Page 2 of Fallen Nocturne

We did not fail.

Vlad’s hatred of Lilith had ripened over the years. A stroke of luck, that slow souring in him. When the moment came he did not hesitate. The four of us bound the enchantress in her own magic and sealed her in a tomb beneath the earth.

I will never forget the silence after. The air tasted different without her presence in it.

Ruth wept for Lilith. Arescaine told him what we had done and I watched from a distance as his face collapsed. He sat on the steps of what would become this great hall and cried like the boy he had once been, before the pool of blood and the centuries of cruelty that followed. I do not know what he mourned. The loss of Lilith’s protection, perhaps. The terror of a world without her leash. Ruth has always been the most afraid of us. Fear in him takes the shape of cruelty.

The rest of us mourned nothing. For the first time since Lilith dragged us from our mortal lives, we were free of her. Free to decide what we would become without her hand around our throats.

Morsvyenn empire rose from that freedom. We had land and power and no mistress to answer to. Arescaine governed. Vlad fortified and filled the library with scrolls from every kingdom he conquered. Han entertained. I healed the sick in the lower wards, tended my gardens, read by candlelight until the wicks burned to nothing.

Ruth punished.

His cruelties escalated in the absence of Lilith’s restraint. Public flayings. Heated iron shoes in the forge. He called it justice. No one dared correct him and the rest of us looked the other way for longer than we should have. During those years, Vlad discovered how our descendants could be created. A human drained close to death and buried before their final breath might rise again as a vampire, bound by blood to the one who made them.

Ruth became obsessed with repeating the process. He tried again and again, impatient with every failure. Most of the bodies he buried rose empty, driven by hunger without reason or memory. They were not vampires. They were ghouls wearing the remains of the people they had once been.

We destroyed each one before it could escape into the surrounding villages. I told Ruth to stop. Arescaine ordered him to stop. Even Vlad warned him that the transformation required control and precision rather than cruelty.

Ruth continued in secret until one of his victims finally rose with a mind and will of its own. He had created his first true offspring. After that, there was no stopping him.

It was glorious for a time. I will not pretend otherwise. We held court in this very hall and the torches burned so bright the room felt like daylight. I can still see it if I close my eyes. The firelight on the stone, the sound of Han’s musicians drifting from the courtyard, Vlad’s low voice reciting something from one of his scrolls. Arescaine at the head of the long table with a goblet in his hand and the weight of the kingdom resting easy on his shoulders.

We were monstrous. We were magnificent. For a while those two things felt like the same thing.

Then Elena died.

Vlad’s human wife. I never knew her well. I watched what her death did to him. The man who built the eastern tower with his bare hands could not be bothered to stand. His grief turned blind and directionless. He stopped reading and he stopped building. Violence became the only language left to him and he spoke it without aim or reason.

The four of us sealed him. It was Arescaine’s decision and we all agreed. We entrusted the binding to a demon lord named Balthazar. Vlad cannot be released without all four of us consenting. I think about that sometimes. Four keys held by four Strigons scattered across the world. One of them is a sadist who would sooner watch everything burn than cooperate with anyone.

The kingdom was never the same after Vlad. Our library went dark and the tower stood empty. Something essential had left Morsvyenn and what remained was just stone and habit.

Ruth grew worse still. Without Vlad to match his appetite for violence he turned inward, fed on his own domain. His punishments became spectacles. He tortured prisoners for days in the courtyard and called it entertainment.

I went to Arescaine.

Come with us. Han and I are leaving. There is nothing left here.

He refused.

Ruth is his blood brother. They were born from the same womb in their human lives and Arescaine has never been able to abandon him. Not even after everything. He looked at me with those steady ancient eyes and said he would stay.

Someone needs to watch over the little shit.

I could have argued. I could have told him that Ruth is beyond redemption, that his loyalty is a chain that will drag him to ruin. But I have known Arescaine for over a thousand years. His mind does not change once it is set.

Han and I left together.

We traveled for a long time. Centuries. We crossed oceans and deserts and mountain ranges that did not exist when we were human. Han collected languages the way other men collect coins. He picked them up in weeks and spoke them as if he had been born to every tongue. I envied that ease in him. Everything is lighter in Han’s hands.

He settled eventually. A small school in a valley where the river forks. He teaches there now. Languages, mathematics, history. To his students, Han is merely a young teacher with an easy smile, endless patience and more knowledge than any one man should possess. None of them know he has lived for more than three thousand years. So have I.

I keep wandering. There is no destination and no purpose. I am not searching for anything. I simply have not found a reason to stop.

Sometimes I wonder where Arescaine is. Whether Ruth has driven him to madness. Whether he still governs whatever shadow of Morsvyenn remains in the dark corners of the world. Ruth’s offspring are everywhere now. Numerous and vicious and utterly without the gifts that mark Vlad’s bloodline. Rumors move through the darker channels that Ruth’s faction is reforming. They are hunting the remaining descendants of Vlad for dominion over all vampire kind.

Vlad’s line carries abilities that surface unpredictably through the generations. Some of his distant progeny are stronger than vampires five times their age. That makes them targets for Ruth’s offspring.