, stranger.”

He came at her again, a whirlwind of controlled violence. Blows that could pulp steel were parried with precise, ringing clashes of her practice blades, each impact shuddering up her arms but failing to break her guard.

He used the environment, kicking a heavy prop chest toward her. She shattered it mid-air with a contemptuous kick of her own, splinters raining around her.

It was a fierce, visceral dance. He was faster in short bursts. She was stronger, her movements economically brutal, each parry a bone-jarring shock to his system.

She took a glancing blow to the shoulder that would have dislocated a mortal’s arm; she absorbed it and repaid it with a pommel-strike to his jaw that cracked bone.

He used Fortitude to simply shake it off before it connected, the paltry wound closing before their eyes.

He was good. Relentless. A master of his Disciplines. He forced her back a step, then another, a hammering combination of fists and feet.

Natalia blocked the last blow, the force driving her heel back through the stage wood. She smiled, a flash of genuine, predatory pleasure.

“I’ll be frank,” she said, still in her own tongue, her voice calm amidst the storm. “I’m impressed you managed to pressure me this far.”

Her eyes closed. 

Bear witness to the power of the Thu’um.

"Tiid... Klo Ul!"

The words tore from her, as a fundamental command to reality itself.

The air in the opera house rippled, warping like hot asphalt. A crushing, glacial weight descended upon the stage. The world slowed to a syrup-thick crawl.

To the most perceptive members of the audience, it was a blur of impossible motion. To the Sheriff, it was a nightmare of paralysis.

His final, driving punch hung motionless in the air before her, the air molecules around his fist visibly stalled.

He could see, he could think, but his body was trapped in amber. The only thing moving at true speed was the woman before him.

Natalia flowed around his frozen blow, a specter in a still world. Her practice blades became the ticking hands of a clock only she could hear.

Two visceral horizontal wounds erupted across the backs of his knees, severing tendons with surgical precision.

Before the pain could even register in his slowed mind, four more precise, lightning-fast strikes—snick-snick-snick-snick—flashed.

His shoulders, his elbows. The major joints, meticulously disabled.

It was a single, complex motion of surgical flurry executed in the space between heartbeats.

The crushing weight lifted. Time snapped back into place with a violent, audible whoomph of rushing air.

The Sheriff crashed to his knees on the ruined stage, his arms hanging useless, blood soaking his clothes. He stared ahead, stunned, his body refusing his commands.

The cold kiss of steel settled against either side of his neck. Natalia stood behind him, the two practice blades crossed like shears at his throat.

The silence in the opera house was absolute, frozen.

She leaned down, her voice a whisper for him, and her gaze fixated on the Prince. “As a show of respect… a demonstration of a pittance of my power.”

She let the moment hang, the threat of decapitation imminent.

Then, with a dismissive flick of her wrists, she tossed both bloodied practice blades aside. They clattered loudly in the quiet.

She turned her back on the kneeling, broken Sheriff, a gesture of utter disregard for him as a threat. Her crimson eyes found the Prince in his chair.

She looked past him, to Alicia, who stood pale and still in the wings.

“Have I proved my point?” Natalia asked, the words clear in the ringing silence.

The question was not one of victory, but of a foregone conclusion.

She was not a petitioner. She was a force of nature that had just announced its arrival.

The silence shattered into a cacophony of murmured dread. Whispers slithered through the shadows like serpents.

“An Antediluvian… waking…”

“A Methuselah, cast out from its sleep…”

“Caine’s own get, come to judge us…”

The Prince’s voice cut through the rising panic, sharp as a scalpel.

“Order!”

The command, infused with decades of unwavering authority and a hint of his own formidable Presence, slammed down on the room. The whispers died, choked off into a tense, vibrating quiet.

His cold eyes remained fixed on Natalia.

She had broken his Sheriff—a being who had ended elders and Sabbat packs—in under a minute.

Yet, she had stopped at the killing blow. A show of respect, she called it.

He saw it for what it was: a display of overwhelming restraint, a queen choosing not to step on an insect to prove she could.

She had maintained the brutal decorum of his Court even as she shattered its strongest enforcer.

Killing the Sheriff would have been a messy, administrative headache. This… this was a statement.

Natalia stepped away from the kneeling, gasping form of the Sheriff, her gaze never leaving the Prince. “If that is your mightiest champion,” she said, her voice carrying easily, “then nothing in this room could stop me from taking your position for myself.”

A fresh wave of shock rippled through the Court at the brazen declaration. It was treason uttered as simple fact.

“But,” she continued, raising a hand slightly, “my… conversation with Alicia has enlightened me. To rule a domain of frightened, hidden things, squabbling over scraps in the dark while hiding from a sun you cannot touch… it is not a throne worth the effort of seizing.”

She was not just insulting the Prince; she was insulting their entire existence. The Ventrue’s knuckles were white where they gripped the railing. The Brujah looked torn between fury and awe.

“You need strength that does not fear the day,” Natalia stated, pacing slowly before the stage, as if addressing her own council.

“I have it. I need… legitimacy. A place within your structure from which to operate, to understand this world. A mutual agreement.” She stopped and faced the Prince fully. “Imagine the things I can do for your… agenda, when your greatest weakness is my mundane afternoon.”

She was not offering an oath of submission. She was not swearing fealty. She was laying out demands, thinly veiled as an offer of cooperation. It was sheer, breathtaking insolence.

And every word was true.

The Prince leaned back in his director’s chair, steepling his fingers once more. The calculated rage that had tightened his features smoothed into an expression of profound, icy calculation.

He had just seen a weapon of unimaginable potential. A weapon that could not be bound by blood, could not be cowed by tradition, and viewed his entire Court as a temporary convenience.

To reject her was to make an enemy of that weapon. To accept her was to allow a wolf to name its own terms for entering the sheepfold.

He looked from Natalia, standing defiant and assured in the center of his ruined stage, to the broken Sheriff being helped to his feet by two nervous Nosferatu.

He looked at the terrified, fascinated faces of his Court. A new piece had been thrown onto the board, one that changed the value of every other piece.

He saw not just a threat, but an opportunity. A solution to problems that had festered for decades. A terror to unleash upon his enemies.

And, perhaps, a fascinating new variable in the eternal, stagnant game.

A slow, thin smile, devoid of any warmth, touched his lips.

“Very well then,” the Prince said, his voice echoing in the hushed theater.

“We shall have an… agreement. You will be recognized as a sovereign entity in residence within my domain. You will abide by the Traditions, particularly the Masquerade. In return, you will have the freedom to act, within parameters we will establish. And you will lend your unique… talents… to the domain when called upon.”

He stood, a gesture that brought the entire Court to a deeper, more attentive silence.

“But understand this, ‘Queen’ Natalia. This is not Nirn. You are not in your frozen keep. Here, even the sun that does not burn you can illuminate your enemies. And even a queen can be checkmated by pawns, if they know the board.”

He was granting her demand, while reminding her that her power had limits in this new, intricate game.

Natalia met his gaze, and after a moment, gave a single, regal nod. It was not the bow of a vassal, but the acknowledgment of a treaty between powers.

“Then we have an understanding,” she said.

The Court erupted into a new, more subdued wave of whispers.

The game had changed forever. And in the wings, Alicia watched, her Toreador heart racing with a terrifying, exquisite thrill.

She had not just sponsored a curiosity. She had unleashed a matchless weapon.

Chapter 5: Hunt

Alicia’s private sanctuary had transformed. It had shed its identity as a mere Toreador’s curated haven, becoming instead the antechamber to a foreign power.

Alicia herself moved with a new, careful deference, caught in the awkward role of a guide to a force she could not control. Sire? No. Translator, sponsor, and now, perhaps, the designated handler for a weapon with regal pretensions.

“So,” Natalia said, standing by the large window, watching the city’s electric veins pulse below. “What is next? In my court, after such an audience, there would be feasting. Or executions. Here, it seems there is only… waiting.”

Alicia poured two glasses from a fresh bottle of vitae, the ritual a comforting anchor. “The Prince will send his commands. Tasks to fulfill, problems to solve—usually Masquerade breaches, rival incursions, or… political inconveniences. We do not know when. But when the command comes, we obey. For the safety of all.”

Natalia snorted softly. “And between these royal decrees? You… exist. You survive.”

“We hunt,” Alicia said simply, handing Natalia a glass.

Hunting. Natalia took the glass but didn’t drink, turning the word over in her mind. “How is it done in this world? I saw your… method. In the hall of costumes.”

A flicker of defensive pride crossed Alicia’s face. “I prefer a subtle touch. Seduction. A brush of Presence, a whispered suggestion. They come willingly, thrilled by the attention. The Kiss is ecstasy for them. I take what I need, veil their memory, and send them back into their lives with a pleasant, if fuzzy, recollection of a daring encounter. No noise. No harm. Everyone is… satisfied.”

“Trollop,” Natalia stated, without malice, as one might note the color of the sky.

“Hey,” Alicia retorted, a flash of her old spirit showing. “If it works, it works. It’s artful. It leaves no mess for the Sheriff to clean up.”

Natalia dismissed the technique with a wave of her hand. “Debasing. I have dominated minds when necessary, as with the gatekeeper. But to simper and flirt for my supper?” She shook her head, her crimson eyes glowing with disdain.

“In my world, my servants brought thralls to the keep. Willing or unwilling, it mattered not. They served their purpose. For longer journeys, I carried potions of blood, brewed by my alchemists.”

She looked out at the sprawling city, a landscape of millions. “There must be something here. Bandit dens? Raiders? Cultists worshipping false gods? Mortals so vile their absence would be a blessing to this ‘Masquerade’ of yours.”

She turned, and a slow, cruel smile touched her lips. It was the expression of a child being told they could visit the toy store. “I like it when my prey screams in terror. The fear is a spice. It makes the blood run hotter.”

Alicia felt a chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. This was not the crude hunger of a Gangrel or the desperate frenzy of a Caitiff. This was a gourmand’s stated preference, delivered with calm, royal expectation.

“This… is not Skyrim,” Alicia said carefully, setting her glass down. “There are no ‘bandit dens’ in the hills, not like you mean. But there are… places. Rackets run by mortal criminals. Gangs. Violent cults, though they are rarer. Places where people do, in fact, go missing with depressing regularity.” She chose her next words with extreme care.

“The Prince’s concern would not be their deaths. It would be the method. A string of bodies drained of blood, torn apart by what looks like bestial claws… that is a Masquerade breach. That brings the Second Inquisition, with their thermal scopes and forensic teams.”

Natalia listened, her head tilted. “So. The kill must be… tidy. Or appear as something else.” She seemed to turn the problem over, not as an obstacle, but as a tactical puzzle. “A disappearance, then. Not a slaughter. A silent taking.” Her smile returned.

“Fear can be silent too. It can be a cold realization in the dark, with no breath left to scream.”

Alicia decided then and there that her role was not to stop Natalia from hunting. That was impossible. Her role was to direct the hurricane. To point it toward acceptable targets and away from catastrophic exposure.

“There is a district,” Alicia said, her voice low. “The old industrial waterfront. It is contested territory. Mortal drug cartels fight over it. The police rarely go there. The Kindred avoid it because the blood is often tainted with chemicals, and the mortals are… volatile.” She met Natalia’s gaze.

“Disappearances there are unremarkable. If one were to hunt there, one must be sure to leave no… calling cards. No obvious marks. And one must be aware that other predators may claim it as their domain.”

Natalia’s eyes gleamed with a dark light. She finally took a sip from her glass, the sterile blood seeming to satisfy a different kind of thirst now. “A hunting ground,” she mused.

“Filled with poisonous, violent cattle. And perhaps rival predators to put in their place.” She looked at Alicia, the agreement from the Prince still fresh.

“This will do. For now. You will show me this place.”

It was not a request. Alicia had just become the royal gamekeeper to a very particular, and very dangerous, huntress.

The quiet, artful existence of a Toreador aesthete was gone, swallowed by the shadow of a Volkihar Lord who viewed the modern world as a new, strange forest full of unfamiliar—but manageable—prey.

---

The industrial waterfront was a scar on the city’s edge—a labyrinth of rusted chain-link fences, decaying warehouses with broken windows like rotten teeth, and pools of stagnant water shimmering with chemical rainbows under the sickly orange glow of security lights. The air tasted of rust, brine, and the sour tang of methamphetamine cooking in hidden rooms.

To Natalia, it was a symphony of corruption. The stench of fear, violence, and desperation was thicker here than anywhere else she’d yet been.

From the roof of a derelict processing plant, they surveyed the territory. Alicia pointed out the key elements with the detached precision of a strategist.

“That warehouse with the flickering blue light—a chop shop. The men there are armed, paranoid. Too noisy. The long, low building with the single guarded door is a distribution point. Too many eyes. But the smaller outbuilding behind it… that’s where they break in the new runners. Isolated. Usually two or three inside, keeping watch over a terrified addict or a debt-ridden fool.”

Natalia’s eyes, sharper than any owl’s, tracked the lone sentry pacing by the main door. “The one outside is bored. His mind is weak. A distraction would pull him away.”

Alicia followed her gaze. “A distraction…” A slow, cunning smile spread across her lips. The idea of playing her own game within Natalia’s brutal hunt appealed to the artist in her. “Leave him to me.”

As Natalia melted into the deeper shadows, flowing down the fire escape with preternatural silence, Alicia approached from the street. She shed her usual aura of predatory grace, adopting the hesitant, lost posture of a privileged young woman in entirely the wrong neighborhood. Her dress, expensive and subtly provocative, caught the harsh light.

The sentry, a gaunt man with nervous eyes, tensed as she stumbled into the circle of light. “Hey! You can’t be here! Get lost!”

Alicia looked up, her eyes wide and artificially bright with unshed tears. “Please,” she begged in the local tongue, her voice a trembling melody. “My car… it broke down. I’m so scared. I don’t know where I am.”

She took a step closer, the fear on her face morphing into a desperate, pleading hope as she focused on him.

She didn’t use the full force of her Presence, just a whisper of it, a subtle nudge. You are my protector. You are strong. Help me.

It was a masterpiece of manipulation. His suspicion warred with a sudden, inflated sense of purpose. He glanced back at the door, then at this beautiful, helpless creature. “Look, lady, you gotta go…”

She took another step, now within arm’s reach. A tear traced a perfect path down her cheek. “Just… just tell me where the main road is? Please?” Her hand fluttered near his arm, not touching, but the invitation was there. The lure was cast.

The sentry’s duty frayed, replaced by a baser instinct. With a final glance at the silent door, he grunted, “Alright, alright. Come on, I’ll show you to the corner. But then you go.”

He led her away from the outbuilding, into a marginally darker alley between two stacks of shipping containers. As he pointed down the street, Alicia’s vulnerable mask slipped.

Her piercing blue eyes locked onto his, and the full, mesmerizing weight of her gaze descended. “You will stand here,” she whispered, her voice now a velvet command. “You will see nothing. Hear nothing. You will remember helping a lost woman, and then returning to your post, satisfied.”

His eyes glazed over. He nodded slowly, a slack smile on his face, already rewriting the memory in his mind. Alicia left him there, a living statue staring at a brick wall, and slipped back into the shadows, her part done. It was clean, bloodless, and effective.

---

Inside the outbuilding, the air was thick with the smell of sweat, stale smoke, and despair. A single bare bulb illuminated a scene of casual cruelty. Two men—one hulking and bored, the other skinny and twitchy—stood over a third figure, a young man slumped in a chair, his face bruised, his wrists bound.

Natalia observed from a ceiling beam, a shadow among shadows. No Celerity, no Obfuscate. Just the absolute stillness of a predator that had learned to hunt in silent, frozen lakes.

She dropped.

A silent descent of death itself. She landed behind the larger man, her hand clamping over his mouth and nose, her other arm snaking around his throat in a vice that crushed his windpipe before a sound could escape. There was a muffled, wet crack. She let the corpse slump soundlessly to the grimy concrete.

The twitchy man spun, his eyes wide, a knife flashing in his hand. “Wha—?!”

Natalia was already moving. She ignored the knife entirely. Her hand shot out, seizing his wrist in a vice-like grip. A sickening crunch echoed as bones powdered beneath the pressure. His scream died in his throat as her other hand seized his jaw, forcing his head back, exposing the throbbing, terrified pulse in his neck.

This was not the Kiss of the Kindred. There was no euphoric cloud, no seductive lure. The Volkihar bite was a violation, an act of cold domination. Her fangs—longer, crueler than the needle-like canines of Alicia’s kind—punched deep into his carotid. The blood that flooded her mouth was hot, laced with adrenaline and chemical fear, a fiery, spicy vintage.

He didn’t moan in pleasure; he shuddered in a horrific, paralyzed agony, his body seizing as his life was violently siphoned away. She drank deeply, efficiently, until his struggles ceased and his heart gave a final, faltering thump. She let the dry, shriveled husk fall atop his companion who was also drained afterwards.

The boy in the chair stared, beyond screaming, transfixed by the nightmare.

Natalia wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, a single drop of crimson stark against her pale skin. She considered him for a moment. He was not the prey she sought; he was spoil, and weak. But he had seen.

She stepped close, her crimson eyes holding his. A mere fraction of her will, the same she’d used on the convention hall security guard, lanced into his mind.

“Sleep. Dream of rescue. Remember nothing.”

His eyes rolled back, and he fell into a deep, oblivious swoon.

---

Alicia found her moments later, back on the rooftop, the city’s hum a distant backdrop. Natalia looked… invigorated. The sterile blood of the Elysium was sustenance; this had been a feast.

“It is done,” Natalia said. “The spoil is unconscious but will live with no recollection.”

Alicia nodded, then frowned. “What happened to your preys?”

Natalia shrugged. “Dealt with.”

“Did you… let them go?”

“Would you like me to show you where the shriveled husks are?” Natalia replied, confused.

Alicia’s blood ran cold. “Wait. You completely drained them?”

Natalia’s confusion deepened. “I was told they are scum, dregs that nobody would miss? I took your counsel.”

“Yes, it’s true, but your Humanity! You drank all of their vitae, and that would—!” Alicia cut herself off, a shocking realization dawning. She stared at Natalia, who stood there without a trace of frenzy, no strange tinge to her aura, no sign of the Beast rearing up from an excessive kill.

“Oh. Oh, wait. You don’t have the Beast inside of you, do you?”

Natalia’s lip curled. “The only beast here is the one you see.”

Alicia exhaled sharply, the pieces crashing together. “Drinking a mortal to death… for us, it’s a line. It risks the Beast rising, it stains our Humanity or Path, it makes us hungrier for more death. It’s a dangerous spiral.”

She leaned against the rusted railing, the reality of the gulf between them laid bare. “And to consume a fellow Kindred… that is Amaranth. Diablerie. It is not just Final Death for them. It is to consume their soul, to add their power and their torment to your own forever. It is the ultimate sin.”

Natalia listened, and then she laughed. It was a low, rich sound of genuine amusement that echoed strangely in the industrial gloom.

“To have all these powers,” she said, shaking her head, “yet be shackled by so many constraints. Fear of the sun. Fear of your own hunger. Fear of consumption by your own kind.” She looked at Alicia, her red eyes gleaming with pitiless clarity. “My curse is a blessing compared to your existence. I take what I need. I rule what I take. And I answer to no one but my Sire, who is far away, and the strength of my own will.”

Alicia could only stare. She had just facilitated a clean, terror-filled hunt for a creature that viewed their most sacred and terrifying taboos as trivialities. Natalia’s strength was undeniable, but it was her freedom that truly set her apart—a liberty incomprehensible to any Kindred. And that made her more terrifying than any Antediluvian legend.

Alicia sighed heavily, a very mortal gesture of exasperation. “Regardless—and I’m saying please here—we need to get the… shriveled husks away from where you left them. And dispose of them. I know a place.”

Natalia let out a dismissive tch. “Fine.” The notion of prey disposal was a new logistical wrinkle. In Skyrim, bodies were left for the frost or the draugr. But she saw the cold logic in Alicia’s panic. Even with the command implanted in the boy’s mind, a pile of desiccated corpses would raise questions no memory-altering command could fully answer.

She moved back through the shadows alone, the building now a silent tomb. The hostage was still slumped in his chair, bound and dazed. Stepping over the two withered forms—one broken-necked, one drained to a leathery parchment—she paused.

With a swift motion of a claw-tipped finger, she severed his plastic bindings. She then lifted him with effortless strength, carrying him out of the outbuilding and depositing him behind a dumpster two alleys over, still deep in his magically-induced slumber. Let his rescuers find him there, she thought. A mystery, but not our mystery.

Returning, she gathered the two husks under her arms like grotesque, brittle firewood. They were shockingly light, little more than skin and bone held together by dried sinew. She brought them to the rooftop where Alicia waited.

Even for a fellow predator, the sight made Alicia recoil. It wasn’t the death—she had seen and dealt plenty—it was the utter, artless desiccation. It offended every Toreador instinct: beauty reduced to ugly, efficient waste.

“Satisfied?” Natalia asked, dropping the remains with a dry rustle.

“It’s not a matter of personal satisfaction,” Alicia snapped, her voice tight. “It’s discretion. This way.”

The disposal site was not far, a derelict incinerator in a sealed-off section of the waterfront. Rusted but, according to Alicia, still functional for discrete uses. The chamber was a dark, iron mouth.

“No Beast means no innate fear of fire, I assume,” Alicia said, keeping a healthy distance from the open hatch. “Don’t tell me you’re immune to that, too.”

Natalia gave a short, dry laugh. “No. That would be ludicrous. Fire burns. Decapitation kills. We are immortal, not invulnerable.”

Alicia blinked. “Wow. Thanks for telling me one of your few weaknesses. I’ll be sure to inform the Prince.”

Natalia’s laughter this time was genuine, a low, rolling sound. “If I let myself be killed in such a stupid manner, then I deserve it. A warrior who fears no enemy can still die to a careless child with a torch. ‘Tis a lesson in vigilance.”

Alicia pointed to a heavy lever. “Open the hatch. Toss them in. There’s an ignition switch on the wall. It will be… intense. I’ll watch from over there.” She gestured to a spot nearly fifty yards away, behind a thick concrete piling.

Natalia looked from the incinerator to Alicia’s chosen vantage, her head tilting in curiosity. “You’re scared of burning bodies?”

“No,” Alicia corrected, her voice dropping, a hint of old, primal shame in it. “Fire itself,” Alicia said. “We call it Rötschreck—the Red Fear. One glimpse of open flame and it screams run. Dignity, strategy, Masquerade—none of it matters. So I’ll watch from where I can’t see the fire.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, though the night was mild. “Unless you’d prefer I succumb to animal panic and draw every eye in the district?”

Natalia looked at her—this polished, controlled creature of the night, brought low by the mere idea of a cleansing flame. Another chain. Another weakness her own curse did not carry. She felt no pity, only a reinforced sense of her own superior design.

“As you wish,” Natalia said, turning towards the iron hatch. She hauled it open with a shriek of rusted metal, the maw yawning black and reeking of old ashes. Without ceremony, she flung the two desiccated forms into the darkness. They landed with a papery crunch. She closed the heavy hatch with a thud.

She found the ignition switch, a heavy, dusty thing. With a shrug, she activated it.

The world inside the incinerator exploded into a roaring, concentrated sun. A blast of searing heat and blinding white light vomited from the hatch. Natalia stepped back, not in fear, but in respect for the raw, destructive power.

The husks vanished in an instant, erased into a bloom of superheated gas and fine, drifting ash.

She watched for a moment, the firelight dancing on her impassive face, feeling the dry heat against skin that would indeed blister and blacken if she stepped into it. A weakness, yes. But a known one. A simple one.

She flicked the switch once more, cutting off the inferno, and walked back to where Alicia waited, pale and tense in the shadows.

“It is done,” Natalia reported. “Your little veil holds. Tonight.”

Alicia nodded, slowly unclenching her hands.

They returned to the Elysium in a silence heavier than any that had come before.

Chapter 6: Garou

The silence between them held on the journey back to the Elysium, a tension born from Natalia’s contemplative superiority and Alicia’s unsettled calculation. The neonate’s anxious energy hit them like a wave the moment they stepped through the entrance.

David stood rigid in the center of the main chamber, having clearly been waiting. The usual giddy awe in his eyes was tempered now by a deeper, more primal fear. He had heard the whispers from the Court, the tales of the shattered Sheriff and the being who did it without breaking a sweat. He bowed, not just in his usual clumsy respect, but in genuine, reverent terror.

“Alicia. My Lord,” he stammered, the honorific for Natalia slipping out unbidden. “The Prince. He just sent a command. For you both.”

Natalia’s bored expression sharpened into keen interest. A slow smile touched her lips. “Well, well. Something exciting, I hope.”

Alicia shot her a warning look before turning to David. “Deliver it.”

David swallowed, his voice gaining a measure of steadiness as he fell into the role of messenger.

“It concerns the old mining tunnels in the hills outside the city. The ones that were sealed in the fifties. There’s… activity. Not mortal. Something’s dug its way in, or out. Patrols have sensed a presence there—bestial, alien. It’s been taking livestock from nearby farms, but last night… a farmhouse was breached. The family wasn’t just killed. They were… rearranged. Into symbols. The Prince believes it may be a feral Lupine, newly changed and lost to its rage, or…” He hesitated.

“Or?” Alicia pressed, her voice tight.

“Or something that came up from deeper in the tunnels. Something that shouldn’t be here. The Sheriff is… incapacitated. The Prince commands you to investigate. To assess the threat. And if it is a direct danger to the Masquerade or the domain… to eliminate it.”

He finished, looking between them. The unspoken words hung in the air: You have the new weapon. Now go point it at the unknown.

Alicia felt a cold knot form in her stomach. A possible Garou. Even a frenzied, isolated one was an engine of destruction. “Symbols? What kind of symbols?”

David shook his head. “The message didn’t say. Just that they were ‘unholy’ and ‘not of any known Wyrm-taint or Path.’ The Prince’s Malkavian advisor is apparently… agitated.”

Natalia listened, her head tilted. Livestock taken. A family slaughtered and arranged. Tunnels. It sounded less like a political nuisance and more like a proper hunt. A beast in a hole. It reminded her of clearing out falmer caves or putting down a rogue werebear.

“A beast in its den,” she mused, her voice rich with anticipation. “And we are to be the hunters sent to flush it out.” She looked at Alicia, her crimson eyes gleaming. “This is more to my liking than policing your kind’s social squabbles. When do we leave?”

“At nightfall tomorrow,” Alicia said, her mind already racing through protocols, threats, and the absolute nightmare of containing both a potential Garou and Natalia in a confined space. “We’ll need to prepare. Silver for a Lupine. Cold iron and wards if it’s something fae-tainted. Flashbangs, heavy weapons…”

Natalia waved a dismissive hand. “Keep your trinkets.” She thought of the potions she could no longer brew, the enchanted arms she could not summon. But she had her will, her strength, and a newfound understanding of this world’s terrors. “Just lead me to its lair. The rest is a matter of claws and consequence.”

She turned and strode towards Alicia’s private chambers, already planning. David stared after her, then looked at Alicia, his face pale. “You’re really going out there with her?”

“We have our orders,” she said quietly, the words tasting like a sentence. “And she is, for now, the closest thing we have to an answer.” The real fear, she didn’t voice, was wondering what kind of question this beast in the tunnels would turn out to be, and if Natalia was truly the answer, or merely a louder, more catastrophic version of the problem.

---

The farmhouse stood in a pool of profound, unnatural silence, a mile from its nearest neighbor. The police tape – a vibrant, criss-crossing yellow Natalia recognized as a barrier cordon from the previous night’s chaos – fluttered in the cold night breeze like tattered funeral ribbons. 

Alicia moved with a predator’s caution, but Natalia strode forward, her modern boots crunching on the gravel drive, her senses flaring. She pushed the broken front door fully open with a creak.

Her first impression was not of gore, but of opulence.

Even ransacked, the interior spoke of a wealth unimaginable to most in Skyrim. Smooth, flawless walls painted in soft colors. A vast, flat window now shattered. Plush carpets thicker than any pelt. Strange, humming boxes of cold food in the kitchen.

This, she thought with a scholar’s detachment, is the home of peasants in this world?

A Cyrodilic count would sell his soul for such consistent warmth, such effortless light, such clean, expansive space. The disparity between this mortal comfort and the furtive, dusty existence of the Kindred was stark. The cattle lived better than the herders.

Then the smell hit her. Underlying the coppery tang of old blood was something else: musk, wet earth, and a pungent, feral odor that was neither man nor wolf, but something violently in between.

The “rearrangement” was in the main living space. Alicia had warned her, but Natalia was a Daughter of Coldharbour; she had seen the artistry of Daedra and the butchery of bandits. This was different. It was not a frenzied feeding. It was a statement.

The mortal family—a man, a woman, two smaller forms—had been placed with a terrible, deliberate care. Their limbs were not merely broken haphazardly, but deliberately positioned, their bodies forming a rough, four-pointed shape. Upon the pale skin of their foreheads, symbols had been carved with a claw-like precision.

They were not letters Natalia knew, nor were they the familiar runes of Oblivion. They were jagged, angular things that seemed to writhe in the low light, pulsing with a faint, residual wrongness that made her vampiric flesh crawl. It was a desecration, but one from a scripture she had never read.

“Not an average Lupine,” Alicia whispered, her voice strained. She stood well back, her beautiful face a mask of revulsion. “A Garou’s rage is a storm. This is… an invocation. This is something that thinks.”

Natalia knelt, ignoring the congealed blood, and examined the nearest symbol on the man’s forehead. She reached out a finger, but Alicia hissed. “Don’t touch it! It could be a psychic brand, a curse.”

Natalia withdrew her hand, but not out of fear. Out of tactical sense. “A trail leads from here,” she said, nodding towards a splattered, dragged path of gore that exited through a shattered rear door and into the night-shrouded fields beyond, toward the dark, humped shapes of the hills.

Without another word, she followed it. Alicia, after a moment of palpable dread, flowed after her.

The trail was a visceral map of terror. It spoke of a creature not just strong, but heavy, dragging its prizes. It led across a trampled field, through a cracked wooden fence, and towards the black mouth of an old mineshaft, partially collapsed but clearly recently excavated, the earth around it torn up by powerful claws.

The stench of the beast was overpowering here, a physical wall of musk and rot. Natalia felt the old, familiar thrill coil in her gut. This was a proper den. A true hunt.

She took a step toward the dark entrance.

“Wait.”

Alicia’s hand closed on her arm. Natalia looked down at the slender fingers, then at Alicia’s pale, serious face.

Alicia let go and reached into her long coat. She withdrew a sheathed dagger. It was small, almost delicate, with a plain leather-wrapped hilt. But the scabbard had a cold, heavy feel. She offered it, hilt-first, to Natalia.

“Take this.”

Natalia looked at it, then back at the dark mine entrance. “My claws have rended dragonhide.”

“If it’s what I fear it is,” Alicia insisted, her eyes grave, “then your claws will not be enough. The silver in this blade might. It is a bane to several things that could be waiting in that dark.”

Natalia scoffed, a puff of frost in the cold air. Silver was for werewolves and ghosts. Useful, but not a panacea. Still, she saw the genuine fear in Alicia’s eyes—not just for herself, but for the catastrophe of sending an unstoppable force against an immovable object without the right tools.

She took the dagger, the weight unfamiliar in her hand. She drew the blade a few inches. It gleamed with a dull, moon-like sheen in the starlight. It was well-made, but it felt like a toy compared to Umbra.

“Hmph,” she grunted, sliding it back into its sheath and tucking it into her belt. “Well, if it makes you less of a worrywart.” She turned back to the mine’s entrance, her form seeming to gather the shadows around her. “Stay here, or follow. But do not get in my way.”

With that, the Lord of Volkihar descended into the black throat of the earth, leaving the Toreador amidst the scent of blood and fear, clutching her own secrets and staring into the dark after her.

The darkness inside the mine was not the friendly, enveloping gloom of a Nord tomb. It was a suffocating, gritty blackness, thick with the smell of damp earth, rotten timber, and that overwhelming, musky stench. Natalia’s eyes adjusted instantly, painting the world in shades of gray and thermal outlines. The tunnel was low, shored up with splintered beams that groaned under the weight of the world above.

She walked alone.

What a familiar sight, she thought, the memory surfacing unbidden. The chill, the oppressive silence, the sense of ancient secrets waiting in the dark. It was like the first approach to Dimhollow Crypt, where she had found Serana sealed away in her stone prison for centuries.

