After making the long journey back down to his lair, upon entering Hyde is suddenly struck by the finality of it all. ‘Is this it?’ he thinks, ‘Is all that I have worked for these past centuries about to be as so much dust in the wind?’ He looks around at the stonework, recalling the countless nights spent cutting each block to fit just so, nights he intentionally kept his hands and mind focused on the menial so that his heart could not long for her.

“I should have told her how I felt,” he mutters “shoulda’ said somethin’ decades ago.” He looks down to the floor because he knows better, knows that he said nothing because there was nothing that could be said. Nothing that would change her mind. To Beauty, duty was paramount, her responsibilities to the clan came first, and of course there was the Camarilla. There was no time for such petty and fruitless interactions as Love.

Hyde knew all this to be true, in the desert of time he had spent learning from her, she had made her intentions clear, without needing to make her intentions clear. Such is her way.

Drifting over to the southwest wall, removing his hat and setting it upon the anvil as he passes, he leaves a wake of discarded clothing across the room, removing his coat, jacket, vest and shirt. Letting his fingers lightly trace the rough stonework, he imagines that he were touching her misshapen face. Without turning to look he reaches behind him, picking up a cold chisel from the table of smithing tools. His face suddenly contorting in anger as he violently chips and scratches away at the mortar around one of the massive stones, spitting and drooling as he hurls obscenities at it.

At last, he rests his forehead against the wall just above his assault, the implement clanging to the floor. Tenderly wiping years of soot from the Masonic seal carved into the stone he nods and says “So Mote it Be,” as if in agreement to something, wedging his inhuman fingers into the crevices he created. “Some things must be done for the greater good.”  He issues a guttural growl as he heaves the quarter-ton stone from the wall, setting it on the ground. “Sacrifices must be made.”

It has been a lifetime since he has looked upon this alcove, longer still since he forged its contents. Within rests an armor rack, upon it is an exceptionally large Roman-style cuirass with a pauldron and  bracer only on the left side, all forged from quater-inch thick steel plates, emblazoned with what appears to be a coat of arms, hammered into the very steel— A fierce catamount perched atop a set of balancing scales, bearing claws and fangs as a warning, upon the scales rest a great sword on one side and riches on the other, intricate filigree to either side and a motto inscribed below: ‘Justitia fiat, ruat coelum’—Let justice be done, though the heavens fall...

“It has been said that ‘A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil.’” he proclaims, donning the armament “Let me become as the scythe.”

Faint echoes of ephemeral screams emanating from the direction of the sewers drag him back from his bloody daydream. As always, his first thought is of her… “BEAUTY?!” he bellows, launching himself into the tunnels.

{Continues in Rabid Dogs [Sewers]}  

--Last edited by mourningstaar on 2008-04-25 14:03:36 --