Vampiolence

11. Voron

Vinyl did not register Voron knocking Octavia from Vellum’s grip. She did not register anything either of them said. She only registered the heavy thump of a body landing next to her, wet spray across her face and the smell of blood.

“You stupid fool! What have you done!?”

“D-Daddy!”

Vinyl poured everything she had into opening her eyes one more time. She was dying. She knew it with crystal clarity. Only dying could feel this bad. Inside and out, everything was only pain. She managed to prise back her lids … and found herself looking straight into Octavia’s wide purple eyes.

Octavia was shaking. No, she was convulsing. Her throat was so dark with blood, it appeared black in the light of the cellar. Yet despite the shudders wracking her body, she did not break eye contact. Haltingly, she raised a forehoof to her neck. Vinyl thought she was touching the wound in shock, the way many victims did. Death was such an unwelcome surprise to some ponies that only touching their own mortal injury was enough to convince them they were dying. Octavia, however, did not seem surprised at the ragged bite Vellum had taken. With grim determination, she brought her cupped, bloody hoof to Vinyl’s mouth.

“Drinking … b-blood … healed him … before,” she whispered laboriously. “Please, Vinyl … they were … g-going to kill me… anyway an’ y-you know … it …” Tears streaked her face. “Please, Celestia … please let this work… don’t let her die …”

Vinyl tried instinctively to resist but Octavia easily pushed her hoof into her mouth. The familiar coppery taste touched her tongue, awakening memories she had desperately tried to forget for ten years.

“I d-don’t c-care wh-what you are o-or … th’past,” Octavia slurred. “I l-love … you … for who you are … n-not … what … or … was …” Her eyes dimmed. “Please … live … for me.” Her breath hitched wetly in her throat. “Don’t … let him … make you i-into … somepony y… you’re … not…” Her words became a single breath, and then she was still. Her bloodied hoof hit the floor. Her eyes still stared, but Vinyl knew they could no longer see her.

Octavia was dead.

Her Tavi was dead.

Just like that, Vinyl was a small child again, screaming for the only other pony who had loved her for her – and who her father’s twisted plans had taken away.

“Winter Song, run! Run far away and don’t look back!”

“I l-love … you …”

I just … I’m happy I’m alive.”

“Please … live … for me.”

Something exploded inside Vinyl in that moment. Maybe it was that taste of blood. Maybe it was a last reserve of strength not even she knew she had. Or maybe she was powered by nothing more than raw grief and rage. Whatever it was, it allowed her to pull herself over to the pony who had loved her more than life itself and accept her final gift.

As Octavia’s blood flowed down her throat, Vinyl felt the last fragments of the curse snap and the dark power inside her surge out of its prison. Her nubby teeth elongated into sharp points. Her eyes prickled with heat. Strength rushed back into her limbs. She felt cuts close up and bruises melt away, leaving her dirty but whole and brimming with more strength than ever before. When she raised her head, mouth dripping, she knew her eyes were glowing full red for the first time in a decade.

And she did not fight the change.

Vinyl roared.

“What the -” Vellum started to say.

Vinyl moved faster than a striking snake. Voron and Vellum flew apart, each reeling from her blows. He landed lightly, lips pulled back in a snarl as his own eyes flared red. Vellum opened her wings to save herself, baring fangs painted with blood.

Octavia’s blood.

Vinyl was beyond rational thought. She moved on pure instinct, every action dictated by the savagery of her own emotions. Something tickled her mind but she forced it back, completely taken up with vaulting off the wall and pinning Vellum to the floor. The other vampire was a hissing, spitting bundle from air to concrete. Her teeth raked at Vinyl’s forelegs and she kicked upwards, trying to crush her belly with her hind hooves. Her wings beat fruitlessly, shedding feathers each time they struck her assailant.

“Vanelda! Stop! I command you to stop!” came a deep voice from far away.

“If you leave her here with me she could be a normal pony!”

“Get off me!” Vellum shrieked. “You traitor! You don’t deserve to be part of Daddy’s court!”

“Daddy, I think she’s going to cry! Big sis, don’t cry! That’s so babyish!”

The tickling inside Vinyl’s head grew stronger.

Voron roared, “I command you to STOP!”

He was inside her head. He was trying to use the reignited connection between them to make her bend to his will. It had always worked before. None of his children had ever been able to resist him.

“A successful unicorn get who carries my blood. Do you even know how rare you are?”

He had no idea. He had never had any idea. Ten years is a long time. It is an especially long time when one is learning magic the way Vinyl had. She was much, much more powerful now than she had been when kind ponies pulled her battered and broken body out of a river and unknowingly set her on the path to a new and brighter life.

Her horn glowed.

