Topic: tangled webs He wove

Ambrose

Date: 2009-09-14 16:47 EST
The Chains are only the beginning...


Brest, France, 1889

The railway system was still a relatively new method of travel in France, and reserved for those with the ability to afford it; as such, it was no shock to either Bastian or Ambrose that their compartment was unoccupied. They feasted that night. The inauguration of the Eiffel Tower in Paris was enough to draw out enough drunken revelry to leave the younger kindred well-fed; he basked in the second-hand inebriation, lulled by blood and champagne as the late night scenery passed them. Bastian flipped through an old newspaper, comfortable in silence, until Ambrose spoke.

"I have been thinking of leaving." His voice was idle, half-lidded cobalt eyes trained on the night outside.

"To America?" Bastian asked, his gray eyes lifting toward the man across from him. "You have been travelling there more frequently as of late."

"Yes." There was more left unsaid hanging on his tongue, poised.

Bastian watched him, read him like any of the books in his library; the train's whistle pierced the air, the sound of it echoing across the countryside. "You have a childe there," he murmured. "Don't you?"

Cobalt eyes met Bastian's storm-gray and the silence hung again. Quietly, the elder kindred folded his newspaper. "That was very foolish of you, Ambrose." There was no admonishment in his tone, only tired observation.

"He was to die, Bastian." Ambrose shifted in his seat, drew himself closer to his sire -- to try and make him understand. "The trials of their false-witches there.. they were going to kill him."

"Some people are brought to death's door for a reason, Ambrose -- some that creatures like you and I are not meant to pull back." Unyielding, Bastian frowned at the scorn he saw in the younger man's eyes.

"People like me." His words came with the snarl of rejection, cobalt eyes gone as cold as the sea.

Bastian's lips thinned to a line. Yes, he thought. People like you.

Sinjin Fai

Date: 2009-10-07 12:55 EST
Sin stood in front of the doors of the dungeons, where he had stood many times before, and hesitated. It was over a month since the Chains were destroyed and he hadn't stepped foot inside yet, still unable to touch the a place so thick with painful memories. The music of Peccavi thrummed above him, the bass pounding through the floors and into his skin; he reached out and quietly wrapped his hand around the door knob.

Dull fluorescent light crawled across the floor of the dungeons, spreading inward from the wall around the shadow of the Spaniard's form. It smelled stale. Pieces of the walls and surrounding cells were still torn away from where Skid and Sinjin escaped from the sacrifice Marcus made. It left him unsettled enough that he stalled again and the music from the club upstairs went still.

We see you.

Quietly, Sinjin shut the door again to face the reality of the past another day. The beat from above thrummed on, and he returned to it.

Ambrose

Date: 2009-11-03 15:14 EST
December 27th, 2005


Christmas night had passed uneventful and had bled into a red morning, wisps of cold still hanging in the sky from the previous evening's snow. The walk from his home to Ambrosia was a long one that began far before dawn had taken its course, but it was quiet and fufilling; a sense of peace had drifted down, sunk into his skin and settled somewhere in the bones where life no longer flooded. Ambrosia's illusion, perhaps powered alone by Ambrose's enduring madness, had fallen, leaving only a burned wreckage of wood and stonework with the scent of old blood that seemed to linger. Sin was surprised to see Ambrose standing across from it, once staring at the ash and now at the sinner himself, calm and apathetic. The spaniard drifted closer to him, always drawn by the older figure.

They stared at it for a time and Sin began to speak. "Why did you drop it?"

Ambrose spared him a minute glance. "It was not worth mantaining, child."

Sin sighed, kicking out at a burnt piece of wood and feeling the faint tingle of magic that clung to it. "I don't know what's going on anymore. At first, I thought it was all connected to the garou-- but the more I think about it, the more I believe the two have nothing to do at all. Other than the attack afterwards, there's no trace of garou anywhere. Just.. Sal, Mesteno and me." The spaniard paused and looked back over his shoulder at Ambrose. "Will you come in with me? I want to see it." But I'm afraid to go alone.

