Azrael

I used to have a bit of a fixation on Mary Shelly's famous book, Frankenstein. I read the book. I watched all the movies. I took the tests on the book to earn points for my school's reading program. It happens when something piques my interest in some way and this happened to happen when I was working on the first book I ever finished writing which I called Eight (it was my lucky number at the time, nothing in the book had anything to do with the number eight when I first started writing it). Everything in the book was going pretty well. I had characters/players established, I had a plot I thought would work but had room to surprise me. I was still early into the book, but I thought everything was set up...

And then Chapter Six happened.

I was a junior in high school. I stayed up late frequently. I finished Chapter Five and I was going to go to bed...

And then Chapter Six happened.

It may have been exhaustion. It may have been stress because my mom was getting married at the end of the school year, I'd lost someone I thought was a friend, and a bunch of other stuff.

Either way... Chapter Six happened and I met Azrael for the first time... or I created him at any rate. I have no illusions my characters are real. They exist in my head in the same way kids have imaginary friends, but that's about it.

So... here's Chapter Six... for your perusal...

            Azrael smiled as he entered Havyn.  It was no small wonder why the vampires were massing here for the Bloodbath; it was almost too easy.  They had no alarms, no shields against vampires, nothing.  They had depended so long on their secrecy.  Long ago Havyn had been a center of commerce for many creatures.  Then the witches did some sort of spell that erased it’s location from the mind of every creature with even a trace of vampire blood in their veins.  That was the advantage of witches, they could do things that altered space and time which no creature could even touch or prevent…accept sensitives. 

Almost every race had a weakness to another race; the witches were weak to sensitives as the Dragos were weak to vampires.  A Brenna shape-shifter could destroy a vampire just as easily with their special weapons.  Shape-shifters could be killed by the more feral and dangerous were-creatures who originated from shape-shifters and witches, but were especially weak to witches’ spells.  This could be altered by sensitives whose powers could only be completely bound by a Drago who knew the sensitive’s true name.  And so the wheel went round preventing any race from completely conquering the others.  The Dragons knew it and kept the secret well known when they were around.  Then they left him to clean up the messes.  They didn’t perceive that a majority of the sensitives would begin to have severe physical weaknesses after they left.  They didn’t see that the witches would forget their place.  They didn’t see the war at all, or if they did, they showed no sign of it. 

Azrael didn’t know what he was going to do now that he was in Havyn.  He supposed that he could get himself a room at Aldis, possibly frightening anyone who saw him due to his rather handsome looks.  Azrael grinned at his little mental joke.  He didn’t really look handsome.  He looked like death…literally.  He had skin whiter than the snow on the ground, hair blacker than any onyx, eyes like little black voids and scars covering most of his body though people only saw his face and hands. 

People called him the “Angel of Death” and with good reason when you took his looks, race and age into account.  He looked like Death.  He was a vampire which killed things to survive, causing the death of others to sort of “follow” him around.  He really didn’t know how old he was, but he assumed that it must be old since he did remember the dragons and the true Queen (not the foolish imposter currently pretending to rule the vampires).  He also remembered how he got the scars: the reckless witches and Nimüe, well really Nimüe.  But it wouldn’t have happened if the witches hadn’t bound her in the first place…

That’s what had really drawn him there.  Nimüe.  Well, not really, a girl with the same name that looked the same.  But Nimue wasn’t this girl’s true name.  That woman was long dead and buried in England near the original site of Stonehenge.  But the foolish witches didn’t remember it.  It probably had been the doing of the Dragons or even Nimüe herself (the original, not this new anomaly).  So he came, if he couldn’t prevent these vampires from making a very stupid mistake of upsetting the witches around the world, then he could at least save this…girl and have a bit of fun while he was at it.

