Path of the Vampire forum

Tizoc was and had been telepathic for the better part of two centuries of being a vampire. As an Allurist he had been instructed early on from his long gone and ash sire Eztli to manipulate the emotions of those around him. Tizoc had been an apt pupil, having been raised in a household which preached the way of the gods of likely the bloodiest religion the world had ever known when human, when one captured in war believed it an honor to die a warrior, stony-faced under the sacrificial blade of the enemy priest, control over emotions was natural. With the vampiric powers bestowed by Tezcatlipoca to each vampire as they each grew closer to the god of shadow it was a matter of him projecting the true emotions covered by Mexica stoicism onto those victims he chose. He learned to bestow upon them the mind numbing terror he had seen in the first Spaniard that had met this fate with their fear of dying, their fear of the wrathful judgement of their Christian God. Of Hell.

The gods of the Aztecs judged too. They favored those who ruled, who fought, who watered their constant need for blood spilled in their names even as the vampires worshipping them slaked their own thirst of the same. Those who fought, those who ruled, governed and those who devoted their lives to the gods teachings found the most honored of places in death. The Aztecs knew no fear of death. Not Eztli, not his prodigy. Others felt that. Tizoc helped them to.

Others lusted after women. They based their entire life around becoming wealthy enough to afford to have a wife and then their entire life trying to keep her. It showed the immense devotion of both to each other. To build a family in those times was to devote your lives to them. That devotion was deep in the elder, it was placed in the fickle hands of those same bloodthirsty gods. He learned to force that devotion into a human, to subvert their will. To make them so devoted that they would die by his hand with the same stoicism as the Aztec warriors.

Emotions were one thing.He felt at home with them, feeling them, hiding them, manipulating them. It was second nature to him. Learning to go deeper though, to enter the thoughts of another, that had required more instruction than mastering the known powers inherent in his very blood.

He had fallen in love with the ability. To be able to read someone’s life, to be able to project your own thoughts, memories, even images played like a movie into the mind of another, it was truly a sign of the powers granted to vampires by the god of darkness and illusion. This evolution from human to vampire had spanned centuries. He had witnessed so much. The changes and destruction of the land, his land, by the invading hordes of Europeans. They came in droves to escape persecution in their homelands, to conquer their own piece of the “new world”.They slaughtered tribes, they attacked villages. They brought diseases and wiped out entire peoples.

That hatred built of the desecration and annihilation of his people ran deep in the elder.

He had used these telepathic powers to find the hunters and destroyers of his new people, vampire hunters. Had he seen the hunters before the day New Orleans burned, he would have known them for what they were through these abilities and he could have stopped them. He could have turned them on one another. He could even have influenced the citizens of the city to turn on them in the streets. He could simply have been lying in wait and as they approached the plantation house owned by his namesake, influenced their minds or their emotions to have simply made them flee in terror, visions of their worst possible fears plaguing their minds for days. These powers would have saved ~her~. His Coahoma. He would not have seen the hunters, all European, hack at her with their bayonets to slash at her with their cruel blades. To stand over her and fire their guns into her. To stand over her and watch her beautiful face scream her terror in their faces, To watch her crumble to ash. To see the same thing happen to his friend and mentor of six years. To see hundreds of years of memories and love and knowledge fall under the hands of the hunters.

Yes, had he been as he was now, constantly appraising, reading what he can, manipulating those around him, none of that would have happened that day.

Had the Secrecy of their kind been upheld, Ambrose would not have lost them for that matter. If a human found out what you were, you had several options. Most of them cruel. To bring them into the world of the shadows, of Tezcatlipoca, to murder them, or to break their minds. When nobody knew of vampire, nobody had hunted vampires.

The vampires were known to the bloody priests of his era. They were thralls of the vampires, they were fed blood by vampires to make them more powerful, to bestow the powers of darkness upon willing mortals to be held up as sacrifices to the gods, or to rule the cities. It was a beneficial arrangement for all.