Furniture around the room lifted off the ground, encased not in her usual pink signature, but in a bright red radiance. Like it was caught in a whirlpool, it began to circle the room, picking up speed as it went. Music stands, books, instruments, chairs, the table – all of it flew like scraps of paper in a gale. The piano chimed discordantly, wires and keys snapping loose as it ricocheted off the wall. The broken pieces of music stand Voron had torn in half clattered in ever-accelerating loops, at their centre a tiny unmoving grey body.

“Vanelda!” Voron yelled above the din. “Stop this madness at once!”

Vinyl lifted her head. The light fitting shattered, sending glass shards into the maelstrom and plunging the little room into darkness. This proved no problem for the three vampires, who continued to snarl and bare fangs at each other in the gloom.

“You’re not the boss of me anymore!” Vinyl screamed.

Voron leaped. The piano crashed down where he had been. For a second he lost his footing and it seemed as though he would be snatched up by the unnatural wind, but he grappled a hold on the uneven stones of the wall and clung on, mane plastered against his face and neck.

Pain seared across Vinyl’s chest. She looked down to see Vellum’s teeth buried there. She had taken the opportunity presented by Vinyl’s diverted attention. Ribs crunched in her powerful jaws. Vinyl brought a hoof down on her sister’s head, but Vellum’s bite was too strong. Pulling her free meant pulling out a chunk of her own flesh and bone. Vinyl felt Voron move behind her, though she didn’t need to turn to see him. Working his way across the stones would not take him long. The maelstrom faltered as another rib shattered. Vinyl wasn’t sure afterwards whether she made the decision or the decision made her. Either way, her head whipped forward and she drove her teeth deep into her sister’s skull.

Vellum screamed into her mouthful. Vinyl tasted revolting blood. It burned her tongue. Yet she held on, knowing that if she didn’t, she was dead and Octavia’s sacrifice had been for nothing. She released her hold on Vellum’s forehooves, shifting to brace her hind hooves on the other vampire’s hips, her rump pointed awkwardly into the air as she hooked her forehooves between Vellum’s ribcage and upper forelegs. Vellum batted at her with her newly freed hooves, grabbing handfuls of mane and tearing it out with chunks of bloody scalp still attached.

“No!” Voron thundered, understanding clear in his shout. “Vanelda, no!”

Too late.

Vinyl snapped her body straight, digging in all four hooves and clamping her jaws tight as she arched her neck. Vellum’s body, smaller than her own and already strained tight in her grip, tore across the middle, spilling viscera onto the concrete floor. She had time to look surprised before, with a wet popping crunch, her head came away from her neck.

“NO!”

Vinyl tossed her head, releasing the skull with its frothy, bouncing curls to be swept up be the maelstrom of her own magic. She spat out the blood still in her mouth and leapt free of the eviscerated corpse, clutching her chest wound with one forehoof. Every breath was a gloopy wheeze and the crunching sensation when she moved was nauseating.

Yet there was no time to focus on her injuries. She felt and heard Voron’s attack but had no time to react before he struck. He cannoned into her from behind like a runaway carriage. What should have laid her flat instead sent them sprawling as she deftly turned it into a roll. He tried to get a grip under her chin from behind but she bit down hard on one, cracking the hardest part of the hoof but missing the soft, blood-rich frog at the centre. He snarled right into her ear. She scrambled, trying to get her hooves under her so she could buck him off, or at least keep him away from the side of her exposed neck. She brought her up sharply, trying to crush his face, but the impact only succeeded in giving him extra momentum to tear off her ear. Pain radiated through her skull, momentarily blotting out all else, right when she needed all her senses.

No! I won’t die like this!

Finally gathering her hooves, she rocketed backwards, pinning Voron against the wall with her body weight and her magic. He doggedly gripped her midriff from behind, trying with one good and one ruined hoof to tear it open. She stamped, kicked, struggled and battered at him, trying to free herself so she could throw the contents of the whirling room at him.

“You will never be free of me, Vanelda,” he growled into her ruined ear. “In this life or the next, you will always be mine.”

With a wordless cry, she summoned part of the broken music stand to her, bringing it up behind her to shove deep into his side. She hoped she’d hit vital organs with the blunt object, but the stab was an untidy one and she couldn’t be sure. The shock of it had the desired effect: Voron convulsed and she leapt free, skidding around the face him in the centre of the room. A whirling dervish of furniture whipped between them like a swollen river.

Something red flashed past. She caught sight of Vellum’s curls and wide-open mouth. Voron’s hoof whipped out snatching it from mid-air. He cradled Vellum’s head almost … gently, giving it a look Vinyl would have called fatherly on anypony else.

“Little one,” he murmured, stroking back her devastated pigtails. “You were always Daddy’s favourite. Always my good little girl.” He planted a kiss on her forehead. “Our children will carry on our legacy, my dear. She will not tarnish what you did for the betterment of our family.”

