“I don’t think anyone’s been here before,” Agnes said, peering up at the weathered walls and crumpled towers. “Just look at how overgrown it is!”

  Vines climbed the facade from top to bottom, while moss grew in the cracks and on top of the walls. Agnes could see trees growing inside, their canopies forming an impromptu roof over the ruins, and plenty of lichen wherever there was even an inch of free space. It was impossible to tell how long it had been since this place was abandoned, and that made her giddy to get inside!

  “Yeah, but ye gotta stay sharp,” Marcus reminded her, fingers tapping along the shaft of his longbow. “Just ‘cause there ain’t no sign of people don’t mean no people never been here. And, hey, besides, worse things in these woods than the bandits, I say.”

  “Yeah?” Agnes grunted, already bringing her machete to bear on the thorny bushes that filled the ruin’s gateway. “Like what?”

  “Bears, old and cranky, and wolves the size of bears, them’s the least of yer worries in Farbane,” Marcus continued, not missing a beat. “But worse than those are the walking dead, skellingtons and wraiths and cacklin’ heads, and the most wicked cultists you’d better hope ye never meet. I saw one, once, swear up and down. Gangly, greasy fella, wearin’ nothing but rags and a rotten hog’s head stuck on like a helmet. Barely got away with me innards still attached!”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t sound… great,” Agnes panted. The bushes in the gateway were thick and vigorous, each branch requiring several chops to get through, but with those long, sharp thorns, just pushing through wouldn’t do. They’d be bleeding before making it halfway! “But, hey, that’s why you’re here, right?”

  “Aye, that it is,” Marcus agreed. He kept scanning the treeline as she worked, eyes narrowed. The old castle lay deep in a valley, on top of a small rise surrounded by thick woods. Sure, maybe the uneven steps carved into the side of the plateau was the only way up, but he didn’t want to risk missing some predator slinking off to the side only to ambush them later.

  Agnes finally stepped back, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. The gap she’d wrought wasn’t large, but...

  “Right, Marcus, c’mon, we can get through now,” she said. Getting in was easy enough, but the two of them still had plenty of little snags and cuts by the time they emerged into a small, roughly square gatehouse. Agnes could see rusted machinery to one side, levers sticking out, but otherwise the gatehouse was oddly empty. Even the floor was unremarkable, nothing but weeds pushing up between stone bricks. Ahead of them lay a short, vaulted corridor, at the end of which a pair of buckled, verdigrised doors yawned open. They looked almost like prison bars, but as Agnes made her way down the corridor, she realised the doors had once been meant to serve as frames for something.

  “Oh Light…”

  Agnes stopped two-thirds through the corridor. Here, greenery had crept in from the open space beyond those buckled old doors, forming a thick carpet of moss and weeds, vines climbing across the walls and ceiling. But what she hadn’t seen until now was what lay amidst the greenery; she saw skulls and bones, rusted pieces of armour, and all kinds of weaponry. Some still glimmered as they protruded from the undergrowth, others languished beneath a half-hearted layer of moss. Agnes swallowed. This must have been a battlefield, once, for so many dead to be gathered in one place. But why had they simply been left here?

  “Not a pretty sight,” Marcus mumbled from behind. “We’s gotta be extra keen now, lass. This many bones, could be some still got that spark o’ life in ‘em, itchin’ to have ye join.”

  “Understood,” Agnes replied, her voice little more than a whisper. “But we press on. I can’t afford to come back from this empty-handed.”

  “Aye, as ye say, lass. Just keep an eye out afore you go putting yer feet down, eh?”

  “Mhm,” Agnes nodded, and began her journey onto the battlefield. At first it was easy enough to slip between the dead, but around the old door they were packed so thickly that she had to walk across old bones. More than one snapped under her weight, each one with a dreadful crack that sent shivers down her spine. Grabbing the old bronze frame for support, she slipped through the gap in the buckled doors and carefully made her way into the wider ruins. A layer of greenish patina remained on the palm of her glove, which she tried to brush off on her trousers with a frown. Unfortunately, it accomplished little more than splitting the ugly verdigris across both.

  Here, beyond the corridor, she found that the roof had long since collapsed. What had once been the floor was covered in an ungodly mix of bones, rusted metal, and stone chunks, while moss and weeds and tall ferns grew all around. Even a few trees had taken root, their trunks almost blending in among the weathered stone pillars while their canopies formed a new roof of sorts. The trees cast the ruins into gentle shadow, giving the whole place an aura of solemnity that was only reinforced by the odd ray of light that managed to poke through the leaves.