Then the invaders brought their religion here. Their Gods were different. Their rules odd and foreign. They made no sacrifices they said. Tizoc had seen differently. They sacrificed vampires. They had brought a purge to the New World that had culminated in the destruction of the vampire race. Secrecy was good when it kept one out of the reach of people like these European Holy Orders.

These things were facts to the elder. And a large part of what made him what and who he was. Withdrawn, secretive, manipulative to a fault, suspicious, and fearful. Fearful of another eternity in the limbo that was the belly of his greatest god, Tezcatlipoca. He did not fear death, only the afterlife of nothing, fading away bit by bit. Before he had broken free with the fissures tearing through the Fade that had been his reality. He had felt the ephemeral matter that had been his very soul slowly ebbing, waning, fading, siphoned away slowly into an abyss of nothingness.

His fear of this end was always there, ever present and the touch of the Realm, the touch of his god had lingered, remained with him even now.

This was the fate his love Coahoma, his sire Eztli, his friend Ambrose Acheron and dozens of his bloodline from ages past still suffered. If they were not gone entirely.

Tizoc didn’t feel badly about invading the thoughts of another to avoid that end. Nor to stop another of his kind avoid it. This being the case it was with a watchful eye that he perused the goings on around his injured thrall. The woman knew everything about the sacrifice chamber beneath the earth and everything that went on in it’s hallowed and bloody walls.

For these reasons, Tizoc had watched the woman being carted away through her own near unconscious mind. He had seen the blurry faces of the paramedics as she was carried from the scene. Tizoc had been keeping very careful tabs. There were marks on her flesh she bore that he had given and while she was completely enthralled by the old vampire, he was of the mind that caution was a virtue. He would not allow the discovery of his family to come for the sake of one thrall.

Moema had fallen, injured from a massive blow to the head delivered by the leader of the Disciples of Crow group the Acheron lineage had assaulted recently. She had been critically wounded by the assault and not knowing how to fix such extensive damage himself, had allowed the medics to cart her off. Now he watched through her eyes to ensure nothing struck the hospital people as unusual and if it did, he was prepared to venture out and end any potential damage done before it could affect their kind any further.

The ambulance bearing his Moema screeched through the night heading for the hospital.

Sitting behind the wheel of her gently used jaguar, the warmth of the seat heater a gentle reminder that outside was cold. Her hands gripped the wheel, knuckles whitening and then returning to colour as she relaxed. Not from anxiety... no, Noemi never felt that, believing it to be a burden thrust upon those poorly bred, lacking mental fortitude. It wasn't for nothing the fields and beasts had best been tended by such for thousands of years. There really were two class of people. Those with centuries of breeding and careful cultivation, and everyone else.

Breeding tells.

As a skilled surgeon she believed in base equality of course. Everyone deserved the best of care, the world needed every sort after all. So it was with only a slight exhalation of breath at the thought of brushing against those that oft disgusted her that she exited her car.

Sliding leather gloves over her fingers, adjusting the impeccably tailored Hermes coat dress to flow with flawless precision down the supple curves of her hips, she looked into the cars window to assure herself her hair was in its unwavering chignon.

Pleased with her scrutiny, she hit her car alarm and was already walking toward the Hospital as it beeped its duty. The hospital was large, fairly new, and well looked after. The board obviously doing as they should when it came to fund raising. Musing over the pros and cons of an overly active Hospital Board she nearly slid across a small patch of ice as the jarring sounds of an ambulance careened toward her. Catching herself she clenched her jaw against a flood of French curses, and waited as the bus finished its parking.

Dismissing the scrambling of the paramedics as she made to pass them by, she almost missed the blood soaked sheet and deathly palour of the victim they scurried to save. Interesting. Noemi hadn't seen wounds quite so extensive since the last Serbian conflict during her hands of mercy days.

