[center][img]https://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/dHRmLjE1OC4zMjUzNGYuVG05aGFDQkNaV0YxYlc5dWRBLCwuMAAA/donrees-claws.regular.png[/img][/center]
 
[Color=darkslategray][b]Time:[/b][/color] Morning
[Color=darkslategray][b]Location:[/b][/color] Rooftop near The Witches Brew
[Color=darkslategray][b]Interaction with:[/b][/color] [@Tae] Maeve 

Noah could detect no hint of fear in the witch, what he could sense was power and age, just as he could with older vampires. How old could a witch really be? They were, at least to his knowledge, mortal just like the rest of his prey. The witches he had killed the other night, they had smelled like fear, they weren’t interesting, not like this one. She was smirking, she found him amusing, just as he found his own prey to be amusing when they tried to fight. She didn’t like his threat against her human, but he wasn’t sure if it was because she cared about humans or if it was more like when the vampire from The Pit had claimed another human as hers. Either way he would have to remember that, in case he needed leverage, he might be able to use her employee in the future. One of the many Maeve’s that surrounded him approached, it touched him first, then it kissed him. Disgusting. Noah tried to bite the witch who was now close enough to his teeth that the chains didn’t matter, but the image of the witch only shimmered and vanished. Was this her big magic trick, it was hardly impressive. 

Suddenly everything around him started melting and shifting, reality twisting and turning itself about in a confusing mess. All the duplicates of Maeve changed before him, becoming horrible hissing geese, wings flapping and beady eyes shining with rage. Confused, Noah looked around, only to find himself no longer on a rooftop, but near a pond and the witch was gone. One of the geese let out a loud honk and he jumped as another swooped at him. He realized what this was; a memory. Noah remembered the very first time he felt true fear, his oldest memory of it, when a flock of geese had attached him as a toddler. He stared at the serrated edges of their beaks as they hissed at him, mocking him. He knew it was stupid, he was a vampire, there was reason to fear these creatures and so he hissed back, showing his fangs. 

Then there was disorienting darkness, the feeling of being trapped, of hunger and fear. He blinked a couple times, each time things brightened, until he could see where he was, a small space dimly lit and it smelled of rot. He was back in a cage, staring through bars at his father’s bloated and decaying body. He watched as his father’s head slowly turned towards him and began to laugh before the corpse collapsed into dust. He was human cattle again, filled with fear and huddled with his mother and sisters. Helpless, as his mother wept only to turn to him and speak, only her words weren’t those of his memory, they were, instead of what he feared to be true. 

[b][i]“You let us down, Noah, you let us die.”[/i][/b] As the image of his mother spoke it changed and withered until it became the frail and emaciated version of her that he remembered when she had died. He watched as she continued to whither until she too collapsed into dust.

Noah lost his sense of reality; the memories were his, the changes to them were all things he knew to be true, and fear made it impossible for him to remember that this wasn’t real. He could feel again what it was like to have a heartbeat, for it pond against his chest, thumping in his ears. The sensation of inhaling stale air in short ragged breaths, and instead of the burning thirst for blood, there was the horrible nausea of a twisted stomach; weak both with hunger and the constant intake of the scent of decay. He felt weak, tired, and afraid. 

[b][i]“You were a terrible big brother.”[/i][/b] His younger sister, Hope spoke, shaking her head as she became just as withered as his mother and crumbled into dust.

[b][i]“Worthless.”[/i][/b] Another voice spoke, the sound of his youngest sister, Angel, agreeing. He didn’t want to look at her, but it had been so long since he’d seen her face. The one ghost who never visited him but as he stared into tiny blue eyes filled with disappointment, she did not become dust as the others did. He didn’t know how she died, what it had looked like, because he hadn’t been there. Instead he watched her die dozens of different ways by unseen hands, each more vicious than the next. Noah couldn’t move, he was frozen and powerless to stop it, and the death kept replaying until finally he closed his eyes, tried to block out the screams, until eventually they stopped. Even without the imagines and in the quiet, he still felt the icy grip of fear. He felt cold in a way that a vampire never could. 

[b][i]“I had such hopes for you, what an utter failure.”[/i][/b] The voice of his master, of Drake, spoke. Noah opened his eyes again to face the look of disappointment from his clan’s leader. Noah knew this was it for him, he had failed to find Shay, his failure would be punished. He looked away from the piercing eyes of the powerful vampire and waited for his death. But Drake turned his back and walked away, Noah was not worth his time, he was not important.

