Flash Fic February Day Eight (02/08/2022) Prompt: Weapon
“What’s this ‘weapon’ supposed to be, anyway?” Hecate asked, carefully stepping over the fallen chunks of concrete and rubble that littered the floor of the abandoned church, Artemis following closely behind.
Lysidias turned, a half smile on his handsome face, and shrugged. “Carter said we’d know it when we saw it.” He was leading the way towards the rotting door that had surely once been grand. But like the door, the church was a rotting, hollow shell of what it once was; most of the windows were completely gone, some of the walls had fallen over and broken into a thousand pieces. But despite this, the building cut an impressive silhouette against the night sky, its barely-standing towers looming threateningly over Hecate and Lysdias.
Hecate huffed as she nearly tripped over a brick she hadn’t seen in the dark. “Doesn’t explain why he picked me to help you. I know next to nothing about ancient Kindred weapons.” This was certainly true; the training she had received from Lysidias himself was always focused on the intricacies of blood sorcery and rituals, never weapons. Even in life, she had preferred the lure of the occult and strange to tale of epic and mysterious weapons.
“Stars didn’t tell you anything, then?” Lysidas’s face was grim as he examined the rotting wood of the door, gingerly placing a hand on it.
She looked upwards, towards the crystal clear night sky, and sighed. “They rarely do, these days. It’s a struggle to hear them at all.” The voices of the stars that had once guided her were now barely even a whisper. A tidal waved dulled into a trickle. Her heart ached every time she was reminded of it, of that lost connection to what she had beloved the most in her unlife. A bitter feeling of hatred for Percy, for the body that now belonged to Hecate, flashed through her. The stars had guided her to safety when Percy had tried to commit Diablarie, but in the process she had lost them forever; something she could never forgive Percy for, and something she could never forget, not when Percy’s face was the one Hecate saw every time she looked into the mirror.
Lysidias pushed the door open, determining it to be safe enough, or not warded, at the very least. It swung open with a groan, the hinges creaking as the door swung inwards, revealing the inky darkness of the church’s interior. “I think Carter wants to believe you still have the gift of Sight. But who knows what’s going on his head?”
They stepped inside together, the cool, damp inside of the church enveloping them. “Well, I don’t have it anymore,” Hecate scowled. “This body was Persephone’s, and she was blinder than anyone I’ve ever met.” Soft moonlight poured in from the broken windows and collapsed walls, casting the rows and rows of rotting and turned over pews in dark, eerie shadows. At the other end of the church, basked in ethereal moonlight, stood the altar, cast in a rainbow of color from the only remaining stained glass window behind it. In it, a woman stood, hands clasped together, clad completely in white, a soft halo over her head casting light around her as another woman kneeled at her feet, praying. Artemis huddled close to Hecate, anxiously looking around and flicking her ears.
She could feel the weight of Lysidias’s gaze on her. “That body might have been Persephone’s, but it’s yours, now. Only you get to decide what it can or can’t do, Hecate.” Before she could comment, he moved towards the alter, beckoning her to follow. “I think I have an idea of where to look for this weapon,” he said, stepping up onto the raised dais, trailing a hand across the alter as he approached, a cloud of dust rising up in its wake.
“I’m glad one of us does.”
She watched him run his hand across the white marble that made up the alter, the stained glass casting him in a colorful glow. Artemis, relaxing a bit, joined him, sniffing around the alter’s base, her tail swishing slowly back and forth. Hecate, meanwhile, found herself wandering amongst the pews, lost in thought. Even now, after almost a year of being stuck in Persephone’s body, she still did not feel at home. It didn’t matter that she had cut her hair into a spiky pixie cut and dyed it white, a style and color Percy would have hated. It didn’t matter how many tattoos she got, both marks of her skill as a blood sorceress the Lysidias had inked onto her skin, and personal tattoos of birds and flowers and nature. It didn’t matter that her fingers had become stained black and brown from the reagents she’d used in her rituals and spells. None of it had made this body hers. She was an invader in this body, and she wondered if she would ever feel comfortable wearing Persephone’s skin.
“Aha, here it is.” Lysidias’s voice snapped her out of her melancholic thoughts. His hand was under one lip of the alter, and with a soft click, the whole thing began to slide back, opening up a dark stairwell that had been hidden under the marble. Artemis yipped happily, circling Lysidas and brushing against him; Hectae shook her head at her, but smiled. Artemis had always been a fan of the Tremere primogen, and Hecate suspected it was because he snuck her treats when he wasn’t supposed too.
Hecate joined them up on the dais, looking down into the inky depths of the stairwell. “A secret passage hidden under an alter? A little cliche.”
