With her relationship with Fírinne secured, and Dellia starting to come back around, things were looking up for Sionann. Except for the part where she still hadn’t really started on her blood-harvesting task. She’d been putting it off. But it was time.
She and Fírinne slipped out the next night, cloaked in shadows. They made their way through side streets to their destination, a neighbourhood of run-down insulae. Specifically, a boarded-up shop therein.
Within, Sionann had already stashed their disguises (stolen on a previous night)- black robes with deep hoods and simple theatre masks-, and their equipment- knives, bowls, a one-urna jug, and bandages.
“You know, KG is right, this would be easier if we just killed people”, Sionann said quietly, as they put on the masks.
“Hmm… let’s just try it the non-lethal way tonight, okay? If it doesn’t work, I’ll let you kill people tomorrow.”
“It’s not like I want to kill people.”
“MMF! HMMF HMMF!”, protested their first victim, thrashing about. It turned out to be rather difficult to hold down an adult man, even one who was borderline blackout drunk. He kept snapping the shadows they had wrapped around his limbs.
“Can we please just kill him?”
“It’s… we can still do this, we just need to convince him to stop struggling.”
Sionann’s rolling eyes could just be made out through the holes in her mask, as she turned towards the bound man.
“Listen, if you don’t stop struggling, I’m going to cut your throat.”
“HMHMMF!?”
“She’s not joking, you should really calm down. This will only take a minute.”
The man’s eyes darted between their faces- although he obviously couldn’t see their expressions, something in their eyes convinced him, and he stopped trying to break free.
“Thank you”, Fírinne said. “Now, we just need a bit of your blood, okay? We’ll bandage the wound afterwards.”
“Mmf.”
Sionann took the knife and scratched the man’s arm. Blood came out, obviously. But not very quickly.
“Hmm. This might take a while”, she muttered.
“I think it’ll come out faster if you cut a vein?”, Fírinne suggested. “Like the ones on his wrist.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
[...]
“So, how much blood do you think we can take?”, Sionann asked, as they emptied another full bowl into the jug.
“Um. KG said we’d need three or four victims, but we want them to survive, so we should probably triple that. Let’s say two sextarii1A sextarius is 1/24 of an urna, so roughly 550ml (a bit more than a US pint). Two of them is an unhealthy amount of blood to lose, but probably not lethal.”
“And, uh, how much have we got so far?”
“Oh. I forgot to keep track.”
“Only I think he’s fallen asleep, which might be bad?”
“Oh fuck.”
The man was not dead. Yet. He woke up when they dumped water on his head, but was clearly not in a good state- very lethargic and weak. They managed to bandage his wounds… ish. They may have cut off circulation to his hand a bit, but hey, at least he might be alive to complain about it later?
They dumped the unconscious man in an alleyway, and went looking for another victim. In this part of the city, at this time of night, that wasn’t all that challenging. The destitute frequently spent what little they had on cheap wine or- ugh- beer (Sionann had no interest in trying out that piece of barbarian culture). Consequently, drunks were a common sight, stumbling home from some shady tavern.
The victim would happily join a female voice offering ‘fun’ in a dark alleyway (Fírinne's suggestion), whereupon they could be gently choked out by restricting their airflow (a remarkably simple technique, one that made the air affinity ideal for assassination), then hauled into the back room of the abandoned store (eldritch energy allows skipping leg day). A bit of intimidation later, and there you have it, blood donor number two.
They didn’t take as much blood from their second victim, only enough to render him lethargic, without passing out (which was still probably too much, but whatever, they were alive enough to satisfy Fírinne).
They repeated the process several times. Unfortunately, the living have this annoying tendency to talk about what happened to them. And while the words of one or two stumbling drunks might be dismissed as just alcohol talking, three of them showing up with the same story was enough to summon a pair of local ‘guards’. The official night watch left the neighbourhood to its own devices, but there were semi-legal gangs who provided the same service.
“Any blood cultists around here?”, one of them shouted into the alley.
Sionann and Fírinne, who were in fact in the middle of draining another victim, froze. Only for a moment, though- they had taken into account the possibility of getting interrupted this way. They left their victim bleeding, and vanished into the darkness.