Vinyl tensed when he looked up at her, expression melting into a snarl as he brought his hooves together, crushing Vellum’s skull into bloody pulp and shattered bone. He ducked his head, gulping mouthfuls of brain matter and squishy red meat. He tugged free an eyeball, chewing briefly before swallowing.

“If you take her eyes, can I have them? I like the way they pop when you tuck them into your cheek and then bite down.”

“Valenda! What you have done is unforgiveable.” With one foreleg, Voron pulled free the music stand and rammed it deep into the concrete floor. “You have disobeyed me for the last time. Your worth is not equal to what you have cost me tonight.” He threw the remains of Vellum’s skull with such force that they ripped through the maelstrom and splattered against her face and the foreleg she had instinctively raised.

It was a dirty trick. She leapt aside, but her concentration had been compromised. Voron bounded through the maelstrom, punching his way through the table that tried to get in his way, resisting the pull of her telekinesis with sheer momentum and raw strength. It should have been impossible for him to do more than stand against her power.

But this was Voron and Voron was good at doing the impossible if it meant dominating her.

Sudden icy fear swept through Vinyl. It was old emotion, frosted hard by history. She couldn’t stand against him. He was Voron. All you could do was run from Voron, and even then it wasn’t enough. He always got what he wanted. Always.

No!

In desperation, she cast the only spell she could think of. Fireworks sprayed from her horn, hitting him in the chest. The smell of burnt fur hit her before he did. She kept casting, but she was weakening and she knew it. Octavia’s blood was not enough to sustain her through this level of combat. She punched frantically at Voron’s throat, trying to crush his windpipe, throwing fireworks into his eyes to blind him. He roared in pain and she wriggled free, turning to buck him so hard in the chin she half expected his head to fly off.

No such luck.

He swept out a foreleg, catching hold of her haunch. She heard the crack before she felt the pain from her own thigh bone. A scream ripped from her unbidden. She staggered away on three legs, trying to lift her injured one but only able to drag it limply behind her.

Voron clambered to his own hooves, wiping blood from his eyes. He growled low in his throat. His eyes glowed red, the irises bathed in white fire that made him look like the demons ponies wrote about in books about Tartarus.

Despite herself, Vinyl backed up. She let out a cry as she stumbled over something, pain rippling up her injured leg. She spared a glance and saw Octavia, half rolled onto her back from being stepped on. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

All at once, Vinyl realised she would never get away from Voron. He was too strong. He had always been too strong. Even when she escaped him long enough to build a new life for herself, he had always been there inside her head. Not the controlling presence of her childhood and adolescence, but a memory so strong he dictated her behaviour even after she had thought herself a brand new pony: Vinyl Scratch, just an ordinary unicorn like anyone else, not Vanelda Vershovski, daughter of a monster. She had never truly let herself be free of him. Since the day she was born, he had always been a part of her, waiting in the wings while she acted out her life on a stage she thought he would never set hoof on again.

But he had.

He always had.

He always would.

Unless …

Vinyl set her stance. “You want me so bad, Daddy?” she spat. “Come and get me. I’d rather die than give in to you ever again!”

“Foolish child!” he hissed. “You could have been part of something so much greater than yourself, and instead you force my hoof like this? I am ashamed to call you my daughter! The only thing you are useful for now is as a bloodbag, just like those useless children of Celestia you so wanted to be like!”

“I’d rather be one of Celestia’s children than the daughter of someone so pathetic not even his own father could stand to have him around. No matter what you do, you’ll never be good enough for him. Never.”

Voron’s eyes flashed hot as the surface of the sun. With a screech, he galloped at her, zigzagging so fast even she could barely track his movements. In less than a heartbeat he was in front of her and she thought she had made a major miscalculation. She felt his breath, smelled the blood on it, saw the raw hatred in his eyes – and cast the spell she had used ten years ago to cover up the crime scene in Professor Orchid’s office.

Instantly, the wavering maelstrom became a swathe of flame. Voron looked up, aghast, and was about to bolt when Vinyl leapt up at him. He reared back, clearly expecting the attack to come from her jaws. Her broken leg shrieked but she threw all her weight and strength into plunging the broken shaft of the wooden cello neck up, under his ribcage and into his twisted black heart.

Voron roared. The maelstrom hurtled inwards at the insane speed it had picked up as it whirled around them, crushing everything in its path. Vinyl pumped everything she had into her magic and her muscles. She would not let Voron get away.

As the flames rose higher and higher, the entire practise room became a conflagration. From within it a roar became a scream, became a keening wail, and finally – finally – stopped.

Sunlight painted strange patterns on the walls. One of them had left the window open all night. There was a bite to the air that spoke of the promise of winter. It would be the Running of the Leaves soon.

“What are you thinking of?” came a sleepy voice from her chest.

