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The Secret Origins of Kalinda Kriegsdottir
Part Two of Several
By Kalinda Kriegsdottir
There really isn't any experience better than a mutual slaughtering of an army of the undead to really bring two people together. Take two random folks off the street from whatever walks of life, give them an armory to raid, and then sick a rampaging horde of cannibalistic corpses on them.
Religion, social class, wealth, politics, sexual orientation. Not going to matter. You give Richard Simmons and Jerry Falwell some motorcycle leathers, shotguns, and a rabid, decaying mass of churchgoers in their Sunday best and somehow they're going to end up pals after having discovered a mutual fondness for being spanked with a cat o nine tails and wearing assless chaps.
You bring together two people who are already close to one another, and you can ignite the relationship into something new. A little spark to ignite the fusion of two souls into a gestalt, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That happened to me and to my best friend in the whole wide world, Delilah.
If there's one thing you can say about elves, its that depictions of them are inconsistent. Are they tall, are they short, are they mortal, are the spirits, are they magic, are they mundane? But where I come from the three best words to describe an elf are smug, magical, and feminine.
Androgynous is a term thrown around to describe elves in a number of places; ethereal, transcendent beauty beyond the mere constraints of binary gender. Unless you're a Dungeon and Dragons character artist, then they all look like a transitioning Ross Noble three months into his-her hormone replacement therapy.
But elves where I'm from are pretty. Universally pretty, and very often damned beautiful. Even the boys. Especially the boys. Femininity has always been idolized in Elven culture, stems from having a matriarchal society.
It's a world that would make your typical GamerGate shit stirrer scream in terror at the real and actual male oppression going on. Cause the gender dynamic is reversed. Boys are the ones who are shorter in stature and slimmer of build. Especially once the Channeler caste rose to prominence and changed the landscape of Elven looks forever.
Every Channeler is basically a were-something, a totemistic shapeshifter enhanced for physical prowess. As a result of the elf/orc wars, a goodly chunk of elvenkind got wiped out and had to be repopulated from a gene pool that was mostly filled up with genetic contributions from red rockets and big floppy donkey dicks.
I'm not kidding.
As a result just about every elf carries some totemic atavisms, animalistic features that run in the family. Clan Kinai of House Darkfire expresses features of snow leopards, much to my great enjoyment and to Delilah's everlasting scorn.
She may be six and a half feet tall and a pair of big pointy teeth that poke down over her bottom lip, but she also has these terribly, terribly cute kitty ears and this great big huge poofy tail covered in spotty floof. I have to touch it, I can't NOT touch it. It's just so soft and fuzzy and OHMAHGAAAWD IT'S SO FLUFFY I'M GONNA DIIIIIIIIIE!
*ahem* Enough squeeing over Del's cute tail. If she were here she'd be telling me "Kal, I will cut the gods damned thing off and give it to you to play with if it will make you sit down, shut up, and quit bothering me."
And she would, too. She's got a whole armory of magic swords and stuff, that's her thing. She's a master of the forge, mechanical, magical, and otherwise. She's got a knife that will painlessly and bloodlessly severe body parts from one another, while still leaving them alive and mystically connected.
"No, it's not as useful as you're imagining it would be right now. Cutting out your poop chute and tossing it into the toilet is not going to mean that you never have to crap again, it just means that congratulations, you have now have an open air digestive system leaking poo mess everywhere and nothing to hold it back." is what she tells damned near everybody, because it's basically the very first question asked with regards to that thing.
Though it CAN be done. She mentioned an ancestor who literally kept her husbands wedding tackle in her purse. Quake in fear, ULW-ites, cause I actually have that thing stashed in my coat somewhere.
I keep it, and a few dozen other magical weapons, in my Coat of Holding because Del and I tend to get into situations like being overrun by an army of darkness on an annoyingly often and regular basis.
And like just about every other female soulmate she ends up wearing my damned coat. Not because she's cold, but because she can actually talk to the bloody thing and thus can pull stuff out of the pockets with something resembling accuracy.
So picture this, it's a lovely Summer evening, and Delilah and I get invited to the tower of the Arcane Protector of New Avalon. It would be like turning down an invitation to visit the White House. And considering that Protector Malicia Thanatos is a blood-sucking, heartless, undead fiend, it would be rather like visiting the White House during the Bush administration.
Except that Dick Cheney waits until you're in the woods before shooting you in the face.
So there's a good, logical reason why the governor of our little corner of the world had invited us into her home with murder on her mind. See, Delilah and I kind of killed her daughter. And by kind of, I mean most definitely killed. In the face. With fifty caliber bullets. Made of silver. And by daughter, I mean unholy vampiric convert.
