An update for my friends

Hello everyone. I just wanted to keep you all in the loop as to what's been happening. My dad passed away one week ago today. He wasn't just my father; he was my friend too. My whole family is grieving, and we have to take care of his estate. This puts a further delay on The Vindicad, I'm sorry to say. Lord willing, I'll be able to take it up again when the dust settles. Your prayers and thoughts are appreciated. Thank you all.

Decision to Redesign

Due to a few unforeseen scheduling circumstances plus a marketing decision or two, I have decided to move the Vindicad to an independent web site. Once that is done, I will resume the story.

Please watch this space for updates. Thanks for all you readers out there who have enjoyed the story so far. Hopefully we will see some improvement in the formatting and accessibility of the story.

Vacation! - Plus a Preview

Hi everyone! I'm gearing up for a vacation next week so The Vindicad will need to be delayed a bit. Look for the next part per the usual schedule: November 1.

In the meantime, here's something to whet your appetite...

Interlude - A letter to Cardinal Stancati

Your Eminence,

The target has been located and insertion has been completed. Our agent is even now monitoring the situation. I have high hopes that we may secure the target by week's end.

Rupert (redesignate: Shocksong) has begun the "Blooding" process, hence is accompanying the target into the field. I have instructed our agent to proceed with all speed and diligence. The remaining Accursed will present no obstacle as their attention will be divided. Our primary contact has assured me that minimal escort will be present.

Success to the project!

Verde

Part 13 – The Voice

Now...


Mist obscured a yellow constellation that formed a writhing pattern before my eyes, a new Serpens daring the hand of Ophiuchus to clutch and tame it. Then my vision cleared enough to see the dull light of the bulb string that cast feeble shadows and silhouetted my shaking extremity as it tried to shield my sight from even that pitiful glare.

The vision was over; my brain finally beginning to categorize the jumbled and unbelievable history I sensed was starting to stare into me. What had I just witnessed?

I could sense my mind changing just as my body had changed. I was man, wolf… and now something else. I could almost see the dendrites and axons shifting their structure, struggling to accommodate my new knowledge, assimilating it into my own memories and psyche. There was an ache in my brain: not the merely tangible pressure on the dura mater, but a suffering of the spirit. I was growing, becoming more that I had thought myself destined to be. I felt old. The weight of history threatened to bow my shoulders.

My hand hurt. As my vision fully cleared, I felt the burning of the mark imprinted there. A strange spiral that I now observed was developing unusual definition. Certain transverse lines and odd angles that reminded me of the drawings the witch had scratched in the earth before the final battle.

He’s marked…

What really had happened to me? Even among the Benandanti, I was different. I recalled the words of Davi after my first change.

And the other visions scraped at the casements of my spirit, wanting to bet let in to display their full and terrible glory. I caught snatches of them, coming unbidden to my consciousness. I knew deep inside me what the mark was for and what my purpose was.

But I was afraid of acknowledging it, because of what it implied. What would grow out of me. What I would give birth to.

You will betray them.

My vision began to blur again, the mark of my hand becoming a mandala that swirled in upon itself, that one refrain chanted over and over again.

The mark swam and reformed, collapsed and swelled, a breathing lung, a beating heart, an excrescence of higher mathematics and non-euclidean tangents. It changed, altered, metamorphosed. As the Benandanti change and alter. We are of wolf and man, past and present, hybrid. Wolf und mann. Lupus et sapiens. Barbaru u Awīlu. Nnggrrann aaaann…

“The Oracle, how do you say it, worked you over. Yes?”

A different mark. New. Not mine. The back of a pale-gray paw brandishing a kindred pattern, darker and clearer, a new cosmic schema somehow both intersecting and diverging from the old.

The Russian accent made me look up and away, peeling my fixation off the twin tapestries of the Benandanti sigils, a hopeful look on my face: gratitude for the distraction.

But it wasn’t Molotok. Instead it was that blue-eyed werewolf, still grinning or grimacing as before, still flanked by two lictors who eyed him with an almost vulturous air. He, like them, was assuming what the Benandanti had always called the “hunter,” the powerful man-wolf form.

If it had been any other of my brethren, I would have welcomed the sight. But the more he continued to stare the more I found myself involuntarily shrinking away, almost willing myself to melt into the cave wall before his crazed glower.

For it wasn’t just the lictor body guards that warned me to be wary of this one. Rather something in his manner shrieked out an omen to senses long buried. I felt something akin to when I and the Oracle had had our little chat. I knew that this creature was quite capable of killing me.

And maybe, just maybe, he desired to do so.

