The Reject Chapter 15 - 4

He started Kali walking with a subtle tug. "I'd planned on Jerold stabilizing the Thagirion but that didn't happen. He punked me, taking the power and using it to militarize them beyond what they could have hoped for without him." Their attention was an almost physical weight. It wasn't often he talked about his plans, and each had speculated long into the night on what his actual goals were.

"Once Anastasia was attacked, I knew she'd never have a place with the Thagirion. Even if they took her back, she'd be a token, nothing more than a bit of fluff to play with. She couldn't win, the system was rigged against her. Her teammates would activelyl work to cut her down, standing on her corpse would add her reputation to theirs. Jerold would never accept an asset that had worked with me, and he'd do whatever it took to humiliated her until she broke. Abraxas and Jerold have every rule on their side and know how to make the game their bitch." His smile was tight and cruel as he looked at the women. "The only way to power, is if the rules are written for us, by us."

"We'll supplant the Thagirion." They stared at him in shock, Lady Kali stumbling slightly at the words. Opening their mouths to argue, they slowly closed them, unsure where to start. "It only takes one teacher to approve a club," Cesare said with a look at Elizabeth.

"Of course, I'll support your group." The low risk made it easy for her to go along with.

"But it would be little better than the chess club ..." Anastasia said, both a statement and a question.

Shaking his head, he looked over at her tortured face, melted skin and discolored flesh making it hard to read her. "More than half their power is in the minds of the students. Real leadership can't be taken, it has to be given. We won't have the blanket authority they do, but we don't need it either."

"I've read through the Student Handbook, while we won't have the bells and whistles, we'll have more than enough." Seeing the skeptical looks, he continued, "All students are allowed to use force to defend themselves or another student. We have the right to ask for arbitration of any infraction of the rules we see, regardless of whether the violation involves us. Every student is charged with protecting the school, students, and faculty, up to and including, executing threats, swiftly and permanently."

The women shared startled looks; they'd never had to rely on rules. Rules only applied to the powerless. Laws were pens of steel to cage victims in, a system designed to strip resistance from the weak. The strong bent and broke them with casual disdain, protected by money and influence from laws formed to punish the failures of birth. They were the apex killers at the top of the food chain, they played by the rules out of choice, not because anyone could force them.

"Why doesn't anyone use it?" Anastasia asked.

"Making a difference, taking control, changing things, is for others. It takes overweening arrogance to look at the world and think you're going to change it. That your special snowflakeness will change how things have worked for centuries. Most are too scared they'd be eaten alive by the Thagirion, gangs, teachers, or random bullies. The rule was never made for them, it was always only a license for the strong to hunt, degrade, and humiliate," Cesare said.

Studying his expression. "You don't think we can make a difference."

He corrected her with a shake of the head. "I think you can make a difference. That's why I want you to lead the club, and the team at the Sanguinem Nativitate." She jerked back, stung by his words. Even Alexandra missed a step staring at him with wide eyes.

"The school already has a team …." Anastasia said, words trailing off uncertainly.

"There's no rule that limits a school to one team. All we need is the support of an Imperium." He gestured at the impishly grinning Kali. "And luckily, we have that in spades."

Walking in silence, the women digested the plan, looking at it from angles he never would've. He didn't have their deep knowing of the Umbrae Lunae world. If there were holes, it would be in the labyrinth of custom and duties that bound the shadow world together. That was his strength, that he wasn't part of the system. Forever the outsider, he could look at their society with new eyes.

Lady Kali's harem formed a cordon between the privileged and the common as they walked across campus, enforced through blood and meat. Devoted beyond flesh, they watched the inner circle with murderous eyes, even as others focused external threats. Stripped of trust, everyone was only a mistake away from being killed, threats taken out before they could manifest. Mistakes were part of the plan, the protection of the Goddess beyond considerations of collateral damage. It was both professional and unchained obsession in practice, with more than one hateful look directed at where Lady Kali held Cesare's hand.

"Why can't you lead it?" The question pulled the others out of their thoughts, but Alexandra only had eyes for him.

