Fic 1:Dark Eden holds many secrets, but none are more cryptic then the tales of the monsters Anacrothe created.

Must Include:Horror, Alchemy

No Mention of:Vampires/Vamprisum

River Of Dreams

"River of dreams take me with you tonight..."

The volumetric flask chinked sharply as he set it down on the marble bench top. With one practised hand he positioned a glass beaker beneath the burette whilst the other opened the small valve set into its side. A thin stream of aqua blue liquid washed into the beaker, hissing as it made contact with the air. Humming to himself, Anarcrothe swirled the potion until the liquid reached the first mark etched into the glass and then shut off the valve.

"Lying in your arms we'll drift to islands of wonder that gleam and glow under the stars as we glide through the dark to the heart of the night "

Picking up a sealed decanter from the bench, he flipped open the lid with his thumb and raising his beaker to eyelevel dripped four perfect drops of silver fluid into it. The blue liquid turned a sudden pink where the silver drops impacted it and he mixed the two with a gentle swirling motion of his wrist. Satisfied with the mixture, he turned and reached for one of the books heaped in a jagged pile at the edge of the desk.

"River of dreams gently hold me again, I remember all you told me

All of the secrets you whispered as we crept away from the daylight and melted back into the night..."

He sifted through the pile quickly, his thumb tracing the spines of familiar volumes searching for the one he required. With a small frown, he lifted the top three aside and bent to take a closer look at those remaining. Disappointed, he straightened and cast around the small laboratory.

"Ah! There you are "

He crossed the space between benches with two strides and placed his beaker of solution to one side before reaching out with both hands.

"Now you should know better than to be sitting on that "

Without breaking its song for a moment, the Chorus bird allowed itself to be lifted and placed to one side. A few of its feathers came loose and seesawed down to rest on the bench. Tutting in mock horror, Anarcrothe picked them off of the shining marble surface and deposited them in the steel bin on the bench top. The bird wouldn't have any feathers left if it kept losing them at this rate, he mused to himself as he wiped off the sticky black residue they left on his fingers. He imagined DeJoule would like the creature even less if it had to sing naked.

"Well now, don't you worry, I won't let her do anything to you again. Mean little wench that she is I won't let her hurt my little Chorus bird ever again "

At least that was how Anarcrothe referred to it. The Chorus bird had been one of his very first creations and he was still proud of it, even if it wasn't looking its best anymore. It had been such a shame when Mella, the serving girl had died. Such a tragic waste. The small girl had been a favourite of DeJoule's who had used her as both a handmaiden of sorts and as an entertainer at dinner. The girl with her dark curls and darker chocolate eyes had been of gypsy stock, and her rich voice had been a regular accompaniment to meals at the Energist's private residence. After her death of the Coorhagen plague, he'd taken the body back with him to his own abode to the south, keeping the corpse ticking over with one of DeJoule's energy devices strapped to its chest. Throughout the two-day journey he'd fed it through a needle injected into one of the veins at the wrist.

A short side-trip through Bane's woods had captured him one of the druid's large ravens, a great black beast with small shining obsidian eyes. It would do nicely.

When he'd finished, he'd stepped back to admire his creation. Its body, never that small, was large and heavy now and its feathers puffed out at slightly odd angles to accommodate the extra fat bodies he'd inserted under the skin to act as energy sources for the new improved brain. The head sat on a neck made stunted by its increased circumference and the extra weight of the front half of the girl's brain attached to the spinal cord of the raven. He'd pulled the raven's puckered bird skin over the bulge at the back of its skull (it had taken careful filing to remove the sharp edges of the hole he'd cut in the bone so that they did not damage the newly inserted brain tissue) and all in all, he thought he'd done a fairly good job of the creature. It had blinked at him slowly with one slightly misted eye and then it had opened its beak and sung.

