Llyr's Court

[Okimiyage]

Liesse led their little group deeper into the maze of tunnels, her twin's witchlights perched upon her shoulder's like a pirate's parrot. Her face, illuminated by their steady green glow, looked wan and drawn--the face of a woman far older than the young girl whom Antha had first met. On and on they walked, drawing closer to--what?

"A labyrinth's heart is different and separate from its center," Rynn said, softly. "Like a bramble patch, all thorns and branches converging into an tangle that leaves any so foolish as to venture into it scratched and bleeding. Have you ever experimented with thaumaturgical architecture, Antha?" Gone was the formal address of, 'Miss Mayfair'; those were civilities best left for the world above. The waking world, the un-shadow world--There was a scent in these halls, something faint but unmistakeable to any who had ever witnessed magic before. And this--this was ugly magic, old and cruel and the color of rust, the air heavy as lead with its presence.

It was impossible to tell how long they walked. It might have been a few minutes, or a few hours. Sooner or later, even the keenest and most observant of minds would be dizzied by the unending twists and turns of the winding tunnels. Until--quite suddenly, and without warning--Liesse led them into what the witchlights illuminated as a high-ceilinged vault-- a burial vault, if the drawers cut into the wall were anything to go by, numerals and names, births and deaths stretching off into the darkness. The room had originally been constructed in an airy, cathedralesque style not unsimilar to that of the Reims Cathedral--and that in itself was strange, for had they descended quite far enough into the earth that such a tall room could not break the ground overhead, yet tree-roots should dangle in thick netting from the vaulted ceiling? In the distance, sarcophagi--their inhabitants rendered upon their lids in dimly gleaming white marble--stretched off into unending darkness, what even Rynn's witchlights could not illuminate.

The boy was smiling. Liesse was not. She had stopped in the center of the room, where marble tile converged in a huge and elaborate crest beneath one's feet. Where, beneath her feet, something wet and dark was starting to spread. Blood; and Rynn glanced about the room and said, almost cheerfully, "Mary's here."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

The sound of her own name did the odd trick of startling Antha back to herself. For some time now she had been quite lost to the feeling she knew and loved the most, the thick ebb and flow of old magic. Spending her childhood years in the attic of Satis House had made that dark and ominous feeling, that sense of things in the dark that could see but not be seen, that could curse and never be touched, akin to a warm, fuzzy blanket for Antha. And people wondered why she was so twisted.
But to her knowledge Antha had never heard Rynn speak her name before, and the lack of formality brought her back to her senses. "Not personally," she responded quietly, distractedly, for the magic had a life of it's own and it pulled at her, tried to draw her back in, "It was my ancestors who had a love of it, and through them I am familiar with it. You should pay my ancestral home a visit some day, mon ami." Antha smiled then, briefly but with that cruel sense of humor.
And then there was no more humor, no more preoccupation with the labyrinth's old magic, because it met with something else Antha was thoroughly familiar with. Death. It was colder than magic, stiller, and yet it met that opposing force with equal force.
It was Nicolae, still gliding behind her with all a vampire's unnatural grace, who nearly shivered when they emerged in the vault. For after all, he was death, and as magic was kindred to Antha, the dead were kindred to him. "Is she?" he murmured to his sister when Rynn had spoken, because there were too many of the dead on every side for him to distinguish on from the other.
Antha, who had seemed to lighten at the presence of death hanging in the air, to gather the feel of it to herself like a pale, glistening shroud and revel in it, simply said, "I would imagine so."
Both of their eyes, Nicolae's brilliant golds and Antha's dark emeralds, were focused quietly upon the stain of blood that crept across the floor.  

[Okimiyage]

"Mary isn't the only one."
The voice, queer and high and shaking, could hardly have been believed to have come from the young man that Antha had made the acquaintance of earlier. Erin, the rude one--like smoke, he had come into the chamber--no presence until now, not even a hint of self to alert any member of their party.

And he was not alone. Cian stood behind him, leaning against the walls of the room like they were the only thing holding him up, the smell of opium faint on his clothes, the haze fading from his mind. Aedan, too--the clever one, the one who had asked about the Talamasca--had accompanied his brothers. Perched atop one of the sarcophagi, his knuckles were white where they clenched the knees of his trousers.

There was a hissing in the air, like many voices whispering together, and something tugged, hard, on one of Antha's curls, and laughed about it.