Curious despite herself she leaned closer as she passed, the woman on the gurney pale beyond hope and worsening by the second.

Noemi moved like a cat, stepping between the paramedic and the wounded girl, curtly informing them she was a doctor and setting to work stabilizing the victim so she would have some hope in hell of seeing the inside of the ER alive. Minutes rushed by as her soft voice barked out orders, her hands flying of their own volition as decisions were made and executed before most could issue a breath. The gurney began to move again, Noemi's hands pressed expertly on the largest of wounds, her eyes scanning once again the extent of injury...

The girl was marked. Bitten. Noemi was sure of what those scars were... though she had never seen anyone so riddled with what had to be the result of fetish lifestyle. She leaned closer still as the ER doctors rushed forward, taking her temporary charge from her before she could catalogue all of those scars...

Left standing in the middle of the receiving room, the keen gaze of green flashed with barely concealed interest. Perhaps this place would not be such a hardship after all, not with mysteries like this...

Noemi waited a few minutes more and then turned to the lavatory to clean herself up and resume her treck to interview. She would most certainly be stopping to check in on the young woman, it wouldn't even seem odd as she was who stemmed the flow of blood and passed her on...

no, this place just might turn into exactly what she needed after all.

Standing outside the assault victims room, Noemi looked over the females chart. Moema was her name... it would look pretty on her headstone unless some talent got to the woman's head in time. Unfamiliar with the surgical staff here, the French doctor could only assume they were competent though that left a lot of openings for failure.

Noemi wasn't even sure why she cared really. She wouldn't start on the surgical staff until next week. Not her problem.

Flipping the clipboard back against the wall she made to turn and walk away. She hadn't taken a single step when she felt eyes on the back of her neck, which of course was ridiculous as the poor woman was in a chemical induced coma until the neurosurgeon was prepped and ready. Looking over her shoulder made her feel childish, but she did it regardless, she would self scold later. As she thought, Moema was alone in the room and safely under. Noemi shivered despite herself...

crossing her arms over her chest, and reclaiming her legendary aplomb, the angel faced killer walked toward the patient. It was just to take a better look at those odd scars, she told herself... and mostly believed...

just as she remembered, the patients skin had myriad odd markings and scarring in what would normally be well hidden areas, but hospital gowns left little to the imagination.

Straightening quickly, she put a few steps distance between herself and Moema, that feeling of danger was intensifying, causing a mild panic to develope between her brows. And that irritated her more than anything. Those brows lowered and a plump lip pursed as she regained that momentary retreat and continued to study the woman.

It probably was just exhaustion from the move, Adam had special needs, as did her laboratory, and it hadn't been as easy to rid herself of Isolde as first thought... who knew the old dear would cling to life so? But Noemi always got her way...

"Nurse." she said, the authority in her voice recognizable even to the dimmest of switches, and the rounds nurse passing by immediately jumped to it. "Yes Doctor?" she asked smoothly. Good, thought Noemi, a competent. "Has any family been notified of this patient, and have records been filled out? I would also like to know the resident Neurologist on call." almost as an after thought she added "Thank you." as the nurse moved into the room. "I'll check at records Doctor, but I've been on shift all evening and no one but you and staff have been in for her."

well now that wasn't unexpected, but even so it was a roadblock to overcome. Noemi wanted answers. She wasn't even sure why she wanted them, but a feeling deep inside told her it would aid her in great ways, her research, her Adam, even her very life...

and Noemi was never one to ignore her gut.

Nodding, Noemi turned to face the nurse as she left the room, ignoring the appraisingly blatant stare she received from the hen. She was used to such looks from women, it failed to even amuse anymore. The sounds of the ER seemed to pick up again as she walked through it, glancing at nothing, seeming lost in thought she made her way back to her car, and perhaps a regaining of her equilibrium.

She had the oddest taste in her mouth... like the memory of blood...

and it comforted her.

