Hildegarde Bingen Glimpses

[Hildegarde Bingen]

Hildegarde was moving in.

It was evident the moment that Iago had begun turning up and depositing boxes and suitcases. His arrivals grew in intensity, until the night that the Lord turned up and simply stayed. That night, of course, there were no new boxes as she had Iago doing the grunt work of establishing her claim to a vacant room. By the end of the night the room was remodelled close to what she wanted.

She grumbled profusely.

Iago growled a lot. In the early hours of the morning, he simply glared at her and left, revving the car loudly before vanishing in a rumble of gravel chips.

The Lord sat in her -mostly- complete room, blithely ignoring the remaining boxes. Then she started exploring the rest of house seeking spots for her paintings and her archive.

The next night Hildegarde wisely kept her activities to completing the conquest of her room. Only once that task had been achieved did she turn her attention to the archive: more boxes; odour of mould and stagnant paper. Furniture was organised.

At last it was done. Then the Lord decided to remodel her room, change her decor and make better use of the space.

Iago left again and didn't come back for two whole nights.

Hildegarde was distraught and demanded she be taken out on a hunting expedition to "clear her mind".

Some Lords are never satisfied.

[Hildegarde Bingen]

Her old suite was cold and empty and austere. The rooms echoed hollowly and the naked spaces with the cold white walls were positively brutal. Iago had made up a bad and small dresser for her few accoutrements. It was exactly what she needed. The Lord fed, then retreated into seclusion and gave some thought upon her impending Oath.

The Oath of the Mysteries.

With this Oath, she committed herself to the Order. With this Oath, the Lord would drew a line under her past and the mysteries it held for her. They would no longer matter; no longer hold sway over her mind... and maybe her soul. That in itself was the greatest change. Her time alone was like a second Chrysalis: here, in the shell of her old haven, with the remnants of her old life (figurative and literal, for she had bought with her the box of precious things which had endured as she had).

Her hands ran over the mangy fur coat one last time. Once, she was certain, it had been expensive and fine and beautiful to behold. Dimly, she could remember waring it with pride when Hans took her out dancing. Those memories were savaged by the Count's enchantments, she knew now - blurred, eviscerated, blotted out. More vaguely, she remembered tottering through a burning world waring that fur (stained then by blood and war). She had been waring it when she died - when the mercenary impaled her on his bayonet and the Count came, sword in hand. What blood the Count hadn't lapped up had spilled onto her. She found the stains still matting the fur, and cast it aside.

She picked out the crisp little Party badge. The Reich had fallen; she was Immortal. The symbol was off-centre and thus, wrong; it did not represent the Wheel any longer. Useless. She tossed it with a jerk of her wrist.

There was the old photograph. She held onto its mangled and bent substance the longest time, a frown deepening upon her brow. The Count had taken her name with his enchantments but if she fought the chains that still bound her, she could hear an echo of it: Johanna! Yes - Johanna and Hans. She was snuggled in her big fur coat, with her arm wrapped around dear husband Hans' rangy frame. Her dark hair contrasted with his Aryan purity; her fuzzy coat and lighter coloured dress with the crisp black lines of his uniform. He had his peak cap set to a rakish angle but his eyes did not smile and his grin was positively reptilian. Had she not noticed that before? Well, dear Hans had not come home and had not been there when the Soviet dogs burned it and ravaged his wife.

Hildegarde tore the photograph apart. It was slow and deliberate at first; by the end her fingers with moving with manic fury. She was tempted to stoke the mass that sat under her mind; to provoke it and let it run free, unrestrained. Then she decided that would have been a waste.

A Seer would not waste the effort.

The only thing Hildegarde kept was the wedding band. This... Johanna looked backward to a mortal marriage. Hildegarde the Ventrue looked forward: for herself; for the Order she was wed to. The wedding band would be a simple enough device to remember that.

When she finally realised Iago was waiting patiently, she gestured to the empty box, its contents and the discarded coat. "Burn them," she instructed calmly.

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When they came for her, she was dressed in a conservative business suit: black skirt; black shirt; black blazer; matt black shoes that absorbed the light; dark hair bound up in a single screw with a single curl draping over her face for decoration.