Azrael remembered Aldis perfectly well back when it had been first built.  It had been a log cabin then with two stories: the ground floor with the public rooms and the second floor with the private rooms.  Each company had its own room, but Aldis did have a limited amount of up to twenty rooms back then.  He had heard that they had added a third floor to Aldis which added another twenty or so rooms.  They also expanded the bottom floor and the eating area he’d heard, covering the old wood with brick and building the additions out of a combination of brick, wood and stone.  He was eager to see it, but not eager to feel the fear of others who looked upon him even from a distance.  He could probably stay somewhere in the unpopulated areas of Havyn and not be bothered. 

There were other options besides those two, of course.  He could visit the Latvian who awakened him.  The Latvian was a vampire who for some odd reason couldn’t get the girl out of his head.  He called her Whitaker.  That was a strange name for a girl, but he assumed it was her surname.  He didn’t see the importance because to him all sensitives were the same and when bound, they usually caused problems for anyone who crossed them.  Then again he was older than the witches and the Latvian put together so he assumed he was wiser about that sort of thing, too.  But he had also learned that it was bad to assume so he decided that there must be a bit of importance to others behind the name of Whitaker.

            Another option was that he could change his mind and just leave Havyn to its destruction.  There were others.  This one wasn’t that special besides the girl and a drago who the witches wanted to rule the Noir, a stupid and ridiculous hope.  If Havyn was wiped out, true, the witches around the world would be very angry, but they’d just retaliate and result in less of the Noir.  This world could do with a lot less witches and vampires anyways.  Besides he really was getting tired of all of this nonsense.  He really should’ve just disobeyed the dragons a century ago and gone to their world, but he was having too much fun at the time to be concerned with hat sort of nonsense.  Now there weren’t any witches that could know enough to send him there.

            The final option was to just take the girl from where she was at that moment in time and leave Havyn to its destruction having accomplished one of his main goals.  This was relatively sensible. Havyn would destroy itself eventually, why not speed it up with the vampires?  The leader of Havyn needed to die and be replaced by someone more sensible and open-minded to the other ways.  True, he might give the poor girl a heart attack, but he’d have some fun doing it, if nothing else. 

            He decided to wait in the woods in a cave he recalled being near the edge of Havyn whilst making his final decision.  Decisions weren’t created to be made lightly.  Every detail needed to be considered to see which would have the best outcome for him.  Azrael had made a rash decision once and now he was covered in scars.  One thing was known about vampires: they learned from their mistakes.

            And Azrael had made many.  He didn’t exactly remember them all clearly, but he knew how they had come about and how to prevent them from coming about again.  He knew never to cross a bound sensitive, especially when the magic that held them was shaky at best.  He, himself, wanted to see all who were involved in this whole twisted event.

            He knew that there was at least one person at the root of it all: Havyn.  It didn’t matter what Havyn it was, the founder of Havyn’s name was Havyn and she (it was always a matriarchy with the witch’s, heaven forbid a chauvinistic male come to rule) would have put into motion the events thinking she was somehow preventing them.  However, others had to be involved.

            First there would be the Latvian, Kristaps, who was leading this bloodbath for whatever reasons seemed to make sense.  Whether it was to encourage the war to move into open war, or because he would get some sort of power out of it, or he was just a fool.  He was the one arranging it all and therefore, most likely the oldest on involved. And if Azrael was right about that, then he merely needed to put together a group of companions to kill him and the whole movement on the vampire’s part would disintegrate into the wind.

            Then there was the matter of Nimue.  If nothing else, he had to save her.  There was something special about her that he couldn’t put his finger on and he wanted to find out what it was before she died.  Then, maybe he’d kill her himself.  No need for another danger to the world like the original Nimüe.  But that made it more complicated what with her closest friend being a drago…

            Then there was another person there who Azrael didn’t even want to know about: a drago.  Why in hell’s name the witches would have a drago living so near to them that she could learn their secrets wasn’t beyond Azrael but it just made everything so much more complicated.  It made things annoyingly complicated.  Especially since the average Drago lived as long as a dragon so she may decide to kill him after he killed Nimue. And he couldn’t kill a drago.  Well he could, but that was dirty work he really didn’t want to do.