All three of the brothers wore masks, of the sort that the figures in the garden above, the spectre-figures that Rynn had called butterflies, had worn. A fox for Cian, a wolf for Erin, a stag for Aedan--and Rynn, now, went to one of the drawers set into the wall, one of the closest (and the name Mary A. Calais still shining in bright gilt upon its surface) and opened it. Reaching into the darkness inside, he drew out two masks of his own; a sparrow, which he tossed to Liesse; she nearly did not catch it, and he gave her a faintly disgusted look before he slipped his own mask over his head. Of all the siblings, only Rynn did not wear the head of an animal. His eyes gleamed from within the polished ivory facade of a human skull, a hairline crack. like a scar, running from temple to cheekbone.

Cian said, triumphantly, "There now. Just like old times, isn't it?"--and laughed, as if he'd made some vastly amusing and horrible joke. His laughter was the only sound in the room, and it did not echo--as though something dampened the sound, absorbed and muted it. "For God's sake, Cian, shut up." Unexpectedly, it was neither Erin or Rynn responsible for silencing their brother, but Aedan.

Liesse said, "Look,"
Overhead, something white and wriggling was struggling amidst the tree roots which dangled from the ceiling. Something with thin white arms, and dirt on its limbs, and tangled hair which had once been brown but was now black with filth.
Cian said, "The whole family's here--" and Aedan did not wait for him to laugh this time, or to silence him, but struck him before he could finish speaking. Cian cupped his hand to his split lip, and his shoulders shook with silent, hysteric laughter.

Blood dripped from between his fingers and upon the floor. The voices, the whispers, were getting louder.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

It was Nicolae who reacted to this display, more than his sister. It was his eyes that went sharp and dangerous, wary, as they shifted between the various siblings. It was his muscles that tensed that slightest bit, preparing for something, anything. "I feel oddly like the half-breed Mayfairs at the moment," he whispered, glancing at the figure on the ceiling quickly enough that a human eye would not have noticed. "Do you think they're going to try and kill us?" And his comment was plain enough, simple enough, that it could have been anything.
Antha's reaction was typical enough of herself. She hadn't bothered to look at the Calais siblings as they appeared, but rather kept her eyes fixed on the figure over her head. "Darling, people have been trying to kill us since the day we were born," she murmured vaguely, misty, like she wasn't quite all there, "Myself more than you. Such creatures are pitiable."
Nicolae glanced at her once, briefly, and then again almost immediately, something like revelation in his eyes. The Calais family was not his main concern anymore. "Don't," he whispered, pleadingly, "Antha, no." But his sister wasn't listening to him anymore. She was traipsing across the floor, following a broad circle around the vault that seemed to hold that figure as it's center. "Antha!" he yelled after her, because he couldn't find the heart to move after her.
"Doesn't it make you feel alive?" she yelled back at him, a trace of something in her voice that was between maniacal and whimsical, "Or have you forgotten what it was like to be Prince of the Red Rose? Have you forgotten, darling Nicolae, the blood that runs in our veins?" She laughed then, a sound ringing about the room that was clearly, painfully not sane and anything but safe, while Nicolae put a hand to his head, gripping his golden curls in his white marble fingers. And somewhere, so far in the distance it made Nicolae dizzy, Jack was climbing the stairs of Mayfair Manor. The lights were flickering, the vampire knew that much, and the wooden door to the attic was cold as ice. The candles were lit beyond the second door, he knew this by the flickering shadows from underneath the door, and nothing good had ever come from those candles.
"Antha!" he pleaded once more, and then was silenced as she took hold of the chains that bound him to her as his Designee of the Legacy, the shackles forged by their shared blood and centuries of magic.It was through these chains that he felt the madness---that old, dark, and purely evil thing they had all seemed to know since before time itself---creep through Jack, so whole and unconstrained that the he fell to his knees on the floorboards and the blood spewed from his lips on the rotting wood before him. And through Jack, it found Antha. Once upon a time, when he was a child, it had called Nicolae's body home. But that had been before Antha, and like it or not she had been strong enough to call herself master over it. That was why it did not crawl through her as it did Jack, as it once had Nicolae, but rather it seeped into her flesh like something quiet and obedient to do her bidding, to lend it's pure malice to her raw power. That was why she laughed and the very earth around the vault, over which the Calais family was master, trembled.
Whatever was about to happen, whatever the Calais family intended to do either to them or to the spirit they claimed plagued them, or whatever the spirit intended to do to anyone present, Antha was only betting on herself. The spirits surrounding them were not hers and she hadn't trusted any of the Calais children to begin with, so the only one that needed to walk away from the vault and Antha's magic was Nicolae himself, and through the chains that bound him he was part of her, part of the thing she commanded, and so it could not harm him.
"Well?" Antha questioned with that dark and terrible smirk to her painted lips, her glassy eyes gone dark and sparkling with something that could not be named, something that did not seem wholly part of Antha herself. These dangerous, ethereal eyes she fixed on Rynn, or the skull that hid his visage, and they did not threaten him in particular. They seemed to say she was waiting---waiting to discern the truth, to see who and what wanted to pit their power against hers, waiting for the chips to fall. "It's your move, children, is it not?"
While she voiced the madness of the thing, the cruelness of it, it was Nicolae who voiced it's curiosity, staring pointedly up at the figure on the ceiling. "What happened?"
 