Tizoc's thrall was like a butterfly, fluttering in a fierce wind. Her master was telling her to remain conscious and she was raging against the darkness threatening to drive her down into it's depths. Her head throbbed and with each beat of her heart shot whiteness across her vision. The pain was unbearable, she wanted to sink into the darkness, to feel comforting numbness overtake her and to just not be there. Instead, the command of Tizoc drives her to fight for the last thing she wants.

The heavy-lidded, near closed chocolate colored eyes of Moema roamed back and forth behind near-shut lids. He brain didn't register what she was seeing enough to remember it. Flurry, snippets here and there and soon forgotten fragments of her surroundings flitted through her mind. The other presence within her head though... it's rapt attention was now focused on the woman, the doctor. She had been examining Moema differently than the others had. She was not worried about the same things. Tizoc narrowed his eyes in the darkness of the sacrifice chamber.

He rose from his kneeling position, turning away from the body laid out on the stone altar before him. She knows too much. She is too curious. She must be dealt with, thought the old vampire. She could become one of them, hunters. Paranoia rises up within the vampire, the thrum of the Darkness, the shadowy taint from the Realm of his master sings in his veins and madness tugs at his mind once more. Kill her, I must kill her. She knows. She looks at Moema and somehow she knows...

There are other ways. She is not yet a hunter.

Kill her, turn her, or simply break her mind with illusion? Enthrall her when Moema inevitably dies of her injuries? Tizoc needed to know who she was. What did she do? What threat did she pose? He had found that the body fixers or today were afforded a great deal of respect and demanded steep payment for their services. They were considered important. He could not just make her disappear like the ones in the sewers, the caverns, even the slums. The police officers would come looking to detain him. Then everything would get messy. Surely she would be of some use to him as a thrall.

She was not Native to this land though. Another invader in a long line of invaders, The vampire thought for a moment and then decided he would get a look at the woman first hand. From there he would figure what to do. The old vampire makes his way toward the fade portals. He will go and she this woman. Perhaps she will even see him.

The portal has him stepping out near the train station, a convenience he could never have fathomed in days long past. A marvel of the modern age to him still. Even though trains were around before his death they did not run under the earth, nor did they work to pull people around a city. They were for going from one side of the country to the other and were mostly used to transport goods. One of many marvels. Depressing marvels which stood atop the bones of his people and many other tribes' people.

As the venom fills Tizoc's mind, as the train shuttles him toward the hospital, as he thinks on how to rid himself of this new threat Moema's eyes open and focus directly on Dr. Noemi Michaux. Her voice, broken and full of pain, but stronger than it has any right to be judging but the semi-conscious state she was clinging to rolls forth from her tongue.

"He comes."

Then Moema is blessedly plunged under a tidal-wave of inky blackness and knows no more.

"He comes" spoken softly enough had Noemi been even one step further from the patient, she might not have heard it. As it was the words stopped her mid stride. Turning to see if perhaps the nurse had somehow slipped back into the room behind her, the doctor was unsurprised to see no one but the injured woman.

The injured woman was staring right at her, against all possibilities and medical reason.

Even as shock registered through Noemi's momentarily stalled mind, her feet began moving her toward the bedside. Something slipped through the patients eyes, something almost oily and alive. Slithering like a molten liquid through the chocolate brown of Moema's iris. Caught in the woman's gaze, Noemi was taken aback as a certainty took root in her brain. The eyes staring at her from that hospital bed seemed ancient, like looking into the still pools of water deep in the forests of her home in France. Almost as if that fantastical Lady of the Lake were about to rise from the depths of those orbs to bestow a horrible knowledge and even more horrible power upon the unsuspecting.

Undaunted will forged through years of discipline straightened the doctors spine, her fingers stroked once, gently over a womans hand who should for all intents and purposes be close to brain dead... yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessss....

