48. Memories
The young Vampire Princess stood in the blood pool, a scarlet mirror that swallowed sound.
Dread pressed on her chest. Elasha lowered her head and found her face in the still red glass.
Her brows were knotted like tight threads. Her wide crimson eyes were fogged with futures, and her porcelain face held no smile, only a bruise-soft sadness at her lip.
She was twelve. Twelve years ago to the day, she rose from this blood like dawn cut out of dusk.
Unlike the other Vampires of Morris, a royal-born knows, at the first breath, the city’s deepest secret buried under cold stone.
They aren’t ordinary beings. When the gods shattered like a fallen constellation, life’s right to bloom was stripped from this land.
The ancestors, winter-worn but stubborn, spent a generation’s wisdom and carved out a path to keep the seed alive.
They cleaved off a piece of the Grim Reaper, the shard most knotted with life, and carried it beneath the curse of the Black Sun.
Then they fed that shard with vampiric magic and life’s anchor, with the tribe’s essential treasure, with blood that thinned day by day like ebbing tide.
At last, a doomed species learned to breathe again, ragged and stubborn, like grass under frost.
It was Year 80 after the Cataclysm. The Vampires found their True Ancestor.
To be precise, the Vampires made themselves a True Ancestor.
The elders, wise as old pines, chose to seal the secret. No newborn would ever know how they came into the world, or where they would go after death.
Except one—the chosen royal.
The royal shoulders the burden of continuance. They cannot let the past go dark. They must inherit the weight and force the tribe forward through storm and night.
They are the civilization’s most basic need. They are persistence made flesh.
That harsh task hit a snag in Elasha’s generation. It sounds simple in one line.
The True Ancestor’s magic was running dry.
After the Nameless One left, the Vampires became godless. With no god to anchor faith, they had nowhere to replenish precious mana, so they stared up through the blotted sky and begged the Black Sun for fuel.
They found a way—blood and the True Ancestor—to feed mana back into Morris and even Spuiset, to keep the wheels turning.
But after more than a thousand years, they realized the True Ancestor’s store was thinning like smoke. Elasha remembered the sleeping infant’s sealed eyes; she felt its mana drop in recent years like a line of dominoes falling.
The once-steady supply system was collapsing with frightening speed, like ice cracking across a lake.
In less than a hundred years, perhaps only a few decades, the True Ancestor would lose all mana. For long-lived Vampires, that’s a single generation.
If the True Ancestor goes dark, Morris loses its spine of magic. The Black Sun’s curse will shroud the tribe again, and their way to breed will vanish like mist.
The young Vampire Princess heard this and chose hard flint over soft moss—abandon the other cities of Spuiset. