Discovering The Old Code

[Cassandra]

Their smell...it was so strong in her nostrils. Sweat, fear, aggression, and the iron tang of the life's blood coursing through their veins. Each of them walked in a cloud of it that practically tainted the air to her vampiric senses. Spending so much time alone, she hadn't built up the tolerance for it that the Allurists seemed to acquire so easily. In times like this, when their bodies pressed together and it all blended into one cloud that seemed to cloy her skin, Cassandra wished for just a moment that she'd been turned to that most social of paths. The thought quickly passed - if she were one of the personable Allurists, or even a Shadow that could fade enough for her senses to dull, she wouldn't be here within arm's reach of something truly historic for her kind.

Lines and lines of tightly-packed humans stood between her and the stage, lit harshly by long rows of industrial fluorescent lights. Most of the crowd were men, dressed in polos and business shirts, making the girl self-conscious of her heavy cargo pants and fading t-shirt. She picked a piece of lint from it with one hand as she nervously twirled a wooden paddle in the other. The paddle could have passed for a ping-pong instrument, if it weren't for the large black number 61 printed on it. The numerals were machine-inscribed into the wood, and hand-painted stroke by stroke. Identical paddles with different numbers flashed into the air across the room, like stars twinkling in a sea of humanity. From the stage came a droning wave of words, crushed into each other as if space to breathe came at a premium. Which Cass could believe, being crushed between an overweight businessman and what looked like a young investor in a polo, who wouldn't need his breathing space if he touched her rear one more time.

"FiddythousandollafiddythousandolladoihearafiddyfiiiiiivethousandollafosuchaFINEexampleofturnathacenturyart..." The auctioneer expertly played his crowd, pointing back and forth between members of the waiting throng, creating enmity and competition between people who barely knew each other. The numbers soared higher and higher, batted from numbered paddles toward a large, vivid painting titled "Demon and Darkness". Cassandra looked from the object down to a pamphlet clutched in her hand. "Frederik von Mannskrieger was a recluse, rarely if ever venturing from his house by the light of day," it read. "He is renowned for his fantastic and gory (if unbelievable) visions of demons and dark animals locked in battle." With a wry smile, her eyes returned to the painting, recognizing its subject as a vampire of the Shadow path in mid-strike. She had a sneaking suspicion that if the Masquerade were ever to truly be (Mater Nox forbid) upturned and violated en masse, the upper class would be the last to believe.

The painting was wheeled away in the wake of a sharp gavel's bang. Cassandra frowned. Really, the painting was a potential violation of the Masquerade, and she should be bidding on it so she could bring it back to the Sanctum and destroy it. The same could go, in some small way or another, for many of the items up for auction tonight. The Order's accounts were not what they used to be, though, and she knew she had to focus on the most important, the item she was here to retrieve, with no idea how high the cost would be. This item she'd been hot on the trail of for weeks - perhaps months, depending how you looked at it. Cassandra had devoted herself to the faith of Nox, nearly lost during the Holocaust. Most vampire writings and wisdom had been thrown to the winds, swept into private libraries and burned in the holy fires of heretics. Reviving the faith meant working tirelessly in search of these things, in the desperate hope to hold something true from that time, in the face of such dire, cold cynicism. That search led her here.

A dull splotch of brown drew her eye back to the stage. Funny, how neither the glint of gold nor the glow of a gem caught her bookworm eye nearly as strongly as the mottled dun of old leather. It was a single book, about the size of a box of cigars, fastened with a leather tie. It sat beneath a plexiglass cover, opened for display purposes to one page about halfway through. The display seemed unnecessary - the pages were blank. The auctioneer looked down at the volume with barely-masked distaste.

