RP:A Mother's Love

Part of the Rest in Pieces: Vailkrin! Arc

Summary: Laezila returns home and Larewen, injured and weighed by the Haathian souls she consumed, snaps. Mother and daughter fight.

House Dragana

Laezila hasn't been back in this House since her brief sojourn here several months ago, both physically and symbolically. What had followed from her departure was not kind to her; homeless, ravenously thirsty, and suffering, the lithe little drow vampire has now returned without anywhere else to turn to. Her pale ebony features of that petite and short frame were gaunt and haggard, her eyes sunken with fatigue and unquenchable thirst, and her fangs in perpetual protrusion from her lack of feeding. Pale crimson eyes sweep over her settings haphazardly, absently, as if not truly seeing anything, as alone in the building she moves along the corridor from dining area toward ballroom. The soft and periodic glow of flickering sconces cast an eerie glow to her practically feral visage, and upon bare, silent feet she treads.

Larewen moves quietly through the forest, her lips pressed into a thin line. Her steps are slow and deliberate, for in the time that she’s had Irenic’s left eye, she has once more become accustomed to sight. To be robbed of it again was… vexing, to say the least. Fortunately the wards she has woven into House Dragana guide her home. The necromancer enters the foyer and slows, the fine hairs upon the nape of her neck bristling. Someone is here, someone other than the servants. Words dance on the edge of her tongue in preparation of casting, but the elf isn’t near as hasty as she appears. Instead, her right eye sweeps over the magics illuminating her House and she takes notice of Laezila upon the landing toward the ball room. Her nostrils flare as she seeks to identify the other and her lips are weighed downward into a frown. “Laezila?” she calls, almost unsure.The elf moves toward the base of the stairs, directing her face up them. If the other should look down at her, she would see her sire, haggard and wounded, but alive. Her left eye is gone, leaving behind an empty socket that oozes a black liquid. The stench of corruption is heavy in the air.

Laezila was only able to bypass wards and spells alike for the fact that she was Larewen's 'daughter', sired by the elder vampire and thus sharing some familial bond. Consciously, the drow had no idea there were even any -nothing tried to stop her, nobody was around. The sudden call of her name causes the woman with shimmering white hair to twist her head and peer over her shoulder tiredly, almost ferally, upon the elder. Neither looks their best, and in some humor of this realization, the former matron weakly smiles.

Larewen cannot see that weak smile or Laezila’s poor condition, and if she could have, she might have frowned. The only indication that something is off with the drowess is her smell, and to that the elf wrinkles her nose. “You smell horrid,” she says, her tone startling even herself. She has been caught in between worlds and the venom that laces her voice is more in line with the woman Laezila had once approached for an alliance. Tentatively, the elf ascends the staircase and approaches the former matron. “Where have you been?”

Laezila 's breif smile that is already struggling dies and evaporates form her face like some rapid decay. Her mouth opens with extended fangs silently, briefly, as if to stretch her jaw and the malnourished frame, before finally a rasp of a voice comes forth. It slithers from her throat harshly, as if it was being forcefully expelled, "Wandering. I am... thirsty. So thirsty."

Larewen says nothing as she closes the distance. The rasp in Laezila’s voice belies her current state and this sparks the necromancer’s maternal instinct. Her hand lifts, wrist upward, and she pulls the nail of her finger across the flesh. As she extends her arm, the sweet stench of corruption and blood, mingled together, wafts upward. It wouldn’t immediately fix the drowess, but it would tide her over and aid her in her recovery. “Drink, fool,” she hisses.

Laezila did not care about the corruption -not at the moment, anyway. She is simply too thirsty, and the vampire lowers her face to seal her lips around the wound, despite the apparent venom lacing the hissing, distracted sire's words. Her pale red eyes roll to the back of her head as she drinks needily, taking in just as much corruption as blood.

Larewen grimaces, her face angled downward toward Laezila. In a surprisingly motherly manner, the necromancer runs the fingers of her other hand through the former matron’s ashen tresses. It isn’t until she can feel the slowly of her own blood that she seeks to draw her arm away from the other. For the moment, she remains silent and thoughtful as she the drow feeds. “Quite far, you have fallen, drow,” she murmurs and there is pity in the elf’s words.