The older man's eyes fell half-closed, lethargic, but he eventually stepped forward into the snow. "If you wish it."

Like a child learning to ride a bike, Sin was careful to make sure his father still held on while there were no training wheels. Sin slipped through the open arch where the main doors of Ambrosia once stood, carefully tip-toeing through the burned wreckage in a tense journey. The ash and blood smelled old now, covered in snow from the crumbled spaces where the roof had caved in. The spaniard moved toward the bar, curious to see if there was any alcohol remaining intact, while Ambrose glanced around the wreckage with intent curiosity. "This has become a graveyard," he whispered.

"I'll find who did it, Father. Most of these kindred were scum," he claimed, gesturing out into the cold, open space where Ambrose stood. "But it's their right for revenge. Christ knows the rest that are still alive agree that it's my duty to do it. Or.. really, they're too afraid to ask you." Sin looked back at him long enough to quirk a smile and was slightly surprised to see no humor in the older man's expression. He even lacked his usual too-polite smile.

"Sometimes, child, I do not think you realize your own power."

Sin rolled his eyes. "Christ, Ambrose, it's not like I'm saying I can't take down a few fu--"

"Do you know why you grow mad?"

The sinner looked up again in surprise. This is the first time he could recall Ambrose cutting anyone off, much less this brashly-- at least, when he was in his right mind. Sin frowned and looked down at the burned bar counter, running his hand across it. "No."

"Neither do I. That, however, is inconsequential. Sinjin," he breathed, drawing closer, "You are feeding your own madness."

Something cold began to claw its way into Sin's brain; his voice grew small. "What are you talking about?"

Ambrose paused directly across from the younger kindred with only the crumpled remnants of the bar between them. "There was no fire, Sinjin. Your mind created it." The father released his child's bicycle and could only watch, hoping he had taught enough so he could pedal alone.

Sin jerked back sharply as if hit by a sudden blow. "No-- no, it's not possible. I'm not strong enough to create that something that complex, Ambrose, you know that--"

"You are stronger than you know."

"..Stop it. Shut up."

"A power that you cannot yet control; one that the mind--"

"I said shut up, Ambrose! Shut the f*ck up!"

"--can easily manipulate to serve a twisted mind. Yet I wonder," he mused, "if it is one strong enough to enact revenge upon itself."

"F*ck you! F*ck you, you bastard!" Sin scrambled over the crumpled wreck of the bar and launched himself at Ambrose even as the illusion began to waver and fade; the ash and snow disappeared and Ambrosia rebuilt itself as if it was always there. Before Sin could even reach Ambrose, he cried out, pitiful, and stumbled. "No-- no," he moaned, slipping against Ambrose as he fell limp to his knees, shaking. "I didn't do it-- I didn't mean to, father, honest--"

Dim cobalt eyes stared down at his disheartened child and Ambrose, the cold figure of indifference, leaned down; he swept his arms around the sinner and let him cry.

"You see, my child, my sinner?" Ambrose murmured quietly, "How the son walks in his father's footsteps?"

Ambrose

Date: 2009-11-03 16:03 EST
Exeter, Rhode Island, 1892


He agreed to meet her again the day she died. Mercy Brown was buried alongside her mother and sister, the last woman in her family to die from a disease of the blood which plagued their household and left only a widowed father and a sickly son behind. He watched the procession, the sad parade of mourning neighbors from the small, haunted town of Exeter; he shared his condolences with the family, though they looked on him with mistrust. Having only arrived in Rhode Island months prior to a chorus of wanton sighs and girlish tittering from the local daughters and wives, his place in this new world was not yet found.

That night, per their agreement, Ambrose waited in the still of the cold New England winter as Mercy Brown escaped her fresh grave with a flourish of laughter and dance. She was an unassumingly dainty creature, elfin in pose and the innocence in her eyes; she had played this game before, he could tell, for much longer than Ambrose had ever lived. She dusted the gravedirt from her funeral gown they buried her in, moonlight soaked in her eyes until they shone like pearls to him.

