Deeper into the underground chambers Jane led Reggio, following a long hallway, the walls reaching up more than fifty feet to the ceiling, with torches hanging above them, set every fifteen feet or so to light the path. She had already explained briefly to him that no one there was mortal, that they were all Witches, but none of it meant anything to him. It only served to confuse him further. He seemed interested in finding these things out, but she could see on his face that he could not make much sense of it. After a while of listening, though, he finally asked a question.
“So why is everyone around here so nervous… so fearful?” He asked. “Is it just because you are all witches? Because if it is, you do not seem anything like the rest of them. Jade seems too proud to be afraid of anything, and she comes off rather arrogantly. And that short girl, or witch, that Jade chased away, she showed no signs of fear, only a strange…” He shrugged his shoulders, “Something I can’t place. But you, you are different than all of them. You seem to……..”
It seemed for a moment that he was just going to keep talking, but as Jane began to laugh, he stopped and looked at her. “Did I say something wrong?” He asked her.
“No.” She told him, trying to stop her laughter, but was still smiling at him. “Your enthusiasm amuses me. That is all. I am glad to see that you wish to learn about us, but you still have much, very much, to understand before you are able to, if you can understand that. Not everyone here will be as forth giving with information as I. Others here, because of the situation we are in, may even look upon your curiosity as pure espionage.”
“If that is bad, I mean no harm with my questions.” He waved his arms to emphasize his innocence. “I just want to learn about everything I can, I always have, and this is the first chance I have ever had, in all my years following this river, to actually be taught something by someone else.”
“And taught you will be.” Jane told him, smiling again. “We have a huge library with all of our history written in countless volumes of books. And they are all at your disposal.”
She had a gut feeling that he would be excited to hear that, which he seemed to be, but the question that followed was one she should have expected as well.
“That sounds great.” He told her happily. “But… what are books?”
“I will show you.” She said as she laughed again, forgetting for a moment who he was. “For some reason I have a feeling you will have no problems reading them.”
Reggio looked at her oddly, getting confused again. He wanted to ask what reading was, but as Jane looked back at him with a look of sheer joy across her face, nothing else seemed to matter.
“Why do you look at me like that, like you…?” Reggio wasn’t quite able to put into words what he saw upon her face.
“I am just happy to teach the ways of witchkind to a vampire.” Jane told him with a smile. “You will be the first one to ever listen, the first to actually care. Your kind is usually so stubborn, but you seem to be different, much like you say of me. I can see you doing great things in the future, as long as you can stay on the correct path, of course. If not, those great things could become equally as damaging.”
“Well…. how will I know what path is correct? How will I know I am doing good things?” He asked as they began walking down the long hallway again. “And exactly what kind of path are you talking about…wooded, mountainous?”
Jane laughed helplessly at his innocence.
“How is this correct path found?” He kept asking, prompting her to stop him.
“Those are things that only you will be able to answer, in time, of course.” She told him. “I can only do so much for you. But the best way for you to have a chance at surviving the future is to know and understand the past.”
“Yes, of course.” Reggio said. “Please continue, then. What is this that I have walked into?”
She chuckled shamefully as she answered him. “A war that never should have begun in the first place,” She put it simply, and then began to explain more thoroughly. “To understand our predicament you must first understand us. We are a peaceful race, we truly are, not fury bent on waging war like the mortals. And they are a completely different story. But we live upon this earth to protect it, not to destroy it. That was our sole mission. I am saddened to say, though, that not all witches were like this. But like most intelligent species it seems, not all of them think in the same way. And some of them wish to seek power and rule over others, turning their own views into rules and casting them down as law upon all of civilization. It seems to happen far too often, and all throughout time. But those witches, the deviants of our kind, they gave our entire race a bad name. Thus, because of their misdeeds, and a stigma that was placed upon our entire species, we were forced out of the old world where we lived peacefully for millions of years, for reasons that none of us will ever truly be content with. So, after more than a year at sea following the maps of the mortals, searching for some form of land, we found this place, this swamp. With nowhere else to go we immediately deemed this new land our new home. But we would soon find out that this place and everything about it was not what it seemed to be at first. Over time we found that there was something strange about this place. It began to drive some of us insane, some of them being leaders of our kind. And others began to develop new powers, as if this place was literally drawing something out of them that not even they knew they had, and causing many of those to suddenly crave that power, when before they did not. Plans had been in motion to undo all of that, though, until you… you know what?” She stopped herself, “Never mind all that. I’m getting ahead of myself.”