He moved with a feline grace as he hunkered next to my curled naked form and extended one clawed hand in an almost courtly gesture. “Golos.”

My throat was dry and my voice came out in a half croak. “Come again?”

“My name, my name,” he said in an oddly chanted cadence. “At least my Benandanti name. My old one would mean nothing to you, nothing, nothing at all.”

“I’m-“

“I know who you are, Shocksong. I saved your life during that last fight. Remember? Assuming your mind recalls it and isn’t filled to bursting with the Oracle’s… gift.” The last word was uttered with an excessive enunciation and a slight downturn of the perpetual smile.

“I remember.” I tried to straighten up but I felt modesty kick in as my hands moved a bit lower on my frame.

“Yes, yes, of course you do,” Golos said and his smile was restored to its full hideous whiteness. “Here.”

The memories that weren’t memories were indeed clashing in my cerebral cortex, and it wasn’t long before I’d figured out the “trick” he now performed before my eyes. But at the time it was like magic. At the snap of his clawed fingers, out of the air a full sized pair of pants landed in his hands. He handed the clothing to me, his blue eyes hardly blinking. I felt and smelled the renewed tension in his bodyguards.

For a moment, I regarded the pants as if they were the corpse of some animal freshly slaughtered just to make me a temporary garment. But since Golos simply continued to stare, I at last slipped them ungracefully on.

The distraction was only momentarily merciful. The terrible meaning of the mark came again without warning. I let my back impact with the tunnel wall, heedless of the shock of pain. “The mark,” I said.

“Marks,” Golos corrected. “You and I, I and you. Or is that me? And there have been and will be others, you know.”

“I... I know it all. I –“

“You know nothing.”

When I looked at him again, the grin was, if possible, wider than ever. “What? What do you mean,” I managed to squeak.

“You’ve only been shown a morsel-tidbit, segment-fraction-fragment-section of the equation. The smallest spicule. A solitary move in the grand chess game. Pawn takes bishop, queen takes pawn, pawn takes queen, rook takes-”

“Game?” I felt my voice grow shriller. “You’re insane! You call this a game? This mark, it’s a curse! It’s changing me. Making me –“

“I know what it is,” Golos said. “Why do you think these two lictors follow me? They know of it, see it, smell it, though they can’t comprehend the burden. Most benandanti are blessed with simple soldierdom, you see. They can’t, they won’t, they musn’t know the heavy load you and I and others like us must carry for all of time, eternity future, unknown dark.

“In truth, they know only the Blooding.”

I blinked and tried to stand. He motioned me to follow him, a soft cackle like a hyena escaping his lupine snout, and I noticed that the two lictors were falling in step with both of us.

I dared entertain the thought that they were beginning to look at me the same way they looked at him.

“Blooding,” I managed to say. “I… remember. Davi mentioned that word when I first turned. What does it mean?”

We were passing by several chambers containing Benandanti in either hunter or human forms, some conversing in human tongues or the True Speech, some reading books or scrolls, some with laptops or working at desks, the huge claws of the hunter forms looking comical as they tapped keys or turned pages. I wondered why they didn’t all shift back to human form as they performed such delicate work. And I observed, though I didn’t realize its importance at the time (probably my focus was on the mad werewolf beside me), that the hunter forms that did these curious things all had wholly or partially gray fur.

“Blooding, blooding, blooding,” Golos was saying. “Just a word. A trial, a journey. Ritual significance. The shedding, the spilling of blood. I was blooded. And I survived, poor poor Golos.”

His half-incoherent words were rapidly starting to annoy me. “Blood? What blood? Haven’t I already proved myself? I fought the Malandanti several times before I came here.”

“Malandanti?” Golos’ voice was almost mocking in its tone as he stopped walking and regarded me with those haunting crystal blue eyes. “Insignificant. Surely now that the Oracle has touched you, changed you, cursed you, you must know this.”

Xo-Hjal and the Abyssal Rift. Quan-Xoth and Ghulathra.

Knocking, scratching. “I can’t…”

"Tartarus and the elders took the measure of you, and they sent me to blood you. Poor, poor young Shocksong."

“What… are they?” I didn't mean the elders. My mind was elsewhere, in a dark place. Golos licked his teeth and I saw with horrible certainty that he understood my question.

He cocked his head and for the briefest of moments the smile was completely gone. But it rapidly returned, perhaps even more maniacal than before. And with it his voice came as a barely audible hiss. “Outermost.”

It.

All my life. All the time. The nameless foe that followed me, hungered for me, haunted every child's dreams in the witching hours.

