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reincarnation vampire lord | miraclewhip
Ultimately, what ends up being the most logical choice is the one he hates the most, but there have been many people vying for the power vacuum that Dracula had left. The greedy, the pompous, self-righteous -- too many have tried to claim the empty throne in his father's castle, and all have fallen. But the courts will never be happy to leave it vacant, and he's tired of the fighting.
So he takes it himself, crushing anyone that tries to overthrow him. Otherwise, he prefers to be merciful and benevolent, even if he loathes the politics and having to outright police the rest of the creatures of the night.
It isn't the most ideal. He sees Trevor and Sypha less than he'd prefer, wanting instead to be with them, watch their children grow, to love them. And he does, but just not as much as he'd like.
"They will die one day, my lord," one of the other vampires warn. "Would you fall into the same cycle as your father before you?"
It is a thought. Alucard knows what the intention is: to turn them into vampires like him. But he could never throw them into his world, a world of night and never having daylight. To survive as does. To truly force a Belmont into what they've hunted after all this time? Unacceptable. So he lets them live as they are, human and wonderful, until their last dying day.
And it is on that day that Alucard locks himself away from the rest of the world, deep in the earth with the crypt of his mother and father. To sleep, now that there is nothing else waiting for him alive.
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And they're his. His. And that feels correct somehow. Not just because they're things that he wants, not just because having a whip in his hands feels more natural than not. But because it feels like they've always been his. His birthright, in a way that nothing in the Belmont house ever was. The daggers are weighted differently than the ones he used before in a way that feels more correct in his hands, short things with more of the weight in the handles than in the blades. The sword is-
-the sword is difficult to look at, in truth.
There's a language to it, sure as any that Sophie knows. The pommel looks to be unusually heavy, so to act as a counterweight to the blade. Best for fighting in close quarters, to keep the weapon as controlled as possible at the cost of the power behind wide, sweeping slashes. A weapon that wasn't expected to be used at mid-range. A small portion of unsharpened metal near the guard, to allow both hands to be safely used for a one-handed sword, almost certainly made that way to account for the danger of fighting enemies physically stronger than oneself. The length of the blade, the depth and width of the fuller, both speak of a user exactly his height and built (or, at least, what his build had been a few months ago).
So many fairly unusual choices in its make, all suited perfectly for a user who would have looked and fought exactly as he did.
He looks away from it. He'll. Ask. Later, probably.
"I'm ready. I want her to see everything."
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(...Grotesque? That's an odd way of putting it. Where did that come from?)
It also doesn't go unnoticed the way that Adrian's smile had changed, seeing Katalin's enthusiasm over his treasures. He'd looked sad before, and tired, as though his humor was a faintly-glowing ember trying to stay alive on a cold day. But watching them — watching Katalin, at least — has fanned those flames back into something meaningful. Something more alive.
He looks better when he smiles like that. More...something. Natural. Less cold. Less suffocating.
"Or...whatever makes the most sense first, I suppose," she amends, a little sheepishly.
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As he moves through the castle, he keeps an even pace to ensure they are not left behind, and also to allow Sophie to properly look at the interior. Not much of it has changed, not unless he willed it -- and Adrian had never desired to really make many adjustments from his father's original creation.
"I admit, I don't know how precisely the story has been passed down for the Speakers," Adrian says. "But I could never forget. In the Belmont hold, there was a viewing mirror that we were able to use in order to track my father, and Sypha-- brilliant, powerful Sypha found a spell to take control of the castle. While we worked, Trevor Belmont held off some of the night horde sent to invade us."
They pass by many of the gears that help generate power for the engine, and Adrian remarks with amusement, "I recall the aftermath of her struggle with the engine. It destroyed it, along with melting the gears. It took quite a bit of time to fix the entire thing, but that was also a testament to her abilities. To overcome the intent of the castle following my father's will is no small feat."
And hovering in the engine room is the engine itself, the familiar twenty sided device, powered by science and magic alike. Recreating that, too, was difficult, but Sypha-- Sypha had been willing to help. It would have taken so many years to do it himself, but Sypha cut that time.
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Brightly coloured birds that imitate what they hear, anyway. And other things, as well, all the wonderful faraway things that Sophie knows of, but those are the ones he remembers best. Animals that speak like people, but without being the night creatures.