            If Azrael wanted to stop the war, he’d have to fix all of those problems, which was too much of a burden so he decided he’d forget to save the world and just concentrate on saving himself.  This meant he’d have to contact a witch…

 As you can see, I wasn't the greatest writer back then, but I had some great ideas. Also, I'd built up a magical world called "The Noir" populated by different races all vying for supremacy. Obviously, that didn't work. So, that went away eventually.

Also... in my head, Azrael looked something like this...

Hello, I'm Luke Goss from Hallmark's Frankenstein miniseries.

Azrael underwent numerous changes over the years. The first being, I decided he wasn't just a vampire. Vampires began to bore me pretty quickly just before Twilight became a major phenomena. I'm not sure why... Twilight isn't at fault.

They were just... so limiting for me for a time. I don't even have a set vampire race anymore. In a multiverse full of wonders there are many creatures, races, and people who claim to be vampires because it's an easy descriptor when in fact, they're not always what they appear.

Azrael became person, a former Spartan warrior who was converted into one of these many creatures that called themselves "vampires", a group of blood-sucking beings that all served a "queen" who may or may not have been the first of their particular race. In truth she was one of a pair of sisters who began the race. There was a fight between the sisters and the "queen" won. The other queen was killed, but that other queen's children lived on and one of those children became Azrael.

That much of Azrael has been set in stone since my senior year of high school along with the twist to the story after Azrael became a vampire.

As a vampire, Azrael was young and handsome, able to seduce any woman, but clever enough to be able to massacre a whole village with no one fighting him or knowing it was him. He was brutal. A monster.

Well, the "queen" couldn't have such a deadly creature running around, least of all a creature that wouldn't even bend the knee to her. So, she sent people after him to kill him... who he promptly slaughtered. So Gaia, the "queen", sent more and more vampires after him... until one day she caught him and tortured him. Then she held him for years, torturing Azrael (then called Thanatos) whenever she felt like it. Then, one day he escaped, found some dragon's blood, drank it, and became the seven-foot-tall, scarred monstrosity that he is now... one of the last descendants/creations of the Dragons charged with maintaining the magical balance of the world.

Then I got to college and a new character started popping up in my head... and I didn't know how she tied into everything until I realized that she created Azrael as he exists in my head. Her name was Nemo and I'll talk more on her in another post.

Anyhow, she popped up in my freshman year of college and I rewrote Azrael's origin story so that Nemo rescued Azrael from Gaia and gave him some potion to make him into the thing he is.

I'm still not entirely clear why... but I think she was lonely and wanted someone like her, but not her equal to keep her company who she could also torment.

Either way, the events of Eight happened... in a different way than the book was written. Someday I'll rewrite it with all the changes. I have to because otherwise Mrs. Covey will die not knowing how it really ended. However, though Azrael does become obsessed with the "sensitive" (read: psychic) known in the above chapter as "The Whitaker", she dies in his arms and he becomes obsessed with finding her again. That's another thing I sort of kept from the original script. Azrael is always pining after the one person he tried to help other than himself... and failed. Only now, he serves Porfirio (his post is going to be interesting) because Porfirio can control the veil between worlds, allowing Azrael to go to other worlds where he hopes to find a version of the Whitaker he can save... that won't die or be terrified of him.

So, that's Azrael or, according to some characters "The Big Ugly". He's changed the most since I first thought him up, but at the same time a lot of his core characteristics have remained the same...

Oh! He's also looking for a way to be handsome again, but that's taken a back seat to his one all-encompassing mission. That's important for his little club with Loki/Coyote, Jack Achan/Cain, and Benny the Cat.

The next post will be about Nemo, the second permanent character for my head to hold onto and the first permanent character who will NEVER EVER BE A POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER EVER.

Have a nice day!