The 28th Night

The 28th Night Destler lied, the fired lasted for three days. Three days of terror, of sheer and abject panic. The Vampric Beast is a creature of impulse of primal instinct. It responds to urges, fight or flight. It thrives on Hunger, Anger, Vice and Fear. Fire is the Beasts Bane, our Bane. And of all the Vampires in the existence, we Khaibit are the most terrified of Fire. I knew Destler. I knew the man’s works. Even while he was busy driving me into a mind numbing insanity he was doing it with a point. There was always method in the melevolence. The first step in his training was to break the psyche, to make them malleable to the lessons. It was easier for him back when I was a neonate. I barely knew the rules then. But that was the better half of a century ago. This was going to take time to break me down. Of course, I also knew him well enough to know that that was pretense. This was Revenge. I left him for dead in a burning building, he’s returning the gesture in kind. After the Third Day, the training began. I was trapped. Closed off in Destler’s gs chamber. The only light and means of escape came from a lucite window revealing a brightly lit room with the furniture casting deep shadows. Destler’s puzzle was simple: the Khaibit controlled and manipulated Shadows. One trick was to step into one Shadow and appear in another. It was one that I had never learned, and Destler was forcing the issue. The first few days I think of as a montag, the stupid attempts, focusing on one of the shadows and trying to will myself there, running into the dark corners to use the shadows , manipulating them crafting them or the shadows in the next room. All attempts failed. I expended so much blood those first few days, burning myself to the brink of starvation. Vitae, the magic that lies within the blood of all living beings, is what keeps us from being Corposes when the sun goes down.. The night I run out of Vitae will be my last as a walking, talking monster. I didn’t want that. Destler, true to his word, fed me when I needed it. My blood is too strong to feed off of animals. I required the blood of humans, at the least. Destler found them for me. A slat in my darkened cell (one of the ones I was sure originlly housed one of those fire nozzles) would slide open, producing an arm. It was too dark, even with my night vision, to make out the details. Gender and Race were irregardless when I needed to slake my need for blood. I fed, and I fed deeply. I am sure without a doubt that I have killed in that night. I am not a fan of killing, not without a pupose. Survival is the greatest purpose I could think of. Survival is what drove me throughout my mortal life a century before. Despite my assurances, the sweet blood felt bitter in my mouth. Finally, I began to train on my own. When I first began Destler’s tutelage last century, he taught me various martial arts forms and styles, many of which focused on my strengths: blunt force trauma. He taught me patterns of movement, means of making me more efficient in my strikes. Destler gave my actions focus, refining my violence. I was doing one of those forms, practicing, training-Destler seemed to approve of that, Idleness was rewarded with fire- when it suddenly occurred to me just how to step through shadows. It was the simplest thing in the world to just see my destinatio, the shdow in the fr corner of the well lit room and step through the darkened cell to it. No one mentioned what Shadow Stepping felt like from the inside. On the Outside, it just looks like someone walks into one shadow and walks out of another in the rea. Destler is the only Khaibit I’ve ever met though (Though the Sheriff of Oneonta wasn’t surprised to see me move Shadows around. I’ll have to follow up with that if ever get out of here) and he never once warned me about how cold it all was. One of the things I had forgotten about was to shut off my nightvision, leaving me stuck in the middle of a painfully white room. I braced myself against the steel table. Pain was a fact, not a sensation for vampires. However, that was the single most important fact in my head at this point. The pain died down slowly. And that’s when I heard Destler laugh, “If it makes you feel better,” he said. “I made the same mistake when I first learned the to go through the dark.” It didn’t. I told him as much as I grabbed the steel table in the room. I hadn’t exactly noticed that the whole thing had been bolted to the floor. It didn’t matter much in the end, as I wrench it clear out of the floor and hurled it towards Destler. My mentor. My tormentor. The table went through him, literally through him and clattered in a heap on the floor behind him. The man standing before me was a walking shadow, a being of inky darkness taking up height, width and depth. Baleful red eyes glowed at me, narrowed. “One would think a month would have cooled your blood.” That stopped me. A month? Had it already have been a month? “28 Days,” he said. “The moon has waxed and waned since your instruction began.” Something worked itself inside me. Surely, in the span of a month, my Family would have been aware of my disappearance and would have reacted somehow. Surely my Sire, Genevieve, would have sensed me through our blood bond. I’d frenzied, starved, raged. And through her the other members of House Asteria, the vampiric childers and a grandchilders of three siblings were all tied into one another through the connecting (and addicting) power of the blood. I was most likely still in New York, Destler as far as I knew had no other holdings. So they would have to be on the look out for me. Wouldn’t they? They’d know by now that I was gone, tortured. So either I was out of their reach completely...or they didn’t make the attempt to look for me. Why wouldn’t they look for me? The thought had no basis, didn’t it? I’d been with my family, always. Why wouldn’t they look for me? Why… My eyes moved towards Destler, the darkened void with his infinite fucking patience. Did he know how much I hated him? Was he even capable of comprehending my hatred of him? His face was obscured, but his posture and voice screamed the patient teacher, “Tell me, Owen. How do you feel right now.” Part of me wished to retort with a snide comment, or to try my hand to slam the two chairs until he decides to come out of his form. But I was tired, and I was confused, and I was angry. “Cold,” I said. “I feel cold.”