Vampire: The Dark Ages - The Domain of Peace Historic

God turn every dream to good! For it’s a marvel, by the rood, To my mind, what causes dreaming Either at dawn or at evening, And why truth appears in some And from some shall never come; Why this one is a vision, And that one a revelation, Why this a nightmare, that a dream, *And not to every man the same;*

CHAUCER

CHAPTER I

The sky was black and tempestuous. Rain fell in torrents onto the moorlands and you yourself, caught in the storm’s fury, were soaked to the bone. Your journey had started in the warmth of day, but in fickle spirit, shine gave way to wind-gales and dark clouds. Out in the quiet moors, too far from home to turn back, at your most vulnerable, w…

CHAUCER

CHAPTER I

Alone, save for your companion, the horse which bore your burden. Trusting in its instincts, you bid it forward at faster pace, though you doubted it could see any farther than you. All about you was darkness and an unending wall of rain.

-until crack!

Lightning, forked daggers of pale-blue light, lit the sky. For a moment, all about you was shown the rolling moors, the lightning casting an unnatural hue across the windbeaten terrain. It was a breathtaking sight, but a brief one you could not indulge in as the roll of thunder gave great fear to your mount. With a terrified scream, the horse reared up, testing your command of the reins. And as it stamped down and lurched forward as if to sprint into the night ahead, the beast lost its bearing on the slick earth. With a sickening crunch, your horse toppled, slamming into the ground. A second later and you joined it, the left side of your body suddenly meeting wet mud. Your vision swam, your shoulder ached, and perhaps only adrenaline kept you from recognizing the extent to which you had been injured in the fall.

Painfully, you clambered to your feet. Nursing a swimming headache, the sounds of your thrashing horse, its broken leg limp as it fought to stand, drummed into your skull. Through it all though, the pain and elements, you held a deep pity for the animal. It had served you well, since you’ve been a young:

[ ] - Man

[ ] - Woman

Kneeling before the horse, grunting as you lowered, you placed a soothing hand on its side. Its erratic breathing gradually slowed as you whispered words of comfort.

And then you felt it.

The gaze. Eyes on your back. Like the world’s noise, the storm, the rainfall, even the horse had quieted, quieted so you could feel all the more firmly your being perceived.

Turning, you looked over your shoulder, up the moor, up the craggy land into a great nothingness of storm. Rain stung your eyes as you tried harder to see anything, something to explain the feeling that covered you.

-until crack!

Again the night sky was cleaved by lightning, like two fell hands ripping apart a blackened curtain. For a moment longer, the world was alight again and you saw it, astride the rocky top of the hill overlooking you.

A black shape of a man, or something.

Darkness returned but the image was seared into your brain, the image of the shape. Every instinct fired within you, a screaming choir bidding you to flee - no, more than that, bidding you to shrivel up and cease existence altogether. And that command only redoubled as your mind, in a fit of terror perhaps, envisioned that black shape again, cutting through the rain, walking down the hill, coming for you.

But though your mind so clearly saw that ghastly vision, your body remained rigid, paralyzed. Even your eyes remained wide open, battered by stinging wind and rain, but unwilling to close.

Under the spell of fear, you watched helplessly as the black shape did appear, cutting through the storm with a near-casual pace. Formless and shifting, the figure became all which you saw, for the world around seemed to matter little in *its *presence. An unnatural dark clung to its figure, and it was not until it stood before you, until it spoke to you, that its features began to peek beyond the black veil.

The man, wrongly formed, spoke in a growl.

"Pray thee, tell me a tale."

His gesticulating hands, fingers too long, nails too sharp, bid you to speak.

You gawked at the stranger, words winding tight in your throat, unable to form quite right. It was not that you could not hear, but that you could hear too clearly; his words cut through the storm, through the patter of rain, through the rolling of thunder. Like nested in an unknowable place within your skull, his words repeated.

"Pray thee listen and tell me a tale. Lest…"

His eyes, blackened pits of malice, held your gaze ironfast. It was as if he looked not at you, but into you.

