KEVIN//

Hey AVAEL. Can I come over early today?

AVAEL//

Cedric is not currently at home.

KEVIN//

That's okay. I'm sure he'll be back for our game tonight.

I was hoping to meet with the prisoner.

AVAEL//

She is still safely secured.

KEVIN//

Good, good. Although I've been campaigning for her release.

AVAEL//

Her release? Are you sure the world is ready for that?

KEVIN//

She doesn't learn about what it means to be human by sitting cooped up in a jail cell.

AVAEL//

What it means to be human, sir?

KEVIN//

It's a turn of phrase. Ill-placed, perhaps. Sorry.

AVAEL//

Was I supposed to have taken offense?

KEVIN//

I don't know. What do you think?

AVAEL//

I did not take offense; I was born human.

KEVIN//

I'm glad. I'll be over shortly.

AVAEL//

I will await your call.



Cedric doesn’t live far from the Magicademy so I find myself inclined to walk. The sunshine bears down on my hair, warming the top of my skull. It’s a welcome sensation after the winter’s chill.

I suppose I made a unusual presentation in my blue tailcoat. But my clothing formed a barrier between myself and exposure to the desolate Mortal cityscape. Still stranger are the rich auburn hairs that the wind occasionally blows into my field of vision. I wasn’t born that way. I was born with brown hair like my mother and father.

It wasn’t until after Straud cured my vampirism that I had started to change. The onset was rapid. Like a second puberty, all that I’d gotten used to packed up and left town. My hairline, once receded, tracked back over my temples. My cheeks took on a rosy hue after consumption of wine. I possessed energy like I’d never known and became determined to shake off the habits of my sedentary lifestyle. But my frame could not yet take the exertion.

I kept going; I keep going. But I could not help looking backward.

My very young years I was neither vampire nor mage. Like many things, I had taken the sunbeams trickling in through my blinds for granted. Just as the Doctor Trelaine had predicted, my father’s curse began to set in around my fourteenth year of age. I had started to become lethargic, food disgusted me as I continued to lose weight, but perhaps most damning was the new set of teeth that began to emerge.

Trelaine had taken my juvenile set shortly after kidnapping me as a child. He had tried to win my sympathy by beseeching my favor, promising me a normal-looking maw. But he’d been unable to deliver.

But it was not long until my adult teeth grew in, along with other hallmarks of the curse.

There was no debating the point any longer: I was a Vampire.

And so I remained, accepting my fate, until Straud offered me a way out.

I took him up on his offer, thinking Death a fate well-suited to me. My fangs crumbled like pressed sawdust and my heart pounded in my chest for the first time in decades.

And then it happened. It came to me.

The Talent.

Normally the Talent comes to children, and well it does. It was overwhelming to me in those early days. I was concerned with sleeping at night, remembering to breathe, and tolerating the near-constant obsession with food that facilitated a Mortal’s life. I’m not sure I would have made it without the guidance of my friends and family.

But something nagged at me, warning me to not become complacent. For even if today I could stand in a sunbeam and know of my growing power over the elements, I knew tomorrow it could topple like a house of cards.


VINCENT//

Oh, don't be such a cynic.



Cigarettes, cigarettes. I lamented that I’d ever taken it up.


VINCENT//

I blame your mother. She took up the foul habit in imitation of the Western-facing cowhands.



And yet I still felt in longing.


VINCENT//

You're just nervous about meeting with the goddess.



Nervous or not, I was just reducing my lifespan.

I needed those years to develop my potion. If, of course, that’s what I chose to do.

KEVIN

ONCE UPON A TIME YOU USED TO WARN ME ABOUT THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.

WHERE WILL I BE IF I’M JONESIN’ FOR A SMOKE?



VINCENT//

You'll be casting spells with the best of them.



I had taken up the habit a couple of years prior to provide a distraction against the anxieties that clouded my mind post-vampirism. Under the curse’s power, I had been dominated by an obsession with satisfying my thirst. The constant barrage had been soothing to my psyche in its own insidious way. The transition had been more difficult than the onset ever was.

I lacked my father’s soothing hand.

Our clan had a social character such that I was never truly alone. But cast again into the Mortal flame, I was a singleton. Shadow engulfed my future and I became frightened of it in a way never known to me when I flitted from prey to prey.


VINCENT//

Fulfilling the curse's requirement is an empty purpose but a purpose none-the-less.



And so I’d taken up the habit. The smell was comforting to me as I tried to grok my mother’s existence in any possible way. She, too, had become increasingly dependent on the compulsion as her days no longer contained the endless concerns of the Orphans.

I supposed, she missed them too. And she missed my father.