She took a moment to back up a bit. “Where was I?” Then she continued, “Ah, yes… So, as our old leadership began to fall apart, two would stand up to take control and bravely lead the survivors of our kind into this new and unknown future. They would come to be known as the king and queen of this new land. The first few months were the toughest we had witnessed in a very long time, but as we built a place to live and began traveling around the area, we found that we were not at all alone here. We found a settlement of mortals to the west of us and, to our amazement, a group of native witches living beyond them, farther to the west, where, to my complete surprise, I found a couple of familiar faces that were believed to be lost forever.”
Reggio’s head tilted sideways as he looked at her funny. Then he blurted out in question, “I’m guessing Chelsia was one of them?”
Jane, in turn, looked sideways at him, and her words seemed to be more pleased than surprised, “What would make you say that?”
The unknowing vampire just smiled at her and shrugged his shoulders, “You told me she was your very old friend, and you spoke it with a certain tone, and just now you used that same tone again.”
“Interesting,” Jane mumbled as she took in his response, almost disappointed about the logical response he had given. She was definitely hoping for something more, but she went on, regardless, never really acknowledging if he was right or wrong. “Yes… well, those two were the ones to help us learn about the dangers of our new environment, an environment that we were not at all accustomed to. So, with our new leadership in place, and with the new knowledge we had acquired, we were finally allowed to get on with our normal lives, although it was a new kind of normal that we all needed time to get used to. And as more time passed it became very apparent that our normal lives of old would never return to us. This swamp began to take an effect on us all, but some more so than others.”
“Yeah, you already mentioned that.” Reggio cut in, but it hardly broke her rhythm.
“Right… well, our new and self proclaimed queen decided to deem herself the ‘mother’ of this land, claiming she had ‘become one’ with it. She began putting together a new group of minds to take care of it, mostly consisting of the elders that we had already taken from power, and some of the older native witches. In doing this she completely neglected the youth of our kind, the young warriors that were promised the future, and suddenly th
e elders were not so willing to give that future up, instead moving to protect it for themselves, as they so often did throughout the past. And this was all done against the wishes of her mate, King Orleans, who had wanted the youth of our kind to be given the roles of leadership. He understood that those young warriors were the future of our kind and that the elders had held them back for long enough. These disagreements would begin to sever the relationship of the king and queen, thus severing the bond that our kind had held onto for so long, like a knife slowly slicing through the fabric of our very race, splitting us in two. And for the first time in our history, as far as I know it, a rebellion was becoming unavoidable.”
“King Orleans suddenly found himself powerless to stop his wife, the self proclaimed Mother, and began keeping mostly to himself. He believed she had gone too far, and he was not alone. Many of the youths felt the same way as he, not wanting to follow blindly behind the orders of some witch gone mad. And these witches would begin spending all of their time with Orleans, completely shunning the Mother, and eventually moved themselves completely out of the mansion to show their disapproval. They refused to be seen with anyone that even remotely believed the nonsense the Mother was preaching, and began an upheaval of power amongst us.”
She pointed behind them. “And these renegades, this growing group of rebels, were actually led by your new friend Jade and a young warwalker named Marigny, a warlock that King Orleans had raised like a son since his youth-hood, as well as myself, and we were soon joined outside the mansion by the king himself, who was finally fed up enough to leave his mate. We stood proudly against the Mother in protest for many weeks, just trying to make things fair for us all, but her newfound insanity gave her the nerve to strip Orleans of all his powers of leadership. She then declared us all enemies of ‘her’ kind, as if we were not even of the same breed anymore. These outrageous comments were taken as truth by all that still followed her, though never by us, and on that same night we were run off into the swamp by our own kind, putting us all out on our own. I suppose she expected us to just die out here by ourselves, but our new leaders, King Orleans and Marigny, led us bravely into the unknown, the sheer majesty of this wet land. After living within it those first few days we quickly found it to be a place of strange wonder and awkward brilliance. There was, and obviously still is, something about this place that seems to avoid our understanding, even to our wisest minds. In the beginning, though, it was all about survival. Days of constant rain thwarted all of our efforts to build some sort of shelter and constantly led us deeper and deeper into the swamp. But then, one day as it stormed down upon us, the clouds threatening to drown us all, we stumbled upon a strange bridge, built by material that none of us were familiar with. We then found ourselves following a trail that was almost carved into the swamp. It was all grown over with various vegetations, clearly not having been used in some time, but definitely a trail made by someone who had been here before us. And that trail led us right through the overhanging moss of the large tree you, yourself, entered through earlier tonight, and into these underground chambers where we are walking right now.”
