November 20, 1993

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Bane stared, wide-eyed beneath his bone mask, sunlight through thr cracked walls of his ruins, through swirling dust motes, gleaming off his polished bone mask through the gaping holes in his ruined keep.

"Her name is Celeena Sharif."

Bane felt a brief sensation of pain in his chest. It was not a physical pain (...and it was); it was not something he could ignore, or

He stared down at the baby, and the baby up at him. "Its eyes..."

Suheila smiled. "Her eyes. It's called heterochromia. She can see just fine."

Heterochromia? Bane sifted through Jonathan's memories, and was answered in silence.

Celeena made a brief raspberry with her lips, slobbering over her chin, and blinking her eyes, one blue and one green, as she watched her parents ramble in sounds that meant nothing.

"...when?"

Suheila made a face. "Are you asking me if it is yours?"

Bane shook his head.

"She has a sister. We have twins."

Bane dropped onto his backside and stared at Suheila and the baby. "How?"

"...well. When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they engage in special hugs. Adult hugs..."

Bane blinked from behind his mask.

Suheila smirked. "It's not like we see one another every day. It's been months."

Bane tilted his head.

"My aunt has baby Nadjia."

Bane clenched his eyes shut. The scent of perfume. A brief flash of electric blue eyes. Jeans.  No, genes. "...Nadjia."

Suheila stared at him with a sympathetic expression. "What's going on inside of you?"

Bane lowered his head, resting his masked face in the palms of his massive hands. He drew in a deep breath and exhaled. "Hide her."

"From you?"

He lifted his head, dropping his hands to his knees, and shook his head once. "Everyone. Hide her. Hide them. You, too. Hide."

Suheila stared down at Bane, or rather at eye level to him. "What's wrong?"

"Danger." Bane arched his neck and felt a succession of pops, a haunting phantom pain aching in his back where the faceless man stabbed him with the rod. "Go. Do not return."

Suheila lowered herself carefully to the wooden floor, Celeena cradled in her arm. "There is nowhere safe for me, now. Nowhere. If I go, someone will only follow me. If I stay, someone will just come to my door. You are the only one who can keep us safe."

Bane frowned beneath his mask. "I cannot protect you, Suheila."

Suheila blushed. "Suheila?"

He nodded.

"I've never heard you call anyone by their name."

Bane shrugged.

Suheila stole a final look at Bane, and then stared down at Celeena. "I'll go... but only to see her off safely. I'm coming back. If I'm in danger, if you're in danger, then hiding won't help anyone. We can take the fight to whoever it is you're worried."

Bane stared up at Suheila, and then past her to the cracked walls of his ruins.

Suheila cupped the side of Bane's mask, drawing his eyes to meet hers. "I'm coming back."

✟ ☧ ✟ 

Bane paced the wooden floor of his ruins.

Of course, he was not worried for the witch, and her infant spawn.

Of course, he cared nothing of them.

He was after all little more than a beast wandering in the flesh of a man, and so he did naturally what beasts would do, rutting with any fair mate that should cross them.

(Liar.)

Bane glared into the empty space of his ruins, the piles of pine needles, and dead leaves piled in their corners, and strew across the floor.  He clenched his teeth. "You are dead. Be silent, already."

He was thankful when he heard only silence in his head.

She was supposed to be back. Leave. Hide the child. Return. Destroy their enemies.

Bane paced.

He did not care. Of course, he did not care. She was the enemy. She was prey. The hunted.

Bane woke out of his loathing, the sense of movement in the cold air around him sending a tight chill down his back. Bane flexed, and shuddered, staring out the crumbling hole in the side of his ruins.

Her unfamiliar silhouette stood just outside his ruins, scant in ragged clothing, staring in with dull eyes, and a vacant expression.

Bane reached for his pistols, but no sooner did he move, she turned and ran.

✟ ☧ ✟

The path was too familiar, and Bane felt the memories of lacerations, and raw flesh on stone, and piney earth. Not one of these memories, his, after all, but the trail was in his head, the path as fresh in his mind as it was the day he lost Nadjia.

...not me. I've lost nothing. I've lost no one. Jonathan Walker is dead.

