Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Thirteen

They rode on a horse-drawn cart along a winding road headed south from the Pillars. The cart’s wheels bumped along the uneven dirt road, rolling over exposed rocks and through puddles of mud. Moebius leaned forward in the driver’s seat, the reins held loosely in his hands. Occasionally, he flicked them to urge the horses forward a little faster. Mortanius, seated beside him, leaned back and tried to enjoy ride.

“Have you heard of the Cult of Sarafan?” Moebius asked idly, his hood concealing his face.

“A cult? You mean like a religion? No, I haven’t.”

“Sarafan was a man who lived a long time ago. He died before either of us were even born. You might say he was a prophet of sorts. He believed that the vampires were a plague upon Nosgoth. He said that the Gods who created the world made the vampires as a challenge for the human race to overcome, and that we must cleanse Nosgoth of the vampires in order to achieve our grand destiny.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mortanius said.

Moebius shrugged. “I suppose it does sound rather far-fetched. The vampires’ history goes back several thousand years. Even I know that. The oldest human records are barely half as old. The vampires lived on Nosgoth long before humans ever did.”

“But people still believe in this cult?”

“Quite so,” Moebius said, turning and giving Mortanius a cryptic smile. “Their beliefs have changed somewhat over the years, but their central tenet is still the same. The vampires are a curse upon the world and it’s humanity’s destiny to destroy them.”

Mortanius shook his head and looked out on the rolling hills as they passed. “How fascinating. Why do I have the feeling you’re about to tell me that you’ve joined this strange religion?”

“Am I so predictable?”

“You’ve always hated the vampires.”

“Don’t you?”

“No,” Mortanius said. “I don’t hate them. I don’t agree with their methods and I have no intentions of ever letting them turn me into a freak like Lora and Romanen. But that doesn’t mean I hate them. As individuals, they’re mostly intelligent and thoughtful. I might even call some of them friends.”

Moebius scoffed. “You mean nothing to them, except as a tool to further expand their dominance over mankind. At best, you’re like a loyal pet. The vampires don’t care a whit for human beings, Mortanius. All they care about are their precious Pillars and maintaining control of Nosgoth. Go on and tell me that I’m wrong.”

Mortanius couldn’t, though, even if he wanted to. The truth was that vampires had no use at all for humans and would probably prefer it if the entire human race remained subservient to them. If they had the ability to reproduce and replenish their numbers, then they could guarantee that the powers of the Pillars would remain firmly in their hands. Many of them, such as Aleph, openly stated that they didn’t want humans to be chosen as Guardians in the first place. The incredible magical power that the Guardians possessed was for vampires and only vampires.

But some of them, such as Janos, clearly desired more for the humans that they shared Nosgoth with. Maybe Janos believed that the humans could be slowly integrated into vampire culture and indoctrinated with their beliefs. In time, the human race and the vampire race might find a comfortable equilibrium.

That was a fool’s dream, Mortanius thought. How many vampires still existed in Nosgoth? One or maybe two hundred, at most? That didn’t include half-breeds like Romanen and Lora, who numbered another few hundred by now, led by the first of them, the one named Vorador. Meanwhile, the human population of Nosgoth probably was in the tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. There was no way the two races could ever achieve any kind of equality when one so outnumbered the other. Especially when the minority maintained control over the majority.

Moebius took Mortanius’s silence as proof that he was right. “To answer your earlier question: no, I have not joined the Sarafan cult. Not exactly, anyway. But I certainly agree with many of the things they proclaim. It is our destiny to destroy the vampires and claim Nosgoth as our own.”

“I suppose you’d have to be the Guardian of Time to believe in destiny,” Mortanius muttered. “Is it true that you can see into the future? You can see what will happen before it happens?”

Moebius pondered this, directing the horses down a less-traveled road leading through a dense mass of trees. “I’m still learning and developing my powers, just as you are,” he said, his voice somewhat softer. “Time … the future … they are complicated things. It’s hard to explain. Sometimes I believe I can catch glimpses of what will happen, but perhaps it’s only fragments of what might happen.”

