Story Branch / Alternate POV
The following chapters are a short story from the POV of a very minor character named Will Oslen. He has NO impact on the plot of "The Night the Vampires Came," which was a stand-alone story. The following chapters are just for fun (like fanfiction). I've changed the POV to third-person just to present a clear divide between the following chapters and the main story of "The Night the Vampires Came."
Chapter 4 - Memories of the Beginning
- Will Oslen -
In Manna City, there once lived a boy who was afraid of vampires.
He grew up, married, and had children, but his fear never truly left him. Some would even say it became an obsession.
The boy was sixteen when his mother died. On a rainy day, she left him behind with none but his butler's son to keep him company. For years this boy lived in that old, decaying mansion with its secret graves and broken chandeliers. The boy always knew that within the river that ran through his family's properties laid the secret to eternal life.
His role would be to guard it and protect it from outsiders' greed.
But, the boy would choose an altogether different path.
He decided to drink from that river and invite others to do the same. He sold the waters and made a fortune. With that fortune, he won the love of a woman, and she gave him two sons — one of his blood and one whom he made his child through familiarity and proximity.
From some viewpoints, a crime committed for the sake of love could be forgiven. For who would choose a life of solitude and loneliness when so much existed outside the walls of his decaying home?
The life he created for himself by selling those secrets was certainly worth it, wasn't it?
Thus our story began on a day when this boy, from whose imagination came so much of the world's suffering, realized that his mother was a goddess. She had been reborn into a different body, into a life that the boy himself would not recognize. Rather than let her go, he wanted to know her, to reunite with his lost mother.
Much like his unwavering obsession with a certain English tutor's daughter, Oslen would desire a meeting with his deceased parent even if it would bring harm to the new life she had found for herself.
Thus, it would be on a rainy day in Windflower Springs that a memory within a girl of her lost child would be reborn.
And from a distance, the boy watched and waited, for a child knows that the love of a mother is the one unconditional gift the gods had deemed to give its mortal children.
He had other names before he became known as Will Oslen, but for the sake of the story here, Will Oslen he will remain.
At forty-three years of age, he was no longer a lonely, reckless boy wandering amid the ruins of an enchanted forest.
After he landed on a rocky ledge in the darkness of the gorge, Oslen wasn't sure how long he lingered there staring at the starless sky. There were never stars in Manna City, and certainly, there were none to commemorate the death of one like the man who created Tercel.
Yet, as the minutes drifted by, turning into hours, he didn't die. He laid there in the watery rocks, thick with that venom that would turn humans into monsters. He half expected the scent of his human blood mingling in that stream would attract the slithering demons to him like sharks to their prey.
Yet, no such company came.
Instead, as dawn approached, Oslen sat up and ripped the vest from under his clothes. Yes, it had been bulletproof. He hadn't even been aware that it had been sewn into his clothing. His chief of security had ordered it done without him even realizing it.
Damn you, Renat.
Wincing in pain, Oslen managed to push himself up from the puddle he had landed in. Oslen wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and it came away with a copious amount of blood-tinged saliva. There once was a time when he had drank blood to maintain his strength and beauty. Now, the sight of the blood troubled him. No longer was he the predator in these parts. He was the prey. If the blood that leaked from his body didn't kill him, it would surely attract demons from the waters hungry for a meal.
He knew that better than anyone.
He was the boy who had filled the world with vampires.
Was it irony that he would die this way, here, or was it simply karmic fate?
With every movement, his right side burned with debilitating pain. Although he wasn't bleeding, it appeared he was, at the very least, suffering from a severe chest contusion. Dawn was coming, and Oslen had no choice but to struggle onto his feet and look for a dry pile of rocks to rest upon. No blood-thirsty monsters would approach him in the light of day.
Perhaps he should have been burned by the sunlight, but after so many years of exposure to the Black Waters, the small puddle he had found himself in wasn't nearly enough to turn him into a vampire.
The soles of his leather loafers slipped on the rocky, granite surface. He wasn't unaccustomed to wandering terrain such as this in this type of clothing, but it had been years since he had left the quiet shelter of his home. Oslen gave up all pretense of refinement and collapsed into a pile of dry-seeming rocks. He left a bloody handprint on the rough surface of a slab of bedrock. Then, he leaned against it and struggled to catch his breath.
He stared at the rays of the oncoming sun and wanted to laugh at his pitiful state. Once, he had ruled the depths of Aemon Gorge. Now, he was nothing more than a frail bag of middle-aged bones with graying hair and a weak left knee. Mortality wouldn't be so hard to bear if the ending came quickly from the blast of a revolver. Rather, mortality was slow and insidious, forcing its victims to become caretakers of an ever-decaying suit of flesh.
"I recognize you," a voice whispered from the darkness. "You were a child when we last met. A fragile little thing hanging onto the loose fabric of his father's trousers."
"Demon, we finally meet," Oslen half-muttered, half-grunted out in reply. He imagined the exchange to be more graceful than this in the weeks preceding this encounter. Yet, he was thankful his plan had worked, and the vengeful god Jaduerial would no longer trouble the world above them.
"Demon? You can call me God of Rebirth, boy."
Jaduerial laughed. The sound reverberated inside Oslen's mind, but he didn't find the sensation alien or intolerable. He had known many demons over the years that appeared inside the darkness of his mind.
"I thought when we finally met, you would come prepared," the god responded mockingly. "But now I see you were prepared. You didn't believe she would pull that trigger."