Her blood-sister, her only equal in the long, cold eternity. A pang, sharp and unexpected, lanced through her. Where was Serana now? Ruling the Volkihar in her stead? Searching for her? Or frozen in time, waiting for a sister who would never return?

The thought was a distraction. She buried it beneath a layer of glacial focus. This was not Nirn. Sentiment was a luxury for those with a home.

The tunnel descended, turned. The signs of the creature’s passage were everywhere: deep gouges in the earth and stone, splinters of wood where it had forced its bulk through a narrow spot. And then, a sound. Not a growl, but a low, rhythmic chanting. Guttural, phlegmy syllables that formed no words she knew, but carried a cadence of purpose. It was coming from a wider chamber ahead, where a faint, sickly greenish light pulsed.

She moved to the edge of the opening and peered in.

The chamber was a junction where several tunnels met, expanded long ago by miners. In its center, the creature knelt.

It was massive, easily eight feet tall even hunched. Its body was a grotesque fusion of man and… something else.

Thick, matted fur patched with weeping sores covered a powerfully muscled frame. Its head was elongated, a wolfish muzzle crammed with yellowed, broken fangs, but its eyes, reflecting the eerie light, held a disturbing, cunning intelligence. Its hands—paws—ended in black, cracked claws, and it was using one to carefully scrape the same jagged symbol she’d seen on the farmhouse victims into the dirt floor, surrounding itself with them.

In the center of the crude circle lay the half-eaten carcass of a cow, and beside it, carefully arranged, were small, pathetic treasures from the farmhouse: a child’s stuffed toy, a ceramic figurine, a silver locket.

The green light emanated from a cluster of strange, phosphorescent fungi growing in a fissure in the wall, but it seemed to pulse in time with the creature’s chant.

Natalia observed, her predator’s mind analyzing. This was no mindless beast lost to rage. This was a ritual. A desperate, deranged one, perhaps, but a ritual nonetheless. The creature was trying to do something. To ward? To summon? To remember? Its motions were frantic, its eyes wide with a terror that bordered on madness, but the intelligence—and the agony—within them was unmistakable.

An equally confused and lost soul, she realized. Cast out, trapped in a form of horror, trying to use broken knowledge to piece together a reality that made sense. The parallel was so acute it was almost amusing.

The Prince’s order echoed in her mind. Investigate and assess. Eliminate only if it’s a direct danger.

The creature, sensing her presence, went rigid. Its chanting stopped. It slowly turned its monstrous head, its nostrils flaring. It saw her, a pale figure in the tunnel mouth. It did not roar. A low, pained whine escaped its throat, a sound of profound confusion and fear. It shuffled back, knocking over one of the little treasures—the figurine. It looked from the broken ceramic to Natalia, its intelligent eyes filled with a dawning, hopeless understanding.

It was not attacking. It was cornered. It was terrified. And it was, in its own horrific way, trying to build a shrine against the dark.

Natalia stood at the threshold, the silver dagger cool at her belt. The direct danger was not immediate. The assessment was clear: a tragic, intelligent monster, a danger only if provoked or allowed to continue its bloody rituals among the cattle.

The Lord of Volkihar had a decision to make.

---

Natalia remained still in the tunnel mouth, a pale statue in the pulsing green gloom. The desire to kill, to unleash the pent-up frustration of her exile on a true, formidable beast, thrummed in her veins like a second heartbeat. This creature’s death would be a symphony of violence, a proper offering to her nature.

But the intelligence in its eyes, the tragic, ritualistic despair of its actions, stayed her hand. It was a reflection, however grotesque, of her own predicament: powerful, alien, and utterly lost.

She slowly raised her empty hands, palms open and facing the creature, a universal gesture of non-aggression she had seen even in this strange world. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and calm, stripped of the imperious command she usually wielded.

“I am not here to fight,” she said in her native tongue, the words meaningless but the tone deliberate. She took one slow, deliberate step into the chamber, keeping her movements fluid and non-threatening. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” She gestured from the creature, to the symbols, to the tunnel leading back to the surface world, her crimson eyes trying to convey inquiry rather than threat.

The creature recoiled, a thick line of drool dripping from its jowls. It let out another whine, this one higher, more distressed. It looked at its crude circle, at the pathetic stolen treasures, then back at her. Its clawed hands flexed, but it did not charge.

The conflict within it was visible—the feral instinct to destroy the intruder warring with the sentient mind that recognized a potential, if alien, point of contact.

Natalia waited. She would give it this chance. If it attacked, she would consider it a declaration of hostility from a doomed soul, and she would answer with the full, brutal measure of her strength, letting it have the first, futile blow as her customary “mercy.” The silver dagger felt insignificant on her belt; her own claws itched for the task.

But the attack did not come. The creature shuffled back another step, its massive shoulders slumping. The intelligent despair in its eyes won out over the bestial rage. It was not a mindless monster. It was a prisoner.

Assessment complete.

Natalia gave a slow, single nod, as if they had reached an understanding. She pointed a finger at the creature, then pointed back the way she came. Stay. Then she pointed to her own chest and back towards the tunnel. I will return.

She didn’t wait to see if it comprehended. She simply turned and melted back into the tunnel’s darkness, moving with swift, silent grace back toward the surface.

Alicia was waiting exactly where she’d been left, a tense silhouette against the starry sky. She spun as Natalia emerged, her eyes wide. “Well? Did you—?”

“It lives,” Natalia interrupted. “It is not a simple beast. It thinks. It fears. It creates symbols. We cannot speak its tongue, nor it mine.” She fixed Alicia with her piercing gaze. “You have the power to understand languages. Use it. Come. Translate.”

Alicia stared at her, aghast. “You want me to go down there? To use Auspex on… on that? Natalia, if it’s a Garou, even a lost one, the moment it senses my Kindred presence it might frenzy! The Auspex might drive it mad!”

“It did not frenzy at my presence,” Natalia stated flatly. “It saw a predator greater than itself and chose despair over battle. It is broken. And it may have answers. The Prince commanded an assessment. We will assess. Now, come.”

Her tone brooked no argument. It was the voice of a commander who had made her reconnaissance and was now deploying her specialist.

After a long, fearful moment, Alicia steeled herself. The curiosity of it, the sheer, terrifying novelty, began to override the fear. To speak to a thing from the deep places? It was a story beyond any she’d ever witnessed. She gave a stiff nod.

“Stay behind me,” Natalia ordered, not out of protection, but to control the introduction. “Let it see me first.”

They descended back into the mine. When they reached the chamber, the creature was exactly as Natalia had left it, crouched by its broken ritual, watching the tunnel with a hunted, hopeless intensity.

Natalia entered first, repeating her open-palmed gesture. “I have returned. With another. She will listen.”

Alicia, peering from behind Natalia’s shoulder, flinched at the sight of the massive, stinking thing. She closed her eyes for a moment, focusing inward. Natalia felt the subtle shift in the air, the psychic hum of a Discipline being activated—Auspex, reaching out not to cloud a mind, but to unravel the meaning behind sounds.

“Now,” Natalia said to Alicia. “Ask it. Who is it? What is it doing here?”

Alicia, her voice trembling slightly, opened her eyes and spoke. The words that came out were in the local mortal tongue, but as she spoke, the power of Auspex worked, not on the creature’s speech, but on her own perception of it. She was building a bridge of comprehension.

She repeated Natalia’s questions, her voice echoing strangely in the chamber.

The creature flinched at the new voice, but its eyes, locked on Natalia’s imposing form, remained wary. It opened its maw, and a series of wet, grinding clicks and guttural growls emerged. To Natalia, it was bestial noise.

But Alicia’s eyes widened in horror and dawning understanding. She listened, her face growing paler.

“He… he says,” she translated, her voice a whisper of dread, “He says his name is ‘Karthak, of the Black Spiral Dancers.’ He says he is lost. That the ‘Umbra’ here is thin and screaming. That the ‘Wyrm’s song’ is silent. He was performing the Rites of Descent, trying to hear the voice of its corruptor… but there is only silence. He thinks… he thinks he has been abandoned in a dead world.”

Natalia’s eyes narrowed, processing the translated words. Black Spiral Dancers. Rites of Descent. Wyrm. The terms were meaningless, but the concepts they hinted at were chillingly familiar: cultists, a ritual, a corrupting deity. This “Karthak” was a priest of a foul faith, severed from its source. His rituals were a desperate attempt to re-establish a connection to his god—a god whose voice couldn’t reach this world.

“Interesting,” she murmured, more to herself. “A soul cut off from his patron’s power. I am no stranger to such… disconnections.” She thought of the muted, distant feel of her own magicka here, the silence where Aetherius should hum.

She turned her head slightly toward Alicia, her voice dropping to a cold, pragmatic whisper. “The Prince’s task remains. We have investigated. We have assessed. Now, we determine the threat.” Her gaze returned to the hulking, miserable creature. “Ask him directly. Will his… rites… bring him into conflict with the hidden folk of this city? With us? If he must kill to hear his silent god, then conflict is inevitable. In that case…”

She let the implication hang. Her body, which had been held in non-threatening openness, subtly realigned. The shift was slight—a grounding of her stance, a loosening of her shoulders—but it transformed her from an envoy back into a monument of lethal potential. The greenish light gleamed in her crimson eyes.

“If conflict is inevitable,” Natalia continued, her voice devoid of malice, only finality, “then I will grant him a final honor. A warrior’s end, in this dark place, away from the mocking sun and the eyes of the cattle. No hunt. No terrorizing of peasants. Just power against power.”

She glanced at Alicia. “If the beast agrees to such an end, I will hand you the dagger back. I don’t need it.”

The lie was seamless.

Natalia, in truth, had no intention of a battle. She had seen his eyes, his posture, the way he cowered. A true fight required a worthy opponent. This was a broken thing. If he chose death, she would give him not a duel, but an execution. Swift, total, and overwhelming.

But the illusion of a chance—the offer of an honorable death—would salve her own sense of decorum. He would not die a terrified animal, but as a warrior accepting a challenge, even a hopeless one. It was a mercy, in its own Volkihar way.

“Ask him,” she commanded Alicia, her tone leaving no room for debate.

Alicia’s voice trembled slightly as she translated Natalia’s ultimatum into the guttural, clicking tongue of the Black Spiral Dancer. The words hung in the fetid air of the chamber, a stark choice between a hopeless parley and a promised, "honorable" end.

Karthak listened, his massive, wolfish head lowering. The intelligence in his eyes churned with a maelstrom of emotions: the ingrained fury of his kind, the bottomless despair of abandonment, and a strange, weary understanding. He looked at his shattered ritual circle, at the silent, dead earth.

The Wyrm was not here.

This pale, cold creature before him, who smelled of ancient ice and a different kind of oblivion, was the only power in this dead world that acknowledged him as anything more than a monster.

A low, shuddering growl built in his chest, not of attack, but of resignation. He spoke again, his claws flexing and digging into the dirt.

“He says,” Alicia translated, her voice tight, “that the ‘song is silent forever.’ That to die by a claw that understands solitude… is a better end than to fade into the silence, starving and mad.” She took a shaky breath.

“He accepts. He will… ‘run his last spiral’ against you.”

Natalia gave a single, regal nod. “Then steel yourself. Perform your last rites. She will leave us.” She gestured for Alicia to go after tossing the dagger onto her.

Alicia didn’t need to be told twice after quickly translating the words. The prospect of being caught between a Vampire Lord and a Garou—even a lost one—in a death frenzy was her deepest nightmare.

She scrambled back into the tunnel, not stopping until she was back at the surface, the cold night air a relief after the tomb-like stench below. She stood, heart pounding a frantic, useless rhythm in her still chest, staring at the black mouth of the mine.

Back in the chamber, Karthak bowed his head over his pathetic treasures for a moment, a final, whispered click of his native tongue escaping him—a fragment of a prayer to a deaf god. Then he turned. The despair burned away, replaced by the furious, focused clarity of a warrior with nothing left to lose. He lowered his head, his powerful haunches coiling.

He charged.

It was a bull-rush of terrifying speed and mass, meant to crush Natalia against the tunnel wall. To a Kindred, even a skilled one, it would have been a devastating, possibly fatal opening.

Natalia did not blur with Celerity. She did not harden her skin with Fortitude. She simply… stepped aside.

It was a movement of such casual, contemptuous precision that it seemed to defy physics. One moment she was in his path, the next she was leaning against the chamber wall beside the charge, as if she had always been there. Karthak slammed into the opposite wall with a thunderous crash of splintering wood and dislodged stone, roaring in confusion and pain.

He whirled, slashing with claws that could rend steel. Natalia leaned back, the talons passing inches from her face. She didn’t block; she didn’t counter. She observed. She weaved around a second swipe, ducked under a third, her movements economical, almost lazy. This wasn’t the intense, powerful clash with the Sheriff. This was less. This was a master toying with a promising, but ultimately outclassed, student.

“Is this the sum of your spiral?” she asked, her voice calm, knowing he wouldn’t understand the words, only the tone of disappointment. “The rage of a lost pup?”

Enraged and humiliated, Karthak lunged again, jaws snapping for her throat. This time, Natalia moved into the attack. Her hand shot up, not with a fist, but with an open palm. She caught him under his bestial jaw, her arm absorbing the monstrous momentum without a tremor, and slammed his head upwards into the low ceiling of the chamber.

The impact was sickening. Rock dust and chunks of earth rained down. Karthak staggered back, dazed, one eye swelling shut.

Natalia straightened her sleeve. The fight, such as it was, had reached its conclusion. The assessment was final. He was no threat to her, and in his current state, he would only ever be a Masquerade breach waiting to happen—a confused, slaughtering thing drawn to the scent of mortal families.

She had given him the honor of the challenge. He had accepted. The rest was merely ceremony.

“Your end has come,” she stated, her voice dropping into the register of a funeral knell. “Die knowing you faced a Daughter of Coldharbour.”

She closed the distance. No more playing. This was the execution.

The desperation of the doomed is a unique and potent force. As Natalia moved in for the final, merciful strike, a surge of adrenaline—or something far darker, the last dregs of the Wyrm’s corrupted gift—flooded Karthak’s broken body. With a sound that was more a sob than a roar, he threw himself not at her, but into her, abandoning all defense. His full, massive weight, fueled by the absolute certainty of his end, crashed like a falling star.

It was unexpected. The force of it, the sheer suicidal commitment, knocked Natalia off her precise footing. They crashed to the gritty floor of the chamber in a tangle of limbs and fur. For a moment, the Volkihar Lord was pinned beneath the beast, his claws, black and cracked, raking down her sides, tearing through the modern fabric and into the alabaster flesh beneath. Shreds of leather and skin peeled away. Cold blood, black in the phosphorescent light, welled from the deep gouges.

And in that moment, as his claws tore into her, she saw it.

Not rage in his one good eye, but a profound, aching sorrow. A tear, thick and wet, traced a path through the matted fur on his monstrous cheek. He was not fighting to live.

He was fighting to matter.

To leave a mark on the uncaring entity that was about to erase him.

The pain was immediate and sharp—a cleansing fire compared to the sterile ache of this world. But beneath her own physical shock, Natalia felt something else: a psychic echo of his agony. The loneliness of the silent song. The horror of the form he was trapped in. The despair of being a priest in a temple without a god.

He knew death was here. He just wanted to depart this world having taken something with him.

A strange, grim respect settled over her. She stopped resisting the pin. She let his claws dig deeper, let the cold burn of her own vitae flow. His wolfish head darted down, jaws gaping wide, and clamped onto the join of her neck and shoulder.

The pain was immense. Fangs meant to crush the spine of a bison punched through her immortal flesh. She heard the crunch of her own clavicle, felt the terrible grinding pressure as his jaws worked, tearing. A chunk of her pale flesh, muscle, and a shard of bone ripped free with a wet, tearing sound. He wrenched his head back, her blood painting his muzzle, and began to chew, a low, guttural moan of terrible satisfaction vibrating through his frame.

Natalia did not cry out. She lay beneath him, her body a ruin of torn fabric and lacerated flesh, and looked up into his weeping, triumphant eye. With her one free arm, the one not pinned under his weight, she reached up. Her hand, slick with her own blood, came to rest gently on the side of his massive, fever-hot head. Her touch was not an attack. It was an acknowledgement.

“May you rest in peace,” she whispered, her voice a ragged but steady breath in the dank air.

Then, with a surge of power that made the very stone beneath them tremble, she moved. Her free hand shot up, not in a slash, but in a precise, piston-driven thrust. Her fingers, tipped with claws as hard as obsidian, drove up under his jaw, through the softer tissue of his throat, and into the base of his skull. There was a wet, final snap.

The chewing stopped. The light in his one good eye flared, then dimmed into nothing. The massive body slumped, its full dead weight settling on her ravaged form.

For a long minute, there was only silence and the drip of blood.

Then, Natalia pushed the ton of fur and muscle off her with a grunt of effort. She stood, a horrific sight. Her clothing was in tatters, hanging off her in blood-soaked ribbons. The wounds on her torso were deep, glistening trenches. The horrific bite on her shoulder was a crater of mangled flesh, white bone visible amidst the ruin.

Blood, black and slick, streamed down her body, pooling at her feet.

She grabbed one of Karthak’s thick wrists and began to drag him. He was immense, but her strength was greater. She hauled the fallen warrior-priest behind her, leaving a broad, dark smear on the tunnel floor, a funeral procession of one.

Alicia was waiting at the surface, her face a mask of dread. When Natalia emerged, dragging the colossal corpse into the starlight, Alicia’s hands flew to her mouth. She wasn’t looking at the dead Garou. She was staring at Natalia.

“By the Blood… your… your body…”

Natalia looked down at herself as if noticing the damage for the first time. She gave a dismissive, wet cough. “Do not worry about me. The flesh eventually restores itself.” She fixed Alicia with a bloody, challenging gaze.

“Or do you not have that power, ‘Kindred’? Does your ‘Fortitude’ only stiffen you against the blow, not mend what is broken?”

The question was another brutal reminder of the chasm between them. Alicia couldn’t toughen her skin to steel like a Ventrue does, and such grievous wounds would take nights, perhaps weeks, of feeding and torpor to heal.

Natalia dropped the Garou’s wrist with a heavy thud. She stood, bare and bleeding amidst the gore, like a statue of a war-god fresh from a triumph. “Nonetheless,” she said, her voice already sounding stronger, the edges of the worst wounds beginning to steam faintly in the cold air as her vampiric flesh actively, visibly knit itself back together.

“What to do with the body? Presented to the Prince himself? I can do that.” She gestured to the corpse as if offering to deliver a package. “A thorough assessment. And a definitive resolution.”

Alicia stared, her mind reeling from the brutal tableau. The massive, reeking corpse of the Black Spiral Dancer lay between them like a felled tree. Natalia stood over it, a specter of regal carnage, her flesh visibly, unnaturally knitting itself back together.

The Prince’s order echoed in her mind: Eliminate only if it's a direct danger. It was eliminated. But the directive ended there. It said nothing about evidence, trophies, or theological complications.

“Burying him here in the mine, sealing the tomb, would be the cleanest option. He would vanish, becoming one more rumor of the hills. But taking him… the sheer, shocking power of presenting such a creature to the Court…”

Her thoughts were interrupted. As she watched, Natalia, still dripping her own vitae, knelt beside the Garou’s head. With a surprising gentleness, she used her thumb to close its one staring eye. Then, she placed her blood-smeared palm flat on its broad forehead, over the crude symbol it had carved there in life. She bowed her head for a single, silent moment.

It was a foreign gesture. Solemn. Respectful.

Natalia stood, meeting Alicia’s puzzled gaze. “Come now, don’t think me an uncouth lout. You offer your respect to the departed, that is all. He died as a warrior, confused and far from home, but a warrior nonetheless. His struggle is over.”

The sentiment, coming from the creature who had just been partially eaten by it, was so dissonant it left Alicia speechless. It wasn’t Kindred. It wasn’t human. It was something older, a code from a world where honor and brutality were two sides of the same cold coin.

“We can take him,” Alicia heard herself say, the decision solidifying as she spoke. “Directly to the Prince’s audience chamber. We bypass everything. This is not a matter for gossip or gallery. This is a report to the throne.”

She stopped, facing Natalia. “But it also re-establishes the scale of what you are. It’s no longer just ‘a strong foreigner.’ It’s ‘the entity that single-handedly dispatched a Garou.’ That is a different kind of political capital. Dangerous, but potent.”

She let the options hang in the bloody air. The truth was a weapon. She was asking Natalia, in essence, how she wished to be perceived: as a useful exterminator, or as a seismic event.

A faint, almost wistful smile touched Natalia's lips, though it did not reach her eyes. "My people—not the Volkihar, the Nords I was in life—they sought glory. They challenged the mightiest foes, so that their songs would be sung in the halls of Sovngarde."

She looked down at her own bloodied hands, then at the fallen Garou. "That door is forever closed to a tainted soul like mine. But the seeking… the need for the challenge to be recognized… that persists."

Her gaze lifted, sharp and decisive. "Let the Prince and his Court come to their own conclusions. I bring the trophy. The truth of its nature is written upon its flesh and in the symbols it carved. Let the wise among them decipher it."

She gestured to the massive corpse. "I can detect mortals and evade their notice, even burdened with this. Worry not. You simply have to announce my return with the... 'results of the investigation.'"

She bent, her regenerating muscles coiling as she prepared to heft the immense body.

"Oh no you don't."

Alicia's voice was sharp, cutting through the night air with a startling authority born of sheer, pragmatic horror. She stepped forward, blocking Natalia's path to the main road.

Natalia straightened, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. "What now?"

"Not," Alicia stated, planting her hands on her hips, her eyes scanning Natalia's ravaged form with theatrical dismay, "with your tits hanging out."

She pointed a rigid finger towards the dark silhouette of the violated farmhouse. "You are not dragging a were-god's corpse into the Prince's court looking like you just lost a bar fight with a woodchipper. Get inside. Find clothes. Any clothes that aren't shredded and drenched in your own bodily fluids. We are presenting evidence of a terminal Masquerade threat, not auditioning for a splatter-film. Dignity, Natalia. Theater."

For a long moment, Natalia simply stared at her, the ancient, prideful predator faced with the utterly modern problem of a ruined wardrobe and public indecency laws. The sheer, mundane absurdity of the objection seemed to war with her imperial disdain.

A chuckle, low and grudging, escaped her. It was not a sound of amusement, but of concession to an unexpectedly shrewd point.

"Fine," she gritted out, as if the word tasted foul. "Keep watch over our 'trophy.'"

She turned and stalked back towards the farmhouse a naked, blood-drenched war-goddess momentarily defeated by the dictates of modesty and Toreador theater. Alicia watched her go, then looked down at the colossal, stinking corpse at her feet, and let out a long, slow breath that wasn't needed. She was now alone in the dark with a dead cosmic horror, waiting for a millennia-old vampire lord to find a clean shirt.

The night, she decided, had taken a truly surreal turn.

Chapter 7: Revelation

The opera house was shrouded in its usual funereal quiet, the air thick with anticipation and the faint, dry scent of old dust. The court had been convened on short notice, a ripple of unease passing through the Kindred of the city.

Whispers of the Sheriff’s condition, of the dawn disturbance, and of the terrifying newcomer had created a tense, electric atmosphere.

Alicia entered first, a picture of Toreador composure. She moved down the central aisle with a measured, graceful pace, her head bowed just enough to show respect without submission. She reached the foot of the stage and offered a deep, flawless curtsy.

“My Prince,” she said, her voice clear and carrying in the cavernous space. “As commanded, we have investigated the disturbance at the old mining tunnels.”

The Prince, ensconced in his director’s chair, watched her with impassive eyes. “And?”

“The threat was… significant. And alien. It has been dealt with.” She kept her report concise, factual, giving nothing away.

The Prince’s gaze swept past her to the empty aisle. “And what of our ‘guest’?”

As if on cue, a new presence darkened the doorway at the rear of the hall.

Natalia entered. She had found clothes in the farmhouse—a man’s heavy flannel shirt, worn and too broad in the shoulders, and a pair of sturdy denim trousers, both dark enough to hide the residual stains of her own blood that no amount of rinsing could fully erase.

They were humble, mortal garments, but on her, they looked like the pragmatic travel-wear of a dirty vagrant.

And hoisted over her right shoulder, one massive, furred arm dangling down her back, was the corpse of Karthak.

She carried it with the casual, formidable ease of a hunter returning from a successful trip, no trace of strain in her bearing. The Garou’s head lolled against her spine, its muzzle agape, its one closed eye a testament to her final gesture.

Its weight was immense, but her stride was unwavering, her boots echoing with a solid, rhythmic thud on the worn carpet. The sheer, visceral spectacle of it—the pale, regal woman and the monstrous, stinking burden—stole the breath from the room.

Alicia smoothly stepped aside, clearing the path to the stage.

Natalia walked the length of the silent court, ignoring the stunned stares from the Brujah, the calculating gleam in the Ventrue’s eye, the frantic whispering of the Malkavian in the wings.

She did not stop at the foot of the stage. With a powerful heave, she swung the corpse forward and let it drop.

It landed before the Prince’s chair with a wet, final crunch of settling bone and displaced air, a mound of matted fur, muscle, and profound wrongness. The symbols carved into its own flesh, and the lingering, unholy resonance of its final ritual, seemed to pulse in the dead air.

Natalia straightened, wiping her hands on the thighs of her borrowed trousers, a simple, practical gesture. She then looked up, meeting the Prince’s gaze directly, her crimson eyes bright in the dim light.

“The investigation is complete,” she stated, her voice echoing slightly. “The threat has been assessed. And it has been eliminated.”

A profound silence gripped the court, broken only by the faint, settling creak of the massive corpse on the stage boards.

Every Kindred present stared, some with naked horror, others with a kind of ghastly fascination. The sheer physicality of the kill, the evidence of it lying at their Prince’s feet, was a shock to a society built on subtlety and shadow.

The Prince leaned forward in his chair, his ascetic features carved from ice. His eyes, however, burned with an intense, cold fire as they moved from the monstrous body to Natalia’s impassive face, then to Alicia.

“You…” he began, his dry voice the only sound in the vast space. “Did this? The two of you?”

Alicia opened her mouth to give a diplomatic, shared account, but Natalia spoke first, her tone matter-of-fact, devoid of boast or apology.

“No. It was just me.” She gestured a blood-stained hand towards the Garou. “The beast was wounded. Lost. Desperate. It had performed rites to a silent god.”

She paused, then added, as if mentioning the weather, “I allowed it to take a chunk of my flesh. A gift for the departed. A warrior’s tribute.”

A fresh wave of whispers, this time tinged with disbelief and a species of dread, rustled through the court.

Allowed it? A gift?

The concepts were alien. Kindred did not allow damage. They avoided it, or endured it through Fortitude. They certainly did not offer their vitae as a departing gift to the monsters they slew.

The Prince’s gaze lingered on the brutal, still-knitting wound visible at the torn collar of Natalia’s flannel shirt.

The evidence supported her outrageous claim. He slowly leaned back, steepling his fingers. The immediate shock was giving way to colder, more terrifying calculations.

“A warrior’s tribute,” he echoed softly, the words tasting strange. Then his voice hardened, shifting from the personal to the geopolitical.

He looked past Natalia, his eyes seeking the shadowy corners of the stage.

“Tremere. Your assessment. These markings speak of a deep, ritual corruption. For such a creature to be here alone, wounded and ranting... this is not a random incursion. Interpret the anomaly.”

A figure detached itself from the darkness near the Malkavian’s usual perch—an older Kindred with eyes that held the glint of polished lenses and a mind like a vault of forbidden ledgers.

The Tremere Regent. He approached the corpse with cautious, academic distaste, kneeling without touching it.

“The symbols,” he murmured, his voice a sibilant whisper that carried. “Not standard Wyld or Weaver markings. This is deep Wyrm taint. Black Spiral Dancer. They are the shock troops of the cosmic corruption, rarely seen so… isolated. They move in packs, fueled by a hive-mind of madness.”

He looked up at the Prince. “For one to be here, alone, performing broken rites… It suggests a severance. A tear. Perhaps it was cast out from its hive. Or perhaps it fell through a… a thin spot. A place where the Gauntlet between our reality and the Umbra—the Spirit World—is fragile. If such a spot exists nearby, it is not just a threat of one beast. It is an open wound. Others may follow. Or worse, things that listen to the Dancers’ songs may already be listening.”

The Prince’s face grew grimmer. A single, feral Lupine was a natural disaster. A weak point in reality was an existential crisis.

His eyes returned to Natalia. She had done more than eliminate a threat; she had delivered a dire warning, wrapped in fur and stench. A weapon, certainly. But also a harbinger.

“You have done more than eliminate a beast,” the Prince said, his voice low. “You have uncovered a vulnerability. This changes the nature of your service.”

He looked from the corpse to her. “The territory around those tunnels must be secured, monitored. We must understand what drew this creature here, and if the wound remains open.”

He had moved beyond issuing simple tasks. Now, he was outlining a campaign. And Natalia, the hunter with the trophy at her feet, stood at the center of it.

As the Court watched, the stranger’s role reshaped itself before their eyes. She was no longer just a force to be reckoned with; she was now a keystone in an altogether more perilous design.

The Regent’s words hung in the air like a funeral shroud.

A thin spot. A tear. A weak point in reality.

Natalia’s mind, ever turning inwards towards her own mystery, seized the thread with the force of a lightning strike. Her crimson eyes, which had been fixed on the Prince with detached defiance, flickered with a sudden, internal blaze.

The ambient chatter of the court, the Tremere’s sibilant analysis, Alicia’s tense presence beside her—all of it faded into a distant hum.

Could it have been related to my arrival?

The question echoed in the silent vault of her thoughts. The method of her exile had been a mystery, a roaring, golden cataclysm of light and sound that had stolen her from the precipice of her hard-won throne and dumped her here, into this muted, electric-shadowed world.

The Elder Scrolls were artifacts of cosmic knowledge, not mere teleportation devices.

They didn't just move things; they revealed, they unmade, they rewrote possibilities across the tapestry of time.

Did the Elder Scroll do that by banishing me here? Did it not just translocate my body, but tear a hole in the doing?

The logic was chilling, and it felt true in her bones. Her arrival hadn't been a gentle insertion into an existing order. It had been a violent puncture.

A metaphysical arrow fired from one reality into the chest of another.

This "Garou," this priest of a corrupting alien god, wasn't just a random monster. It was a symptom. A piece of spiritual debris sucked into the wake of her catastrophic passage.

If the Gauntlet was thin here, it was because she had ripped through it.

A slow, cold smile touched her lips—an expression of grim, cosmic vindication, devoid of pleasure. Her exile was not a quiet punishment. It was an event. An incision.

And this world, with its fragile Masquerade and its fearful, hidden predators, was now bleeding from the wound of her coming.

She tuned back into the moment. The Prince was watching her, waiting for her reaction to his new directive. The Court held its breath.

Natalia looked from the Prince, down to the slain Dancer at her feet, and then back up. Her voice, when it came, was thoughtful, carrying a new, unsettling weight.

“A weak spot in reality,” she repeated, tasting the words.

“You seek its cause.” She paused, letting the silence build. “Consider this: I am here. I should not be. My arrival was not… subtle. It was a severing. A scream across the voids between worlds.”

She took a step forward, her gaze pinning the Prince. “You ask what drew this creature? Perhaps it was not drawn. Perhaps it was spilled. A drop of poison forced through a crack made by a larger force.” She gestured vaguely, dismissively, at the corpse.

“This thing, with its silent god… it is a rat, fleeing a flood. The water it flees is the echo of my coming.”

The implication was staggering. She was no longer just a dangerous immigrant or a powerful weapon.

She was suggesting she was the cataclysm itself. The origin point of the instability.

The Tremere Regent stared at her, his academic detachment shattered into sharp, fearful interest. The Prince’s icy composure finally cracked, revealing a flash of something far older and more anxious beneath.

“You are saying,” the Prince said, each word measured, “that your presence here created this vulnerability?”

“I am saying,” Natalia corrected, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur that somehow carried to every ear in the dead-still hall, “that if you wish to sew up this ‘thin spot,’ you must first understand the needle that made it. And that needle… is me.”

A low, rising tide of murmurs swelled in the opera house, a chorus of dread and speculation.

The Prince’s revelation of a reality-wound was bad enough. Natalia’s calm assertion that she was the cause was akin to declaring oneself a walking, talking natural disaster.

“A breach in the Gauntlet, caused by her…”

“She is the puncture wound itself!”

“Then the only way to seal it is to remove the foreign body…”

“Send her back! Banish her!”

“And lose the only thing that can kill what might come through?”