“So will the human race achieve its destiny?” Mortanius asked sarcastically.

“You don’t need me to tell you that,” Moebius replied evenly. “It’s obvious. The vampires are a dying race. They’ll eventually go extinct. The twisted half-breeds they create are a pathetic attempt to create surrogate offspring. But there will come a day when the vampires are no more, and on that day the human race will take over as the rightful rulers of Nosgoth.”

“They’re immortal,” Mortanius reminded him. “Or close enough to being immortal that it makes no difference. I suspect it will be a very long time before the last of them dies.”

“So the entire human race should just sit back and wait for them to die in their own good time?” Moebius asked. “All the while creating more half-breeds and selfishly keeping the magic of the Pillars to themselves? The vampires have no right to rule over us. If the vampires won’t give us what we deserve, then we should take it by force.”

Mortanius said nothing. In truth, he had long expected Moebius to suggest such a thing. It had been done before, of course. Humans had risen up in rebellion against the vampires many times over the centuries, usually in isolated areas where one vampire preyed too often on the residents of a particular town or village. The most recent of these events – that Mortanius knew of, at least – happened about six years previous, in a village called Ormindale. A vampire named Atanua was attacked and his home burned down by a furious mob when he forcefully turned one of the villagers into a half-breed. The vampires were forced to send a dozen of their number to put the rebellion down as quickly as possible, and Atanua was secretly relocated to a new estate, the location of which Mortanius did not know.

Such rebellions rarely had any lasting effect. Even vastly outnumbered, the vampires were too powerful to fight. They were far stronger than any human and they had the ability to fly. In addition to that, they all possessed magical powers. Mortanius supposed that if a large number of humans managed to corner a vampire inside a building, then they might be able to kill him, but many of them would die in the process. To his knowledge, only one or two vampires had ever been killed by human hands, and it hadn’t happened in probably over a hundred years.

Moebius directed the cart down a narrow, winding road through the trees. It was already growing dark outside, and the trees blocked what little sunlight remained, casting them in a shadowy twilight gloom. Mortanius peered up through the branches at the sky above.

“You know, I told Lora I would meet her for dinner,” he said.

Moebius chuckled. “I’m sure she’ll forgive you for not being there.”

“I am getting hungry, though. If I had known this was going to be a long trip, I would have gotten something to eat before we left.”

“Don’t worry, you can have something to eat when we get there.”

“Get where? You never told me where we’re even going. You live around here somewhere, don’t you?”

“Yes, I have a small house not far from here,” Moebius replied. “But that’s not our destination.”

“Why did you have to bring me all the way out here? I thought you just wanted to talk.”

“I wanted to show you something first.”

A few minutes later, Mortanius began to hear the sound of water splashing. Moebius steered the cart along a narrow, winding road through the trees to reveal a secluded waterfall deep in the middle of the forest. It was little more than a stream that splashed noisily down a rocky drop of about twenty feet into a shimmer pool of clear water. In the brightness of day, it probably looked quite beautiful, but it was already dark outside so the waterfall had a ghostly, ethereal quality that Mortanius also found appealing. Mortanius was about to comment on it when he noticed a pair of torches on poles burning off to the side of the waterfall.

Moebius hopped down from the cart and dug around in some old canvas bags in the back. He handed Mortanius a plain brown cloak similar to the one he wore.

“Here, you should to put this on.”

“What? Why?”

“I want to introduce you to some people. But they don’t know that we’re Guardians. Your clothes are too fine for a commoner.”

Mortanius stared at him for a moment and then gave a short laugh as he climbed down off the cart. He removed his expensive red cloak and donned the simple brown one. For now, he decided to go along with this nonsense, although he could not deny that he was very curious exactly what Moebius was involved in.

“What people are here, exactly?” he asked.

“Who do you think?” Moebius said with a smile. “The Sarafan Cult, of course.”

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->