1 Apocalypse Now

The sounds of a distant klaxon unsettle Aleera's ethereally beautiful features. The childish, spritely vampire bride's face contorts in ways that only subtly morph her features but the slight shift is still enough to make her face appear harshly angular and terrifying.

She is wearing one of her master's precious pendants, a gaudy but powerful thing that fills her with more mighty ascendant power than she'd be able to safely manage without the strange accessory. To her left and to her right are two other vampiric women, her sisters; Marishka and Verona. The three women are all staring at a high-tech display that beeps incessantly.

Each of her beloved siblings also wears precious jewelry given to them by their shared master and husband, the dark god-like being who they are presently worried about.

The three "Dark Brides", special vampire lords that only a sanguinarch can create, possess strong enough senses that even the void of space outside of their space station is not enough to blind them to the terrifying reality of their current situation. They can, through the power of ascendant abilities, hear the sounds of pitched combat.

They hear the groans of mountains of metal being flung through outer space at speeds that would astonish people unaware of ascendants and their physics-defying abilities. The trio listens as spaceships piloted by people on their side clash with spaceships piloted by aliens loyal to other masters. And when they hear the pained screams they instinctively recognize and know in their hearts are coming from their master they all gasp in eerie unison.

"Master, flee!" One of them, Verona, shouts, telepathically, to the man who saved their lives long ago. Verona's plea is ignored by their dark king, but the figure is not silent. The distant god touches the mental web that connects their minds and prepares to speak to them, quietly.

"My brides… I am afraid that this battle may not go as I wish. Thankfully we have contingencies, such as your jewelry. I have never been happier that I gave you such meaningful ornamentation, as it may allow me to seize victory… Of a sort, anyway." The figure explains, trusting his brides to remember that each piece of jewelry is a precious phylactery in which silvers of his soul reside.

They do, of course, as they are the companions, trusted aides, lovers, and wives of the sanguinarch. Ascendant energy courses through them, supercharging their bodies and allowing them to perform great and terrible acts in the name of their master. Sadly, the ascendant energy coursing through them is not enough for them to protect their beloved husband.

"Before I perish and our foes shatter our capital ship, I need the three of you to escape. And to take my newly created tome with you. It is a powerful thing… In fact, the blasted item is playing a role in my defeat here. Creating it took too much energy." Their god explains, and complains, in the same mental breath. Verona, the most mature and powerfully willed of the three, is the first to truly react to this.

The mature vampire disincorporates into thin, speedy mist and almost immediately darts towards the one door leading off and out of the command deck of the futuristic starship. She is already making her way toward the bedroom the three god-like creatures share with their master. Her mist form is nearly completely invisible, as her mist naturally camouflages itself to allow her to excel at any stealthy work her master needs her to do.

"Marishka and Aleera, prepare a portal to some distant universe using some of Sophia's blood… The portal will be one-way, but one-way will be all we need." Their master tells the other two siblings, urgently. Neither woman hesitates and both begin to input the necessary commands into the consoles that control their spaceship and which will allow it to do the difficult work of creating an even temporarily stable pathway to another universe.

As they do as they are told, the two vampires feel the floor underneath them grow hot, thanks to their ship now possessing a somewhat overclocked and highly taxed calculative system. They both repress shudders as they silently, telepathically tell each other that this will turn out okay.

Outside of the spaceship, the sisters, and even the regular vampire spawn of the mighty sanguinarch, hear a distant roar that is physics-defyingly loud. The dragon lord intent on slaying their master is distantly roaring, making his intent clear to all present on the battlefield.

Their spaceship is rocked by plasma beams, fired from distant spaceships that are aware of the ship's status among the armada known to belong to their dark god. Distantly, the mature Verona hisses in anger as she watches the ship shudder around her.

A synthetic, robotic voice fills the air, alerting the ship's crew that the ship's shields can only take so much more damage before being destroyed. That is why Marishka and Aleera both exhale in relief when the floor beneath them begins to cool off and the air in front of them begins to shimmer with aetheric energy. A swirling portal is slowly coalescing in front of the vampires!

Aleera is about to leap into the portal when Marishka reaches out her hand and places it firmly on the vampire's shoulder. She gives her energetic sister a cold, stone-like look that causes the woman to sigh in annoyance. To their credit, none of the other vampires on the command deck of the ship move to dart toward the portal. They know better than to leave the ship, as doing so would make the thing an even easier target than it has proven to be so far.

The command deck has massive magically reinforced windows that allow its inhabitants to see out the vessel. Until now they'll only seen distant ships fighting each other, and the occasional mountain of debris their master telekinetically hurls at their attackers, but they are all shocked when the view outside of the ship is transformed. A gigantic breath of raw electrical power in the form of an unknown number of white lightning bolts fills the view afforded to the crew by the massive windows.