“That’s, uh, pretty amazing.” Reggio told her, trying his best to understand it.
Jane smiled back at him. “Yes, it is quite amazing, I suppose. The chambers were abandoned when we arrived, completely empty. We weren’t even able to find a single trace of anyone ever being here, no signs of who they were or what happened to them. Those torches on the wall, though, lit up all on their own upon our entrance and have not gone out since, so we have no idea who built it or how they actually managed to do it. I mean, how they built all this beneath a swamp is beyond me. But regardless, we just settled in and began to call it home.”
“So, now…? Do I…?” he stuttered with his words. “Is this…?”
“Yes, Reggio, now you may call it home, as well, as long as you do not mind a few nasty glares being shot in your direction until everyone gets used to you.” Jane told him. “And now that you know a little more about how the survivors of our kind were split into two groups, being reduced to a ridiculous war between a love sick king and a queen gone mad, maybe you can understand better how adding a vampire into a group of paranoid witches may cause them to be a little pessimistic about you at first.”
“Yes, I suppose I understand.” He told her. “But why do I keep getting called a vampire? Am I not the same as all of you?”
Jane smiled delightfully. “Not quite, Reggi.” She said to him. “And that explanation may get a bit more confusing, but I will try my best to simplify it for you, if you would like.”
“Please,” he told her, “Because I cannot see the difference between us.”
She laughed briefly before beginning, knowing that this was a very complex explanation that he may not understand. “Now, as I said, this can be complicated to explain, mostly because the truth of our origins is still a mystery,” she began, “But when I speak of Witchkind, I speak of all supernatural beings with intelligent thought. And by supernatural beings, I mean beings with powers beyond the mortal’s ‘natural’ ability of explanation. Before them, none of these names even existed. So if you can think of Witchkind as a tree, it may be easier to understand. All of the branches would be different categories of supernatural beings, each with their own unique qualities. This list includes Witches, like myself and Jade, Wizards, like the one that Jade was speaking with before I got her attention, and Warlocks, like Marigny. But those are only the core of our breed, the larger branches from which smaller branches extend from. Those smaller branches are mostly extinct, but they would include Sorcerers and Sorceresses, Temptresses, Alchemists, Mages, Lycanthrope, and yes, even Vampires, just to name a few. And just as each branch extending from a tree is different from the next, so are all of the different breeds, or races, of Witchkind, though we are all believed to descend from the same bloodline, or extend from the same tree, if that is easier to understand.”
“Yes, I believe it is.” Reggio confirmed.
“Good,” the witch nodded before continuing, “Because the ancient past is something that is often disputed. Not everyone believes it to be as I do, and not even I can explain the logic behind my beliefs. But as I see it, we are all no different than any other species upon this earth. Every species descends from a single bloodline and evolves over time, splitting and diverging along the way, and only the strongest are able to survive. We, though, unlike any other, have been blessed with a blood, an understanding, and a power much richer than any other species left on this Earth, one that does not need to evolve like the other species. We also have a better understanding of the world around us than others, due to our length of life, something, I am afraid, that you will have to deal with yourself one day. It can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. But that’s me getting off the subject again.”
She laughed before going on, “Witches know things about this world, our Terra, that no other species would even dare to understand, and facts about this life that could drive any other race completely insane. But we have also learned to harness powers that no other species could ever dream of wielding. And those powers are different for every different breed, or branch of our species, each having come from a different part of Terra and being taught different forms of magic or sorcery or simply being born with certain abilities. We have grown much like the mortals have, expanding from our place of birth and populating the land as we spread out across it, learning all we could along the way and passing it down to future generations. And today we are still learning. None of us had ever thought that our blood had reached out this far across the ocean, to this strange land, but it has. These different environments change us over time, no differently than time has changed the mortals. We all come in different colors and sizes, each having our own way of speech, and with none of us knowing about the other for many millennia. Some races are stronger than others, while others are faster than the strong, with others, still, being smarter than the both of them. So
me races specialize in building kingdoms and cities, while others are more adept at tearing them down. And this goes for both witch and mankind. Neither of us is perfect. Nothing ever is. The only thing we all have in common is the ground we all walk upon. Other than that, humans and witches can never get along. They are selfish and full of greed, but in some ways now, we are no different. Each race serves its purpose, I suppose, but ours is simple… ours is the protection of our Terra and every bit of its splendor, something the mortals do not mind destroying.” She growled under her breath, “And the mortals, I tell you, are the doom of this world. But they are not what I was talking about. I seem to have strayed a little bit into my own personal feelings. Where were we? Ah, yes, the differences between you and I. Well, to begin with, I seem to be taller than you.” She looked over at him with a joking smile on her face.