"I'm nobody." Gesturing sharply, he stopped the women from coming to his defense. "No one outside this group gives a damn if I live or die. They won't follow me, they won't listen to what I have to say, and they don't believe in me. Anastasia's descended from a mythic figure, beautiful, talented, rich, and cultured. They want her to lead them, all she has to do is give them a reason. She's also the only one that knows what the Thagirion do." Alexandra nodded at the sense behind his words, but it was a far cry from accepting.

Anastasia had carefully watched the exchange. "She'll never follow me." She faced Cesare, continuing softly, "And you'll never let me call the shots."

Alexandra's baring of teeth wasn't anything that earned the right to be called a smile. "You got that right."

Sighing, Cesare looked between the two before settling on Anastasia. "You know the game and the players, why wouldn't I let you call the shots? That's what you've never understood, I do the things my way because it works." The words were starkly simple without justification for keeping her in the dark. "Alexandra will never be yours; you'll never have her loyalty. But if you want your dreams to be more than talk, you'll deal with it, because your fucked without her. And there is no we, if she leaves." The threat hung in the hair as Anastasia met his eyes for a long minute before nodding in resignation.

There wasn't much Anastasia could do. Alexandra was a powerhouse of brutal strength, connected to a lethal band of killers feared in the Umbrae Lunae world, and that was outside her being a rich and gorgeous heiress. She was a dream pick to have on any team. That she was also a psychotic killing machine was icing on the cake. And Anastasia knew if Cesare pulled out, she was a lame duck waiting for a hunter to carve her into dinner.

Seeing acceptance flood Anastasia, Cesare locked with the vampire's lethal eyes. "I need you. There's no one I'd rather have at my back. But I'll understand if you can't do this."

Her stalking walk settled into a long-legged loupe as deadly aggression bled out of her body. "You're my commander, I'm ever at your command." It was said with the simpleness of something he should already know.

Lady Kali asked the question on the tip of his tongue. "Why follow him? I've never known a member of the Order of the Dragon to take orders from anyone."

Her golden braid flashed in the washed-out sunlight as Alexandra shook her head. "I'm a soldier. We follow strength, we follow winners. I've only known success and honor since I took him as my commander." She met the eyes of the immortal with the fearlessness of a natural predator. "I walk beside him because he honors me."

Looking away, her words were low and quiet, emotions compressed into a laser of distilled wonder and awe. "There has never been a member of the Order of the Dragon in the Sanguinem Nativitate. Despite every knight dreaming of proving their martial excellence on that hollowed field of slaughter, we've always been denied. None of you would let me join if he wasn't forcing you, his own worth granting me the dream of every knight since the founding. My Order's been vilified, cast into the sewer without even the chance to argue our cause. Cesare owes me and my Order nothing, still he does more for us than those who owe us their lives. He's protected me, supported me, bleed for me and mine, taken insults by the dozens and honored God in my presence. No one, no one at all, has done so much for me." With clear eyes, she looked on Cesare with profound gratitude. "Few know what it's like to be hated and alone, to be feared and reviled for being true to who you are. None of you know how much a helping hand can mean to someone burning in their self-made pyre of truth."

Giving the vampire side long looks, the others went silent. Alexandra didn't show a hair of care for the stares they gave her. Instead of trading looks with them, she returned the harem's scowls with a challenging stare of her own.

These things developed a momentum of their own. Kids could die, people maimed and crippled, war erupting between the groups, this could take them all down in a frenzy of slaughter. Elizabeth would face the years of degradation, simply because she'd never leave the school. Every bit of credit she'd earned over the years would burn along with every dream she had of being accepted.

Alexandra was betting everything on him. She needed to be a legend, a titan of unstoppable power, feared, and respected. He was her last gasp before she fell below the waves and gave up, consigned to the weapon everyone thought she was. A mindless animal, unleashed and forgotten, it's worth in corpses and nothing more.

Lady Kali had the least and the most to lose. Money and time were nothing to the immortal. She didn't care if he killed kids or saved the world, only that she was helping him. It would be nothing but a bit of fun if her daughter wasn't tangled up in it. If he failed, her daughter would be under the knives of the monsters that came for them, the dreams she bleed for today dying stillborn in her heart.

The danger wouldn't hold Anastasia back, people like her didn't think of losing. No, her worry would be if she'd lead, or dance to his tune. Until now he'd held his stolen power with clawed hands, a fleshy prison he'd die holding. What she didn't get, was that he wouldn't be giving up his perverse strengths. She didn't need them, had no need for him to give her anything, she was strong enough to take her own.