"What now?" He asked, his English not yet so crisp as his French. "Another family to hide in -- another abandoned stowaway aboard a merchant ship?" He smiled for her, offered his arm like a gentleman; this was her place, this new land, perhaps the first of the kindred to make her mark on it, and he respected her for it.

"Mayhaps a harlot," she suggested, winding her willowy arm against his sleeve as they left her grave behind. "A different game. This one's old -- another grave to add to my collection. What of you? Your childe?" There was mocking in her tone. Your little witch-boy, she called him once, before he went back to France for his final farewells from Bastian. Scrawny-scared thing.

"Newport, amongst the sailors. I have not seen him yet." He lead her away from the jutting graves behind the Baptist church and toward the winding roads that cut paths into the woodline.

"Ambrose," she crooned, his name whisper-soft against his arm as she nuzzled her cheek there. Such a gentle creature; no wonder she played this game for so long. "Ambrose, Ambrose. Abandoning your little creation so soon?" Mercy had to sway up on the very tips of her perfect toes to touch her lips to his ears. "Make him a monster. Make him beautiful, just like me. Just like you."

He looked down at the murderous vixen masquerading behind the doe eyes of a young girl and something unsettled welled up and into him, fed parts of him long starved. His smile was carved in porcelain. "I will."

Ambrose

Date: 2009-12-06 17:15 EST
Newport, Rhode Island, 1862



At one point his name was James Fisher. Having spent the majority of his life with the swagger of a dockside sailor, his heritage was well-known to Newport's dockside town. The son of an English prostitute and her one-night suitor, he was born on the tides of a ragged sea as his mother fled from Europe to start a new life on the other side of an ocean. With no father, and a mother trying to mend the frayed edges of her life back together, the young James Fisher was left to his own devices.


The dockhands of Newport found him frequent company, giving him plenty of fathers built from the roughest hewn society made; when he was of age, and the men had shown him his parts and what they were for (whether by example or by use, James never said), his company expanded to the whores of New England that most chose to pretend did not exist. His trend of falling in with the wrong crowd continued through-out his life, much to his reformed mother's despair, but when he began taking the company of a young woman named Rebecca Nurse, his mother wondered if he was, perhaps, done with all his wild oats.


Rebecca Nurse, a pious and well-respected seamstress, was the Devil's mistress. Behind her veneer of Christianity and dumb-founding beauty was a woman who dedicated her life to a black world of mage-craft and magic. James, still then young, was first afraid, but then entranced. This was a side of the world he had never seen -- and if there was a God in this damnable place, surely it was in the hands of this woman and her friends, in this magic that they brewed amongst the elements.


She introduced him to the world he could not see: one of changlings and faeries, where people wore the skins of animals and drank the blood of the damned. Rebecca was showing James how to slip between worlds when her chastity of appearance was broken; in a church, a flurry of women screamed as they swore they saw her spectre cursing them.


Rebecca and her companions became some of the many who fell to the trials of witchcraft that moved from Salem to Newport. James still remembered the crowds: the sway of people carrying torches as they were lead to the oldest oak in the center of town, where a noose and fire were waiting. Rebecca was calm -- her escape was inevitable, he knew -- but James, poor James, cried and wailed. His life would end here. Rebecca may have introduced him to the Unseen World, but he had no talent for it.


The crowd's rallied and swayed around them as the nooses were placed around their necks. "If ye be witches, ye will live," the minister cried, "and if ye be Holy in the name of God, he will return thee to his waiting arms!"


"No!" James cried, snot and tears pouring him him. "No, please! I'll be good! I'll never do it again, I promise! On the name of God--"

When he invoked the name, the whole world seemed to fall still. Everything slowed down until he saw the face of a man, one he couldn't recall seeing there before: he was tall and pristine, expression a mask of serenity that he could stare into for days. While the rest of the world stood like macabre statues, this man moved toward him from the crowd. "Boy," he called, "if I save you, will you call your will to another name?"

Anything, thought James. "Yes!" He cried out desperately to him, his eyes wild with hope. "What name? What name? I'll call you master from this day forward if you take me from this wretched place!"