Everything else is familiar only from stories and from old, burning aches. He remembers the Speaker's stories, how Trevor Belmont barricaded the hold with only a single plank of wood. (And that phrase, more than anything, is an indication of the correctness of the Speakers saying that paper is a dead thing. On paper, that seems like an impressive feat. With the addition of tone of voice, it sounds very, very different).
He recognizes the engine again though, now, and he points it out to Sophie, the kind of pride in his voice that makes it seem like finding it for her was an achievement rather than a sequence of unfortunate coincidences that somehow ended well for him.
"That's it. The engine!"
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Despite herself, her cheeks go a little pink, beneath the freckles. "So, when we tell the story, we recite that Sypha Belnades dragged the castle to rest atop the Belmont Hold. And...also that it held still, but not because she broke it."
Editorializing? From my Speaker of origin? Whoever would have thought.
Her skepticism of earlier is melting away with every step, however — not because anything in the castle is necessarily convincing her otherwise, but because she's gradually forgetting to be skeptical in the face of the wonder of the castle's interior. It's as though she can almost see the now-mended gears melting beneath tongues of blue flame, how they must have twisted and warped from trying to fight against the intent imposed upon them. She can imagine the devastation that such a thing must have caused. She can imagine the birds pausing to perch inside before fluttering back out the open doors.
(Which is a strange thing to imagine. But she can imagine it.)
But what really pushes all other thoughts out of her mind is the sight of the twenty-sided control hovering in the engine room, waiting for them, and even before Katalin points it out to her she knows what it is, and even before anyone says anything, she knows what it does. Knows how to move her hands, to wrap around it. Knows what awful force it would take to make it behave, and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can be made to behave.
Her hands are up in the air before she even realizes she's moved, shoulder-width apart and angled to open her palms, like using a trick of perspective to pretend to pinch the moon between two fingers, like she could push and turn and spin that device if she really wanted to try.
"This is how it moves," she says under her breath, and it's hard to tell if that's meant for the boys or for herself.
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All too quickly, Adrian goes silent, watching how Sophie moves her hands. Maybe it is just part of the Speaker tale, but it reminds him of that dreadful, important evening, how Sypha wrenched control of the castle, fought against it, but ultimately succeeded. Because Sypha was such a wonder, an unstoppable force.
Perhaps the story is just that accurate, but he swears-- he sees it, in Sophie's hands, how she moves.
It makes Adrian go silent, his brows knitted and his eyes curious. Eventually, he does have to look away. It would be too easy to believe that maybe there is something to it, to reborn souls of the two people he loved most, but he doesn't think he could manage to swallow down the horrific disappointment of being wrong too.
"Yes," he says eventually. "Like that."
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Except it did. Because the engine in the story was never the collection of metal and pumps and coal and water that he'd imagined, but this thing. And the means to control it was never levers and chains like those machines, but the motions that Sophie always made. It finally, finally clicks, now that he's not overwhelmed by the first touch of daylight on him in months, that that was how Adrian moved his hands before, when moving the castle.
(Naturally, he attempts to imitate Sophie's movements. And then thinks better of it. Not that he could move the castle accidentally, but it's still best not to risk such a thing.)
"It's strange, when it moves." He adds. That, at least, he can speak on with some authority. "The first time, I thought it must have been an earthquake, everything shook around so much. Coming here was much smoother."
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(She doesn't remember, actually, if those movements were a part of the story she'd learned. They've just been a part of it for as long as she can remember, because that's how the story goes.)
What Katalin says is curious, though, too, because she can just imagine what the castle must've looked like, shaking around the way he implies. Fighting, she thinks idly. Fighting. Struggle. Sometimes the castle wants to do things, and sometimes it doesn't. What a strange thought, that.
"The intent of the castle, you said," she remarks to Adrian, almost offhandedly. "Does the castle itself have its own will, then? Separate from yours?"
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He looks at Sophie. "When Sypha was taking control of it, she remarked how it was fighting against her. The castle only adheres to one master at a time. Dracula's will was so deeply ingrained to the castle that, on occasion, the interior would shift as he wished it. Every few centuries he could change the interior's structure and behavior. Parts of it as alive as any creature.
"For me, I had no real desire to make any changes. It is... mostly unchanged as to what it was 300 years ago."
Well, that and Adrian has been sleep for the past few centuries, but he doesn't think he'd have shifted much.