A Jaded Life

A swift wave of my hand produced a block of Ice behind the newly created creature, allowing Lia to put her down without dropping her into the mud and muck beneath us. Given that this was no longer the same Maria we had welcomed onto this clearing, it felt appropriate, she was no longer the worthless and weak thing who had struggled to make it up the mountain, she had become something more.

Now, she only needed to prove to the world that she deserved to be something better by surviving, if she was so weak that she would squander the gift we had given her, well, in that case, I could only say, too bad.

Studying the collapsed body with my soul sight, I noticed that there was a quite remarkable difference between Lia and the new vampire, not only in the magnitude of their power but also in the quality. It looked as if the new vampire had only a shadow of Lia’s magical powers, making me wonder just how that worked.

Could it be that the powers a new vampire gained were tied to the blood used to create them? It made a certain amount of sense, the process of making a new vampire was essentially a ritual that killed the person but didn’t allow their soul to pass on, instead the soul was altered in the process, changed to become something antithetical to what it had been. We still didn’t understand the mechanics of that process, though I had a few fairly wild ideas but nothing I could currently substantiate, just some guesses from current observations, a few theories adapted from myths and similarly wild conjectures. Nothing I was willing to entertain as a serious possibility until we managed to gather more information.

However, this might give me a further piece of the puzzle, so, before the new vampire had time to wake up, I quickly cut my hand, using Blood Magic to infuse the blood exiting the wound with as much Darkness Magic as I could and let it drop into her mouth. The Blood looked fascinating, the sheer concentration of Darkness Magic made it into something reminiscent of the Void Crystal we had found a while back, but the effect it had on the Vamprie was even more impressive.

Where before, she had looked just like she had before being turned, now, there were veins of black running all across her body, standing out starkly despite her tanned skin. It was quite a fascinating sight as if the major blood vessels had been filled with tar without intruding into all the smaller blood vessels that gave the skin its blush. I had no idea how that might work, so I focused on my magical sight, taking the process in that way.

What I found was even more impressive, it looked almost as if the vampire’s body was trying to take in this new power but it was simply too much. The altered Soul was akin to a dam filled beyond capacity and the overflow was flooding into the body, changing it on a fundamental level, even beyond the change into a Vampire.

I had no idea what this might result in, but from the silent scream on the vampire’s lips, it didn’t appear to be pleasant, an observation a brief use of my Mind Magic confirmed. If I could bottle the agony this new vampire was in and use it as a weapon, I would have a formidable tool. Alas, I doubted it would be really effective unless I could make their body provide the energy for their suffering, if I simply tried to replicate the agony with Mind Magic, I’d have to provide the power for it.

Shaking my head, I focused on the vampire’s mind once more, trying to understand how her body managed to send this much pain into her mind, so I could replicate it at a later date. Watching how the power I had infused her with tore through her flesh, reshaping it in ways I could barely perceive, much less understand, was incredibly fascinating. It was almost as if the flesh was remade from the ground up as something new.

It went beyond the transformation into a vampire, though that, too, reshaped the flesh. The, still partially ongoing, vampire was turning the old flesh into something visually similar but fundamentally different. The differences between alcohol and water, both were clear liquids, both had a similar density and fairly similar boiling points, one was soluble in the other but one would burn while the other would extinguish fire. Well, up to a point, I might have to look into some of the more interesting interactions in that regard, but the fundamental point remained. No matter how similar they might look, they were not the same.

The difference between the original flesh and the vampiric flesh was the same. They might look similar enough at first glance but one was powered by Life and Vitality, the other by Death and its necrotic energies.

And into that ongoing transformation, I had poured an additional power that was now tearing through both the mortal and the vampiric parts of the new vampire, making something new.

“Was that supposed to happen?” Luna asked quietly, studying the new vampire with wide, fascinated eyes. Following her line of sight, I felt my eyes widen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. It was almost as if part of her hand was dissolving into shadow, merging with the darkness around her into some half-way state between the physical and the realm of shadows.

“We might want to step back a little,” I admitted, not quite sure what was going to happen next, but I wanted to watch as it was truly fascinating.

Sadly, when I took another look with my Mind Magic, I realised that neither a mortal nor a vampiric mind was capable of withstanding that much agony, especially not when ti was part of a fundamental change, causing the new vampire’s mind to start fraying. It was slowly coming apart and I doubted I’d be able to stitch it together in any meaningful way, though the fragments should remain within the new vampire. Likely not in an ordered state, but they would be still within it.

While it wasn’t as easy to observe the strange transformation from afar, it was almost certainly a great deal safer. Just watching how some of the rain pouring on the still form from above was torn apart in a strange, shadowy haze was a little disconcerting, a reminder that Darkness could also be hungry. And the Darkness now inherent to the newly created Vampire most certainly was but not in a way I actually understood.

After some time, the process came to a stop and the creature lying on the slab of Ice stilled for a moment, its mouth, previously opened in a silent scream, snapped close and all other movement ceased. No breath, no twitching or fidgeting muscles, nothing, it was lying still as a corpse.

But the moment didn’t last, the magic within the creature coiled up and suddenly, it shot forward, surging towards us in an explosion of movement and shadows. For a creature beneath level five, the attack was incredibly impressive, strong enough to overwhelm an enemy three times its level but trying to use Darkness to attack me? Especially Darkness of the level the creature was wielding?

The explosion of movement and violence was halted in its path, its fury completely unable to make a dent in the far superior control I had over the Darkness around us, to say nothing of the sheer weight of power I could put behind my will. No, this attack wasn’t coming anywhere near us, no matter how the creature raged.

“Foolish creature,” I shook my head, sending out a blast of Mind Magic, causing the new vampire to stumble back, allowing us to see it in its new form for the first time. And Hel, was that thing ugly. Parts of the body had been eaten away and replaced by the Darkness, leaving some odd rends and tears in its mangled flesh where a black, oily substance was leaking out. Her face, on the other hand, was still disconcertingly human, framed in a cloud of inky blackness, the eyes completely black while the mouth had turned into a gaping maw filled with sharp, startlingly white, teeth.

“Can you understand me?” I asked, trying to use my Mind Magic to see if there was anything left within that mind to communicate. Sadly, the only response I received was a strange, incredibly high-pitched shriek that almost made me blast the creature again.

“Not quite what I had in mind, Mother,” Lia quietly complained, studying the bestial creature before us intently. Maybe it was the tone in which Lia was speaking, maybe it was simple fear before a superior predator, but the creature tried attacking again and again, I blasted it back. Only this time, the creature didn’t remain nearby, instead, it immediately scurried off, fleeing into the dark forest around us.

“Alas, I think that can be counted as a failure,” I sighed, looking at the trail for a moment before pulling on the shadows around us, making us all disappear. Time would tell what could become of the creature that once was Maria Perez.