Laezila pulls away from that arm in shame as she hears that murmur, that pity, and lifts her fingertips to her lips to touch it against the corruption and crimson blood there. "I do not know what I am doing anymore," she weakly replies, "I do not know how to be this."

Larewen furrows her brow at Laezila, “Yet you led a House whose members were this or wolves. Where is that woman? The one that came to me to make a deal, to form an alliance. The one that behaved like a drow? You have become weak and fearful. Explain this to me. Explain why your own kind terrify you? You were raised in that society.”

Laezila shakes her head, "I led them, yes. But the elf took it all from me. I believed I was strong, but I have seen what happens to those Gevurah gets her claws into -the deity that she has on her side. She took my magic." A pause, she had been rambling, and it was something that she didn't really like to do. So a moment was taken to collect her thoughts, before she speaks, "I am fearful because I have become so weak. I have become weak because I have no idea what I am doing. What do I do, mother?"

You knows which elf Laezila speaks of and her lips curl in twisted amusement. Though in hugely different ways, Emrith has made the both of them weak. For the former matron, that elf was ruin and damnation. For Larewen, he was life and happiness. “You learn to accept the ways in which you are now better.” Out of habit, her hand reached for the other’s chin to tilt her gaze upward, even if she cannot look into the drowess’s eyes. “You fear your kind, yet you are now stronger than them. Cut their throats and they die. Cut yours and… you can keep fighting. You can learn to wield a sword, Laezila, and you will be even harder to kill.” Undoubtedly, the drowess can smell Emrith's scent upon her sire.

Laezila certainly does smell that scent, a familiar and hated scent, and it causes the teenager's eyes to narrow. "What is that...?" She sniffs audibly, and brings her face up the woman's arm as she does so, as if catching the whiff of a trail and following it. "You -reek- of him." Her voice has become a hiss of a snarl, "You reek of the evil elf, how could you? He ruined my life!"

You had not cared that Laezila was her ally the day she saved her and Emrith. She was there for latter, aware that she loved him and terrified of losing him. It was Emrith she needed to live, and Laezila had been saved by chance. She could have let the girl die, but she did not. The elf inhales, then exhales, as she diverts her marred gaze from the drow. A bitter chuckle leaves her lips. “Oh, if only he was evil,” she laments. Then… Then she remembers what Emrith did to Laezila - a sort of torture she had never inflicted on anyone and the elf laughs. It’s not funny, really, and yet she can’t stop. The fates that Emrith brought the two were so different, and yet the end result truly was the same. As the realization of Larewen’s own weakness strikes her, the curse carved into her flesh comes alight with a fierce verdant flame. It brings the necromancer to her knees, a cry of surprise tearing itself from her lips as heat begins to roll off her body. The sudden agony ends what little control Larewen has of silencing the voices trapped within her mind, those souls she’d eaten, and suddenly she is accosted by a disorienting cacophony. “I’ve become the weakness I’ve feared all this time,” she is laughing again.

Laezila tilts her head, causing those white locks to shimmer as they fall over head paled ebony features in a brief masque of her contorted face. Her eyes narrow subtly as the other begins to laugh like a lunatic, and furthermore when her sire drops to her knees. The young ex-matron understood very little of it. "Stand up, you are losing your head," she hisses, "he has done evil things to me."

Larewen cannot stand. Not at this moment, not with so much pain wracking her body in lieu of the curse’s activation. Her skin is practically on fire, it burns so hot and the elf is muttering a spell in near desperation to remove it. This, naturally, only triggers the second part of the curse and the scars begin burrowing into her skin. Blackened blood bubbles from the glowing runes as she lifts her gaze, brown eye and empty socket, to stare at Laezila. “Yes, yes he has. And yet my nature is too evil for him,” she snickers, a grin splitting her lips widely. “He has it in him. That darkness. It simply needs stoking beautifully and you!” She pauses, gasping for unneeded breath as a particularly vocal Haathian soul shouts within her mind. The elf swats at her own cranium for a moment. Once, twice, a third time seems to do it and slowly the necromancer is struggling against madness and pain to rise to her feet. “You have become something I’d sooner kill than call my own, you’ve fallen so far!”