She looked down. “Good morning. How long have you been awake?”

Octavia yawned delicately into her cupped hoof. “Not long. I was just too comfortable to say anything. You make an exceedingly cosy pillow.”

“You wouldn’t have to use me as a pillow if you didn’t wriggle around so much while you sleep.”

“I like to listen to your heartbeat.” She turned her face upwards, smiling. A strand of hair fell across her face. She looked rumpled and content and absolutely beautiful.

“Celestia damn it, you’re pretty.”

“Oh shush. I need a shower, mascara and a mane-brush before I look even halfway decent.”

“If you weren’t pretty, would I do this?”

“Vin-mrrf!”

The taste of her lips is as wonderful now as it was the first time the kissed, though much less hasty than those stolen moments in her dorm room so many years ago.

“You’re incorrigible,” Octavia laughed.

“Um, cool?”

“Don’t pretend dumb with me, Vinyl Scratch. I know you’re not as thick as you make out.” Octavia heaved herself into a sitting position and immediately clasped her forelegs around herself with a shiver. “Blast it all, did I forget to shut the window again? Sorry love. It’s like an icebox in here.”

“All the more reason for snuggles.”

She squeaked as she was pulled down again into another embrace.

“Vinyl!” she giggled. “I have to go to work! And I really do need a shower first!”

“Snuggles eclipse showers.”

“They do not!”

“Do too.”

“You really are an incorrigible wretch, you know that?”

“Yeah, but you love me anyhow.”

Octavia’s head thumped down on the pillow, framed perfectly between white forelegs. She smiled upwards. “Yes, I do love you, but I don’t love being a smelly beast.”

“I’d kiss you even if you stink of old fish. And cow dung. And mouldy cheese.”

“You paint such a lovely picture.” She reached up, pulling her down for another deep kiss. “Whatever did I do with myself before you came into my life, you grotty creature?” She traced her hoof lightly, producing a shiver of pleasure. “Oh, it’s like that, is it?”

Their kiss seemed to go on for too long and, at the same time, ended far too soon. The alarm clock rattled out a warning that they were, indeed, going to be late for work.

Octavia sighed.

“To be continued?”

“To be continued,” she agreed. “Very much so. I might even let you get the front door closed when you get home.”

“I love you, Tavi.”

“And I love you too, Vinyl. Now shoo. You’ll be home late today so I’ll wait up for you, okay?”

I’ll wait up for you, okay?

I’ll wait up.

I’ll wait.

I’ll …

The smell of charred flesh and wood filled the air. The walls of the practise room was so burned, it was impossible even to see the outline of the door. A gigantic pile of blackened debris smoked in the centre of the floor.

Abruptly, the still-hot pile moved. Plumes of ash curled up and out as the top shifted. Tiny red cherries crackled and flared as what meagre oxygen remained in the room reached them. The flames had been doused as quickly as they began, but even so the air what was left was thin and difficult to breathe. That did not stop the face that appeared from gasping it greedily.

Vinyl pushed aside what remained of her furniture. It tumbled to the floor, shattering into ashy fragments. With great effort, she pulled herself and then her cargo free and rolled down the side of the pile. It wasn’t especially tall, but she hit the floor with a jolt that elicited a cry and lay there for several moments. At no point had she let go of what she was holding.

Octavia had landed against Vinyl’s chest when they hit the floor. Her cheek appeared pillowed there, as if she had just gone to sleep – if one ignored the massive wound that had ended her life, or the fact that they were both singed from where Vinyl’s protective barrier had not quite managed to keep them safe as her firestorm burned Voron to a crisp.

His body was still in the burned pile, as twisted outside now as he had always been on the inside. Vinyl had no compulsion to dig him out. She had watched from behind her barrier as he burned. It hadn’t been enough to stake him the way old legends demanded you stake vampires. She had forced herself to the very limits of her strength to make sure he was finally, ultimately dead.

“He’s gone, Tavi,” she whispered. Her voice was scratchy and brought on a coughing fit that caused Octavia’s body to slide sideways. Vinyl caught her, dragging her back into place. She stroked Octavia’s mane, the movements jagged with exhaustion. “He’s … really gone.”

Beside them, the ash pile shifted and collapsed inwards, filling in the hole Vinyl had created and burying Voron’s body once more.

“All my life I … I dreamed of him being … b-being … I thought … I thought that if I could finally be free of him I’d feel. I’d f-feel …” She had nothing left to cry with. That didn’t stop her body trying. She bit her lip, chest too injured to tolerate the stress of sobbing as deeply as she wanted to. “It was all I ever wanted.” She circled her forelegs around Octavia, burying her face in the top of her mane. “It wasn’t worth the cost.”

And there, in the tattered remains of her life, Vinyl Scratch screamed out her endless grief.