—- 𝐋𝐄𝐆𝐀𝐂𝐘 || castlevania
chapter one | fallen
synopsis: The spoken prophecy mentions three: the sleeping soldier, the hunter, and the scholar. But the souls of Wallachia refuse to sit in wait, and with their anger, they forge a fourth—the far Wallachian. The Legacy is forced to emerge from the darkness of a distant future, with a singular purpose: Wallachia's retrubition.
warnings: gore, violence, cursing, depictions of: ptsd, anxiety, depression - {to be updated as fic continues}
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Blue-hot pain burst through your skull from the impact on the ground. Agony blurred your vision of the sun, which stared down at you from the centre of the sky, taunting as you lay between two rows of buildings.
Flashes streak through your mind. Figures: a young woman in blue robes, a blond man floating, and another man whose face was clearer than the rest. Whispers escaped from the cracks in the cobble, rising with the black smoke that they moved in—they were too loud, too quiet, too many to decipher, until they weren’t.
You groaned, cradling your head in your palms, curling in on yourself, writhing on the floor from the pain. It began to intensify: your neck burned where it met your shoulders, your limbs felt as if they were being drawn from your body, and no matter how much air you took in, you felt as if you couldn’t breathe.
Go to him. The voices slithered in your brain, overlapping like a snake pit. Trevor Belmont is your key to homecoming. Join his party—help them kill Dracula, and you will go home.
—
The smoke covered the cruel sun now, engulfing your body while its whispers started anew, again impossible to understand. The voices that first carried scalding hisses and messages that fell before your ears, screamed. They cried and begged and wailed around you—sounds not only outside you, but in you. Tendrils of screaming smoke funnelled into your ears, your mouth, your nose, your eyes. The wails continued, the pain continued, the agony continued.
You weren’t sure how long you had been in the alley, but you found yourself, again, staring into the sky. This time, it was the moon that met you, and you bathed in her kind, gentle light. The pain subsided—all of it at once—and you finally had the space in your head to think: Where the hell were you?
Piecing together your day before you found this hell, you remember fragments: waking up, taking the subway, returning a library book, then falling. The gleaming library tiles opened beneath your feet and swallowed you whole, then you fell through wind and black void, all to wind up here: in the middle of nowhere. That’s all you know.
You took a wobbly stand, brushing off the dirt on the clothes you sported. These weren’t what you wore to the library. Your tee was replaced with a ruffled linen shirt, and your jeans with a pair of brown trousers. Your sneakers, however, were the same as before, and you still wore your stone bracelet on your wrist.
Flicking your head to the voice behind you, you see a lady shouting at you through her doorway.
“Здраво!”
“Що фăцĭ дацắ рău!?”
You also see that you have no idea what she just said. Where in the world could you possibly be?
From her not-so-pleasant expression, you could gather that she didn’t want you in front of her house anymore, so you frantically raised your hands in surrender and all but ran off as quickly as possible.
You weren’t in your country anymore, that you could tell. Everything here was unfamiliar—old; the windows had no glass, and the buildings you passed all had wooden doors. Were you in Europe?
The thought roused anxiety in you that hadn’t surfaced since you got here. You’d felt abnormally calm till this point when you really should be terrified. You stopped walking at the cusp of the alley. Nothing happening right now made any kind of sense. Black smoke couldn’t talk, and people couldn’t teleport. This wasn’t real.
You understood it now. This was a dream.
Smoke stirred in your body, tendrils curled around your bones. You could feel them.
You think this is a farce, young one? The voices returned with a vengeance, pounding against your head. Our pain is real. You have felt it, and you will save us from our suffering.
One voice spoke louder than the rest, clearer. It was sharp, stinging in the way she chided you.
You didn’t notice the way your vision swam until she stopped talking. Your head throbbed, and you braced against a wall, too unsteady to stand. Huffing, you focused on the smoke invading your body.
Do not be naive. We brought you here for a reason; you will see it through.
“Who are you!?” you demanded, “Where am I? I–”
A cough rattled your ribs.
“I want to go back home.”
We are the ones who survived through death, young one. The voice turned sombre. Now you must avenge us. Us and all the ones who were turned into nightmares of themselves.
“W–What does that even mean? I can’t avenge anyone’s deaths! I need to leav–”
He approaches, young one. We will tell you when he has come.
