The tower

The messenger rang a bell, after a few minutes one of the doors opened. The messenger looked at the other men in our party. "See that door at the end of this hall?" The men nodded. "Behind it are a set of stairs. Go up three doors then straight down that hall until it ends. You will find an area with food, water and other things you might want while you wait. If you need anything not provided, stop one of the priests and ask for it, they should be able to tell you where it is or have it brought for you."

"Thank you, messenger." The trainer and my unit went to the door the priest had indicated. I felt their relief when they saw the stairs. They were brave but they had spent most of their life either underground or on the ground, the lift seemed like a terrible idea to them. The messenger looked at me and seemed to be trying to find the right words.

I stepped past the man and entered the lift that had opened the doors. There was already a man on the platform and he seemed mildly surprised, not that it showed. The messenger seemed to think better of what he had been planning to stay to me instead he just stepped on the lift and closed the doors. The man already on the lift pulled a string that hung from the ceiling and went through the floor. I felt the lift start to move up. The messenger watched me like he expected me to pick now to start panicking. Every man dies, when death decides she is ready for them it doesn't matter where they are, what they are doing or what type of life they have led. When death decides she doesn't want them cutting off your own head might be survivable.

I watched the rope with a curiosity, every few moments a line would appear. At first I wondered if the priest was counting the lines, that seemed like a foolish thing to do. What if the priest lost count? Then I noticed that on each line was a number. I stopped studying it when I noticed the number was over 20. The lift slowed then stopped at one point and I guessed the people turning the wheel had to switch out since the messenger didn't open the doors. The lift started moving again a few seconds later. The priest by the rope started to watch it closely so I figured we must be getting close to our destination. The priest pulled on the rope again and the lift started to slow and the line fell below the floor as the lift stopped.

The messenger waited until the lift was completely stopped before opening the doors. He stepped out and I stepped out just a second behind him. I tried to put out of my mind how it seemed like the floor was shifting under foot. I had more important things to be thinking about anyway. The doors on the lift closed and I heard it moving back down.

Guess they think this might take a while. The floor was dark. I could see windows not that far away, but with the sunset the place was like a cave. This clearly wasn't the top floor of the tower but it was higher than I had ever been before. That didn't have my attention as much as the red eyes watching me and the messenger from a throne like chair.

I watched the floor as the messenger started to move towards the throne. My other sense had been driving me crazy since I stepped into the building. It wanted me to run, or coware to hide, if I couldn't get away. I had stomped down hard on the feelings but they wouldn't go away. That sense had gotten worse as we had risen in the lift. When the door had opened the feeling had changed suddenly instead of flight it wanted me to fight. I stopped after only one step, the messenger had gone almost four before noticing and stopping to wait.

I focused on the floor trying to get the sense out of my head but it was going back and forth on how I should react. If I lost consecration for a moment I would bolt and even I wasn't currently sure which way I would go. I was not able to keep the sense pinned so I sent it out around the room. I had gotten used to being able to navigate in pitch black but what my sense was telling didn't match what had to be on the floor.

Where the messenger stood was a small black flame guttural in its existence on the verge of going out completely. He wasn't a danger wasn't what was scaring me to the point my mind was almost gibbering in fear. The place where I had seen the red eyes watching me. That was a pit of tightly controlled midnight flames, my sense touched it and it lashed out.

"Surinder, boy." It was Father's voice. I was suddenly back on the hill by the house. We had been hunting all day and ran into a bear. Father was watching as the creature tried to mual me.

"Surinder, it is trying to kill me!"

Father laughed and watched as I dodged. The bear was faster than I was so I knew I couldn't run. It was one of the few times I remember being truly scared of death. "And how is fighting going for you, Mir?"

I let the darkness wash over me. Surinder, but don't give up. The messenger's flame gave before the dark inferno as well. Only something seemed different. The messenger was watching me waiting and the darkness could see from the messenger's eyes. He was getting curious as to why I wasn't moving. I got the feeling that the large darkness knew of me but it was not going to kill me yet.

I took a breath and brought my mind back to what I could feel and see normally. I swallowed fear I hadn't realized I was feeling and followed the messenger. I didn't take my eyes off the ground as I followed the messenger. It was a longer walk then I had thought it was when I stepped out of the lift.

The messenger stopped kneeling on the stone ground. I let myself fall to the ground, still a step behind the man. It felt like I was moving through soup, but I didn't really think my movements were slowed. It was like a battle rush, my perception of time had changed causing a delay.

I wanted to speak but I held myself in check. This meeting had already proved more peraliss then I had suspected. "I am finding you to be quite the puzzle. You avoid your sisters, which I now have reason to believe it is because you cannot reproduce, but that doesn't make sense. As you requested a meeting with me. Which makes me wonder if you know what you are? And yet you fight in the arena and no one has reported any strangeness with your fights, other then your old froms. As well as the fact that you fight way more then any sane person would. So if you know and you know as much as the septon seems to think you would know to not bring yourself to my attention. Yet not only do you make yourself stand out in the arena, you border on insubordinate to your mother, and you specifically request a meeting with me. So you have bought yourself some time, not much. So let's start with what you wanted this meeting for?"

I was having a hard time focusing, there was too much going on around me but it didn't match what my eyes were telling me. "I wished to discuss the drop in the growth rate of your human cities, master." I was talking to the floor but I didn't need to see our lord to feel a dangerous shift in the darkness.

"Continue."

"The drop in the short term is probably good. I would hope you are considering the conflict within the order's the lord gave you, master." This was the riskiest thing to talk about. I expected our lord's patents to give out and to die just for bring up the lord.

"What do you think you know of it, child?" I felt the shadows reaching towards me and I let them move through it seemed to pause before rejoining the rest of the swirling mass around me.

"The lord ordered that you cannot leave the lands he assigned you after the civil war, master. You are not to raise an army and to that end you cannot allow any other vampires within the land you have been given. The problem is that you were ordered not to raise an army, but you must have enough humans to sustain yourself and for them to make more. A human army might not pose enough of a threat to get the lords attention but I would suspect he is not a fool. The arena trains your humans and it wouldn't take long to convert enough to make an army." I felt the blackness heat up and start moving faster. "Not that it would ever be masters intention to do so, as he is clearly loyal to the lord. The problem would be that the clearity doesn't go much beyond your priest and if Avery is still serving the lord, she might not get that far before she decides you are a problem, master."

"If she uses human spies."

"There are reports that make you suspect she did last time, master."