The Bitter & The Damned (Grumpy & Diana)

[Diana]

One might say anyone that owned the Ainsley Estate must be insane - which in Jonathon Blake's case may very have been true considering he died in a freak ziplining accident while on a trip with his mistress. Perhaps if he had lived in the centuries old New England home, he'd have been another on a long list of unfortunate souls victim to the estate curse.

Alleged curse. When the manor and it's grounds came into Chloe St. Andrews' hands by way of inheritance (fuck his two previous wives and his mistress), she'd come to find out the local color about the place had been more than exaggerated. First of all, no one had ever died from anything beyond old age or common place illness. As far as the records showed, no one had even murdered anyone either. In fact, the only reason the house had remained empty for so long was that it was incredibly expensive to upkeep and at some point it had simply gotten lost in some rich asshole's collection of properties.

May he rest in eternal damnation.

Despite all this, the moment Chloe saw the house and grounds itself she knew in an instant this was somewhere special. Sure, renovating an entire house wasn't quite the same as rescuing antiques, but there was a damn fine amount of old pieces inside the home and with a good amount of work she could make the place truly beautiful. More than that, she could create a business through renting rooms, using it as a venue, and so much more. Chloe could build a legacy of her own.

Investing everything she owned into the place and moving right on in, Chloe got to work. The estate was so large, things had to be done in sections. A month had been spent in updating the kitchen, another month in making sure she had a proper bedroom and bathroom suite. Every week someone was coming in to fix electrical or replace walls. Six months in, everything was honestly going as well as it could.

Until today.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

Chloe squealed, sloshing her way through ankle deep water that was now flooding a laundry-room-in-progress. The demo work on the walls had been finished to expose all the beams, electrical, and pipes that needed to be updated. But one of those mustached bastards must've forgotten to cut off the water supply. Chloe had no idea when this mess started, but it had gone on long enough to flood the entire room and it was spilling out into the rest of the basement.

"Freaking hell!" she shouted again, finally making it to the main pipeline. Setting her flashlight aside, it took some muscle (and a lot more cursing) to twist the valve shut. Slowly the pouring water came to a stop.

Chloe sighed and frowned at the mess. Well. She supposed something had to go disastrously wrong at some point.

An odd croaking sound gave her pause then, like the bending of wood and a spine chilling scraping of stone. The ground under her feet rumbled a bit to her confusion. By the time it dawned on her to run - it was too late! Chloe didn't make it three steps before the stone floor beneath her feet crumbled under the weight of gallons and gallons of water.

Water, stone, lumber, and Chloe hit the ground below in a painful crash. When all was still, she muttered a soft curse, lifting her head and testing the movement of her limbs to make sure nothing was broken. Bumps, bruises, and open cuts for sure, but at least nothing felt broken.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Water and stone seeps and crumbles into the dust of centuries, great clouds of the particles kicked up by Chloe's sudden entry into the level beneath her would-be laundry room.

A level of the building that, it should be noted, has not appeared on any of the blueprints.

There is silence, save for the trickle of crumbling stonework and the slosh of recently disturbed water. Light spills down from the room above, bathing Chloe and what was until recently her laundry room floor in stark light. The rest of the space around her is clad in shadows, impenetrable to the human eye. No patches of sunlight, not even so much as a breeze. The scent of stale, trapped air and centuries of rot begin to threaten the edges of Chloe's nostrils.

Yet behind where she has landed, something can be seen. The edges of it catching the glow of the house lights above. A structure, tucked away beneath the house and constructed from pale limestone. It is ringed by six shards of limestone that seem to jut directly from the ground, three on each side of it. The first three lie broken, shattered into pieces on the floor and lost to the light above. Their opposites, however, stand tall and strong. Were she to squint her eyes, Chloe could just about make out the symbols that have been etched into them, carvings and pictograms in a language few would recognise.

At the centre, a thick slab of limestone laid carefully onto the floor itself. Ancient brass handles have been set into the corners of each side, and like the spikes of limestone that frame it the slab itself is coated in an intricate pattern of carvings. Ornate and interwoven, separated with great craft and care into sections. Sections of the design are beautiful.

Yet other sections are disturbing to the eye, the beautiful patterns breaking down into maddening swirls and nonsensical shapes. It fascinates and unnerves with every passing inch of stone.