Oslen struggled to form his words now, even though his bruised ribs didn't allow him to speak for long periods. "You entered me because you thought she wouldn't harm me. You thought she was too weak to kill me."
"I entered you because I was tired of the other girl and her trivial little thoughts about love, honor, and her family."
"Do you find my mortal concerns more interesting?"
"Not more interesting but perhaps less hysterical."
Jaduerial was quiet after that. Sunlight was advancing on the cavern's walls, and Oslen felt its warm rays dry the cursed dampness from his clothing. Jaduerial was different from Villaris. He wasn't a mindless monster bent only on destruction. Oslen could feel Jaduerial's spirit leave his body and appear as a shade standing before him. He was still mentally teetered to the being and could see himself through the demon-god's gaze. What Jaduerial believed to be his greatest strength — the reading of the mortal minds of the bodies he inhabited — was also his greatest weakness, for a clever mortal could read the god's mind in return.
That was what his mortal body's greatest advantage was, Oslen realized. It wasn't his magnificent powers to harness nature or his resistance to Black Waters. It was his experience in the face of mind control, born after many years of being subjected to it. Now, in this game of psychic chess, he finally had the advantage that neither Ian nor that girl from Windflower had.
"Are you here to help me kill Grismal, Blake?" The angel finally asked.
Oslen winced at the name, although he pretended it was his ribs that bothered him. No one called him that name anymore except his wife. He understood why Jaduerial asked that question. Oslen could see himself through Jaduerial's eyes, or at least he could imagine what he looked like. He was like a broken mannequin, collapsed against a slab of rock. He hardly felt like the formidable monster of the world's nightmares. At that moment, he felt his spine wasn't enough to hold his world-weary body upright anymore. His shirt was ripped at the collar, and several buttons were missing. He imagined rolling down the bottoms of the cavern hadn't done wonders for his face either.
He hardly looked the part of a man who could take on the God of Death, even if Grismal was only the ruler of those who lived lives tainted by vampirism. Either way, Jaduerial had a good reason to doubt the man before him was worth an honest try at saving the world.
"Why didn't you have Ian do it when you had the chance?" Oslen finally asked. Jaduerial found the question amusing as this was the last question he expected to come from Oslen's lips. For a second there was silence as Jaduerial contemplated the question.
Oslen wasn't a fool. He knew how the question would be interpreted. Ian was his son, his only child with any blood relation to him and his wife. He knew that Jaduerial expected him to do everything and anything to protect his child. However, it had been a day full of revelations regarding parental devotion. Perhaps, Jaduerial thought the same of Odelia, and they were now at the bottom of Aemon Gorge.
But, then again, Ailith wasn't Odelia, not anymore.
A mother's love could conquer many things, but perhaps, in the face of death, it was capable of only the briefest of all flickers of recognition.
"I didn't use your son because he wasn't suited to the task," Jaduerial replied carefully as though he was finally aware that the boy he was addressing was no longer a naive fatherless boy but a calculating warlord. "Perhaps one day he could be, but today —no."
"Was he weak? Cowardly? Too dull to do ask you asked?"
"No," Jaduerial retorted, finally realizing he was being taunted. "Because he despises you. He didn't want to kill Grismal and absolve you of your sins. His mind is too clouded with thoughts of killing you. He has great powers, but he doesn't have any focus. You should be grateful I kept him away from you."
Oslen pushed himself up into a sitting position. Jaduerial's words weren't unexpected. He knew that Ian was entirely lost to him. True, Oslen didn't wholly believe that Ailith would shoot him, but in the back of his mind, he secretly hoped that she would put an end to his existence. Perhaps with his death, he could have earned some degree of redemption in the eyes of those who blamed him for the Blight Rain.
"Don't worry, my boy," Jaduerial continued with a small laugh. "You don't need to worry about that child anymore. Without my spirit inside of him, he has no powers of his own. Your child may be able to magnify the abilities of those around him, but he has none of his own. He is no threat to either of us."
Oslen stared into the distance. Something about the spirit's tone of voice was starting to unsettle him. My boy, what are you doing here? My dear boy. . .don't ever venture near the vats of cursed waters. My dear, dear boy. . .
Father.
Those words echoed in Oslen's mind even as he played with his tutor's daughter in the forest with the vampire bones. He had so envied her. She was able to leave that place when her father's work was done. He could never leave, could never fully dissociate himself from that cursed place.
Oslen turned his blue-green eyes up at the spirit standing before him. All his life, he had been told his eyes weren't quite green, even though he so desperately wanted them to be. He was so unlike his father, Sebastian.
He differed from his father in more than just his appearance. He ventured into those cursed waters and became a creature of darkness. Because only by doing so could he escape from River Way and live a life that felt distinctively his own.
Slowly, surely, the shadows wrapped around the spirit, and his appearance changed from that of a shimmering ray of sunlight to a man with crimson red hair and green eyes. Jaduerial stood before Oslen as the man he had soon too often in his dreams. From his ashen grey trousers that the small boy could never keep his grip on to the strands of white in his father's hair and comforting wrinkled eyes that graced his portrait. It was the only thing the boy had to remember his father's face by. Until now. Now, Oslen's father stood before him just as he had the day he disappeared into Aemon.
"I know you were following me the day I died," Jaduerial mused. "I knew you were there, Blake. I know you tried to stop them from murdering me, and it haunts you. I've watched you from afar for years."