Bane kept pace, but she was fast, faster even than he... and worse, she knew the trails, the trees, the woods, and forest as well as he. Who was she?

No... no. He knew who she was. She belonged to the disfigured man that ran him through that night, at the place Jonathan and Nadjia would go. She ducked, and dipped below fallen trees, and darting around them as she sped forward.

Within moments, Bane was clear of the trees, and they were in a clearing. He watched her silhouette as she continued at full speed for houses on a long street past that familiar place (Gallows Road...).

Bane ignored the frustrating echo of the Jonathan's memory in his head. The name of the street made no difference.

She continued to the first house at the end of Gallows Road, and there she rushed up over the iron gated fence with too much grace, crossed the courtyard, up the small stairs and turned for a moment.

Bane stopped at the perimeter and watched her watching him. After only a moment longer, she turned and entered the house through the front door.

✟ ☧ ✟

Laurelynn dropped to the floor of Simon Bellar's keep, the trap door closing over her on the way, and ignored the ladder on the way down. She landed with nimble precision, and hurried to his feet, kneeling down at the concrete block foundation beneath his baroque high backed seat.

Simon Bellar stared down at her, admiring the scar on her cheek - a hard learned lesson for her early attempts to escape - as he passed a cattle prod back and forth between his hands.

Chained to the foundation beside him, Suheila glared at Laurelynn, and Laurelynn ignored the fury in her young face; she would understand in time, shed her old life, and get her new name soon enough.

"Did you fail me?" Simon arched his head back, squeezing drops of saline into his eyes.

"No. Your monster followed me here."

Suheila Sharif narrowed her eyes, shifting her cold gaze between Simon, and Laurelynn. "You're so fucking dead."

Could Simon smile, he would. He glanced down at Suheila. "You should thank me for saving you from that thing. In due time," he wiped a trickle of slobber away from the slit in his bondage mask. "...you will."

"We'll see." Suheila could not draw her arms up, the ragged skin of her wrists were testament enough to that. She closed her eyes, and felt the faceted black glass warm against the skin of her chest.

Simon's attention snapped to Laurelynn as his pet began to scream, her clothing smoldering on her body.

Bellar loved her already.

No, not Laurelynn, but his new pet.

The Arab mare, and her uncanny, and inexplicable ability to do his other pets harm with little more than a thought. That kind of power he could wield just having her at his side...

Suheila screamed out, eyes wide as the painful waves of electric rolled through her body, sparks arcing off her metal shackles.

Bellar held the prod to the center of her back a moment longer, his lesser pets mewling, and cooing behind her agonized howls.

Suheila screamed, bellowing somewhere between rage, and agony, and collapsed.

Bellar watched as Laurelynn's eyes, nose, and ears wept thin streams of blood. She collapsed, writhing on the concrete, foamy blood and spittle gathering at the corners of her mouth.

Bellar held the cattle prod on Suheila's back. She stopped screaming.

Laurelynn stopped moving, eyes unblinking, ever staring into empty space .

✟ ☧ ✟

The front door fell inward, smoking holes where hinges once held it in place.

Bane stood in the doorway, his shotgun in one hand, the other outstretched in the space absent the door. He sucked in a deep breath, and exhaled it all at once, slinging his shotgun back over his shoulder.

The lights were off inside, blinds drawn shut. Darkness did not hinder him, but he hesitated before taking the first step inside.

It was still - too still - inside; still shadows, furniture unused, untouched, and unmoved. The walls were void of decoration, uncommon for even the lowliest coven scum.

The house had no life in it; and what was the life of a house? A concept he once had no understanding. Even his ruins lived, and breathed, teeming with memory, tragedy, and the stink of magick left behind in its walls. His ruins, his keep, full of old memories, each stacked one onto the next.

Bane took a single, heavy step inside, too aware of the hard marble tiles in the foyer. He felt the marble crack underfoot, his each plodding step, the stress of his weight breaking the rough, unpolished black tiles.

The air inside was stale, sterile, and only the faint stink of base emotion lingered in the facade of a house.

(Whited sepulcher.)

Bane nodded with the memory of Jonathan's voice as it crept into the back of his mind.