He wouldn't push them into supporting him, it was too radical with too much on the line. If they turned their backs and walked, then they walked away from him. Either they bleed for him or they left him as they'd found him, alone in the shadows that birthed him.

The cobblestones glittered with a film of frost, a slick skim that turned trustworthy stones into things of treacherous beauty. Black trees stripped of green stretched skeletal branches above the path, tearing sunlight into beams of feebleness devoid of heat. The underbrush was cold and dead, only the hardiest ferns bearing any green.

Excitedly talking students streamed around the protected bubble of the harem, eager to get a good seat for the bloodletting. For them, today was nothing more than a half day and a fight between titans. Eyes shining with blood hunger, the students' steps quickened, breaths coming fast and shallow, their need as sexual as a man thrusting between a lady's thighs. No matter who won, someone would be butchered, skin stripped from muscle, guts spilled across the ground, insides steaming in the cold light of day. A child would be torn from their shadowed sanctuary, the sanctity of their body revealed as meat. They hungered for humiliation and degradation, the savage play of monsters.

They came around the bend, the stadium unfolding in all its wonder, hooking his breath from his lungs at its sheer magnificence. Massive old ones joined with nubile ancient woman, from black to white and everything in between, the trees wove themselves together. Gnarled old growth towered into the sky alongside spindly white ones that danced in and out of sight. The sisters and brothers of the wood blended into a color palate of the living world.

Defying winter's hold, their leafy canopy was as lush as it had been in summer. The leaves shone vibrantly green, making a lie of the gray world of winter. It was unbridled life existing beyond the season and its vagaries of life and death, a monument to the life force of something greater for being joined. A single life is less than a flicker in the void, only when we're united as one does our flicker become a candle able to hold the demons at bay. For those cast out of that light, the only survival was to become a demon, to make the void their home.

Looking between Cesare and the stadium, the group stopped with him. They didn't feel the wonder of it, the soul deep connection that bound Cesare to the wild. The beauty of the place didn't flay their soul open, peeling skin aside, leaving them raw and exposed. It was more than beauty, life spilled from it, filling the air with the breath of a goddess.

Looking on this avatar of the wild, words spilled from his mouth like a half-understood prayer. "I've known nothing as beautiful, as meaningful, as this cathedral to life and slaughter. It's a grace I've never seen, a blessing birthed from the beauty of the soul that created it."

Elizabeth looked at him with a face curiously sterile, stripped of everything but a thread of anger. "I sometimes think you're the greatest thing that's ever happened to me, twisted around a curse that destroys everything I thought true." Agreeing nods marked out his friends as they watched him with blankly frustrated expressions.

Where the Thagirion's entrance into the darkness of the underworld was starkly functional, this was a work of art. Elizabeth crafting a fitting door into the wonderland the avatar of the forest held within it.

Thick roots of coal black wove and bound themselves into steps delving deep into the earth. Not a trace of brown or white marred the pure stygian steps or the tangled snake like walls. Eldritch currents cast eddies in the air, swirling maelstroms felt along the edge of the soul, madness an edge shaving at the crystalline matrix of a man's being. Born in the darkness of the earth, this was a place antithetical to the brilliance of the sun and its rotting truths.

Heavy with the scents of growing things, the air smelled of ancient times birthed in blood and sacrifice. A time of feathers and fur, of fires and dances in the moon. Flickering on the edge of sight, dimensions of unknowable forces pressed in on the world, called by a priestess of the old ways. Here, the cunning way parted the veils of what was, and what is.

The brief landing at the bottom faced an arch of waist thick black roots, sable rivers flowing up into a midnight crescent. Blessed runes sanctified the wood, shining with the light from distant, twisted places. Malignantly watchful, each was an eye belonging to nothing living or dead, an intense, goggling orb of alien interest. Drowning in fey currents, the harem rustled uneasily, fear tightening eyes, hands seeking the talismans of violence.

This wasn't like the runes on Elizabeth's Sanctuarium, those let others pass regularly. These things stripped the world of its light and life, leaving only stark hunger in its place. Carved into and yet apart from the wood, they glared down on the party with the apathy of mad gods.