Chapter 2 2
Now, her heart gave a final, agonizing thump... and stopped.
Then suddenly…
"The King wants you alive, little pig," a gargoylish vampire sneered, kneeling over her broken form in the filth.
He slit his own wrist, slicing open his gray flesh, and pressed the bleeding wound directly against Elizabeth’s graying, lifeless lips. He forced his dark, corrupted vampire blood down her dead throat, forcing her dying organs to violently react.
She gasped.
When the cold, damp dungeon air dragged its way back into her lungs, it felt like swallowing glass.
She opened her eyes, her vision swimming in nauseating, blurry waves of gray and black. She wasn't in the cavernous abyss beneath the ravine anymore.
She was in a windowless cell. A rusted iron bed, a single wooden chair, a bowl of cold,congealed oatmeal, and a small glass of cloudy water sat on the floor.
Trembling, her fingers crept up to her throat. The jagged, fatal slash was gone, replaced by a raised, tender scar. She was alive.
But as she tried to sit up, a wave of crippling dizziness slammed into her. Her head throbbed violently, her limbs felt like lead, and her body hummed with the sickening, hollow ache of extreme iron deficiency and blood loss.
Clang!
The iron door rattled violently. A vampiric guard stepped into the gloom, his heavy boots crushing the glass of water she hadn't even reached for.
"Awake, pig?" the guard sneered, landing a brutal kick directly into her ribs.
Elizabeth gasped, curling into a ball as pain exploded through her chest.
"King’s orders," the guard growled, grabbing a handful of her hair and slamming her head against the stone floor.
"You don't get the peace of sleep. You stay awake. The more you are awake the more your blood tastes addictive. You count every hour, every day, every week of your suffering."
For the first three days, there was no food. No water. Just the damp condensation dripping off the slimy dungeon drainage pipes, which she was forced to lap up off the cold stone like a dying animal.
On the fourth day, the cell door creaked open, and a metal tray was kicked inside.
On it sat a slab of gray, raw meat from an unknown creature—rotting, foul-smelling, and writhing with fat white worms.
Elizabeth gagged, backing into the corner. She wanted to die. She prayed for the dark void to take her back. But the guards came back every day.
If she so much as groaned in her sleep, they beat her until her breath rattled with blood. If she cried, they broke a finger.
Months blurred into a relentless nightmare of purple bruises, broken bones, and suffocating isolation.
Her body withered away. Her collarbones jutted out like sharp knives beneath paper-thin skin; her cheeks sank into hollow caverns.
She looked like a dry skeleton wrapped in dirt, her hair matted and wild, hanging around her face like a tangled shroud. When the guards stopped bringing even the rotting meat, hunger drove her past the brink of sanity.
She ate the cockroaches that skittered across her legs. She chewed on the skin of dead rats she managed to catch in the dark.
Her mind fractured. She no longer screamed. She no longer begged. She forgot her own age, forgot the sound of her own voice, forgot what sunlight felt like.
By the end of her first year of captivity, the harvesting stopped entirely. She had been forgotten.
Left to rot in the dark, just like the brittle, nameless skeletons lining the cells beside hers—the forgotten sacrifices and discarded blood-slaves of the Coven’s brutal empire.
One freezing night, lying on the stone floor with her bones aching and her lips cracked and bleeding, Elizabeth felt her heart give a tiny, pathetic flutter.
This is it, she thought. Her lungs refused to expand. Her pulse slowed to a bare, shivering crawl.
She felt no fear. Only a deep, bottomless abyss of absolute hatred. With her very last, fragile breath, as her heart gave its final, dying beat, she didn't pray for heaven. She didn't pray for peace.
She wished, with every remaining atom of her ruined soul, for the complete and utter annihilation of the vampire race.
I want them to burn.
And in the pitch-black silence of her death... the dark shadows in the corners of her cell finally began to whisper back.
A ragged, agonizing shockwave tore through Elizabeth’s chest as the ancient shadow magic hit her system. But instead of turning her into a mindless thrall, the clash between the dark, monstrous blood and her dying human heart shattered an ancient, hidden seal deep within her soul.
And something just snapped. Something primal, terrifying, and ancient woke up.
It started in the very pores of her skin, sinking into her atoms, consuming her soul.
The shadows around the ravine didn't just move, they listened to her. The woven shadow magic of an extinct, ancient bloodline burst forth, thick and ink-black, crawling up from the dirt like writhing snakes.
Elizabeth’s eyes snapped open—no longer human, no longer weak. They glowed with an ethereal, murderous violet light.
The pain of her broken heart didn't disappear; it condensed into a burning, icy core of absolute hatred.
She looked up through the darkness toward the ceiling, far above where King Alexander sat drinking her blood from his silver glass. She could feel his mind up there—arrogant, powerful, completely unaware of the monster he had just unlocked.
She didn't scream. She didn't cry.
Elizabeth opened her bloody mouth, and from her vocal cords spilled the first silent, rhythmic vibration of an ancient chant.
The shadows around her danced to her melody, entering the mind of the vampire above her, turning his eyes blood-shot as his own brain began to melt into horrifying visions.
Drink the blood of my people, King Alexander, her mind whispered into the dark void, her chant weaving through the shadows, climbing the stone walls toward the throne room.
Drink it down. Because every drop you take is a thread I will use to tear your mind—and your kingdom—to ash.
