The Ritual

NoMoreNoMoreNoMoreNoMore!! NO MORE!!

The Wizard’s mind screamed at itself over and over and over until the ragged words and evil sun became his entire world. Even the pain—the blinding agony—faded with the screeching in his mind.

But not really. The searing, scraping, clawing, ripping torture never truly faded. How could it? That anguish was at the root of everything . . . was everything . . .

. . . except the screaming.

NO MORE!!

But there had to be more. The only way for there not to be more was to emerge from the vat. Only then would the boiling, throbbing, blistering, scorching . . . stop.

Of course, once he emerged from the vat, skin still aflame, he would burst into actual flame, when the raw, molten rays of the sun hit his shredded skin and incinerated him in an instant. He would be destroyed.

The Final Death.

He wondered, again, in the minute, hollow corner of his mind that could still harbor thought, if that end would not be better. Why not, he thought? What use immortality when Kan, his only reason to exist, was gone? Gone. Destroyed by the one who still hunted him; the one who made this torment necessary; the one he had to defeat—against impossible odds—if he ever hoped to have a moment’s peace in this dark un-life he was now cursed with.

Sung.

And, by the most ironic of circumstance, the one who revealed this secret to him. The secret of a bright, full life, rather than a shaded half-life, imprisoned by shadow; the secret of the dawn; the secret of walking in the daylight; the secret of the sun.

The Vat of the Blood Sun. Or, as Sung also called it: The Ritual.

The Wizard never knew why he had not died from Sung’s bite that day. When he had given it any thought at all, he supposed it had something to do with the strength of his own will and the depth of Sung’s rage. Whatever the cause, when he awoke to his new un-life, he found power was not the only gift he was cursed with.

While he slept, huddled, shrouded and sheltered from the fevered beams of the sun, memories from another mind—Sung’s mind, he came to realize—whizzed and whipped about inside his head like roof tiles in a hurricane. For months and months, he endured it, thinking it all part of the curse—to be burdened with the tortured memories of his enemy—and tried his best to ignore them. But, after more than a year of embattled slumber, he realized the memories were not going away, so he endeavored to examine them. That is when he found out what truly lurked within his horrendous dreams.

Sung’s memories. But, not just his memories. His nightmares, the faces of his victims, the scent, sight and taste of blood—all types of blood; ahhhh, so much blood—the feel of succulent flesh, hundreds, thousands of heartbeats—straining with life, thundering with fear . . . fading in death; he felt the burn of the thirst, the fire in the belly that had denied itself the nectar of life for days and weeks on end, just to see what would happen and how long it could endure . . .

And that is when he realized that Sung’s memories contained much more than mere recollections.

They contained Sung’s secrets.

For years, even though he was beginning to make sense of the frayed tatters of memory, the totality of it—centuries of existence—still eluded him. He was, however, able to discern some things. And, the main thing he learned was that Sung had devoted his un-life to learning all there was to know about the creature he had become.

The Wizard still did not know everything—and suspected he never would. But, he knew enough to know that he needed to do the same thing. He was going to be trapped—perhaps forever—within the shell of the monster he had become. He, like Sung, needed to learn all he could about the thing. In doing that, not only would he gain vital knowledge of his own existence; he would gain the same insight into the un-life of his enemy.

So, as he attempted to inventory the careening images from his nightmares, he learned that certain memories, certain incidents stood out more clearly than others. For example, the more significant, more traumatic, more . . . painful a memory was, the more he was able to make sense of it. That is what brought him to the single most traumatic of Sung’s memories: The Ritual.

One of the first things Sung had experimented with was sunlight. He absolutely abhorred the fact that he had to slink around in the shadows while the sun ruled the sky. He despised this so much that he nearly destroyed himself twenty times over trying to find a way around it.

That was also what led him to begin experimenting on humans. There were plenty of them to go around, he reasoned to himself, so he began stocking his dungeons with test material. Man, woman, young, old; it did not matter, he needed to know everything as fully as possible. He would sometimes turn ten, or more of them a day trying to wring this secret from their unwilling flesh.

Finally, one day, he painted one of his victims with a thick coat of blood and shoved him into an open courtyard. The emaciated man had begun shrieking immediately but, to Sung’s surprise, did not burst into flame. Instead, as he fell to the ground, convulsing in agony, his skin, under the thick coat of coagulated blood, started to exhibit a curious behavior.

It was . . . boiling.

Or, perhaps it was the blood itself boiling. It was difficult to tell as the man had writhed away from the shadowed doorway and Sung was reluctant to move closer. After about fifteen minutes—fourteen more minutes than any other subject had lasted—the outer coating of blood started to bubble and flake away, and the man’s skin started to blacken and peel. Finally, enough of the blood coating was gone that the man went the way of any other vampire left in the sun.

Sung was elated and immediately prepared three more prisoners with varying amounts of blood. He very quickly realized he needed a way to keep the blood on them, as there seemed to be a cycle developing in the first few minutes of exposure. It was as if the blood coating was feeding off the body and, conversely, the body was feeding off the blood coating. If he could find a way to maintain the blood coating, the victim had a chance of surviving the process.

After several months of frenzied experimentation, he finally developed a sarcophagus-like vat fashioned from opaque crystal. The blood and the victim needed to be exposed to the sun’s blazing light, but he found the opaque filter contained the blood, as well as helped prolong the cycle. He filled the vat with fresh blood, sealed a turned prisoner inside and left him in the courtyard to await the fiery dawn.

