Dream, Damion (Theophany)
The village is covered with a smoky haze, and burning homes light the nightscape in a hellish red glow. Ash flies everywhere, a grey, powdery snow lit by glowing embers that carry the blaze from thatched roof to thatched roof. Most of the dying men's groaning and weeping is over now, as they leak their lives into the mud, but the women's screaming goes on as the pirates gang-rape girls, maidens and mothers. The night is filled with drunken shouts, women's shrieks, and hopeless sobbing. Figures dart to and fro, silhouetted against the burning houses, looking like mad, cavorting demons with swords and torches.
Under the scent of fear, pain and fire flows the heavy, sweat perfume of blood.
Damion is driven like a possessed soul by that dark perfume - starving, crazy, searching the wreckage for anything alive, anything he can sink his fangs into and steal the life from. But everywhere he goes the pirates, his comrades in arms, have been there first, leaving nothing but the toxic waste of dead blood behind. Men lie curled around their spilled intestines, women lie with their skirts hitched over naked, spreadeagled legs, impaled by some drunken rapist's dagger, children lie with their skulls caved in, brains splattered over the walls, bodies in the looted wreckage of their homes. But nothing remains alive. There is no blood to slake his raging thirst.
The thirst tears at him, claws at his bowels like some small, starving beast, stretching up to rake tiny talons down the inside of his throat. Damion staggers, an addict without his fix, the need to drink so great that he is almost ready to savage the corpses around him, to rip the flesh of his own wrists, just to satisfy the craving. But wait - he smells something alive, something moving between two of the outlying houses. Like some feral beast Damion attacks, fingers digging into the human's shoulders, yanking the hapless victim close to his chest as though they were passionate lovers.
"Korv -"
The voice - familiar. The scent - familiar. The face - familiar. Damion's fingers dig harder into the woman's shoulders as he recognizes his mother, the human healer who sheltered and cared for him and raised him as her own. One of the few ever to perceive the goodness behind his dark, inhuman skin.
A surge of guilt stings his throat, coils like a cold snake around his heart. What sort of beast has he become, to attack his own mother? What sort of monster, to help raze his own village?
Tears run down his mother's face, glistening in the firelight of her burning home as Beverly Sunspear sobs and stares helplessly up at her son. With a howl of remorse, Damion buries his fangs into her neck and feeds on her life. He is a monster. He is a vampire.