Aleera and Verona know enough about ascendants to know what they are seeing. They are witnessing the power of an enraged dragon lord about to appear on the battlefield, one who has great power over the storm element, one of the eight elements that dragon lords can command.

For the briefest of instants, several vampires quietly resign themselves to what they believe to be the surefire end of their lives. They even close their eyes as the electrical breath attack closes in on the ship!

Aleera and Marishka do not resign themselves to such an unpleasant fate and ready themselves to dart through the portal. They only hesitate because they wish for their sister to accompany them through the swirling miasma of chaotic magical energy.

Their sister successfully retrieves the book her master asked her for, even as he himself appears right in front of the capital ship. He is a lone dark dot in the impossible, destructive sea of light created by his foe to fry him and his servants.

The very nanosecond before the electricity would pierce the ship, as well as the ship's master, a massive mountain of free-floating debris created by the battle, wreckages of ships and corpses floating through the void of space, congeals to form a colossal barrier that shields the spacefaring vessel. Their god has used his otherworldly telekinetic abilities to form an impossible barrier that is hit, and annihilated, by the electricity before he and his vessel are.

The electricity slams into the barrier, and almost effortlessly annihilates it. In nanoseconds, the barrier, itself the size of a small town, is completely destroyed. The electricity is somewhat diminished in both sheer energy and scale, when it hits the god-like master of necromancy and his vessel. He screeches in pain, the sound impossibly loud, and the ship's shields are completely destroyed by the electrical energy which strikes the vessel but the ship itself is not destroyed, meaning that the god's personal sacrifice is not in vain.

Even as lights in the vessel flicker on and off for a few moments, the mist form of Verona appears at the entrance of the vessel's command deck. She shouts to her sisters, speaking without the proper anatomy needed to do so, telling them to enter the portal, while she speeds towards their shared destination.

They do not hesitate to dash through the swirling maelstrom of magical energy, and Verona herself, spurred on by a strange instinct she does not have time to question, partially reincorporates to grab two nearby vampire spawn by the shoulders and drags them to and then through the portal. The very nanosecond after all five creatures make it through the portal they find themselves in the basement of an apartment building in a strange world, and the portal disappears behind them.

Instinctively all five vampires fall to their knees and silently take a beat to catch their breaths, metaphorically. They are in some strange, windowless room in a destination they did not get to pick and none of them can hear a thing other than the soft sounds that even their undead bodies make.

In the span of time it takes a mortal human's heart to beat, the three dark brides sense their god and savior perish, his life snuffed out by the mysterious enemy who struck when their master was at his weakest. They feel their connection to him weaken, but not fade entirely, thanks to the jewelry they are wearing. All three brides visibly exhale, relieved that their master's instincts and paranoia have ensured that even his death is not the end.

The book Verona brought appears in her hands and begins to glow and vibrate violently. The woman lets the thing go, and a strange, automated voice begins to come out of the thing.

"Alert: Death of creator detected. Scanning his memories to see if resurrection protocols already exist… Resurrection protocols detected. Beginning to aid in resurrection protocols." The book "says", the strange voice coming out of it sounding almost exactly like the automated voice of the creature's capital ship. The book suddenly projects a wave of black energy that shoots out of it omnidirectionally and only stops when it collides with all three of the creature's phylacteries.

"Phylacteries touched… Beginning time dilation." The book declares, causing all of the brides, and the spawn, to gasp. The jewelry intrinsically linked to their god's soul begins to glow, radiating powerful necromantic energies, even as all five people are abruptly frozen in place by the powerful tome.

The tome, a powerful manifestation of a particularly hefty essence, begins to get to work. The thing spews energy into the phylacteries of the ascendant vampire-lord, and the cosmic jewelry greedily laps up the energies. The three phylacteries would normally take a millennium to resurrect their god, but they are being substantially aided by the essence belonging to their creator. All the while, time very slowly begins to pass.

Seconds turn into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days, and days into weeks. This particular universe is frozen in place as the powerful ascendant's last bits of lifeforce, contained within the phylacteries themselves keep the place in stasis, showcasing just how powerful this particular ascendant being was at the height of his life, but elsewhere time is not affected by the events in this one universe. In the universe of the sanguinarch's birth, the universe moves on in the wake of his death, and even his greatest enemies begin to forget about him.

As weeks turn into months, which begin to turn into years, the energies that the essence aiding in the resurrection of the sanguinarch passed through when it was brought through the portal are absorbed by the essence itself.

