Written by Bruce Baugh
©2002 by White Wolf, Inc.
Monday, 1 November 1999, 6:40 AM
Hotel Vista del Castillo
Zaragoza, Spain
Sunrise was only four minutes away now, and the ghosts were leaving before All Hallows' Eve became All Saints' Day. Lucita turned her head occasionally to watch them fade out of the lands of living, but her attention was focused on the spires of the Aljafer’a, the capital of Aragon when it had been a kingdom and not just a Spanish province. Her hotel was almost a dozen miles west of the palace, on an uninteresting strip of commercial road. Its one redeeming feature was its height: tall enough that the upper stories looked out over the modern mass of Zaragoza and offered an unobstructed view of the hilltop crowned by the palace. Her suite occupied half the top floor, and she'd put the room's most massive wooden chair directly in front of the windows. Full sunlight wouldn't strike her, but light was already glaring off of the office and car windows catching dawn's first rays.
The palace's silhouette had changed in the nine hundred years since she drew her last breath there. Unfamiliar shadows fell across the palace's walls. There'd been no great civic towers, let alone skyscrapers, in the Aragon she'd known, and the new buildings surrounding the Aljafer’a loomed like conquering soldiers of a mightier empire.
But still...there was the window where she'd watched her father argue with her uncle about Uncle Ramiro's abbot. There was the battlement where she'd paced and said the orisons her confessor (May he rot in Hell, the thought intruded) assigned. There was the little shrine erected in the memory of her grandfather, a Moorish-embellished monument to the warrior who died fighting Moors.
It was still her home.
She felt the prickling across her skin from reflected sunlight. She wasn't burning yet, but it was just a matter of time. It took all her strength to hold herself in the chair. The curse within her made her tired. The bed looked so appealing. Day was no longer her element. Like Jacob of old, she wrestled with an angel of the Lord, but there'd be no blessing for her, no moment when the tormenter would say, "Well done, good and faithful servant," and depart. A few wisps of smoke wove through the layers of blanket, toward the smoke alarm she'd disabled during the night.
Ghosts had never been common in Lucita's experience, but even very rare events happen over the slow dark centuries. She knew a fair amount of the etiquette suitable for addressing the restless dead, modes of inquiry likely to draw out useful answers and modes of address unlikely to provoke attacks (or, worse yet, later vengeance). She knew that at times ghosts were frequent in the lands of the living, though not why, and therefore wasn't particularly surprised to find herself thronged on this All Hallows' Eve. She was surprised to find one of the ghosts both familiar to her and capable of making itself--himself--tangible long enough to hold a meaningful conversation.
He had been a retainer to her family only two generations after Lucita's time. He remembered the tales about "the poor lost one," the promising young lady who wasted away so tragically. They'd reminisced about the old ways--nothing consequential, just the routine of life in the lost age. Now he walked up to stand beside her, very carefully not obscuring her view, and pointed at her bare hands and face. "Milady, don't you think it a bit presumptuous to court stigmata this way? It isn't seemly for you to lay out your flesh so that the mark of Caine becomes the image of Christ's wounds, and that's what will happen if you don't put them under cover."
Lucita didn't turn to look at him. "These hands have spilled more blood than I can imagine in one place. These eyes have looked on countless sins. These teeth have drained the gift of life again and again. I told myself for a thousand years that I was all the things my sire wasn't. But I was just like him: I have preyed on others for my own ends. God won't take the curse away, but I must atone as I can. It's baptism, if you want to call that. I'm going to let fire strip off what water can't."
The ghost looked doubtful. "Milady, you were educated in the classical manner, and it's my duty as a tutor to point out that you are speaking in the absence of authority. Which of the blessed fathers tells you that cooking yourself removes sin? You're confusing an accident of your condition with its essence. This is a stunt, not genuine penance."
This time she did turn look at him, briefly. "Are you forgetting your place? You were a servant, and now you're just a ghost. Who, exactly, are you to judge me?"
"I am a servant, milady. I saved my masters from embarrassment with private wise words. Should I stop doing so now, when a daughter of the royal family is once again in need? You put on a martyr's appearance, but it's for your own guilt rather than the glory of God or a true witness. God is not mocked."
6:44 AM. Lucita's travel alarm clock chimed one second before direct sunlight struck the highest tower of the Aljafer’a. Her hands began to smoke, and she felt the skin of her face beginning to wrinkle and crack. Sunlight crept down the palace's red walls. With her inhuman eyes, Lucita could clearly see constantly shifting patterns of shadow in the courtyard as sunbeams shone through layered geometric lattices built when she was a child.
The outer layers of her skin now drifted around her as a fine ash. Smoke--some columns black with vitae, others white with vampiric flesh--filled more of the hotel room, and its haze obscured the topmost foot of the windows. The pain was unbearable, and her strength continued to fade. Soon, she feared, she would collapse into fearful frenzy and flee like any neonate coward to the safety of some dark corner. She started to cry, but stopped as soon as she felt the bloody tears sizzle and burn on her cheeks.
Lucita had seen sunlight less than a dozen times in the last nine hundred years, and the reflected glare made it nearly impossible to see. She willed blood to her face, strengthening the burning tissues and restoring some measure of supernatural clarity to her vision. After a few rapid blinks, she could make out people walking in front of the palace. Memory peopled the landscape with servants, messengers, farmers delivering food, soldiers on their way to battle. The men and women who actually moved along the familiar roads, though, were none of them. They were not servants. They were employees, bound to their superiors by contract and economics rather than by oath and faith.
Realization broke upon her with an almost physical pain--she actually did drag her focus in for a moment to see if the windows had shattered. The palace she had known was as dead as her family, as dead now as the darkling priest who'd made her a vampire. The shell remained, but its soul had gone wherever souls go. She remembered a particular hollow tree in which she and dead departed Anatole had sheltered, in their walks along the Danube road. The palace was like that. The mortals who went around and through it were as irrelevant to the old place as she and her mentor were to that tree. It served them, but only because it no longer lived the life intended for it.
The ghost was right: there was no point to this. Her pain would not bring back her lost Aragon. She might act the part of its lady, but nobody now would serve as they'd served then. This was a delusion.
As her eyes began to crack, Lucita's vision grew more and more impaired. Within just a few seconds it was no better than any living person's, and in a few more she was nearly blind. Her world now consisted of the window, a bright rectangle, and the pitch blackness of everything else around her. Her hands no longer held firm; her body trembled in the chair, and if she had her full strength, the arms of the chair would be splinters now. She couldn't see her hands, but she could hear the click of bony fingertips on wood.
Finally her resolve failed. She managed to avoid full-blown panicked flight, but she had to stand and walk with all the dignity she could muster toward the bed and darkness. Her last step ended in a stumble--she hadn't remembered the count just right, and she ran into the footboard. The mirror above the bed smashed with the force of her impact, and she felt pieces of glass drive into her burning skin and tinkle onto the bedspread and floor. She drew the blankets and bedspread around her, feeling the power inside her healing her wounds, knowing that in just a few nights no sign would remain of her act of self-mortification.
The ghost spoke from somewhere near the window. "I go, milady. You have made yourself hurt, and to what end? You are no wiser or better than you were. You are still yourself. As the prophet Jeremiah said, 'The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.'" With a whisper of inrushing air, it was gone. Lucita slept.