Water from the pipes above seeps around the stone slab, dust and splinters speckles the surface. Yet the limestone seems remarkably untarnished by age and neglect. It is a bastion of preserved craftsmanship and beauty in an otherwise damp, mould-strewn tomb that Chloe St Andrews has stumbled upon quite by accident.

And upon her sudden arrival into this forgotten space, the thing tucked beneath the limestone burial slab begins to stir.

 

[Diana]

"Damn..." This was quite unexpected, though not unheard of. The really old manor houses and estates often had old basements, hidden rooms, and strange crawl spaces that didn't appear on the blueprints. Of course, falling through the damn floor was not how Chloe wanted to discover one, but at least it was something truly interesting.

Rising to her feet and dusting off (well, smearing dirt and mud) her clothes, she paused long enough to grimace at the long rip in her sleeve and the burning streak of red. Still, the real miracle was that nothing was broken. Though as she glanced up at the hole in her floor, Chloe wasn't sure how she was going to get out just yet.

Shoving some fallen stones and less heavy beams out of her way, Chloe found her flashlight in one piece. Cracked, but working. She used it to examine the old room a little better. Normally these sorts of rooms were root cellars for storing food or wine, but the intricate limestone carvings... This was a beautiful work of art!

It wasn't until she got up close to the slab that it occurred to her that this might be a tomb.

"Oh fuck," she muttered under her breath. An old family mausoleum right under the house? That was pretty unusual... creepy even! Maybe all of those weird stories about the house had some merit after all? Chloe already had her wheels spinning on how she could use this. Obviously, she'd have the house declared protected by the historical society. Then perhaps some research could give her a few fun facts to use as a spooky backdrop to tours.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Blood runs down the hand of Chloe St Andrews. Just a trickle: it isn't a deep scratch. But the skin on the human arm is thin and tender, prone to bleeding rapidly when perforated. It gathers at the tip of her palm, hovering over the strange limestone slab she has inadvertently uncovered. It pools, like a tiny river swelling and threatening to burst it's banks.

A single droplet of crimson escapes from her hand, and descends down to the stone beneath.

Then another. And another.

They dash themselves apart on the limestone, sliding into the gaps and crevices of the carvings as though the stone itself is hungrily devouring it. They spill on to, in to, stone that has been left undisturbed for centuries.

They set in motion mechanisms that have been dormant for just as long.

An audible groan, deep and resonating, emanates through the hidden chamber. The ground shudders, and for a moment it's as though Chloe's about to fall through the floor again. Then there's a booming crunch of stone splitting, grinding, forcing it's way upwards. Before her very eyes, Chloe can see the slab of limestone she's inadvertently dripped blood upon begin to rise, angling itself up as it goes until it's triangled away from the floor.

She can't tell if it's the flashlight beginning to fail or not, but it seems as though the carvings on the stone have come alive, swirling and dancing before her in hypnotic, horrifying patterns.

---

He dreams.

It is a dream without end. Lasting centuries. Lasting the beginning and end of civilisations. From his dream, he can see it all. Echoes from the world beyond, the world he has been sealed away from, emerging and growing as he slumbers.

He dreams of ships and sail, voyages of discovery and conquest. He dreams of blackpowder and steam, of industry and progress. He dreams of war, on a scale he cannot fully fathom. Casualties that could destroy nations, fire from the skies. The scent of blood and burnt offerings reaches him even down here, in the dark. Where he lies forgotten.

He dreams, and it is as though the dream will last an eternity. A part of him knows that this is wrong, this wasn't the plan. He should have been awakened by now, long before now. Something has gone wrong, this small coherent part of his mind tells him. But it doesn't matter. Not anymore.

There is only the dream.

Then something seeps through the dream. Quite suddenly, without warning. Dark and crimson, a trickle of life itself forcing it's way through the dream at long last. He inhales deeply, letting the scent of it wash over him, through him, into him. Yes, he knows that smell. Just the very hint of it is like a current of electricity coursing through his body: he comes alive at the promise of it.

He dreams no longer. As he feels himself rising upwards, emerging from the very earth itself, his body starts to animate once more. Bones clicking into place, organs stutter back from dormancy. It's as though he's coming alive again for the first time in centuries.