She walked boldly forward into darkness and did not look back. This was the way of the Mysteries; of the Seer

[Hildegarde Bingen]

The problem with the archive was that it was filled with old letters, parchment, journals, grimoires and other crumbling and hoary manuscripts that had been written in code and latin and greek. None of this corpus had ever been catalogued and indexed, leaving her leaf - quite uselessly - through the aged and crackling documents without a guide or context.

At best, she could make some broad assertions about the contents of her archive, especially when the evidence of the "family portraits" were included. She was looking at one of them now, as she idly shifted protesting parchments into piles - the Spanish Lady in her Court finery, holding a small portrait in her hands; a baroque priest stares out of the portrait, a pale oval in the gloom. Her Grand Sire had been a sorceress of the Lance, till she had met the Dracul; then, it seemed, she had worked on the Coil of Blood; her Sire a maverick of sorts, hiding in plain sight as one of the Spanish Inquisition - a move both bold and reckless. Unfortunately, the archive petered out once the Spanish Lady bought the German Count into the Blood.

Her Sire had been a mercenary; one who had heard the Emperor's plea and ridden for Vienna when threatened by the Grand Turk. Somehow, in the fighting of that lightning fast campaign season, they had met. The archive was silent as to whether he had been Ghouled before the Embrace: he was mentioned as an ally and a contact for Iago but nothing more. There was another painting that depicted them both - and one in which he, at least, was definitely alive. A second painting, done some decades later, depicted them both in Court finery and marked by the pale hue of the Damned. This - the 18th century - was the Count's heyday and he cut a dashing figure in his Prussian uniform. The archive continued with his own experiments in Alchemy and stranger things - he had begun his career studying the Blood but soon found his home developing the Domain of Terror - the Coil of the Beast.

That would explain the Count's love of the stake. A great metaphysical pin with which to chain the self and confrnt - later to break - the Beast within their souls. Had that not been his first lesson? Had he not controlled her will and had Iago pierce her with spear and stake? Left her hanging with blood pooling from her pierced body while he sat below, hunger writ on his face as he watched her contort and writhe in agony? Till enlightenment had come and she had let herself hang limp. And smile like an angel back at him. Why had he scowled?

The archive continued. The Count's greatest success and most terrible failure. Amid the litany of dissections and alchemic incantations, were the letters. Politics. Schemes. Alliances. The Count had a wide circle of correspondence - member of what passed for the Order at that time, and Acolytes. Even revolutionaries who believed that the lessons of Rousseau should be applied to the tyranny of the Unconquered. Gripping stuff. She had found the constitution for a new Domain previously; she found it again, added to it - a bold plan to take Berlin with the Crone. Then, disaster and destruction.

At least now, the evidence was clear. He was bound by dark arts against his well and entrapped in his own ancestral lands. The alchemical experiments continued, supplemented by new studies into the power of Domination. But it was like watching a literary light go out - a slow withering of intellect over the course of centuries. Even the remaining correspondence withered away over the 19th century. By the 20th century her sire, the Count, had been forgotten.

There was absolutely nothing about her in the archive of her lineage.

When she asked Iago about this obvious discrepancy (had she not been the cause of the Count's increased activity? Had she not stayed the ennui of Torpor?) Iago simply shrugged.

[Hildegarde Bingen]

It was that of the month. Iago could feel the pain gnaw at his vitals; it made him feel excited - a sensation he had become accustomed to over long, long, decades of service.

He sought out his Regnant. She too, it seemed, had developed an internal clock that was in synch with his own. She had ceased her habitual pacing through the Chapter House and retired to a parlour. There she waited, enthroned in an extravagant armchair weighty with age - it had been discovered in the move; one of the few oddments remaining in the then empty building; cleaned, re-upholstered and varnished, it had been given a new home in the parlour with a strategic vantage point that covered the entire room. Hildegarde had added to the general effect by making up a fire that burned tastefully (if smokily) in an elegantly simple fireplace.

