Return-Path: Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 11:36:47 -0400 Reply-To: WILSONE1 Sender: Forever Knight TV show stories From: WILSONE1 Subject: The Grand Inquisitor (01/02) To: FKFIC-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU Literary Reference: This story takes its title and more than a little of its substance from a little parable by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel 'The Brothers Karamazov'. It's been some time since I wrote my final college essay on 'The Grand Inquisitor', but the shade of that bitter old man haunts me still. Much like some other characters I could mention... Disclaimer: The characters portrayed within do not belong to me. I am merely taking them through hell and back again. Permission given to archive. ======================================================================= The Grand Inquisitor - A Post LK Story in Two Parts Erika Wilson April 1998 "There is no crime, and therefore no sin, there is only hunger." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 'The Brothers Karamazov' ======================================================================= -Part One- The stranger entered the square with the first rays of the sun. The crowds from the nightly market had long-since scattered, blocked and shuttered into their homes away from the threat of morning and the 'Gardes du Soleil'. A long shadow preceded the stranger, stretching out like the marker of a sundial until it reached the first step of the great staircase. The woman seated on the steps stared at the shadow and raised her tearstained face from the child lying limply across her knees. "He wanted to see the sun, just once." The woman choked. "He pleaded with me, 'Mama,' he said in his poor, whispery little voice. "Take me into the light before I die, please'." The tears ran in gold and vermilion rivulets down her cheeks. "But he could not wait so long. Even as the cursed darkness faded, it picked up my son and carried him away. Down into the depths where the light can never reach him." She brushed the hair away from the child's pallid forehead with a tremulous smile. "Still I have brought him here, so the sun might view all that is left, though the soul is fled. Let the Gardes come and take me, what more can they do to me?" The woman looked up into the stranger's face, blinking through her tears and the unfamiliar brightness. "But you should not be out. You may have some reason to care if they come and take you. My home is just down there. It is the one with the open shutters and the door flung wide. Go, take shelter before the Gardes come." The stranger merely moved forward, gazing with curious intensity at the dead child. "Do you not hear me?" The woman asked. "If you stay here, you will be taken." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They say that He has been restless of late. Pacing the lightless corridors of the palace by day even as he stalks the parapets by night. He has increased the number of the Gardes and more of us are taken every day. Decent, lawful folk who have never stirred a foot outside after daybreak. It is as if He is searching for someone, though I cannot think who." The woman sighed. "Perhaps it is something mentioned in the ancient Prophecies. But only He would know anything of that. My belle-mere spoke to me of the great burning, when all copies of the Prophecies were sought out and destroyed. The smoke choked the city for days and the ashes blew about the streets for weeks. Some thought to gather the ashes and keep them, as a reminder of what had passed away, but all who tried were caught and taken. Now no one dares to speak of such things." The woman smiled wearily at the stranger. "Except those of us who have no more reason to care." The stranger smiled back and the woman caught her breath. "You... who are you who can smile so? You with the colors of the dawn in your hair and the light of the sun in your eyes?" The stranger did not answer, but reached out, asking to hold the dead child. The woman nodded, sliding the limp form into the other's grasp, but never taking her eyes from the stranger's face. "Is it you?" She asked. "Are you the one He waits for, trapped like an animal in His darkened palace and gazing like a vulture from its moonlit parapets?" The stranger examined the child, peering into the half-closed eyes and pressing an ear against the motionless chest. Inhaling deeply, the stranger covered the child's mouth and breathed in, causing the bony chest to rise. With a small cough, the child twitched, blinking sleepily as if he was just now waking. The mother gave a soft cry of joyful disbelief and gathered the boy into her arms. "Mama," the boy asked. "What is it? Why are you crying?" Then he looked at the light spilling across the stones of the square and regarded the world with greatly widened eyes. "Is this how the sun makes the world look?" He marveled. "Oh Mama, so many colors I never dreamed of. How beautiful it is." Fear filled the woman's face and she stood hurriedly. "No," she told the child. "Never say that. We must go back to the house. You must forget what you have seen." She looked down at the stranger, pity warring with gratitude in her expression. "Thank you." She whispered, clutching the child tightly against her chest. "I wish there was some way to repay you, but I cannot help you. I do not even dare to remember what has happened here. They will come and take you down into the darkened corridors where He waits for you and when He is done with you, all will be as it has always been." She turned and scurried along the stairs, hesitating at the edge where the shadows cast by the building drew a line between the light of the sun and the darkness beyond. The woman turned, staring at the calm-faced stranger one last time before she passed into the shadows. The stranger sat quietly on the steps, weaving together the bright ribbons of sunlight streaming between her fingers, until she was spotted by a patrol of the Gardes du Soleil. She rose to