Consort

Chapter One: Into The Darkness

Chapter One

Central Prunecia District, Outer Damnatalia - 2162

     It was a night of dreary fog and frightfully heavy rainfall in the chill urban sprawl of Damnatalia - a great city once known as London, in the land known as England in the old days and Vultura in the more recent of times. It was the year 2162, a dark and dystopian time of mechanical war beasts, airbourne monstrosities and repressed revoluton, in which the world was divided and now warred with its brothers in order to see how far one may rule. The skies were filled with glorious, steam-powered airships, and the land of Damnatalia below was both graced with beautiful landscapes and plagued with the darkest and most impure of souls, fuelled only by a horrific and unmentionable penchant for alcohol and human blood. The city itself was run by a tyrannical, immoral, immortal government, each and every seat in the British Parliament was filled with a highly-ranked and even more highly-paid vampire; religion cursed the city's surface, Damnatalia's very own ill-famed Prime Minister Larten Sybilan - coaxed on only by his own uncontrollable lust for power and sovereignity - being the only thing suppressing the greatest revolution in history that could very well have brought Damnatalia out of its dark days of poverty, addiction and transgression. 

The horrific reign of the tyrannical religious man began only after he had threatened his then-patron, Queen Elizabeth II of England, over a century ago, with the destruction of her great nation to the hands of steam-powered monstrosities and great airbourne terrors, and so she was forced to resign and forfeit her title to the wicked and atrocious leader.

The dark, melancholic, almost ominous figure that was Felix Walker, a young eighteen-year-old private detective employed by a Mr Laurence Quinn, could be seen marching down the street, his sandy-brown hair darkened from a stormy day's outdoor investigating and a rain-soaked trudge home from his workplace. Upon his head a black top hat was perched precariously, and he gripped it tightly for fear of it blowing away in the suddenly brutal wind; over his eyes a pair of brass goggles sat, shielding his eyes from stinging raindrops and whipping wind. His black-and-white-striped cravat, tied around his neck in somewhat of a loose bow, flapped ferociously in the harsh wind. Despite the driving cold, the only thing on the boy's mind at that moment was his most peculiar case yet: the untimely death of a yound newlywed couple found with puncture marks in their necks, the female discovered at home in her humble kitchen by a visiting neighbour, and the male discovered in a back-alley cabaret by a worker in the rather seedy establishment. The case had ultimately been proclaimed a murder, by the superior authorities of the cleay immortally-influenced Damnatalian Metropolitan Investigative Force. Our young detective already had a suspect in mind, although not a specific one as such: vampires. The undead had plagued the streets of Damnatalia for what seemed like a millenium, and finally, with this one case, Felix had actual proof of their immorality and their sins; if only he could solve this one case, then perhaps he could uncover for himself the sins of vampires, and finally bring an end to the horrific reign of both the King and Sybilan. His many studies and recollections of experiences with would-be vampire cults and "familiars", and the darkened and more secretive immortal world, would certainly prove to be of use in that particular case, as well as in his own personal research. 

Walking alongside the young eccentric was his good friend, and trusted tutor and employer in the field of investigation, Laurence Quinn, an equally mad and eccentric middle-aged man with glaring brown eyes and hair as black and shapely as a raven's folded wing. A trused acquaintance and former government employee to Larten Sybilan, and the easily-influenced and dimwitted King Aras Illingworth, he was a man of high power and one to be reckoned with. 

His voice was a low Cockney growl as he spoke. "I just don't get it. I mean, I don't believe that...well, vampires have ruled over us for decades, and have done a darn well good job of maintaining order, lad. I just don't see how its possible-"