Laezila 's eyes remain narrowed as she feels a distinct anger, a hatred begin to pool at her. How dare she. How dare this absentee mother, this distracted teacher, this... The necromancer was struggling against madness and pain to stand, and the drow just had it. Her foot comes up, aiming to plant her heel harshly into Larewen's sternum in a brutal kick meant to end the already struggling necromancer to the ground. "I've fallen because you've failed." She turning, moving to stride, to stalk out.

Larewen might be on the brink of madness, of delirium, but she is not so slow that the drow’s booted foot stops her from reacting. Even as it connects with the scarred flesh, even as it starts an unhealing wound in the elf’s belly bleeding again, the woman’s gloved hand curls around the other’s ankle. Her grip is tight, even as blood bubbles up her throat and out of her mouth. “No, you fell before that,” the elf hisses, her voice hoarse. She has no intention of allowing Laezila to leave and even as she says this, as she realizes the former matron’s intent to leave, wind kicks up within the manse at her bidding. The door slams shut. Larewen is still grinning wildly at Laezila. “You know that I cannot be bothered with weak things, and yet you place the blame on me? No, no that is not right, Laezila. You act like a surface dweller. That is not my doing.”

Laezila is full of fury, watching that wild grinning woman with a feature of disgust after whipping her head around upon the slamming of the door. "It is your doing. You abandoned me. You're the failure. You're the weak one." She spits on the floor derisively, coldness glittering in her light red eyes that reflected yet belied the hurt she feels as the one that sired her turns on her. She was supposed to help Laezila. Suppose to care for her. Not... Whatever that is. "Look at yourself."

Larewen has managed to find her feet finally and even as Laezila spits on the floor, a gloved hand shoots outward to cup the girl’s chin. With a sharp jerk, she seeks to brink Laezila’s eyes to hers - not that she can see the youth’s face.”Look at myself?” she says, and she’s trying so hard to stop that maniacal laughter. “No, Laezila. Look at yourself. You had a House. A house of drowic vampires and lycanthropes. Creatures you are accustomed to being around, yet you’ve not the faintest clue as how to help yourself? The way you have been behaving, hiding in far away cities and cowering within Vailkrin… It’s a wonder you once held the rank you did. Look at me, child. I am not here to coddle you. If you wish to be the woman you were, the woman you were destined to be, then you stop this damned foolishness. Clean yourself up, dress yourself in finery, and be something that we can both be proud of, you fool.”

Laezila glares with a growing resentment at the woman her fangs bared was her head is jerked to bring her gaze to the elder's. Tough love? She didn't much believe in it, to her it was a mother turning away from her child, it was another scratched off a startlingly short list of those to count on. That resentment burns, smolders. "You are not here for me at all," she fires back, "I will figure it out on my own."

Larewen shakes her head sharply at Laezila. “No, no you won’t. Because your place is here, in Vailkrin, with me. You are the only one of this House that has it in you, has the capability, of heading Dragana in my stead when I take this city’s throne,” she corrects and even then the litany upon her flesh is fading back to its dormant black. With it, so too do the voices quieten as she regains control of her magic, of her mind. “And that will come sooner, rather than later. You will be the new Lady Dragana.”

Laezila very practically sneers, "You just spoke of how you would kill me, and how weak I am, now you are saying you want me to lead, that my place is here?" Her eyes are narrowed in that angry resentment -there was no pleasing this elder vampire, the drow suspects.

Larewen clicks her tongue at Laezila. If she could see the other’s expression, she might smile. “I have no intentions of letting you remain so,” the necromancer states, coolly.

Laezila scoffs. She rips away from Larewen, but instead of going to the door, she heads for the stairs like a rebellious teenager seeking solace in their room.