greet them, seemingly oblivious to the sharp metal staves pointed at her heart. The Captain gestured and the Gardes fell in before and behind to escort her to the palace. The gates to the palace were barred and locked against the malevolent intrusion of the daylight. The Captain pounded the butt of his iron pike against the massive doors and stood back as the heavy bar was lifted and the doors pushed wide. With a simple exchange of nods, the possession of the prisoner was transferred to the Corps du Palais. The doors swung shut, slicing through the light and leaving the prisoner standing in a dank gloom, illuminated only by the lanterns chained to the staffs of the corpsmen. Suspended within this pallid isle of light, she was led down blank, cheerless corridors and a series of winding staircases. As they descended, the darkness seemed to grow more massive and absolute. It carried a weight measured in thudding footfalls and weeping stone walls. At the bottom step of the final staircase, she was handed over once again to a pair of guards whose colorless faces and pale, sightless eyes spoke of creatures selected to exist in absolute darkness. They took hold of her with chill, unyielding fingers and waited for the last echoes of the corpsmen's boots to fade, along with the last vestige of light. The floor over which she was guided had been worn smooth by the uncertain shuffling of countless feet, though her escort strode forward with firm confidence. From either side came the sounds of weeping and wordless moaning, muffled by intervening wood and stone. Her arms were released and she was shoved gently but firmly to one side. There was the unmistakable sound of a door shutting and a bar sliding into place. All other sound disappeared and she was alone. Cautiously exploring the wall, she discovered a wooden pallet along one side of the cell and sat down to wait. ***** He stood on the parapets, watching the last feeble rays of the sun slither reluctantly over the edge of the horizon. It was his one faint victory over his eternal nemesis; this daily reminder that it could never hold the world in its fiery grasp for one second more than its allotted time. Day would always die and night would emerge, unfolding its cloak of blessed darkness. He closed his glowing eyes and inhaled that darkness, savoring the feel of it in lungs that rarely bothered with the unnecessary act of breathing any more. The cool gray flavors of dusk trickled past his lips and he allowed himself to feel the first stirrings of hunger. With an anticipatory grin that revealed his flashing canines, he turned and stepped into the dark pit of the stairwell, gliding leisurely down through the center of the spiral. At the bottom, a single candle waited for him. He needed no such aid to see, but he liked his victims to look into his face before they died. Most reacted with simple terror, but some responded with bemusement or even a strange sort of relief. He wondered what sort of tales they told of him these days, that would elicit such varied reactions. Not that it mattered. They could make up anything they liked, but they would all still die without knowing the truth. No one remained who knew the true tale of his origins. All the writings had been destroyed, following the Prophet who had written them to the flames. He closed his eyes against that memory. Even after everything that had passed between them, who could have thought that she would do such a thing? A final betrayal after and eternity of betrayals. He still remembered the smile on her face as she backed through the doorway into the full blaze of the sun. The memory pulled a growl from his throat and he felt the hunger rise in response to his anger. He picked up the candle and made his way to the first cell. ****** He wiped a trickle of blood from his chin with a forefinger and sucked on it thoughtfully. Usually three a night was sufficient to assuage his hunger, but recently he had been feeling a strange anxiety that sapped his strength and caused him to feel unpleasantly weak and vulnerable. He had been told of one brought in this morning, a woman, a stranger who evinced no fear of the sun, the Gardes or even of him. He wondered what her foolish courage would taste like and a feral light kindled in his eyes as he opened the door to her cell. She looked up when he entered and at the sight of her face, he nearly dropped the candle. "Natalie." He breathed in harsh disbelief. She blinked a little in the unfamiliar light and regarded his glowing eyes and glittering fangs with unreasoning calm. He gave a brief shudder and felt his long-repressed mortal features slip into place. "Nat," he rumbled awkwardly, trying to remember how to speak in soft, human tones. "It's Nick. Don't you remember me?" End Part One ====================================================================== Comments, critiques, etc. to: Erika "Maybe I do need that exorcist." She muttered worriedly. Return-Path: Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 13:04:12 -0400 Reply-To: WILSONE1 Sender: Forever Knight TV show stories From: WILSONE1 Subject: The Grand Inquisitor (02/02) To: FKFIC-L@lists.psu.edu See Part One for Introductory Messages ======================================================================= The Grand Inquisitor - A Post LK Story in Two Parts Erika Wilson April 1998 "There is no crime, and therefore no sin, there is only hunger." