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clickerflight · 2 years ago

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Burned at the stake - Part 1

Well. I have done it. 14K ish words. I'll put this out in about 5 bits me thinks. Anyways, enjoy!

Content: Vampire whumpee, out of body experience (?), mention of vampire trafficking, burning flesh

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Fanatic was a word often tied to cults, to religious nuts, to conspiracy theorists, which really is quite narrow minded. The word fanatic more often applies to a wider range of people, more specifically known as anthropology students. After all, who else would spend outrageous amounts of money and time to go to some remote jungle that could most certainly kill them in a thousand different ways for the remote chance that they might find some ancient temple that some random drunk dude swore till he was blue was there, and also very haunted.

So, yes, Joanna was having just about as much fun as a human being could experience as she hacked her way through the brush ahead of her slightly less enthusiastic colleague, Kyle. Because he had more of his wits about her (more but not much more as he was a student of ancient languages and only here in case they found the temple and something needed to be translated) he was slowed by making sure they marked the path back clearly.

“Joanna, when was the last time you looked at the map?”

“Kyle, you know as well as I that time does not exist out here,” she replied, pausing to get a sip of water before pushing forward again. “But we do not need a map! All we need is our hearts and our minds!”

Kyle laughed as she flashed him a grin while reaching to pull out the map and check the compass. “Yeah, we’re on track.”

“Good,” Kyle replied. “Do you know how much farther we need to go?”

“Well, probably another 2 or 3 miles but…..”

Kyle paused, looking at Joanna who’s movements became more purposeful and smooth, like she was completing a ritual. Kyle felt it as well. There was a tension in the air. Something that said they would discover something interesting soon, like the forest was holding its breath while it waited for their reaction.

And now that he thought about it, the birds had all gone silent.

Joanna had noticed as well, and she slowed down so he could catch up with her. His shoulder brushed hers as she paused, leaning to see past the foliage ahead. It almost seemed as though there was a man-made clearing, and the tension in the air went from intriguing to nerve wracking. Kyle glanced past Joanna who tightened her grip on her machete and pushed forward. The foliage around the clearing was dense, and the effort to get through it left Joanna and Kyle exhausted as they took turns cutting the vines. Kyle was so exhausted, in fact, that when he broke through the foliage with one last swing his tired arms and legs didn’t expect the lack of resistance and he fell through into the clearing.

A cloud of fine particles filled the air around him, coating his mouth as Kyle took a surprised breath. Kyle coughed hard, stirring up the ash around him as he forced himself up and out of the cloud he had stirred into the air, trying to find fresh air as Joanna came out behind him.

Kyle continued coughing out a lung or two as she stood there silently, and as his voice came back to him, he choked out, “I’m fine, by the way.” He coughed, listening for Joanna’s apology or joke or-

He blinked hard, eyes watering as he turned to look at her. “Joanna? I-”

Joanna was pale and staring at something behind him. He turned quickly, ash swirling up around his feet. The ash was everywhere in the clearing. The clearing was huge, as well, as though it had been burned and razed. Or maybe the thick layers of ash were killing off life and keeping the plants from coming back in the clearing.

The immense expanse of ash, so strange and wrong compared to the jungle that refused to touch the clearing, was nothing compared to what was in the middle.

A pole jutted from the ground, silver chains nearly hidden in the ashes underneath the charred and blackened mass skewered on the pole. There was the faint shape of ribs in the mass, the whole thing smoking faintly in the sun.

“Uhhhhhhhh, what’s that?” Kyle asked softly, but his voice seemed to ring in his ears without the dense foliage to muffle it.

“I dunno, but I’m gonna touch it,” Joanna said, kicking her way through the ashes with a scared, though determined step.

“Joanna!? What do you mean you’re gonna touch it!?” he cried, reaching forward to stop her.

She dodged past him, turning grey as the ash melted into the sweat of her body. She reached the charred mass on the pole and reached out a hand, brushing over it. She screamed and jumped back as more ash and char crumbled through her fingers. Kyle reached her, nearly knee deep in ashes.

More of the black char crumbled away, and something pale peaked through what remained of the ribs. Something that pulsed and flinched.

Holding his breath, Kyle leaned forward as Joanna vigorously wiped her hand off on her pants.

“Er….. I think this was.. Is it a vampire?”

“What?”

“There’s a heart under here. Still beating,” Kyle replied, not removing his eyes from the heart which seemed to be fused to the pole which skewered up, just barely missing it. He was trying not to be sick, but his stomach churned right along with the pulsing of the vampire heart.

Joanna shoved him out of the way so she could look, and Kyle was glad for it as he hadn’t been sure he would be able to look away. He grabbed his water out and sipped on it, shivering slightly as he dealt with what he’d just seen.