Lysidias snorted. “We’re Kindred, Hecate. ‘Cliche’ is our bread and butter. I’m not surprised someone chose to hide it like this.” He pulled out a flashlight, clicking it on and shining it down the stairs. They were carved out of white stone that, unlike the rest of the church, seemed well preserved. “Watch your step,” he warned, and they began to descend the stairs one after the other, the darkness swallowing them.
“Why does Carter even think it’s here?”
“He got a tip off, apparently. Some kine saw some of our types lurking around here last week, reported it to the police… you know how this goes. Carter thinks they were hiding something. At least, that’s the story he’s fed me. Who knows if its true.” Lysidias sounded bitter, even to Hecate. She knew he wasn’t happy with Prince Carter, but she wondered just how deep that unhappiness would run before it turned into malice.
Hecate was silent for a moment. “What do you think he wants to do with it?” She whispered, though she knew there was no one who could overhear her.
It took Lysidias a moment to answer. “The answer a good Camarilla Primogen would say is ‘he’d use it to protect us and the Masquerade.’ But… I think he knows his power is slipping. And he wants to hold onto it no matter what.” The three finally hit the bottom of the stairwell, the stairs giving away to a short corridor that ended in a metallic door that gleamed in the light of Lysidias’s flashlight. The door was tall, with elegant designs carved into its surface; Hecate recognized some of them as belonging to blood sorcery, others, she wasn’t sure, but they seemed magical in nature. “And here we are,” he said, matter-of-factly, his expression grim. He led them to the door, and Hecate felt small in its wake, as though it were a powerful being, as she were a child at its feet.
There was a knot in her stomach, much like the first time she had met Artemia. Run, her instincts screamed. Run, now. But they couldn’t return to the Prince empty-handed. And there was no reason to suspect there was anything dangerous behind the door; Artemis would have alerted them had she scented any Kindred or kine.
Lysidas put a hand on the door, waiting for a moment, before slowly pushing it open. This door swung silently on its hinges, quieter than a whisper. Artemis whimpered, and Hecate’s stomach lurched as Lysidias’s light pierced through the darkness. The room was circular, with unlit candelabras lining the walls. A marble alter, twin to the one above, sat in its center, its surface stained red and brown. Even the walls and floor were coated with the same substance that stained the alter; the scent of old blood, fear, and pain was nauseating. And there, floating quietly above the bloodied alter, was what looked to be a massive mirror, its edges cracked and jagged, broken shards floating around it, as though it had its own gravity. Hecate knew, without needed to do any ritual or look any deeper, that horrible, horrible things had been done in this room.
Lysidas swore, pushing Hecate backwards. She swallowed, struggling to find her voice. “I-is that…?”
“An Occulus, yes.”
“They’re supposed to be-”
“Myths. But there’s one staring right at us.”
“What do we do?”
Lysidas backed her up even further, shutting the door and cutting off the sight of that awful room, “We seal the door and we leave. Carter cannot get his hands on this, do you understand me, Hecate?”
“I-…”
“If he gets this, we will all be in terrible danger. The Occulus will give him power and vision that no one Kindred should ever possess. He can’t be trusted with it power, its knowledge. Do you understand me, Hecate?”
“Yes,” she breathed. She had read about Occuli, once. Mystical mirrors that allowed the user to see into the minds of others without them ever knowing, that allowed the user to explore visions of the past, or force others to relive their worst memories. They drove the people around them insane, eventually considered so dangerous that making them was banned, and every record of how to create them was destroyed, along with every existing Occulus shattered and destroyed.
Except this one, apparently.
“Good, now help me seal this door.” He pressed his palms flat against it, and she joined him, her mind whirling. What in the world could Carter want with such a thing? Lysidias started his ritual, Hecate joining in, feeding his ritual with the powers from her blood. Bright red lines slowly formed to draw a circle against the door. They glowed softly, casting both Lysidias and Hecate in a ghostly light. When the circle completed, and flashed one last time before disappeared, Hecate was left tired and hungry; Lysidias had pulled on most of her power for this ritual along with his own, from the way he was leaning against the wall for support. The thought that Lysidias was scared enough of the Occulus to draw on so much power was enough to terrify Hecate. “That will hold it, for a while, at least,” he panted, clearly exhausted. “When we see Carter, we tell him we didn’t find anything, that the church was empty, and the kine were just playing some stupid prank. He cannot know what we found.”
Hecate nodded, numb; Artemis seemed to sense her fear and huddled in close as the trio hastily began the ascent back upstairs. But even as they left the Occuli behind, Hecate had a horrible feeling that this wasn’t the last they’d see of the ancient mirror.
