Castlevania: Crescent Moon Concerto -- By James Haley [haleyjd@hotmail.com]

1852 - Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness - Reinhardt, Carrie, Henry

The Vampire Killer was passed to Reinhardt Schneider, another man of Belmont blood to whom the ancestral name was lost, but not the fate which accompanied it. Having seen a Blood Moon rise, fulfilling a prophecy made by a priest of the Orthodox Church eight years before, he set out for the old castle.

At the same time, a young girl named Carrie Fernandez also set her sites on Castlevania. A descendent of Sypha Belnades, most of her family had been killed many years ago in a raid by Dracula's minions, leaving her an orphan. Her adoptive family would meet the same fate. When the Blood Moon rose, she felt the calling of her bloodline and set out to destroy the Dark Lord herself.

While these two brave warriors risked their lives battling against the Devil, the Church dispatched a lone soldier equipped with a blessed rifle to look for children who had been recently kidnapped by Dracula. That soldier's name was Henry Oldrey, the same who had earlier been rescued from certain doom by Cornell. He felt it was his duty to take up the role of his hero by rescuing the kidnapped children.

As these three launched their assault on Castlevania, each found a different path and faced different challenges. Reinhardt encountered the lovely but cursed Rosa, a young woman who had been brought to the castle and was doomed to slowly become a vampire. Carrie was constantly harrassed by the witch Actrise, who was intimately familiar with the power of her bloodline, and tried to tempt Carrie into joining the side of evil. Henry succeeded in finding all the missing children in only seven days' time. There was one other child in the castle whom Henry did not meet, however -- a blue-haired, blue-eyed boy named Malus.

Reinhardt and Carrie both had meetings with Malus, however. Each time they met him, his behavior grew more and more confusing. He changed from a lost, frightened child into a red-eyed maniac raving about the power of Dracula with little warning.

Reinhardt would eventually be forced to battle Rosa by Death, who was using the maiden to torment the brave warrior. Atop the Clock Tower, just as several of Death's scythes were about to bury themselves into Reinhardt's chest, Rosa jumped in the way, taking the blow full-on. She died in Reinhardt's arms as he told her that God would forgive her. He then went on to destroy Death.

Carrie would find herself locked in battle with Actrise at around the same time. Horrified by the witch's confession of sacrificing a hundred children to Dracula, including her own, Carrie destroyed her and at last felt she had vengeance for her family.

It is unclear which of these two warriors went on to defeat Dracula at the top of the castle keep. What they both found out was that the boy Malus was not just a boy, but was actually the mortal reincarnation of Vlad Tepes himself. Malus morphed into the fullgrown Vlad before their eyes. He explained that the Dracula they thought they had defeated was a decoy -- the guardian of his sleeping spirit. He demanded that the warriors grovel at his feet like worms, but they refused. Even as the castle keep collapsed, the battle raged on.

Eventually Vlad was defeated, and in his place was Malus, once again seeming to be a human boy. Reinhardt truly believed that Dracula had been banished from the boy's body, but just as he was about to offer a hand to him, blue flames burst up around the child. Reinhardt wheeled around to see Charlie Vincent, an eccentric old man who thought himself a master vampire hunter, clutching a bottle of holy water. "Don't you see? This child is Dracula himself!", he said. Malus's eyes again turned deep red and from his mouth Dracula's voice spoke abominations.

Reinhardt and Carrie were spirited away into an alternate reality, where nothing could be seen but endless, unfeatured desert. Suddenly they each heard a terrible roar, and they turned to see before them Dracula in dragon form. They succeeded in defeating Dracula, although the battle was epic. Dracula breathed columns of fire, summoned great flame dragons, hurled dangerous explosives, and sent shockwaves through the ground. In the end, both warriors had to turn away as Dracula, burning and sinking into a black pool, was consumed by a ray of unholy light, his ear piercing shrieks and bellowing roars the only audible sound.

Both of the warriors were transported to different places, and they watched as Castlevania crumbled into the now purified lake that surrounded it. Reinhardt had achieved victory, but he despaired in the fact that the battle with evil would never end. Suddenly, a beam of light shone down upon him, and a single red rose fell near his feet. As he looked up, he saw Rosa before him, returned to life as a human. She embraced Reinhardt, and his sorrow was suddenly lifted from him. He told her that even though the battle against evil would last forever, it was the humans who would win because they had love, and they had hope in one another, and that the power of these together could defeat any evil. They went off to start a new life together.

Carrie left to return to the nearby village. On the way, she asked the peasant giving her a ride to let her off at the bottom of a grassy hill. She went up to visit her mother's grave for the first time in a few years. After placing some beautiful flowers on the headstone, she turned and looked at the sky, and she felt truly happy at last, for she had avenged her family's deaths and had fulfilled her destiny in helping to destroy Dracula. She knew that somewhere, her mother was smiling down on her.

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