[Okimiyage]

Liesse said, quietly, "She's challenged them."
Rynn smiled. I thought she would.

But first, there had been a question.

The roots gave up their prisoner suddenly, so that when the white and flailing limbs of Mary Calais hit the floor, it was with a crunch.
"We ate her," Rynn said.
'She wasn't really part of the family, so who knew that she would stay around for this long? Such a nuisance--such a pity---she couldn't even behave herself in death. But she deserved it."

Rynn's smile could not be called a smile in good faith any longer. It was a baring of the teeth, a death rictus grin--and worst of all, a smile of recognition. He could see what Antha was becoming, what she was building herself up to, and he liked it.

She'd certainly gotten their attention. He could sense the haughty gazes of his ancestors, fixed upon the Mayfair girl like their eyes had been soldered to her. "Antha," they whispered, and her name split into a multitude of whispers and fled the light.

And the body, that maimed and crumpled corpse upon the polished marble tile, sat up. Her dress had been white once -- long ago, before blood had turned it the color of bitter rust. In a voice that did not quite choke on the words, but seemed to want to, the corpse croaked, "Hi, Antha."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

"You ate her?" Quite suddenly, Antha laughed. Or perhaps it was not her, for beneath the ringing tones of her own voice there was something unusual.
Nicolae cringed at the sound, as if he didn't like what his sister was becoming. "I don't like this," he said softly to her as she resumed her slow circle around the vault, "I don't trust them. They remind me too much of us right now."
Again that laugh, the cruel and hysteric amusement. "At what point did we trust them?" she called to him from across the room, her gaze sweeping clear across the broken, pitiful form on the ground to watch him, "You knew as well as I did his story was fake! But by all means, if you're afraid then go crawl back into your crypts, darling brother."
"It seems easier to just kill them," he commented dryly, diverting his eyes, because he knew what was coming next.
It was swift and smooth, the veil of blood that came down over his face, dripping heavily onto the collar of his shirt as he felt of the thousands of strings on his face that had been his skin, the shredded web of torn and tattered flesh that brought a steady drizzle of blood to the floor. "If you do not have anything useful to say, Nicolae, then do not say anything at all." Obediently the vampire fell to silence, waiting quietly for his flesh to heal enough that he could wipe his face on his sleeve, leaving his face smeared with crimson but visible beneath it.
"Now." She halted, ignoring Mary entirely for the thing did not like her, and settled her gaze very squarely upon Rynn. "We've been terribly patient about all this, but I believe it's about time you explained things now." The smile she flashed him then was something just short of threatening, full of cruel humor, because she knew what his response would decide. The thing liked him for now, it seemed to recognize some deep, dark cruelness in him akin to what resided in Antha and what made her master over it. But that favor was fickle and it was waiting quietly to see what Antha decided.  

[Okimiyage]

