The Dragon's Trial [ attn: William, Vee, Bertram ]

[Samael]

Find the fire in your blood. Wield it against the chains of your mortal past. And come to stand beside me.

These are the last words that William hears before his world goes red, his anger flares white-hot. Which is not to say that there is nothing of his own mind right after...there is a brief second where he steels himself, attempts to figure out the meaning of those words. Is he to just rip through, use his Tzimisce-granted powers, something else? William is a quiet man; he watches, observes, learns.

This is not a time for quiet. And his options are narrowing quickly as the Beast travels up his spine, chokes his esophogus, coils around his brain.

And then there is heat. There is fire all around him. And it's too much; the Beast that was about to take him lunges and snaps into his brain, divesting it of William.

This isn't William. This is Shaitan, the character that William created for his career. Maybe it was always there all along. Ioana knows what he did, what happened. She is the only one in this room besides William who knew what really happened; the others got a brief retelling of the story via the Tzimisce Cardinal. That version told so much and so little. It didn't express how his world went red for the first time, long before he was a vampire, as he grabbed a baseball bat that had shattered his face and given his beloved mother a subarachnoid hemorrhage that she has never (and probably will never) wake up from. That rage, so similar to this one, had guided him as he brought that bat down, forcefully splitting the skin of Jacob Halloran's forehead open on the first swing. Shattering his skull on the second. Turning his face into so much meat-and-blood spackle on the third. And there was a fourth. And a fifth. And a tenth. A fifteenth. When William had finally finished (because the bat had broken), there was nothing recognizable in Jacob Halloran as even human from the mid-chest upward.

So perhaps he had always meant to be a Cainite. Maybe fate guided him to this moment to fulfill a destiny. He came up with Shaitan out of the nickname given to him in prison. Devil, the erudite prisoner had said. He thought that it fit, and it became the creature he took on the persona of when he stepped between the ropes. It certainly fits now, in this instant.

Shaitan takes those words from Vee, and he uses them. The fire in your blood, much different (or is it?) from the fire that scours him. But no less crucial. And he acts.

William is not a survivor yet. He may be some day, but he is not yet. Shaitan is. And that's exactly what he plans to do; survive. With a roar, he plants his foot against the back wall of the enflamed alcove, using the pain of the flames and the searing of his skin to give him extra strength as he just, quite frankly, barrels through.

Samael
Okay I guess I need a Courage roll, so...
Dice: 3 d10 TN9 (3, 6, 7) ( fail )

niko
D:

Samael @ 3:03PM
[[-2 BP to Strength, Strength+Brawl, Spec Brute applies, and for fuck's sake if I fail this one I give up.]]
Roll: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALID

jamie @ 3:03PM
*o/*

niko @ 3:03PM
5 suxx!