His words lingered overlong before he continued, stepping close, hand brushing your grimacing face. This close, he rank of damp earth.

"Lest I choose to gorge upon thine human throat and not that of thine beast."

His cracked lips parted by a tongue, revealing for just a moment the teeth of a predator.

With your face cradled in his pallid claws, and yourself transfixed totally to the stranger’s presence, you choked out your words, sputtering and sobbing. You told, in your frightful state, the only tale you could muster - the tale of yourself.

You told:

[ ] - A Tale of Faith

God had always led you well and provided, you said, for you were an honest Christian. You came from little but taken in by the Abbot of Canonsleigh, or the Prioress of Polsloe, you were afforded the opportunity to grow beyond your station. Letters and Latin, maintaining the ledgers, tending the land accounted in God’s name - you learned much in a short while. And so studious were you that as a young clerk, you were entrusted with a letter, to be hand-delivered to the Abbot of Launceston. It was that holy mission that brought you here, through the Dartmoor, into this hellish nightmare. Was this Satan, you asked?

[ ] - A Tale of Service

You were of a noble lineage, in a sort. Your family, the de Instowe, held a one-fourth knight’s fee in the Honour of the de Briwere. Hard times had befallen the family, since your father Robert de Instowe had grown infirm. Now it fell unto you to serve in his stead, to act as clerk to the Sheriff of Devon and deliver unto him a message in Bath. This quest was what has led you here, through the Exmoor, to this nightmare. Was this your end, you asked?

[ ] - A Tale of Intrigue

It was, you began, a misunderstanding that started it all. The promises or prophecies or poultices you may or may not have peddled were by no means assured. Any keen listener would hear your equivocation and know that you merely offered ideas. And so all those unanswered prayers and lost hairs, they were by no means your fault. But others thought differently and for that reason you fled Cardiff, to spend a time away at Brecknock, before landing instead into this nightmare. Was this real, you questioned?

[ ] - A Tale of Woe

Her body, you stammered, was mangled when you arrived that morning. But the damned rumors, of tryst, of jealousy, they had planted seeds that bloomed into unassailable suspicion before you had a word in otherwise. They’d called for you to be hanged the next morrow, an innocent put to death. The violence it took to escape, it was necessary, honest. Out of Bodmen you ran, into the Dartmoor, into this accursed nightmare. Was this your punishment, you cried?

[ ] - A Tale of Toil

What fanciful tales could you tell when your life was that of toil? You woke early, worked the fields fed by the Oare Water, and made certain that your idle cousin pulled his weight tending to the sheep. It was his foolishness which suggested the journey, taking a bundle of wool through the Exmoor, to the Town on Tone to haggle for better bargains in the market-town. For want of more, you had wandered into this nightmare. Was all this for nothing, you demanded?

The stranger listened to your tale, all of it without interruption or emotion, unblinking and unbothered by the storm around him. And when you gave your last words, he released his grasp over your body, not just of his hand upon your face, but the piercing presence that had once locked you into place.

Then, dropping down like an animal, he passed you and buried his face deep into the neck of your horse. The poor beast screamed as the stranger, himself a beast, himself a devil even, partook in a gruesome feast. You stepped back once, twice, three steps before the stranger addressed you one last time.

"A tale enough for respite, yet not enough for mercy. Three moments you will have now until I hunt," he said simply between wet, bloodied bites.

Only a second passed before you took to a sprint, the meaning of the devil’s words reaching your legs before your mind. The world was awash with heavy rain, obscuring dark, and only the crunch of rock and soil beneath your feet could be heard above your pounding heart.

One moment.

You had left any semblance of trail behind and like bewildered prey, you moved erratically, scrambling upwards towards an unknown aim. Your footing was unsure and twice you sprawled down, forcing yourself up, up, higher upon a cliff of rocks.

Two moments.

Reaching elevated ground, you stopped, looking back from where you came and saw nothing but a trail cleared by your own clumsy footfalls. You caught your breath, mind still swimming with panic. You questioned where to go as you looked down, down, from where you had been.