[b][i]“I gave you such a gift, and you wasted it.”[/i][/b] The voice of his sire spoke, her voice like venom, as her elegant hand gripped his jaw and forced him to look at her. 

[color=slategray]“I’m sorry, I can do better.”[/color] He whispered back, but somehow he knew he couldn’t. He failed his family, as painful as that had been, that he could deal with, they had been weak, but to fail his clan and even worse his sire, that meant he too was weak. 

[b][i]“No. You can’t. Worthless as a human, even more so as a vampire. You were a mistake.”[/i][/b] The words felt like his heart was being ripped out but, instead of his heart though she went for his fangs. His mouth was pried open and his fangs were ripped from his mouth as he shrieked. He could taste his own blood, it tasted like failure. Celeste gripped his fangs in the palm of her hand and they too crumbled into dust and her dark eyes looked at him like he was nothing. 

Something hit him hard in the back of the head knocking him to the ground and as he turned to look he saw the perfect version of himself. A vampire with fangs that gleamed and eyes that held nothing but bloodlust and it looked at him and it grinned with hunger. 

[b][i]“Prey.”[/i][/b] The other, better, Noah spoke and as he looked down he saw the floor was made of mirrors. His reflection in the mirror was human, no fangs, no bloodlust, just a scared human boy covered in bite marks. Human cattle. The mirror floor shattered and broke sending him falling into darkness. 

Noah closed his eyes and opened them again as the sensation of falling stopped. There was still nothing except the darkness. He screamed but he couldn’t hear the sound. He tried to reach out to feel something and his hands hit against something hard and cold, covered in jagged scratches directly in front of him. He knew where he was now, this was the coffin. Panic set in as he frantically scratched at it, he could feel his fingernails snapping as he clawed, trying to escape. Trapped, in the dark and alone, back in the coffin, where there was no escape. He knew no one wasn’t going to let him out this time. He kept trying to scream but there was only nothing. This was worse than death, trapped alone forever with only the thirst.

Then there was Maeve again, grinning in front of him, she spoke but Noah couldn’t focus. The spell was gone but the fear and panic remained, he struggled against the magic chains that held him. Whatever she had done to him, the spell that made him see and hear things, filled him with rage. As he writhed against the chains the light grew hotter, seared against him, he felt like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. His skin sizzled and burned and he grinned, the pain was a good thing, it was something, it was better than trapped alone in a dark coffin. 

He felt her hand grip his face and he snarled, his fury trapped just as he was by her magic. The feeling of her thumb digging around beneath his eye socket was nothing compared to the feeling of being irrelevant and helpless, the way he felt before being a vampire when trapped as a blood slave, and the way he felt when kept inside a coffin as he was being reformed into a killer. He hated it; helplessness and weakness, he was supposed to be above that now but it seemed he had so much more to learn. Noah realized that he had grossly underestimated the kind of power this witch held. She was different, not like Shay or the two he had killed, this one was special. As his right eye was ripped from him he let out an explosive scream of pain and rage that devolved into laughter. With the eye that remained he saw the witches face and expression, one filled with brutality and fury. He understood what she was, she too was a monster, and that he could respect. 

The sublime and piercing agony he felt where his right eye had once been was nothing compared to truly feeling fear in a way he had not for a long time. Not since his sire left had anyone been able to match such exquisite torment. She identified herself as ‘The Warrior Queen’ before sending him off the rooftop and into an alleyway below, which made him wonder if she was something more than just a witch. As he staggered back to his feet he could feel blood dripping from his face, and as he gently touched at his skin he winced. He stared at The Witch’s Brew, wanting more to do something more but now was not the right time. 

In the distance he could hear sirens just barely able to make them out over the ringing in his ears. He remembered his hunt, not for this witch but for Shay. This witch would have to wait for later but he could feel a new obsession taking root, hatred and fascination whirling around in his mind. He licked the blood from his fingers, it did not taste like failure the way it had in the fear vision, that was all mind tricks. The culmination of the mind tricks, the loss of an eye, and the still persistent ringing in his ears made his head ache in a way that demanded immediate attention. He needed to feed, not just to soothe the pain and confusion, but to wash away the still lingering memory of the fear vision, to remind himself of who he was. Except it was morning and he was covered in his own blood and barely able to walk around, he could not hunt like this. There was really only one place he could think of to get blood but the thought of going there for help made him sick. He kept himself in the alleyways, slinking towards Alexis’s, a bar he knew served vampires too incompetent to hunt down their own meals, and a place he knew he could, at least, get blood.