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What had he done?

His body was wracked with pain and guilt as he knelt on the cold stone floor, shaking, hunched over, and arms wrapped round himself. He didn’t want to process what had just happened, but it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t ignore it. Something had been torn away from him, someone, and it hurt. Like nothing else he'd ever felt before, it hurt.

So, this is what it felt like, to lose what mattered most.

And he had done it to himself.

To prove…what? He’d been on a quest to show that he was better, that he cared enough to put himself at risk for his vampires. But it had all been a farce. A joke. That had hurt enough, in a way, one that incited his rage.

But this….

He had traded his pride for pain. Unrelenting. It seared through him, even now, and left him raw, and worse. It smashed into him, wave after shocking wave. He was drowning in it, and when he gasped for air, for respite, in that rotten, cloying cave air, it came out a choked sob instead.

He had been warned that this could happen. The Spear exacted a heavy toll.

He had been warned.

Time passed.

When he’d finally drug himself to his feet and out of that cave, the now dormant Spear of Destiny in hand, he had felt directionless and wracked with guilt. Ravnos was gone, he could feel it so acutely, an absence in the world, that familiar warmth that he had been able to seek out no matter where he was, at any time.

What was once a comfort, was now, very suddenly, just an empty void.

He’d gone back to his temple, at first. He had sunk into the shadows on the ground and briefly thought that he might stay there. He could go dormant too. He could sleep as the other Gods had slept. Someone else could take up the Vampire domain. Perhaps Lilith. She was more than capable, even if she was not a Deity herself.

Maybe Torpor would finally return. She’d be more than happy to see his utter failure and take up the position.

But he didn’t stay there, in the shadows. He had slipped through them and back to his home. Back to the cold, empty dark. Back to familiar loneliness, only this time that loneliness was made worse because he had had that taste of what being with someone, of what truly loving, could feel like.

He had locked his doors and mourned. He’d let himself feel every bit of the pain he deserved to feel for what he had done. It burned through him, destroyed him, and just when he thought he could, maybe, function again, it started anew.

He’d wept, and it wasn’t very God-like, but he hadn’t cared anymore.

The days and nights like this blurred together. Time was a funny thing, to a God. They’d lived so long that even a week could seem to pass in a blink of an eye.

He didn’t really know how long it had been before he had felt capable of facing the world again. He started by reopening the temple. That was easy enough to do, as it wasn’t as though many came to visit anyways. He went back to watching, and it was in this watching that he noticed something very strange.

It wasn’t just that Ravnos was gone. It was as if he had never existed.
He followed the ripple effect like lines on a map. Grendel made it his business to know all vampires. It came with the job. There were many that were missing. Many that should have been, but were not. The realization of it was startling. It obviously had something to do with the Spear, about how it could change destiny, but…

What did that mean? Could what was done be undone? For the first time in a while, Grendel felt the stirring of something within the darkness that consumed him. A pinprick of light. Of hope. How had he not thought of this before? The Spear was still in his possession, dormant now, no longer whispering sweet promises in his ears, but it existed still. He’d spent so much time overcome with despair, it hadn’t even occurred to him that, maybe, possibly, this could all be fixed.

He suddenly felt a desperate need for answers, and he knew where he needed to go first.