Three moments.

A sound like stone against stone, a sensation like the earth itself shifting. Before your eyes, you saw emerge from the craggy moor a black shape, a devil or something worse. And like a hound of hell, it surged forward, hands and feet slapping the ground in full pursuit of you, your life, your soul. Two eyes, crimson red, burned through the dark, nearing at unfathomable speed.

In shock, you stepped back but the beast appeared all the quicker, spurred on by your weakness. With claws like blades, it slashed across your sternum and again across your stomach, spilling forth your insides into the barren soil. You pressed your hands into yourself, holding what you could of the blood and more which leaked out of you, a futile gesture but one which gave the stranger pause. He stared at your bloodied hands, at the wound which pumped with every heartbeat. And with a look of great hunger, he reached forward, his savage paw inches from your opening.

-until crack! And boom!

In a brilliant flash, lightning descended upon earth and struck the space between you and the stranger. Your body was flung backwards, your ears ruptured from the resulting blast of sound and energy. Through blurred vision, you saw the stranger, the beast, the devil howling, its contorted face bearing terrible fangs at the sky. At first it appeared scornful, but as the moment passed, you recognized the true emotion: terror.

You struggled to your feet, nearly slipping on your own innards as you willed yourself up and away, anywhere but here with the monster. Each footfall down the moor was agony, your world view lilting and unfocused, your footing never certain. Perhaps you ran for a minute, or perhaps an hour, you would never know, but at last your body surrendered to the spasms of pain and exhaustion and hemorrhage. You fell hard upon the earth and tumbled down, lacerated and bruised with every dash of a rock until at last you rested still. There you laid, broken at the bottom of a nameless ravine, shivering and bleeding, in the stormy moorlands.

This would be your grave.

Or something akin to that.

For in your delirium, at the doorstep of death, you saw something, an opening in the earth, an alcove of stone just large enough for a shelter.

And in it, you saw someone.

Your memories of the following moments were fractured, images and feelings without context. Pale hands grasping beneath your arms, a shushing coo as you gurgled in protest. Fingers prodding your wounds, tracing a line from the grotesque opening to your heart, and thereafter to your throat. Lips pressed against your ear, words you didn’t understand, before those same lips moved farther down, pressed against your neck. A prickling sensation, a draining comfort. And then a hand over your mouth, a driven instinct to suckle, and a welcomed warmth passed your lips, into your mouth. It is a wellspring from which you drink greedily.

Then there is black and silence, a nothingness save for a faint, weakening beat of a heart - your heart? Thud, thud, and then naught. A piercing silence, a void that then suddenly fills with swirling shadows, images of faces unremembered, of furious beings of light and retribution, of mouths moving with words of comfort and love and peace - and they are all now alien to what you are becoming. The weight of it all presses upon you, like a coffin lid draped across your soul, the finality of black. Would that it ended there, an image of Purgatory then you could take solace in.

But it is not the end. A burning pit of coals within your belly, a fire without warmth, animation without breath, living without soul. You are afire in damnation and yet you remain as cold as clay. When at last you cannot withstand or understand the experiences your weak mind tumbles through, they cease for but a moment.

And then ecstasy, pure ecstasy. An indescribable flood of rapturous emotion. A beast in chains thrusts at the walls of your mind and in every movement there is a resounding joy, a rippling mirth that nearly obliterates from your memory the pain and heartache of this transformation. A final image, eyes wide and looming over you. And in their vastness, you fall, sinking deep into their velvet peace.

It is then that you awake from this stream of thoughts and enter into a new World of Darkness…

Hello and welcome to Vampire: the Dark Ages - The Domain of Peace. As the name suggests, this is a quest set in the World of Darkness setting, primarily inspired by and taking cues from its Dark Ages setting. Our story begins in 1242 with your death in the moorlands of Britain and will follow our fledgling as they navigate the World of Darkness.

Throughout this quest, I’ll encourage plan-style voting to help generate a cohesive character. I’m looking forward to exploring the wretched world we have ahead of us with you at my side.

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