The voices overlapped, a cacophony of fear and cold pragmatism. The Ventrue Primogen spoke of “containing the variable.” A Gangrel snarled about “cutting out the infection before it festers.” The Malkavian simply giggled, a sound like breaking glass.

“Order!”

The Prince’s voice cracked like a whip, infused with decades of command and a flicker of his own formidable Presence.

The cacophony died, simmering down to a tense, vibrating silence. He did not look at the bickering courtiers. His eyes were fixed on Natalia, who stood amidst the chaos as unmoved as a glacier in a storm.

His mind, an ancient engine of survival and control, turned over the brutal calculus.

Sending her back.

The ideal solution. Excise the anomaly, let the wound heal.

But how?

The Tremere couldn’t do it. The rituals required were the stuff of apocalyptic myth, not practical thaumaturgy. The Malkavians might know a way, but it would be a path of madness and certain destruction.

She was not a spirit to be exorcised; she was a physical, willful entity from a cosmology that did not obey their rules. Attempting to force her out might widen the tear, not close it.

And then there was the other side of the ledger.

The weapon.

He looked at the massive Garou corpse, already beginning to bloat and reek in the warm, still air of the theater.

A Black Spiral Dancer, a creature of mythic horror, slain single-handedly.

By a being who felt no Rötschreck, who shrugged off the sun, whose very blood seemed to knit her back together with preternatural speed.

She was unburdened by the Beast, by the Traditions, by the gnawing fear of the dawn.

She was the ultimate scalpel. And his city was sick.

Sick with Sabbat whispers on the wind, sick with this new, reality-rending infection, sick with the constant, grinding pressure of the Second Inquisition.

A scalpel this sharp could cut out many cancers.

But could he hold the handle?

Decisions, decisions.

---

The Prince leaned back, steepling his fingers once more, the picture of calm deliberation. The court watched, holding its collective breath.

“Speculation on origins is a luxury for archivists,” he declared, his voice cutting the silence. “Our immediate concern is consequence. And containment.” His gaze swept the room, silencing the last of the whispers.

“The stranger, Natalia, has proven her… unique utility. She is also a point of ongoing instability. Therefore, she will be both our blade and our subject of study.”

He pointed a bony finger at the Tremere Regent. “You and your chantry will study the site of the incursion. Map the weakness. Determine if it is spreading, or stable. Report only to me.”

The Tremere bowed, a glint of hungry curiosity in his eyes.

He then turned his gaze to Alicia. “You remain her sponsor and liaison. Her freedom of movement is now conditional. She operates at my command, or with my explicit permission. Her hunting grounds are the contested zones, the places where her… exuberance… will cause the least collateral damage to the Masquerade.”

Finally, he looked at Natalia. “You have brought us a problem wrapped in a solution. You will now be part of both. You will aid the Tremere in understanding what your arrival has done. And you will be the first, and last, line of defense against anything else that might try to crawl through the hole you made. Is this understood?”

It was not a request. It was a sentencing. He was making her both the warden and the prisoner of the breach, binding her to the city’s fate with chains of responsibility and mutual threat.

He was keeping his devastating weapon, but aiming it very, very carefully.

The Court watched, waiting for her reaction—for the proud, volcanic refusal.

A low, rich laugh escaped Natalia’s lips, a sound that held no warmth, only a dark, private amusement that echoed strangely in the hushed theater.

It wasn’t the reaction the Court expected—not defiance, not submission. It was the sound of someone hearing a particularly clever, yet utterly insignificant, joke.

Of course, she thought, the words crystalline and contemptuous in the privacy of her mind. Royal decorum. He must perform the act of command, the pantomime of control. He never had any true power or authority over me, and he knows it. But the theater requires its lines.

She saw the calculation in his eyes as clearly as if it were written in the air. The fear of the unknown she represented, weighed against the sheer, brutal utility of her strength.

By declaring her both “blade” and “subject,” he was trying to cage a hurricane with paperwork and purpose. It was an admirably mortal tactic. A jarl would have tried the same.

Her laughter faded into a faint, lingering smirk. She inclined her head, not a bow, but a slight, regal tilt of acknowledgment.

“As you command,” she said, her voice smooth, devoid of any trace of the mockery that had fueled her laugh.

The words were correct. The tone was impeccably neutral.

Yet, the sheer fact of her agreement, delivered so easily after such a display of power, sent a fresh, confused ripple through the court.

A gasp, quickly stifled, came from somewhere in the shadows. She obliges?

They didn’t understand. Obeying a strategic directive from a temporary ally was tactics, not submission.

A choice of the battlefield, not a surrender of will. He was giving her a hunting license and a puzzle to solve—both things she desired.

The “conditions” were the meaningless rustling of leaves to a creature that could uproot the tree.

The Prince watched her, his own expression unreadable. He heard the obedience in the words, but he was ancient enough to hear the vast, silent reservation behind them.

It was the best he would get. It would have to suffice.

“Very well,” he said, his voice regaining its dry, definitive edge. “Court is adjourned.”

With a final, slow look at the grotesque trophy still steaming on his stage and the untamed power standing beside it, he rose from his chair.

The gesture was a dismissal, and the gathered Kindred began to melt away into the shadows of the wings and the aisles, their whispers now a subdued, frantic buzz.

Natalia turned, not waiting for Alicia, and began to walk back up the aisle she had paraded down with death on her shoulders. The audience parted before her, a silent, fearful sea.

Alicia caught up to her at the doors, her face a mask of conflicting emotions—relief, anxiety, awe. “That was… surprisingly diplomatic of you,” she ventured.

Natalia didn’t break stride, pushing out into the cool, electric night. “Diplomacy is the language of those who cannot afford to say what they mean,” she said, her breath frosting in the air.

“I said what was necessary. He heard what he needed to hear. The game continues.”

She glanced at Alicia, her crimson eyes gleaming. “And now, we have a new hunt. Forget the beasts in the holes. We hunt the hole itself—its shape, its cause. With permission to kill anything that tries to crawl out.”

She smiled, a true, predatory smile this time.

The Prince’s sentence, in her mind, had just granted her the keys to the most interesting playground in this strange, shackled world.

Chapter 8: Legacy

The silence in Alicia’s penthouse sanctuary felt different after the Court—a thick, brittle quiet, like the ringing aftermath of a detonation. Gone was the usual hush of curated art and genteel predation.

Natalia stood by the window, her back to the room, watching the electric grid of the city pulse like a captured nervous system. She had traded the blood-spattered flannel for a simple black turtleneck and trousers, the modern fabric still looking like a temporary disguise on her immortal frame.

Alicia was at her small bar, pouring a glass of vitae with hands that trembled just enough to make the crystal chime softly against the lip of the decanter. The veneer of the composed courtier was paper-thin, stretched over a core of raw, jangling nerves.

“I have a question,” Natalia said, her voice cutting the quiet. She didn’t turn.

“You usually do,” Alicia replied, her tone attempting lightness and failing.

Natalia turned then, her crimson eyes catching the ambient city glow. The light in them was that of a surgeon's lamp—cold, analytical, and utterly devoid of the feverish glow of power. She looked at Alicia—really looked—as if seeing her for the first time since the convention hall.

“Why are you the Toreador Primogen?”

The question hung, blunt and heavy. Alicia blinked, a flicker of offense crossing her features. “I am the eldest Toreador in the city with the requisite standing and political acumen. My lineage is respected, my Elysium is impeccable—”

“You are weak,” Natalia interrupted, the words not a sneer, but a simple, devastating statement of fact. She took a step forward. “I have seen your peers in that theater of ghosts. The Brujah with his contained fury. The Ventrue with his inherited weight. The Malkavian with his shattered insight. Even broken, your Sheriff carried a gravity of violence you do not possess. Your power is a parlor trick. A flutter of the eyelids, a whispered suggestion. It is for seducing cattle, not ruling predators.”

Alicia’s face paled further, the bloodless white of marble. “My strength is not in Fortitude or Potence. It is in influence. In patronage. In the art of the possible.”

“Is it?” Natalia tilted her head. “That first night. At the hall of costumes. You approached me. Your Auspex, your ‘heightened senses,’ should have told you I was wrong. That I was neither Kindred, nor Garou, nor anything your world has a name for. I was a void, a tear in the reality you know. And yet, you thought your little flutter of ‘Presence’ was enough. You thought to make me a thrall, or a meal. You walked up to a sleeping dragon and tried to pick its teeth.”

She took another step, now within arm’s reach. Alicia didn’t back away, but she seemed to shrink. “It was a foolish, reckless, childish gamble. The act of a neonate drunk on her own minor gifts, not a centuries-old Primogen who understands survival. Which leads me to conclude a simple, ugly truth.”

Natalia’s voice dropped to a whisper that was colder than any shout. “You are the Primogen because there are no other Toreadors. No older ones. No wiser ones. Where are they, Alicia? What happened to the elders of your clan in this city? Did they fall to the Sabbat? To the Inquisition? Or did something else… prune the garden, leaving only the prettiest, shallowest bloom?”

It was a scalpel slid between ribs she had never let anyone see. All the calculated poise, the artistic refinement, was stripped away, revealing the stark, terrified survivor beneath.

For a second, Alicia just stared, her blue eyes wide, her lips parted. The insult to her power was one thing. The exposure of her deepest, most carefully guarded insecurity was another. The truth of it—the hollow, accidental nature of her title—was a wound she had spent decades artfully bandaging.

And something in her snapped.

Not the Beast. Something more human, more mortally fragile.

Her hand flew out, a sharp, stinging slap that connected with Natalia’s cheek with a crack that echoed in the quiet room.

It was a pathetic blow. It wouldn’t have staggered a mortal child. It did nothing to the Daughter of Coldharbour except turn her head a fraction of an inch. A faint, pink mark appeared on the alabaster skin and faded in an instant.

But the act itself was seismic.

Alicia stood there, her hand still raised, her breath coming in sharp, unnecessary gasps. She had just struck the creature who had broken the Sheriff and slayed a Garou. The weapon of mass destruction. She looked as shocked as Natalia felt.

Natalia slowly turned her face back, her expression one of pure, unadulterated astonishment. Not anger. Not offense. Astonishment. She raised a hand and touched her cheek where the blow had landed, as if confirming the impossible had happened.

Alicia lowered her hand, clenching it into a fist, her body trembling with a violent cocktail of fear, rage, and humiliation.

“You… you have no idea what you’re talking about,” she hissed, her voice raw.

“You swagger in here from your storybook world and think you see everything? I am a survivor. Do you understand that word in your frozen keep? I have survived things that would have broken your precious ‘will’ into dust and scattered it on the wind. I am here because everyone else is gone. Because when the storm came, I was the one small, pretty thing that huddled in the right crevice and didn’t make a sound while the giants were torn apart!”

The confession tore out of her, ugly and real. It was the cry of the last one left, the courtier who inherits the crown because the royal family has been massacred.

Alicia’s anger had melted away, replaced by a pallor that was more than just the lack of blood. It was the pallor of a truth long buried, now exhumed. She looked away, towards a framed abstract painting on the wall—a splatter of desperate reds and grays.

Alicia’s gaze fixed on the abstract painting, her sight tunneling straight through the canvas into a frozen night a decade past.

“You want to know what happened to the elders? The true Toreadors?” Her voice was a dry whisper, like leaves skittering over a grave.

“They called it the Week of Scarlet Snow. By the third night, the snowfall in the financial district was stained pink—vitae, diluted by thaw and misery. They weren't fighting a war; they were reaping a crop.”

She took a shuddering breath, the memory pulling her under.

“My sire, Lorenzo… he painted the exact shade of a dying man’s last sigh. He believed sorrow held more hues than joy. The Sabbat made his execution a masterpiece of cruelty. They nailed him to the old cathedral spire with slivers of his own paintbrushes. Then, in the square below, they built a pyre of his life’s work—canvases two centuries old, curling to ash in the flames. They forced him to watch. He made no scream—only tears. And when the dawn finally came… it washed him away like a watercolor left in the rain.”

Her knuckles were white around her glass.

“Magdalena was our Keeper of Elysium. She could hear the history in a stone’s silence. They turned her tomb into a chemical furnace. They poured concrete laced with powdered garlic, vervain, and sanctified ash around her, dissolving her from the inside out over two endless nights. We listened to her telepathic screams fade until there was nothing left to scream with.”

Alicia’s eyes finally snapped back to Natalia, bright with a grief decades hadn’t dulled.

“I survived because I was at the opening of a vapid modern art exhibition. I was ‘Lorenzo’s pretty trinket’—decorative, forgettable. While the deep roots of our clan were torn out, I was the shallow stone left skimming the surface.”

A bitter, broken sound escaped her.

“My ‘political acumen’ is the art of smiling at those who may have slaughtered my family. My ‘impeccable Elysium’ is a tomb I’ve dressed in silk and call a salon. You look at me and see a weak Primogen. I look in the mirror and see the final flicker of a candle that should have burned out long ago.”

The astonishment on Natalia’s face faded, replaced by a slow, dawning understanding. Then, to Alicia’s shock, a grim, appreciative smile.

“A survivor,” Natalia echoed, nodding slowly. “Yes. I see that now. The slap proves it. Not a ruler’s calculated punishment. A mortal’s lash of pain. You still have that spark. Faded, buried under centuries of posturing, but it is there.”

Her smile vanished. “Do not mistake my observation for contempt, Alicia. Survival has its own honor. A different kind. A quieter, more desperate kind.”

She turned and walked to the window again, giving Alicia a moment to compose her shattered dignity. The city’s lights winked below, indifferent.

“You ask if I understand survival,” Natalia said, her voice softer now, reflective. “Let me tell you how I claimed my throne. It was not through a mighty war against external foes. Not through glorious conquest.”

She looked over her shoulder, her crimson eyes holding Alicia’s. “I killed my adoptive father. Lord Harkon.”

Alicia stared, the personal horror of her own exposure momentarily eclipsed by this new, colder one.

“He was not my Sire,” Natalia continued, turning fully to face her. “Molag Bal himself is my Sire. Harkon… took me in. A powerful fledgling, brimming with the Master’s favor. He made me his courtier. Then, in time, treated me as his own daughter. A favored daughter, even. I was more… devoted to the teachings of Coldharbour than his true daughter Serana ever was. More ruthless. More ambitious. He saw a kindred spirit. A true heir to his legacy of domination.”

She paused, the memory playing out behind her eyes. “And then he unveiled his great plan. A foolish, vain, world-ending folly. He sought to use an artifact, Auriel’s Bow, to blot out the sun. Permanently. He believed that was all it would take for our kind to rule the world. That with the sun gone, mortals would simply fall to their knees.”

A bitter, hollow laugh escaped her. “Sounds familiar, yes? Your Sabbat fanatics would probably hail him as a prophet. Eternal night through an act of cosmic vandalism.”

She took a step closer, her gaze intense. “He was going to doom us. All of us. Not just the Volkihar, but every thinking creature on Nirn. He would have drawn the wrath of every Daedric Prince, every Aedra, every mortal hero, and every rival vampire clan onto our heads. He would have made us the target of all creation, for a ‘victory’ that would have left us ruling over a dead, sunless rock. He cared nothing for the well-being of our people, our blood-kin. Only for his own pride, his own twisted vision of godhood.”

Natalia’s gaze grew distant, focused on a memory of clashing steel and roaring magic. “When I confronted him, he shed his lordly guise. He became a storm of leathery wings and rending claws, a true Vampire Lord unleashed. The castle shook. He threw everything at me—ancient spells, the summoned fury of Coldharbour, the very blood in my veins screaming to obey him. I gave it all back to him. Blade, frost, and a will he had forged but could no longer command.”

She paused, her voice dropping, not with sorrow, but with the cold weight of a timeless recollection. “And in the end, as he lay broken, the monstrous form receding… I saw it in his eyes. Not hatred. Not even rage. Disappointment. A profound, weary disappointment that his perfect heir, his kindred spirit, had failed to see the grandeur of his madness. That cut deeper than any weapon. The silence where his approval had been was a colder void than the emptiness between stars.”

Natalia’s voice dropped to a near whisper, laced with a sincerity that was more terrifying than any rage. “I might not look like it, Alicia. I am arrogant. I am brutal. I take what I want. But I genuinely care for the well-being of my subjects. My blood-kin. Their prosperity, their safety, their legacy. Harkon’s plan was genocide wearing a crown. So I killed him. I plotted with Serana, who also loved him but saw his madness, and I drove a stake carved from his own hubris through his heart. I took his throne to save my people from him.”

The horror on Alicia’s face was complete. It wasn’t the horror of a childe killing a sire—that was a Tuesday in the Jyhad.

It was the horror of the motive. The chilling, rational, patriotic patricide.

She had killed a father who loved her, because she loved the people he ruled more than she loved him, or his dream.

“You… you killed one of the only family you had left… for the good of the realm?” The concept was so alien, so antithetical to the Kindred existence of selfish survival and personal power, it barely computed.

“Yes,” Natalia said simply. “And I would do it again. That is the weight of a throne worth having. Not one taken by accident, in the aftermath of a storm.”

She let the comparison hang, not as an insult, but as a stark delineation of their paths. “You survive. I ruled. We both have blood on our hands, but the stains are of different shapes.”

The silence that followed was profound. The slap, the confession, the horrific history—they had torn away another layer of the strange dance between them. Alicia saw the weapon give way to the ruler, and to a code of power she could barely fathom. Natalia saw the courtier dissolve into the survivor, a figure defined by the ghosts of her betters.

Alicia finally looked away, her shoulders slumping. The fight had gone out of her, replaced by a weary, hollowed-out understanding.

“We are both monsters,” she murmured, not to Natalia, but to the room. “But we read from different scriptures.”

Natalia gave a single, slow nod. “Indeed. Remember that the next time you think to slap a queen. The scripture I follow has chapters on reciprocity that are… vividly illustrated.”

A ghost of a smile, brittle and exhausted, touched Alicia’s lips. It was not an apology, and Natalia did not expect one. It was an acknowledgment.

The game had changed again. They were no longer just handler and weapon, or even teacher and student.

They were two lost souls from different hells, standing in a quiet room above a sleeping city, each finally seeing the true shape of the other’s scars.

Chapter 9: Education

The ceaseless, sun-drenched noise of the mortal world had become a persistent hum in Natalia's awareness, a puzzle she had largely ignored from the shadows. But the urge to see, to understand the daylight kingdom of her prey and her reluctant hosts, became an itch she could no longer ignore.

The Prince’s “conditions” were gossamer; her discretion, she decided, was proven by the fact a Garou corpse now moldered in some Tremere lab without the mortal world ever raising an alarm.

Alicia had protested, of course. “Massive Masquerade risk! The sun doesn’t burn you, but they’ll see you don’t blink!”

“I proved my discretion,” Natalia had countered flatly.

“By carrying a werewolf corpse through your big city undetected. A daytime walk is nothing. Besides,” she added, a sly edge to her voice, “your enemies don’t operate in the day. It is the one time I can be sure I am not observed by your kind.”

One afternoon, as the false sun hung high and merciless in a sky the color of faded denim, she acted.

In the privacy of Alicia’s sanctuary, she regarded the offered “disguises” with disdain before assembling her own.

A pair of dark, sleek sunglasses—a marvel of this world, shielding her unnerving crimson eyes without the need for a glamour. A wide-brimmed hat of black felt, pulled low. A high-collared trench coat, long and severe, hiding the pale column of her throat and the unnatural stillness of her form.

She looked less like a mortal and more like a revenant from a noir film, but it would suffice. The masses, she had observed, were experts at not seeing.

And so, she walked.

Stepping into the full, blazing force of the afternoon was still a psychological shock. Every fiber of her being, honed over centuries, screamed that this was death. But her skin merely warmed. The light was blindingly bright, even through the glasses, washing the color from the world in a way that felt sterile and alien. The shadows were sharp and shallow, offering no true refuge.

But the life. It was overwhelming.

A river of mortals in garish, synthetic colors, flowing along concrete banks. The roar of the metal beasts was a constant, grating thunder. Smells—exhaust, fried food, countless perfumes and unwashed bodies—assaulted her in a chaotic soup. She moved through it all like a stone in a stream, an immutable obstacle around which the current parted without truly noticing.

Her observational intent was pure. She was a cartographer of the mundane apocalypse. She deciphered the glowing signs, her mind piecing together meanings: CAFE. PHARMACY. STOP.

She listened to the jagged, rapid-fire cadence of English, catching familiar words floating in the deluge like debris in a flood.

“Coffee.” “Late.” “Meeting.” “Phone.”

She understood perhaps one word in twenty, but patterns emerged. She could not speak it, not in conversation. Her tongue was still shaped for the rolling vowels and guttural consonants of her homeland. But she was learning the map.

She watched children laugh, couples argue, old men sit in silence. She saw the crushing weight of their brief, frantic lives in the lines on their faces, in the desperate speed of their movements.

They were like mayflies, burning themselves up in a single day’s frantic dance under this mock-sun.

And they were utterly, blissfully unaware of the ancient, hungry things that watched them from the cool, dark places just beyond their neon-lit perception.

A strange feeling settled in her—not pity, but a profound sense of… ownership. This was the herd. Chaotic, noisy, vibrant, and doomed. Her Kindred hosts saw them as a resource to be carefully farmed, a danger to be meticulously hidden from.

Natalia saw them as the natural inhabitants of a world she was now a part of. The wolves did not ask the sheep’s permission to walk through the meadow in daylight.

After hours of silent, relentless observation, as the sun began its descent, painting the glass towers in fire, she turned back.

She had walked miles, seen wonders and horrors that would make a College mage weep, and spoken to no one.

She returned to the Elysium as the last of the daylight bled away. Alicia was waiting, tense.

“Well?” Alicia demanded. “Any incidents?”

Natalia removed the sunglasses, revealing eyes that had seen a world no other Kindred in the city truly had. “No incidents,” she said, her voice quiet. “Only… illumination.”

She hung the coat and hat, the mundane garments looking absurd in the curated elegance of the Toreador’s space.

“Your cattle,” she mused, staring out the window as the city’s own lights began to wake, mimicking the stars they hid. “They live louder entire lifetimes in a single day than your kind does in a century. It is… impressive. And terribly fragile.”

She turned, a new, unreadable depth in her gaze. “I have seen the territory. I understand the board better. The Prince’s permissions mean nothing. But the sunlight… the sunlight gives me a perspective he will never have.”

That walk was no idle stroll. It was the first, sunlit survey of a kingdom she had already begun to claim in her mind.

---

The main chamber of the Elysium was quieter than usual, a low murmur of conversation from a coterie of Nosferatu in a far corner, the soft strains of a forgotten opera on a hidden speaker.

Natalia had claimed a high-backed leather armchair near the decorative fireplace, a position that gave her a commanding view of the room while remaining apart. She was not brooding, but processing—the sensory torrent of the daylight world, the intricate, fragile politics of the night.

She saw David before he saw her. The neonate was a skittish creature, clinging to the edges of Kindred society, his face often lit by the glow of his smartphone like a mortal. Tonight, he was scrolling intently, his brow furrowed.

He glanced up, saw her, and froze. The usual mix of terror and awe flashed across his features. Then, to her mild surprise, he squared his shoulders and began to walk towards her.

He stopped at a respectful distance, holding up the phone like a talisman.

On its screen, she recognized the familiar, ornate script of a book from her own world—The Book of Daedra, or something very like it. From a "lore website" called “The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page.”

"My Lord," he began, then switched to a halting, painfully accented attempt at her native tongue. "Um… hello. I… learn. From here."

Natalia’s eyebrow arched. The words were butchered, the grammar non-existent, but the attempt was genuine. And he was not using Alicia as a crutch.

A slow, intrigued smile touched her lips. Here, in this nest of ancient, stagnant predators, was the one creature still curious and malleable enough to try and build a bridge.

“You speak to me without your sire’s voice,” she observed in her own language, speaking slowly and clearly. “A bold choice. Or a foolish one.”

David swallowed, then pointed from his phone to her, and mimed talking with his hands. “Help?” he said in English. Then he tried her tongue again. “You… talk. I… listen. Learn.”

The amusement deepened. Something productive, indeed. A project. A living reference guide to this world, delivered by its most digitally-native inhabitant.

“Very well,” she said, gesturing to the low stool opposite her chair. “Sit. We will talk. We will help each other understand.”

She switched to simple, heavily accented English, piecing together the words she’d absorbed. “You. Speak. Your words. Slowly.”

David’s face lit up with a zeal that was utterly, vulnerably mortal. He sat, perched on the edge of the stool. “Okay. Yes. I can… I can do that.”

He took a breath, visibly organizing his thoughts. “My name is David. I was… embraced… ten years ago. By Alicia. I was a… college student. For computers.”

Natalia listened, her mind working to map the sounds to meanings. Embraced. Student. Computers. She filed them away. “Alicia… chose you. Why?”

David shrugged, a very human gesture. “She said I had… an eye. For patterns. In code. In art. She finds beauty in… strange places.” He looked at his phone. “Like this. She finds your story… beautiful. Terrible, but beautiful.”

Natalia gave a noncommittal hum. “And you? What do you find?”

“It’s real,” he breathed, his fear momentarily overshadowed by wonder. “The Elder Scrolls. The Daedra. It’s all real. I have… a million questions.”

“You may ask one,” Natalia said, leaning forward, her crimson eyes fixed on him. “Then it is my turn.”

David didn’t hesitate. “Molag Bal. The stories say he… created vampires. In your world. Is it… is it like Caine here? Was it… painful?”

A direct, personal question about the nature of her damnation. Natalia appreciated the lack of pretense. A personal inquiry that deserved a response in her personal tongue. “It was not a curse borne of murder and godly wrath, like your Caine,” she said, her voice dropping.

“It was a ritual of domination. Of breaking. He seeks to create masters, not penitents. Yes. It was painful. It is meant to be. The pain is the first lesson.”

David shivered, not entirely from fear. His Auspex was not as potent as Alicia's, but he must have understood the most important words. The scholar in him was captivated.

“My turn,” Natalia said. “This ‘Second Inquisition.’ Alicia speaks of them with fear. What are their weapons? Not swords and torches, I presume.”

David’s expression turned grim. “Data. Satellites. DNA sequencing. Financial tracking. They find patterns. A missing person report here, a strange blood test result there, a pattern of night-time activity… they connect the dots. They don’t burn chapels. They drone-strike warehouses.”

Natalia absorbed this. Enemies who fought with information and distant, precise fire. A completely novel form of warfare. “And your ‘Beast’,” she continued. “You fear it. Why? It is your strength.”

“It’s not us,” David said, his voice earnest. “It’s the animal. The hunger. It doesn’t think. It just… takes. And if it gets out, you wake up covered in blood, having killed everyone you loved. Or it makes you run from a matchstick like a scared rabbit. It’s a predator living inside you, and it’s always, always hungry.”

Natalia listened, and for the first time, felt a faint, distant pang of something that was not quite pity, but understanding.

Her condition was a transformation, a unification with a predatory nature. Theirs was a possession, a schism. They were haunted houses. She was a fortified castle.

“Your turn,” she said.

David chewed his lip. “The… the Thu’um. The dragon shouts. Is it… is it really just… yelling?”

Natalia threw her head back and laughed, a genuine, startling sound that echoed in the quiet chamber, making the Nosferatu in the corner look over in shock. “Just yelling?” she said, her eyes gleaming.

“Is a hurricane just wind? Is an earthquake just a shrug of the earth?” She leaned in, her voice taking on a low, resonant power that seemed to vibrate in the air itself. “It is voice as will. It is belief given sound, and sound given force. To Shout is to command reality to obey. It is not for the faint of heart, or the weak of spirit.”

David stared, mesmerized. The lesson continued, deep into the night. A trade of secrets and syntax.

He taught her words for “surveillance,” “firewall,” “biometrics.” She described the soul-crushing cold of the Soul Cairn, the whispering malice of the Ideal Masters. He was an eager pupil; she was a meticulous, demanding one.

By the time the first hint of false dawn tinged the sky, Natalia had a rudimentary but functional grasp of conversational English.

And David carried within him truths about reality and divinity that would forever separate him from the other neonates.

They had, in their own way, armed each other.

The Lord of Volkihar had found her first, true informant. And the neonate had touched a reality far older and more terrible than the Blood of Caine could ever be.

Chapter 10: Deliverance

Several nights of focused, almost scholarly effort with David had borne strange fruit. Natalia’s mind, honed by centuries and the disciplined study of the Thu’um, was a sponge for patterns. She could now parse the basic flow of English conversation, understand the gist of street signs and scrolling news feeds, and make her own crude needs known without Alicia’s intermediary hiss of translation.

It was a functional, utilitarian grasp—the language of a soldier or a hunter, not a courtier. She could ask for blood, identify a threat, or follow directions to a “contested zone.” The delicate verbal fencing of the Camarilla Court, the layered insults and political nuance, remained a closed book. For now, that suited her. Words were a tool. Her will was the weapon. And she was beginning to understand that in this muted world, the most devastating strikes were those that targeted both.

Another folded missive, delivered by a silent ghoul, found its way to Alicia’s sanctuary. The Prince’s seal was a drop of wax as dark as dried blood.

Alicia read it first, her elegant features tightening. “The Tremere have made no progress on the… ‘point of entry.’ The geomantic readings are chaotic, but stable. No new breaches.” She looked up, her gaze meeting Natalia’s.

“However, they have a different problem. One that requires your particular… aptitude.”

Natalia took the proffered note. Her eyes scanned the precise, formal script, her mind laboriously translating the clinical language into actionable meaning.

Cult activity. Moloch infernalists. Intelligence indicates they have captured at least one Kindred—identity unknown—and intend to use a mass burial of mortals in a perverted ritual. Their goal is not to create Cainites, but to harvest vitae on a sacrificial scale for infernal workings. Location: isolated meatpacking plant, decommissioned. High risk of a catastrophic blood-fueled ritual breach. The captured Kindred is to be retrieved or silenced. All other witnesses unacceptable.

It was a hit. A sanctioned massacre.

Then she saw the name. Moloch. The letters seemed to pulse on the page. The phonetic echo was unmistakable, a dark mirror to her own Sire’s title.

Mol-ag Bal. Mol-och.

A shiver that had nothing to do with temperature traced its way down her spine. In her world, names held power. Echoes were never accidental.

“Moloch,” she said, the new word feeling strange yet familiar on her tongue.

“Worshippers. Not to create, but to… consume.” She understood the core violation: they sought to drain the sacred power of the Blood to feed a silent god. “A theft.”

Alicia nodded, hearing the condemnation but missing the deeply personal creed that fueled it. “Infernalist filth. They don’t want an army. They want fuel. They’ll bleed a vampire into a pit of dying mortals, corrupting the Embrace into a single, large-scale sacrifice. It’s a perversion of the blood itself.”

Natalia’s lips curved into a smile that held no warmth. She handed the note back. “A sanctioned massacre. No possible Masquerade breach.” The terms were perfect. This was pest control with a royal pardon, not a hunt with restrictions. And at the heart of it, a name that whispered of a connection, however faint, to the Prince of Rape and Domination she called Master.

“This ‘Moloch’,” she pressed, her voice dropping. “Its nature?”

“A Canaanite god. An old, cruel god of fire and child sacrifice, adopted by degenerates and infernalists,” Alicia said with distaste. “Its worshippers seek power through atrocity. Their rituals are… excessive.”

Fire and sacrifice. Domination through breaking.

The parallels were not exact, but they were close enough to stir the ancient, cold blood in her veins. This was not her Sire’s work, but it was a crude, mortal approximation. A blasphemous parody she felt a sudden, personal urge to correct.

“They create mockeries of the Embrace,” Natalia mused, her hand unconsciously curling as if around a non-existent blade. “They play at godhood with stolen power. And they invoke a name that echoes the Lord of Coldharbour.”

She rose from her chair, the modern garments she wore seeming to transform into armor under her imperious bearing. “This is no longer merely your Prince’s command. This is a personal insult. One I will rectify.”

She looked at Alicia, her crimson eyes burning with a dark, joyous fire. “I will ensure this ‘Moloch’ receives an offering his followers did not intend. A lesson in true dominion.”

The hunt was on, but the battlefield had changed—from tactics to theology. And Natalia was a very devout, and very violent, high priestess.

---

Alicia’s sleek car slid to a silent stop a quarter mile from the derelict meatpacking plant, its silhouette a jagged black cutout against the light-polluted sky. The air here carried the ghost-scent of old blood and industrial bleach, now overlaid with something fouler: burnt copper, cheap incense, and the sharp, animal fear of trapped mortals.

