Black Storm rolling… (WoD)
He knew one day, somehow, he would change the world.
Liam McKenzie Frasier was nobody’s fool. He had known his whole life that there weren’t very many opportunities for people like him to make a name for themselves that didn’t involve the Ten Most Wanted list. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1980, to a grade school teacher and an ironworker, Liam had learned early that to get what one wanted, you had to be willing to pay the necessary price. At someone else’s expense, if needed.
He can still remember his mother, mostly just sensory images of a smiling woman with brown hair and doe eyes; hugging him during a Christmas nativity scene, the smell of baking bread as she rolled dough and patted it into pans, the soft feel of her hands as she stroked his hair and sang him to sleep. But there were no fond memories of his mother beyond childhood; his father, a surly Black Scotsman with a wicked temper and a taste for strong drink, had seen to that.
Young Liam knew little of why his father killed her, strangled her in the little bedroom her son slept in, the one with the blue and green oval knit rug and the brown bear lamp. He’d strangled her even as he sobbed hysterically, calling her a ‘lying whore’ and crying for Gaia to forgive him for ‘fornicating with the unclean’. He understood even less after his father beat him savagely and threw him down the stairs into the dank cellar, shouting obscenities and calling him a ‘mongrel bastard’. A long night of sleepless thought had not shed anymore light on the subject, until the next afternoon when the door opened and a severe woman in a plain black pantsuit and chunky heels(grandma shoes, Liam thought) and an elderly man in a worn flannel shirt came down the stairs in the company of his father. They didn’t look at him, a scared five-year-old boy with blood dried on his cheeks, they simply took him by the hand and led him out of the cellar into his new life. A life of degradation, fear, and intolerance.
They told him that they were there to ‘save’ his father. That they would ‘save’ him too, and teach him how to be strong in the eyes of Gaia. They told him that they would redeem his ‘tainted’ blood and bring him up in the arms of the greatest of earth’s warriors, the Fianna. They told him these things and then they took him, and his father, to a small village in the Highlands, far from the city and his friends, and they did their damnedest to ‘beat the Wyrm’ out of him.
He knew there was something strange about them. There was something feral about the eyes, something predatory in their way of moving, and when he was ten he’d seen them change for the first time. At that moment he knew. He would change the world and he would save people from the monsters that lurked in their midst, the ones who bred themselves into human society and used people’s own blood against them.
He killed his first human when he was twelve. He’d practiced on animals up to that, mostly stray cats and dogs, and on one memorable occasion, a pony belonging to the gypsy family who passed through every summer. Liam knew that the old gypsy man who headed the caravan had suspected who had slit the creature’s throat and left it in a hedgerow, but rested comfortably in the knowledge that people never believed anything the gypsies had to say. He’d thought he was ready. But all of his macabre practice didn’t sufficiently prepare him for what he intended to do; kill his father.
He’d nearly died in the attempt. The old man had battled valiantly in defense of his own life, first stabbing him and then bludgeoning Liam about the head and face with fists like half-hams, but memories of his mother’s hoarse cries and swollen, black tongue had been enough for the nearly man-sized Liam to hold on until the man’s struggles ceased and his heavy fingers dropped from the hands encircling his throat. He’d stood over his father’s inert body and felt no remorse, no guilt, only the satisfaction of a job well done. He took his personal effects and fled across the heather, his bloody gut wrapped in a sheet, until he found refuge in a culvert and from there made his broken way towards Edinburgh and the future.
The future had been dirty, brutal, and educational. A back-alley doctor told him that the knife wound had barely missed his spleen, which would have bled him out in a few minutes. After the man had stitched him up and dosed him with antibiotics, Liam paid him back by slitting his throat with one of his own scalpels and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. Within a few months, Liam realized that he was going to have to leave Scotland; the place was getting a little too close for comfort, what with the police and the so-called ‘Garou’ all trying to capture and/or kill him. He’d stowed away aboard a cargo vessel heading for the US, and, after making port in New York, disappeared into America’s seedy criminal element with nary a pause.
Thing proceeded predictably after that. A self-made man, he called himself, after the dust had settled and the blood had dried. He had become one of the strongest and least-fucked-with leaders in organized crime; a pretty impressive feat considering he was neither Russian nor Italian. But good business sense and a wide streak of ruthlessness had stood him in good stead and by the time the bombs fell he’d become king of his own little empire, an organized crime ring spanning whole states. He’d knew he’d been marked by supernaturals as a threat and had survived numerous assassination attempts, all of which had only boosted his reputation. One man, a Don Venicci of Atlantic City, had even tried to call a truce with him, but Liam had sent all of his messengers back opened.
The end of the world didn’t even put him off his stride. Gifted with a mild telekinetic ability that he’d used to great advantage over the years, Liam noticed within a couple of months the sharp increase in mankind’s mental processes, in some cases waking up dormant ability and in others manifesting soon after birth. An idea began to form.
This was his purpose. This was how he could change the world for the better, give humanity the edge it needed to rise above those who would devour it from the inside out. He’d begun drawing in mercenaries and raiders, paying them in goods and slaves, and buying slaves, any slaves who showed any increased mental function. He’d chosen a handful of them as consorts, giving rise to the term ‘slave-wife’. He himself owned more than ten, women he had hand-picked from the pens for the strength of their talent, and they had produced many children, most of them also showing some kind of ability. His first slave-wife, a shy, doe-eyed woman by the name of Tess, had remained his favorite, despite her inability to produce any offspring beyond her first, a stunted defective unable to talk. No one dared question his choice, Tess was incredibly talented, one of the most powerful in the band, and she had become a fixture in the pens with her healing skills.
The nomadic lifestyles of the gypsies he’d seen as a child stirred him to keep his community on the move, making it more difficult for other raider bands to strike them. He’d begun training his psychic chattel as weapons, like trained attack dogs, and used others for the camoflage of the caravan as it moved and rested. They never followed the same circuit twice, changing direction seemingly by whim, to confuse and frighten possible attackers.
They had seemed invincible; a storm that struck and moved on, never the same place twice, moving across the country like a plague of locusts. One angry group of raiders in the Great Plains had proven amusing, but in the end their dependence on supernatural interference had been their undoing. Liam’s Black Storm had moved in, taken what they’d wanted, and moved on before the other band, a ragtag group of scavengers called the Red Skulls, could react. Liam and his second-in-command, a morose gunslinger named Judah, had led them on a merry goose chase all around Iowa before they’d given up in disgust and a bit of superstitious fear. The Black Storm was rolling.
Things were definitely going in his favor now. Wisconsin had turned out to be ripe pickings, except for a bit of a nuisance in the central region calling itself Avalon. A collection of wizards and werewolves living in a fairy castle, Avalon was a prime example of what Liam McKenzie Frasier loathed more than anything else on earth. It was all a lie, an illusion, the bait for the trap, luring people, normal people like him, into lives of oppression under a regime of unnatural monsters. Liam suffered no illusions; he knew he was a monster, but at least he was human.
Avalon would have had to wait, but for one very important thing. A strange man, traveling alone, had somehow approached the Black Storm as it rested, walked unnoticed through its sentries, and spoken to Liam of the White Foxes, of the powers they possessed. Frasier had no interest in the Foxes or in their help. But this man, this emissary, told him of the Foxes plan, their goal; to separate the worlds of the natural and the supernatural forever, and Liam rejoiced at the idea. As the old adage said, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", so had he had thrown in his hand with the Black Priest, Malachai, with the enthusiasm of the righteous. Let them tremble. They would fall as so many others had before him, and he would revel in the knowledge that he had struck a great blow for humanity.
The Black Storm was rolling.