To be fair she totally deserved it, since she was Delilah's aunt and had been making her life a living hell since basically before Del was born.
The position of House Matriarch is kind of a half and half deal, half inherited position and half meritocracy. If you end up being good at staying alive, you get to keep the position.
Auntie Dao-Mai got the position when grandma Metsuki did something very few matriarchs and elves in general get to do; she died of old age. Delilah's mom, Dara, managed to drive Dao-Mai out a decade or two later.
It's very much like baseball, in that there's a lot of posturing, posing, groin-grabbing, and spitting with a bunch of politics, manipulation, and money deciding things way before anything actually takes place on the diamond. And if you get three strikes, you're out.
Dara dethroned Dao-Mai and fended off three attempts at upheaval. In the eyes of the house spirits that means that Auntie Mai sucked so bad that no further attempts to take down Dara would be sanctioned. For an elf a goodly portion of their magic comes from their house spirits and totems.
Think of Dao-Mai like Jackson Adams, oh look he's sucked and failed to win the big one. Oh! He's sucked and managed to not win the big title again! Yeah, he sure as hell isn't going to go and win the World Championship from a guy he's never beat, while dealing with a 104 degree fever, the Hershey Squirts, and Whooping Cough.
She couldn't hack it at full strength, and trying to come at the throne from a position of lesser strength would probably end up with her getting killed. But the position is handed down, typically, from mother to daughters, and Delilah is Dara's first born eligible daughter.
So rather than fight Dara, Dao-Mai could simply kill off Delilah, become next in line for the throne, and then try and off her sister in a manner that didn't include direct physical confrontation.
Delilah's innate powers don't really lend themselves to a knock down, drag out interpersonal brawl. Mine do. Long story short, we cheated our asses off and I got mine kicked from pillar to post.
Eight foot tall scary wizard vampire cat-woman with a huge fucking sword fighting then six and a half foot tall, unarmed, non-caster Kalinda. As a matter of fact I ended up with about four feet worth of magic lightning sword slammed through my chest. Pierced my half-developed draconis fundamentum - my dragon lung. It's the thing that fuels a dragon's breath weapon, a store of raw elemental energy. Healed me, burned her, and being pinned to the damned thing like a bug catcher's butterfly brought down her own impenetrable magical barrier.
Bang, silver bullet to the head.
Bang, silver bullet to the heart.
You're supposed to crush your foe, leave them broken but alive, able to serve you and serve the House. But there's a loophole, you can battle one another according to the core values of the House.
Elven language is tricky, it's like it took the most complex, fiddly, obnoxious bits of every language and went "Yup, we're using that." It loves wordplay, it loves looting other languages for new words and meanings. There are a thousand different ways to interpret the name of House Darkfire. Because it's not actually CALLED House Darkfire, the simple version is "a bolt fired from the darkness," a sneak attack in other words.
What we did was end Dao-Mai with a high caliber sniper rifle with Delilah hidden from sight damned near a mile away.
A bolt-fired, lever-action rifle. From the darkness.
And Malicia lost her baby girl.
Vampires don't reproduce easy. They can suck somebody dry and that'll get them a fanged, blood-sucking walking corpse, but a Drained Vamp is weak, withered, and dumb as a box of rocks. It's a dead thing, the soul has fled, and there might be some residual memories floating around, but it's not the person it was before it got drained.
They can give somebody living a taste of vampire blood, and that'll beef 'em up, bind them, make them loyal. But it also makes them junkies out for a fix. There are withdrawal symptoms. Strong, sentient, but not an actual vampire.
It's hard to make a full-fledged member of the bloodsucking nobility of the dead-but-moving set. Strong, pretty, powerful, smart, and in full retention of their spirit. Easier to become a lich, you keep your soul, you're immortal, but you're stuck in your own dead body which is still going along to meet the fate of all flesh.
Vampires get to live forever, be awesome, and not rot. It took a lot of raw magical power and an unspeakably vile ritual involving a slumbering not-quite-alive not-quite-dead Cthulhu-lite elder god thing to make our first proper vampire, and it kind of broke the whole damned world when it happened.
I think I mentioned before that the Empire of Blood isn't native to Tatheon, the world where I'm from. The whole making the very first vampire thing was what made the gods go "Nope! Not dealing with this mess!" and got us shucked into the memory hole.
Though it did take them about 200 years to figure out how well and truly fucked it made all their divine plans and plots and shit before they kicked us out, though.
Making a new vampire is like growing grapes, the most efficient way is to hack off a chunk of grape vine and stick it in similar growing conditions to where you got it from in the first place, fertilize it, and let it grow. Except in the case of vampires the cutting isn't from a grapevine; its from their very soul. And to put it in somebody, you're going to have to rip out a chunk of their soul to allow the vampiric piece a place to go. And you can't just go around with a huge bleeding wound in your soul, so you stuff the bit you got from your newbie vampire in there.
