The pair of hulking Wamphyri aspirants who had dragged this small, unassuming human being in here were now slumped, smouldering shreds of blasted flesh puddling the flagged floor with their ichor; and the magician (oh, yes, for this, surely, was magic!) who had cindered them was at the window, gazing out on Starside's night skies and ruin-scarred plain with devastating eyes. For where and whenever his gaze alighted and lingered it brought fresh ruins; and all across the sky in the deepening gloom of sundown, Shaithis's New Wamphyri hordes were exploding into fiery tatters and raining their debris down among the shattered stacks of their olden forebears.
Raging his frustration, Shaithis discovered himself robed again, with his gauntlet at his hip. Knowing what must be done — that he alone had the measure of The Dweller and his father — he fitted his deadly weapon to his hand and, in the tradition of the olden Wamphyri, rushed at them to cut them down. And why not? For they were only flesh and blood after all, just as the great white bears of the Icelands had been flesh and blood. And as the vampire Lord knew only too well, all flesh is weak. Even Wamphyri flesh, in the right circumstances.
In Shaithis's mind the Dark Hooded Thing heard his chaotic, bloody thoughts and said, Fool! But Shaithis wasn't listening.
He came upon the hell-lander first, and swung his gauntlet… which froze in mid-air, as if time itself had stopped. But then Shaithis saw that time had simply stretched itself, and that his monstrous gauntlet crept across the intervening distance in a maddening slow-motion. The Dweller's father saw it coming and his strange sad eyes turned (but oh, so very slowly) to burn upon Shaithis's face. And the scarlet eyes of his son, the great changeling wolf, were likewise upon Shaithis from where that slavering creature floated on the air, caught at the high point of its spring.
In the manner of the Wamphyri, the pair spoke to Shaithis in his raging, blood-drenched mind; and not only them but the Dark Hooded Thing, too, all saying the same thing: You have destroyed us all. Your ambition, your passion, your pride.
Die! Shaithis replied, as his gauntlet collided little by little with the hell-lander's head and slowly shattered its bright core.
Aye, bright! Bright and blinding and deadly as the furnace sun itself! For there was no blood, no bone, no grey and pulpy brain in the magician's head at all — nothing but golden fire. Like the seething, seering nuclear fire of the sun.
Indeed, it was the sun, endlessly expanding out of the small destruction of the hell-lander to encompass and destroy… everything!!!
Shaithis started awake, felt the ice against his flesh and thought for a moment that it was searing golden fire. He cried out, and a thousand fragile icicles shattered and came tinkling down from the ice-castle's fantastic ceiling. In the next split second the vampire Lord saw where he was and remembered what he was doing here, and as his nightmare receded and reality closed on him, so his breathing and the pounding of his heart gradually slowed. Then-He scanned across the frozen expanse of the ice-castle and found the dark forms of Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson in their niches, and saw that the former had likewise come awake. And now the Ferenc's gaze met his across the glittering ice-sheathed vault.
'Dreaming, Shaithis?' that one called out to him, his words chasing themselves to and fro in the bitter, echoing air of the place. 'An omen, perhaps? You cried out, and it seemed to me you were afraid.'
Shaithis wondered if the dream had been self-contained, like his inward-directed thoughts, or if Fess had been 'listening in' on it. He hated the idea that anyone should spy on him, especially in his subconscious, where the seeds of all of his ambitions — indeed his intentions — were stored in darkness, awaiting their germination. 'An omen?' he eventually answered, but quietly, hiding what confusion lingered still. 'No, I think not. Nothing portended, Fess. A pleasurable dream, that's all, of woman-flesh and sweet traveller blood.' Of the Lady Karen rotting on my couch, and the entire Wamphyri race wiped out in the sunburst of an alien mind!
'Huh!' the other grunted. 'I dreamed only of ice. I dreamed I was frozen in an ice-tomb, and that some unknown thing was melting its way in to me.'
'Then it's as well my cry of sweet pleasure woke you up,' said Shaithis.
'Aye, but too early,' the Ferenc grumbled. 'Arkis sleeps on. In this he's the wise one. Let's drift a further hour or two before we're up and about.'
Shaithis agreed; and grateful that the giant had not read him, he settled down again and closed an eye…
And again Shaithis dreamed. Except that this time, even more certainly than the last, he knew it was much more than any common dream. The setting was a meeting between himself and the being known as Shaitan the Fallen, whom he recognized at once as that selfsame Dark Hooded Thing who had been his sinister, frowning familiar — perhaps even his alter-ego? — in his nightmare of frustrated revenge.
He was aware of the Thing as a shadow among lesser shadows in a cavern of black rock, unsuspected except for the red glow of its eyes where they floated in luminous yellow orbits. What he, Shaithis, was doing in such a place he could not say, except that he felt he'd been called here. Yes, that was it: he was not here entirely of his own free will but mainly because this enigmatic being had called him here.
And as if to confirm that thought: 'Shaithis, my son,' said the Dark Hooded Thing, whose true voice was deeper, darker, and probably more deceiving than any Shaithis ever heard before. 'And so at last you've answered me. Difficult to reach you, my son, through that clever deflective screen of yours, else I had known you and called you here long before now.'
Shaithis's Wamphyri eyes and awareness were accustomed now to the gloom of the place. Indeed he saw and sensed as well as ever, which is to say very well indeed: as a cat at night or Desmodus on the wing. The darkness made no difference; in fact, and with regard to his whereabouts, it merely served to confirm his first instinctive guess that he was in some natural chamber deep in the belly of the slumbering volcano. Which would appear to make Shaitan the Lord of these subterranean regions.
In such close proximity, the other read his thoughts as if they'd been spoken words and answered: 'But of course, just as I have been since… oh, a long, long time.'
Shaithis peered intently at the crimson-eyed shadow which was Shaitan. It was strange, but for all his vampire-enhanced awareness he saw only an outline of the other's form. No fault of his; his senses were not impaired; Shaitan must be shielding his physical self in a manner like to Shaithis guarding his thoughts. But… Shaitan the Fallen? Could it really be — was it really possible — for any creature to live so long? He made up his mind that indeed it must be, for here he stood in the presence of just such a one.
And: This isn't just a dream,' said Shaithis then, with a shake of his head. 'I can feel your presence and know you are reaclass="underline" that same Shaitan of whom Kehrl Lugoz was, and is, so mortally afraid, that ancient Being out of the first annals of Wamphyri legend. You were banished here in prehistory, and you live here still.'
'All true,' the other answered, and darkness stirred where he stood, as if he had offered a casual shrug. 'I am that same Shaitan, the so-called Unborn, who was and is your immemorial ancestor!'