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 'The Brothers Karamazov' ======================================================================= -Part Two- She stood and took the candle from his hands to hold up before his face. In the flickering light she carefully examined the broad sweep of his cheekbones and the strong curve of his mouth. Reaching past his shoulder, she pulled a long ripple of golden hair into the light and fingered it curiously. "It's gotten rather long, hasn't it?" He remarked. "I guess I don't think about that sort of thing much anymore. At least I don't have a beard. I remember how you hated that." He tried to laugh, but her eyes met his and the laughter died abruptly. She stared into his eyes for a long, endless moment and then stepped back and blew out the candle. Fury overwhelmed him, bursting through his throat in a snarl and flaring into his eyes as blood-red fire. He clamped his hands on her shoulders and pulled her against him. "I could kill you now." He rasped, scraping his fangs across her neck. "Tell me why I shouldn't. Give me a reason to let you live." She said nothing, standing mute and unresisting in his embrace with his fangs pressing against the skin of her throat. With a sound of disgust, he thrust her away, causing her to stumble against the wooden pallet. "Maybe I should just leave you here, buried alive in the silence and the darkness until your mind slips into madness. Can you imagine what it would be like? To never see the sun again? To never feel its warmth upon your skin? To be denied the sight of a sky so blue it makes your eyes hurt?" He approached her with a soft snarl. "Of course you can't, otherwise you would not judge me so harshly for what I have become." He reached out and tangled his fingers loosely in her hair. "You never understood then, you can't possibly understand now. How could you?" The silken texture of her hair beneath his fingers brought back wave after wave of memory, until he cried out from the pain. A soft hand reached out and touched his cheek, resting there for a moment before drawing back. He caught the hand and pressed it against his lips. "She said you would be back." He whispered into her palm. "She avoided me for two hundred years and then she exploded through my doors in the middle of a hurricane with her hair in tangles past her waist and her eyes full of mad visions. She said that the Guardian at the gate had given her a glimpse of the future and then sent her back. She hadn't wanted to come back, not that second time, but she said she had not been given a choice. She had a message to give me." He laughed, a harsh, crow-like sound. "And then she wouldn't tell me what it was. She said she'd written it all down and that I could go looking for it, since I had always been so fond of digging things up." He sighed and rubbed the hand he still held lightly across his face. "Then the eye of the hurricane passed overhead, with seabirds calling to one another as they flew across the sunlit stillness. She smiled at me as she backed through the door and spread her arm out wide, like the wings of the seabirds and flew up into the heart of the sun." The anguish of that moment, even so long ago, was palpable in his voice. "And this time there was nothing I could do to bring her back. What the sun takes, it does not return. My beautiful, eternal Janette. I still have her portrait, you know, specially sealed against any further deterioration. It is a process I worked very hard to develop, once I had determined that if I could not become mortal and death was to be denied me, I would accept my fate and endeavor to live forever." The candle flared to life in his hands and he placed it in a niche in the wall. "Oh yes," he told her. "That night in the loft, I truly wanted to die. I had promised you that we would be together, no matter what and I begged LaCroix to help me keep that promise." He paced the short length of the room fitfully. "But he refused. He did everything he could to keep me alive, pounding reason after reason into me until he finally discovered the one thing that could keep me from destroying myself." He gave her a look over his shoulder that should have sent her recoiling away, but she did nothing, said nothing. "I had to survive you see, so that I could obliterate him." He shrugged at her lack of reaction and continued pacing. "It was quite a chase. Much like our relationship of the past hundred years, only this time *he* was the quarry and I was the hunter. At first I think he rather enjoyed it; matching wits with me and evading me every time. But each time I lost, I learned more about my prey and eventually he realized that the thing chasing him was merely a reflection of himself." He grinned humorlessly at the memory. "I can't even think of the number of times he told me in that snide, superior tone of his; 'Nicholas, don't be a fool, you can't run from yourself forever'. And so he took his own advice and stopped running. And I destroyed him. My Master; my enemy; my friend; my brother; my father; my last and final reason for living." His fair eyebrows quirked together. "But somewhere during that pursuit, I also lost my reason for dying. And so I determined simply to exist. But this time it would be on my terms. I was though trying to blend in with human society, or hiding along its shadowy fringes. >From now on, humanity would be forced to blend in with me. If I could not walk freely in the sun, neither could they. If I were to be denied the comforts of religion and its artifices, so would they." He turned to her and smashed his fists against his chest. "I may be trapped in this prison of flesh, but now I have widened the walls of my prison to include the world. A brilliant solution, don't you think?" She continued to regard him with a calm, untroubled gaze and he felt himself growing angry again. "Don't you rebuke me." He growled. "Don't you dare rebuke me. You do not have the right and you certainly do not have the power, no matter what Janette's Prophecies might have said." He thought he caught a flicker of interest in her expression. "Oh yes," he nodded. "It wasn't until I began eradicating the religions of the world that I stumbled across the message Janette brought back from the Guardian for me." He laughed again, a bitter, if more human sound. "Imagine my chagrin when I finally discovered Janette's 'message' masquerading as the writings of some holy prophet for a new-age religious cult. It took me a while to decipher the actual meaning of the text. The original copy was long gone and the numerous versions contradicted each other on almost every