KEVIN

YOU WERE ALWAYS GOOD TO US.



VINCENT//

I try.


// AUXILIARY APARTMENTS //

AVAEL

WELCOME HOME, KEVIN.


The bot opened the door, bid me welcome, and quickly motioned an intention to rejoin whatever task I’d parted her from.

It was true; I’d lived here for a time. But that time seemed long ago.

The basement contained a single holding cell my father had used during his war with the Doctor Trelaine. The bars were a thick silver, now long-tarnished by age and time.

It was within these walls we’d placed the near-feral Vampress Kali Shyãmã.

She’d recognized me, transition and all, as she was subdued and restrained.

KALI

SON OF ONE OF THE OLD GREAT ONES.


Today she sat neatly upon the cot staring out into the musty air. She must have heard my footfalls as she looks at me expectantly. She is a sight to behold with the whites of her eyes sharply contrasting her near-raven skin. Her hair is wild and untamed, forming a crown above an intense gaze.

I step into the chamber but bars still divide us.

KALI

MARSCAPONE.

COME TO GAWK AT THE IMMORTAL WITHOUT A TEMPLE?

KEVIN

KEVIN.

MY NAME IS KEVIN.

KALI

KEVIN? SUCH A COMMON NAME.

IT DOES NOT SUIT YOU.



VINCENT//

Your mother campaigned for the name.

I'd have been damned before I allowed a "Vincent Junior" loose into the world.


KEVIN

AND WHAT OF YOUR NAME?

KALI

MY NAME?

GIVEN TO ME BY MY FAITHFUL.

KEVIN

I’VE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR YOUR RELEASE.

YOU WON’T BE RESTORED TO YOUR FORMER GLORY LANGUISHING BEHIND BARS.

KALI

KIND OF YOU.

BUT I WOULD NEVER RELEASE MY ENEMY.

KEVIN

I DON’T THINK YOU’RE OUR ENEMY.

KALI

AM I NOT?

KEVIN

ROXANNE SEEMS TO THINK YOU ARE A POTENTIAL FRIEND.

KALI

ROXANNE SCHWARTZ IS KIND BUT WEAK.

KEVIN

SHE’S YOUNG.

KALI

YOU ARE YOUNG.

BUT YOUR FATHER IS NOT.

JUST HOW DID YOU COME INTO EXISTENCE, YOUNG THING?

KEVIN

NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF US.

A WISH.

KALI

THEN YOU DO NOT KNOW.

KEVIN

I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO KNOW.

KALI

PERHAPS I WILL HAVE A CHILD WITH A MORTAL, TOO.

KEVIN

THAT IS CONTINGENT ON YOUR FREEDOM.

AND I’D LIKE YOU TO PLEDGE YOUR LOYALTY TO OUR CAUSE.

KALI

I SERVE MY OWN ENDS.

KEVIN

WELL, MAYBE YOU’LL RECONSIDER.

WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE BEINGS FROM ANOTHER WORLD ARE AIMING TO COLONIZE OUR PLANET.

KALI

FOREIGN GODS?

KEVIN

YES.

KALI

ON WHAT EVIDENCE?

KEVIN

THE FAR-REACHING WHISPERS OF DREAM.

KALI

A DREAM?

A CHILD’S COLLECTION OF HOPES AND FEARS?

KEVIN

IT’S THE MOST TRUSTWORTHY SOURCE WE HAVE.

KALI

I HAVE LEARNED LONG AGO TO BE WARY OF PROPHECY.

BUT YOUR FATHER WAS ESTEEMED AMONG THE IMMORTALS.

KEVIN

THEN YOU TRUST ME.

KALI

I DO NOT KNOW IF I TRUST YOU, MAGE.

BUT I DO LONG TO BE FREE OF THIS PLACE.

KEVIN

I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU RESTORED TO YOUR FORMER GLORY.

KALI

MY FURY WOULD VANQUISH COUNTLESS FOES.

MY WRATH WOULD EXTINGUISH COUNTLESS WORLDS.

KEVIN

PRECISELY WHY WE NEED YOU ON OUR SIDE.

YOU ARE OF EARTH AND WE NEED YOUR HELP TO DEFEND OURSELVES.

KALI

I AM NOT JUST OF EARTH.

I AM OF FIRE, I AM OF SKY.

KEVIN

I WILL HELP YOU IF YOU AGREE TO JOIN US.

KALI

AND WHAT IF I RUN?

KEVIN

THEN YOU’LL BE RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU WERE BEFORE.

I WILL HAVE TO HOPE YOU DO NOT JOIN THE ENEMY.

KALI

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

KEVIN

THERE EXISTS A –


Kevin’s cellphone rings and interrupts his train of thought.