tampered | Log: Complete

Current Mood: aggravated

Log: Complete

When: April 3, evening
Rating: R
Characters: Pyramid Head [

favored_son]
Summary: It's difficult to bring down the son of Dracula, but not impossible if you know where to strike first.
Log:

The evening was quiet, and after having another argument with the parasite residing in his left hand, D determined to leave the flat for a short walk. Short, by the Hunter's standards, meant a promenade lasting several hours. He followed the streets towards the forest, as always armed with his sword and a selection of weapons specific to hunting vampires. Left Hand was uncharacteristically silent after another round of threats in response to his troublesome loquaciousness. D had been sufficiently irked by the creature's boldness of late to take more satisfaction from his victory than was typical of him.

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Subtly at first, then perhaps more noticeably, the sounds of the forest entire began to fade into silence.

The stars likewise began, one by one, to become choked off with a crawling, consuming darkness.

The darkness spread, and deepened until nothing beyond the pool of light caste by the wane backlight of the city

At the very edges of this caste light the darkness moved; shifted, melted, stretched and ran.
The writhing mass then coalesced into a form.

The monster jerked, and twitched, but seemed otherwise unphased as it raised itself to it's feet. Turning back, it drew forth it's nine-foot steel blade from the darkness beyond.

The blade hit the earth floor with a reverberating, mettalic thud, and the Executioner set off, the tell-tale scream and grind of his slow gait heralding his arrival; Relentless, remorseless.

The Red Pyramid, Right Hand, Great Blade.
He lived in it, moved through it, was a part of it.

.....And through the darkness, he could hear a smell. See a sound.

The call and response of the condemned.

Child of Blood

Child of darkness

The Condemned

Great Child

"D," Left Hand muttered, voice tense as it broke the silence.

"I know." The Hunter's hands remained at his sides. He waited, listened, and let the danger come to him. The thing that stalked him was slow, it's footsteps easily discernible to the dhampir's extraordinary hearing.

She wept as she clawed at him. Screams escaped her lips, choked by the blood that welled from her torn throat. She would drown in it if he did not finish her first ... but the taste of it ... Her life was intoxicating, her fear as thrilling as the act she had meant for them to enjoy. Dante drank until nothing more could be pulled from her veins. Only when he returned home, blood on his hands and lips, did he realize what he had done.

D's step faltered as the memory came to him, unbidden, and with a clarity that made the world around him disappear. He hadn't meant to kill her, hadn't meant to taste her blood at all, but he'd been too young to understand what he risked by allowing Elise to invite him to her bed. He'd been too young to understand that there were things he was not ready to overcome. The Hunter clenched his teeth and pushed past the vision.

There were more screams. Always screams. After six thousand years, one would have thought he'd get used to it. D remained impassive as he stepped into the village, but the screams tore at him as Elise's hands had so long ago. They pleaded, condemned, with little effect save to remind him that he was guilty for their deaths. He had come too late. The village had put out a contract for a Hunter, and the lord of the district had struck back with brutal force. D moved through the village gate, heedless of the shattered wood and twisted hinges. Tonight, he would kill every vampire, ghoul and monster he found. There would be no payment, but each death within the village walls was on his head. He could have prevented them, if he'd truly been worthy of the name he'd been born to.

The Red Guard advanced, but never broke the halting, slow pace.

*Thump...griiiiiiind* As the blade cleaved a furrow through the moist earth.

*Thump..griiiiiiind* His grey-skinned, gnarled right hand extended to point at the condemned.
He does not speak, for he has forgotten how, but that pointing hand says enough.

It tells of the secrets that the condemned, the killer holds, and the foreboding promise to make good on those pleas for redemption.
Spring shoots, and new life shrivel and die in the wake of this grisly apparition.

The rust-red helmet begins to drip a viscous crimson fluid from it's sharpened corners.

Tears for the dead

The pointing hand never wavers, but speaks instead of the dark pains the condemned sees behind his eyes.
Words without speech...

It is your turn now.

((OOC: ARG! Power was out most of the day. Sorry for delay -_9 ))

D struggled past the memories just enough to close the connection shared with his father, not wanting him to see the future that his son had known.

Blood coated the floor. It was his own, and the vampire's, and the woman's. The woman. Beautiful. Dark-haired. Icy blue eyes. Like D. She could have been--but no, his mother was dead, and she had been fair-headed. D snarled as he lunged towards her killer. He would end this now. He no longer cared if he lost himself in the process.

"D!" Left Hand was trying desperately to push past the visions. "D, snap out of it! That was seven thousand years ago!"