✟ ☧ ✟

Simon Bellar sat in his baroque style throne, looming over his pets, and stared with wet, lidless eyes up at the ceiling as the monster tread through his domain in clumsy, heavy steps.

He worried, but not a worry born of any fear of the mass creature that walked like a man; he worried the beast would not find its way into the converted dungeon where he kept his prizes, and pets.

Suheila lay unconscious beside him, the back of her shirt scorched from the cattle prod, and still manacled and chained to the concrete foundation that made his pedestal.

Could he smile, he would. The creature in the mask moved faster now, stalking above from room to room. He heard a lamp crash against a wall in the den. He heard the table overturned in the dining room. He heard the sound of shattering glass, then distinct pop of a tube as his television broke through the coffee table in his den, and he imagined the glass spraying out over the carpet, the pungent odor of electrical wires as they shorted over broken circuit board.

The monster's pace quickened, its large, long strides bounding from one side of the house above, and back, back and forth, its loud heavy steps grew louder, and heavier as the witless thing lost patience.

Then, without warning, the noise stopped and it was silent.

Simon raised his hand up in a sharp gesture of silence, tight leather gloves glistened in the low light of his dungeon.

✟ ☧ ✟

The silence lasted long, Simon Bellar's tight leather clad outstretched hand holding the silence over his pets, even as the Arab mare began to stir. 

The silence shattered as the trapdoor to his makeshift dungeon exploded inward, the monster dropping the distance from the floor above, toward the concrete below, its weathered, and in many places tattered, leather duster flapping up over it... and then it was on there, crouched low, those green eyes locked on Bellar's unblinking stare.

"You."

This was the moment for too long he waited. He felt his black wool pants tightening around his groin. Bellar lowered his hand in a sharp downward chop. "Monica, to me. The rest of my pets... kill that thing."

Monica, who prior to falling victim to Simon Bellar's indoctrination, was Eliza Langdon, some rich girl he snatched right up off Gallows Road. Eliza, who turned out to be more than just some rich girl, a daughter to The Order his father (may he burn in hell), and his Uncle so faithfully served; Monica, by her new name, and identity now, came obediently to his lap, who relieved the tightness of his trousers, and brought hin out into the tepid air of his dungeon.

Oh, how he poured his resources into The Order's efforts to find her, investing in equipment for thensearch parties as the drudged the lake, and Pridewater Creek. The amusement of grieving parents who would never know their lost daughter, a Huntress in their Order, was nearby all along.

She never begged once that he set her free, though her threats, and her demands echoed up from his dungeon with every visit, and every departure. It was not the tranquelizers, or the atrobe lights that broke her, though, the pretty mare she was. She killed two of his pets before she finally succumbed to the addiction of those sweet drugs, introduced between electric shocks, and that place between waking, and sleeping.

It was the agony of withdrawal, and the near climax of the opiates that brought her to heel. It was her love of sensation, and those sensations when she was on them that opened her eyes to her savior; not some Christ on a Cross, but the sovereignty of hedon pleasures. She was his, as they all were, but the biggest prize waited still, chained to the floor at his right hand, waiting for her salvation, too.

Simon felt hot breath in him, anticipation, and tension, and he reached down and stroked her hair.

Within moments, there was warmth again, the humid warmth of her mouth as she began to work on him as Sinon watched his loyal pets rushing at the monster that cost him his face, and that pretty mexican girl at twin knolls park.

There was excitement in this, and the pleasure from two fronts, to watch this man-animal die without the need to lift so much as a finger... and of course, Monica.

The monster, a living creature of nightmares would die, and its nask would make a fine trophy above his throne in the dim light of his dungeon.

✟ ☧ ✟

They came all at once, a cacophany of screaming. The sound was all too familiar, the memories of the Emim  perched there upon Ehts, the mother tree, and how they sounded in their snarling, bellowing, screaming and gnashing. 

Bane unholstered his revolvers, firing into the overwhelming crowd of scant clad women, these witless victims of the faceless monster there in his throne, abusing his power, the hedonistic fiend who took these women, and broke their will. Perhaps it was not their fault, these empty bellowing  hollows. Shadows of their former selves, replaced by the stench of rotted poppies, lust, and the will of a madman.