Clarity shot through Noemi, so strong it blocked all sound and any other thoughts from the brilliant turnings of her mind. She was sure of what she had seen, though the comatose patient was once again lost to the world, eyes slipped closed, pale skin ashen and lackluster against the stark white of the hospital sheets. Something had pushed this womans brain to a momentary awareness, some THING, because Noemi was sure there was no medical explanation for what she was witnessing.

This, this was what she had been searching for. This was what would answer all of her questions, triumph over all her failures. This was her key toward mastering death. Overcoming it. She was sure of it.

But how to harness it? Study it? This woman's brain was scrambled and unsavable unless the lottery of medical wonders gave her a God for a neurosurgeon.

So caught up in her musings as she was, it never occured to Noemi to feel afraid. It never occured to her she should perhaps turn, and walk away, never looking back and drink this memory into a tidal wave of wine and darkness. Fear was alien to the darkness of her mind in any event, so it wasn't even missed as she settled into a chair next to Moema, pulling her tablet from her briefcase to begin the hurried taking of notes.

'Adam...' she thought, her fingers stilling as she clicked send on her tablet, moving her notes toward the files of her home computer. 'I will not fail you again my child. You WILL live.'
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A clock ticked off the seconds as they passed, the antique a sentinel for the Michaux family, generations now. Faithful as it was beautiful, it kept watch over the room as it always had, and always would. The soft sounds of it's steadfast march seemed to slow, as the air became somehow thicker, ominous, as if being sucked from the atmosphere leaving a deafening void.

The sheet covered form laid with care upon a metal table was still, unmoving and cold. No flicker of life, no presence that alerted a body that someone else was sharing their space. Patient. Waiting. For her....

Waiting for Noemi...

Waiting for the veil to be lifted from the unborn necromancers eyes.

“Re-animation… to see dead bones stir… You can make it happen… I can help…” The words slide into Neomi’s mind, the feeling one akin to oil, leaving a residue tainted with evil but promising the forbidden fruit she has labored for for so long. There is no confusing it with the spoken tongue, it is her own thought spoken by another. “To the south… a factory. It sits abandoned by the Train station… what you seek resides within, deep within the earth… ancient… immortality… It can be yours.”

The threat of the rogue hunter who had been plaguing the city dealt with, Tizoc has nothing pre-occupying him outside of the concerns of his Brood. This woman already sensed the trouble with Moema, somehow had sensed him. He could see through the eyes of his thrall at will and what he had seen was of great concern.

He spoke into Moema’s mind and the thrall sat bolt upright staring into Neomi’s eyes. Her voice comes out through the pain, teeth gritted together even as she speaks repeating the words that crash into her own mind, her will to do his bidding stronger than the pull of death which was threatening to drag her out of his power, out of his reach, out of this world. “There is a price… the heart… the blood. What are you willing to… pay?”

Moema slipped into unconsciousness the instant the last word slipped from her lips. It is in that instant a man enters the scene, his powerfully built frame appearing in the doorway.

With a glance to Moema he turns his attention to the doctor, his eyes appraising her as if weighing her very soul.

Tizoc burrows deep into her memories as he watches her from behind eyes that resemble less a human’s gaze and more that of a shark.

It should have struck him as strange. Those words, they had followed the Europeans from their cursed lands. but in the upstart nation supplanted in his homeland, this Canada, this... America, this... Mexico... it had fallen out of favor. The woman's accent he recognized instantly. In New Orleans he had heard it often enough. French. A clean accent, not bastardized like the ones who spoke it around the city he now called, but still did not think of, as home. Though his gaze remained stony the words set a fire to something within. Flashes of his past flitted through his head, memories. He let them slip away like smoke in a breeze. The moment, the now, mattered.

