Bane

November 18, 1993

The air out here is wet and smells of memory, but these memories ade not my own. I see the silhouette of the old willow standing between me and this wretched place.

I can feel the echoes of history here, songs from the land of the dead god.

Taal remembers and so Driftwood remembers. Driftwood remembers and so the Sons and Daughters of Driftwood remember.

How this willow survived so many hanged, so many boughs cleaved away. The resonance of time emanates out of it, the begging, the fear, the tears and the sound of laughter from children swinging on a crude rope affixed to a wooden plank.

The frayed remains hang rotting on the branch, the wooden plank long broken beneath it in a mossy grave.

This place, Blackwood's place, it was never clean... but the old man kept whatever darkness resides within subdued. Now it vibrates, permeated with the nauseating stench of magick.

Somewhere inside the last of Blackwood's line conjures within a circle all her own. Were the old man alive, what would he do?

...what could he do?

The air out here is wet, and smells of memory... but these memories are not my own.

✟ ☧ ✟

The trek through the labyrinthine mansion of the Blackwood estate yielded nothing, but it did not have to.

Bane knew where they would be and they knew he was here.

This would not be a repeat of the incident at Simon Bellar's.

He would do nothing to distract them, nothing to disturb them; that elder hunter, Donovan Blackwood, who died honorably without so much as a scream.

(You murdered him.)

Be silent.

The Order will fall to the last man, woman and child. Your fading memories cannot stop me, cannot thwart me, cannot change my mind. You are an echo, and when The Order is gone, so will it be the same with you.

From the recesses of Bane's memory there was no response.

He waited a moment longer, smiled beneath his mask and nodded once. The memories used to come in his voice - the voice of the young Jonathan Walker - but that voice was long changed now. So long changed, Bane no longered remembered its sound.

The memories what haunted him now nagged as a small child nags for a new toy, except now they nagged without a voice.

Soon that would die, too. Soon, Bane would have peace.

He stared up at the ceiling, his heavy black dreadlocked hair hanging down the back of his leather duster. Up there past the ceiling, the floors and beyond, a circle sat in silence with bated breath.

Up there they waited and down here below he drew in a deep breath. He released it slowly, and made his way to the stairs. He made no attempt at silence, the stairs straining and creaking beneath his heavy booted feet.
He ascended to the second floor, the third, and then to the stairs he knew led to the attic space. Bane made his final ascent toward the landing, his eyes locked on the heavy looking oaken door; its iron fixtures made it look more a medieval prison, a tower atop a castle where Blackwood could have kept political rivals, or wives who could bear him no sons.

Beyond the door, destiny called.

Bane reared back a moment and paused. He reached for the handle of the door. It refused to turn. He pushed a palm into the heavy wood, and the door itself would not yield, would not bend, and would not budge. Had only the hunters this kind of strength, perhaps that concrete house of ill repute might have lasted.