It had a name.

Now if only I could forget.

I felt a chill that was not of mere temperature: a biting freezing soul disease, a brush with the Unknown far more odious and alien than any of the mere monstrosities of body that I had slaughtered without a second thought.

May God have mercy on the one who knows. And why did I feel that I had just met my best friend in this insane monster that wouldn't stop baring his teeth at me?

“Since the old days, the dead days,” he was saying, his voice interspersed with horrible little giggles. “Ancient tomes, forbidden texts. Nightmare visions. Feebly poking-prodding. Never knowing, never daring to speak it out loud.”

I only stared while the grin twitched in a fresh dose of madness. “Outermost. You know the word, Shocksong, you know. Like I do. This universe, one of mindless forces? Gravity, time, space, velocity: what are they? What are they really? Can you tell me that, canyoucanyou?

“Dig and delve, find more and more. Yet we never see the end. God Particle. Grand Unification Theory. First Cause. Mystery of quantum. Names for the same thing."

“What thing?” My voice was a whimper.

“The Truth.”

My mouth was a desert. I said nothing, not daring to admit the implications of what Golos was hinting at.

“Outermost," he said again, and I wished that he would stop saying it. "What lies beyond? Floundering complexities we believe are mere forces? What crawls and rebels? What longs to engulf, dissolve, annihilate? What lies beyond the stars, beyond the heavens, beyond our souls? What drives the Malandanti? What curses our dreams and drives us mad-loony-rabid, non compos mentis in the dead hush when the clock strikes twelve?

“What would raze your wolfy little mind if ever you saw It? Full and furious boils. Jerking cilia. Pure non-thought, squirming idiocy.”

I felt and heard a ripping of cloth and felt the fangs emerge again. But I was only barely aware of it. “I don’t want to hear any more,” I growled.

“Too late, too late,” Golos chanted, like a mocking macabre clown singing a ditty at a child’s party. “Better you hear it from one who has been where you are now. Embrace the existence of utter madness now, before it destroys your mind as it did mine.”

“You?” My hunter form’s senses smelled the loathing on the lictors’ fur. They hated and feared Golos, as well they might be expected to.

And maybe, just maybe, they were starting to hate me.

“Yes,” Golos said. “I have seen… things: my punishment and my destiny. My name, which means ‘The Voice,’ was given to me long before I turned. When I was human, I committed acts unspeakable, things that destroyed and poisoned my conscience. And my enemies never saw my face, only my voice. The Benandanti took pity on my miserable soul. Or perhaps this was their ordained punishment?

“But regardless of why they saved me, I have received recompense. Now I am like you. Aberration, mutation, deviation, call it what you will. And our destinies are intertwined.”

My fur was bristling. What did he mean by “intertwined?” Was I going to end up like him, half-insane, a danger to everyone around me?

“Why?” It was all I could ask.

“Why you or why me?”

I was silent. I didn’t really know what I meant, so I just let him go on.

“Why, why, why? Who can say in the end? I listen. Rumors that the Benandanti are not all they seem. They speak of one I don’t understand. The kind one. But the mark they only whisper of with fear. Tares among the wheat perhaps? Doomed among the righteous?” Here he tittered again. “I can’t say. Why the mark, why the growth under the skin. Why, why, why? As for me… they hunt me. Even now I sense them. They are closing in.

"Guilty, guilty am I. But no matter, you are here for blooding. They sent me, little Shocksong. And here I am, here am I."

I flexed my claws, ready to kill this wolfen parody. He only giggled while the lictors' lips curled in fierce and dangerous snarls. "Bloody blooding, Shocksong. Are you ready? Time for your testing. Marked ones must be tested. Monsters in our midst, loyalty assured. Prepare yourself."

My ears flattened of their own accord. "Prepare for what?"

"Simple, simple. You heard the howl, the newcomers from the stars. The den is buzzing with the news. We are not alone!" These last words he howled in a grandiloquent tone as if he were announcing a Spielberg movie.

"What about them?" I said.

"We need tools. We will help them. We need knowledge we don't have. Well get it. You'll get it!"

"How?"

"Easy-peasy lemon squeezy," Golos answered. "Tonight you get to turn your first werewolf."

In Four Days - The True Enemy

Shocksong meets a new and dangerous ally.

And his fears are given a name.

Read The Vindicad, Part 13 - "The Voice"

Available on 10/1/11. See you then!

