10/31: Hunt

On a sunny afternoon in Vesuvia, the real one filled with much less red and more of the blue, orange, white, tan, and multiple hues of a city vibrant with life and devoid of zombified monsters, the former Count Lucio wades in the canal with his lover, Eridæus. It is a peaceful moment for them both, with the reckless warrior finally recovered after his four week possession under an agitated Mare. Lucio has long been convinced what he’d experienced was nothing more than the cruel tormentings of the aforementioned creature, as Eridæus and the others have updated and informed of the previous actions they saw him do the night before he found himself in that horrid place of sorrow, flesh, and blood.

But, if he had travelled further down the canal that day, he would have seen it.

The limply afloat notebook is damp, the text has faded, its edges are worn from all the sweat, blood, and viscera that once stained its pages, but, regardless, it is a familiar face one that the blonde Count would know all too well.

Strangely, despite its worn condition, the tide manages to flip some of the pages and slowly, a bloodied red inscriptions, written like a madman in the middle of his meltdown fill the remainder of the pages. The passage overflows the pages, the text repeated ad nauseam as if the person, or thing, that journalled it was on their final breath of life. The repeating passage is written in a foreign, other-wordly text, but if one were to translate, it would read as follows:

The plate lays in a now dilapidated, blown to pieces underground room, shattered to many particulate, minuscule, broken pieces.

Raked in the blood of a man that once stood are a group of beasts, laughing; laughing in what can only be a sorrowful concoction of elation and anger, joy and frustration, bliss and anguish, all at the same time as the force beyond them, the name that was once called He, H.A.E. and “they,” vents out his rage through them while they celebrate. The beasts once called Muriel, Julien, and Portie celebrate that their friend has returned home, as he should have, even if they are trapped forever in the world of crimson, flesh, and false autonomy. Meanwhile, their commander, their god, darkens the sky and sends more creatures on the hunt to rip apart the surviving bystanders--what little left there are of the denizens to feast on.

To satiate the god.

The god vows to find him again, he will find his target again, and fulfill that insatiable desire of vengeance and torture even if now, more than ever, it could never be obtained. The god’s original target, the man who tore a hole where his soul, of what was once one person, lay--has been permanently vanquished.

A scent, a trail ... something will come and allow for him to take what was, and still is, his. To watch Lucio suffer--any Lucio suffer--is the only purpose the god has left now. He must hunt and he will never stop hunting until that desire is filled even if it spans across the infinite multiverse itself.

The beasts, his pawns, laugh now but soon they will all unite again under his control, and he will be far less lenient this time--underestimation and arrogance will not be repeated twice.

I WILL find you, Lutzokh Lucio.

Perhaps, it is best the Count and his partner never went further down the canal.

Let mere coincidences and nightmares remain as such, and nothing more.

-Phillis