"Yes," said Rynn, softly. "Like wolves, we bit and snapped and tore her to bits, and then fought over the scraps afterwards." Rynn went to Liesse then, his twin even if she wore a sparrow's head now. They linked their hands together; like lovers, the two of them had an uncanny aptitude for finding the spaces of their bodies into which each fit best. But even the familiar space of her brother's body could not console Liesse; through the eyes of her sparrow mask, she was weeping, in sobs which shook her from the lungs up but could not be heard. The brothers took in the tableau silently--except for Cian, who was shaking with mirth, the white shine of his teeth set into the blood from his split lip.
"You know what it is like to be part of a legacy," Rynn said, quietly. The explanation, here, now, at last. She deserved that much. "You know what it is like to have--ha--ancestors. Even if they are not being talked about, they are constantly looking over your shoulders. Except for most people that's just a metaphor. Witching families aren't so lucky."
The thing that had been Mary was trying to get up, now. It's limbs jerked and shook, in a manner that would have been nearly comedic were it not so repulsive.
"Mary is half-blooded," said Rynn. He released Liesse, now, loosened the death-grip about her waist that he had maintained. He walked the rounds of the floor, circling the creature that his little half-sister's corpse had become. "Enough, as they say, to perform a few minor cantrips, to write a ward-spell that almost works--" There was a vision, of sudden and dizzying clarity, of what the mockery in his voice referred to. A playroom door, papered with ward-signs that almost--but not quite--was enough to keep her brothers out...
They'd dragged her by the hair out of the playroom, down the flight of stairs and through the house, so that by the time she'd made it to the garden she's already broken skin and her scalp was bleeding. But like all children, their hatred for her was absolute and unforgiving. "Mary," said Rynn, his voice cutting through the haze like an executioner's axe, "was the reason why the West Wing burned to the ground. The reason why our parents died. The reason why nobody--" and he threw his hands up, to the vaulted ceiling, to the roots above, "--nobody was around to explain what my family is responsible for. What our name--" His voice broke; it was easy to forget that Rynn was only sixteen. But it was only for a moment, and when he began again, he had control over his own throat. "What our bloodline has been made accountable for. The house. The maze. The gardens. The land. And most especially--the most important--the corpses, Antha, the bodies. They're all here. Even I haven't explored all of the vaults, but we can--" he glanced towards his brothers, swiftly. "We can hear them. And we started to, after our father died. He wasn't buried with the rest of them--how could he be, when he burned up all to ashes in the fire? But they needed someone, they said, anyone with a speck of magic would do. Just enough to satisfy, they said. And then they'd go away."

Rynn stopped, and smiled ruefully at the floor. "But they never said they wouldn't come back."
As they had, in his nightmares. And every time they visited, they grew more and more insistent. The ancestors were hungry. It wasn't easy, they said, to keep the labyrinth in check anymore. And they let Mary take Liesse, while she tended to her roses in the gardens.
That was when Rynn knew that he had to find a sacrifice for them.
"In hindsight," Rynn said, thoughtfully, "I suppose some people may accuse me of biting off more than I can chew. Antha Mayfair is the city's most visible witch, if not necessarily the most respected..." His lip curled at that, and he stopped pacing to stick his hands in his pocket and look at her. His voice was the purr of some monstrous jungle cat. "But if you want results, they say, go to the best."

Rynn watched her, his eyes gleaming within the hollows of his mask. He was baiting her, that much was obvious, and waiting for her to take the first step (and trip.)
This was Calais land. It was steeped in their blood, their sacrifice. Their darkest demons roamed here untethered. The earth held their magic like veins of gold. And the head of the Calais family--it did not need description. Rynn could feel it surging under his skin, lapping at his fingertips like an eager dog, the magic that begged and keened to be used. He could feel the ancestors at his back, a wall of souls stretching into shadows, whispering at the threshold of his mind.
He wondered, if he won, what the bitter empress of the Mayfair legacy's heart would taste like.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

