So, its been a good while since I last updated my little diary here, and as I write this from the hospital bed in the ‘facility’ I’ve got me checked into, I guess I have to say that while things have been going pretty well for Animus lately, there’s been a bit of a downturn for me.
I was doing OK. I’d managed to get past the crazies that taking the Animus caused, and the therapy sessions with Lady Katerina had things mostly under control. But then some things happened in House Hendrake at a wedding duel there, and it was revealed that while I was stuck in that life support chair for forty years, a sneaky cock sucking arsehole fucking bastard called Armin Hendrake somehow found out about the place, managed to sneak in without getting himself killed seven ways from Sunday, stole genetic material from my body and went off and made himself a son with it. I guess you could say I didn’t take this news well.
And then it never rains bur it pours, right? I have this cousin. I’m my Mom’s first born, and she’s her Mom’s first born, and our Moms are sisters. So this cousin of mine, who happened to be Head of House Hendrake, decides she doesn’t like that fact that through a completely different quirk of fate with our relevant fathers, I’m actually her heir presumptive to House Hendrake. Considering that I was currently occupying the number one slot in the Wellesley league tables, I can’t see what she was getting her knickers in a twist about. Oh, wait a minute. That’s right. She wasn’t getting her knickers in a twist because she’d stopped wearing any, along with anything else. I believe the quote was ‘I wear nothing because I fear nothing!’. Personally, I would say that is an excellent qualification for her to be occupying the bed next to me in here, but as it happens, that’s not how things turned out.
History was not on her side in regard to doing anything about her succession problem. A birth order is a birth order. And its not like there weren’t plenty of births. She’d had a good marriage before she inherited the House and before she and her husband did something monumentally stupid that got him committed as an alternative to executed and her let off free and clear, but then she’d had a second good marriage, followed by a number of casual fucks, so its not like there wasn’t a well established birth order for her dozen offspring.
Undaunted by petty things like facts and truths, my cousin has a rabbit hole moment worthy of – well me really, if I’m being brutally honest. The scheme she comes up with is right up there alongside anything Merlin or I could ever have envisaged. She and her twin brother, who she apparently had a teenage crush on, go back in time, link up with their young selves back then, prior to anybody having got married or done any kind of teenage fumbling in the dark, and they persuade their younger selves to be each other’s glorious firsts, then get their memories wiped so that neither of them remembers that they already did this thing in the past.
Now that would have only been completely mad as an idea if it had been left at that. No such luck. For whatever reason, my cousin decided to hit sanity right out of the park with a couple of other small but relevant details. For starters, their trip back in time turns out to have not been a precise and well executed surgical plan. While they were there, cousin managed to get herself harvested by another time travelling nut job, quite possible in a very similar way I was, which makes the other thing she did that much more preposterous actually, but anyway we’ll get to that, and it would appear that there is now a race of time travelling war machine empowered beings hell bent on destroying all other life, that incorporate genetics from my cousin. Strike one.
Then when she gets back to the present, for reasons that utterly defy comprehension, she took it upon herself to decide to make me her designated enemy. Quite masterfully really. she played me like a badly tuned violin. First off, having now got her previously unknown first born heir apparent from the past, instead of using tact and diplomacy to inform me of the fact that I was supplanted as heir to Hendrake, she practically hits me in the face with a glove over it, by having her chief of staff inform my lawyer that in no uncertain terms I was out of the succession, and done with in Hendrake. Strike Two.
Even yet, the fat lady hadn’t sung. Sure, she was up on her feet and had her music in front of her, and the orchestra were well into the overture, but the die was not yet cast. So what does she do? Well remember that son I didn’t know I had? Cock Sucking Fucking Bastard had manage to persuade him to take part in an insurrection. Son was in the Hendrake oubliette. All she had to do was expel him from Hendrake and hand him over to me. Did she? Did she hell as like. Strike three.
The Hendrake Hell-Keeper literally challenged me to ‘Bring it on!’ They steal my son. They turn him into a brainwashed rebel. They jail him in Hendrake Hell, and then they challenge me to come and get him if I dare?
Someone had to pay for that. And really there was only one door at which my wrath could come calling. The author, director, and lead player in this whole saga of insanity was my cousin. But it would not be enough to just defeat her. For this level of sin, she had to be obliterated. The punishment that Swayville declined to extract that many millennia ago would be extracted now by me.
Reckless Creative Genius, right? Nobody was going to challenge my right to be the most reckless when it came to plans. What I needed was a scheme that could get round the situation we have with grandmother. Hendrakes are users. They always have been. Anything to hone the edge a little sharper. Just killing my cousin would not be enough. She’d be back with red eyes. But what if here soul wasn’t available to turn it into a demon?
What makes a soul unavailable? It has to already be somewhere. If it’s not alive, then it has to be possessing someone. But if it’s possessing someone then it’s driving the bus, and back in action. Except what if the person it’s possessing has so strong a soul of their own that the possessor can’t get purchase? Impotent possession. And even better. A child was stolen off me, so I steal a child off her, and with my strength of mind and her strength of body, that child would be perfect for having Cousin’s soul bound into it as an impotent possession.
So I did it. With a small bunch of friends, I rescued my son. Fuck You Hell-Keeper. Oh wait, yes they did. Then I subdued my Cousin, dragged her to the Abyss, used her blood in the Abyss ritual to sire a child, bore the child, killed my cousin and bound her soul into my daughter. I defeated her. I paid Hendrake back for all the wrong it had done to me. I won. I am victorious. She is dead and forever confined to a small corner of my daughters mind.
So why do I feel like utter shit? Why do I feel like if I were to tread in me, I would throw my boots away and get new ones rather than try to scrape me off? Why can’t I stop crying whenever I think of my lovely brilliant, beautiful daughter? Why am I not even able to bring my self to start helping rehabilitate my rescued son?
What am I going to do?