The girl's voice had poured out from the creature, higher now and not as rich, but most definitely that of the girl. He'd been a little disappointed to discover it only sang the one song, a pretty melody that he recalled was one of the popular ballads at the time. Something about a river of dreams. Of course now, so many years later, he knew the song off by heart and yet still he never tired of hearing it.

DeJoule had not liked the chorus bird. Anarcrothe had thought that throwing the energy bolt at it had been a little too extreme, but he wasn't foolish enough to argue with the woman when she was in that mood, so he'd tucked the squawking bird under his robes and headed home. He really thought she would have appreciated the gesture a little more he'd mused, sitting in the carriage home, stroking the slightly singed feathers of the creature. But then, you just couldn't please some people.

"River of dreams gently hold me again, I remember all you told me,

All of the secrets you whispered as we crept away from the daylight and melted back into the night "

And now, now the bird had lost most of its shining black feathers and those that were left were coated with a bitter-scented oil that oozed from its puckered skin almost continuously. The Alchemist doubted the creature could see the world any longer from eyes turned to a milky white, and if he were to be totally honest, it had recently begun to smell just a little. But still, its voice remained pure and the alchemist would not have parted with it for the world. It was, after all, his very first creation.

Picking up the book it had been perched on, he wiped the droplets of black oil from its leather-bound surface and flipped it open. The pages were covered with annotations and sums in his neat hand and he peered closely at these for a moment before setting the book back down. Pulling open a drawer in the bench, he drew out a small wooden box from which he removed a slender glass syringe. Selecting from the assortment fitted into indentations in the box's interior he inserted a thin needle into the syringe and with a flick of his finger to be sure of its fastness, he took up the beaker of potion and set out across the laboratory.

There was a small, bubbling clucking from behind him and he turned to look back over his shoulder.

"Well now, my precious. How could I forget you?"

With a fond smile, Anarcrothe settled the Chorus bird on his shoulder and scratched its breast feathers as it resumed its song.

The laboratory was set many floors below the surface of Dark Eden in the strange citadel that had come to be the home of the alchemist and his two companions. It had two doors only, heavy oaken affairs girded with bands of black iron. One led to the upper levels, and the other, the one through which Anarcrothe and his singing companion now passed, led down a flight of twisting stone steps to the dungeons below.

DeJoule had never liked the dungeons, he thought as he padded down the narrow stairs. But then, there was very little the disagreeable woman did like.

By the time he had gone a hundred steps, he could hear the first sounds echoing up from below. He heard the mournful wailing first, and in the background a rhythmic pounding. With a weary sigh and a shake of his head, the alchemist marched onwards. When he encountered the heavy iron door at the foot of the stairs, he brought out a basalt wand from one of the pockets in his robe and traced a symbol over the thick bar that locked the door firmly. There was a click and a brief shimmer of green light. Placing the wand back in his pocket, he lifted the bar and opened the door. As soon as it swung open, there came a great wailing from beyond and now that there were no barriers between it and his ears, he could make out the metallic sound of chains accompanying the cadence of the pounding.

The light from the stairwell revealed a corridor lined with dark iron doors that stretched away into the distance. Anarcrothe reached out and felt for the switch that he knew to be on the wall to his left. Finding it finally, he twisted it and the corridor was suddenly illuminated with harsh white light that came from a strip of DeJoule's devices fitted along the length of the ceiling.

"Was I awake or did I dream?

The kiss of waves the silver slip stream that tumbles as it turns again towards the sea "

The Chorus bird's song lifted eerily above the mournful calling spilling out from behind the doors and he shook his head sadly. There had been a time once when the bird's singing had calmed the dungeon's inhabitants, but as time passed they seemed to lose their ability to listen to it. Swirling the beaker of potion absently in one hand, the alchemist set off down the corridor. In the distance he could hear the rhythmic pounding of something large and heavy repeatedly throwing itself against the iron door of its cell. The clattering of its chains was sharp and annoying and it set his teeth on edge. As he came within twenty feet of the door, the noise became almost deafening and above the pounding he could hear the harsh panting of a large creature. The doors of the cells were each twelve inches thick and reinforced in three places by bars of six inch iron, and yet still the door he approached shuddered, albeit almost imperceptibly, with the impacts from within.