“There. The main loading bay is their access point,” Alicia whispered, pointing to a sliver of dim, flickering light from a half-open steel door. “Be careful out there.” The words slipped out, a reflex born of her own Kindred’s ingrained caution.

Natalia, already unfolding her long limbs from the passenger seat, paused and chuckled, a low, grating sound. “Concern. For a simple pest control.” She turned her head, the city’s ambient glow catching in her sunglasses. Alicia had been a loyal ally, a useful guide in this strange world. Loyalty, even of a temporary and self-interested kind, demanded acknowledgement. Natalia gave a single, slow nod. “Your concern is noted.”

Then she was gone, melting into the deeper shadows between rusted dumpsters and skeletal conveyor belts, leaving Alicia alone with the hum of the engine and her own racing thoughts.

---

Inside, the plant was a cathedral of decay and perversion. Flickering kerosene lamps and black candles cast leaping shadows on walls stained with decades of grime and fresh, hastily-painted infernal sigils. The central space, once a killing floor, was now an altar. A massive, crude effigy of a bull-headed demon—Moloch—loomed, woven from barbed wire and bone. Before it, a dozen mortals in soiled red robes chanted in guttural Latin, their eyes glassy with fanaticism.

And in a large, repurposed livestock pen, the “cattle” awaited their fate. Twenty, perhaps thirty men and women, bound, gagged, and trembling. Their eyes were wide with a terror that had passed beyond screaming. They were the raw material for the ritual, vessels to be filled with stolen vitae and offered as sacrament.

Natalia observed from the high steel rafters, a specter in the smoke. She saw the knives being whetted, the thick rubber hoses and surgical tubing laid out, leading to a large, central drainage grate. In a cage of reinforced steel bars, separate from the mortal pen, a figure slumped. The stink of old vitae and despair wafted from it—the captured Kindred. She heard the head cultist, a gaunt man with fever-bright eyes, begin a rant about offering “the sacred wine of stolen immortality to the Bull’s furnace.”

A child of Caine reduced to livestock, its divine Curse being siphoned for a ritual. This was the heart of their blasphemy.

Enough.

She dropped.

An earth-shattering declaration of hostility. She landed in the center of the ritual space between the altar and the pen, the impact of her boots on the concrete floor a sound like a cracking bone. Dust and candle flames shuddered.

All movement stopped. All chanting died. Two dozen mortal eyes, some fanatical, most terrified, fixed on the pale, severe woman who had appeared from the darkness.

She spoke, her voice cutting through the silence, each English word deliberate, hard-edged, and dripping with contempt.

“You. Play. At gods.”

She took a step forward, the cultists stumbling back. “Your… Moloch.” She spat the name. “A weak echo. A stolen name.”

The head cultist found his voice, shrill with outrage. “Who are you to defy the Bull’s chosen? Seize her! She will be the first offering!”

Three burly acolytes lunged, knives flashing. Natalia didn’t draw a weapon. Her hands shot out, moving with a speed that was a blur even in the lamplight. She caught the first wrist and twisted. The sound of snapping bone was loud as a gunshot. She ripped the knife from his spasming hand and drove it up through the jaw of the second. The third received her palm against his chest; a surge of Volkihar strength sent him flying backward into the barbed-wire effigy with a wet, tearing shriek.

Chaos erupted. The cultists screamed, some attacking in a frenzy, others trying to flee. Natalia became a whirlwind of precise, overwhelming violence. She broke necks with sharp, efficient chops. She tore out throats with her fingers. She used their own sacrificial knives against them, painting the grim sigils on the walls with their arterial spray. It was a dismantling. A correction of a flawed and arrogant premise. Each kill was a punctuation mark in her sermon against their heresy.

Within minutes, the only sounds were the guttering of candles, the drip of blood, and the choked, muffled sobs from the livestock pen.

The head cultist was not among the quick dead. Natalia had made certain of that. As he’d chanted his final incantation, she’d closed the distance in a blur. Her claw hadn’t struck for his heart or throat. Instead, she’d driven stiffened fingers into the soft junction of his hip and thigh, severing tendons and the femoral artery with clinical precision. He had collapsed, a marionette with cut strings, and now he lay in the spreading pool of his own vitae, feeling his unlife leak away in slow, agonizing pulses, utterly helpless to do anything but watch the aftermath of his ruin.

Natalia stood amidst the carnage, her borrowed clothes spattered red, her expression one of cold satisfaction. She turned towards the pen. The mortals inside cowered, some weeping, some staring in catatonic shock.

The surviving hostages… no witnesses. The Prince’s order was clear.

She looked at them—the addicts, the lost, the forgotten. Spoiled cattle. There was no honor, no sport, in this kill. It would be butchery, not hunting.

And besides, it would also be a waste not to use them as test subjects—to see if her Shout could amplify her vampiric gifts.

She walked to the front of the pen. They shrank back.

“GOL,” she Shouted, her voice commanding. They flinched as one. “HAH.”

Her hands came up, and she pulled the sunglasses from her face, tossing them aside. Then, in the bloody half-light, she let the full, hypnotic power of her vampiric gaze ignite. Her eyes became pools of liquid crimson, swirling with ancient will and the chilling glamour of Coldharbour itself.

A collective, shuddering gasp went through the group. They couldn’t look away. The terror, the confusion, the recent horror—all of it was funneled into that mesmerizing gaze.

She poured her command into them, a psychic wave washing over their fragile minds. The words were in her tongue, but the meaning was implanted directly, bypassing language.

RUN. HOME. FORGET EVERYTHING.

The binds on their wrists and ankles seemed to grow slack, their knots undone by relaxed, compelled fingers. As one, they scrambled to their feet, their movements jerky, marionette-like. They did not look at the bodies. They did not look at her again. They simply turned and fled, stumbling out into the night through the doors she had entered, their minds already weaving a bland, nonsensical cover story for their lost days—a bender, a bad trip, a shared delusion.

Silence returned, deeper now. Natalia was alone with the dead and the stench. She walked to the head cultist, who lay dying in a pool of his own vitae, gurgling. She knelt beside him.

“Your god,” she whispered in his ear, in her own language, knowing he would understand only the final, damning truth in her tone. “He is not here. But mine? His Daughter is.”

She stood, leaving the dying man to his futile prayers, and walked back out into the night. The pest control was complete. The insult to her Sire’s name had been answered. And not a single mortal witness remained to threaten the precious Masquerade.

---

The air in the opera house felt heavier than usual, thick with the scent of old blood and fresh apprehension. The Court had assembled with swift, grim efficiency, summoned to hear the report on the “sanctioned intervention.” The Primogen watched from the shadows, their expressions unreadable masks. The Sheriff, still moving with a slight, careful stiffness, stood at the Prince’s right hand, his eyes fixed on Natalia with a mixture of professional respect and cold, personal fury.

Alicia delivered the initial, formal report, her voice a smooth, emotionless recitation. “The cult of Moloch has been eradicated. Twenty-three cultists, terminated. The site has been… cleansed. No physical evidence remains that would require external cleanup. Property damage was contained to the interior of the structure. The captured Kindred—a Nosferatu neonate—was recovered. He is currently quarantined within the Chantry. The Regent informs me the ‘psychic residue’ is significant and the purification rites will be… extensive.”

The Prince, seated in his director’s chair like a judge on a dais, listened with his fingers steepled. His aura of control was absolute, but Natalia, with her senses attuned to power, could feel the subtle, probing pressure of his attention.

Alicia had mentioned it in passing—this Prince, a former Ventrue antitribu from the Sabbat, was an anomaly.

He possessed Auspex, a discipline usually denied to his Clan, a testament to a twisted, potent lineage. His ascension had been controversial, bloody, and ultimately successful because he wielded a combination of traditional Ventrue authority and the uncanny, piercing insight of a seer.

“And the witnesses?” The Prince’s voice was quiet, but it carried to the farthest balcony. “The captives. I was very clear. No witnesses.”

All eyes shifted to Natalia. She stepped forward, past Alicia. She spoke, not in the halting, crude English of the streets, but in her own tongue, knowing he would understand the meaning through his gifts, and her tone would carry the truth. Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact.

“So I did release them. But they witnessed nothing. As the command stated.”

A ripple went through the court.

Mass Manipulation.

The Prince’s unblinking gaze intensified. The use of Presence or Dominate on a single individual was common. On a small group, under duress, it was the mark of a powerful elder. To impose a uniform, amnesiac command on more than two dozen terrified, traumatized mortals, all at once, in the middle of a slaughterhouse, and have it hold so perfectly that not a single mind broke or rebelled… that was something else. It spoke of a will not just powerful, but monolithic; a psychic force that could reshape reality in the minds of others as casually as one might rearrange furniture.

“My scouts have reported,” the Prince said slowly, each word measured. “The individuals in question have returned to their… habitats. They exhibit no signs of recall. Their stories are inconsistent, illogical, and show no signs of coordination or external influence.” He paused, his Auspex-laden gaze seeming to peel back the layers of her statement. “No insubordination. A neat solution. One that even a Ventrue far my elder would find… demanding.”

He acknowledged her feat with a cold, clinical assessment that laid bare its staggering difficulty—a verdict, not praise. He was also subtly reminding the Court—and her—of the hierarchy of power. Such an act was possible for the ancients of his own Clan. She had just performed it as a matter of course.

Natalia met his gaze, a faint, contemptuous smile playing on her lips. Political theater, she thought. The weighing of feats, the subtle positioning of her power within their understood spectrum. As if it mattered where she fell on their scale. As if the act had been about meeting his standards, and not about efficiently completing a task and delivering a theological rebuttal to a cult of idiots.

“The threat is eliminated,” she stated, cutting through the unspoken posturing. “The Masquerade is intact. The result is exactly as is written in the missive. The method is my own.”

The Prince held her stare for a long, silent moment. The Court waited, breathless. He could punish her for technical disobedience. He could try. Or he could accept the undeniable efficacy of her work and the terrifying flexibility of her power.

Finally, he gave a single, slow nod. “The result is acceptable. Your method, while… unorthodox, proved effective.” His fingers, which had been steepled, lowered to grip the arms of his chair. A minute gesture, but from a creature of such preternatural stillness, it was the equivalent of another man recoiling.

He leaned back, the tension in the room easing a fraction. “The matter is closed. The domain thanks you for your service.”

The Prince’s verdict was a door closing. Natalia walked towards it, feeling the Court’s gaze like a physical pressure. Its quality had altered. The heat of shock had cooled into a deep, calculating chill.

They had witnessed a storm that could snap a giant’s spine. Now they had seen the same storm pass over a field of wheat, leaving every stalk standing, yet fundamentally changed. The brute was gone from their eyes. In her place was a sculptor, and they were suddenly, terribly aware that they were all made of clay.

Chapter 11: Taxi

The rhythm of the nights took on a new, almost domestic pattern. The Elysium became less a fortress of fear and more Natalia’s forward operating base and academy. Her “lessons” with David were no longer clandestine meetings but expected events. They would sit in a quiet corner, David with his tablet open to language apps and cached lore pages, Natalia with the fierce, focused intensity of a general studying enemy terrain.

“Irregular verbs,” David would say, prompting her.

“I go. I went. I have gone,” Natalia would recite, her accent thick and guttural but the syntax perfectly correct. She demanded vocabulary lists for architecture, technology, and law enforcement. She was not learning to chat; she was learning to infiltrate, to assess, and to command.

Her daylight excursions became bolder, more systematic tests of her growing knowledge. She would walk for hours, a pale, striking figure in her sunglasses and long coats, moving through the thrumming heart of the mortal world with the detached focus of a botanist in a dangerous jungle.

She would stop at a “cafe,” point to an item on the menu, and utter a single, perfectly pronounced word: “Coffee.” She would stand before an ATM, watching the mortals interact with it, deciphering the steps. She listened to conversations on park benches, on buses, parsing the rapid-fire slang and emotional cadences.

The Prince knew. Of course he knew. His network of ghouls and loyalists was extensive, and a being of Natalia’s anachronistic presence did not move through a modern city unseen by those trained to look.

Reports landed on his desk: Subject observed in Financial District, 14:32. Subject observed entering public library, 15:17. Subject observed purchasing a… pretzel, 16:05.

It was a form of defiance so profound it was almost philosophical. It spat directly on the core tenet of the Masquerade: Thou shall not reveal thy true nature to those not of the Blood.

Here she was, a vampire, strolling through the mortal world’s most crowded spaces in broad daylight, not to feed, but to… learn. To observe. It was an act of such casual, towering arrogance that it left the Prince’s usual mechanisms of control—threats of exposure, fear of the sun—utterly meaningless.

A Blood Hunt was discussed in tense, private councils. The Tremere Regent advocated for it, citing the existential precedent. The Sheriff, still nursing his pride and his wounds, seconded it vehemently.

The Prince listened, then asked the only question that mattered: “How?”

How do you Blood Hunt a creature that treats your greatest weapon—the sun—as a mild inconvenience? How do you corner her when she can walk into the one time and place where no Kindred enforcer can follow? How do you threaten someone who has already demonstrated she can dismantle your strongest fighter and mentally rewrite two dozen mortals without breaking a sweat?

“She is discreet,” the Prince finally said, his voice weary. The reports were clear. Not a single mortal had called the police on a “pale, creepy lady.” Not a single one had taken a picture that went viral. Her unnatural stillness was read as aloofness. Her lack of blinking was hidden behind dark lenses. She moved with a predator’s economy that was mistaken for athletic grace.

“She observes her own… aesthetic Masquerade. She flouts the principle, but not in a way that creates evidence. To move against her now would be to start a war we cannot contain, over a breach that has not occurred.”

He coped with the galling reality by re-framing it. Her walks were not an insult; they were an intelligence-gathering operation he had, however reluctantly, sanctioned. Her growing knowledge made her a more precise tool. The defiance was logged, internalized, and added to the ever-growing ledger of her unique dangers and utilities.

So the Prince stayed his hand. He allowed the reports to accumulate, a testament to his own forbearance and her unnerving competence. The night-to-night politics of the Camarilla continued—petty grievances, territory disputes, the endless dance of influence.

And in the middle of it all, like a fixed, cold star, was Natalia, slowly mastering the language and the landscape of her exile, while the most powerful Kindred in the city could do nothing but watch, and seethe, and plan for a day when her usefulness might finally be outweighed by the sheer, intolerable fact of her existence.

---

The request was unorthodox, but Natalia presented it with a formality that amused Alicia. “I wish to take your Childe on a… linguistic patrol. To test my comprehension in the field. With your permission, of course.”

It was one of the rare moments where Alicia held a tangible thread of authority over the force of nature in her sanctuary. Natalia, for all her ferocity and cosmic arrogance, consistently bowed to personal authority and established decorum—when she chose to acknowledge it.

It was a quirk Alicia had come to recognize: things that reminded Natalia of her own royal standing—protocol, the requesting of permissions from a fellow “lord” for the use of their subordinate—were treated with a kind of nostalgic respect. It was a game of thrones she understood, even on a foreign board.

Alicia could have said no. And, as promised, Natalia would not have been offended—merely dismissive, and likely would have gone anyway.

“Okay,” Alicia said, crossing her arms, adopting the tone of a wary mother hen. It wasn’t entirely an act. David was her Childe, her responsibility, her flawed, fascinating creation. “Just… don’t go too far from home. And David? Keep your eyes open. For more than just grammar.”

David nodded, vibrating with a nervous excitement he couldn’t hide.

---

They walked. Not through the contested, shadowy industrial zones, but through the neon-drenched arteries of the city’s nightlife. Natalia moved with her usual predatory grace, but her attention was on the environment. As they passed glowing signs and overheard snippets of conversation, she would mutter the English words under her breath, testing their shape.

“Ex…clusive. Night…club.”

“Close,” David said, falling into the role of tutor with ease. “The ‘x’ is more of a ‘gz’ sound there. Egz-clusive.”

She repeated it, the guttural Nordic edge softening incrementally. “Egz-clusive.”

They walked in companionable silence for a block before she asked, her gaze forward, “Do you miss it? Your old life. The sun. The… warmth of food?”

David thought for a moment. “Sometimes. The idea of it. The smell of coffee in the morning. Real sunlight, not just the memory of it.” He shrugged. “But it’s like missing childhood. You remember the good parts, gloss over the boredom and the bills. This… this is sharper. Clearer. Even when it’s terrifying.”

Natalia nodded, understanding the trade. Immortality for a narrowing of experience. A fair bargain, to her mind.

He gathered his courage. “Can I… ask you something?”

“You may.”

“You seem… very fascinated by me. By… all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the city, at himself. “Why?”

The question hung in the air. David’s eyes went wide as the full impudence of it hit him. He’d just asked a demigod why she found him interesting. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

She laughed, a genuine, rolling sound that made a few passing mortals glance over in surprise. “Nothing to fear, little teacher. It is a fair question.” Her smile faded into something more contemplative.

“The night we met. You looked at me… and you saw a story you knew. A world you had visited in your games. It was your… revelation… that shook me. To learn my unlife, my world, my battles… are entertainment for mortal children.”

She looked at the passing crowds, her crimson eyes distant. “It made me wonder. Am I real? Or am I an arcane simulacrum, spun from the dreams of this world? Who can say?” She shrugged, the philosophical weight dismissed with regal practicality. “But more importantly…”

She stopped walking and turned to face him fully. The ambient light caught the pale planes of her face. “What fascinates me… is the moment in Alicia’s chamber. When I disrobed.”

David felt a cold flush—a phantom sensation—creep up his neck. He remembered. Vividly.

“I could sense it,” she continued, her voice dropping to a confidential murmur. “Desire. From you. From deadened loins, a ghost of mortal hunger stirred. Not for blood. For… flesh. For connection. It was… highly unusual.”

She leaned in slightly, and for a terrifying, thrilling second, David thought she might kiss him. Instead, she brought her hand up and gave a single, light, almost playful flick of her finger against the fabric of his trousers, right at the belt line.

The touch was electric, jolting him out of his undead stillness.

“One night, perhaps,” she whispered, her breath cold against his ear, “I would be interested in pursuing that manner of… desire. With you. As a proper reward for services rendered.”

She leaned back, a slow, predatory smile gracing her lips. Her eyes held a promise that was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

“Think about it,” she said, her tone returning to its normal, cool register. “And try not to encounter your Final Death until then.”

With a final, deliberate wink that was utterly anachronistic and devastatingly effective, she turned and continued walking down the street, leaving David rooted to the spot, his mind a whirlwind of shock, awe, and a very old, very dead part of him screaming back to life.

The lesson had become an immersion, David so focused on refining Natalia’s pronunciation of “subterfuge” and “infrastructure” that he’d lost all track of the city’s geography and the slow creep of time. When he finally glanced at his phone, the pale glow of the screen illuminated his face with dread.

“Oh shit. It’s almost four. The sun… how are we going to get back in time?” Panic, a very mortal relic, tightened his voice.

Just then, as if conjured by the need, a yellow taxi rolled to a quiet stop at the curb beside them, its rooftop light glowing a benign, vacant white. No passengers. A minor miracle in the pre-dawn stillness.

David’s worry evaporated in a puff of relief. “C’mon!”

They slid into the back seat, the familiar scents of pine air freshener and old vinyl enveloping them. David gave the address of the Elysium’s discreet downtown entrance. The driver, a silhouette in the rearview mirror capped with a flat cap, gave a silent nod and pulled into the flowing, thinning traffic.

The close confines of the cab altered the atmosphere. Natalia, pleased with the successful acquisition of transport, seemed to find the proximity an invitation. As the city lights streaked by the windows, her playful teases from the street resumed, but more pointed in the intimate dark.

A cold, deliberate fingertip traced the line of his jaw. A hand rested, briefly, high on his thigh. Once, as the cab took a corner, she let her hand “slip,” brushing against him in a way that was absolutely not a mistake, her face a mask of innocent serenity when he jolted.

“An honest mistake,” she murmured, her lips close to his ear, the words in her native tongue, the meaning clear from her tone.

David was a statue of conflicted fire and ice, unable to protest, barely able to breathe.

They arrived. David fumbled with a wad of mortal currency, thrusting it at the driver. “Keep the change.” He scrambled out, needing distance from her electrifying presence, expecting her to follow.

Natalia slid across the seat. As she placed one boot on the pavement, the driver’s voice stopped her. It was a calm, mild baritone, utterly ordinary, yet it seemed to fill the space she’d vacated.

“Ma’am?”

She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab, and looked back.

The driver had turned slightly in his seat. His face was unremarkable—middle-aged, with the tired eyes of someone who worked long nights. But his gaze held hers. “Don’t mind taking you for a ride around town. For free. You look like you’re from out of town. Could show you all the good places.”

David, standing on the sidewalk, stared. “What? No. We’re here. Come on.”

Natalia held up a hand, silencing him without looking away from the driver. Her predatory senses, dulled by the playful distraction with David, were now wide awake, screaming a silent alarm. She had suspected the moment she stepped into the vehicle, a faint, discordant note beneath the city’s hum that David, with his neonate perceptions, had missed entirely.

Something about the driver reminded her of them—the Kindred. The profound stillness, the absence of a vital heat. Yet he wasn’t them. Not exactly. The aura was different—deeper, older, and devoid of the Beast’s frantic, hungry signature. And he was nothing like her, either. No scent of Coldharbour’s ice, no ripple of magicka.

What emanated from him was an aura of repressed might. Not power merely held in check, but power so immense it had settled into a state of profound, permanent quiet, like a mountain range that had forgotten it could quake. It was majesty, worn down to the shape of a humble cabbie. It sent a thrill down her spine—not fear, but the sharp, joyous recognition of a potential equal. Perhaps even a superior.

“It’s okay,” she said to David, her voice low. “I can handle myself. Wait for me at home.” Her tone brooked no argument.

Before David could protest further, she slid back into the cab and pulled the door shut. The taxi eased away from the curb, leaving a stunned David on the sidewalk, watching the taillights vanish into the grey pre-dawn.

---

The cab drove without apparent destination, weaving through the emptying streets. The silence was comfortable, charged.

“You knew,” Natalia said finally, not a question. She spoke in English, her accent still thick but clear.

The driver chuckled softly. “Knew what, ma’am?”

“The moment I stepped in. You are… not like the others here. And not like me.”

“Just an honest taxi driver,” he said, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror. They held a depth that belonged to canyons and ocean trenches, not to city streets.

“An honest driver who feels like a king wearing a beggar’s cloak,” she countered.

He smiled, a faint, sad thing. “Kingship is a heavy crown. Sometimes it’s nice to just… drive. To listen. To watch.” He took a slow turn, the city’s grand park a dark blot on their left.

“You’re doing well, you know. For a sovereign cast adrift. You show the locals respect. You don’t spit on their little customs, even though you could break their court over your knee. You play by the rules of a foreign throne. That’s wisdom. Or cleverness. Either way, it keeps the peace.”

Her blood ran cold. How could he know?

He seemed to read her thought. “The world whispers, to those who know how to listen. It whispers of tears, of things that fall through. You carry the sound of the tear with you. A faint, ringing silence.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know what it is like. To transgress against authority. Due to… personal audacity.”

It was his turn to fall silent for a long moment. The first faint tinge of grey was touching the eastern sky. “I do,” he said, the words heavy with the weight of genuine, ancient regret. “I transgressed against the greatest Authority of all. For love. For pride. It… did not end well. For anyone.” He glanced at her. “Your audacity is of a different sort. You transgressed against reality itself, it seems. And you ended up here. In my back seat.”

“Who are you?” she breathed, the question torn from her.

“What did I mean by all that?” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Just the ramblings of a blue-collar worker. Don’t worry about it.” He smoothly turned another corner, and the familiar façade of the building that housed the Elysium’s secret entrance came into view. He had driven a seemingly aimless loop that brought them right back, with perfect, impossible timing.

He pulled to the same curb. The sky was now a delicate, dangerous shade of pearl grey. True dawn was minutes away.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again sometime,” he said, his tone once more that of a polite, slightly weary cabbie.

Natalia stepped out. She leaned down to the open window, her crimson eyes searching his mundane, profound face. “I do not believe in accidents. Not of this magnitude.”

“Believe what you like, ma’am,” he said with a gentle smile. “Have a good day. Try to stay out of the sun.” The last was said with a glint in his eye that held no fear, only a kind of poignant amusement.

The taxi pulled away, silent as a ghost. Natalia stood on the empty street as the first, tentative rays of sunlight broke over the skyline, painting the glass towers in gold and fire. The light touched her, warm and harmless. She didn’t feel like a queen just then. She felt like a piece on a board so vast she had only just glimpsed the edge, and she had just been politely, terrifyingly acknowledged by another player whose nature she couldn’t begin to fathom.

She turned and slipped into the welcoming dark of the entrance, the cryptic words of the honest taxi driver echoing in the silent chambers of her mind.

The hidden door to the Elysium’s antechamber whispered shut behind Natalia, sealing out the creeping dawn. Inside, the air was cool and still, but the atmosphere was tense. Alicia stood like a statue of disapproval, her arms crossed. Beside her, David fidgeted, relief and residual anxiety warring on his face. He hadn’t gone to his room. He’d waited.

“There you are,” Alicia said, her voice tight. “How… nice of you to finally grace us with your presence.”

David shot Alicia a nervous look but stayed quiet.

“What were you thinking?” Alicia continued, stepping forward. “Just accepting a total stranger’s offer like that? It could have been a trap. A deadly one. You may be immune to the sun, but there are other ways—”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Natalia began, the familiar, effortless arrogance rising to her lips like a reflex. “You know nothing in this city can defeat me one-on-one.” The words hung in the air, her usual declaration of supremacy.

Then she stopped. The memory of the taxi’s vinyl seats, the calm, depthless eyes in the rearview mirror, the aura of quiet, continental power—it washed over the boast, bleaching its color, revealing it as the hollow, childish thing it was.

She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, the haughty light had dimmed, replaced by something more measured, more weary.

“Actually… no,” she said, her voice lower, the tone shifting so drastically it made Alicia blink. “Hold that thought. It is too early to make that kind of statement.” She met Alicia’s gaze directly, without defiance. “You were right. There are things in this world… forces… that I know nothing about. Reckless conduct, born of arrogance, will only be detrimental to all of us.”

She paused, and then did the single most shocking thing anyone in that Elysium had ever witnessed.

She inclined her head, a gesture of genuine, if minimal, contrition.

The silence that followed was absolute. It was a silence that seeped under doors and through walls. From the private chambers deeper in the sanctuary, neonates witnessing from keyholes froze, their minds struggling to process what they’d just saw.

The monster had been humbled. The unshakable, glacial arrogance had… cracked.

Alicia was speechless. David looked as if he’d been slapped.

Natalia didn’t wait for a response. The encounter had drained her, not physically, but in a deeper, more philosophical way. The bedrock of her self-understanding had been seismically tested.

“I wish to take a brief nap,” she announced, her voice flat. Without another word, she walked past them, moving toward the sanctuary of Alicia’s private rooms with a stride that was still regal, but now carried the weight of a humbled, calculating mind.

The moment she was gone, the whispers began—frantic, disbelieving.

What happened in that taxi? What did she see?

---

The yellow cab cruised the now fully sun-drenched streets, a mundane bubble of shade in the brilliant morning. Inside, the driver hummed a tune that hadn’t been popular for seventy years. He picked up a fare—an elderly woman with grocery bags—and drove her across town with polite, quiet efficiency.

After she left, tipping him with a wrinkled dollar, he pulled over by a scenic overlook. He got out, lit a cigarette (a habit he didn’t need but enjoyed the ritual of), and leaned against the hood of his cab, looking out at the city waking up.

“A queen from another storybook,” he said to the empty air, his voice a soft rumble. He took a long drag, the smoke curling around his unremarkable face. “Proud. Strong. Used to being the apex. Thinks she understands the food chain.”

He chuckled, exhaling a plume. “She just got her first look at the ocean, and realized she’s been swimming in a pond.” He flicked the ash. “Good for her. Humility is the beginning of wisdom. And wisdom is the only thing that might keep her alive long enough to be interesting.”

He finished the cigarette, crushed it under his heel with meticulous care, and got back into the driver’s seat. The engine purred to life.

Chapter 12: Cipher

The request—no, the command—came without warning.

For nights, David had felt it looming. Natalia’s hunger for knowledge had shifted. She no longer wanted to merely hear about this world’s perception of hers. She wanted to see it.

“You will show me,” she stated, not from the doorway of his Haven, but already inside, having entered with the silent presumption of a queen. She stood before his cluttered desk, her crimson eyes fixed on the sleek monitor and the glowing tower beside it. “This ‘game.’ This ‘Skyrim.’ You will show me what your kind made of my home.”

David froze, a cold spike of dread piercing his still heart. His Haven, a nest of cables, energy drink cans, and posters of digital art, felt suddenly like a trap. He’d fantasized about this moment in an abstract, nerdy way—showing the Dragonborn her own legend. The reality was a thousand times more terrifying.

“My Lord, I… it’s just a… a representation. It’s not real,” he stammered.

Natalia’s head tilted slowly. The ambient light from the RGB keyboard seemed to deepen the shadows on her severe face. Her voice dropped, losing its usual imperious edge for something lower, more dangerous.  “Is there something wrong, David?”

David interpreted the words as what they truly were: the executioner’s axe ready to fall upon his neck.

“N-no. Of course not.” His hands trembled as he woke the PC. The monitor blazed to life. He navigated with rushed mouse clicks, launching the game. The familiar logo appeared, the theme music swelling. New game.

Natalia watched the screen without a flicker of emotion as the cart rolled into Helgen. The Imperial captain called out names; Alduin, the World-Eater, descended. Her gaze was fixed, analytical, a predator studying a reconstruction of its own hunting grounds. “I was in Riften when this happened,” she murmured, more to herself. “We heard rumors of a dragon attack at Helgen. I thought it was tavern nonsense until I encountered my first dragon and devoured its soul.” Her voice held neither warmth nor longing, only a sharp comparison between history and this strange, flickering imitation.

“Show me Castle Volkihar.”

David’s stomach plummeted. This was the moment he’d dreaded most. With a silent prayer to any god that might listen to a vampire, he loaded a save file. One he’d completed the Dawnguard questline with.

The world dissolved and reformed into the frozen courtyard of Castle Volkihar. Natalia leaned forward, her nose almost touching the screen.

It was… small. A compressed, simplified dollhouse of the vast, oppressive keep she remembered. But the bones were there: the main gate, the hall, the looming architecture. A crude sketch, but recognizable. She pointed a claw-tipped finger at the screen. “The chapel is to the left. The library wing… it should be there, but it is missing.” She was mapping, comparing, her mind overlaying the grandeur of her memory onto this pixelated replica.

Then her finger jabbed toward the screen. “Find Serana.”

“My Lord, perhaps—”

“Find her.”

The compulsion hit him like a physical blow—a velvet-wrapped command that bypassed his will and seized his motor functions. His hand moved the mouse against his own terror. He navigated the digital avatar through the halls, into Serana’s personal room.

And there she was.

Natalia’s breath caught.

Her sister. Her blood-kin. The only other being who understood the weight of Harkon’s legacy and Molag Bal’s touch.

But she was… wrong.

Serana’s in-game model wore a hyper-sexualized parody of the Vampire Royal Armor—all strategic cut-outs, exaggerated curves on her parody of a body, and a leer permanently etched on her polygon face. As David’s avatar approached, a voice line triggered, dripping with a sleazy, inviting tone utterly alien to the reserved, haunted woman Natalia knew.

“Back for more, my love?”

The connection shattered.

Natalia’s influence over David’s mind snapped like a taut wire. He gasped, reeling back in his chair, his eyes wide with terror as he looked from the screen to Natalia.

The air of cool observation vanished, obliterated by raw, volcanic fury. Lips peeled back from lengthening fangs. Eyes kindled into hellfire.

She turned from the screen with the slow, terrible grace of an avalanche beginning its slide.

“What,” she whispered, the word sizzling in the air, “have you done to my sister?!”

Thought fled. Instinct screamed. David bolted.

His chair toppled as he scrambled backward, across his small room, until his back hit the wall. He curled in on himself, arms raised in a futile shield. “I didn’t! I didn’t make it! It’s the game! It’s just how they designed her! Please!”

Natalia stepped forward, her hands curling into talons. Her posture was that of a predator zeroing in for the kill. The air grew cold enough to mist. This wasn’t about Masquerade breaches or political utility. This was sacrilege. A violation of the only sacred memory she had left.

She loomed over his cowering form, her shadow swallowing him. Her claws rose, poised to shred—

“Uhm.”