As the night ebbed, Sung could feel the molten sun crawling up towards the horizon. He watched the vat, the victim still and quiet inside. Being a vampire, the man could survive without breathing and just floated there, eyes closed, sated from the glut of blood he was able to ingest while submerged. Sung had anticipated this and the vat was filled far more than any vampire could drink. Besides, he observed curiously, the level of blood never seemed to diminish, even when the man was first submerged and was virtually inhaling the sweet nectar he swam in. Sung noted all this in his meticulous manner and continued to await the hated sun.

Finally, the awful orange orb slithered over the horizon. Involuntarily, Sung shrunk back in his shuttered observation chamber, but kept his eyes on the vat. When the first horrid ray of light touched the crystal, the man immediately jolted awake and started pounding the inside of the vat. It was clear he was in immense agony and his mouth gaped in a scream that Sung could hear, even through the thick walls of the vat.  Though he was inhaling blood instead of air, he was not drowning. Sung had experimented with this, also. When a vampire inhaled blood, its lungs adapted to filter out unnecessary substances, keeping the creature alive, even in the absence of air. Blood, he found, could even be absorbed through the skin, if necessary.

Once the vat was fully bathed in the searing light of day, the boiling started. Though there was almost no air, something was causing the blood to bubble, as if a huge fire was blazing below the vat. Sung quickly realized the boiling was actually coming from the man’s skin. The skin was furiously peeling, flaking and melting away under the sun’s relentless assault. But, as quickly as it dissolved, it was growing back! Through the crystal, he could see bright pink skin re-forming before the scarlet ropes of muscle could be revealed.

It was a cycle!

The hated sun was doing its cruel job and searing away the man’s skin, but before its grisly task could finish, the body drew sustenance from the blood and regenerated the skin. And, the skin that dissolved into the blood transformed it—much like an actual bite turns a human—into vampire blood, which was able to draw its sustenance from the body that floated within it.

The body sustained the blood, which sustained the body!

And that insufferable yellow ball of death, the flaming bane of his existence, the abhorrent sun was the gruesome catalyst for this entire process.

Sung had laughed out loud at this. “Imagine,” he thought. “The very thing that would destroy me, may be the key to my true immortality.”

After that, it was only a matter of time. And more victims. He finally settled on a formula of three days for a strong body; a body whose blood and skin had been conditioned sufficiently by age, or an almost equally painful aging process (which he had also developed during this time). At that point, Sung had been a vampire almost two-hundred years. His experiments led him to believe that he would be able to emerge into the sunlight after only one full day in the vat. However, since the slightest miscalculation would be fatal, he subjected himself to three.

Those were the three worst days of his entire existence. And worst of all was knowing that, when the searing, blazing, flaming daylight was gone, and the cool, soothing night finally fell, it would only be mere hours before the excruciating cycle began again. And there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. For the only way to stop it was to stop The Ritual. And the only way to stop The Ritual was to emerge from the vat. But, to emerge from the vat, before The Ritual was completed, was to step into the Final Death. So he waited. And endured. Each agonizing day.

When night fell, after the third day and he lay in the vat, unconscious, wrapped in a fresh layer of bright, pink skin, his loyal attendants pushed the vat back into the castle. As instructed, they did not remove the lid.

Three days later, Sung’s blood-filled eyes popped open and he jerked awake, shoving the lid of the vat off so hard that it landed across the room and shattered against the far wall. He still felt himself screaming the way he had screamed as the cruel sun boiled him in the vat, but no sound came out. Not realizing it—nor caring—he had ruptured his vocal cords the morning of his second day in the blistering sun. Finally realizing his ordeal was truly over and he had survived, he sat slumped over the side of the vat and just gasped heaving, rasping breaths through his ruined throat.

He had no idea what time of day it was and he was all alone in the room. He had given his attendants strict orders not to come to him—no matter what they heard—unless he sent for them directly. He should have been in peak condition, but found he was almost as weak as a human.  He attributed this to the strain his body had been under, so he continued to wait, hanging limply over the side of the vat, letting his body recover. Unbeknownst to him, his still-healing body, as part of its recovery process, was slowly absorbing the blood in the vat. He thirsted, but was too weak to even drink. Raising his head slightly, he saw through the archway that the vile sun was still in the sky. He gave an involuntary shudder and steeled himself for the next phase of his experiment.

After taking the next hour to flex his muscles, he was finally strong enough to stand and rose to his feet in the blood that was left in the vat. Looking down into the scant inch of murky, maroon liquid that remained, he made a note to himself to save this blood for testing. Surely it would be altered somehow and he needed to know if there was anything to be learned from it.

Stepping out of the vat, he took a deep breath and turned to the archway. He could already tell that something was different because he no longer felt that horrid skin-crawling tingle he was used to while being awake during the day.

Looking down at his arms, he was surprised to see that his skin was no longer the fresh, pink shade he had seen upon awakening. His skin was darker—almost tan. It reminded him of fishermen he had seen, or nomads; people who spend their entire lives in the sun.

For the first time in over a week, Sung smiled. When he submerged himself into the vat, he was completely naked. And, completely naked, he walked boldly into the sun . . .