“Hey! Listen to me–!”
The smoke fell still, settling in your chest and taking the pain with it. You stare for a moment—at everything, at nothing—before the reality of your situation sets in.
You must do well. Goodbye.
The pain was real. Real as the feeling of the wall against your shoulder and the breeze upon your face. Just as the smoke said, you weren’t dreaming. You had to find a man named Trevor Belmont in hopes that your immaterial captor released you from this other world.
Other world.
How was any of this even possible? Were you in another universe? Another realm? How were you expected to go along with this quest when it was all so mortifyingly world-shattering?
You leaned off the wall and surveyed the street—footpath? You weren’t sure. It wasn’t exactly bustling considering the time, but occasional locals passed. They all wore peasant’s garb you’d see at a renn-faire, and you couldn’t spot a phone, headphones, backpack, or anything that could indicate you didn’t get thrown back a couple hundred years.
You guessed that your clothes were changed to help you fit in—which made you question the smoke’s choice of leaving your shoes—but they didn’t do much help when you didn’t know what any of the passers-by were saying. You stood at the entrance of the alley watching people go from, to what seemed to be a central area, considering that people walked up the street either bone-tired or rowdily-drunk. They all had one thing in common, however: they were moving quickly.
After about fifteen minutes of seemingly unwelcome people-watching, you relented. No one here spoke anything you could recognise. The only person—or persons—you could understand was the smoke, and the smoke hadn’t returned since its cold departure.
You had no choice; you had to try to talk to people, ask them where you were, when you were, and who this Trevor Belmont guy was. Stretching your legs, you stepped out of the alley and into the moonlight of the street—
—When immediately, you walked into a man rounding the corner.
“Си е̇мце̇ бине, Домніце?”
The elderly man held out his arm in concern, asking what could only be a variation of ‘Are you okay?’. You steadied yourself and brushed off your clothes, offering him a smile.
“I’m alright, Sir. Are you?” You reassured.
He squinted at my words, frowning slightly, before asking you something brief—for you to repeat, you guessed. You obliged, less spirited than before, and again, he didn’t understand you. You’d never anticipated how irritating the loss of communication could be. You lightly shook your head, smiling and offering him a thumbs-up. The man’s blue eyes lingered on yours for a moment too long before nodding and continuing on his way.
You turned after he was squarely behind you, watching as he strode off, until you remembered something.
“Wait! Sir!”
He wore the same blue robes as the woman you saw in your anguished state. You had no idea who she was, but she had to be connected to Trevor somehow, and any information was better than none.
The old man stopped and turned to you, a patient confusion resting on his face. You truly studied him: white hair, wrinkle-framed features, and, yes, the draping blue robes; a short hooded cloak over a long-sleeved blue garment.
You talked to him slowly, enunciating every syllable as clearly as possible, “Do you know Trevor Belmont?” you repeated, “Trevor Belmont?”
He deliberated on your words, a hint of recognition fluttering through his features, hopefully at the name. He shakes his head, saying something with uncertainty; only the name ‘Belmont’ stood out to you in his response. It looked like a no. You just started in this new world, and you were ready to give up on progressing.
Your shoulders sagged, and you turned back to the lip of the street, leaving the alley.
“Чекай!”
—
It was his turn to call you. He smiled and motioned for you to follow him, and follow him you did. It wasn’t like you had anywhere else to go.
The area the old man rushed you to was full of vaguely ravaged homes. You couldn’t see anything as much as you’d have liked, as clouds shrouded the moon, but you could see the long shadows that the buildings left. He led you into his home, which was warmly lit by lamplight, with brick walls which hardly kept out the night’s lonely chill. But the house wasn’t empty, no. You walked in on a congregation, a few shy of a dozen people in the same blue garb. Was this an ambush? Were you just stupid enough to be led into a cult? Why were there so many of them?
Your eyes flicked over every blue-cloaked figure in the room, but she wasn’t there. You couldn’t find the woman amongst the group; no one had her brown hair or her sharp blue eyes.
You turn to the old man again, wariness likely evident in your gaze, because he looked at you with what felt like pity, before turning to a black haired blue-robe, sighing slightly. He pointed at you, finger hovering over your chest, and he asked a question.
“Me?” you mused, “What do you mea– Oh! Do you need my name?”