  “This is… incredible,” she breathed, finding a large, moss-covered block of stone to stand on. The ruins stretched out before her in a rough rectangle, with doorways set into the left-hand walls and wide stairs on the far wall that led up to nothing but a landing with a large window whose rusted metal shutters let no light inside. Above the landing only a few steps remained intact, the rest jutting from the walls like uneven stone ribs.

  “Aye,” Marcus agreed, scratching his salt and pepper beard. “A mighty find, this. Ye were right, lass, ain’t nobody been here since… well, since a proper long time back, I reckon. How’d ye even know this was ‘ere?”

  “Books.”

  “Books?”

  “Yeah. There's this old story following one of the first paladins and his priestess wife. They hunted down plenty of vampires, and I’ve been trying to track their journey. As far as I can tell, this is the place where they killed the Dark Lovers.”

  “What, ye figured out where to go from old legends and books? Didn’t take ye for the readsy type, but then, I ain’t never been one meself, and as my ma always told me, it takes one to know one.”

  Marcus hesitated for a moment, glancing back the way they came.

  “I don’t like it, though. Ain’t nothing good what ever comes from the bloodsuckers, ye better believe me on this, lass. Ye said ye can’t return wi’ nothin’, but ye’d have yer life, at least.”

  “Oh, don’t give up now!” Agnes frowned, smacking his shoulder with the back of her hand. “Look! We’re already here, at a place nobody has found before. Think of the riches we could find! Your grandkid would be set for life!”

  “Aye, maybe,” Marcus muttered, fingers tightening around his longbow. “But I feel the wrongness in the air, lass. This place ain’t right, not one bit.”

  “Yeah, well, help me search, then. The sooner we find something properly valuable, the sooner we can leave.”

  Agnes moved out into the ruins, deftly stepping from stone to stone. She didn’t trust the weeds between them not to hide something sharp, be it a shard of bone or an old spear tip, and she didn’t exactly enjoy the idea of limping back home with a punctured foot. No, better walk on the fallen debris, even if the moss was a bit slippery.

  The deeper into the ruined hall she went, the more the remnants of the battle changed. Here she saw full sets of steel armour, buckled and rusted, as well as full heather shields and once-beautiful swords. There was lots of ash here, too, spilling out from breastplates and clogging up chainmail. When Agnes realised she was looking at the mortal remains of vampires, she swallowed hard. Maybe Marcus was correct. This really didn’t feel right. But they weren’t in danger, were they? Nothing was moving apart from Marcus and her. It was just an old castle full of bones, like finding a bear skeleton in a cave. Creepy, but not dangerous.

  Just as she was about to turn around and leave, she found it: Her ticket to financial freedom. Nestled between the roots of one of the trees lay a suit of once-fine armour, its outline twisted and broken; whoever had worn this armour hadn’t died prettily. Though worn and weathered, the plates were decorated with tarnished bronze and carried traces of red lacquer. As she crept closer, Agnes saw the bronze visor, shaped like a snarling demon; even in death, the sight of it sent shivers down her spine.

  “Marcus, I found something. Come take a look at this,” she called out, crouching down next to the armour. That was when she noticed a glimmer down between the roots; carefully reaching down into the gap, she pulled out the hilt of a sword. Despite its age the gold was lustrous and deep, and the inch or so of remaining blade shimmered even in the shadow of the tree. Bending down, Agnes could see more shards of the blade nestled between the roots. Behind her, Marcus trudged up, stopping as he saw the armour.

  “...We should leave. Ain’t nothing good gonna come from that thing, lass. Stinks of blood to me, blood and death.”

  “Yeah yeah, but what about this?” Agnes said, turning around to hand him the hilt before reaching down to dig out those shards. “It looks real expensive, right? Think some antiquities dealer would want this? The church, maybe?”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “I ain’t never seen metal like this afore,” Marcus said, turning the hilt around in his hands. “Looks like silver, don’t it? Only, it ain’t silver. I ain’t never seen silver what would shine in the shade. Sorcery, feels like.”

  “Yeah? A magic alloy?” Agnes hummed, pulling out a shard from under a big root. It was about the length of a finger, slender and jagged, yet sharp all around. “Help me fish out the rest. Once we get as much of the sword as we can, I say we leave. This has to sell for enough.”