“That… was… a joke, right?” Reggio asked, the air around him growing suddenly thick and his voice becoming raspy.
“That is right!” she said excitedly. “You are learning already.”
“But I…. just want to know…. who I am.” It was clear that something was bothering him.
Jane looked at him strangely for a moment as they took a right down a connecting hallway, but after he smiled at her, she just kept talking. “Who you are is something you must find out on your own… but what you are can be explained, at least to an extent. What you are, Reggio… is a vampire. As a whole, we are a dying species… but you, Reggi, you are of a nearly extinct race. The vampire culture has suffered from century’s worth of neglect and war and there are now very few that are still alive today. The survivors can only hide themselves in the shadows of reality in order to simply stay alive. They have a much easier time blending in with the mortals for some reason, but are hardly even a fragment of what they once were. They used to travel in packs, like wolves, and used to reign terror across the entirety of the old world, trying to mold it into their own creation, just as so many other races have tried to do, with none of them ever coming so close to victory as the vampire race once did. But now each vampire has been reduced to a life of solitude, at least as far as we believed, although many were there to help run us out of the old world on that night five years ago. Before that night, we have not had any real contact with them since the first evolution of mankind, when the Great Thousand Years War began. Since then, we have only fought against them, something I care not to remember or experience again. Their extraordinary powers give them a decisive advantage in battle. Their powers of regeneration make them extremely difficult to defeat. But their one weakness, besides the sun, may be their hunger. Besides that, we hardly know anything about them. They have done well in shrouding their past in secrecy. But after fighting against them for so long, we have learned ways to combat them. For instance, a wizard not too long ago, in our last battle with them, he discovered that if a vampire is fed a sick mortal, one with a terminal illness, it will affect the vampire and ultimately… they become stripped of all their… strength…” Jane’s voice was trailing off as she watched Reggio. It seemed as if he were not paying any attention at all. He looked as if he was fighting just to remain standing.
Then, as he looked at her and forced a smile onto his face, his instincts not allowing him to let her know of his true pain, all of his muscles seemed to fail at once. His head felt as heavy as a thunderclap and his chin dropped to his chest. Then his arms seemed to both fall limp at once, dropping to his sides as he stumbled over and slammed into the wall. Jane, sensing that something was wrong, rushed over to his side as he used the wall to hold himself up, the stone cold against his palm.
“What is wrong?” She asked him, talking fast and sounding genuinely concerned.
Reggio could not reply, though, his lips too weighted to even sound out any words. Sweat was pouring down his face like a waterfall as his right leg suddenly gave out and he dropped down to one knee, still leaning against the wall. Jane bent down to look into his now bloodshot eyes and asked him once again, “Reggio, what the fury is wrong?”
He didn’t reply that time either, and his vision was now beginning to retreat away from him as well.
He managed to find the strength to grab onto Jane’s wrist, though, and squeezed it as hard as he could, his hand shivering against her flesh.
“Reggio, when was the last time you fed?” She asked him as she felt that he was hardly putting any pressure on her wrist at all.
Reggio knew it had been weeks before feeding on those mortals earlier, but that was no cause for what was happening to him. He knew it had to be that dirty blood from that sick old man. It was doing something to him and he was not able to tell Jane. He figured her assumption was close enough though, as his muscles grew weaker. He could have tried to feed on her to try and counter the blood that was being rejected by his body, but he didn’t even let the thought cross his mind. Instead, he used up the last of his strength to nod his head ever so slightly, right before collapsing face first onto the cold, hard floor at Jane’s feet.
“Damn it!” She cursed aloud as she reached down and grabbed him up off the ground. “Right when I get him frening back!” She then draped him over her shoulder with a grunt, showing surprising strength as she ran back down the hallway they had just turned away from as fast as she could. “You’re not dying on me this time! I didn’t even get a chance to tell you about Heather.”
Chapter 5 - Learning