His expression said that he didn’t grasp anything you said, and you mentally cursed yourself for forgetting. You pointed at yourself, slowly saying your name, before you got an idea.
The ground was dirt, loose dirt. You kneeled, earning unintelligible murmurs from the other blue-robes. With your finger, you traced your name in the ground, pointing at it, then yourself.
You thought you struck gold, but when no one signals even a bit of recognition, your hope flickered out. The black-haired blue-robe returns with a small sack with a wooden spout of sorts. The sloshing in the leather implied water, and made you notice just how parched you’d been this entire time. You took the bag of water gingerly when the man offered it to you, and you studied it carefully, considering how diseased drinking water from an animal’s skin could get you. Then the lack of saliva in your mouth took over your common reasoning. You drank like a bird in a drought, not wasting a single drop of the water. The old blue-robe and the black-haired one exchanged a nod before the younger man walked away again.
On the floor, you looked around you and realised just how childish you’d been, but the inquisitive eyes around you didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, they all watched you with a blanket of sympathy which spanned the whole room. It comforted you for a while, before you remembered your true situation, and that this alone couldn’t possibly help you with the vengeful mass of smoke possessing your body.
The old blue-robe crouched beside you, grasping your gaze before he dropped it and started sketching in the dirt. Three lines turned into a house, and he turned to you, talking with a questioning tilt.
“No,” you said, crossing lines through the house and shaking your head.
Then he drew a cart—a wagon? And asked you the same thing as before. Again, you denied and crossed a line through it.
He was in the middle of drawing something else when the smoke rose again.
It was in your right arm this time, moving it without your will, and you panicked, nearly screamed in the blue-robes’ residence. The people around you exchanged unsettled words and glances, some stepping back and some stepping forward. Black-hair rushed to the old man’s side and made him rise, much to the white-haired man’s disdain.
Your pointer finger extended, and you balanced yourself on your left hand, hoping it also didn’t go rogue. All you could do was watch in abject horror as you traced a figure that you’d seen in one place before. Dark, shaggy hair, eyes that looked permanently irate, an unshaven shadow of a beard, and a long, straight scar over his left eye. This was the clearest face you saw when you suffered on the ground. This had to be him.
You felt the smoke settle in your arm, and for a moment you were flooded with relief, before it moved again—in your throat. You coughed black smoke from your mouth, blinking back tears. Your mouth moved apart from the rest of your body, your voice clear when the rest of you trembled. You looked bleary-eyed at the old man when the smoke spoke through you.
It was not your language, not your voice, but you understood it:
The blue-robes gasped and stepped further away, fear clearly showing through their faces. The old man, however, stepped forward.
“Do you know this man? Do you know Trevor Belmont?”
“... are you?”
You understood him as smoke rushed to your ear canals.
The old man—the speaker?—hummed, but shook his head regretfully.
The smoke spoke, “Do not concern yourself with my identity, speaker. Tell me if you know the Belmont, and help my host if you do.”
“I do not know of any living Belmont. The family has not been heard from for a long time, though I have a feeling you would know that.”
You felt the smoke’s frustration in the way that it flared throughout your body, but you could not hear it in the way she spoke.
“Very well, speaker. Thank you for entertaining my silly question.” Her voice held less weight than before, but to you, it was no less terrifying when coming out of your mouth.
“Of course,” he said with a smile, “We will help you both.”
“If you can, may you still help this young one while we need to stay here in Gresit?” The words did not feel like a question.
The smoke at your mouth settled with voices of soft laughter that only you could hear. Your limbs slackened, and you slumped on the floor, arms grasping at your throat as you gasped for air that did nothing to quell you. You stared at the drawing that you made—no, that the smoke made, eyes wide and flowing with tears.
The black-haired blue-robe whispered something sharp to the old man, and you raised your gaze to the pair. The elder, the speaker, walked to you with a steady smile. He rested his hand on your shoulder, unwavered by your harsh flinching.
“Do not worry, dear child,” he talked, and you understood him, “We will help you until you are free.” You understood his undertone, but you didn’t comment. Right now, you didn’t want his warm hand, you didn’t want to be sent back in time, you didn’t want to find any damned Belmont, and you didn’t want a cloud of industrial smog to be controlling your body and polluting your brain. Right now, all you wanted to do was to go back home, return your library book, and cry.
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