Coming to a halt outside the door, Anarcrothe slid open the small hatch in its face. The pounding immediately stopped.

"Good afternoon, Brutus," the alchemist said cheerfully.

There came no answer from the cell's occupant.

"Your arm please, Brutus."

A large, hairless forearm was pressed against the bars, its black skin stretched taut over thick sinew and swelling muscle. Anarcrothe half-filled the syringe with the liquid from the beaker and setting the glass vessel on the stone flags, quickly and efficiently inserted the needle into the flesh of the creature and administered the potion.

The arm disappeared suddenly from the bars and a shuffling could be heard from within the cell. The alchemist stepped close to the grille and peered through. He smiled as he watched the creature within drag itself unsteadily back to the far corner of the cell to collapse in a boneless heap. It was large, the size of a small warhorse, and although mostly canine in appearance it favoured a bipedal stance that allowed its elongated forearms to hang loose. Completely hairless save for the tuft of long fur at the end of its lion-like tail, Brutus was a shade of black that put Anarcrothe in mind of coal dust. Thin-waisted and huge-shouldered, the augmented musculature of the creature made it seem almost malformed.

Originally, Anarcrothe had intended to give Brutus wings, but had decided that his sheer bulk would render the additions useless. Instead he had settled for a pair of curving lesser arms that extended from behind the creature's shoulders and hung down either side of its body. He wasn't sure what use Brutus would have for them, but he was sure it would find something. The head was large and flat-browed with a maw filled with a double row of teeth. Anarcrothe liked his creations to look fierce. That fear-inspiring head with its yellow eyes was now rested quietly on folded forearms, a thin trickle of saliva hanging from one corner. The beast which had so recently been raging like a creature possessed slept now as peacefully and obediently as a puppy. Addiction could be such a useful tool.

"River of dreams softly flowing away

Let me follow where you call me, and make me a part of you deep in the heart of you,

Let my reflection be clear in the water of life that tumbles at it turns again toward the night "

The wailing of the rest of the cells' inhabitants had ceased. They always did that once Brutus had calmed as though uneager to draw attention to themselves now that the main troublemaker had quieted. Anarcrothe smiled. They would all have their turn eventually. But Brutus was his latest project and his most adventurous to date. Brutus was to be a guard for both Dark Eden and its three human rulers. Powerful, fast, unstoppable, and completely subject to the whims of the one that held the supply of potion that fuelled his rage. It had taken Bane a month to capture the mountain lion, three months to capture the greater white bat that the alchemist had never used, and forty years to trap the werewolf. Anarcrothe had done the rest.

One day soon, this project would be complete and he would breed more of Brutus' kind and then Dark Eden could begin to expand ever further. With one last look through the grille at his sleeping patient, he slid the panel shut with a snap. Reaching up, he scratched the Chorus bird under the beak.

"Come then, my pretty. Time for our lunch too "

The Alchemist turned and retraced his steps back towards his laboratory. On his shoulder, the Chorus bird settled its wings back into place and resumed its song. The words echoed high and pure along the corridor and mixed with the soft sounds of Brutus' gentle snoring.

"River of dreams take me with you tonight "

-

Author's note: That was a lot of fun to write! I admit that when I started out I had no idea of who Anarcrothe actually was. I thought he was woman. Yeah, yeah, I'm a child of Soul Reaver sue me

I've used the spelling "Anarcrothe" as keeping with that detailed on the entry for the character found at .uk.

The song lyrics that the Chorus bird sings are taken from the song sung by Hayley Westenra called "River of Dreams" and can be found on the album "Pure". It's a slightly classical song and is sung by a girl with an exceedingly pure and beautiful voice, and as I was aiming for a bit of creepiness for this piece I thought it fit perfectly. I don't believe there's any need to know the song to get the impact however.