Part 12 - Dark Embassy

Now... Wormwood fell to Earth in the Carpathians. The summit of Mount Hoverla was cloaked in white feathers and glass sheets in the sub-zero gloaming. The seven thousand feet of air that separated its gentle crown from the far flung sea drew moisture from flesh and made an anxious silence. Hoverla, the great winter obstacle to brave and foolish mountaineers, highest of the Carpathian pinnacles, hump of the Hodytsya spine. Older than mankind, quiet and grim, torpid in wintertide. For thousands of years had it lain, indifferent to the whirlpool of puny human passion. The ancient nameless peoples were long dead, the dark Cimmerians and tall Scythians had come and gone through the misty eons. The Kievan Rus, Poles and Cossacks, Tsarsists and Sovietskii, all were dust. And Hoverla remained, unchanging. Until Wormwood came. The Presence occulted by Luna's disk had learned of the true nature of the beings that waited to greet its questing finger with fire and shot. It had called to its kin in the dark places, now knowing the mark of the New World. And it knew that this world's time was short. As the poisoning star descended, harbinger of what awaited in the Unknown, the eyes of men in nearby Luhy and Breboya crossed themselves. For the falling star was not made of white fire as such things ought to be. Instead it was green, pulsating, strange. And when it fell to the summit of Mount Hoverla and made for a moment a strange orange glow before dying away, those same men made a silent vow to tell no one what they had seen. They crossed themselves doubly when they heard the howling from that distant peak, a howling that somehow seemed to come from wolves far too large and powerful. For the first time since the Chernobyl monstrosity, the name of a far more ancient horror was uttered. Vurdalak. Three Benandanti, two lictors and one banshee, stood near the pinnacle, ignoring but not unaware of the vandalized shards of state symbols which yet survived, fragments of broken teeth protruding above the snowy gum line, a relic of past angers against a temporal and all too cosmically ephemeral regime. The lictors' names were Skymane and Ardolf. The banshee who led them was Erhard, and he was old with eyes that could not help cast their gaze to the west where he had once been an American soldier fighting in another cold and dark place while Panzer divisions crushed their path through the Ardennes. His companions were relative pups, having only been turned in the last two decades. He himself had turned Ardolf, who at the time had been an aging soldat whose regrets had long outlasted both Hitler's and Adenaur's regimes. A bite and a scrape of claw under the full moon, and Ardolf had become a lictor. It had been necessary, a kind of reconciliation that had saved the former corporal from a destroying Luger and awakened him to the service that yet remained to atone for his complicity in the deeds that had already earned him prison time and cost him his family. This Erhard too reflected upon: the covenant of the change. Bite and claw together made the path of the Lictor. A simple bite would produce a Banshee, while a mere clawing alone would earn the form of the Vex. For this was the way of the Benandanti, held in strictest control by the Elders since the time of Bellator, successor to Addar of the Iron Mane. The retroviruses and unearthly organisms in the Benandanti physiology made the changes in predictable but easily mishandled ways. There had been aberrations. Mutations. Monsters. And now he wondered, as his wolf-like irises rested upon what had just impacted the ground not ten feet from him and his brothers, if this was another of them. The call had been answered. The Elders had sent a delegation of their most trusted warriors to the place prepared for the meeting. And now the three Benandanti watched the object in fascination and no small amount of misgiving. Its descent had been noiseless, its landing virtually without sensation. And when that shining chrysalis of green and yellow sighed forth a cloud of glowing orange vapor, the werewolves tensed, expecting a foul excretion of Malandanti from the sphincter passage that slid open with a sound of flesh on flesh. But what came to the nostrils of Erhard and his comrades was no noxious miasmal blast, but a fresh spicy and warm scent: an aroma of honey and herbs and moist atmosphere that called up images of tropical jungles and cooking fires in remote and unpeopled places. A soft tread, not unlike the gentle knocking of wood on wood sounded from within the cocoon. All three werewolves howled, the traditional greeting of packs of their kind, unknowing whether the birthlings of this egg from the stars would even understand it. Skymane's and Ardolf's voices were bass counterpoints to Erhard's banshee wail, a chamber orchestra of the True Speech, the haunting language-song of the Good Walkers since the birth of their race. And it was answered by a song from another world, a kind of singing and chirruping from within the chrysalis, a leafy honey-spotted arpeggio trilling in ten chords, susurrations syncopated with fluting menageries of hollow bones and lullabies of white noise. It was beautiful. And somehow the Benandanti understood it. Out of the cocoon stepped the first of the speakers. Slightly taller than Erhard but more slender, a blue and violet carapace that formed prisms for Luna's light, two exoskeleton legs carrying it forward like an insectile cat, and four more limbs, two that looked like human arms with natural chitin armoring scale-covered muscles and two more ant or spider-like