The man watched him for a moment, settled eyes on him that were critical and the sharpest blue James had ever seen. When he spoke again, it was with a movement forward.. and while the rest of the world became still, he removed the noose from the boy's neck. "You will call me Ambrose. And I will show you what this woman never could."


When the world moved again, hundreds of people saw a boy and a woman hang, saw two bodies writhe and twitch until the life was drained from them, and while neither things were real, they burned like living flesh. Meanwhile, while evening descended, Ambrose took the boy Fisher in his arms and embraced him to a different death all together.

Delahada

Date: 2009-12-06 19:45 EST
Continued from Legacy.

You are a frightened child looking for comfort where you will find none.

At the start of their relationship, during only the second year of his life, his mother had said those words to him, and they had never stopped being true. Yet, at the same time, she was wrong. Salvador knew his mother herself could offer him no solace, but her sanctuary was another matter entirely.

He left Dris with only the fleeting hope that they might make amends. Left the bard to his solitude and thoughts, and Salvador walked through his own. There was just too much to think about. There was always too much to think about. And whenever he found himself drowning in uncertainty, his feet always led him here, to his mother's house, to the Bone Grove.

He was still weak from his excursion into the past, from viewing what had been and walking through history. His eyes were still yellow. When he stepped foot over the threshold of the real and physical world and into the thick silvery mists of her domain, he found the flooding surge of her presence to be intoxicating.

Salvador stepped blindly on cracking, crunching bones, trudged through the cold blood sludge of the turf beneath. His steps were unsteady and wavering. He felt drunk in ways he could never be. No amount of alcohol could ever make him feel this inebriated.

She was nowhere to be seen, but everywhere that he could see. The mists that curled and cloyed at his legs were her. The bones and blood beneath his feet were her. The split stone in the center of the grove, with its mystical epitaph, was also her. There were only two things in this place that were not her: himself and the twisting, twining coil of a tree crafted of dead veins and warm blood, with all its many mysterious trinkets clinging to its dripping branches and the beating heart in its damp, slick trunk.

He had many reasons for coming. One such reason was the mystery of that pulsing tree's heart. Salvador knew who it belonged to; he had put it there. He looked upon the dripping branches and listened to the steady thum-thump of a dead man's heart. But he stopped before he reached the tree. He stopped before the single grave marker in the center of his mother's grove. He looked sadly upon the rune-etched words and read them as only his eyes could.

Here lies the Father
Loved once by the Mother
despised by those blind to truth
admired by those willing to see

time cannot have him
and he will never be forgot

Salvador's most important reason for being here was Sin. He dropped to his knees before the epitaph with a weary sigh. Bones crunched under his weight and the ground beneath slurped against his thighs, trying to suck him down into the sodden grave below. He put his hands on his knees and bowed his head with a weary sigh.

"I don't know if you can hear me," he said to no one, to a ghost, to a dead man in his grave. No, he wasn't sure if the Father could hear him just now, but he hoped he could. He didn't want to have to summon him, just to tell him, just to ask... "I don't know, but... Winter's almost here, and I was hoping... Autumn wasn't so bad for me this year. I only got out of control once, maybe twice, I don't know. But nobody died. It didn't last long. I came out of it quick enough and got myself together.

"Maybe... Maybe he was the reason. Maybe it's because he's always been there for me. I don't know that either. It could be that I'm just ... getting used to it. I know my limits. I know when to stop. I know not to keep pushing until I snap and everything goes red. I know..." Salvador sighed and bowed his head even lower until his chin was against his chest.

"I know what you did to him last year. You should be dead and buried and gone, and maybe that's my fault. I didn't listen to you. I hated you. I still hate you." Salvador breathed a sharp, quiet laugh at his own expense. He and Dris really did have much in common. "You said... 'It is not his to keep. It is for those who walk beside him.' And I didn't believe you. I didn't want to believe you. I didn't want you to control me like you've always controlled him. I thought if I could defy you, prove you wrong, that he... That he wouldn't still be so f*cking attached to you!"