  “Ach, leave it, lass. We ain’t got no business meddlin’ in matters we don’t understand, ‘specially the kind what stinks of vampires. Light as my witness, we-”

  “Don’t you dare back out now, Marcus!” Agnes hissed, whirling around to stare at the man. “We are so close to earning our payday, you hear? So fucking- Mnnh!”

  Agnes dropped the shard in her hand with a gasp. It fell to the ground with a gentle tinkle, blood from her palm staining the silver red.

  “Fuck. Fuck! I hope this doesn’t get infected, I can’t afford to lose my hand!” she whined, clenching her wounded hand while rummaging in her belt pouch for a bandage with the other. “Marcus, gather the… Marcus?”

  Looking up, she saw the man had taken a few steps back, staring wide-eyed at the tree. No, not at the tree; following his gaze, Agnes saw the helmet had shifted. That demonic snarl was looking straight at her now, blue fire burning behind bronze eye sockets. She screamed and scrambled back, dropping her bandage in the process and smearing blood across a fallen rock. The armoured suit began to move, twisting and cracking and groaning. Before either of them could react it burst forward, tearing its helmet off to reveal a cadaverous, fang-mouthed creature. Agnes screamed and raised her arms, but the thing tackled her, pinned her down, and sank its fangs into her neck.

  Marcus dropped what he held and ran, trying not to listen to Agnes’ pleading screams. Panicked, he fled deeper into the castle, running through dark corridors lined by dark, yawning pits masquerading as doorways. He turned right, then left, then left again to scramble through a half-collapsed wall, driven by a gnawing fear. It wasn’t long before he was hopelessly lost, turned around and confused by the twisting corridors and empty rooms.

  ? ? ?

  Anastella slowly felt sanity return. She felt the fresh blood coursing through her veins, rejuvenating her body and mind, but… she also felt… vague. Foggy. Not quite awake just yet. She stood up and stretched, her eyes never leaving the woman. How strange. It was almost like she didn’t realise what she was seeing. Anastella closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Had blood ever smelled so inviting? Maybe when she was very young. Starved. Opening her eyes, she looked down at her hands. Turned them around. Clenched them shut, then opened them again. She felt so very weak…

  Her eyes returned to the human. Young, fair-skinned, well-blooded. The woman had been wounded, her hand cut open by… by the shards of Anastella’s sword. The vampire felt a pang of sorrow. She had never named the blade. She didn’t believe in naming tools. And yet, seeing it broken, its pieces scattered among rust and ruin… it hurt. And the great hall? Anastella looked around. It was an uncomfortable feeling. She could still see the estate as it had once been. The high ceiling. The elegant pillars. The majestic arch of the big stained-glass window, and its slender cousins along the outer wall. Anastella could see it all before her, vague and insubstantial, a ghostly image overlapping the overgrown reality.

  Anastella felt heavy. Imprisoned. She began to tear at the rusted remains of her armour, snapping old buckles and belts with ease. Piece by piece she was set free, until she stood before the great tree in the middle of the hall wearing nothing but a dirty, tattered tunic that reached mid-thigh, belted around the waist with a threadbare red sash. The breeze was gentle, but she could feel it. Her skin felt raw. New. She closed her eyes again, took a deep breath, and let it out. Anastella didn’t need to breathe, but… Drusilla had taught her. Drusilla. The name was branded into her very soul. She remembered raven hair, porcelain skin, ruby-red eyes and matching lips. She remembered… kisses. Gasps. Wracking sobs and cries of pain.

  She remembered blood.

  Anastella opened her eyes and drove her fist forward, knuckles slamming into the great tree with such force the wood splintered. When she pulled her hand back the bark fell away, revealing cracks which slowly started to leak sap. She looked down at her hand. Turned it around. Clenched it shut, and opened it again. She felt weak. Distracted, as if she had woken up into a dream. She knew she had died. The paladin had crushed her body, burned out her blood. By all accounts, she should have remained dead. How long had she been asleep? Why had she come back? Anastella licked her lips, tasted the remnants of the woman’s blood. It had been good blood. She felt it inside of her, pure enough and with a scholarly aftertaste.