Iago noticed this as he entered the parlour, hand rubbing his side as if he had stitch. He'd have to check the chimney out. The Mistress seemed to forget that smoke had to go somewhere. She was dressed in her customary black: this time it was an old dress with widows weeds and veils, right out of the nineteenth century. How like a doll she was, all dressed up and meticulously placed. In the ruddy light, her black garments melded with the darkness and her face was stained with orange and yellow.

She saw him! His heart thundered.

She barely moved but what there was spoke volumes: a welcome, an offer, acceptance. Her right arm lifted; wrist turned so that her flat palm was raised upward. A sigh escaped his lips - a sensual thing almost wholly animal. It was the same feeding posture her Sire, the Count, had adopted so long ago. Nothing like the rituals performed by Lady Isabella (disturbing like taking the Sacramental Cup) which she had maintained even after her conversion the Dracul's cause.

Need drove him forward. He did not register crossing the intervening distance. He was at the threshold and then he was kneeling beside the massive armchair like an obedient dog. And then he gave himself over to his hunger. He drank deep of her ichor - a burning slick torrent that made him gag and retch even as he savoured it on his palette as if it were the finest of wines. He drowned in it even as he whimpered like a craven beast. She was leaning over him then and he sobbed like a child finding a long lost mother.

They stayed like, Thrall and Regnant, embraced, for a very long time. Yet when Iago returned, sated, to his car he registered that the clock had only moved forward by some 15 minutes. He sighed and sat, exhausted; dreamed of that distant night in baroque Naples when he was a sell sword and he had spied a spanish lady, unaccompanied in the night. When he caught up to her and spun her round, she had Hildegarde's face.

[Hildegarde Bingen]

The room was a dark pit of shadows. Moving, baroque, shadows that were barely given substance from the ambient light from the small window or the tall candles that Iago had carefully placed, defining a space around one wall. The shaft of the stake was a solid spike of night striking out from the wall; its singular purity marred the human form punctured by its length.

The shadows moved as Hildegarde moved. Soft, slick, sounds were made loud in the oppressive silence and the solid thud the Lord made as she folded heavily to the floor. At this point the ritual - her ritual - was always the same: she drew what spilled Vitae she could back into her shattered form and, flailing with weakened limbs, dragged herself to where Iago knelt with a bowl. The scent of blood guided her; its cooling promise a prod and a goad to haul her broken body towards the sweet nectar. This part was always a challenge: a test of control. Would she will her form to repair itself before she tasted of the blood. Could she master the Beast that hammered inside her broken ribs and pulverised, vestigial, organs?

The Enlightened Sable Scribe of the Burning Equilibrium, Castellan and Whip of the Lords, succeeded. Spreadeagled, she lowered her face to the bowl and lapped up the heady, tepid brew. It was enough to give her renewed vigour. Enough for her to raise her smeared head and speak calmly, in a voice devoid of pain.

"Show me the work."

Enough for her to move her naked, savaged and listless form to inspect her gaping wounds while Iago danced around her with a mirror.

"Good. Good. Wonderbar." She allowed her hand to trace the carnage, even as she willed the Vitae to surge and burn through her. Bones knit; sinew, tendon, flesh bubbled as it sprang back in a mockery of nature.

A whimper, repressed.

Hildegarde arched an eyebrow. "What? You... may speak, Iago."

"Enough!" Her ghoul's voice was quiet, but it resounded in the near empty room with its intensity. "Surely there are other fields of study? Surely you have learned enough by this... torture?" A beat. Taking his chance when his Regnant failed to respond, he licked his lips.

"There are other means of reaching within... This... This can only serve to strengthen the body, now. Is not your field of study the Beast Within. I have books... Kine books. Yes! I know. But the disciplines of the last century should at least be examined, surely. This... This... Is starting to smack of addiction. You have no second. Yet you continue. The Academy stands empty and you are either in here or wandering the halls with your keys and a vacant look in your eye."

He paused again, struggling with the power of the bond. A hint of cruelty in his voice: "You were not this way under my Master's guidance. Even in his decay he could manage both himself and you."

That got her attention. For a few moments at least.

"Iago. I am dirty. Bathe me."