Salvador punched his knuckles down into brittle bones and old blood sludge. His other hand fisted against his knee, nails tearing into denim while he bent forward. He grit his teeth together and tried to restrain himself from trembling, from crying, from whining. Rage and sorrow swirled together inside him, and though he fought hard he couldn't keep the tears from splashing to the ground.

"We were doing so well," he whispered, whimpering and sniveling. "Everything was fine. He was happy. Smiling. And then... All this bullsh*t happened with Dris and Jaycy and... Christ." He pushed against the ground and bent back out of his forward hunch, swiped the back of his sleeve under his nose with a sniffle. He used the heel of his hand to rub the tear streaks off his face and laughed breathlessly at himself.

"So much sh*t's happened," he went on. "Not that I expect you to care or anything, but... Is it too much to ask that you leave him alone this year? Please? Just ... let him be himself. I don't know if you can hear me, but God I hope you can, because I'm asking you. F*ck, Lucien, I'm begging you. Please... Please give him an easy winter this year? Just for once, help me keep him happy."

Silence was all that answered him. No ghost crawled out of its grave. No fearsome, toothy shadow beast leered down at him. Not even the wind dared pass through this place. There was only the quiet sigh of the breeze slithering through the barren trees along the Grove's border, beyond the Veil. But Lucien Jean-Pierre Rosie did not answer him. Salvador didn't expect him to anyway.

Ambrose

Date: 2009-12-10 06:45 EST
Bastian was not like other men. Bastian had no interest in power, in domination and cruelty towards humanity, as Ambrose and Diabholtz; he cared little for the affairs of the world and how it moved, or even his own sired children. Bastian accepted death as a means to an end -- and his end was knowledge, and nothing more. He craved it. He was obsessed with it. As years went on, it appeared without obvious negativity; he trained himself to be a perfect creature of clinical detachment towards his hobbies and a font of warmth to his peers, the few he saw. He could not recall the last time anger touched his heart, even after Ambrose abandoned him for the new world. Such things were beyond him now. All that mattered was knowledge.

As such, he had his curiosities.

"I will offer you a deal, madame."

Fionna Helston sat before him, tense with hope, teacup tucked between her delicate fingers. There was a stark humanity in her eyes, her very posture, that he could only compare to Sinjin in his best moments.. but here was a creature who may have been through worse than the Spaniard and survived unbroken.

He had to know. He had to know the how and why: this was not a knowledge one found in books and tomes. Other places, however--

"I would like to commission you for a painting. If you will do me this, I will give you what resources you need and Marcus to assist you."

Art was the key to the soul. Here was a language untranslatable by words, one she spoke and he understood. What would she say? What would her unconscious show, that her mind barely perceived? He tried once to look, but the opportunity was swept from under his feet; ever a patient man, he waited for the next to arrive. And here it was: spread before him like a teatime brunch.

"Are you sure? It seems so much, for a painting."

"I am quite sure, my dear. I was sadly outbid in the auction holding your pieces and have regretted it since the day."

He had not been lying. Bastian rarely lied; his sincerity was never false, nor his kindness. Knowledge was the only thing that mattered, in the end. The knowing would save him. And in this case, the Knowing might help fulfill his final promise to Ambrose, the word he was bound to keep.

He had to know. And so, he waited.

Sinjin Fai

Date: 2009-12-28 18:24 EST
"I feel odd," he told Salvador, and he hadn't been lying. The days leading up to the winter solstice became more odd as time went on. He felt quiet, pensive, and the shadows at his heels often worked with a mind of their own. The image of those very same shadows eating Judah Bishop whole was burned into the back of his eyes and left him uneasy.


When the bells of midnight began on the twentieth, Sinjin had been rising from his table at the Annex to help call a few matches; before he reached the couch, as the toll ended and the first few seconds of the solstice began, shadows ate him whole.


What happened there Sin didn't remember, but when they spat him out onto the ground again, it was with a pain he hadn't felt in years: a heartbeat.


And somewhere, amongst sand and ice and bone, a corpse began to smile.