Slowly, Kuradek fed, and he recovered his strength, and thought long and hard. He brooded. He remembered a time, the time of the vachine and he spat out black lumps of smoking phlegm with rage. He reached down and tore off a baby's arm, ignoring the dead blue eyes which stared up from a bloodied pile of infant corpses. He chewed on the fingers for a while, and having gnawed to the bones, moved up to the wrist, sucking at the bone marrow and picking strips of flesh clean with his fangs.
The vachine!
Bastards!
He remembered like yesterday their magick, how they had taken control from the Vampire Warlords by their deceit, them, the slaves he had allowed to live! And even the sacrifice of Silva Valley did little to cheer Kuradek, even the death of so many vachine did little to satiate his lust for revenge. For Kuradek knew, knew they had expanded north, past the Black Pike Mountains, and there were hundreds of thousands still remaining, still breathing air, still breeding human cattle and mixing their blood with foul oil-magick. They were impure, the vachine; they were deviants of the vampire. They were an outcast race. They were a clock work race, and Kuradek would not have it! His eyes glowed, and his long arms flexed, talons dropping to shriek against stone with an array of sparks. No.
Kuradek would make the vachine pay.
One day.
All of them…
Slowly, Kuradek rose from his bloated slumber and blinked lazily. He stepped up to the high window in the west tower of the Blue Palace, and stared out across the blackness of Jalder. No fires burned, now, and a cold ice wind blew across what appeared a deserted city. And yet… yet he could smell those who still lived, could smell the blood in their veins, hear the pumping of their hearts like discordant music, off-key notes, a poisoned orchestra. Kuradek breathed deep, and leapt from the high tower window, landing and cracking the ancient stone flags of the courtyard. A group of the turned scattered in shock, then fixed eyes on their master and returned slowly, smiles on pale faces lit by the moon.
Kuradek hissed, and gestured the slaves back, then he moved, running through the darkened streets, moving with awesome speed across snow and ice, talons gripping with surety, smoke-trailing head weaving from side to side as he sniffed, as he hunted… he reached a cottage, skidded on ice, kicked the door across the room in an explosion of splinters and stood in the centre of the space. One talon smashed down through floorboards, and the whole room seemed to erupt in violence as screams rent the air and Kuradek leapt down into the hidden cellar where eight people hid, and swords struck at him but seemed to slow through his smoke-filled, symbol-tattooed body then emerge from the other side without harming the Warlord. His talons lashed out, punching holes through men's chests. He grabbed a woman, and his long limbs pulled apart and both her arms came off at the shoulders spewing blood and leaving her screaming, her blood describing fountains across the walls. Kuradek loomed over a four year-old girl with curly brown hair, brown eyes looking up at him in awe and shock and wonderment. He reached down, and with a quick bite, removed her head, swallowing it whole.
Kuradek lifted his smoky muzzle and… howled, howled at the city, at the moon, at the stars, at his tortured past, at his escape from the Chaos Halls, at the bastard vachine and their curse and imprisonment, but most of all, Kuradek howled with enjoyment and hatred and rage and impotent fury and the joy, the pure acid joy of the hunt.
Throughout Jalder, Kuradek's howls and screams seemed to stimulate the turned vampires into action. They rampaged through the streets, breaking into houses, searching through attics and cellars, finding more hidden humans and either drinking their blood and leaving drained corpses, or as they had been instructed, turning them into yet more vampires. Into Kuradek's Legion.
For Kuradek knew.
Falanor was full to the brim with human offal. And they would bring the fight to him. They always did. It was their nature. But he would crush them. Unlike a thousand years ago, when the vachine turned on their masters, this time Kuradek and the Vampire Warlords would be ready…
As the hours passed, and day turned to night turned to day, so Falanor fell under the spread of the vampire. And unlike the vachine before them, who had sought simple extermination for blood-oil magick, and for sacrifice, the Vampire Warlords sought slaves, sought an army of the impure. For that way, they could expand. That way, they could create Dominion.
In Vor, Meshwar the Violent uncurled like a snake and stood tall, stretching, smoke curling from the corners of his mouth. His blood eyes dropped to survey the slaves before him, and he strode down the once pure regal steps of King Leanoric's beautiful Rose Palace, and stared out through huge iron gates, out over the destruction and desolation of Vor, Falanor's capital city.
Smoke curled along midnight streets, swirling about the feet of many slave vampires bearing the mark of Meshwar. He grinned, a smoke grin of tightly reined insanity, and surveyed his handiwork. He was not called The Violent for no reason…
In the City Square, a huge pile of corpses burned, their drained, angular figures like wooden stickmen seen through flames. Meshwar's eyes drifted impassively over the thousand or so unfortunates, their clothing, skin and bones turning to ash as fire roared and crackled like feeding demons, illuminating the palace with an orange glow.
What Graal had begun so many weeks earlier with his ice-smoke and blood-oil magick, with his invasion of Vor by the Army of Iron – well, now Meshwar was finishing the task.
The Army of Iron were camped out of the city. All vachine camped alongside them had been taken into the forest and executed. Some vachine had put up a fight, several bands even escaping into the woods; but Meshwar sent squads of vampire killers after them, hunting them down, ripping out throats and clockwork hearts, spilling gears and cogs to the forest undergrowth,
Now, though, now it was all his. And the worm Graal was the problem of Bhu Vanesh. Slowly, through Meshwar's mind eased a thought web, for he did not think like normal mortals. This multi-threaded strand held ideas of death and destruction for Graal, but also amusement for it would annoy Bhu Vanesh. It would not be long, decided Meshwar, until Graal died a horrible death, despite his misplaced loyalty in their Summoning. To Meshwar, Graal was an imposter. A twisted impure. A melding of that which they sought to stamp out…
Meshwar's eyes surveyed Vor once again, then again, and again, taking in the destruction, the rampage, the violence. There, the Five Pillars of Agrioth had been chained and pulled to the ground by teams of horses and cattle. Five thousand years of history destroyed, because it was the history of the Ancient, the history of the Ankarok , and they were a pestilence long dead and better ground into the dirt, into dust, even moreso than the vachine.
The Great Library had first been ransacked, the books burned, then the ancient building itself set alight. That had been a particularly pleasing night's work, Meshwar nodded, smoke-filled mouth forming a smile, skin changing and shifting like a chameleon, and the image of the violence flashed across his flesh like moving, animated tattoos on smoke. On Meshwar's skin, the other slaves could see the re-enactment of the Great Destruction, as it would come to be known. Even after fires had died in the Great Library, leaving the teetering blackened walls smoking and charred, stinking and unstable, so Meshwar had personally led a team of vampires in pulling down the remaining walls until only rubble remained.