Path of the Vampire forum

Title: Watery Blood
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Characters: Caspian, Fletcher

Caspian must post first, outlining a story on the following theme (feel free to get creative):

Setting: A water-logged farmland trail
Backstory: The group happened upon one another by chance (some or all characters).
Occurance: [character 1] has been wounded to the point of near death
Variable: Caspian is naked for some reason.

Participants: 2
ARES: no
Speed: very slow
Chapter: no
Minimum Words Per Post: none
Maximum Words Per Post: none

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This thread was generated via the Roleplay Matchmaking System.

The farmhouse is as tired as the landscape: dreary and winter-beaten. It sits there in grey and oaty hues that sink into the swollen belly of the river. The Jones Family have been producing wheat and dairy products on the farm for over a hundred years. Charles, Marie, and their two daughters, Sophie and Jojo, are the current living occupants. Today is Sophie’s twenty-first birthday and she isn’t about to celebrate like a country mouse.

Sophie sets her eyes on the city. It’s all about the bright lights, the music, the crowds, and the drinking scene. It’s new, it’s different, and it’s the taste of freedom and escape and anarchy that she’s been craving since she was sixteen. It dissolves like acid on her virgin tongue. The music is so loud that it makes her skin tingle and her heart feel squishy. The bass thumps in time with her pulse as if they’re one, filling her from head to toe with music. Overfilling her. There’s distant hazy chatter all around her, but laughter rings in her ears like chiming bells. She laughs too. She joins the crowd, jumping into a huddled group of dancers like Tic-Tacs being shaken in a box. Their bodies move like water transformed by music, flowing in rapid arcs, limbs in constant motion, painting a picture sound alone can never achieve. With each swaying movement of their hips, with each alluring twist of their body, they tell a story of ensnared beauty, youth, and hope.

From up in the high seats, Sophie looks like she's floating. She twirls with the confidence of a nine-year-old boasting fairy wings and crystal slippers; she has the audience entranced. They come to see the dancers, to see which humans are easy pickings to be spirited away. Caspian has her scent and he makes his way down to separate her from the crowd. It doesn’t take much. A smile. A suggestive word in her ear. A brush of skin against skin that makes her whole body tremble, and she’s his. Sophie coils around his arm like a snake and he leads her out of Eden. He has his mind on somewhere private he could take her. Sophie has her fingers curling in his hair, scratching at the base of his neck. Her head rests on his shoulder, she squeezes his hand, and murmurs about being taken back home. Cas can’t think of any better poetry, so, he obliges.

It's the smell that hits him first. When she first lugs open the unwieldy, russet-painted door of the barn, a puff of the sweet, musty odor of last summer's straw presses into his nose. Then he detects the undertones: the stuffy musk of animal fur and the stank of old, moulded-over dung and droppings, and maybe the sharp smell of aged, oily metal and machinery. In the dim pallor of light, he begins to make out the shapes of dusty frames of wooden stalls and poles, and the heavy bosom of the loft that hangs from the ceiling just as its brown-bat companions cling to the rafters. As they walk in, Sophie closes the doors behind them; the tired hinges creak like the moaning of cantankerous old men and makes Cas turn and laugh before they climb up to the loft to shed their clothes.

The barn has seen better days, too. Twenty years of rain, sleet, and baking summer sun has taken its toll. The structure that once kept the weather off the wheat, hay, and the sheltering cows is now more draughty and soaked than a railway platform. The roof that had been cedar shingle, the same as the farmhouse, is worse than a gap-toothed sailor. Tiles are missing, rotten or sticking up at awkward angles so that moonlight dapples in. The hayloft barely holds their combined weight and creaks ominously with every movement. This is when they start to hear some rubbing and scratching against a post beneath them. It’s much too loud to be a rat. The snap of twigs and the crunch of gravel suggests something bipedal, but, then there is this heavy, dragging sound that follows it. Sophie stiffens against him.

“Wait. Stop.”

“What?”

“I think… I think that’s my dad,” she says. She is hiccupping her words.

Caspian, unsympathetically, laughs in her ear. “I don’t think so, lover.”

“But. But he’s going to be so mad. I’m not supposed to bring boys home.”

“I still don't think that's your dad."

“Put your clothes back on!" she cries.

“But."

“Hurry up!"

Caspian manages to tug on his boxers and jeans before something heavy thrusts its weight against one of the posts. That’s all it takes to have the hayloft collapse inward and to the side, springing shut like a faulty bear trap. Sophie grapples for purchase, her nails scrape and heels drag across the worn oak floorboards, but, it’s not enough. She slips down into the floor and is suddenly devoured by the darkness in one gulp. Silence echoes in the wake of her beating heart. Cas gets two, maybe three, seconds to consider the danger he’s in before the solid feeling beneath him dissolves to nothing. He drops like a rock, his body snapping over the steel bucket of a harvester. He lands on his forearm and abdomen, then slumps onto his heels.

The acrid smell of stale blood and rot envelops his nasal cavities. The fresh kind licks the back of his throat. Pain causes his vision to wobble and he grits his teeth to bite off a yelp. Cas has broken a few of his lower ribs, but, the worst of the damage is from where his own bones have shot like shrapnel up into his organs. He wraps his hand around the break of his forearm, which prevents the sharp edges of the bones from piercing his skin until he can find some other bandage. In the cloying darkness, he recognises stray limbs and a wall of razor-sharp tusks that shudder and move about the floor in unison. As he tries to compute the movement as being part of one giant, terrifying organism, he can’t help but dissociate from the idea when there are vital parts visibly missing between limbs, teeth, an exposed skull, eyeballs, and claws.

Only one creature can fit the description of what Cas is seeing - and not seeing - with his own eyes: a fadebeast. His best chance of staying alive is to escape the barn without being caught, but, the beast stands between him and the door.