It was an odd thing, listening to Rynn's explanation. For a moment the haze of utter insanity lifted from Antha's mind, leaving her staring at him in a fashion that was...oh, what was the word?
The same was true for Nicolae, though on a smaller scale, and at length they turned their eyes to one another and between them there passed a look. In that look, there were worlds of things; understanding, sympathy, revelation, and more than anything there was that acute stab of pain. And then between them there passed something else, a flood of memories as visible as the look they had passed each other. "We are sort of the experts in making half-bloods disappear," Nicolae whispered to his sister, somewhat ruefully, and then was silenced as the dark thing threw his own memories at him. Children on the rotting floorboards, smears of blood under his feet, corpses strung from the ceiling by ropes in neat little lines. And Antha...Antha possessed, mad, driven a far cry from that line between humanity and the utterly demonic. She had always been covered in blood in those days, the little fourteen-year-old thing, always with that knife in her thin, crimson hands, and she had always laughed. It was that laugh that still haunted his nightmares, still put any other 'horrors' into perspective.
Nicolae didn't believe for a moment that anything was bigger and badder than Antha, not even an entire family, the living and the dead, and so he did not run to her defense. Rather, he let the thing reclaim it's hold upon him, quietly. He let the power of that being that had been worshiped as a deity through civilization after civilization ingrain itself into his cold, hard flesh.
But Antha had never sent it away to begin with. It had receded slightly, temporarily, but with the tail end of Rynn's explanation it flooded her, made Antha half herself and half the incarnation of old magic. "Silly children," she said, laughing softly as if Rynn had made some less than clever joke, "You really must be pitiful, letting your ancestors drive you to such foolish lengths. Mary's death is easily justifiable. But me?" She laughed again, and this time Nicolae cringed as if he had been stabbed, because that laugh wasn't human. "Let us pretend, for a moment, that you are powerful enough to overtake me. What then?" Again that laugh, and this time the earth shook with it, threatened to crush the vault in upon itself. "Let us pretend every supernatural entity in Osiris City would not come after your heads, either for revenge or the simple fact that it isn't wise to leave you to your own. Let us even pretend that I would not linger in this realm, that I wouldn't drag your bodies into bloody graves and bring everything left of your family legacy down in ashes. What then? What do you think to accomplish with your sacrifice? They will not be satisfied, not even with me, because the dead never are satisfied. And besides, there is nothing about me to appease them. With my death I would bring rage like a plague that would creep through your spirits, your land, your very air. Rage that would not abide until everything---your home, your things, your sanity, and finally your bodies---are consumed and vanquished by it." She paused here, a grin to her darkly painted lips that promised, just for a moment, that she liked the thought of these things.
It was while she said all of this, however, that her fingers curled around the Mayfair emerald strung around her throat. That old gem that had been passed through her ancestors since the dawning of their unnatural blood, that had witnessed fearsome magic and the most unspeakable acts. It had never been some simple piece of ornamentation, her ancestors had seen to that, and for the moment it was prepared to take action at the slightest provocation. If Antha said when, it was ready to spread the floodgates, because it was all she really needed to call upon centuries of Mayfair magic. It alone was her link to the Mayfair witches who had long since been dead, and they were enough to cancel out the Calais spirits altogether.
"Antha," Nicolae called softly, keeping his ground some distance away, "It's always a possibility they're possessed. If you really want to save them---" and he assumed she did, for whatever purpose, since she had made no move against them yet, "We might as well disperse the spirits first."
Antha seemed to consider this, quietly, toying idly with the knife that had appeared like parlor magic in her hands. "I suppose it's no use trying to keep them for Atticus, is it?" she sighed, touching the silver hilt of the dagger to her lips.
Nicolae merely narrowed his eyes. "No," he said, flatly, "Let's just get this over with."
There came then a soft, disappointed sigh, followed instantly by a cruel twist of her lips as she brought the blade down into the palm of her hand, biting into her flesh, preparing to draw the first taste of blood. "Very well."  

[Okimiyage]

The blood that dripped from her hand made the girl-corpse of Mary smile, made the pool of blood under Liesse's feet race along the cracks in the the marble tile to join it.

Rynn smiled, "Yes. In hindsight, it was a terribly stupid idea. But it was a risk I was willing to take." And look how it had paid off.
The situation had an enormous amount of potential to be either very good or very unfortunate. And besides that, Rynn longed to witness the talent which held all of Osiris City in check. As much as he did not like to admit to it, he was enjoying himself. He'd always had something of a competitive nature, which was one of the reasons that he had been named the heir to the name rather than one of his older brothers succeeding the title. Anything that they could do, Rynn was determined to do better.

Liesse wrapped her arms around her waist and watched him silently. She was afraid, her twin was insane, and her brothers--well, she could feel the silent, seething heat of Erin's unhappiness from a mile off. She risked a glance at the shivering, crippled thing that was once her younger sister. Her hands hung at strange angles, limply dangling from the ends of her arms--evidence of the broken wrists they had given her to stop her fighting back.

Liesse wet her lips, and watched with concern as the Mayfair girl spilled her blood upon the floor. She could still recall the taste of Mary's blood, her heart some exotic fruit that had slid down her throat like ambrosia.

Rynn was planning something, she could feel it. The ancestors could, too. Liesse just--didn't know what. But they hung around him like a shroud, and their collective whispers were nearly deafening.

Erin said, softly, "It should be Rynn, by all rights, who dies here tonight." His eyes glittered, maliciously, through the stag's-head of his mask.