  Crouching down by the corpse, she rifled through the woman’s clothes. Useless rations of food and water, a handful of copper coins. Nothing with which to glean her purpose. What had she been doing here? A tomb robber? A researcher? A… Anastella’s eyes landed on a longbow, discarded among the debris. It was too far away to have been the woman’s. Another… there was another. A rat in Drusilla’s castle. Someone to interrogate. She considered taking the woman’s machete, but only for a moment. Using it felt wrong, like replacing her sword. She bent down and picked up the broken hilt. Still as beautiful as she remembered it; light enough to be swung with one hand, long enough to be comfortably held in two. She pointed it forward, its long, slender blade shimmering in the shade. Ah, dark silver, hewn from the mines far to the west and forged in blood. A weapon worthy of a vampire champion.

  Anastella walked across the great hall, moonlight filtering in through the stained-glass windows to light her way. Her gown felt as light as air, the breezy cloth akin to wearing nothing at all. She pushed open the door to the rest of the estate and slipped into the candle-lined corridor. Walking along the carpet she smiled and nodded, greeting Drusilla’s guards and servants. Anastella opened her mouth to hail Albert, but paused before any words could emerge. She licked her lips to try again, but… nothing. Something was wrong. She looked down at herself, the fine gown replaced by a tattered tunic. When she looked back up Albert was gone. The corridor was empty, the candles long-gone. She blinked. Anastella saw Albert swinging blindly with his sword, taking one of the humans with him even as he turned to embers and ash. That’s right. Albert had died.

  She looked down at the broken hilt in her hand. Turned it around. Cut the air to the right, then to the left. It truly was shattered. Maybe she could have repaired it, but the estate was in ruin, and Anastella lacked the materials in any case. She looked back over her shoulder, towards the great hall. Maybe she should - her head whipped back around. A clatter. The longbow. Yes, she remembered now; there was a rat in Drusilla’s estate. Anastella resumed her hunt, prowling down the ruined corridors of her home. She could smell it, a whiff of fear and sweat in the air. Anastella turned right, then left, then saw Drusilla standing by a window, drinking from a goblet. With a smile she stepped forward, reached out for her love, only to hiss and pull her hand back. She looked down at her smoking digits, and when she looked back Drusilla was gone. Nothing remained but sunlight filtering in through the gaping window.

  Anastella came across a half-collapsed wall and hopped through, deftly landing on the other side. She could smell her prey properly now; a man, terrified, hiding within the library. The door was gone, as were the books, but the rotten bookshelves remained in the dark, windowless room. Did he think the darkness was his ally? A shroud beneath which to hide? Anastella could tell where he was. She crept up behind a bookshelf, her footsteps silent, and then thrust her left hand forward. Her claws easily pierced the soft wood and grabbed the man around the neck, then she janked him through the bookshelf and whirled around to slam him up against the wall. He squirmed like a beast sensing its end, trying in vain to unfasten her grip around his throat.

  “P-Please! Don’t hurt me! I h-have family waitin’ for me!” he rasped, legs kicking at the floor. Anastella looked at him, her eyes empty. He was an insect, insignificant. Even his blood was of poor quality, stinking of alcohol. To her surprise she found her grip easing up, allowing him to suck in a greedy lungful of air.

  “Why… did you come?” Anastella asked, her words strange to her own ears. Her tongue felt thick and dry, unused to forming sounds. She saw the human staring at her mouth. Or at her fangs?

  “It was all the lass’ idea!” the man pleaded, eyes watering. “She hired me! Said there’d be plenty t’ loot, treasures to be found, b-but I didn’t mean to raid no vampire castle, swear on my mum, bless her soul!”

  “...Ah,” Anastella said, and let go. He fell to his knees, hacking and coughing, holding onto his neck. Anastella moved faster than anything Marcus had seen before; suddenly pain bloomed as half his fingers were severed in a single cut, his neck sliced open by a broken blade. He wanted to scream, to escape, but he found his body held by a hundred invisible fetters, his head forced back. Anastella held her palm above him, siphoning all the blood from his neck into an orb. He tried to fight it, but soon enough his limbs went limp. A few moments later the last drops of blood were extracted, and Anastella let his exsanguinated body slump to the side. She turned her hand around, and watched the blood orb hover above her palm. It was far from appetising, but blood had other uses than mere sustenance. Focusing her will she boiled it down, compressing and refining until nothing but its essence remained as a small, ruby marble.