beneath that seemed to always probe the air. Two multifaceted eyes regarded them without emotion from a man shaped head that possessed small dancing mandibles flanked by strange openings like fluted organ stops. It had no antennae, but a sort of mane of violet fronds that moved as if there were wind, though there was none on this curious night among the Carpathians. Its torso or thorax seemed to suggest a reptile rather than an insect, with a fleshy ribcage and dark blue scales with whitish edges. Meanwhile the all too bug-like abdomen ended not in a stinger but what looked like some sort of diamond or quartz stone that seemed to give off its own glow. Erhard found himself rooted to the spot with fascination as the alien (there was no other word for it) was immediately followed by another of its kind, virtually identical in appearance except for subtle variations in color. He smelled the equal enthrallment on the skins of his fellow werewolves. How could one not be bewitched by such a sublime moment? All those generations of the parent race of mankind that had longed for what they naively called "first contact" and it was not they who had made it in the end! The being from another sphere cocked its prismatic head and regarded Erhard. The banshee smelled something coming from it besides the aromatic odor emitted constantly by it and its fellow. A pheromone trail like another language, the True Speech of a world far away in the void. But no. Not alien. Not anymore. Through some medium he had never known existed until this moment, some power set deep within his cells and tissues that the Elder Writings had hinted at but never fully admitted, Erhard knew exactly what these beings were and what to say to them. The howls of the Benandanti, the spoken language of the man primates, the whistling of alien wings. These made up only one True Speech. Many languages had long been invented and evolved. But Language was not. There was only one Tongue. Erhard stepped forward, his foot paws making two crunches in the snows capping Mount Hoverla. "Welcome," he said. "Welcome... my brothers." The head of the first alien bowed its head. And when its voice came, it was spoken in English. "I am Fexxel of the Xai Kath, protectors of our race. We are honored to walk the soil of your great world. We have sought you long, brothers, and we regret meeting in this desolate place which is the only spot where the satellites of your progenitors do not look for us. But what may we call you?" "Erhard of the Benandanti," the banshee said. "We didn't know there were others like us... out there." "That," the alien said, a dirge note in its piping voice, "is perhaps the mystery when once you have heard its solution, will show you how near doom is to you." Erhard cocked his head, his yellow eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?" "The Poisoned Ones. You call them the Malandanti. The Evil Walkers. You know what they are and whom they serve." The fur of the three Benandanti bristled. "We don't speak of those things," Erhard said. He felt his heart racing. He knew more of this than most of his kind did, though all the Good Walkers had heard the whispered rumors. "That must begin to change," the Xai Kath said. "These Malandanti know that we, your kind and ours, hold the secret. Yet they have been content with terrorizing the dreams of our races because they believed that to make mortals fear the night was enough. It has been their delight and the best way to thwart us in our ancient war with the darkness. "But we have come to warn you, Benandanti brothers, that the Poisoned Ones move to a higher plane of destruction and terror. Know that we and the passengers aboard an ark that even now lurks behind your Luna are the last of our race: the Xai Kath and our progenitors, the Kyz-Thi people. We hail from a world that no longer exists save in our memories. And these Evil Walkers are the cause of it." The Benandanti again felt their fur spring erect, and Erhard immediately grasped the appalling implications. But it was his friend Ardolf who responded. "The Malandanti... they killed your people in the open? Butchered them en masse?" "And more," Fexxel said. "They swept over us in a living tide of death and disease that brought down our cities, burned our continents, and shattered our very world. Knowing we were doomed, we fled to the one place our queens told us we might find allies." There was only one answer in the face of such appallingly hideous revelation. "Of course we'll help," Erhard said. "But neither humans nor Benandanti have a way to reach you. We have no true and viable spacecraft of our own." "Leave that to us. The queens and the swarm lords will see to that in due time. For now, we bring you a message. "Gather your elders so that they may plan with us. Form a pack of your most talented warriors to carry out a great mission. We have absorbed your history during our exodus and learned that the Poisoned Ones have kept you fighting bravely but randomly across your world. They do this because they are hiding something." "What?" "That they have spent thousands of your planet's revolutions on a terrible project, one which is near to completion. "And thus it is already too late to stop it."

In Three Days - Contact!

The fate of two races intersect as a secret meeting in the Carpathians foreshadows a quest for the unspeakable. The Benandanti must ready themselves as the continuum of history moves toward an apocalyptic event that will shake the fabric of reality.

Find out more in The Vindicad - Part 12: "Dark Embassy"

Available for viewing on September 15...