“What do we…. What do we do with it?” Joanna asked, reaching in and touching the heart very gently, almost stroking it like one would do to the chest of a friendly bird. She watched as the heart fluttered and she touched it again gently. This time the heart pulsed in response and she found herself whispering, “It’s alright. We’re not leaving you here.”

“We’re not taking that thing, are we?” Kyle asked. “What if it was left here because it was, I dunno, a monster or something?”

“So we should just leave it here?”

“We… well, we shouldn’t leave it to suffer, obviously, but we could, er…. I’m sure we could find a stick…”

“We’re not killing it. That’s murder,” Joanna replied, still stroking the pale heart.

“We should call the government, then. This isn’t our problem!”

Joanna gave him a withering look, cupping the heart and shielding it from the sun as more of the chest cavity collapsed. “And they’ll kill it for sure. You know that this country doesn’t ‘waste’ resources on vampire recoveries.”

“Alright, alright, fine,” Kyle said. He took another sip from his water and sighed. “Alright. Are we going to smuggle it back with us?”

“We have to.”

Kyle sighed. “Alright. We’d better take it back to the hotel and figure out how we’re going to get it back home. You’re carrying it.”

“Chicken,” Joanna said with a sharp grin. “Could you pass me your handkerchief?”

Kyle nodded and handed her a couple clean ones from his bag, most of them out of ziplocks and already damp to help with staying cool while they hiked, as he usually used them for.

Joanna gently wrapped them around the heart and cooed at it. “I’m sorry, love, this is gonna hurt.”

She gently pried the heart from the pole, which revealed itself to be made of silver and had burned the heart to the metal. The heart thumped irregularly as she pulled it away from the pole, leaving charred flesh behind. It nearly squirmed right out of her hands and she shushed it, pulling it more gently until she had the swathed heart shivering in her hands.

She stood up and turned, still cooing at the heart and stroking it gently, making sure the sun wouldn’t get to it by wrapping it in another piece of cloth.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kyle said with a heavy sigh. They turned back and made their way out of the jungle slowly and surely. With the heart tucked into her bag, they got a taxi in the rundown town to get back to their hotel room.

As soon as they had the door locked behind them and were all settled, she pulled the heart out. The wrappings were dried out now, though the heart looked a bit better for being damp. She went and made the handkerchiefs wet again, wrapping them around the heart, which still flinched when she touched it, but seemed to be beating at a steadier rate.

“We need a plan,” Joanna said.

Kyle sighed, sinking into the bed. “We can’t keep it here. There are only so many times we can extend the trip, and if it’s discovered it’ll be confiscated and destroyed…. Or worse.”

Joanna nodded faintly. The two of them were well acquainted with the fact that there were dark markets trading in pieces of vampire hearts, claiming them to be ancient creatures with fantastic knowledge of the past. Most of the time, the poor things weren’t allowed to grow and were just kept in a silver lined box and treated like an interesting old trinket. Or they were grown out, forced to tell all they knew, and then they had their hearts removed again so they could be easily stored or sold on. You didn’t get into anthropology without first dividing which side of that moral quandary you stood. Many of their peers were actually lobbying for even more rights for vampires so this sort of thing would be cracked down on a bit harder, though she knew that the laws they volleyed for were specifically ones that would put vampire hearts in the hands of people like them. Of course it would be in the name of helping ancient vampires transition with people who understand a bit of the world they used to live in before they were stripped of their bodies, but the motivations were the dreams of getting useful information first, and straight from the source.

Joanna would be lying if she didn’t have the same thoughts when they were riding back from the jungle.

“I guess that just leaves the matter of how we’re going to get it back,” Joanna said. “I used to know some guys we could have shipped it with, but they got arrested a couple of months ago….”

“It probably wouldn’t be safe to ship it. It might get eaten by rats on the way, or someone might hear it thumping,” Kyle replied, standing up to have a look at the heart. “I think you might have to hide it under your shirt or something.”

“Under my shirt?” She asked, annoyed. “Why my shirt?”

“Because you can use your bra to keep it from falling out,” Kyle said, sounding ashamed with having to even voice the idea out loud.

“Bold of you to assume I wear one,” Joanna said to get back at him. He spluttered in a very amusing fashion and she laughed, the heart in her hands picking up the pace for a moment.

“Alright,” she said when Kyle looked close to fainting with embarrassment. “I guess that’s fair. But someone at the gate will absolutely notice that my shirt is moving every time it does.”

Kyle sighed. “We have a few more days. Maybe we can find some way of making it be still for long enough to get through the gate. There has to be something.”

Joanna gave him a long-suffering look. “Fine. Hold this,” she said, passing the heart to him before pulling out her phone and typing ‘How to get a vampire heart to stop moving.’

………………………..