A voice, light, awkward, and utterly mundane, cut through the murderous tension.

Alicia stood in the open doorway, a tablet in her hand, her elegantly raised eyebrow faltering as she took in the scene: David cowering on his bed, Natalia standing over him with murder in her eyes and claws bared.

“I… understand I am intruding upon your… private time,” Alicia began, clearly misinterpreting the scene as some bizarre, violent fetish, “but the Prince’s directive won’t wait. It’s urgent.”

The trance broke. The all-consuming rage drained from Natalia’s face, locked away behind a mask of glacial control. The practical need of the moment overrode the personal insult. She slowly straightened, retracting her claws. The glacial temperature in the room eased by a degree.

She didn’t look at David again. She turned her burning gaze to Alicia, and with a voice smoother than polished marble and colder than the Void, said, “Then we will attend to it.”

With one last, searing glance that promised this is not over, she swept past Alicia and out the door.

David remained on his crumpled mattress, shaking. The cheerful, sleazy voice of digital Serana still echoing from his speakers—a brittle monument to his near-Final Death.

Alicia looked from his pallid face to the game on the screen, her Toreador mind quickly piecing together a more accurate, and arguably worse, scenario than the one she’d imagined.

“Oh, David,” she sighed, not without sympathy. “You showed her the mods, didn’t you?”

She then followed Natalia, leaving David alone in the wreckage of his Haven, the Prince’s urgent mission now a welcome distraction from the primal terror now permanently etched into his undead soul.

---

The opulent, art-filled sanctum felt like a different world from David’s digital nest.

Wordlessly, Alicia activated the sleek tablet and handed it over. The Prince’s stark, angular seal flashed once. “Read it yourself,” she said quietly. “The particulars are… precise.”

Natalia took the device. Her eyes, still holding the residual heat of her fury, scanned the text with swift, analytical precision. The language was stripped of all ornament, a skeleton of instruction: Synapse Tower. Air-gapped core. Physical extraction. Dead man’s switch purge protocol. Disable or fail. Recover project files for 'AENEID' – asset retrieval critical for ongoing counter-intelligence against Second Inquisition data-gathering models.

Then her gaze snagged on the deployment order.

OPERATIVE PAIRING:
STORM-BREAKER: Tactical insertion, physical overwatch, asset escort.
CIPHER: Infiltration, digital lock manipulation, purge-protocol subversion.
Note: Nosferatu crypt-networks engaged in priority VERMILION counter-intrusion. CIPHER is the sole available asset with required expertise. Coordination is mandatory.

Natalia’s brow furrowed slightly. The cold calculus of the mission was clear, but the labels were opaque. “These designations. ‘Storm-Breaker.’ ‘Cipher.’ Who do they refer to?”

Alicia met her gaze. “You are Storm-Breaker. David is Cipher.”

A low, quiet sound escaped Natalia— a breath of profoundly annoyed comprehension, sharp and controlled where a growl would have been. The universe, or at least the Prince’s petty bureaucracy, was subjecting her to the worst kind of ignominy. She was to be leashed, for the next several hours, to David—the very source of her fresh, white-hot rage. She was to protect him, guide him, and rely on him, minutes after deciding to paint the walls with his vitae.

She looked up from the tablet, her expression a flawless mask of icy calm that did nothing to hide the ire in her crimson eyes. “The Nosferatu are occupied,” she stated, her voice dangerously flat, repeating the pretext from the text.

“A convenient crisis,” Alicia replied, her tone neutral. “Or a calculated one. The point is, Cipher is the tool for the job. The only tool for this particular job, according to the Prince. And Storm-Breaker is the only one who can get that tool to the worksite and back in one piece.”

Natalia placed the tablet on Alicia’s desk with a deliberate, soft click. The silence stretched, filled with the unsaid: I almost killed David. I wanted to kill him. And now I must ensure he lives.

“Can the tool still be used?” Natalia asked finally, with the demeaning insult.

“He will be,” Alicia said, a trace of steel entering her voice. “He’s terrified of you, not broken. His professional pride will override his fear. It’s all he has right now. Use that.”

Natalia’s lip curled, but it was the closest she would come to acknowledging the twisted logic. The mission was a clear line through the chaos of her anger. A target. A procedure. Cipher was no longer her sister’s defiler in that context; he was a component. A fragile, irritating, but necessary component.

“Then inform Cipher,” she said, the codename dripping with contempt, “that we leave at the next nightfall. He will outline the parameters of the fortress and his role. I will listen.”

It was not forgiveness, nor was it even acceptance. It was a brutal, pragmatic ceasefire dictated by a higher authority. The hunt was on, but the most dangerous predator in the room had just been ordered to work on a leash, alongside prey she still very much wished to eviscerate.

The walk back to the main chamber was a study in contained violence. Every step was a conscious act of control.

---

The approach was made under the cover of a moonless, cloudy night. Synapse Tower was a slender spike of darkened glass and steel in the financial district, a monument to silent, digital wealth. At this hour, it was a ghost of its daytime self, only a few security lights glowing in the vast lobby.

They observed from a shadowed service alley across the street. David had a slim tablet open, his fingers flying over the surface. “I’m piggybacking on their external maintenance feed. Visual only. Lobby has two guards at the main desk. Rotations every four hours. Sub-level access is via a keycard and PIN elevator at the rear of the lobby. The elevator itself has a weight sensor and a silent alarm if it descends without proper authorization.”

Natalia watched the building, her senses extended. She could hear the low hum of distant generators, the faint echo of footsteps from the lobby guards. She smelled cleaning chemicals, polished marble, and the coppery tang of nervous sweat from David beside her.

“The plan?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

"We don't go through the lobby," David said, his eyes fixed to his screen as he pulled up a schematic. "There's a secondary utility access—HVAC maintenance. It leads to a sub-basement adjacent to the server level. Less guarded, but it's a maze of ducts and machinery. We bypass the main elevator and come up from below. The server room has its own layer: a six-digit code, changed daily. The Prince's people have today's."

He zoomed in on a node at the room's center.

"The primary lock is electronic, keyed to the code. But the moment we initiate a data pull, it triggers a dead man's switch—a kernel-level purge protocol that will wipe the entire array. That's the real lock. The code just opens the door to the timer."

Natalia studied the schematic, the labyrinth of tiny passages. “This ‘HVAC’ path. Can you navigate it?”

“With the schematics, yes. But it’s tight. And there will be pressure sensors, laser grids in the ducts themselves once we’re near the secure zones.”

“Pressure sensors and lasers,” Natalia repeated, a faint, familiar smile touching her lips. The tools were different, but the principles of the trap were the same as in any ancient Nordic barrow. “You navigate. I will follow. And I will handle the… obstacles.”

David looked at her, then back at the monolithic tower. The sheer scale of the task, the layers of modern security, seemed to dwarf them. But beside him stood a being who treated gravity and concrete as mild suggestions. He took a deep, unnecessary breath.

“Okay,” he said, powering down the tablet. “The utility access is around the back, near the loading docks. Shift change for the perimeter patrol is in twelve minutes. That’s our window.”

The build-up was complete. The target was sighted. The tools were in place.

The silent, digital fortress stood unaware. It was prepared for hackers, for commandos, for corporate spies. It was not prepared for the two anomalies converging upon it: a ghost to whom its walls were a suggestion, and the architect who had learned to whisper in its machine-tongue.

The utility door was a heavy, unremarkable slab of steel, secured by a magnetic lock. David produced a slender device from his pocket—a black box with prongs—and pressed it against the junction box. A series of tiny, colored LEDs on his device cycled from red to amber to green with a soft click. The magnetic seal disengaged with a sigh of released pressure.

“Thirty seconds before the system logs the bypass as a maintenance fault and sends an alert to the secondary security desk,” David whispered, his voice tense. “Go.”

---

Natalia slipped through the door into a world of industrial hum and deep shadow. The sub-basement was a cathedral of machinery: roaring air handlers, throbbing water pumps, forests of pipes and conduit. The air was hot, thick with the smell of ozone and lubricant. Yellow safety lights cast long, dancing shadows.

David followed, sealing the door behind them. He consulted his tablet, the glow illuminating his focused face. “This way. Stay close to the western wall. Avoid the open floor—pressure mats.”

They moved, Natalia a pale wraith in the gloom, David a shadow at her heels. Her movements were not the aggressive strides of the hunter or the lord, but something else entirely—a liquid, boneless flow. Each footfall was placed with preternatural care, not a scuff, not a click. She drifted past a sleeping boiler like a cold draft, her body contorting to slip through a narrow gap between a pipe cluster and a concrete pillar without brushing either.

It’s funny, she thought, the memory surfacing as her muscles remembered the old, mortal-scale rhythms of stealth. They see the Volkihar Lord, the shatterer of Sheriffs. They think brute strength is my only language.

But before the gift of true silence from her vampiric blood, before she could still her heart and lungs at will, there had been shadows of a different kind. The dripping sewers and wooden rafters of the Ratway in Riften. The tense, breath-held moments picking a noble’s pocket or slipping a jewel from a display case under a guard’s nose. The Thieves’ Guild had taught her patience, misdirection, and the art of being a ghost before Molag Bal had made her a demon.

Focus, she chided herself, slipping under a low-hanging cable bundle. No time to praise yourself in your head.

Her moment of mental arrogance was its own tiny wrench. As she straightened on the other side, her shoulder, moving with the unconscious assurance of one who believed herself undetectable, grazed a conduit pipe. It was the faintest of touches, no louder than a moth landing.

But in the constant, rhythmic thrum of the machinery, it was a discordant note.

Clink.

A small, metallic sound.

From a gantry twenty feet above, a recessed sensor pod swiveled with a soft whir. A pale red laser grid, invisible to mortal eyes, lanced down, painting the floor around them.

“Shit,” David hissed, freezing. “Motion-triggered laser curtain. We’re painted. The system’s triangulating. In ten seconds, it’ll seal this sector and flood it with paralytic gas.”

Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in his dead veins. This was his domain. His failure. The brute force he accompanied was useless against an automated system about to lock them in a box.

Natalia looked at the swiveling sensor, then at David. Her face was calm. “Cipher,” she said, the single word a command and a question.

The word cut through David’s fear. Cipher. Right. The obstacle was technological. The tool was him.

His eyes snapped across the room, synapses burning. The laser grid was both a wall and a watchman—but every watchman filed a report. That data streamed first to a local security node before reaching the main system.

“The junction box!” he whispered urgently, pointing to a grey cabinet bolted to the wall near the sensor’s mount. “The one with the blue stripe! It’s the hardline node for this sector. If I can introduce a loopback signal into the feed, it’ll make the system think the laser is still sweeping clear space!”

“How long?”

“Fifteen seconds to access, maybe five to splice!”

Twenty seconds. The gas would flood in ten.

Natalia didn’t hesitate. “Do it.”

She moved with targeted, explosive purpose. She bounded across the open floor in a blur—not weaving, but disrupting. Her form passed through the laser grid like a stone through a spiderweb, breaking beams with deliberate, scattered triggers.

She avoided nothing. Instead, she overloaded the sensor with a rapid storm of breaches, flooding its logic with noise and buying a precious window of confusion before it could resolve a clear threat signature. By the time David sprinted across in her wake, the system was still processing the cascade, blind to his simpler, single crossing.

She reached the junction box. The cover was secured by four recessed, star-headed bolts. Her fingers elongated, her nails hardening into black talons. She drove them into the metal beside the bolts and pulled. The reinforced cover shrieked as it was torn from its housing, revealing a nest of colorful wires and blinking chips.

David was right behind her, his own slender, precise tools in hand. He ignored the violence of the entry, his entire world narrowing to the circuit boards. His fingers danced, pulling a micro-spool of cable from his kit, stripping ends with a tiny, heated blade, his eyes reading the board labels with frantic speed.

“Seven seconds,” Natalia reported, her head tilted. Not toward the ducts, but inward, sensing the shift in the air. A sweet, cloying chemical scent touched it first. Then, from vents across the ceiling, a milky, vaporous cloud began to vomit forth.

David’s head snapped up. “No! It’s too soon! The purge sequence is faster than the schematics showed!”

The gas descended, a silent, spreading fog. Natalia saw the terror in David’s eyes. The hack was his domain; this chemical tide was hers.

A fitting penalty, she thought, the notion cold and clear amidst the rising chaos. My arrogance triggered the seal. My flesh will pay the toll.

“Do not stop,” she commanded, her voice cutting through his panic. Then she did something he had never thought she would do.

Her form blurred into dissolution. Her body fragmented into a swirling, semi-corporeal mist—a gift reserved for a Daughter of Coldharbour, the power to walk as fog. But she did not flow away to safety. She surged upward, into the descending cloud of paralytic agent.

The two vapors met and mingled. Where her mist touched the chemical gas, it sizzled faintly. A cold, invasive burn, like alcohol on an open wound, spread through her dispersed consciousness. She was not immune; her essence entangled with the toxin, wrapping around the particles, containing and corralling the spreading plume with her own substance. She became a moving, suffering filter.

“Four seconds!” David yelled, his voice muffled as he pulled his shirt over his nose, his eyes watering. He fought to focus on the green wire, the shaking splice.

Above him, the milky cloud churned, held in a turbulent sphere by an invisible, agonized will. Tendrils of Natalia’s mist burned away, dissipating with a faint, bitter smell.

Two seconds.

The splice held. The command executed.

One.

The progress bar hit 100%. The sensor seized mid-swivel as the laser grid dissolved into nothing. The vents too, fell silent.

The remaining gas, now cut off from its source, began to thin. Natalia’s mist coalesced violently, snapping back into her solid form beside David. She stumbled, catching herself against the torn junction box. Her skin, usually pale, was tinged a sickly grey. She took a sharp, unnecessary breath, her crimson eyes burning with pained fury—at the system, at the gas, at herself.

The silence that followed was heavy, pregnant with the scent of ozone, burnt plastic, and residual toxin. David stared at her, the hacking triumph in his hands feeling suddenly small.

“You… you absorbed it,” he whispered.

Natalia straightened, the grey tinge already fading as her vampiric resilience reasserted itself, but the echo of the corrosive burn remained in her gaze. “I contained the consequence of my error,” she corrected, her voice rough. “Do not mistake it for altruism. Now, move. The path is clear. The next mistake will not be mine.”

She turned and led the way deeper into the machinery, leaving David to scramble after her, the memory of her dissolving into that poisonous cloud now seared beside the memory of her raised claws in his Haven.

Her power served for more than breaking; it was for enduring. And her pride demanded that even her punishments be self-administered.

He had proven his worth. The infiltration was compromised, but not broken. They were still in the game. And now, they were on a timer. The system’s anomaly would be investigated. The quiet skulk was over. The next phase would require a different kind of expertise.

---

David stared at his tablet, the glow reflecting the fresh tension in his eyes. The security node they’d just fooled was already registering the discrepancy. A silent, digital query was pinging a higher-level server. In minutes, maybe seconds, a human would look at a screen, see the fault in Sector G-7, and send a physical team to check.

“The anomaly’s been flagged,” he whispered, his voice tight. “They’ll send a patrol. We have to move. Fast. But the main route to the server sub-level is through a monitored corridor. With the alert up, it’ll be swarming.”

Natalia processed this. The plan had hinged on quiet infiltration. Quiet was no longer an option. A direct, brute-force assault would bring the entire tower’s security down on them, mortal and automated, and their window for the data extraction would vanish.

“Alternative path,” she demanded, not a question.

David’s fingers flew over the schematic. “There is… one. Not on the official plans. A maintenance chase for fiber-optic lines. It runs vertically between the sub-basement we’re in and the server level. It’s a tight squeeze. A vertical shaft, maybe eighteen inches square. Ladder rungs.” He looked up, grim. “It comes out inside a server rack itself. We’d be popping out right in the middle of the room. But if they’re mobilizing guards for the corridors, the room itself might be lightly staffed, at least initially.”

A vertical coffin of a tunnel, emerging into the lion’s den. It was a desperate option. It also played to her unique strengths.

“Show me,” she said.

He led her through a maze of pipes to a blank section of wall. A seemingly seamless panel, but David found the hidden latch—a recessed button disguised as a bolt head. He pressed it, and a narrow, square section of wall hissed open, revealing a yawning, dark shaft. A stale, dry breeze whispered up from below. A series of metal rungs, slick with dust, descended into blackness.

“It goes down about sixty feet,” David said, peering in. “The server level.”

Natalia listened. From the corridors behind them, she could now hear the distant, crisp sound of booted footsteps—multiple pairs, moving with purpose. The patrol was coming.

“Go,” she ordered. “I will follow. Quickly.”

David didn’t argue. He slung his tablet across his back and swung into the shaft, his descent swift but clumsy compared to her preternatural grace. Natalia slipped in after him, pulling the panel shut behind them with a soft click, plunging them into utter darkness save for the faint, green glow of David’s watch.

They descended in silence, the only sounds the scuff of David’s shoes on the rungs and the distant, metallic groans of the building. The air grew cooler, drier. After what felt like an eternity, David stopped.

“This is it,” he breathed. “The access panel into the server rack is just below my feet. It should be… there.”

Natalia hung above him, listening. Through the thin metal of the panel, she could hear the deep, resonant hum of thousands of servers. The sound was a physical pressure. And… voices. Two. Muffled, bored.

“...check the perimeter feeds again. Johnson said he saw a blip in G-7.”

“Probably a rat. This old building.”

“Protocol says we check the room seal anyway. Go do the walk.”

A sigh, then the sound of one set of footsteps moving away. One guard leaving. One remaining.

David looked up at her, his face a pale oval in the gloom. A question in his eyes.

Natalia held up a single finger. Wait.

They hung in the darkness, listening. The remaining guard shuffled, muttered something about overtime, and the sound of a chair creaking suggested he’d sat down. The hum of the servers was a blanket of white noise.

This was the moment. They couldn’t wait for the other guard to return.

Natalia pointed downwards, then made a slicing motion across her own throat. Open it. I will handle the guard.

David nodded, fear and adrenaline making his movements jerky. He pulled a small, powerful suction cup from his kit, fixed it to the panel below his feet, and turned a handle. There was a faint pop of releasing pressure. He lifted the panel a bare inch.

A slice of blinding white light and a wave of chilled, sterile air shot up the shaft. The hum became a roar.

Through the crack, Natalia could see the underside of a server rack, a forest of blinking green and red LEDs. And ten feet away, the back of a guard’s chair, the man’s head just visible over the top.

She tapped David’s shoulder twice—now—and let go of the ladder.

She dropped through the opening like a falling blade, silent and lethal. She landed in a crouch between towering server racks, her form a splash of wrongness in the clinically ordered space.

The guard in the chair must have sensed the displacement of air, or seen a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision. He started to turn, his hand going to the stun baton on his belt. “Hey, what—?”

He never finished. Natalia was already across the gap. There was no dramatic leap, no snarl. One second she was crouching, the next she was behind his chair. Her arm snaked around his throat, a bar of iron. A sharp, precise jerk upwards and to the side. A clean, wet snap echoed, hideously loud in the hum-filled room.

The guard went limp. She lowered him silently into his chair, arranging him so he appeared to be looking at a monitor, his head lolling slightly.

David lowered himself through the opening, replacing the panel with a soft click. He took in the scene—the dead guard, Natalia standing calmly beside him—and swallowed hard. The reality of her efficiency was more brutal than any frenzy.

“We’re in,” David whispered, the word swallowed by the deep, resonant hum of a thousand servers. He pointed across the sterile, chilled room to a fortified terminal station.

He moved swiftly, Natalia a silent shadow beside him. He entered the code: 7-3-0-4-9-1.

The terminal screen unlocked, presenting a complex interface. David’s fingers flew, navigating menus. “I’m locating the target data core… initiating the extraction link.” He plugged his shielded drive into a port. A prompt appeared on the main server monitor:

DATA TRANSFER READY. CONFIRM EXTRACTION?
WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED TRANSFER WILL ACTIVATE PURGE PROTOCOL.

“There it is,” David said, his voice tight. “The dead-man’s switch. The moment I confirm this, a sixty-second countdown starts to wipe everything. I have to deploy the Prince’s countermeasure software during the transfer to kill the purge before it finishes.”

He looked at Natalia, the weight of the next sixty seconds in his eyes. “Once I hit confirm, we’re on the clock. The system will log the breach. If the other guard is on his way back, he’ll see it.”

Natalia glanced at the door, then back to the screen. The guard outside was still a potential complication, but the digital timer was now the primary threat. “Can your countermeasure succeed in time?”

“The Prince’s package is designed to. In theory. I’ve never tested it on a live system this advanced.”

“Then theory becomes practice. Proceed.”

David took a sharp, unnecessary breath. His finger hovered over the enter key. This was the point of no return. The data, or a digital funeral pyre.

TRANSFER INITIATED. PURGE PROTOCOL ACTIVE: 00:60

A second progress bar appeared beneath the first—blood red, counting down.

The data stream began. From the corridor, the returning guard’s voice called out. “Hey, Mike, you see anything? The blip’s cleared but central is still antsy…”

Natalia’s attention didn’t waver from the door. The numbers on the screen were David’s concern. Hers was the mortal on the other side of the steel. She reached out with her will, not to see, but to seize.

She infected his thoughts with a poisoned memory. A stolen bonus. A sneering remark. The visceral, personal sting of betrayal from a partner he was supposed to trust. She wove the resentment into the fabric of his recent past, making it feel older and more real than the present moment.

Outside, the guard’s muttering twisted. “Mike, you son of a bitch…” The keypad beeped. Locks disengaged. Thunk. Thunk.

“Status,” Natalia said, her voice a flat line. Her gaze never left the door as it began to inch open.

“Ninety percent!” David hissed, his eyes glued to the screen. The red purge timer flashed: 00:15.

The door hissed open a slit, revealing the guard’s face, already contorted with a fury that wasn’t his own.

“Transfer complete! Purge terminated!” David gasped, yanking the drive.

Natalia pointed to the vertical access panel they’d entered through, then to the dead guard in the chair. She made a sharp gesture: Go. I will handle this.

David didn’t need telling twice. He scrambled for the panel as the main door hissed open.

“You motherfucker!” the guard roared, charging past the door, his world now narrowed to a manufactured grudge.

The second guard stepped in, his face set in a scowl of pre-existing annoyance, courtesy of Natalia’s psychic suggestion. “Mike, I swear to God, if you’ve been hitting the—“

He stopped. He saw Mike slouched in the chair. At first, it looked like he was asleep, or passed out. The guard’s implanted memory of Mike’s laziness flared, hot and righteous.

“You useless piece of…” he growled, stomping forward. He didn’t see Natalia, a statue of shadow pressed flat against a server rack behind the opening door. He didn’t see David silently vanish back into the ceiling.

He reached Mike’s chair and shook his shoulder. “Wake up, you drunk bas—“

Mike’s head lolled at an impossible angle. The guard froze, the anger morphing into confusion, then dawning horror. But the implanted narrative was strong, a toxic root in his mind. The horror twisted, redirected by Natalia’s subtle, relentless pressure.

This wasn’t an accident. This was a fight. A fight you started. He provoked you. You pushed him. He fell.

“No… no, I didn’t…” the guard whispered to himself, recoiling.

Then, the final nudge. A surge of panic, and the vicious, self-preserving instinct to cover it up. To make it look like something else. The implanted impulse took full, violent hold.

“You did this!” the guard snarled at the corpse, the lie becoming his truth. “You made me do it!” His fear transmuted into a performative rage. He grabbed Mike’s body, hauling it out of the chair. He slammed it against the server rack once, twice—thud, thud—the sounds echoing terribly in the sterile room. “Always looking down on me! Always taking what’s mine!”

He was loud. He was angry. He was making a perfect, believable scene of a personal dispute gone tragically, violently wrong.

Natalia slipped through the access panel, pulling it shut behind her. She found David clinging to the ladder in the dark shaft, trembling. She didn’t speak. She simply began to climb, swift and silent as a spider. He followed.

Behind them, through the metal, they could hear the guard’s continuing, desperate charade—shouts, the sound of a fist hitting flesh that would no longer bruise, the crash of a tipped-over chair.

He was committing to the lie with every fiber of his being, creating all the noise and chaos that would explain a death and cover their own silent escape.

They ascended the shaft, emerged into the humming sub-basement, and retraced their path through the machinery, now ignored as all security attention was diverted to the “altercation” in the heart of the server room. They slipped out the utility door and vanished into the night just as the first sirens of internal security response began to wail far above them.

Blocks away, in the shadows of an alley, David leaned against a wall, the data drive a heavy weight in his coat. He looked at Natalia, who stood composed, not a hair out of place.

“Job well done,” she stated, the words simple, final.

David could only nod, the violence paling against the cold precision of the aftermath. The theft was one thing. The true violation was the mind she had remade—a man now raging at a corpse, believing himself the wronged party.

Her force could shatter walls; her subtlety could shatter a soul.

Chapter 13: Reward

Notes:

The first smut chapter.

The sterile, secure light of Alicia’s large-screen monitor replaced the gloom of the server farm. They were gathered on her plush sectional—an unlikely trio. Natalia sat with regal ease in the center. David, by her unspoken invitation, perched stiffly on the cushion beside her, the honor and terror of the position making him shiver with nervous energy. Alicia reclined in a chaise lounge nearby, a glass of vitae in her hand, watching the scene with a strange, resigned acceptance. There was a time the mere thought of David—or anyone besides a chosen lover—in this room would have sparked her ire.

But Natalia had reshaped the space’s politics. She was a force of nature that had taken up residence; you didn’t get annoyed at the weather for being in your garden, you just accepted it and hoped it didn’t hail. As long as the ancient, arrogant furniture remained polite and didn’t smash her curated art, Alicia found she could tolerate the presence.

On the screen, a local news anchor with perfectly coiffed hair spoke over footage of Synapse Tower’s imposing façade, now dotted with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

“…authorities are calling it a tragic incident stemming from a workplace dispute. Sources within the private security firm confirm an altercation between two employees in a secured area turned deadly early this morning. The investigation is ongoing, but foul play beyond the involved individuals is not suspected at this time…”

A faint, nostalgic smirk touched Natalia’s lips. The memory surfaced, warm with the camaraderie of shared, secret triumph. Nights in the Ragged Flagon, the air thick with smoke and mead, listening to Brynjolf or Vex recount how some pompous noble or corrupt merchant had been undone, their misfortune a public spectacle they themselves had engineered. The thrill wasn’t just in the take; it was in the watching, in seeing the carefully constructed world of the mark unravel in the most humiliating way possible. This sterile, digital report was a pale shadow of those tales, but the echo of the old joy was there.

“Well now…” Natalia murmured, her voice cutting through the anchor’s bland commentary. Her tone had shifted. The usual imperial ice was still there, but beneath it ran a current of something… warmer. Acknowledging. Intimate.

David tensed beside her.

She turned her head slightly, her crimson eyes fixing on him. “You have more than proven your worth tonight. Cipher.” The codename was simultaneously a caress and death sentence for him.

David’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. A phantom panic—the ghost of a racing heart—seized his undead body. He managed a dry, airless stammer.

“Shush.”

The single, soft command silenced him utterly. The room seemed to shrink, the news broadcast fading into meaningless noise.

This was it. The Reaper hadn't forgotten. She had come to collect.

Natalia’s gaze didn’t waver. "Remember my promise? That one night, as a reward?" She paused, letting the memory of her touch in the cab—her whisper in the dark—flood the space between them.

Then she asked, her voice casual, conversational, as if inquiring about the weather or the quality of the vitae.

“Would you like me to make a man out of you?”

Silence swallowed the room, leaving the question echoing—obscene and profound in its simplicity. It wasn’t lewd, though it carried that implication. It was alchemical. To make a man out of you. To transform the nervous neonate, the digital ghost, the living key, into something else.

To acknowledge the spark of mortal desire that had stubbornly survived his Embrace and fan it into a different kind of flame with her own ancient, predatory passion.

Alicia, from her chaise, didn’t move. She took a slow, deliberate sip from her glass, her expression unreadable. The technical mother of this Childe who was being asked, in her own sanctuary, for permission to… remake him. And the asker was a queen who asked for nothing, only took or offered.

---

He sat frozen, caught between the Sire who had given him eternity and the lord who was now offering him a different kind of awakening. The only sound was the droning news report, talking about a deadly dispute that was, in its own way, a lie they had authored together.

The atmosphere in the room congealed, charged with a tension that had nothing to do with fear or politics. David’s nervous stammering died. His eyes darted from Natalia’s unnervingly warm gaze to the placid, unreadable face of his Sire, and back again. She had promised to burn away the lingering mortal boy, the terrified neonate, and forge something new in the ashes. He wanted it. The desire, so long a phantom ache, crystallized into a cold, sharp certainty in his dead heart.

Or perhaps this was her final gift—a last wish granted before the inevitable end.

He swallowed, a dry, useless motion. “Yes,” he breathed, the word scarcely a sound. “I… accept.”

A brilliant, predatory smile cut across Natalia’s face. “Wonderful.” She turned her head with languid grace toward Alicia. “Alicia. Would you care to observe?”

The question lingered—absurd, invasive, yet delivered with the same casual, regal tone as an offer of more wine. Do you want to watch your Childe deflowered?

Alicia’s reaction was a masterpiece of Toreador control. No splutter. No glare. She simply arched one perfectly sculpted eyebrow, her expression a blend of profound distaste, weary amusement, and a flicker of something darker—perhaps curiosity, perhaps a Sire’s possessive pang. She took another slow sip, her eyes never leaving Natalia’s over the rim of her glass.

“My dear Natalia,” she said, her voice like polished glass, “while I am endlessly fascinated by your… cultural explorations, some rituals are best observed from a distance. Or not at all. I shall retire. The acoustics in here are about to become… disagreeable.”

She set her glass down with a definitive click, rose with fluid grace, and swept out. The door to her inner studio closed behind her with a soft, final sound. She had not granted permission. She had simply removed herself, a silent, elegant condemnation and concession all at once.

Natalia chuckled, a low, rich sound. “As you wish.” Her full attention swung back to David, who seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. “Now then.”

She stood, unfolding to her full, imposing height—taller than him by several inches, her frame all lean, corded muscle and ancient grace beneath the modern clothes. She looked down at him, her head tilted, the severe line of her ponytail falling over one shoulder. “A real man leads his bride to the altar, does he not?”

The script of the moment was taking hold. The neonate, the hacker, the living key receded. Here was a chance to become something from the myths she’d walked out of. He stood, his movements gaining a hesitant confidence. “Yes,” he said, his voice firmer. “This way.”

In the absence of a proper bed, he led her towards the room’s center—to the deep, velvet-cushioned divan that served as its primal focus. It was the closest thing to a ritual altar this sleek space possessed.

They stood before it. The silence was absolute, save for the distant hum of the city. Natalia began to undress— shedding all practicality for the ceremony of her “wifely duty”. Each garment fell like a layer of armor discarded before sacred combat. David mirrored her, his hands trembling only slightly.

Soon, they stood bare in the cool air. The contrast was stark.

Natalia was a vision of deceptive elegance. From afar, she might have been a buxom beauty carved from pale marble—all sweeping curves and impossible grace, her skin flawless save for the faintest silvery tracery of old violence. It was only up close, in the intimate silence, that the truth revealed itself: the powerful definition of her thighs, the lean muscle etched along her torso and shoulders—a sculptor’s afterthought, a warrior’s foundation. The brutal wound from the Garou was now just a faint, pink seam, the only immediate proof of the savage strength hidden beneath that breathtaking form.

David was softer, younger, his form clinging to the ghost of a mortal college student's physique. Where she was monumental, he was merely pale; where her coolness spoke of deep earth and ancient frost, his was the surface chill of a stone left in shadow. Yet, a hot, desperate pulse of life thrummed insistently at his core—a stark, mortal contradiction to his cool skin and the ancient stillness of the predator before him. He looked up at her, eyes wide, drinking in the reality, his entire being focused on that single, throbbing point of want.

He looked up at her, eyes wide, drinking in the reality. They savored the sight, the forbidden novelty of it. For him, it was the culmination of a fantasy that had become terrifyingly real. For her, it was an experiment, a reward, a reconnection with a physicality that was usually reserved for hunting and killing.

She reached out, her cold fingers tracing the line of his jaw, then down his chest. “Well then,” she murmured, her voice a husky vibration in the quiet. “How would you like to begin?”

The air between them seemed to crystallize. David’s nervousness didn't vanish so much as transmute, subsumed by the intoxicating script Natalia had offered.

A man leads. A man demands.