Seven thousand faces, arms, eyes open and staring.
Hands raised from the crackling earth, the crimson fluid ran from the edges of the helmet; rivulets to rivers.
An ocean of blood flooding a macabre garden of grasping hands.

Men, women, children....all reaching out to scream, to beg

Why?

"Why did you let us die? Why didn't you stop it?"
Pulling, grasping hands at the killer's cloak, his boots.....

A lifetime, or a moment, there was no difference anymore.
Not down here.

Down in the darkness.

Down dancing in the streams...

The Red Guard reached one grey gnarled hand out to wrap around the condemned's throat.
The rust ( blood? ) ran from the great helmet, and splattered across the condemned's face, as the Gaurd forced him to his knees.

They needed you. You were the only one who could save them...

...But you are no less a monster than those that destroyed them.

The chatter of the creature in the condemned's hand caught the attention of the horrific consciousness beneath that massive metal helm, and the Red Gaurd turned slightly to regard it.

One hand about the condemned's throat, the Executioner raised one heavy booted foot to bring it down with bone cracking weight onto the prone wrist of the prostrate condemned.

The Great Blade, spattered with earth and blood ( rust?) took aim.
...And an underhanded strike of surprising dexterity for such a lumbering creature, and such a cumbersome weapon, removed the chattering hand from it's owner.

At that moment, D's eyes burned red. He reached for his sword with his remaining hand, straining to escape the cries of the ones he had failed. He knew his guilt. He knew it better than any of them, because they had not known the name he'd been born to, the mission he had failed. Each movement was slow, as if he could hardly feel his own body.

Enhanced he may be, but Red Pyramid is as strong as the guilt you carry. If it defeats you, He defeats you.

The boot ground the tiny bones in the Killer's hands together with delicate pops, and cracks, his right hand still forcing the condemned's throat straight, and his head up.

The left neatly pivoted the hilt of the Great Blade, and with a mighty thrust, buried a foot of the massive cleaver into the earth.
Now free, he took hold of the Killer's sword hilt, meaty fingers curling around D's own and crushing his fingers against the hilt.

Hands raised from the crackling earth, the crimson fluid running from the edges of the helmet; strings of sinewy flesh threading between the grasping hands, and the Executioner.

The monster drew D's blade along with him, and strained against the dhampir's resistance.

A woman with ice blue eyes...her dark hair plastered to her cheeks in sticky red chunks clawed her way over the tangle of limbs, and flesh...

Slowly but surely, the Red Guard turned D's own sword against him, the blade angled toward D's solar plexus.

The woman's eyes, so full of questioning pain, met D's own, her ruined throat twitching and moving as she spoke. The esophagus tissue whistling as it tried to draw air.

The Executioner fought D's struggling mind, and struggling body...

The woman opened her mouth, and a flood of sticky blood streamed out.
Her voice a memory of beauty was superimposed over a gurgling shred of sound; something between a moan, and a cry of pain...

...The Executioner's strength overcame; fueled by D's own guilt...

Why? she begs...

..As the sword slid home through the bone and muscle of D's chest, piercing the fleshy disc between the spinal column segments.
With a vicious twist, the Red Guard severed the spinal cord as a simultaneous roar of stygian thought-made-solid broke from the metal helm, and pierced the killer's mind.

GUILTY!

The dhampir screamed as his blade twisted in his flesh. He did not attempt to block out the pain. He was deserving of every moment of it. Blood rushed from the wound in a swiftly growing pool. D's cry only ceased when he had no more strength to utter it. His remaining hand closed around his blade in a futile effort to remove the weapon so he could heal.

This was more familiar.
The condemned was finally quiet.
Finally accepting of his judgment.

...And so, the Executioner went straight back to business.
Calm, and clinical. Done with cruelty for there was no longer need.

The condemned wept for pain. For loss, and in repentance.
The Executioner seemed to nod the great razor-edged helmet once, as if to say; Now, you understand.

With the chest trauma, and the dark blood flowing freely from the dhampir's chest, the Executioner released the protruding hilt of the sword, and batted D's hand away from it easily.

Ponderously, his hand now free the Executioner jerked the Great Blade from the earth, and lifted the edge, then took his time aligning himself with the prostrate condemned.

He raised the blade, and with another surprising display of surgical dexterity with such a massive weapon, drew it sharply across the killer's throat.

A river of blood to match the lake within the condemned's mind; to match the oceans of blood and carnage the killer left in his wake.

JUDGMENT ALWAYS FINDS YOU

Bleeding, and weak, it was no trouble to gather his burden, and his weapon up, one under his left arm, and the other dragging behind with the halting grinding noise the Executioner was accustomed to.
The darkness receded as the Red Gaurd's footsteps did.

Darkness fading back into the night.

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Log: Complete

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