The cosmic power within an omega lord's blood, especially one with both thirteen omega sparks and the natural powers of an etheric nova, which is a critical alchemical ingredient necessary for safe travel between universes, slowly becomes a part of both the essence and the powerful being it is resurrecting. And it begins to subtly, but significantly, alter the resurrection the creature is undergoing.

Years turn into decades, and very slowly a pair of feet begin to form in the strange windowless room where the creature is being brought back from the dead. With every passing year more and more energy is poured into the feet, and they become more and more solid. As they solidify, the rest of the body is slowly brought into existence as well.

Beginning from the feet up, the body of the mighty sanguinarch is slowly reconstituted. As more and more time passes, more and more of the creature's body is slowly formed in the strange room of the curious apartment building. By the time only a few moments before a century would have passed since the reformation of the creature's body began, the sanguinarch is fully formed.

The creature lets out a quiet gasp and opens his eyes, only to see the interior of the lightless, windowless room, the floating book responsible for the speedy resurrection he is now benefitting from, and the five frozen figures which passed through the portal he ordered be created during the last few moments of his past life.

He takes a beat to study the figures, the lightlessness of the room not at all bothering him, and sighs in annoyance as he realizes something important. The sanguinarch has no idea who these people are, or even who he is.

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The first thing I note about my surroundings is how odd they are. I can see a book floating in the air in front of me, as well as four beautiful and one handsome, frozen figures surrounding me. I also don't hear anything at all aside from the noises made by the strange book as it slowly floats around me, circling me and clearly studying me somehow.

"Worry not, master. I am using some of the power I absorbed during my creation process, as well as some of the power embedded in your phylacteries, to give you a moment to catch your breath. I know you must be confused, but allow me to explain what is going on." The book says, which somehow does not surprise me. I do not respond, but at the same time I don't panic and I wait to see what the book says next.

"Ah… I see that you are not surprised by my ability to speak. That's good. That means that while your memories might be lost, your particular common sense isn't. That will help you adjust. Allow me to introduce myself; I am the Essence of the Player Handbook, and shortly before you perished, you created me." The thing reveals.

"I am sadly running a bit short on time, aiding in your resurrection was highly taxing you see, but the long and short of a lot of different events is that you are a mighty god, of sorts, to vampires and other undead beings. There are creatures on your level who sought to end your life, and so when you were left weakened in the immediate aftermath of creating me, they struck. They succeeded in destroying you, but as a sanguinarch, the name most commonly attributed to your kind, you had contingencies in place in case such an event occurred. Namely, you had phylacteries." The odd "Being" tells me.

"Phylacteries store away portions of your soul. Those well-versed in the arcane arts, particularly of necromancy, can use phylacteries to come back from the dead. Which is what you did. Normally such a process takes a millennium for a creature as powerful as you, but I aided in the process and made it much quicker. Only a century has passed since your demise, and for your dark brides and your spawn it will only feel like moments have passed when I reawaken them." The book says, causing me to chuckle a little bit. I suppose I should be skeptical of its claims, but I have a strange feeling that the thing is telling me the truth. It's an odd feeling that I can't shake, even when I try to do so.

"Further still, the moment that your brides took me, and your phylacteries across a portal you called for them to make and flee through, your soul absorbed some of the energies used to create that very portal. The reason why your resurrection has left you drained of your memories is that your body and soul have been touched and warped by exposure to the blood of someone with an omega spark, a strange lattice of anomalous energy possessed by creatures known as omega-lords. These odd beings, which are now extinct, could once travel throughout the multiverse." The book tells me, its mechanical voice turning strangely reverential for a moment.

"You have evolved and begun the process of becoming something else. You are beginning to become greater than a sanguinarch, though I remain unsure of any specifics. For now, what I do know is that you have gained the ability to evolve in ways that are not totally clear to me. You are in a fairly mundane world at the moment, but even here you are experiencing strange growth. I can sense you changing, growing, in response to your surroundings." The voice whispers, curiosity clearly audible in it.

"My strength is fading… I am using up the last bits of the vestiges of your old lifeforce and my own enhanced might. It will take me a bit to recharge fully, but I am still a highly useful item to possess. My pages are filled with wisdom that will aid you on your journey, and I have many useful abilities. Even without my full strength I can and will be of service. I am delighted to have helped you not only come back from death but begin a strange and wonderful evolution." The book says, before falling to the ground.

As soon as the strange book hits the ground the people around me gasp and their eyes widen as they see me standing before them. I tilt my head slightly to look at them and smile, even as I feel a part of myself running on instincts I can't remember the source of and relaxing.

"Hello everyone. My resurrection has not left me unchanged, but I sense that I know you, on an instinctual level. I am delighted to be alive, even if I am… missing valuable information." I say to the assembled crowd, all of whom smile at me even as some of my words elicit micro-reactions that are more complex than joy.