You also can't just go chopping off hunks of your soul and cramming them into random people. You have to prepare the growing conditions ahead of time. You have to have someone who has a lot in common with you. You have to mold them, shape them, nurture them.
It takes years, sometimes decades, to get a potential vampire to a place where you can bring them into the fold. A lover, a child, a friend, and a soulmate. That's what you have when one vampire creates another. A vampire who gave up a part of their very being in order to create another of their kind in someone that they cared for very, very much.
Then a fluffy kitty girl who's spent the last six years hermiting it up in a junkyard and a blue goofball who owns a pizza parlor with virtually no accomplishments to their names went and offed a centuries old vampire's youngest spawn.
That's got to sting.
So here we are in a brand new year with ULW's very first pay per view behind us, and yet nothing's changed. Nothing's shifted. Nothing's gotten better. In fact things look to be getting worse.
Silencer's grown a conscience and had the scales fall from his eyes, but now we've got fucking New Eden debuting to stink up the joint with Axe body spray and brimstone. Yeah Ray, unless your idea of peace, love, compassion, and harmony involves demonic possession and a fucking hive mind, I don't have a clue what you'd hope to accomplish by bringing that particularly pile of batshit insanity into ULW.
And guess what? i'm going to be watching it very, very closely. Because the twin cancers of Silas Mason and the Sinistry that fucked over the IWC for me and a bunch of other folks have decided that shitting all over two wrestling federations isn't enough, and that they need to go for the trifecta.
It's not going to end up bothering me much, I'm a dragon. Attempted diabolic possession ends up with one very chilly, very charred hellspawn. But on the bright side, due to my inherent magical nature I'm actually capable of performing a quasi-exorcism.
Being basically a walking ley line in and of myself, I'm considered solid on the ethereal and astral planes. I can punch incorporeal demons in the face. And angels. And ghosts. And demonic ghosts. And robot zombie cowboys. So if you see somebody with pitch black eyes, I can give them actual black eyes and drive the oogey-boogie man right out of 'em.
And if you need more than that? I've got Leeland Gaunt on speed dial. You know Mr. Gaunt, the fellow Sinistry made sure to run out of the IWC before they starting bringing in the major portion of their spook show. British dude with a cane, Curtis Hughes school of fashion with the whole never taking off the sunglasses, has a seven foot tall gestalt eidolon that will literally eat malevolent spirits.
You need some wards set up, you want your safe protected from incorporeal pickpockets, want to take some measures to make sure your daughter doesn't get sucked into a TV, Gaunt's your guy.
But they again, Ray, it seems like Jason King's your guy too, right?
You look at him and you see dollar signs. You want him to be your knight in shining armor. Your money maker, your magic Champion the Wonder Horse, complete with a bit and bridle that'll let you lead him around by the nose and make him do fancy tricks.
Gosh, Ray, you've done just about everything but crawl up the man's ass. And you probably WOULD have crawled up his ass if he hadn't reflexively clenched and went "Dude, the fuck are you doing? Get the hell away from my ass!"
Because he's not stupid. He sees what you're doing, and so do I. You're doing your best to put a wall between Jason King and the rest of the roster. A wall of hatred, a wall of jealousy, a wall of resentment. You want people clenching their teeth in rage, you want them reflexively curling their fingers into rending claws at the mention of his name. You want them going "Why does the boss adore him so much? Why am I not the one showered in adoration? Why don't I get the marketing campaign? Why not me?"
I don't give a fuck about power. I don't give a fuck about fame. I don't give a fuck about fortune.
What do I care about? Pizza. Orange soda. Justice. Rules being followed. Being right. Punishing stupid people.
It's why we don't get along, Ray.
You're a bullshit artist. You're a liar. You're a big greasy scumbag in a cheap suit that will slap words together in whatever combination will get you your desired outcome. That has terrible, terrible taste in music. You heard me Fatter, Balder, Duder.
And somewhere in the midst of farting out your mass media marketing hype a little bird tweeted something in your ear. In the midst of your best Max teh Fayt "EHRMAGERD WE HAS TO HIRE NEW PEOPLES CUZ NO ONE CAN BEAT TEH JERSON KERNG!" campaign, I mentioned that he hadn't beaten me yet.
And here we are, Jason, set to square off against one another. Here I am, tossed in here like an afterthought. Because despite the fact that he couldn't be arsed to actually SHOW UP to his fucking commitments and WRESTLE A GODS DAMNED MATCH ON A PPV, Bongsmoke Johansan has decided that he needs to embrace the sunk costs fallacy like he has Priest embrace his phallus to try and justify the exhorbitant amount SCW darling Damien Angel is getting paid by chucking him into the main event slot with Little Miss Meat Curtains herself, Willow Wilkes.
