Disclaimer: This is a rewrite of Thirst, and this is a new chapter.
Vasco Isidoro's unlife force traced a crimson swirl in the murky flow of the river, fading quickly into its arcane constituents. His authority curled about her like bat-wings wrought of iron, a bulwark delicately won and flaunted as she marched across the deck; the ambassador of her own nascent statelette. The black bandana she wore was her night's call to arms, a banner of implicit threat.
Walking onboard a rotten confection such as this yacht made Monroe's tongue feel as if it were covered in treacley tallow. The carpeting was plush, a purple that was perhaps meant to invoke images of Byzantine nobility. It reminded her of a vivid cave fungus. Framed portraits of the dread overseers hung on either side of her in the narrow Hall. Their value likely eclipsed all the meager income she'd earned and stolen in her near century of life and unlife.
Lord Isidoro, his visage reminiscent of an oily toad trying to smile reassuringly...even his own painter was unable to render him on canvas bereft of disturbing unctuousness.
Lady Shira, resplendent in orange and red silks, one of the most beautiful Kindred she'd ever seen. Her nature was radioactive, corroding everything around her like a rogue star.
Pakhan Maksim, like sharp flint chips shaped into a man. The artist had captured his lantern jaw and pitiless gaze, wearing his tyranny upon his coat sleeve - noble and cruel as a cliff face.
Bishop Odovico, perhaps the most unnatural of them all. The distended shape of his body beneath his bone-white robes eclipsed his head, mostly obscured by an argent veil.
Finally, Sister Clementia, feared in equal measure for her ferocity and otherwise unknowable visage. The delicately filigreed, weeping steel mask and nun's habit were at odds with the trail of ashen bones she'd left.
Even to one such as Monroe they were monstrous, their humanity a faint echo in the distance of their long, bloodsoaked requiems. Their existence was underpinned by the dying screams of hundreds over the centuries. She mastered her base fears, an anxiety exuded by the Beast in her mind that feared direct confrontation with elder predators such as the Overseer Committee.
The boat felt bigger than it appeared. Her journey along that rotten-plum shaded carpet seemed a drawn out affair, as if meant to give her time to turn heel and slink back into the shadows. When that journey ended before a pair of lacquered cherry wood doors, she struck the brass knocker three times against its plate. Each thud felt like the disturbance of some sepulchral place, reverberating through her ribcage.
To her surprise, the doors slid apart along a track, silent and smooth as a waterbug across oil; she'd expected the doors to creak open on tortured hinges, but that was part of the illusion - to make her feel like this yacht was one of their moldering estates. Back in the days when she drew breath beneath a sweltering Louisiana sun, an associate - not someone she'd have called a friend, those were a rare breed - had insisted on teaching her these mindfulness techniques, and she'd been skeptical then. Such conscious control over her own will, however, had proven invaluable against creatures such as the Overseer Committee.
More than one neophyte had been staked and thrown in the bayeux when Clementia had peeled back the protective caul over their minds, tasting their thoughts like a fly sampling rotten fruit. That self control, and the protective conditioning practiced by the Syndicate itself, was like a stony tomb around the restless ghost of her thoughts.
The meeting room was an exercise of lavish excess, one that twisted her purple-tinted lips downward; she caught herself before a snarl of disgust could crawl over her face. Crimson carpeting edged in what had to be actual gold thread led her gaze to the oblong table, a great slab of white and black marble at odds with its slender iron supports.
Seated upon tall-backed chairs were the masters of the Ashland Domain; this was her first time among them alone, an unenviable position for any young Vampire. By this point in her struggle with the Overseers, however, both she and they knew the reaction to her death would be one of catastrophic uprising. Nonetheless, standing in the presence of powerful creatures hundreds-of-years dead caused her cold heart to clench in fear.
"This is the cause of our delay, Isidoro?" Every note of Lady Shira's voice was like the stroke of an elegant, barbed scourge. Her gray eyes, passing over Monroe as if taking note of a crane fly, were hooded in nonplussed disdain. She felt disgust every time she laid eyes on this famed hedonist.
"I regret to say so." The Nosferatu settled in his chair, his flesh sagging around his frame as he steepled his long fingers. "It seems that she and her fellow
siervos
have made to block our passage."
"With what? The 'unity of their Cause' made manifest? Perhaps by holding hands?" Pakhan Maksim didn't even bother to look upon her. He was like a cenotaph of some bygone noble wearing the sort of tacky, overpriced clubwear she'd spot in Club Astrakhan. He was busily fingering a rope of glinting white-gold necklaces from a small pile upon the table...counting his tribute, no doubt. Monroe wondered where the show of wealth began and the compulsion to count ended with him.
Lady Shira's hair, pulled back in oily night dark streaks, caught the gilded glinter of her shimmering, silvery dress like cold stars in a stranger sky. "Who is she, even? Is she one of yours Maxim?"
"Well I'm wounded. Don't recognize one of your own subjects Miss Shira?" Monroe drawled, shocking them into quiet at the fearless breach of protocol - speaking without instruction to do so...and addressing her as 'miss'? Carter felt a sick thrill flutter in her lower belly as she watched the elder Daeva rise to her feet, a bestial cast crawling over her face as she approached.
"Conduct yourself, Lady Shira," came a rasping voice from the bloated figure seated at one end of the table, so still until this point that he might as well have been in torpor. The silver veil covering the Bishop's face barely stirred, and his voice sounded muffled as if beneath a pile of grave dirt. "All of us, even you, knew this was coming. Do not act scandalized before the Dark of Truth." That was news to Monroe, who'd planned this whole endeavor with redundant layers of secrecy; surely he was bluffing.
By his side as ever, the masked figure of Clementia remained unmoving, though Monroe could feel the weight of her ferrous gaze.
She watched Shira's inner struggle, reflected from behind her eyes; it reminded Monroe of a fire burning inside of a church adorned with stained glass windows. The elder blinked and seemed an entirely different person from the fanged monster only a moment before, huffing like an impatient teenager and crossing her pale, bared arms. "Fine, fine, our holiness never lets us have any fun. Lucky you."
"If I don't remember you, you musn't be a terribly important little lick." Shira gave her a once over, her heels stabbing into the carpeting as she circled the younger revolutionary. "Did we let you in during the Armistice?" The insult was taken flatly; she was no out of towner.
"Name's Monroe Carter. Lived here all my life and hereafter, but like Mister Isidoro told me out on the river bank - your time is oh so valuable and I - "
"Monroe Carter? Now I remember, you're Avariel's get, aren't you." She expected that Lady Shira might invoke her Sire's name at some point throughout this conversation. It always brought a curious pang of guilt and vindication. Shira's predatory orbit halted before Monroe. Despite being roughly the same height, the elder undead felt as if she towered over the younger. "Haven't heard from her lately. Why hasn't she come herself to deliver your malcontent, I wonder?"
"You can ask her if you see her," the younger Daeva suggested nonchalantly, resting a hand on her hip in yet another violation of courtly etiquette. She relished their squirming discontent. "Until she comes callin', guess you can either hear
our
'malcontent' straight from the source, or we can just...wait here 'til dawn."