He stepped into the role like a suit of armor. The neonate’s deference burned away in the heat of a more primal imperative. Her performance as the blushing bride was the ultimate gift—a queen lowering her crown for him alone, elevating his boldness into kingliness.

His hand, which had been hovering, finally moved. Steady now, it rose to cup the side of her face, his thumb brushing the impossibly smooth, cold plane of her cheekbone. The touch was a claim.

“Kiss me,” he said, the command a rough whisper, echoing her own past imperatives.

A slow, approving smile curled Natalia’s lips, her crimson eyes glowing with promised debauchery. She inclined her head, the blushing bride acquiescing to her groom. “As my love commands.”

Forget the chaste peck of a storybook. This was a collision. His mouth found hers with a hunger that was all mortal urgency, a desperate, years-dead need roaring back to life. Her lips were cool, but they yielded, then answered.

She kissed him back with a centuries-old knowledge that turned his clumsy fervor into a duet. Her tongue traced the line of his lips before sliding against his, a cold, slick invasion that made him shudder. He could taste the faint, metallic ghost of old blood and something else, something cold and ancient like a glacier’s heart.

His hands grew bolder, sliding from her face down the strong column of her neck, over the powerful slope of her shoulders. His touch was eager, mapping territory he’d only worshipped from afar. He traced the ridges of her collarbone, his thumbs dipping into the hollow at the base of her throat. She allowed it, her own hands coming to rest lightly on his hips, a silent encouragement.

He broke the kiss, his breath coming in ragged, unnecessary gasps. His lips trailed down her jaw, to the pale column of her throat. He hesitated for a fraction of a second—this was the place of the Kiss, of death—but the role, her permission, overrode the instinct. He pressed his mouth there, feeling the absolute stillness where a pulse should be. He nipped at the cool skin, not breaking it, but claiming it.

A low, throaty hum vibrated through Natalia. “Yes,” she breathed, the word a puff of frost against his ear. “Show me what a man desires.”

Emboldened, his hands slid down her back, over the fascinating landscape of sculpted muscle. He explored the powerful curve of her spine, the dramatic taper of her waist, the fierce swell of her hips. His touch was no longer reverent; it was covetous, possessive. He pulled her flush against him, and the contrast was electrifying—her solid, unyielding strength against his own frailer, softer form. He could feel the latent power in her, a coiled spring, and the fact that she allowed him to hold it was the most potent aphrodisiac he’d ever known.

He turned them, guiding her back until her knees met the edge of the velvet divan. She followed his lead, sinking down onto the lush cushions, looking up at him with heavy-lidded eyes that promised both submission and boundless power. He stood over her, drinking in the sight: the warrior-queen laid out like a feast, her fiery hair fanned out against the dark fabric, her body a map of pale temptation.

He knelt between her legs, his hands sliding up her powerful thighs. The skin was like cool satin over steel. He leaned down, his mouth leaving a trail of kisses along the inside of her knee, up the sensitive inner flesh. She let out a soft sigh, a sound utterly at odds with her nature, and it spurred him on. His tongue traced patterns, his teeth grazed lightly, learning the geography of her immortal flesh. She brought her hands up, fingers threading through his hair with a firm, almost painful grip, anchoring him in the sensory storm.

He worshipped her with his mouth and hands, a diligent acolyte at the altar of his own deepest fantasy. He learned that a certain spot on her hip made her arch ever so slightly. That a slow, deliberate stroke along the inside of her arm drew a faint, pleased tremor. The foreplay was a lengthy, sensual excavation. There was no rush, no frantic need for culmination. This was the reward, the savoring. He was rediscovering sensation through her, and she was allowing herself to be explored, a continent yielding its secrets to a brave, if temporary, conqueror.

Her responses were subtle, controlled—a sharp intake of breath that didn’t need air, a minute tightening of muscle, a low murmur in a language he didn’t know but whose meaning was unmistakably carnal. She was playing her part to perfection, the blushing bride awakening to passion, but beneath it, he could feel the vast, patient amusement, the ancient creature indulging in a novel form of pleasure.

Finally, he leaned over her, bracing himself on his arms, looking down into her face. Her eyes were fully open now, the crimson depths swirling with a dark, amused hunger. His own desire was a cold, hard ache, a phantom of life screaming for satiation.

“Now,” he said, the word thick with want.

Natalia’s smile was a scythe. “Is that a demand, my love?”

“Yes.”

Her laugh was a silken promise. “Then proceed.”

The main event loomed, the final threshold. He hovered there, at the precipice, the length of their foreplay having stoked the need to an almost painful intensity. The roleplay held, and the ritual demanded completion. He was about to take what had been offered, to cease being the student, the neonate, the tool, and become, for this night at least, the man.

For Natalia, the act itself was a world away from the violation that had birthed her. That had been an act of cosmic violence, a shattering of will and flesh by a Daedric Prince, a claiming that left only cold dominion and a throne of ice in its wake. It was the foundational trauma of her existence, the source of her power and her curse.

This… this was different.

When David, emboldened by passion and her crafted fantasy, finally claimed her, it felt less like a conquest and more like a mutual surrender to a shared script. And in that surrender, in the shocking, intimate joining, something unexpected shifted within Natalia’s ancient core. It wasn’t the physical sensation—though the novelty of it, the sheer mortality of the act, was fascinating.

For the first time in her eternity, an intimacy was being offered, not taken. A role was being played with her, not imposed upon her. The control was hers to give, and she had given it freely, as a reward.

The feeling was so alien it was almost disorienting. A flicker of something that wasn’t dominance, wasn’t predation, wasn’t cold calculation. It was… connection. Her first true moment of intimacy, however artifice-laden its origins.

She leaned into the roleplay with renewed, almost vicious commitment, egging him on. “Is that all, my love?” she gasped with exaggerated breathlessness, arching beneath him. “Does my love find me… pleasing?” The submissiveness was a performance, a gift she draped over her own immense power, making his fantasy all the more potent.

And David—lost in the sauce, as he would put it in his own words—became a creature of pure, unleashed passion. The careful student was gone. His hands, bred for keyboards and code, now roamed her body with a possessive fervor. His nails—not claws, but sharp nonetheless—raked lightly down her back, leaving faint, thrilling trails on her impervious skin. He covered her throat, her shoulders, her bounteous breasts in a frantic tapestry of kisses, some soft and worshipful, others sharp with needy hunger. He even, in a moment of delirious, instinctual abandon, took her pink nipple into his mouth, nursing with a fervor that was both ridiculous and deeply, primally earnest.

“Take my seed,” he moaned against her skin, the words slurred with ecstatic abandon. “Have my child. Be the mother of my…”

The statement was biologically ludicrous. They were both undead, both incapable of such creation. But the fantasy had consumed him utterly. This wasn’t about Kindred or Volkihar. This was the wettest dream of a mortal gamer made horrifyingly, wonderfully real, and he was speaking its language without filter.

Natalia laughed, a dark, rich sound that vibrated through both of them. “Yes,” she purred, her hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. “Give it to me, my love. All of it!”

And he did.

He erupted with a force and a volume that genuinely surprised her. A shuddery, desperate cry was torn from his throat, a sound of pure, unvarnished release that had nothing to do with the Kiss. The cold, vital essence of his spent passion flooded her, a shocking, profane baptism. She had underestimated the depth of his fantasy, the sheer pent-up mortal want that had survived his Embrace and attached itself, with laser focus, to her. This was its catharsis.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of his ragged, unnecessary gasps and the hum of the city. Then, with a fluid, powerful motion, Natalia rolled them over, pinning him beneath her on the velvet. She looked down at his dazed, blissful face, his eyes wide with post-climactic shock. She lowered her head, capturing his mouth in a deep, full-tongued kiss that tasted of cold, copper, and spent desire. It was a kiss of possession, of conclusion, and of subtle, genuine thanks.

When she broke it, she shifted to lie beside him, one arm draped across his chest. David lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, his body humming with a phantom of sensation, his mind a white-noise void trying to compute what had just transpired. The fear, the awe, the technicalities of being a neonate—all of it had been burned away in the furnace of the experience. He had, for a little while, been exactly what he’d dreamed of being.

Natalia watched the play of stunned realization across his face, a small, unreadable smile on her lips. The reward had been delivered in full. And she, the ancient Daughter of Coldharbour, found herself quietly marveling at the strange, new echo in the hollow places of her being—the afterglow of a shared, consensual fiction.

---

Time, for a while, ceased to have meaning. It was measured only in the slow, steadying rhythm of non-existent breaths, the faint settling of dust motes in the slivers of city light piercing the blinds, and the gradual cooling of skin that had never been truly warm. The velvet of the divan was a dark sea around them, cradling the aftermath of the storm.

David finally stirred, the dazed, blissful shock in his eyes slowly giving way to a more profound, quieter awe. He turned his head on the cushion to look at her. Natalia lay on her back beside him, a pale statue reposed, one arm behind her head, staring contemplatively at the ceiling. The fierce, playful light in her crimson eyes had banked to a soft, smoldering ember.

“Thank you,” he whispered, the words raw and utterly sincere. They seemed to hang in the still, charged air. “Thank you so much.” He paused, a strange, peaceful smile touching his lips. “I don’t mind my Final Death anymore. Not after this. You’ve… you’ve given me heaven on earth.”

Natalia’s head turned. She looked at him, and for a moment, the ancient, weary creature beneath the queen was visible—a being who understood the true, bleak weight of eternity. Then, it was gone, masked by affectionate mockery. She laughed, a soft, breathy sound.

“Stop being a ridiculous boy,” she chided, the words fond. Then she caught herself, a glint of amusement in her eye. She shifted her tone, adopting the exaggerated, submissive lilt of her earlier roleplay. “Ah, pardon. A ridiculous man.”

“The test is concluded,” she said, her voice low and devoid of its earlier theatrics. “You have passed.”

David blinked, the peaceful afterglow tightening into confusion. “Test?”

“You defiled a sacred memory. You presented my sister—my blood—as a common bawd for your flickering, phantom amusement.” The words were frost, but the fury that should have fueled them was absent, replaced by a chilling analytical calm. “A crime worthy of a slow execution. But a tool that can infiltrate a fortress is rare. A mind eager to bridge worlds is rarer still. I needed to know if the creature who possessed those qualities had a spine, or only appetites.”

She propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at him, her expression turning pragmatic, though her eyes remained strangely soft.

“I saw the asset in the tower. I saw the pupil in our lessons. Tonight, I wished to see the man. To see if the one who made those… alterations… had the courage to reach for what he truly desired in the flesh. Or if he would cower behind his screen, forever a ghost in his own existence.”

A faint, genuine smile, thin as a razor’s edge, touched her lips. “You reached. You claimed. There is a fire in you, little teacher. It is a small, mortal flame, but it is real. It burns with desire. And that…”

She leaned close, her final words a whisper that carried the weight of a decree.
“That is a flame I will not snuff out. Your transgression is pardoned. You have my word.”

That declaration sealed the night’s transformation. David felt it settle into his bones, a new, quiet certainty. The neonate’s constant, skittering fear had not fully vanished, yet it had been decisively put in its place. He had been tested in fire of a different kind and emerged not just alive, but altered.

“You have undergone your rite of passage. You will be sharper for it. More focused. A more effective member of the… cause.” Her fingers traced an idle, possessive pattern on his chest. “And a Final Death,” she added, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur, “would mean you will never experience this… particular form of commendation… again.”

Was it a promise, a threat, or merely a statement of logistical fact? Her tone gave nothing away, leaving the implication to blossom in the dark, fertile soil of his hope. It was a hook, beautifully baited, to ensure his continued loyalty, his continued desire to prove himself, to stay alive.

Before he could formulate a response, the soft click of the studio door echoed in the room.

Alicia stood in the doorway, backlit by the softer light of her private space. She had changed into a silk dressing gown, her face a masterpiece of composed neutrality. She took in the scene: the tangled sheets, the two pale forms on the dark divan, the intimate, musky scent that now overlaid her usual perfumes of oil paint and vitae. Her gaze swept over them, then she walked slowly into the room, her heels silent on the plush rug.

“Well, well,” she said, her voice dry as bone dust. She didn’t look at Natalia; her eyes were on David, a complex mix of maternal exasperation, faint pride, and deep, weary understanding. “What a mess you’ve made.” Her tone encompassed the physical disarray, the political ramifications, the shattered peace of her sanctuary, and the irrevocable change in her Childe.

From her vantage point beside the divan, her gaze was inscrutable, evaluating him from this new, messy angle. “Be sure to clean it up, David.”

The command was gentle but firm, layered with meaning. Clean the room. Clean up any lingering emotional turmoil. Clean up the potential fallout from this. It was a Sire’s order, reasserting the fundamental hierarchy that had just been, for a few hours, gloriously inverted.

David met her gaze, and for the first time, there was no flinch in him. He simply nodded, a man accepting a practical task after a night of revelation. “Yes, Alicia.”

Alicia gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod of her own. Then, without another glance at Natalia, she turned and glided back into her studio, the door shutting with a whisper of finality.

Silence descended once more, deeper now. The outside world, with its princes and Garou and masquerades, felt very far away. Here, in this velvety nest, there was only the aftermath of a shared dream and the new, unspoken understanding between a queen and her knight, forged in the most intimate of fires.

The chapter of the nervous neonate was closed. A new one, uncertain, dangerous, and thrilling, had just begun.

Chapter 14: Amaranth

The change was subtle at first, then unmistakable. Natalia no longer moved through the Elysium’s common areas like a glacier through a meadow—aloof, silent, leaving a wake of chilled awe. Now, she would pause. She would linger by the grand piano where a Malkavian neonate named Leo often picked out dissonant, haunting melodies. She would stand at the edge of a conversation between two Brujah neonates arguing over modern political philosophy.

And then, she would speak.

Her English was no longer just functional. It had gained a rough, archaic cadence, her accent a guttural melody that turned common phrases into something that sounded like lines from a lost epic. But the grammar was correct. The words were chosen with care.

She approached Leo one night as his fingers stilled on the keys. “The song,” she said, her voice cutting through the residual echo. “It speaks of broken glass and forgotten names.”

Leo, a twitchy young man with eyes that never seemed to focus on the same plane, looked up, startled. Most Kindred avoided him. “It… it does. You hear it?”

“I hear the shape of the silence between the notes,” Natalia replied, tilting her head. “It is a skilled sorrow. I am Natalia.”

An introduction. After all this time. Leo blinked, then gave a spasmodic nod. “Leo. I was… a composer. Before.”

“And now you compose with memories,” she stated, not a question. “A different instrument.”

She moved on. She learned that the Brujah arguing about hegemony, a fierce woman named Chloe, had been a labor organizer. That the quiet Nosferatu lurking by the liquor cabinet, who went by ‘Spindle,’ had been a master archivist for the city, now preserving secrets of a different kind. She asked about their past lives with the focused interest of a general assessing the history of a newly annexed territory—clinical, deliberate, devoid of polite curiosity. She learned their regrets—a family left behind, a career cut short, a moment of cowardice that led to the Embrace. She listened, her crimson eyes intent, absorbing the lore of their damnations.

And always, underneath the words, she sensed it: the envy. It was a low, constant hum, especially from the younger males. They looked at David, who now carried himself with a new, quiet confidence, who walked beside Natalia as an acknowledged companion rather than a skittish guide.

They had heard the rumors, the muffled sounds from Alicia’s sanctuary. They saw the way Natalia’s gaze would sometimes rest on him, a flicker of possessive approval. They envied the acknowledgment itself—the carnal encounter was merely the most visceral part of it. To be seen, truly seen, and rewarded by a power that dwarfed their own, a power that walked in the sun.

It amused her. Ha.

This was a practice wholly alien to her existence in Volkihar Keep. There, beyond the names of her immediate court—Serana, her seneschal, and the rest of her inner circle—the lesser vampires were furniture, tools, or potential threats. Knowing the personal dreams of a blood cattle was as irrelevant as knowing the favorite flower of a particularly sharp sword. Her demesne had been a frozen, sprawling castle, and she its distant, glacial heart.

Here, she had no personal coffin, no private wing, no miles of haunted ice to separate her from the others. She shared this modern, compressed demesne. The noise of their un-lives was inescapable. And a peculiar, deeply ingrained tenet of her nature—the obligation of nobility—stirred. A true ruler knew her land and its people. Even if these people were wretched, cursed things, they were her wretched, cursed things by association and temporary alliance. To ignore them was not just arrogance; it was poor governance. It left blind spots. It fostered resentment that could be weaponized.

So, she learned their names. She mapped their desires and their grudges. She noted who was clever, who was strong, who was a gossip, who held a secret. She was taking census of her new, involuntary court.

One night, she found David being subtly challenged by one of the envious Brujah, a broad-shouldered neonate named Marcus, over the use of a particular terminal in the common area.

“The Prince’s work takes priority,” David was saying, his voice calm but firm, a new steel in it.

“Everything’s the Prince’s work with you now, isn’t it?” Marcus sneered.

Before David could retort, Natalia’s voice cut through from across the room, calm and conversational, yet it silenced everything. “Marcus. Your grievance is with the allocation of resources, not the man. Your strength is in your arms, not in terminals. Chloe tells me you wish to patrol the riverfront docks. A desire for open spaces. Why waste time here, in a box of light, when you could be asserting your strength where it matters?”

Marcus froze, stunned to be addressed by name, his private longing laid bare so casually. He looked from Natalia’s impassive face to David’s, and the fight drained out of him. The envy was still there, but it was now mixed with a dawning, wary understanding. She was watching. She knew.

He grunted, a non-answer, and slouched away.

David met Natalia’s gaze. She gave him the faintest nod. It was a lesson in rule, delivered without a single raised voice or bared fang. She was learning them. And in learning them, she was beginning, in her own insidious way, to rule them.

The Elysium was transforming into Natalia's demesne in practice—no longer merely Alicia's domain or the Prince's territory. It was a dominion built on the far more potent and unsettling foundation of her attention, eclipsing even the fear of her strength.

---

The summon was a silent, heavy expectation that settled over the Elysium, a shift in pressure felt by every Kindred within. The Prince did not request; he commanded an audience. When the sleek, black car arrived, Alicia was already waiting, a vision of controlled elegance, her face a mask of polite neutrality.

Natalia emerged in a modern outfit of black that Alicia had provided—a seamless fusion of timeless authority and contemporary lethality. A tailored black blazer, sharply cut and structured, rested over a fitted turtleneck of the same void-like hue. The fabric was a matte, technical weave, suggesting armor rather than cloth, with seams that followed the powerful lines of her shoulders and back as if mapped by a strategist. The trousers were narrow and precise, ending just above ankle-length boots of supple, black leather, their soles silent but substantial. No jewelry, no ornament—only the stark geometry of the clothing and the pale severity of her face.

This was not the borrowed mortal wear of her first days, nor the archaic leathers of her homeland. This was the uniform of a queen who had studied her new court and chosen to out-dress them all in their own language. It was armor of a different sort—psychological, political, impeccably tailored to intimidate.

The ride was silent. Alicia watched the city flow by, her thoughts a whirl of strategy and damage control. Natalia sat perfectly still, her crimson eyes reflecting the passing lights, her mind turning over the possibilities. The Prince’s last mission had yielded something. Something valuable enough to summon her directly, and dangerous enough to require “careful planning.”

The opera house was a tomb of anticipation. The court was already assembled, a sea of pale faces and dark attire in the dimness. The Sheriff stood at the foot of the stage, a healed but grim monument. The Primogen watched from their boxes like carrion birds. The air smelled of dust, old blood, and sharp, nervous energy.

Natalia and Alicia walked the central aisle, the silence so profound their footsteps were the only sound. They mounted the stage. The Prince sat in his director’s chair, looking older, sharper, the weight of his domain etched more deeply into his face.

“Natalia,” he began, dispensing with titles. His voice was dry, but his gaze was intense, probing. “The data you retrieved from Synapse Tower has been… illuminating.”

Alicia stood slightly behind Natalia’s left shoulder, ready to lean in and whisper nuance, to smooth any linguistic or cultural barb.

“It contained intercepted communications from the Second Inquisition’s regional intelligence hub,” the Prince continued. “They’ve been monitoring a Sabbat cell operating under the guise of a shipping logistics firm. The Inquisition knows of a planned shipment—but they’ve deemed it low priority, a ‘theoretical threat’ buried under more immediate concerns. A mistake we will not make.”

He leaned forward slightly, the light catching the sharp planes of his face. “The shipment is not of weapons or money. It is a substance. A refined, synthetic compound derived from vampire vitae, laced with specific, debilitating toxins and psychoactive agents.”

Natalia processed this. A weapon designed for their kind. “Who is the target?”

“Us,” the Sheriff growled from the side, the word like gravel crunching underfoot.

The Prince cut in, his voice a dry, precise blade. “The entire domain. It is a Sabbat operation—codenamed ‘Crimson Shroud.’ They plan to turn the compound into a mist and pump it through the ventilation of our primary Elysiums and Havens.” He paused, letting the horror of the method settle over the silent court. “It will not kill outright. Its purpose is to induce mass frenzy, systemic paralysis, and psychic fragmentation. It would shatter blood bonds, oaths, and sanity itself. Our strongholds would become charnel houses and asylums… leaving us helpless for their cleansing teams.”

The horror of the plan settled over the court. A Masquerade breach of unimaginable scale, coupled with total tactical annihilation. It was an act of total war.

“The lead,” the Prince said, cutting through the murmurs, “is the shipment itself. It arrives at the Port Authority’s private freight terminal, Berth 7, in seventy-two hours. It is being guarded by a Sabbat ductus and his pack, masquerading as customs officials. The terminal will be locked down, sanitized.”

He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto Natalia’s. “We cannot simply assault it. An open battle at the port would be seen, would be heard. It would be war declared in the loudest possible way, and we are not ready for that kind of conflagration. The Second Inquisition would be on us within hours. This requires extraction. Silent, total, and deniable. The shipment must disappear as if it never was. The Sabbat must be left confused, hunting ghosts, with no evidence to point to us.”

He let the challenge linger in the space between them, a silent ultimatum etched into the cold air. A near-impossible surgical strike. The kind of operation that demanded a scalpel, not a hammer.

“And if we succeed?” Natalia asked, her voice cool, cutting to the core of her own interest.

The Prince’s lips thinned. “The compound itself is a treasure trove of intelligence. Its synthetic base, its tailoring… it suggests a level of biothaumaturgical knowledge we did not credit the local Sabbat with. Our Tremere believe its origins may not be… terrestrial. Or rather, not bound solely to the paradigms of this world.” His gaze was piercing. “Understanding its composition, its underlying principles of ‘reality violation,’ could provide significant insights into… dimensional instability. Into how things fall through, and perhaps, how a path might be traced back.”

The offer was not stated, but it permeated in the air, more potent than any promise of territory or title. A way back to Nirn.

Alicia inhaled sharply beside her, recognizing the monumental bait.

Natalia did not react with visible excitement. Her face remained the same impassive mask. But inside, the cold, perpetual engine of her will focused to a razor point. This was no longer just another mission for the local lord. This was a thread, however thin, leading out of the labyrinth.

“Careful planning,” she echoed his words. “Define it.”

“You will have the complete schematics of the terminal, guard rotations, security systems. David will be your tactical support for the digital aspects. You may select one other asset from the Elysium, someone whose skills complement utter silence and precision. You will infiltrate, eliminate the Sabbat presence without raising any alarm that leaves the terminal’s perimeter, secure the shipment, and extract it to a location we designate. There will be no fireworks. No witnesses. The shipment vanishes. The Sabbat are left with a mystery.”

He leaned back. “Succeed, and you will have our deepest gratitude. And our most focused scholarship applied to the mysteries you represent.”

Natalia held his gaze for a long moment, weighing the precarious, silent war against the glimmer of a way home. She gave a single, slow nod.

“Then we will plan,” she said. “And the shipment will disappear.”

---

The logic was inescapable. David was a necessity for the digital labyrinth of the port’s security. And for the physical component, for another set of eyes, another predator who understood the dance of the Kindred and the absolute need for silence… it had to be Alicia. She was the eldest in their immediate circle, her blood potent, her command of Disciplines refined over a century. While her preference was for the velvet glove, the gilded cage, she had not survived the Camarilla’s politics and the Sabbat’s periodic purges by being merely decorative.

When Natalia stated the selection in the privacy of Alicia’s sanctuary, Alicia’s reaction was immediate and sharp. She set down her wine glass with a definitive clink.

“Don’t think me fully helpless,” she said, her voice losing its usual melodic lilt, turning brittle and hard. “That wounded Garou was a force of nature in a breakdown. I am not a brawler, but I did not reach this position, maintain this Elysium, by simply whoring my way through eternity.” The rare, raw bitterness in the word ‘whoring’ surprised even David, who flinched. “I have my own… capabilities. When the shadows fail, and discretion is no longer an option.”

Natalia watched her, a slow, appreciative smile spreading across her face. She had seen glimpses of the steel beneath the silk—the ruthless pragmatism, the cunning that had ensnared and sponsored her. Now, she was seeing the edge of the blade itself.

“Good,” Natalia said, the word a quiet approval. “Channel that disdain. Save it for our proper enemies. The ones who would turn your beautiful, fragile world into a screaming ruin.” She leaned forward. “Your Celerity. How fast?”

“Fast enough to empty a clip into a heart before the first shell casing hits the ground,” Alicia replied, her eyes glinting. “Fast enough to make a mortal’s perception see a blur and dismiss it. And my Presence… it can cause more than desire. It can cause blind, gibbering terror. Or a loyalty so fierce it will make a man step in front of a bullet for a stranger.”

“Useful,” Natalia nodded, her mind already weaving their disparate skills into a tapestry of violence. “David will be our eyes and ears in the wire. You will be the swift, precise sting. And I will be the immovable object that removes obstacles.” She looked between them. “First, we stake out the terminal. We observe, we confirm the schematics. We look for the flaws the Prince’s spies could not see… and then we strike.”

---

After three nights of planning they found themselves perched in darkness again, but the environment was utterly different from the abandoned waterfront or the sterile server farm. The Port Authority freight terminal was a sprawling, concrete-and-steel organism, pulsing with muted industry even at this hour. Giant gantry cranes stood like sleeping dinosaurs against the starless sky. Stacked shipping containers formed canyons of rust-streaked color. The air reeked of salt, diesel, and the dank smell of harbor water.

Their vantage point was the roof of a disused customs office overlooking Berth 7. David had a high-powered monocular with digital feed linked to his tablet, recording everything. Alicia was a statue of black silk and sharper angles beside him, her senses extended. Natalia simply watched, her predator’s eyes missing nothing.

Berth 7 was active, but with a hushed, tense rhythm that felt off. Men in high-visibility vests moved containers, but their movements were too coordinated, too aware. They scanned the shadows with the focused paranoia of soldiers, not the bored vigilance of night-shift workers.

“There,” David whispered, pointing. “The office by the crane control. Heat signatures show six inside. Two standing guard outside. That’s the nerve center.”

Natalia followed his gesture. The prefab office had a single, reinforced door and narrow, wire-meshed windows. “The shipment?”

“Incoming,” David said, consulting a silent alert on his screen. “Tracked the manifest. A refrigerated container, designation CS-7. It’s on a truck, due in forty minutes. It will be backed directly into the sealed warehouse at the rear of the berth.” He zoomed in on the warehouse—a large, windowless structure with a roll-down steel door. “That’s the kill box. Once it’s inside, they’ll have it surrounded.”

Alicia’s voice was a cold murmur. “The guards on the perimeter. See how they move? In pairs, overlapping patrols. No blind spots longer than fifteen seconds. And they’re armed. Not stun batons. Submachine guns, under the vests.”

Natalia nodded, absorbing it all. The Prince’s schematics were accurate, but they couldn’t convey the feeling of the place—the practiced, military efficiency of the Sabbat pack playing dress-up. This was a prepared defensive position, more than a mere guard detail.

“The warehouse door is the only point of entry for the container,” she mused. “And our point of extraction. We cannot allow it to seal.” She looked at David. “The control for that door?”

“In the office. Hardwired. Probably a manual override at the door itself, but that would be in the open.”

“Then the office is a primary target,” Natalia said. “Silence it, and we control the door.”

“And bring the entire pack down on us the moment the silence is noticed,” Alicia countered.

“Not if the silence is… misinterpreted.” Natalia’s eyes gleamed. “David, can you mimic their voices? Send false all-clears?”

David chewed his lip. “Maybe. If I can get a sample of their traffic, isolate a frequency… it’s risky. A wrong cadence, a missed code-word, and they’ll know.”

“Then we acquire a sample,” Natalia said simply. She pointed to a pair of patrolling guards moving into the shadow of a container stack, momentarily out of direct line of sight from the others. “Those two. Quietly.”

Alicia followed her gaze. A slow, dangerous smile touched her own lips. The disdain she’d spoken of, the frustration of being underestimated, found a focus. “I can get one,” she said. “Before he makes a sound.”

Natalia met her eyes. “I will take the other. David, be ready to record.”

The stakeout was over. The planning was giving way to its first, critical test. In the oily darkness of the port, the hunt for a way home began with the silencing of two sentries.

---

The plan crystallized in Natalia’s mind with a brutal, elegant simplicity. These were not mortals to be dominated and released. They were sworn enemies, a direct threat. Leaving them alive, even unconscious, was an unacceptable risk. But their knowledge, their access, was an asset for the next few, crucial minutes.

David turned to Alicia, his voice a low, concrete-echoing whisper. “We need their comms. Their voices. Their codes. We can’t just knock them out.”

Alicia’s eyes narrowed. “Then we take them. But how do we ensure their cooperation? Domination is shaky under stress, and we don’t have time for subtlety.”

“We do not need their minds,” Natalia said, a dark, speculative light in her eyes. “We need their mouths to speak on command.” She remembered the Prince’s demand for a blood bond on her first night at the Court, the ultimate shackle of the Kindred. “Our blood. They will drink it.”

Alicia recoiled, a flicker of genuine horror on her face. “A forced blood bond? Natalia, that is… it’s a profound violation. It’s not just a leash; it’s a violation of the self. It’s a taboo for a reason!”

Natalia’s expression was one of cold pragmatism. “They are Sabbat. They live to violate. And we are at war. Your Toreador fascination with the novel… consider this a new canvas. I have no idea what my own blood would do to them, and I am deathly curious. Yours is a known quantity. Now, do you wish to complete this mission, or shall we return and tell the Prince his ‘scalpel’ was too squeamish?”

The challenge hung in the air. David watched, wide-eyed, from behind his tablet.

Alicia stared at her, the conflict plain. The artist’s revulsion at the crude, ugly method warred with the survivor’s understanding of its necessity, and yes, the dark, scholarly curiosity about its effects. Finally, her jaw tightened. She gave a sharp, reluctant nod. “Fine. But quickly. And you will deal with them… afterwards.”

“Naturally,” Natalia said.

They moved. As the paired Sabbat guards rounded the corner of the container stack, stepping into a pool of deeper shadow cast by a towering crane, Natalia and Alicia struck.

It was a symphony of synchronized predation. Alicia was a blur of black silk and lethal intent. She appeared in front of the lead guard as if teleported, her hand clamping over his mouth and nose, her other arm a vice around his chest, pinning his arms. She used her Celerity not to flee, but to overwhelm, her strength augmented by that burst of motion, crushing the breath from him before he could think to struggle.

Natalia was simultaneously behind the second guard. Her attack was not about speed, but absolute, irresistible force. One hand snaked around his head, covering his mouth. The other seized his jaw from below. With a terrible, wet crack of dislocating bone and tearing tendon, she wrenched his mouth open, holding it in a grotesque, gaping rictus. He gurgled, eyes bulging with agony and terror.

With a swift motion, she dragged her own wrist across the guard’s exposed, razor-sharp fang, slicing a deep line. Her vitae welled forth—not the dark, wine-rich blood of a Cainite, but something black, colder, shimmering with a faint, inner frost-light that seemed to swallow the dim glow of the harbor lights.

She pressed the weeping wound against the guard’s ruined mouth. “In my court, to share my blood was the highest honor—an induction to be among the elite. Let us see what it does to your kind.”

The guard choked, his body convulsing as her blood flooded into him. This was not the potent, generation-deep allure of Toreador vitae. This was something other—an invasive, glacial essence that carried the echoing silence of the Void and the crushing dominion of Molag Bal.

Alicia repeated the act on her own captive, slicing her other wrist and forcing the blood down her captive’s throat as he gagged and fought. In moments, both Sabbat warriors were slumped in their grasp, not unconscious, but entranced, their wills subsumed by the violent intimacy of the bond. Alicia’s captive looked at her with the pathetic, desperate devotion of an abused hound seeing its master for the first time.