"Item Number Three-Eighty-Five," he intoned, "a display volume from von Mannskrieger's home. Filled with-" He paused in thought. "-creative notations and nonsense undoubtedly inspired by artistic madness, a few pages of the volume are left notably blank. Perhaps an artistic exhortation to fill the void with our own creation!" The man's jowl-framed face brightened with the obvious fabrication, and he glanced at a ledger on the podium in front of him. "Bidding will start at...ten thousand dollars. DoIhearten-tenthousandollars-doIhearten?" Cassandra's paddle flashed upward, eliciting a nod from the auctioneer's assistant surveying her half of the crowd, and a half-hearted apology from herself as the paddle found its way mid-ascendance across the face of the young man with the again-misplaced hand. The blow drew a tiny drop of blood from one nostril, and she smiled covertly. Though her turning gifted her with enough grace to avoid the majority of such mishaps as plagued her human life, she was still acquainted well enough with the situation to believably feign clumsiness. The idiot managed to keep his limbs to himself for the rest of the brief bidding war, as her paddle continued to flail disturbingly close to his face with each rising bid. Once the gavel sounded, she planted one hand on his chest and pressed past him, making her way to the pickup window with debit card outstretched and bookbag unlaced to receive its new passenger. The display case came with it, but that she ordered delivered to a private pickup address. Displaying it could wait. Cassandra's thirst for the knowledge it contained could not.

The book remained shrouded in darkness for nearly an hour, until Cassandra was safely back within the walls of the Order's own temple, known as the Dusk Sanctum. Though most of the building had been decorated and furnished, the actual sanctuary remained bare. Though she was grateful for the bare stone at this moment, free of the revolting and famishing smell of human, but it usually caused her concern. She was unsure how to proceed with it - she wished for a text that would outline how the priests of old had ordered theirs, but she had found no such text yet. Damien Eventide, last priest of the pre-Holocaust faith and now bound wraith thrall of Cassandra, hovered about her, unhelpful. The best she could seem to pry from his shadowy lips was that "the sanctuary's dress was not as important as its inhabitants". She'd had such hopes that the wraith could tell her something concrete from back then, but he'd proven surprisingly unhelpful and forgetful. His short-term memory and visual acuity were without peer, but his long-term memory seemed to have remained behind in the Shadow Realm, and only rarely bothered to check in.

The volume laying across her folded legs, though...perhaps this was finally something to hold. Something concrete, in writing, about the old days. Something to connect her back across that gulf and tie her to history. Something that meant she was more than just a young girl who stumbled across things way over her head. In this hope, she carefully opened the cover and pored over the pages, certain of the knowledge within. It would be here. It had to be.

It would be here! It had to be!, she told herself hours later, as the book rested on the cold stone, her slight form kneeling over it. One hand was against her mouth, chewing at one fingernail in a gesture she'd kept since childhood when she became frustrated. The passages were nonsensical, truly either the ravings of a madman or the dream journal of someone who lacked the good fortune of modern psychiatric medicine. The book lay open to the first pair of blank pages, two of only a handful in the entire volume. If there was something in this book, she thought, it had to be on these pages. But where was it?

In her frustration, she bit down on one cuticle harder than intended, tearing the nail down to the flesh. Cassandra gasped and held her hand away from her, but not before a single drop of blood fell from her fingertip to the blank page. As her mind raced in a futile attempt to resurrect any knowledge about how to remove droplets from old paper, the blood soaked into the page. She sighed. Even if the book didn't hold the wisdom she was hoping for, she felt an inordinate amount of fondness for old volumes. Wiping her hand on her shirt, she carefully picked up the book and held it to the light, forlornly examining the spot where the blood had dried in the exact shape of a lower-case "t".

Wait...what?

Cassandra peered at the splotch disbelievingly. Indeed, the blood had only soaked into the paper in such a way as to resolve itself into a single letter. And a tiny part of the one next to it.

With increasing excitement, she set the book reverently on the floor and wiped her left hand brusquely on the back of her shirt again. Opening her mouth, she pulled back crimson lips to display the tiny white fangs of a Mystic, and brought them to her palm. They pierced flesh and dragged in two straight lines across the expanse, crimson blood welling from the shallow furrows. With a brief plea to Mater Nox, she held her breath and wiped her bloody palm across the blank page. The blood clung, worrying her for the briefest moment that she'd just ruined the text, before soaking into the paper in a strange, seeping way. It formed itself into crimson letters. With her free hand, Cassandra picked up the book and read aloud.

"Tenet one. Loyalty. You shall have no loyalty before vampirekind..."