#philipofgwynedd

[loutrefantome]

I love him ❤️

[bloodanddye]

||Dies Irae||

It was a terribly strange thing -- where most went to church when they felt guilty, Emily often found herself feeling guilty when she went to church. No matter what truths she knew or learned she could never quite dark ache that told her that she did not belong. Even after over a century, she was always surprised that she did not burst into flames or get struck down by lightening the moment she crossed the threshold into a church. But despite all of this, she inexorably found herself hiding amongst the shadows in a pew at the back of one church or another, praying not simply for her sins but that no one would notice the wolf amongst the lambs.

The only lights in the large Southern church were a few scattered candles and a dim lamp with a stained glass shade that hung just above the chancel. Despite the late hour, there were still a few other parishioners sitting like lonely statues about the darkened pews, each with their heads bowed and their eyes closed. An older African American woman sat at the furthest edge of the pew closest to the transept, her greying hair hidden beneath a dark scarf and her lips moving in whispered prayer. For the longest time it seemed like the only sound in the entire church... Other than the heartbeats.

Emily knew that she did not need to be alone in this place. She knew that nearly that if she reached out to someone, with a child’s face and a child’s voice, she would likely be met with every ounce of Christian charity the others had to offer. Or at least a soft nod and a gesture to join them in the pew. Even her adoptive parents had offered to join her. Sadly, it was still too difficult to even speak to the priest that wandered about the the church checking the candles at each station and statue, let alone a father that was older than her entire faith.

So she sat, another lost soul with her dark hood pulled up over her hair and her head tipped forward in both silent prayer and desperately dark thoughts. It was only as she began to feel herself tumbling forward into the hole in her soul that she sensed something walk out of her nightmares and into the church.

A vampire. An older vampire. A much older vampire.

“Oh God...” she whispered.

[vampireadam]

He hardly appreciated the snapping letter he had received, signature certified, calling him back to London about the restoration work on his old estate. The castle proper had been ruined beyond repair in the wars but the manor house was worth fixing. When he had actually stood at the ruins, last seen in 1612 as he made preparations to sail on to the new world, he had to hand it to the English. Even their ruins were classical. Too bad he hadn't been there to watch the old thing crumble, and too bad he couldn't linger long, he had a train to catch.

The meeting it turned out was nothing much of anything. The Lords hadn't changed much through the centuries, only the names. That he had, by reputation at least, tricked the Germans into carpet-bombing the house and neighbors of someone who had tried to shut him out of he war planning might have helped. If you don't want my help then you wont get my help, and everything around you will be bombed into a 200 foot wide, forty foot deep crater. Now look, some of the bombs missed and hit the neighbours. Too bad you didn't want my help.

All in all, Adam decided that this was the sort of thing that could have easily been handled on the phone and no one would have had to have been threatened. The manor house, he explained for the fifth time, with the Lord's neck firmly in his hand (claws only poking in for the lightest scratches) this time, would draw vampires out of the cities, giving them a place to gather away from humans to compare notes and to not be so brutal.

He decided to find a room in London for the rest of the day. A night in London again would be fun. Before heading back to the manor at dawn. That is... if he could find a hotel far enough away from the clandestine meeting where he could shake off the thoughts of killing the one guy. He honestly didn't mind the taunts that came with the fact that he had Americanized so thoroughly, it was the complete waste of time it had all been. Really. A phone call would have been enough.

Strangely enough though, the longer he had spent in that room the more of his old English accent came out. The work of the subconscious machinations of his mind automatically switching to fit-in-no-matter-where-you-are.

He found himself walking on a street a little dissapointed that so many of the old buildings had been torn down and replaced with new ones, but he might have had an indirect hand in that, what with the carpet bombing run he had arraigned.

philipofgwynedd