Natalia’s captive however, wasn’t so lucky.

His body convulsed as if struck by lightning, every muscle seizing in a violent, arching spasm. A muffled, wet scream tore from behind Natalia’s palm, choked and bubbling. Where her blood met his—this thin, watered-down curse of Caine, this pallid imitation of vampirism—it did not bond. It rejected.

The guard’s veins, visible beneath his paling skin, began to darken and bulge, not with blood, but with a spreading, inky corruption. Frost crackled audibly from his lips, his nostrils, the corners of his eyes. His flesh rippled, patches of it blackening and withering as if flash-frozen and then necrotized in the same instant. His eyes, wide with unimaginable agony, filmed over with a milky, crystalline sheen—the horrified blindness of a system in total, violent revolt which somewhat reminded Natalia of the Moth Priest she once enthralled.

Alicia’s captive stared, his own bond-forged devotion forgotten in the face of this visceral, biological sacrilege. David recoiled, his stomach lurching at the grotesque spectacle. Even Alicia, who had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Week of Scarlet Snow, felt a cold, profound horror tighten in her chest. This was not Discipline nor any vampiric art she knew. This was a violation of kind—an alien essence treating a Cainite’s body like a paltry, unworthy vessel, and expressing its contempt in a display of grisly, transformative violence.

Natalia watched, her grip unyielding, her head tilted in mild, clinical curiosity. There was no fear in her eyes—only a faint, distant amusement, and beneath it, a flicker of cold disappointment. In Skyrim, a Daughter of Coldharbour’s blood was a gift, a transformative elixir that could elevate a lesser vampire into a true Vampire Lord. Here, it was a poison. A curse that cursed back.

“Fascinating,” she murmured, almost to herself, as the guard’s convulsions began to slow, his body slumping into a twitching, ruined heap. His skin was now mottled with frostbite and necrotic patches, his breath coming in ragged, frozen gasps.

He shuddered once, a final, feeble tremor, before his body stilled—then dissolved into a pile of fine, grey ash. Final Death. Her wrist had already healed, leaving only a faint silver scar that faded as they watched.

“It would seem,” Natalia said, her voice dry and untouched by the horror before them, “that my Sire’s gifts are… poorly received by your lineage.” 

Natalia turned her attention to Alicia’s guard, who still knelt slack-jawed, his gaze fixed on his unwilling Sire. “One question resolved,” she remarked, her tone cool and procedural. “Now the other. David, acquire the codes.”

Working with a speed born of horror-fueled focus, David isolated the comm frequency. With Alicia issuing gentle, irresistible commands, the enthralled guard provided call signs, clearance codes, and the pattern for routine check-ins. David programmed a sequence into his equipment. For the next twenty minutes, the Sabbat nerve center would receive periodic, digitally-perfected “all-clears” from this sentry.

The false safety was established.

Now for the loose end.

Natalia looked at the guard, kneeling in the filth, his adoration for Alicia a pathetic mockery of personhood. “There is no way we are letting enthralled Sabbat walk away from this,” she stated, the finality absolute.

Alicia, pale and shaken by the act of forced bonding and the grisly death she witnessed, nodded mutely. The taboo had been broken. The deed was done. The next step was… cleanup.

The man looked up at her, his adoration for Alicia making him blind to the danger in Natalia’s eyes.

“Your Toreador fascination is fulfilled,” Natalia said to Alicia, though her eyes never left the guard. “Now, witness the culmination of mine.”

She moved. Not to kill him, but to kneel before him. Her hands came up, cradling his face with an almost tender cruelty. He blinked, confused.

“I have always wondered,” Natalia murmured, her voice a hypnotic whisper, “what it would be like to savor the vitae of a Kindred.”

The words penetrated the bond-induced haze. Diablerie. The ultimate sin. The Amaranth. A terror older than the Beast awoke in his eyes. He tried to pull back, a weak mewling sound escaping his ruined mouth.

“Shhh,” Natalia soothed, her grip tightening. “It will be an education.”

He was weeping openly now, fat, bloody tears tracing through the grime on his face. The bond to Alicia warred with the animal terror of annihilation. He looked past Natalia, directly at Alicia, his Sire-by-violation, and let out a choked sob.

“Please… Sire… Mother… help me… don’t let her…” he begged, the words a child’s plea for salvation.

Alicia felt the plea like a physical blow. The bond, however forced, created a twisted connection. His terror was hers to feel. She took an involuntary step back, her face a mask of conflicting horror.

Natalia watched the exchange, a cruel smile touching her lips. “Good,” she purred. “Let me taste your fear. It is… spicier than your blood.”

She descended on the guard. He didn’t fight. He just kept staring at Alicia, weeping, as Natalia’s fangs found his neck and the dreadful, silent suction began.

This was not the draining of a mortal. There was no ecstasy from the release of life. This was a profound, soul-deep siphoning. The guard’s body arched violently, a silent scream locked in his throat. His essence, his memories, his curse—the totality of his Cainite existence—was being violently drawn out, not just as blood, but as self. His form began to desiccate with terrifying speed, skin tightening over bone, collapsing inward.

His final moments were a whimper, a whisper of “mother…” before he too, crumbled into ash. His essence, his stolen devotion, consumed.

Alicia watched, frozen, her own dark fascination warring with primal, societal terror. This was the taboo of taboos. To consume another’s soul. To add their power and their torment to your own. It was monstrous. It was, in a terrible, aesthetic sense, the most profound violation of form imaginable. And she could not look away.

Silence, heavy and polluted, returned to the shadow of the containers. Two small piles of ash were the only evidence the men had ever existed.

Natalia rose, a faint, cold steam seeming to emanate from her pores for a second. She licked a single, black droplet from her lip, her crimson eyes glowing with a new, unsettling depth. Her eyes began to close as she processed the influx—the jumble of Sabbat rituals, memories of violence, the taste of a different curse. She felt… denser. Sharper. There was no euphoria, only a cold, satisfying consolidation of power.

She opened her eyes and looked at Alicia, who stood white-faced, trembling slightly. David was simply staring, his tablet forgotten in his hands.

“Now,” Natalia said, her voice unchanged, yet somehow carrying more weight, an echo of a stolen voice in its timbre. “The loose ends are dealt with. The operation continues.”

She had just committed the gravest sin in Kindred society with the casual efficiency of swatting a fly. The reminder was seared into both their souls: beneath the learned decorum, the strategic alliances, the flashes of unexpected warmth, Natalia of Volkihar was, and would always be, among the most dangerous creatures of the night. She was the most dangerous vampire because she operated utterly outside their cage of fear and taboo, not due to her strength or her sun-immunity. The path to Nirn was being paved with diablerie and ash.

Alicia’s mind was a storm. The cold, clean lines of her usual thoughts—aesthetics, politics, survival—were shattered. In their place swirled the visceral horror of the forced bonds, the echoing, child-like pleas of the guard, and the profound, societal transgression of the Amaranth she had just witnessed. This was a desecration of the very fabric of what it meant to be Kindred, a violence that went beyond bloodshed. The ash seemed to cling to the air, to her silk clothes, to the inside of her skull.

They moved from the shadow of the containers toward the sealed warehouse, a silent, tense procession. Natalia led, a dark star of absolute purpose. David followed, his focus brittle, clinging to the technical tasks as a lifeline. Alicia brought up the rear, her steps automatic, her senses screaming.

You truly are a monster.

The thought wasn't directed, just a silent, screaming conclusion in the echo chamber of her mind.

As if the words had been shouted, Natalia’s voice resonates through the mental noise, low and conversational, without turning her head.

“I can see his memories. Swimming in the dark behind my eyes. A failed seminary student from Naples who became a petty thief in Detroit.” Her tone was analytical, almost bored. “His fear is the brightest thing. A sharp, cold brand. And his hatred… it is a constant, impotent cursing. A litany against the ‘pale witch.’ He is still weeping in there.”

She chuckled, a soft, dry sound that was more frightening than any snarl.

Alicia stumbled on a loose piece of gravel. The casualness of it was abominable. “And that doesn’t… bother you at all?”

Natalia did glance back then, just a flicker of her crimson gaze. “My mind was already dominated, shaped, and claimed by another, long before this gnat was born. His shouting and cursing are in an empty room. A phantom yelling at an ice wall.” She turned forward again. “He has a choice. He can rage himself into oblivion now, or he can persist as a faint, angry ghost in a corner of my consciousness. It matters not. He is already dead. I have merely… relocated the furniture.”

The philosophy was as chilling as the act. It reduced the ultimate sin to a matter of interior decoration.

Alicia found her voice, though it was thin. “You truly are a monster.”

This time, Natalia stopped. She turned fully, her face illuminated by the sickly yellow glow of a distant security lamp. The expression wasn't anger or regret. It was one of profound, impatient bemusement.

“And water is wet,” she stated, the archaic idiom sounding like a decree. “The sky is up. Fire burns. I am a monster.” She took a step closer, and the aura of stolen power, of deepened cold, pressed against Alicia. “Have I amused you with this inane philosophical chatter, Toreador? Has it satisfied your artistic need to categorize the horror? Or can we now fully dedicate ourselves to the task at hand?”

The question was a slap. It stripped away the pretense of moral reckoning. This wasn't a gallery opening to be critiqued. It was a war. They were in the middle of a battlefield, and she was asking if Alicia was done having an existential crisis.

The shock of it acted like a bucket of ice water. The swirling terror in Alicia’s mind was compressed, forced into a locked box labeled ‘For Later.’ The artist was shoved aside, replaced by the survivor—the elder who had held her ground for over a century. Her spine straightened. The tremor in her hands stilled.

“You’re right,” Alicia said, her voice regaining its cool, clipped edge. “The task.” She looked past Natalia toward the looming warehouse. “The door. David’s false signals won’t hold forever. Let’s move.”

A ghost of an approving smile touched Natalia’s lips. She gave a single nod. “Finally.”

The moment of weakness, of horrified reflection, was over. The monster had acknowledged its nature, and in doing so, had forced her ally to do the same. There would be no more chatter.

The path ahead was lit only by the cold logic of the mission and the faint, screaming echoes of the consumed soul.

Chapter 15: Judgment

The infiltration, after the brutal prelude, was unnervingly smooth. David’s false signals held. The sentries they bypassed were complacent, trusting the digital lies in their ears. They slipped through the labyrinth of containers and service tunnels like ghosts, arriving at the heavy, climate-sealed door of Warehouse 7B.

According to the schematics and the stolen memories, this was the inner sanctum, where the ‘Crimson Shroud’ was being prepared for distribution.

David worked his magic on the electronic lock. A series of green LEDs flickered to life, and the heavy roll-down steel door groaned, then began to rise with a metallic rattle. Natalia slipped beneath it before it had fully cleared her height, Alicia a shadow at her shoulder, David remaining outside as their overwatch.

The space within was a cathedral of quiet menace.

The vast space was dominated by the refrigerated shipping container, its humming unit the only sound. But arrayed before it, bathed in the stark white light of industrial lamps, was a welcoming committee. A horde of Sabbat, armed and armored, formed a loose semi-circle. And in the center, standing before the container as if it were his throne, was a man.

He was older than the grunts, his aura a palpable wall of controlled, vicious power. Fine clothing, now stained and practical, showed beneath a tactical vest. His face was sharp, intelligent, his eyes gleaming with the cold, fanatical fire of true belief. Alicia’s senses screamed a warning.

This was no mere ductus. The potency radiating from him… Eighth generation, perhaps seventh. A true elder of the Sword of Caine, at least a century or two ahead of her own blood.

He smiled as they entered, a predator amused by mice walking into his den.

“The rumors are true, then,” he said, his voice a cultured baritone that echoed in the metal space.

“A dead Garou, dragged like a trophy to the Camarilla’s puppet court. And they say a single Kindred felled it. I must admit, I was skeptical. Your worth is leagues beyond what that traitor Caldwell deserves.”

Natalia stepped fully into the light, her posture relaxed, her head tilted. “My reputation precedes me,” she said, her English clear and laced with mocking amusement. She offered a shallow, theatrical curtsy. “A pleasure.”

The Sabbat elder’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “The pleasure is mine. I am Valerius. And you have walked into a trap laid just for you.”

“Unfortunately,” Natalia sighed, as if discussing a minor scheduling conflict, “I cannot afford you the same honor of a brief bout that I gave to Karthak. Circumstances, you understand. Time is short.” She spread her arms wide, an open invitation. “Come. I will let you unleash your best first blow against my undefended self. A courtesy.”

The sheer, towering arrogance of the gesture stunned even his hardened pack. Valerius’s composure cracked for a second, replaced by incandescent fury. No one, no one, dismissed him so utterly.

“Arrogant bitch!” he snarled. Then he moved.

It wasn't Celerity at all. Alicia recognized the feral power of a Gangrel, but this was something else entirely—a rare, specialized expression of Protean she had only heard whispers of. His body coiled like a moray eel in its den, then unleashed with terrifying hydraulic force. This was movement born of the deep, adapted for explosive, short-range lunges. He launched himself across the warehouse floor like a harpoon fired from the dark. Natalia, true to her word, didn't raise a defense.

He hit her with his full, augmented mass—a living battering ram that wrapped around her torso. No claws, no fangs, just raw, driven weight. The impact was thunderous, a concussive whump that would have shattered concrete. He didn't try to hold her or subdue her; he used his grip only as an anchor, a lever to transfer every ounce of momentum into her body. He drove her backward, lifting her from her feet, and hurled them both toward the warehouse's far wall.

Not just any wall. Reinforced steel.

With a final, roared exertion of animalistic power, Valerius drove them through it.

The metal shrieked, buckled, and tore. They erupted from the warehouse in a shower of sparks and twisted steel, flying through the open air beyond the berth. There was no ground below them. Only the inky, freezing blackness of the deep-water harbor channel.

Splash.

They hit the water and vanished beneath the surface, the chaotic froth of their entry swallowed by the dark, silent deep.

Alicia stood frozen with her back against the shattered wall, the cold sea wind whipping her hair. The shock was absolute. She had seen Natalia shrug off blows, dominate Garou, consume souls.

But this… this was different. The water was a nullifier. It robbed speed, distorted senses, turned strength into a clumsy liability.

And Valerius had planned this. He’d tackled her toward the sea. He was trained for this. He had the home-field advantage in a way the Garou never had.

Even the strongest beast on land is mere food for sharks in the water.

The thought was a cold dagger in her gut.

A low, collective growl brought her back. She turned slowly. Countless pairs of Sabbat eyes, gleaming with malice and triumph, were now fixed solely on her. Valerius had removed the primary threat with brutal, brilliant efficiency. Now it was just her. And David, somewhere in the shadows behind her, useless in a straight fight.

The lead Sabbat, a hulking brute with a chain-wrapped fist, cracked his neck. “The pretty Toreador is all alone. Think she’s as tough as her pet monster?”

Alicia felt the old fears rise—the fear of messy violence, the massacre that killed her superiors, the fear of losing control, of the Beast. But beneath it, hotter and sharper, rose the sting of Natalia’s last words to her. Have I amused you… or can we dedicate ourselves to the task at hand?

The monster was gone, testing her mettle in the abyss below. The task remained. The shipment. Their survival. Her pride.

She let the fear burn away in the furnace of that lingering insult. A slow, dangerous smile, entirely devoid of warmth, spread across Alicia’s face. It was an expression the neonates in her Elysium never saw, one reserved for rivals and mortal prey who had overstayed their welcome.

“Alone?” she repeated, her voice a silken purr that carried over the wind. She let a fraction of her Presence bleed out, sharp and cold. The Discipline she normally used to enthrall and seduce now sent shivers of dread—a shadow of imminent, elegant violence.  “You poor, blunt instruments. You have no idea what ‘alone’ with me really means.”

Her hands went to her hips, where twin custom pistols rested in quick-draw holsters beneath her elegant silks—compact, matte-black, and loaded with silver-tipped rounds. She had not come to a warzone unarmed.

Celerity thrummed in her veins, a promise of blinding speed. The time for artistry was over. Now, she would paint the warehouse walls with Sabbat blood, and prove, to herself and to the monster in the deep, that she was far from helpless.

“Lorenzo. Magdalena,” she whispered, barely audible. “This is for you.”

The tension in the air snapped.

The lead Sabbat lunged, chain swinging. Alicia moved like a blur. One moment she was standing; the next, both pistols were leveled, her form a study in lethal geometry. She didn’t fire once. She fired in controlled, overlapping bursts, Celerity turning the trigger pull into a staccato rhythm faster than thought.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—

Silver flashed in the stark light. The first attacker’s chest erupted in three neat, smoking holes before his chain completed its arc. The second, already rushing in from the side, took two rounds to the face, his skull fragmenting in a spray of dark vitae and bone. A third, farther back, was lifting a submachine gun when a round pierced his throat and another his heart, dropping him before his finger found the trigger.

The sound of the gunshots arrived late—a single rolling echo chasing the carnage her speed had already wrought. The first shell casing finally hit the concrete with a faint ting, just as the second Sabbat’s body crumpled.

Alicia was already shifting, turning, her pistols tracking new targets. Her movements were fluid, economical—the precise, rehearsed lethality of a predator who had long ago mastered the dance of lead and death. She didn’t waste motion. She didn’t waste bullets. Each shot was a punctuation mark in a sentence of utter, violent refusal.

They had thought her a delicate thing, a courtier to be overpowered. They learned, in the space between heartbeats, that she was a painter whose medium was ballistic silver and whose canvas was their flesh.

---

The world became a roaring, silent chaos of pressure and cold. Natalia’s senses, so keen in air, were muffled, distorted. The harbor water was a murky soup of silt and industrial runoff, reducing visibility to a few feet. The crushing weight of the deep squeezed her from all sides, a foreign, hostile element.

Valerius was a phantom of violence, a creature born of it. His very form had changed, shifted in a way that spoke of a deep, unnatural kinship with the sea. His limbs seemed longer, streamlined, and his hands and feet were broad and webbed, propelling him through the water with terrifying, eel-like grace. He didn't rely on brute strength alone; he moved with the water’s own currents, an extension of the dark itself.

He didn't try to grapple or bite. He harried. A powerful kick from his transformed legs, driven by the water's own resistance, hammered into her ribs, driving the scant air from her lungs in a stream of silver bubbles. A swipe of claws—still sharp, still deadly—opened a line across her shoulder. He circled, always just out of reach of her own powerful but water-slowed strikes, a predator in his true element.

Think! The command screamed in her mind, a novelty after so long of overwhelming superiority. She was the Lord of Volkihar, a master of ice and terror… on land. Here, her strength was bogged, her speed a memory. Valerius’s tactics were clear: wear her down, disorient her, then drag her deeper into the lightless, crushing blackness where even her immortal body would be pinned, trapped for nights or weeks until the mission was dust and the Prince’s war was lost.

Her mind raced through her arsenal. The Vampire Lord form? In this confined, crushing space, it would be a death sentence—a large, trapped target. Summon a Gargoyle? The conjuration required a connection to Aetherius, a thread she could barely feel in this world, let alone underwater. Her frost magic? Even if she could unleash them, to freeze the water around her would be to encase herself in a tomb.

She was truly, utterly on the back foot for the first time in centuries. The raw, unfamiliar taste of peril was metallic on her tongue.

Valerius darted in again, a blurred shape of adapted muscle and malice. His claws raked across her ribs in a searing line of fire. She spun, her counterstrike sluggish and wide, missing him by inches as he melted back into the gloom with a flick of his webbed feet. He was toying with her now, wearing her down like the tide eroding stone. Each pass brought him closer, his presence a growing, alien weight in the water, his laughter bubbling up in mocking streams of silver.

She could feel more than just his movements—a low, thrumming pressure in the water itself, a silent command that seemed to vibrate in the murk. He wasn’t just a swimmer; he belonged here. The harbor was his domain, and she was an intruder.

---

Above, in the shattered warehouse, Alicia danced a deadly, desperate ballet of bullets.

The Sabbat pack, emboldened by her isolation, swarmed. They were weak, their blood thin, their techniques crude. But they were many, and they fought with the feral, coordinated frenzy of their sect. Open warfare was antithetical to her nature—but survival was not.

A shovelhead with the blunt aggression of a Brujah lunged, a chain swinging. Alicia didn't blur aside. She drew and fired in the same motion. The gunshot was a sharp, clear punctuation in the chaos. The round took him in the center of the forehead, and he fell before his chain could finish its swing.

But another was already there—a Gangrel, fast and feral, his claws already extended. A meaty fist shot toward her jaw. She twisted with Celerity, turning what would have been a bone-shattering blow into a glancing hit, but the force still staggered her.

“Look at her move! Like a scared little rabbit!” a Tzimisce-neonate hissed from the shadows, his flesh already twitching with the urge to reshape.

“Bet she’s even prettier when she’s screaming!” another jeered, a Malkavian whose eyes are bright with madness—raking over her torn silks.

The humiliating, degrading remarks were like barbs. They sought to wound her pride, to trigger the rage that would make her reckless. Her clothes were shredded, her hair a wild tangle. She was a painting of elegance being viciously defaced.

But the rage that rose was cold, focused. It wasn’t the Beast. It was something older, sharper. It was the memory of Natalia’s dismissive bemusement. Have I amused you?

No, she thought, pivoting as a Lasombra’s shadow-tendril lashed toward her ankle. She put two silver rounds into the darkness where his heart should be, and the tendril dissolved with a hiss. You have not.

She fought not just to survive, and not just to prove a point to Natalia. She fought for the ghosts of her clan. For the elders who had been broken, burned, and buried by creatures just like these.

She used her Celerity in short, surgical bursts—a flicker to the left to put a round through a Pander’s knee, a blur to the right as she emptied the rest of the clip into a charging pack of shovelheads. The gun clicked empty. She didn’t pause. She dropped the pistol, drew its twin, and kept moving.

Her Presence, when she could focus it, slammed into individuals as sheer, crippling awe—a momentary freeze as they perceived a vengeful angel of terrible beauty, a final witness to their own profane end.

But for every one she dropped, two more pressed in. A clawed hand—Gangrel again—tore through the back of her dress, scoring deep lines in her flesh. She hissed, spinning, and raked her own nails across the attacker’s eyes before putting a bullet through his temple. He fell back, howling, then still.

She was holding. Barely. But she was being worn down, cornered against the humming refrigeration unit of the cursed container. The thought of failing, of being overwhelmed by these animals after all her centuries of careful, beautiful survival—after surviving the storm that killed her betters—was a poison more bitter than any tainted vitae.

It was the fear of proving the whispers right: that she was only Primogen because she was the last one left standing. That her survival was a fluke, not a testament.

And then, the gun clicked empty again.

---

Below, Natalia’s mind, forced into a corner, flickered through her memories in the haze of frustration—something from Ysgramor’s Tomb, a Shout she dismissed as a frivolity for bards and beast-tamers. Useless in a world of swords and spells.

But this wasn't Skyrim. And the sea wasn't a forest stream.

She stopped struggling. Let her body go limp, her head loll back, limbs drifting like seaweed in the current. A pale, broken doll suspended in the dark. She closed her eyes, shutting out the chaos, turning her focus inward to a single, razor-sharp point. A will made manifest, intent woven into sound. It demanded clarity, not desperation.

Valerius paused, the silt cloud settling around him. He saw her floating, seemingly spent, and a triumphant surge of bubbles escaped his fanged maw. He could already feel the thrum of his own power in the water—the low, resonant call of Animalism that had always made the predators of this harbor shy away or obey. This was his domain. He powered forward, claws extended, ready to drag her into the lightless depths for good.

Natalia's eyes snapped open.

Her mouth parted.

“RAAN MIR TAH!”

The Shout tore from her throat as a resonant pulse that rippled through the water like a shockwave. To mortal ears, it might have been mistaken for a distant explosion or the groan of shifting metal—but to the primal rhythms of the sea, it was a thunderous decree. A summons etched in blood and instinct, a command that bypassed kinship and spoke directly to the ancient hunger beneath the waves.

For a heartbeat, nothing. Valerius recoiled instinctively, the psychic vibration rattling his bones. He tried to push back with his own will, to reassert his Animalism, to calm what was coming—but the water was already shifting. The vibration hummed through the pylons, a subtle change in pressure that made the silt dance anew. Valerius turned his head, his glowing eyes widening in dawning, horrific comprehension.

Shapes emerged from the gloom—sleek, torpedo forms of muscle and fin, black eyes like voids, jaws lined with rows of serrated death. One. Then three. A pack of great whites, ancient hunters of the deep, drawn by the Shout’s imperative as if it were the scent of chum in the current.

He could feel them—as extensions of a will older and colder than his own. His own command slid off them like water off scales. They did not recognize him as master. They recognized only the clarion call.

Impossible.

The thought barely formed before they struck. The lead shark, a behemoth over fifteen feet long, slammed into Valerius like a battering ram, its maw closing over his right arm at the shoulder. A savage shake, and the limb was torn free in a cloud of inky vitae. Another shark latched onto his left leg, ripping it away with mechanical efficiency. A third, even larger, lunged for his torso, its teeth punching through armor-like skin and crunching bone.

Valerius's scream was a torrent of bubbles and shredded flesh, his body convulsing in the frenzy. The sharks were relentless, driven by an allegiance older than reason. They tore him apart piece by piece, a whirlwind of fins and blood in the murky depths.

Natalia watched, her body drifting, the cold current soothing her wounds like a balm. The Shout had worked—as a call to the wild, turning the sea itself into her ally. In a world of hidden predators and fragile masks, she had summoned something truly primal, uncaring of politics or curses.

As the feeding frenzy slowed, Valerius's remains floated in a haze of gore—a mangled torso, one leg twitching weakly, his face a mask of shock and agony. She kicked forward, her hand closing around the collar of his tactical vest. With powerful strokes, she began her ascent, dragging the broken Sabbat elder behind her like a fisherman hauling in a gutted catch.

She breached the surface with a gasp, the night air a shock after the suffocating depths. Hauling herself onto the shattered edge of the loading dock, she pulled Valerius's ruined form up beside her. Water and vitae pooled around them, dripping into the harbor below. She didn't pause to catch her breath. Her body coiling like a spring, she stood, gripped the vest tighter, and began walking, the wet, scraping thump of his body against the concrete echoing through the warehouse.

She stepped through the shattered wall into the light.

---

The scene before her was a tableau of degradation. Alicia was on her knees, held by two leering shovelheads. Her remaining clothes were in shreds, revealing pale skin marred by deep scratches and bruises that were already beginning to heal with sluggish Kindred resilience. A third Sabbat, a sneering brute with a crude knife, was poised behind her, the blade hovering near the base of her skull—a promise of Final Death after whatever other humiliations they had planned. The others circled, a pack of hyenas smelling blood, hurling crude, sexual taunts that hung in the air like a foul stench.

Alicia’s head was bowed in a last, desperate concentration, her will a frayed rope holding back the Beast and the shame.

Then, footsteps.

She didn’t roar. She didn’t charge. She simply walked forward, each step a measured, heavy click of wet boots on concrete. The air in the warehouse seemed to thicken, to grow colder.

The scene inside froze. The Sabbat holding Alicia, the one with the knife at her neck, the jeering circle—all turned as one. Their taunts died, strangled in their throats.

They saw Natalia, water streaming from her like a vengeful spirit risen from the deep. And they saw what she dragged: their ductus, the master of the depths, the peerless Valerius, reduced to a screaming, limbless thing trailing viscera and terror.

Natalia walked to the center of the space, directly in front of the semicircle. With a final, contemptuous heave, she dumped Valerius's remains on the concrete before them. He gasped, a wet, sucking sound, his single remaining eye rolling wildly, fixing on his pack with a mute plea.

All attention was on her. On the impossible proof of her victory.

She looked down at Valerius. Then up at his horrified children.

“The ocean,” she stated, her voice calm, clear, and dripping with mock sympathy, “was supposed to be his killing ground.”

She raised her boot, clad in its heavy, waterlogged leather. She held it for a moment over Valerius’s throat, letting them all see. Then she brought it down.

Not a stamp. Not a crush.

She drove her heel into his throat like a stiletto, a single, focused point of annihilation. There was a wet, definitive snap—the sound of a spine severing clean within its column. Valerius’s single eye glazed over.

Final Death.

Absolute silence filled the warehouse. Then, a clatter—weapons dropping from nerveless fingers. The shovelhead’s knife hit the concrete with a sharp ring. The two holding Alicia released her as if burned. She slumped forward, then scrambled back, her wide eyes fixed on Natalia as she withdrew behind the vengeful Volkihar.

The Sabbat pack was broken. The execution itself was one thing—but the horror of it, the visceral finality, had shattered them. Their god of the deep had been shredded by sharks and finished with a single, precise strike.

Natalia turned her gaze upon them. Twelve faces, pale with terror.

Perfect.

She inhaled, the air tasting of blood, salt, and fear.

“GOL HAH!”

The two Words of Bend Will lashed out, as a wide, dominating wave. It washed over the shovelheads, a psychic tsunami that found no resistance in their shattered wills. Their terror was the fertile ground; her will was the seed.

“Line up.”

Their bodies jerked, moving against their will, shuffling into a ragged line before her, like soldiers on parade. Their faces were contorted, muscles twitching in rebellion.

“Rejoice.“

Grinning rictus smiles stretched across their faces, tears of horror streaming from their eyes. A few began to giggle, a high, hysterical sound.

“Celebrate.“

They started to jump up and down with clumsy, jerky enthusiasm, clapping their hands. It was a macabre puppet show, their primal minds screaming against the directives imposed upon them, but utterly powerless to resist the monolithic weight of her dominated will.

“As I devour you,” Natalia said, her voice a soft, melodic promise that cut through their forced merriment. “One by one.”

Alicia, from her place against the container, watched in frozen, appalled fascination.

Is she planning to…? The thought couldn’t fully form. It was too monstrous.

Like children at a festival, they began clapping their hands in erratic bursts of joy. But beneath the compelled merriment, their voices cracked open with desperate, vocalized pleas, the words spilling out in a nightmarish dissonance that clawed at the air.

“Please, no—Yay, this is fun!”

“Have mercy, oh God—Woo-hoo, yeah!”

“Don’t do this, I beg you—Clap clap Let’s go!”

Natalia stepped up to the first in line, a young man whose forced grin was a mask of utter despair. She placed a cold hand on his cheek. “You first.”

She leaned in and bit.

This was nothing like Valerius’s clean, severed end.

This was slow. Deliberate. A gourmet’s savoring.

She drank his blood, his essence, his meager, pathetic spark of the Curse of Caine, while he stood there, forced to shiver with “excitement,” a whimpering, ecstatic moan torn from his throat by her command. His body desiccated, crumbling to ash that dusted her fingers and the floor.

She moved to the next. A woman who was weeping bloody tears even as she hopped from foot to foot. Another bite. Another slow, agonizing drain. Another pile of ash.

One by one.

The warehouse fell silent save for the soft, wet sounds of feeding, the crumble of ash, and the grotesque, happy little squeals and claps of the waiting victims. The smell of blood and voided oblivion filled the air.

Alicia watched, her own injuries forgotten. This had ceased to be combat. It had become an execution—a sacrament of hatred. The Prince’s justice was the Blood Hunt or the sun; this was a darker liturgy.

This… this was something from an older, crueler mythology. It was damnation served with a smile, oblivion delivered as a gift.

Their leader had humiliated Natalia, made her feel vulnerable for the first time in ages. And so his children, his pack, would not just die. They would celebrate their own unmaking. They would stand in awe and ecstasy as she erased them from existence.

No Prince of the Camarilla, no Archbishop of the Sabbat, would ever conceive of a punishment this terrible, this intimately profane. It was an act of pure, tranquil fury, a volcano expressing its rage by slowly, methodically turning a landscape to glass.

Natalia continued down the line, a pale goddess of annihilation presiding over the happiest massacre in history.

The last of the tranquil fury would only be spent when the last Sabbat was a memory, and the warehouse floor was a path of grey ash leading only to her, like the ghosts of the screams that never came.

Silence, thick and absolute, reclaimed the warehouse. She took a slow, deep breath—a gesture of completion.

A low, contemplative laugh escaped her. It was a sound of dark, private amusement.

“Oh, Alicia.”

Natalia’s voice was a low murmur, almost conversational, as she turned her head toward where the Toreador still huddled. A faint, distant smile touched her lips, but her eyes were focused somewhere else—somewhere inside.

“You should hear it,” she said, tapping a temple with one bloodless finger. “The… noise. That one sentry isn’t lonely anymore. He has company. A whole chorus.”