He isn't, of course.

'Alive' is not a term that applies to him any longer.

---

The din of stone scraping upwards tapers off, letting a silence hang in the tomb that Chloe has found herself in. The carvings on the slab, now setting at a forty five degree angle from the ground, have died down once again, but every so often it seems as if they are vibrating and morphing even now.

Then a voice cuts through the silence. A voice from behind the slab itself. It's dry, rasping, as though the speaker hasn't touched a drop of water since before Chloe was born. The voice is thick and strange, distinctly male. He speaks in a curious accent, one that could be Irish and yet it is somehow older than that.

"Well now," rasps the voice, "what took you so long?"

 

[Diana]

"NO. No. Fuck this, no."

Her immediate reaction was instinctual - throwing her hands in the air, flashlight and all, and backing up so quickly that she nearly tripped over the fall stonework behind her. Chloe continued cursing under her breath as she scrambled to get as far away from the moving limestone and unexpected voice as fast as she could.

Of course, by the time she got back to the spot where she'd originally fallen, common sense started kicking back in. Chloe didn't believe in ghosts and zombies or any of that nonsense, really. Construction workers and electricians and plumbers have all been in and out of her house for months, not to mention how long the house had been empty before that. For all she knew, there could be squatters making use of some old sewer tunnels and secret family mausoleums.

This was explainable. Weird, but explainable.

Bolstering her courage back up, Chloe turned around on her heels, aiming her flashlight at the weird limestone tomb to get a better look at her first "guest". Fully expecting some bedraggled homeless guy, or even an teen runaway in a ripped old band t-shirt.

"You realize somebody owns this house now, right?" she called back, sounding a lot more confident than she actually felt, considering she just fell through the floor and had the shit startled out of her. "Get your stuff and get out."

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Silence hangs in the recently uncovered chamber, dust from the sudden arrival of Chloe through the ceiling now beginning to settle. Her flashlight beam illuminates the thick slab of limestone: the carvings seem to squirm under the spotlight and try to writhe away.

Then the voice sounds again.
"Of course something owns this house, you confounded pox bottle! Who the Hell do you think you're talking to?" There's some angry scraping of rock, a few booming thuds as something heavy crashes against stone, and the slab pitches forward like someone's just lit off dynamite behind it. More dust and debris comes spilling out, but Chloe's flashlight illuminates the outline of a man pulling himself out from the space. "For that matter, who in the Hell am I talking to? Are you one of Cormac's maidservants? I told that useless sap that he was meant to perform the Raising Ceremony himself, not send one of his lackeys to do it for him. And for that matter, what kind of half-arsed offering was that? You barely applied enough blood to get it running!"

The man steps clear from the cloud of dust that billows out from the tomb he was within. Tall and angular, impossibly thin but wiry, his hair a curling mane of red that tumbles down behind him without any hope of being contained. Under the light of Chloe's flashlight he looks as though he's never seen so much as a drop of the sun in his life. He stares across at her, expectantly, folding his arms like a schoolmaster who's about to launch into a tirade.
"I have to say, you're making a right arse out of this. Where's the rest of the blood? Or my robe, for that matter?"

It's at the mention of robes that the rest of the dust filters clear, and it becomes increasingly clear that this gangly stranger is quite entirely devoid of clothing.

 

[Diana]

It must've been the accent throwing her off - how would some random Irish lunatic end up in her cellar of all places - for the fear at all of the weirdness was giving way to utter confusion.

Aaaaand.... he was butt-ass naked. Alright then. This was going to be one of those sorts of nights.

Chloe pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, willing away the headache that was quickly taking over and making her skull throb. He definitely sounded completely drunk or high off his rocker. From the bits and pieces of his ramblings, he and some friend - Cormac? - must've been up to no good down here, and the idiot had been trapped down here. Maybe even pranked by his missing buddy since everything was "going wrong".

"Listen, I don't know what sort of weird cult shit you and your friends have been getting up to, but this is my property now. I'm going to ignore all this," she gestured a circle with her hand at his naked form, "bullshit, since I'm sure you didn't know. But you're going to have to tell me how y'all got down here in the cellars, so you and I can get out. And maybe I won't call the cops."