Oh boy, two inherently unlikeable piles of goober peas in the tippity-top spot on the show! Oooh, two people that the fans absolutely LOATHE in the motherfucking go home spot.
Well, that is if Angel will actually grace us with his fucking presence and if Willow hasn't posted some drizzly shit on Twitter, staged black and white photo shoot with her showing off the goods via her favorite misheard Scott Stapp lyrics "With thighs wide open," said something emo, and follows through by actually quitting the fucking fed. For a fucking sociopath she sure has a bug up her butt about what other people think and say about her.
So meanwhile two paragons of butthurt SCW emo pageantry are handed the main event, the world fucking champion and the only person even CLOSE on the League of Superstar rankings are consigned to somewhere in the middle of the show.
Gee, I think all the crap John Browncheese is flinging in my general direction is starting to splatter onto other people. And you just know there's some ridiculous plot in the works. After all, SOMEBODY has butted her big stupid nose into my last TWO matches and gets to debut on the main show wrestling motherfucking piddle. Why? Because she's got the same last name as one of the principal operators of the company. Hooray for neopotism, whopee!
I love how everything is about love, kindness, compassion, and fairness. But the moment I get involved? Nope! Off the table, do whatever bad things you like without consequence!
Out late partying, strung out on dope, or got your dick caught in a doberman or something? Hey, sure, we can totally cancel your pay per view match.
What, no, don't be ridiculous! Of COURSE you don't have to wrestle your own matches!
Threaten to quit the fed on Twitter? Here, have a main event match with another wrestler of bad behavior and ill repute!
You, me, Clay, and Cameron, we're the only people in this stinking company that come out here and do our jobs honestly and reliably. I get shit on, Clay gets shit on, Cameron gets slandered with stupid bullshit about being a batterer, and you Jason? You get put on a pedestal and are made the center of a marketing campaign geared to make everybody else on the roster hate your stinking guts.
Silencer is right. ULW is a fucking hellhole that perverts and corrupts everything that it touches, and whatever it can't bring down to its level, it'll try and bury in shit.
And you know what? I don't care. Because I can stand here from my lofty height of seven feet, look out head and shoulders over everybody and see the tide of onrushing excrement for what it is. It's not going to smell good, but it's fucking New York, nothing fucking smells good here, and it just reeks worse the closer to get to Jersey.
And do you know what the REALLY fucked up thing about this is, Jason? It's the fact that even the corrupt corporate douchenozzles, the primadonnas with the sticks up their asses, and the SCW Pwecious Widdle Feewings Brigade don't even believe in the success of their own fucking agenda.
I mean they're not even taking the chance, Jason, not even the slightest CHANCE that all their run ins and plots and gimmickry and probably changing the match stipulation at least three times between the start and the end of the night fail.
Because you're the ULW World Heavyweight Champion, Jason. And I'm the highest ranking member of the roster without a belt in my possession. I'm sitting here, the most qualified to be number one contender. I'm sitting here being one of the hardest workers of the company. I'm sitting here being the biggest, sharpest thorn in Raymond van der Fart's fat, flabby side. And despite all that they're not even going to take the teensiest, tinsiest chance that this Big Blue Bitch is going to walk out of FUF the World Heavyweight Champion.
Yeah, Jason, the big bad marketing campaign that says they have to look outside ULW for talent because you're so awesome and no one can beat is so unsure about your actual chances of beating me that they've made this a non-title match. Because if I get the belt I'm sure as hell not going to get an Apple Dough entry theme, inspirational slogans on some fucking tea towels, and fuel Raymond's wet dreams of a sea of five year olds in Fruity Pebbles t-shirts stretching from sea to shining sea.
I've got a hell of a potty mouth, for starters. You can't print any of my best stuff on tea towels and t-shirts for the Make a Wish Foundation childrens with ass cancer. The moral guardians and that stuck one up biddy that pisses and moans to the BBC won't allow it.
And besides, where the hell are their going to find a pair of jorts that fit me? Not to mention that the denim is going to look awful with my complexion. It'd look like I was wrestling naked.
Yeah, I'm not going to be the ULW's mass marketed monstrosity, Jason. And do you know what? I'm not going to let them make you into an empty, soulless, stale shell of yourself.
I'm going to win, Jason. I'm going to beat you. I'm going to derail the hype train.
And it'll be for your own fucking good.
Hugs 'n kisses, Jay-Kay! See you in two weeks!
[Kalinda chuckles and casually blows a kiss at the camera, sending a tide of billowing fog along with it.]
[Fade to white.]
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