She let out a soft, airless chuckle.

“All that begging. All those tears.” Her gaze sharpened, snapping back to the present. “Where was all that bravado when they had you cornered? Hmm?”

She shook her head, the gesture almost pitying.

“Weaklings.”

She walked toward Alicia, her steps leaving damp prints on the concrete. Water still sheeted from her hair and clothes, and a dusting of ash clung to her boots. She stopped before the huddled Toreador, a silhouette of soaked leather and pallid skin against the sterile lights.

The cruel amusement was gone from her eyes. What remained was a stark, assessing clarity.

“You,” Natalia said, her voice stripped of all theatrics. It was low, matter-of-fact.

“You stood. Outnumbered. Degraded.” Her gaze tracked over the torn silk, the scratches already knitting closed. “You did not break. You did not run. You fought in a form that was not your own.”

A pause, heavy and still.

“You have my respect.”

Respect.

From the creature who had just diablerized twelve souls in a row, forcing them to queue for their own annihilation with smiles plastered on their faces.

Respect from a being who now carried a cacophony of stolen, screaming consciousnesses in her mind, a gallery of the eternally damned who would either fade to nothing or be forced to bear witness to every atrocity she committed from now until the end of time.

Alicia looked up at her, the horror in her eyes layered—the physical shock overlaid with something deeper, colder: the soul-chilling weight of that ‘respect.’

Natalia extended a hand—a gesture of pragmatic alliance, not aid. “The mission is not concluded. The shipment remains. Let us finish this.”

Alicia stared at the offered hand. It was pale, elegant, and devoid of traces of her soul genocide. It was the hand of the monster whose respect she had somehow, terrifyingly, earned.

After a heartbeat of paralysis, the survivor in her, who had just been to the brink and back, asserted itself. She reached out, her own hand trembling only slightly, and took it. It’s as if she can hear faint screams from that touch.

Natalia pulled her to her feet with effortless strength. The contact was cold.

“David,” Natalia called, her voice echoing in the silent space.

David emerged from his hiding spot near the shattered wall, his face a mask of shell-shocked terror. He had seen it all.

“The container,” Natalia said, nodding toward the humming, refrigerated unit. “Open it. Secure the contents. We are leaving.”

As David scrambled to obey, tools in hand, Alicia stood beside Natalia, her body aching, her mind reeling. She had proven she wasn’t helpless.

The cost of that proof was now etched in ash on the floor and in the unfathomable depths of the monster’s gaze. The mission would be completed. But nothing, for either of them, would ever be the same.

---

The return to the opera house felt like a march of ghosts. The air, usually thick with silent intrigue, was now charged with a different kind of dread—a raw, metaphysical horror that no amount of political calculation could mask.

David walked beside Alicia, his presence in the Court—unprecedented since his Embrace—solely due to the need for his technical report. But he moved like a man sleepwalking through a nightmare. Alicia followed with a stiff, wounded grace, her physical injuries hidden beneath fresh clothes and artful makeup, but the shadows in her eyes were new, and deep.

The Court was packed. Word, or rather, the psychic stench of what had happened at the port, had seeped through the city’s Kindred consciousness. They weren’t here for a report; they were here to witness the aftermath of a cataclysm.

The Prince sat in his chair, a statue of aged ice. He listened as David, in a flat, detached voice, outlined the digital infiltration, the confirmation of the ‘Crimson Shroud,’ its location secured. He nodded, a minimal gesture. His gaze shifted to Alicia.

“Your valor is commendable, Alicia,” he said, his voice devoid of its usual dry warmth. It was a statement of record. She had done what was required. Nothing more.

Then, he looked at Natalia. The temperature in the room seemed to drop another ten degrees. All whispers died.

“My scouts,” the Prince began, each word weighed like a stone, “have reported from the warehouse. They speak of… mass diablerie. Thirteen souls, extinguished in one location, in one night.” He leaned forward slightly, his Auspex-laden gaze scouring her. “And yet, here you stand. No red tinge mars your aura. No tell-tale beacon of stolen souls screams to the heavens. Thirteen Amaranths in a single night would mark you as a walking obscenity, a lighthouse of damnation visible to every sensitive being in the country.” He paused. “Is this true?”

Natalia met his gaze, unblinking. “Yes.”

A collective, silent shudder passed through the assembly.

“The Beast,” she continued, her voice calm, instructive, as if explaining a simple fact of nature to children. “You all fear it, coddle it, struggle with its hunger. I have no such passenger. My will is my own. My hunger is my tool. Their souls are not fuel for a frenzy; they are… souvenirs. Occupants.”

She offered a faint, chilling smile. “Would you like to see a parlor trick?”

Before anyone could react, she closed her eyes.

When they opened, they were different. The regal, imperious light was gone. In its place was a feral, spitting hatred. Her body language coiled, her lips peeled back in a snarl that was not her own. A voice, rough and male, ripped from her throat: “You fucking crazy bitch! I’ll tear your heart out! I’ll find your grave and—”

The shift was instantaneous. The snarl vanished. Her posture crumpled, her face dissolving into the mask of a weeping young woman. A high, pathetic sob echoed. “Please… no more… I have a daughter… please, just let me go…”

Another snap. A new posture—arrogant, sneering. “Camarilla pig. Your blood is weak. My Sire will flay you alive for this!”

Another. A blank, catatonic stare, a single tear of blood tracing a path down her cheek.

Then, it ended. Natalia’s own demeanor settled back into place, smooth as water. She looked at the Prince, her head tilted. “What do you think?”

The sheer, unadulterated terror that filled the opera house was a living thing. It had a taste—cold copper and dust. It had a sound—the complete, vacuum-like absence of breath. Elders who had clamored for Blood Hunts, Primogen who had schemed toward them, the Tremere Regent who trafficked with things that gnawed at the edges of reality... all of them stared with the wide, uncomprehending eyes of children witnessing a fundamental law of their universe being broken.

This was not diablerie as they understood it. This was taxidermy of the soul. A gallery of the damned, worn as a skin suit for amusement. It was an act of such profound, cosmic insolence that it made a mockery of their most sacred terror.

They felt, for the first time in their long, predatory lives, a flicker of sympathy for the Sabbat. At least the Sword of Caine offered a clean, fanatical death. This… this was an eternity of curated humiliation.

The Prince’s stoicism was a cliff face against a tsunami. He did not flinch. He did not blink. But the effort to maintain that façade was visible in the minute, fossil-like tightening of the tendons in his neck. He had just been shown that the weapon he thought he could aim was, in fact, a sentient abyss that collected the screams of its victims like trinkets.

After a silence that stretched into eternity, he spoke. His voice was hoarse, stripped of all inflection.

“The Court is adjourned.” The words were final. There would be no discussion, no commendation, no further debate. “We will seek answers to your origin as promised. That is all.”

He rose, a deliberate, heavy motion, and without another glance at Natalia, at the ash-pale faces of his court, he turned and vanished into the shadows of the wings.

The dismissal was absolute. But the unspoken truth hung heavier than any decree: She must go. Not just leave the city, but leave this world. No amount of power—sun-walking, Garou-killing, reality-rending power—was worth harboring this.

The cost went deeper than the Masquerade—it struck at their very understanding of what they were. She was a walking blasphemy, and her continued presence corroded the foundations of their existence. The search for a way to send her back had shed its skin as curiosity or bargaining chip. It was now an evacuation order. A desperate attempt to expel a natural disaster.

They had to find the crack in reality she fell through and, by any means necessary, shove her back in.

---

The silence in Alicia’s sanctuary was a physical presence, thick and suffocating. The usual quiet of predators at rest had been replaced by the hollow aftermath of a cataclysm.

David had bowed, a hasty, terrified gesture, and fled to his room the moment they’d returned, the doors to his Haven shutting with a definitive click.

Alicia sat on her chaise, a crystal glass of blood-wine held perfectly still at her lips, but she wasn’t drinking. She was just… hiding behind it, her eyes distant, staring at nothing.

Natalia stood by the window, watching the electric pulse of the city, a landscape she could now navigate but felt further from than ever.

“Thank you.”

Alicia’s voice was a cracked whisper, so soft it was almost lost in the hum of the climate control. She lowered the glass, her eyes finding Natalia’s reflection in the dark glass. “I never got to properly say that. After… well. After you got them off me.”

Natalia turned slowly. “That disturbed you more than I had anticipated.”

A short, brittle laugh escaped Alicia. It held no humor.

Alicia let out a short, hollow breath. “Severe underestimation doesn’t begin to cover it. We are unmoored. Primogen centuries my elder are staring at walls. The Prince himself was one tremor from unraveling at the seams.” She took a desperate swallow of wine, the glass trembling faintly in her hand.

“You’ve planted a fear in us… Father forgive me for saying it… deeper than the fear of Caine. Caine is a story. A myth. You are… evidence. You made our damnation look like a choice. Our ultimate sin is merely your parlor trick.”

She looked up, her gaze stripped bare. “We don’t want your power anymore. We don’t want your strength. We want our world back. The one where our traditions mean something. Where the rules matter. We’re scared, Natalia. We just want to feel real again.”

Natalia listened. The Queen of the Volkihar in her dismissed this as weakness—fear to be wielded, chains to be broken. The bleating of sheep who had seen the wolf wearing the shepherd’s skin.

And yet… the part of her that had learned their language, shared their roof, even forged this strained kinship with Alicia, felt a cold, sharp puncture.

Disappointment.

The same hollow ache she had felt at Harkon’s dying gaze.

She had overplayed her hand. She had let the tranquil fury at being humiliated underwater, the need to reassert absolute dominance, override the subtle, long-term game. She had caused an irreparable faux pas in existential politics.

Without a word, she turned and walked towards the door.

Alicia didn’t ask where she was going. She just took another drink, her gaze blank. “Sure. Whatever.”

Natalia stepped out into the city’s night. The air was cool, the sounds a familiar roar, but it all felt distant, muffled, as if she walked behind thick glass. She moved without direction, her mind a churn of cold calculation and colder regret.

Had she truly risked her only path home—her foothold in this alien world—for the sake of a lesson? For the visceral satisfaction of watching defiance crumble to ash?

In Skyrim, such a display would have cemented her rule for a millennium. Here, it had made her a pariah. A weapon too dangerous to aim, a riddle to be solved and discarded.

She turned a corner into a quieter, tree-lined street.

Soft yellow headlights washed over her from the curb. A familiar taxi idled silently, a blot of mundane yellow in the dark.

The passenger window slid down. The same unremarkable, tired face looked out. “Good evening, ma’am.” His voice was a calm baritone in the urban stillness. “You seem… adrift. Would you like a ride?”

Natalia stopped. She looked at him—this impossible, mundane creature whose presence felt like a folded realm, a contained immensity. In the Prince’s court, she had been declared a monster. In the Elysium, she was a terror. Here, on this empty street, before this quiet driver, she felt something else entirely: seen.

Not judged. Not yet. But weighed.

She didn’t hesitate. She opened the rear door and slid inside. The familiar scents of old vinyl and pine enveloped her. “Drive.”

The cab pulled away from the curb, merging into the late-night flow. The scene was set. The judge was behind the wheel. The defendant, a queen of ashes and stolen screams, waited in the back for a verdict that might be the only one that truly mattered.

Chapter 16: Humility

The cab glided through the sleeping city, a bubble of quiet in the noise. The driver didn’t look at her in the mirror. He just drove, his hands resting lightly on the wheel.

After a long silence, he spoke. "Pride. The first fortress. The first prison. You build it sky-high when the world makes you feel small. Then you spend forever hearing every little chip fall from the walls."

Natalia's eyes, fixed on the passing streetlights, narrowed. "You presume to know my walls?"

"I know the architecture," he said, a faint, timeless weariness in the words. "I've seen it built from the first stone. Yours is a grand design. That's what makes the cracks so loud."

"Cracks?" The word was a spark to tinder. The cold control shattered, replaced by a heat that was personal, raw.

"They are vermin. All of them! The fanatics in the dark, and the courtiers in their velvet tomb! They cling to their little codes—codes of fear, codes of madness—while I stand in the light that scorches them! Their master tried to drown me, and his curs laid hands on my ally, soiled her with their filth! I gave them order, I gave their wretched story a graceful finale!"

"Grace," he repeated, and the word held a universe of sorrow. "Is that what it was? From where I sat, it looked like you took the one thing that gives a cursed life its shape—its fear, its struggle, its precious, terrible story—and you used it to write a punchline."

He met her gaze in the mirror, and his eyes were deep enough to drown epochs. "The first lesson a tyrant learns is that you can break a body. The last lesson a ruler learns is that breaking a soul's meaning is what truly makes a monster. And monsters are very, very lonely."

The truth of it didn't feel like a revelation; it felt like a key turning in a lock she hadn't known was there. The heat drained from her, leaving a hollow, cold cavity behind. She looked down at her hands. "They were weak," she muttered.

"And you are lonely," he said, as a simple recognition.

The words settled into the silence, as a foundation stone. She didn't deny them. This loneliness was different—the isolation of power, and the loneliness of a language only she spoke, in a world that she didn’t belong to.

"I tried," she said, the imperial rage stripped away, leaving something quieter, more bewildered. "I learned their names. I offered... a place. A semblance of court. And they recoil as if from holy fire. Because I will not kneel to rules born from a fear I do not share."

The cab rolled on for a few blocks, her words hanging in the still air between them like smoke. Finally, he spoke again, his tone shifting into something lighter, almost conversational, yet with a core of absolute gravity.

“I know a place,” he said. “Quiet. Private. A good spot for… a thought experiment.”

Natalia’s head lifted. A trial by combat. A physical contest to vent this roiling energy, to re-establish a pecking order with this enigmatic being. “A challenge?” she asked, the word sharp with anticipation.

A low, warm chuckle filled the cab. “Oh, nothing so crude. It will be strictly educational. And I promise,” he added, his eyes catching hers in the mirror, that ancient light glinting with something like amusement, “not to disturb the neighbors. It’s just a battle of wits.”

Mind against mind. The thought was a cold, sharp comfort. Her body had been tested—by water, by fang, by brute force. But her will… her will was the unbroken glacier at the core of her, the thing that had faced down dragons and Daedric Princes. In that arena, she was inviolable. The simmering frustration found a new, purer focus.

A slow, intrigued smile touched her lips, the first genuine expression since the warehouse. “Very well,” she said. “Lead the way.”

The cab glided to a halt not in some grimy industrial yard or forgotten cul-de-sac, but at the curb of a small, pristine city park. It lay dormant under the deep night, a geometric patch of stillness. The air here was different—clean, carrying the scent of wet earth and dormant blossoms.

He opened his door and stepped out. Natalia followed, her boots meeting paved walkway instead of cracked asphalt.

He led her without a word to a simple wooden bench nestled under a broad, ancient oak. Its leaves rustled softly with a breeze that did not touch her skin. He sat on one end and gestured to the space beside him. The domestic tranquility of the scene was almost offensive in its innocence.

“Comfortable?” he asked, his voice a low vibration in the quiet. “Now. Breathe. Look at me. And don’t blink.”

Intrigue warred with deep-seated caution. But a queen does not show hesitation. She settled onto the bench, her spine straight, a monarch on a rustic throne. She drew a slow, deliberate breath she did not need, and fixed her crimson stare upon his tired eyes.

For one heartbeat, there was only the park, the bench, the man.

Then the world turned to liquid and poured away.

---

The sensation was a total dissolution. The park, the bench, the oak—all of it softened, running together like heated wax, hues bleeding into a vortex of grey and gold. A profound, leaden pressure gathered behind her eyes, a psychic gravity hauling her consciousness inward. She felt it unlatch, not from her body, but from the very concept of here.

When the vertigo passed, she stood.

Beneath her was fine, pale sand, stretching to a horizon swallowed by heat haze. An endless, sun-scorched desert lay under a sky the color of a week-old bruise. The air lay motionless, parched, and silent in a way that hurt the ears. This was no mere vision. It was a place. A pocket of reality. An expanded domain of thought made solid, given terrifying form.

And across the bleached expanse, perhaps a hundred yards distant, he stood.

He was no longer the tired cabbie. The same man, the same clothes—but the aura of restrained might was now unfettered. It poured from him in visible waves, warping the air like a heat shimmer, yet it carried a cold that sank into her marrow and made the stolen souls in her mind shrink and whine.

The majesty she had sensed was laid bare, not as a threat, but as a simple, staggering fact. He was a mountain range given human shape, an ocean held in a cup. The power did not rage; it simply was, so vast it had settled into a terrible, absolute stillness.

He looked at her from across the dunes, his expression still calm, but his eyes now held the depth of something ancient and fathomless—like staring into the well of time itself.

"Welcome," his voice echoed, not through air, but directly in the vault of her mind. "To the proving ground. Here, we will have our battle of wits. The rules are simple: impose your will upon this place. Shape it. Command it. As I will. We shall see whose reality holds."

He raised a hand, palm up. Above it, the washed-out sky rippled. A constellation of impossible geometry bloomed into being—shifting, crystalline shapes that vibrated with a silent song of broken logic. They drifted in the air like a chandelier wrought from frozen dreams.

"Your move, Lord of Volkihar."

A feral, exultant grin split Natalia’s face. Finally.

A venue without fragile Masquerades, without trembling neonates, without the petty, shackling politics of fear. Here, in this endless, silent desert, was a canvas for the only language that truly mattered: raw, unchained will. The language of her Sire, Molag Bal—the grammar of domination.

She planted her feet in the fine sand, feeling the immense, psychic weight of this place press against her. It was a challenge, and her entire being sang in response. She would not just shape this reality; she would break it over her knee and rebuild it in her image.

She focused, drawing upon the core of her being—the Draconic might that was her birthright, the glacial power of the Volkihar, the stolen echoes of a dozen souls now screaming in the gallery of her mind. She poured it all forth as a command.

"KNEEL."

The command was uttered as a concussion of pure will, a thunderclap inside the skull of the world.

The desert obeyed. The sand for a mile around her erupted in a single, seamless tidal wave, rising in a perfect, crushing ring to blot out the bruised sky. It hung for a moment—a mountain range of dust and intent—before roaring down toward the solitary figure with the force of a continent's collapse. The very light dimmed above him, suffocated by the sheer, hateful pressure of her decree.

She was not finished. With a guttural snarl, she tore her hands apart. From the periphery of her unleashed dominion, the ground vomited forth jagged spines of black ice. They shot across the dunes like spears, veins of crimson—frozen, corrupted vitae—pulsing within their depths, a glacier’s wrath given murderous purpose.

And as the wave fell and the ice converged, she reached into the gallery of stolen screams within her and pulled. Their terror, their rage, their final, profane curses were given form and direction. Phantom shapes, translucent and shrieking with silent, soul-rending fury, poured from her in a torrent, a spectral tide of the damned racing ahead of the physical cataclysm. It was an assault on every level: to crush the body, pierce the essence, and unravel the mind.

It was a display of power to make gods hesitate. It was the kind of fury that could unmake a city, unraveling it thread by thread until even its memory dissolved.

It accomplished nothing.

The cabbie watched the mile-high wave of sand descend. He didn’t move. He simply… considered it. The wave froze in mid-air, every grain of sand suspended, caught in a snapshot of time. Then, it dissolved—as if unwound, each individual grain drifting peacefully back to the desert floor as if placed by an infinite, careful hand.

The jagged black ice racing toward him reached an invisible line ten feet from his position and simply stopped. They did not shatter. They did not melt. The ice ceased to be. The malignant crimson veins faded to clear, crystalline water, which fell as a gentle, brief rain, pattering harmlessly on the sand before soaking in.

The screaming phantom army reached the same boundary. Their forms wavered, their silent shrieks softening into faint, bewildered sighs. Their features—contorted with rage and terror—relaxed into vague, peaceful melancholy before dissipating like morning mist touched by sunlight.

He hadn’t blocked her. He hadn’t countered with greater force. He had dismissed it. He recontextualized her cataclysmic will into harmless, natural phenomena. Her domination met not with resistance, but with a profound, absolute indifference that was infinitely more devastating.

Natalia stood, chest heaving with unneeded breath, the echoes of her expended power ringing hollowly in the sudden, returned silence. The desert was pristine, unchanged. Her opponent hadn’t taken a single step. The constellation of crystalline shapes still rotated peacefully above his palm.

The grin was gone from her face, replaced by dawning, humiliated shock. She had thrown the full force of her being, the sum of her curse and her stolen power, at him. And he had treated it like a mildly interesting weather pattern.

She was struggling. More than struggling—she was utterly, completely outclassed in the one arena she believed was her sovereign domain. The will that had toppled a tyrannical lord, that had silenced the World-Eater’s roar, that consumed souls for sport, was here less than a whisper against the tectonic silence of his presence.

The cabbie lowered his hand. The constellation winked out of existence. He looked at her across the untouched sand, his expression placid, but his eyes held no mockery. Only a deep, ancient patience, and a trace of something that might have been pity.

“Your will is strong,” his voice echoed in her mind, soft as a drifting feather. “But it is a shout in a room you mistake for a closet. You seek to conduct a symphony by striking a single, deafening chord. Now… listen.”

The dismissal cut deeper than any blade. Her magnificent assault—the sand, the ice, the screaming dead—had been undone with less effort than a sigh.

Her pride, already bleeding from the struggle in the water and the Court’s horrified retreat, was now stripped to the nerve, exposed and shrieking.

The calm in his voice, the pity in his ancient gaze, was the final, unforgivable insult.

---

A guttural snarl ripped from her throat—a sound of the beasts in Coldharbour’s pits, not the measured speech of queens. The so-called battle of wits was a charade. Another layer of humiliation. 

Fine, she thought. If he wished to witness her true strength, he would feel it firsthand, drowned in the essence of his own undoing.

Strategy evaporated. Finesse burned away in the furnace of her wounded pride. She dropped into a crouch, sand spraying from her boots, and launched herself forward.

It was pure predation. A streak of pale fury across the hundred yards of desert, closing the distance in a heartbeat fueled by Daedric wrath and all-consuming rage. Claws out, fangs bared—a living weapon aimed at the heart of the silent mountain.

He watched her come, his head tilting slightly. As she crossed the midpoint, claws aimed for his throat, he didn’t raise a hand. He simply spoke, his voice slicing through her snarl with impossible clarity:

“Oh. Interesting. You might need these, however.”

A casual flick of two fingers.

And they appeared.

Not in his hands. In hers.

The weight. The balance. The familiar, hungry song—it hit her senses like a returning heartbeat. In her right hand, Umbra, its blade a shard of solidified void drinking the false sky’s light. In her left, Penumbra, its edge shimmering with the cold fire of forgotten stars. Her Daedric blades. The companions of her ascent, severed by the cataclysm of her exile.

The shock of their presence—the sudden, visceral completion of a severed part of her soul—nearly shattered her charge. Her fingers clenched around the worn leather hilts on instinct, and a surge of power, her power, older and more intimate than any stolen vitae, thrummed up her arms.

But it was too late. Rage was the engine, and it would not be denied. The falter in her stride vanished, consumed by a greater fury. Weapons or not, he had to die. He had seen her weakness. He had dismissed her. He had pitied her.

Only his complete and total extermination—his body torn to mist, his power scattered to the void, his memory unmade—would scour the shame.

“Stop mocking me!” she shrieked in her native tongue, a raw cry of hatred.

The world narrowed to the space between her blades and his flesh. There was no desert, no sky, no stolen souls weeping in her mind. There was only the white-hot fury of her humiliation and the twin promises of Umbra and Penumbra—promises of rending, of unmaking, of silencing that calm, infuriating voice forever.

The cabbie did not move to block. He merely stood there, within the killing radius of her reunited Daedric artifacts, as she committed to the only language she had left: utter, unrestrained annihilation.

She was upon him. Umbra carved a shrieking arc of anti-light towards his neck. Penumbra thrust low and vicious for his gut, a move to disembowel and sever. Completely devoid of a duelist's technique; it was a butcher's opening gambit, fueled by millennia of bottled dominance.

She became a vortex of savagery. It wasn't the elegant, predatory dance she'd used on the Sheriff, nor the brutal efficiency of the Garou kill. This was something older, dredged from the primal well of her being and honed on the scales of dragons. A savage dragonslayer’s perfected flurry of blades, sharpened over lifetimes.

Umbra shrieked in a horizontal blur aimed to decapitate. Before the motion was complete, she was already pivoting, Penumbra lancing in from below in a vicious uppercut meant to split him from groin to sternum. She used the momentum to spin, a descending heel-strike cratering the sand where his head should have been, followed instantly by a reverse-grip slash from Umbra, a move designed to hook under a dragon’s wing-seam and tear it free. Every motion flowed into the next, a seamless, devastating tapestry of violence. The air itself seemed to bleed darkness and cold fire in the wake of her blades.

Her teeth were bared in a silent, continuous snarl, her crimson eyes pools of incandescent rage. She was a storm of Daedric steel and immortal hate, a force that could carve through legions, shatter fortresses, and had, in fact, brought down beings who thought themselves gods.

The blades never connected.

They passed through the space he occupied as if he were made of smoke. Not because he moved with Celerity—he didn’t move at all. One moment her sword was cleaving through the space his neck occupied, the next his form was simply… elsewhere, not by dodging, but by the location itself ceasing to be relevant. Her heel struck sand. Her reverse slash cut empty air.

She whirled, adjusting, her fury mounting into a frenzy. She attacked again, a whirlwind of strikes that would have turned a castle into gravel in seconds. Overhand chops, lunging thrusts, sweeping arcs that could shear through stone pillars. The sand around them was churned into a fine, furious mist by the force of her blows and her passing.

Nothing.

Finally, as she lunged in for a final, two-handed spear-thrust with both blades aimed at his heart, he spoke. His voice was a pebble dropped into the center of her hurricane, impossibly clear and calm.

“Are you done?”

The words didn’t stop her body—her momentum carried the thrust home—but they froze her mind. The twin points of her Daedric swords stopped a hair’s breadth from his sternum, not because he blocked them, but because the very concept of ‘forward motion’ ceased in that localized space.

He remained, a fixed point in the chaos, his hands still at his sides, his expression one of detached observation. Her world-rending assault was, to him, a performance happening just outside his personal space, a furious pantomime he had no need to acknowledge.

He looked down at the tips of the blades, then up into her wild, rage-contorted face.

A final, cornered scream of fury built in her chest—the raw intent of unmaking. She drew a breath, and unleashed it point-blank into his weary gaze.

"FUS RO DAH!"

The force that had shattered dragons, leveled walls, and carved history into the stone of her world erupted from her in a concentrated storm of sound and will. With full intent to obliterate.

The air between them ripped.

And did nothing.

The Unrelenting Force struck him and simply... ceased. No ripple, no recoil, not even a flutter of his clothes. It was sound without echo, force without consequence, a shout swallowed by a deeper, absolute silence. The power drained from the words the moment they left her lips, leaving them as empty as a sigh in a tomb.

“My turn.”

He didn’t strike her. He unleashed no counter-assault of cosmic power. He simply… looked at her.

And Natalia saw.

The vision unfolded within the core of her being. She saw herself—a single, desperate note in an infinite symphony. The vast loneliness that girded her pride was laid bare, not as a pillar of strength, but as a fortress built to conceal a profound, childish terror of being truly alone.

The echo of Molag Bal’s violation, which she wore like a crown of power, was revealed as a psychic scar she compulsively reopened, re-enacting its cruelty on others to prove she was now the violator, not the violated. Her patronage of David, her maneuvering with Alicia, her disdain for the Court—all of it was reframed as the desperate play of a lonely god arranging dolls for company, smashing them when they dared to act outside her script.

He showed her the pettiness beneath the grandeur. The fragile girl from Riften, frozen in time at the moment of her ultimate breaking, who had spent centuries layering persona upon persona—Queen, Lord, Predator—to scream back at a universe that had broken her first.

It was a mirror held to her soul. The reflection showed no mighty Vampire Lord, only a lost, furious child wearing a crown of stolen power, standing in a desert of her own making.

The vision lasted less than a second. It lasted an eternity.

Her arms went limp. Umbra and Penumbra slipped from her fingers, dissolving into motes of shadow and dying starlight before they could strike the sand. The all-consuming rage evaporated, leaving a void so vast and cold it threatened to swallow her whole. She stumbled back, collapsing to her knees in the fine sand—in the utter, soul-crushing weight of realization.

She stared at her hands, her breath coming in ragged, useless hitches. The Garou Slayer, the Soul-Eater, the Sun-Walker—all of it was gone. What remained, kneeling in the dust, was simply… Natalia.

And for the first time since the day she died, she had no idea who that was.

---

The desert dissolved. The searing dry heat vanished, replaced by the cool, damp breath of the park at night. Natalia flinched, a full-body recoil, and found herself back on the wooden bench, her fingers clawed into the weathered wood. The cabbie sat beside her, once more just a tired man in a driver’s cap, all that unimaginable power folded away out of sight.

“Ma’am?” His voice was soft, laced with a veneer of concern. “You all right? Spaced out for a second there.”

She blinked, her crimson eyes wide, the ghost of that infinite reflection still swirling in their depths. She looked at her hands—empty, clean. No sand. No blades. Only the crushing weight of what she had seen, a stone lodged where her heart should be.

He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a murmur. “Let’s head back to the cab. Jogger.”

Mechanically, she stood. Her legs were water. She followed him to the idling taxi and slid into the back seat. He took his place up front, and they pulled away, leaving the serene park behind. The city lights streamed past the window, unseeing blurs.

The silence that settled between them held no hostility. Only patience. A quiet, waiting instruction.

“Humility,” he said after a few blocks, eyes on the road. “It isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less. You’ve built an entire identity around what you dominate, what you break, what you take. It’s a giant, flashing sign that screams ‘I AM HERE’—just to drown out the quiet voice that whispers you might not be anywhere at all.”

Natalia said nothing. She stared at the back of his headrest.

“The wounds,” he went on, his tone matter-of-fact. “The ones from your Sire. They won’t ever truly heal. You can’t un-break a vase.” He paused, letting the metaphor settle. “But you can fill the cracks with gold. Kintsugi. You can redefine the lesson of the scar. Was it a lesson in cruelty? Or was it a lesson in survival? In the sheer, stubborn will to persist, even when you’re shattered? The source is the same. The meaning you assign… that’s your choice.”

He drove in silence for a while, letting the enormity of that idea sink into the quiet—that she could choose the meaning of her own damnation.

Finally, he pulled the cab to a smooth stop at a familiar corner, near the discreet entrance to the Elysium. He put the car in park and turned slightly in his seat.

Natalia’s voice, when it came, was stripped of all its former grandeur, hollowed out. “Why?”

He waited.

“You could have let me burn. On my own pride. On their fear. It would have been… easier. Why show me the cracks?”

He looked at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable.

“There’s a saying in this world,” he said finally, his gaze holding hers in the rearview. It was no longer the gaze of a cabbie, nor the universe-spanning stare from the desert. It was something in between—ancient, weary, and profound. “Wherever we go, it is the blood of Caine which makes our fate.”

The words lingered in the quiet of the cab, a cryptic benediction. A warning. A simple truth.

He gave a small, sad smile. “Farewell, Natalia. For now.”

She got out of the cab without a word. It pulled away, its yellow paint swallowed by the night. She stood on the sidewalk, the cold stone of the city beneath her feet feeling more real than it ever had.

A question crystallized in the silence of her mind, cold and immense. What are you?

The presence, the power, the insight that cut to the marrow of her… and that final, weighted reference. Caine.

The implication was a yawning chasm. Was he…? Could it be…?

To even form the thought felt like a sacrilege. To speak it aloud would be to make it true—to anchor the entire mythic foundation of this strange, shadowed world upon the axis of her own exile. It would remake everything around the simple fact of a cab ride in the dark.

No.

The understanding that settled over her was new, and fragile. That searing desert vision, that mirror held to the core of her… it was not a weapon for the Prince’s armory, nor a bargaining chip for the Tremere. It could not be traded, analyzed, or leveraged.

It was hers alone. A gift, or a verdict, from a power whose scope made the politics of this hidden city seem like children squabbling in a cellar. To speak of it would be to profane it—to drag a silent, cosmic truth down into the muck of their fearful games.

For once, pride had no part in her silence. This was not a secret to be hoarded, but to be guarded. Hers. Her solitary crossroad.

Whether she would heed its terrible clarity, whether she would mend her broken pieces with gold or keep wielding their jagged edges against the world… that, as he had said, was hers to decide. And for the first time, the weight of that choice did not feel like a chain.

It felt like a key, cool and real, lying in her still-trembling palm.