major point. Don't you think it terribly amusing that I became the most dedicated disciple of the Prophecies even as I had every existing copy of them burned?" He looked at her unsmiling face. "Well, *I* thought it was funny, until I figured out what Janette was trying to tell me." He shifted with blurring speed and appeared a handsbreadth away from her. "She was trying to tell me about you. She predicted that a great evil would cover the world in darkness, blotting out the face of the sun until She who had lived among the dead would herself rise from the dead to rejoin the living. She would come into the world with the first light of the sun, breathing life into the lifeless and bringing death to the deathless." He circled around her, his voice filled with purring menace. "I am the Great Evil, you see and you are She Who Will Deliver the World From Darkness." He brushed the hair away from her neck and ran his fingers down the smooth column of her throat. "Quite a leap from Forensic Pathologist, isn't it? But I don't think you're going to be able to fulfill your destiny as mankind's Savior." He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her tightly against him. "I wasn't sure at first, but now I know what I am going to do. I am going to keep my promise, Nat. After two thousand years we can finally be together." He lifted them both into the air and flew back up the column of the stairwell to the star-washed parapet. "Look at it, Nat," he breathed into her ear as he rested his chin on her shoulder. "I can give this to you, all of it. I can give you the world." His chuckle was rusty from disuse. "All you have to do is let me bring you across. I won't disappoint you again, I've learned my lesson. I know you wanted me to do it the last time, but I let you down. That's why you came back, isn't it; to give me one more chance to get it right." He turned her to face him, his eyes flashing eagerly and his fangs bared in a feral grin. "We can be together forever Natalie. All you have to do is say 'yes'." She touched his face again, running her fingers across his cool, pallid skin with gentle familiarity and then with a smile that glowed as if lit from within, she stepped backwards over the edge of the parapet and disappeared. "NOOOOO!" Screamed Nick as he flung himself after her. But he was too late and crashed into the pavement beside her. With a sob of pain, he cursed the bones swiftly knitting themselves together and the flesh pulling closed over his wounds. Pushing himself to his knees, he leaned over and gathered Natalie's limp, broken body into his embrace. Russet tears mingled with the blood matting her thick, beautiful hair. An ancient warning pierced through his grief and he gazed dully at the sulfurous glow beginning to light the eastern sky. Staggering to his feet, he walked with slow, heavy steps towards the central square of the town. He sat down on the great staircase with Natalie cradled in his arms to watch the sun rise for the first time in nearly three thousand years. He wasn't sure what would happen. He had seen LaCroix stand in the direct light of the sun without flinching and he was now older and more powerful that even his Master. The sunlight crept up the stairs, like a cat stalking its prey with slow stealth. Nick fought the urge to pull his feet up away from the steadily encroaching fingers of light and instead concentrated on Natalie. His toes felt as if they had been dipped in acid, but he spread Natalie's hair out across his arm and marveled at the innumerable shades of gold and red that mingled with the soft brown strands. His legs were being attacked by stinging scorpions, but he found himself captivated by the soft curves of her lips and he kissed them for the first time in two millennia, crying for each lost day of those years. Hissing steam had begun to envelope them both and he finally looked up and gazed into the full face of the sun. Its glory burst upon him and he smiled as he willingly offered up his dark and shriveled soul to be judged. ***** He was gone. The woman searched her house, frantically hoping that her son was playing a trick on her and would spring out of his hiding place, laughing at her fear. She finally faced the knowledge that he was no longer in the house and she looked at the closed shutters in dismay. She knew where he had gone and with shaking hands, she opened the door and ventured out into the bright morning. She found him standing on the great stairway beside a large area that had been blackened as if by fire. He looked up at her with wide eyes. "She was here, Mama. The woman we met yesterday. I only wanted to peek at the sun through the shutters, but I saw the flames of the fire so I came to see what was burning." He scuffled at the edge of the blackness. "It was all gone when I got here and they were lying on the stairs, curled together like this. "He balled his two hands together tightly. "The woman from yesterday along with a strange man, who had hair the color of the sun. I went to see if they were okay and they both opened their eyes and looked at me." The boy smiled. "the man's eyes, they were so blue, like that." He pointed up at the brilliant sky. "They looked very surprised. And then he saw the woman and he laughed and kissed her and the woman laughed and kissed him back and then she kissed me." He scrubbed at his cheek. The mother was very confused and a little scared. "Where are they? Where did they go?" She asked. "They just got up and walked away." The boy replied with a shrug. "That way." He pointed towards the risen sun. "She told me something before they left though, to tell you." The woman caught her breath. "What?" "She said: 'Come. Come out of the darkness and rejoin the living'." The boy frowned. "Do you know what she meant?" The woman knelt down and hugged her son. "Yes," she nodded, tears of joy running down her face. "Yes I do." End ====================================================================== Comments, critiques and psychological profilings to: Erika