They probably should’ve choked the victim out first, in hindsight. Because as soon as they ‘left’, he started mumble-shouting through his gag. Which the guards heard, since they were right outside (they were only using a sound-reducing shield, since they didn’t want anyone to discover their use of regular magic by being too blatant).
“Good gods”, the first exclaimed as he stepped into the room, his torch illuminating the blood-soaked floor, blood-stained jar, and bleeding victim (who was now properly unconscious). “They weren’t kidding.”
“Shit. This is serious. We need the actual watch in here”, the second said, panicked.
At which point, the door slammed shut behind them. Tendrils of darkness whipped out of the shadows, wrapping around both guards. Before they could struggle free, a knife slid into the second guard’s neck, cutting into the jugular. He stumbled backwards, clutching his neck, but soon fell to the ground as the blood rapidly leaving his head caused dizziness that knocked him off his feet.
The first guard swung his club in the vague direction of where the attack had come from, only to have someone step up behind him, grab his arms, and pull them behind his back. The surprise, combined with a lot more strength than the hands’ size suggested, was enough to give the knife-wielder the opening she needed, darting in and once again cutting through the jugular.
“Aw, fuck, it sprayed everywhere. Some of it got in my eye.”
Fírinne was not quite as drenched, but was much more shaken by the two corpses at their feet. “We just killed people”, she eventually managed to get out.
“Oh, right. Well, it was them or us.”
“Sorry, I need to… sit down for a minute.”
“Take your time. I think there’s enough blood left in these two to finish our quota, so no more hunting tonight.”
There was, although it was a bit of a pain to get it out. A lot of it was on the floor, and while mopping it up with some cloth and squeezing it into a bowl might’ve gotten back some, it was a lot easier to just hoist their body upwards, causing more blood to leave their necks.
Their intended victim was still knocked out, and Sionann bandaged his wounds before gently affixing her mask to his face and putting her cloak on him. She then laid him on the ground, and put the knife in his hand. Not the most elaborate framing attempt, but it was better than nothing.
She then helped Fírinne to her feet and out of her own black cloak (bundled up and thrown away elsewhere), and they went into the front room of the shop to wash themselves with conjured water. Once dressed in their plain robes, they headed back to the Vestal order. The jug was stashed in another abandoned shop en-route.
Sionann was expecting there to be rumours about blood-stealing cultists in the morning, but was pleasantly surprised not to hear any. Perhaps people getting assaulted/murdered in a run-down neighbourhood was just not remarkable enough to involve the Vestals, even if the circumstances were strange, with any talk of shadow bindings dismissed as the ramblings of drunkards. They hadn’t exactly flaunted said bindings- most of their victims probably didn’t even realise they weren’t tied up with rope.
On the night before they returned to the forest came the worst part of this whole blood-harvesting operation, at least for Sionann. She had, foolishly, volunteered to do it by herself, since both Fírinne and Dellia were utterly disgusted by the process.
To wit, drinking the blood. They needed to smuggle the blood into the Fey Wood, and carrying an urna jug would definitely raise some uncomfortable questions. Kin-Galud had accounted for this, and had marked Sionann with an eldritch rune that would let her keep the blood inside of her body, undigested, and then… regurgitate it later. Volume apparently didn’t matter, since the blood would not literally sit in her stomach the whole time, but rather be absorbed by her soul(?).
She stared at the unsealed jug, the tangy smell of blood wafting into her nose. Ugh. Well, serving a demon was never going to be all fun and games. Better get it over with.
She mentally activated the rune inside her stomach, and carefully poured out a cupful of blood. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, and chugged.
…oh fuck.
…oh sweet heavenly fuck.
Blood tasted amazing. And she could feel it being absorbed into her soul, the rush of power making her entire body shiver.
She drank another cup. And another. And another and another and another.
When she realised the jar was empty, she cursed. Would it be too much to go out and collect some more blood? Just a few more sextarii. They’d gotten away with it once.
…no, she should restrain herself. There’d be more opportunities to drink blood later. Oh, Fírinne and Dellia were gonna feel so stupid for missing out on this.
And that, children, is how the first Vampire was born