The Draconic Wizard Workshop

#6, Action: The Mexico City Hive

Originally posted here on November 6, 2021.

I remember much from my life as a Mage and vampire. Dozens of exciting moments stick out to me, some of which would only qualify as “action” in a rather boring movie, but the one I have chosen to discuss is the purification of the Hive under Mexico City in late 2008. This is a completely non-canon event, deep within a canon-divergent timeline.

Warnings for violence, death, gore, mind control, and aspects of body horror. My life is not a sanitized one.

Picture it: late 2008. Changes have been rumbling in the vampire world: whispers of ancients awakening, artifacts found, levels of cooperation previously unheard of. The sect I had long since joined, the Sabbat, welcomed one of its highest-ranked members, Cardinal Uldrak Illian, back to Mexico City, its power base, after a year of being MIA. He returned with a powerful artifact and a retinue most unusual—not members of the Sabbat, and in one case, not even a vampire at all.

I speak of Krusa, a werewolf.

To keep the background of this particular moment short, he eventually made it clear to us that the foul creatures and strange corruption under our city was not just Tzimisce experiments or slight infringement and activity from another source, but a full-fledged Hive under the city. He explained that a Hive is a massive, sprawling series of underground tunnels and chambers, filled to the brim with corrupted werewolves, spirits of destruction, and mortal humans possessed by these spirits, their bodies and minds twisted into unsavable abominations whose best chance at salvation is a quick death. Furthermore, the creatures of this Hive had kidnapped the Sabbat’s leader, and Uldrak Illian had gone in alone after her, getting himself captured on the way. We had to go in and get them before the forces in the Hive did anything else or launched an attack of their own against the city.

We gathered what few forces we could in less than an hour. Myself, some of the Tremere antitribu, a couple of other Cardinals, a small handful of Priscii, Krusa, a couple of his friends including the Setite Vanessa and the Gangrel Beckett, and what other Sabbat we could recruit on the way made our way to one of the entrances. At the other entrance, two more of Krusa’s friends, the Gangrel Benji and the Assamite Chaiya, along with Sascha Vykos, kicked off a distraction to lure as many of the corrupted werewolves out of the Hive as they could while the rest of us went in the back entrance. I heard that their distraction of choice was a “batnado:” calling as many of the bats in the city to them as possible to create an obvious supernatural disturbance.

(For those familiar with Mage: The Ascension factions, the Technocratic Union was not particularly pleased by this, and had a run-in with our “distraction” while the rest of us were underground. But I digress.)

We broke our way into the small industrial building and were greeted by fomori--the twisted humans I spoke of earlier--which we dispatched easily. We made our way through the hole in the floor into a long, earthy tunnel, killing fomori as we went. One, I Dominated into being a guide of sorts, controlling his mind enough for him to tell us where we needed to go and point out shortcuts when we needed it.

The first chamber was the most memorable, for me, until we reached the bottom floor. We descended down the tunnel into the first chamber, filled with fomori and corrupted werewolves, as well as two mounted guns of some description. The heavily armored went in first to draw fire, allowing the Lasombra with their shadow magic to destroy the guns. After that, my Tremere moved in, providing covering fire while I did the same.

Werewolves are surprisingly hardy—one nearly reached me before our werewolf seized him and threw him against the wall. The fight was vicious, the scent of such powerful blood in the air exhilarating, the ability to unleash my full potential with no fear of being observed by mortals or causing penalties in others’ opinion of me freeing. I unleashed hell: waves of flame, shards of solidified blood, fragile and jagged spikes that rose from the ground.

At one point, one of the corrupted werewolves leapt at one of the more vulnerable members of our attack force, I forget precisely who. I froze them in midair with Movement of the Mind—effectively telekinesis—and took a hold of their blood with a separate power of mine. At once, I pushed on their body and pulled on their blood, flinging them into the center of the room and taking their blood for myself and the other vampires, providing a much-needed refuel of blood and taking one enemy out of the action.

We fought our way through that chamber and the rest of the rooms on that floor. We slowly made our way down through the Hive, taking a shortcut when our “guide” brought it up and thereby avoiding a considerable chunk of the fighting. We were a strike force, not an army: while we could take quite a few of them, we would have sustained heavy losses had we tried to attack the worst of them. We skipped down to the bottom floor without their knowledge.

This lowest section of the Hive, foul and meaty, dripping with unknown fluids and housing distant screams, was built like a labyrinth. We passed through twisting corridors filled with fomori and the occasional werewolf, passing pools of stale blood and piles of human corpses as we went. The stench was indescribable: I will not even try.

Eventually, the Tzimisce among us began to twitch, and when asked, they said, “Can’t you hear it? The singing?”