He looked to his mortally wounded thrall. She had laid down her life in battle against the hated defilers of the spirit world. Vampire disciples following a human Prophet of Crow who wished to bring the horrors of the Shadow Realm and visit them upon the physical like the woman who stood before him's ancestors had done to his people with their "civilization". The thought of both left a sour taste in his mouth. Moema had earned her gentle death. Tizoc had been forcing her to cling to the last vestiges of her fading life. She was likely beyond medical aid even now without him pushing his will into her, driving her to fight.

Looking away he withdrew the bond between them, severing it and freeing her. Then he looked to the doctor as the screens told the tail of a mortal soul passing from the mortal realm and into whatever afterlife waited to greet them.

"You will meet me at the factory in Newborough, the one closest to the subway station. Tell no one. Bring nothing with you. Tomorrow after the sun has taken it's leave and the moon has shown her face."

The man turns without another word and walks off down the hallway without a backward glance.

Tizoc Yayauhqui, childe of Eztli, who bequethed death and rebirth to him beneath a waning crescent moon was born on the exact opposite phase, the waxing gibbous moon. The moon had been swelling, fighting away the shadows of the Night time sky while his mother birthed him and it had been dying, falling into shadows as he did the same under the fangs of the Necuratist elder vampire. It was thought a child born when the moon was pregnant was a blessing to his parents. The vampires of the Tozoztontli line which he descended from believed the same about a siring rite performed when the moon faded from the sky, giving way to the power of their lord Tezcatlipoca as it receded into the darkness.

Tizoc had sired his childer Vega, Machk and Kika under a waxing crescent, just as the moon had began to reveal her face once more. He intended to do the same one more if this one was worthy. Otherwise her death would be a tribute to the revisitation of the moon goddess to the world, shedding light into the darkness which he and all other vampires inhabited. In a way his choice of timing reflected his distaste for his sire. He disagreed with the older vampire on many things. His attacks on the Spanish had been done in ways that led the enemy to their doorstep, his method of punishing his childer and their childer and theirs was excessively brutal and at times seemed without cause. Tizoc had never questioned the elder though. It was not his place. Eztli had been the one to gift him to the Smoking Mirror and to plea for his return. He had paid for it in blood.

It would be wrong to judge such a creature.

These nights there were no elders of his lineage. While Tizoc was in some ways an elder, having survived a span of centuries, he had been sealed away for half of that time in the Realm of the Night god, the place where the fallen warrior Kitchi awaited rebirth.

A cyclical existence which would carry on it's course until the end of the fourth age.

Looking back now on the night of the 21st of June, Tizoc realized he had acted with haste. He did not regret his choices to turn the three of his line however. There was no use in wishing the past to differ from the course it wad already taken. Perhaps though in retrospect he should have waited, established himself. He should have made sure to stay with them those first nights when the thirst burned brightest, seemingly unquenchable, gut knotting and burning in the throat of the newly turned vampires like fire.

Still, they had suffered through their initial ordeals and slowly they were returning. Relationships may be strained but they were mending the rift between them much as the rends made to their flesh from his ritual to create them had mended.

Time. Such a simple concept. Time. Actions with would happen, happening, then they had happened. Such a simple immutable thing. For something that could not be changed it brought great changes with it's passing.

The vampire stand within the shadows, deep within the factory, a living statue, not breathing, not shuffling or fiddling. None of the typical signs of a living breathing being to give away his presence come from the man who could for all intents and purposes be a statue for the moment. He watches the woman who entered gather her composure. He gives her, for this moment in time, that small gift. Time. He could fly across the distance at her, a blur of motion which would end in her demise but instead, he waits. He will not be hasty. He reaches out instead of with gnarled hands, with him mind, probing patiently through her memories.

She is definitely naturally inclined toward the Path of the Necromancer, he thinks. The moon is a fitting phase, returning the light from the darkness of it's death. All he needs now is a portent, an omen. He continues watching the most intimate and important moments of the woman's life from the shadows, a silent, unseen voyeur in the depths of what will, one way or another be her grave.

The only question is for how long?

Time, so simple a thing, yet so very important.