There had been pain for a very long time. How long? How does one count heartbeats when one does not have fingers to aid them? Does time even matter in the face of all of that pain? Reasoning certainly doesn’t. One learns to stop questioning the why of the pain, and try to adapt ways of ignoring it. Or using it in intervals to stay sane.

What was worse than the pain was when there was no more body to feel. Just a heartbeat to keep the time. The nothingness lasted…. Less than the pain? It was hard to tell. It was almost worse. There was no way to grow anymore, to try and escape from this place, so finding ways to stay sane became almost nonexistent. There was an occasional burning that would bring sanity back, but never for long, like the brush of a finger over a hot stone to remember what heat was like before it was doused out in a river.

Being a heart, you couldn’t properly muse. You couldn’t have proper thoughts. Just memories that played in an order of thinking. A mockery of it, like drawings of a sunrise to try and describe a sunset.

Still, it was all one had left when put in such a position. Playing memories over and over in a semblance of thoughts, hoping that the use of them in this way would not damage or destroy them.

The heart had given up on stringing memories into thoughts. It was tiresome and sad. Instead playing out favorites. The heart had grown quite good at this over time and had begun to use its infinite time to uncover new ones. Like digging. Brushing aside the sand of time like the sands in the -

“Maman! Can I dig in the garden?”

“Yes, Esial. Listen for me when I call for you!”

“Yes, Maman!”

Sand on the edge of the herb garden. Maman was a healer. Esial, the young boy with bright eyes and sticky fingers got to digging, using a nice stick he found. Usually, he would dig out lines and pull leaves off of plants and trees, shoving them in the dirt so he could have his own garden and he’d show his Maman, and she would always aww and coo at him and scoop him up. They would show father when he got home.

But just as he started this wonderful pastime, his stick scraped past a rock. He stopped and used his fingers to scoop away the dirt. The stone was small and rather round. The black color took hold of his imagination. It could be an amulet! It had to be! Why else would this small stone be so black and shiny? He giggled as he ran around, pretending to vanquish evil with every wave of the stone until his father came home and saw him.

His father had been very keen to listen to Esial describe the magic powers the stone had.

“I don’t know about putting flight and fire blasts into the same stone, but we can see what we can do.”

The workshop smelled like mint and sage and his father started painstakingly carving runes into the stone, whispering about what they meant and how they would protect his little Esial.

The Heart wished it could remember all the details.

“There,” his father said, putting a leather cord through the hole he’d drilled out with some sort of magic. “Try this on.”

Esial did, and was delighted. He loved his amulet more than anything! Except perhaps the blanket Nanan had made for him when he was born. He decided he would always keep it on him so he would-

“THERE! GET IT!!!”

Esial ran through the trees, heart thumping stolen blood through his body. He’d been so hungry. He’d needed something and it was better that it was an animal than a person, right?

“THIS WAY!”

Esial came sliding to a stop and ran in another direction, not wanting to be cut off by the hunters. He reached up to his chest to grab his amulet, but his pale fingers closed on empty air. His amulet? His AMULET! Where did he-

The Heart stopped that memory in its tracks. The Heart had control over the memories, and it didn’t want to watch that one again. Not again.

Instead, the heart reached for a memory of teenage years, pondering over them all to-

East blood.

There was a hand, pounding with east blood cradling the Heart. Why were there hands? Pain, burning, screams, flinching, fear-

The fingers smoothed over the Heart. Memories of Maman smoothing down hair lovingly surfaced and the Heart slowed, now more curious than scared. Something cool, moist, damp, was wrapped around it. The Heart relished in the feeling before the hands tugged. Sharp pain tore alongside the Heart as it was ripped from something and the fear came back as more cool, moist, damp was wrapped around it.

Time passed and the Heart got the sense of… movement. They were going somewhere. The Heart couldn’t sense the hands anymore, though. But it was moving

Eventually, the damp, cool, moist was pulled away and the East Hands stroked the heart directly. The Heart did not think, but it did hope.

The East hands placed the Heart in new ones. Rougher, bigger, Northwest blood. The Northwest hands held the Heart, though did not stroke it. The Heart grew nervous as it sensed the anxiety in the blood flow beneath it. Soon enough, though, the East hands were back and were stroking it again. The Heart relaxed just enough that, when the cold, dry, freezing touched its flesh, it was merely confused rather than afraid. That changed very soon as the East hands left and disappeared entirely. The fear became vivid and sharp as the cold enveloped The quickly beating Heart. But as the heart got cold, it grew tired. And even more so. The fear dropped to mild anxiety, then to malcontent tiredness. Then…. Nothing.

Part 2

@whumpsday

#vampire whumpee #rescue #carewhumper #having a hard time with tags right now #ancient vampire #What a good time this has been

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