They lashed out at Bane without skill, or combat prowess, with feral, graceless and violent rage.

They were little more than insects to him, to be crushed beneath his bootheel, his ancient mind born to violence, and in possession of a body forever in its peak physical state... but where one was weak, and even five would offer little challenge, these slaves to the leather masked madman were many, a colony, a hive, and their numbers were overwhelming.

He wrested his arms from their sharp grasps, their fingernails ripping free from cuticles against his heavy leather duster, tearing into the flesh of his throat wherever they could find purchase. Frantic hands with steely grips pulled at his hair, his duster, and his sleeves, and every punch, every pistol whip, every kick that threw one away from him, another replaced her.

There were too many of Bellar's wretched slaves. Beneath the mounting pile of screaming violence, he felt his pistol pulled from his grip. Somewhere beneath the crushing weight of the onslaught, someone took his blades. Someone upholstered his other pistol.

No room to maneuver.

No room to ready his shotgun.

No personal armory left on him, but his hands, and feet.

The dull popping of a broken neck; someone's jaw torn free from their face, ragged meat hanging from bone in his clenched hand; the wet splash of heat flowing through the eyelets in his mask, down his face; the length of his own blade sliding between his ribs... the sensation of fire in his lung, the burning agony of drowning slowly in his own blood; a deafening explosion, and hot metal piercing, tearing muscle, shattering bone; thunderous heartbeat in his ears; dull pain, a second blade piercing kevlar, the length a slow, long slide through his sternum into his heart; fists beating against the otherworldly bone of his mask; the world blurring, going grey, color melting away, sight fading in and out with his dying pulse.

Pain, and sound drifted somewhere in the distance of his mind, the weight on him, the grasping hands, the now rapid stabbing, far away.

Could he die? Yes, he decided. He could, and would death be so unwelcome? The voice of the dead boy, Jonathan, no longer creeping through his thoughts, haunting him of a life he never lived. He could die, and it would be a sweet relief from the hell he brought himself into when he entered the world of men.

No more pain. Pressure, far away now. His heart ready to give up.

It was about time.

This monster, this ugly faceless monster, the wayward predator that preyed on women had his revenge. He won.

✟ ☧ ✟

The flash of blue light compelled Bane to open his eyes, and there he stared up from beneath Ehts, the mother tree. The pain was present in him again, and he raised up his right hand to see it was still the same hand, his hand, stolen from Jonathan so long ago.

They barked, snarled, and drooled, perched on her branches, teeth bared for those who had the faces to bare them, and those others, reptilian, opened their jaws wide.

If this was death, it was unwelcome. Bane pushed himself up, sitting, and then standing. He stepped back, each step wracked in painful protest. He reached to pull the blades from his body, and found no purchase. No wounds. No bleeding holes from clumsy gunshots.

"I'm not here."

...here enough, Yan'shuf.
Tanīn crept from its branch, curling around the bough of the tree to a lower branch.

"Yanshuf is dead." Bane's voice was thick, his words slurred even as they left his mouth.

You will be soon enough.

"Try me. I will end you."

Impudent whelp. No better than the boy whose life you stole. We cannot be beaten, cannot be destroyed.

"Evidence speaks to the contrary." Bane made a lazy gesture to his mask. "Try, and perhaps next I will wear yours."

Tanīn leapt from its branch. Bane leapt toward it, and caught it mid air, his large gloved hands clenching the creature's massive toothy maw shut. He threw it by its scaly narrow snout into the ground.

Tanīn struck the cracked, crumbling asphalt with a loud thud, landing on the crown of its over-large head. Tanīn howled, but before it could recover, Bane landed on it and mounted it.

Tanīn struggled under Bane's weight, and Bane threw a series of heavy mounted punches. He felt Tanīn's bone break beneath the surface of it's scaly hide. Tanīn whipped it's long tail around its body, and Bane caught it in his hands. He dismounted the struggling emim, turning on his heel and dragging its body around him until Tanīn was airborne, wavering through the air with Bane spinning at the center. Tanīn howled a high pitched roar, but its kin stayed put on their branches.

Bane released Tanīn who sailed in a tumbling arc from Bane, and back into the rough bough of

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