“Oh no,” Vanessa said. “Uldrak heard singing just before we lost contact.”

Shuffling footsteps came around the corner. As it came into view, its power and rage washed over us.

Uldrak’s body, hanging from its bones like a puppet from a string, faced us. All of his dozens of eyes rolled back into his head, his extra limbs dangled limply, the stitches normally keeping his mouth from opening too far completely snapped. (To be fair, he looked like this before, and had never been one to look “normal.” The horrifying part was that he was not in control of his body, not his appearance itself. I’d been sitting ten feet from this in yearly meetings for well over a century and had long since stopped being shocked at the ways that Tzimisce vampires will fleshcraft themselves.)

It was clear: the being in control of this body was not Uldrak. The Tzimisce covered their ears and doubled over, twitching in pain. I and the other Tremere felt an itch in our blood, a soft singing that the others could not hear.

The Eldest, ancient Antediluvian (clan founder) of the Tzimisce, stood more-or-less before us, possessing Uldrak across the many intervening miles.

He demanded to know where his childe was, in a booming, sinister voice that sent several of the Tremere running. It was all I could do to clutch my staff and keep myself under control. I confess little memory of this encounter, as hard as it was to control the terror in my blood. Krusa, the one who had slain the Eldest’s childe, was primarily left to talk to him, to somewhat deny it, to deflect, until one of the Cardinals managed to teleport behind the Eldest and strike Uldrak’s head hard enough and with enough power of Faith to shake the influence off.

I would rate that as less “exciting” and more “frightening,” but rest assured, we will get to “exciting” again soon.

We regrouped after that, sending Uldrak and some of the more shaken members of our group back to the entrance of the labyrinth as the rest of us carried on. We still had to rescue our leader, and according to Krusa, there was a threat physically within the Hive itself: a creature called the Second Heir, a werewolf that had been fed vampire blood and pumped full of corruptive energy since the day it was born and had since grown into a monster that, if not stopped, could become unimaginably powerful.

Not liking the idea of that growing beneath our city, we pressed on, and eventually reached the final room: the gestation chamber (not my naming, I assure you) of the Second Heir.

That creature was so horrible as to be almost indescribable. Imagine something very much like a werewolf, then make it nearly twenty feet long, body extended like a larva with four insectoid legs between its two mammalian ones. Its eyes, all six, are compound, its jaws are framed by mandibles, long antennae twitch on its head. Its tail, completely buglike, coils into a scorpion stinger. Its fur is patchwork, covering chitin plates, and black ichor drips from between its teeth.

I have seen a lot of horrible things in my long life. That was one of the worst.

The room itself was huge, fleshy, pulsing with veins and musculature. In the back, our missing Regent seemed unconscious, bound within the wall and dead to the world.

The Second Heir gave us no room to consider it. The beast charged, Rage pulsing in its blood and making it faster, stronger, more agile than anyone could have believed.

My role in the fight was paramount, if not as heroic as some others’: I slowed it down. I took a hold of its blood and body and struggled, fought against it, to make it comparatively sluggish, only barely supernaturally fast and creating openings for others to rip at its plates, slash at its soft spots, and to avoid its strikes. This took nearly all of my concentration; I only managed to launch a couple of solidified blood shards at it through the whole battle.

Its claws dug deep into my allies, its jaws nearly severed one of the Lasombra in half, and its tail, most dangerous to our werewolf, who was not dead and therefore vulnerable to its venom, was an ever-present threat. It even breathed out a cone of sickly green balefire at one point, washing over each of us and making us scatter in terror. Had I been alive, I would have never felt such adrenaline before: as it was, my heart was hammering to keep my blood moving and active, struggling to sustain the magic keeping it from slaughtering us all in seconds.

The turning point came when someone awoke the Regent and gave her enough blood to allow her to activate her powers. The Second Heir was immune to most magic, mine only working as well as it did due to my history as a true Mage, but not to her Obtenebration, as it had been feeding off of her blood for years. Darkness that the Lasombra could not control properly wrapped around it and held it still long enough for Krusa to properly behead it.

Even then, its body thrashed and struck out wildly from the ground, and did not still for nearly a minute.

Escape was a matter of scooping up our wounded and barreling back up the secret tunnel, having Velya open up small lava geysers to block their pursuit of us along the way.

Despite my many experiences with the sieges on Ceoris, no individual attack scared and excited me as much as the assault on the Hive. The lack of planning, the horror and the unknown of the creatures, the knowledge that we were rescuers and not simply attackers, that there was something on the line… It produced a unique atmosphere, one that, despite the exhilaration it brought, I hope to never experience again.