  Anastella slid the blood essence into her sash for safekeeping and slowly made her way back to the great hall. She could see both past and present at once, overlapping and twisting, fighting for her attention. One moment Anastella passed a well-appointed painting room, lit by a flock of flying candles, the next she strode past a sun-flooded ruin where the roof had fallen in. One step was taken on soft carpet over black marble tiling, the next on rough stone and moss. Sometimes she looked down at her shattered blade. It helped, slowly but surely; with every step she took she saw things clearer. Maybe it was the blood restoring her body, but Anastella felt more and more in control; more and more like herself. By the time she stepped through the empty doorway to the great hall, she saw the overgrown ruins for what they were.

  The woman’s corpse remained where she had left it. Anastella took the bloodied shard from where it had fallen and tried to fit it against the hilt, but no; it must have been from further down the blade. She knelt down by the tree, found a few hints of glimmering dark silver, and began to gather up the pieces of her sword. It took several minutes, but eventually she had just about half a dozen long slivers arrayed in her lap, each one sharp and deadly in its own right. This wouldn’t be enough to reforge her sword, but it was something, at least. Anastella looked around, truly seeing the hall for the first time. A battlefield, a ruin… not an ideal place to prepare for a journey. Still, she had some means available to her.

  Human bones were plentiful, though their quality was questionable. Having gathered the choicest among them into a rough pile, she held both hands out above them, palms down. She could feel the magic inherent in each bone, a tiny strand embedded deep. This magic she could touch, even shape, until it flowed together into the form she wished. Before long the purest of those strands had slithered out of their bony containers, gathered in a yarn-like ball in the air between her palms. Anastella closed her eyes and focused; the osseous strands wove together, twining and circling until a small, nondescript ring of bone had been formed. Opening her eyes again, she snatched it from the air and slid it onto her right ring finger. It pulsed, once, as the magic within the ring joined up with hers. As far as foci went it was a sloppy hackjob, but in her current state Anastella would take any boost to her magical potency, no matter how small.

  Next she needed gear suitable for a vampire. The human woman had plenty of leather clothes, and some mixed fabrics too; these materials Anastella unwove and reformed, crafting a padded leather cuirass to go over her tunic, fingerless gauntlets that reached the elbow, and knee-high stirrup greaves. What little usable steel remained in the great hall she gathered up and formed into thin protective plates for her gauntlets and greaves; into the plates on the back of her hands she inserted the shards of her sword, one for each knuckle, forming uneven claws roughly two-inches long. Finally, she took the cloth and the thread to make herself a patchwork capelet, complete with a hood to keep her just a little bit safer from the sun. Anastella took a few steps, stretched, made sure it all fit; then she picked up the fallen longbow. She practiced its draw, made sure the claws on her gauntlets wouldn’t get in the way, and then, satisfied, she crafted a bundle of arrows that she tied to her corslet’s belt with string woven from the surrounding greenery.

  By now, Anastella had picked the great hall clean. All that remained untouched was the old hilt of her sword, and a couple of its left-over shards. She hesitated, unsure what to do, before the answer came to her with a faint smile. Returning to the hollow by the great tree, where she had slept the years away, Anastella dug a small hole into which she placed the parts of her sword. She knew plenty of other shards remained hidden somewhere beneath the tree, so this seemed as fitting a spot as any for a burial. Some of the old sword’s pieces would remain with her, but the remainder would rest here, where her old life ended. After placing a cracked tile of black marble over the impromptu grave, Anastella brushed her hands free from dirt and stood up.

  Turning, she looked up into the canopy. The sun played through the leaves, creating dangerous little light rays that warmed her skin to an almost painful degree, and yet it was… kind of nice, actually. Anastella held out her hand, catching such a ray in the palm of her hand. Pain flooded her system almost immediately, a deep, aching warmth that pooled in her palm before radiating out along her fingers and up her arm. The ache grew, and grew, and grew, until any sense of the sun’s warmth was overpowered by a red-hot agony that sent searing lances of pain up into her shoulder. The trees took mercy on her, shifting in the breeze and cutting off that light. Anastella sighed, watching her skin smoke around the gauntlet. She clenched her hand, then unclenched it again as she pulsed blood through it, repairing the damage.

  The painful warmth reminded her of Drusilla, a twang of longing filling her chest. Anastella knew Drusilla was still alive. She had to be. Turning around, she glanced at the corpse-choked doorway leading to the gates. It was time to leave this place, she knew as much, but she felt reluctant. So many wonderful memories had played out among these halls. Maybe she should stay a bit longer? Put things in order before leaving?

  Just… for a few hours. Until the sun set.