“Do you remember the curse of Black Sun Devouring?”
Princess Eliza led Lilith toward the elevator she’d taken up. The Vampire lifted a steel panel beneath the buttons, revealing a sigil like three triangles fused.
Lilith couldn’t read it. Its lines felt foreign, like a river from a different school of magic.
Eliza pressed the sigil. Crimson washed over the corridor, drowning the old amber glow like dusk smothering lanterns.
A heavy stone door hummed. It bulged from the wall like a cliff shouldering through fog. It turned half a circle in place and opened a pitch‑black passage.
The princess guided Lilith into the gloom. As they went down the steps, she asked softly.
“I remember. Life can’t be born beneath the shroud of the Black Sun. Is there a problem?”
Lilith held tight to what she’d crammed in a rush. The Cataclysm and its ripples were clear in her mind, but Eliza’s timing felt odd.
“Then do you feel anything off in Morris, or even in Spuiset?”
“Off? What’s off? Morris avoids the outside, what else could be—wait.”
The memory of first meeting Annie flashed like a lantern. A Vampire receptionist had treated her as a lost child and wanted a patrol to send her home.
But how could Morris have children?
On Spuiset, the last life was born two thousand three hundred years ago.
And everyone Lilith met seemed unexpectedly young. Not just their bodies; their spirits didn’t carry two millennia of dust.
“Why does it feel like the Vampires haven’t lived those 2,300 years?”
Lilith didn’t believe they’d broken Black Sun Devouring. If they had, why sit in Morris? They would have swept Spuiset clean.
Even without sweeping, they could have moved the nation. The continent still had places unclaimed.
“You’ll know soon.”
Eliza brought Lilith to the end of the tunnel. Another stone door waited, mute as a sealed tomb.
Eliza halted, turned, drew a small knife, and placed it in Lilith’s hand.
“Inside lies a secret known only to the Vampire royal line,” she said, raising her right index finger like a candle in the dark. “This door opens only to blood from the Transylvania line, the tip of the right index finger.”
Lilith saw tiny scars at her fingertip, like starlit scratches from many tries.
“But I’ve heard White Dragon blood can open any mechanism in this world. I’d like to see it.”
“Sure.”
Lilith slid the knife across her left thumb. When the bead of blood blossomed like a red berry, she smeared it on the sealed stone.
The heavy portal held still a breath, then turned inward and invited them in, like a mountain parting to show a path.
“It really works,” Eliza said, eyes wide as moons.
“Of course. It’s the Dragon God’s blessing!” Lilith planted her hands on her hips, chin tilting skyward like a proud sparrow.
“Heh.” Eliza chuckled and said nothing, stepping through the open stone first.
“Mm—hmph!” Ignored, Lilith shot her a glare, then skittered after her, tailing the princess like a small shadow.
“See? This is where the secret sleeps.”
Eliza stopped by a railing and leaned, gazing into the space below the platform like a watcher at the edge of a well.
Lilith craned her head over the bars. She braced for something unspeakable, a nightmare with no name. She saw a pool of blood.
Just a pool of blood.
“What is this? Your Vampire granary?”
Curiosity tugged at her. Vampires fed on blood; hiding a food store as an age‑old secret seemed plausible. But why restrict it to royals?
“Of course not.”
Eliza shook her head and lifted her eyes toward a sealed pipe overhead, as if waiting for it to yawn open and drop something.
“Today is the day. You can watch.”
“What day?”
“That day is that day.”
“Could you be clear.”
“This is forbidden.”
Heat rose in Lilith’s chest, a spark flaring into smoke.
Riddlers, the lot of you—just go away.
Eliza ignored her sulk. She glanced at her watch. When the hour hand pointed straight up, she spoke.
“It’s time.”
“What—”
Before Lilith could finish, the pipe opened. A corpse fell from the mouth like a stone dropped into silence.
A red light speared up from the blood pool and caught the body midair, pinning it like a moth in glass.
Then a baby floated slowly from the pool. Blood fell in soft threads. The red light faded, and the thing binding the corpse was the baby’s umbilical cord.
The cord stabbed into the corpse’s belly. It flicked twice in the air, as if testing the knot, then began to pull.
Lilith didn’t know what it drew. The Little White Dragon could only watch, horrified, as the corpse shriveled, like wine pressed from a grape.
Soon only a withered skin clung to bone.
Then the right hand. It vanished as if erased, neatly detached, like it had never belonged.
Next the left leg, left hand, right hand, and the torso. Each slipped away into thin air, leaving no cut, as if the body had never had those parts.
At last, the baby reeled the remaining head close with the cord. He reached out with chubby little hands, cradled it, and kissed its forehead.
The head became a thread of pale blue smoke. It curled into the baby’s small belly like mist entering a gourd.
The baby twitched in the air and dropped straight into the pool, setting ripples running like rings of rain.
After a quiet beat, the pool turned violent. Blood bubbles rose and drifted upward like scarlet lanterns.
The whole pool gurgled and thrashed, pale red steam breathing out like a pot at full boil.
Moments later, a boy wrapped in amniotic fluid was spat from the pool, slick as a newborn from the sea.
An invisible hand of magic caught him, steady as a midwife, and slid him into another pipe.
As the pipe closed, the pool stilled again, its surface smooth as glass.
“What… was that?” Lilith asked, voice trembling like a reed in wind.
“Two thousand three hundred years ago, at the instant of the Great Cataclysm, Udis’s last child was born,” Eliza said.
“The true progenitor of Vampires. The one we all call—”
She turned to Lilith and, for the first time since they met, offered a real smile, soft as dawn.
“Mother.”
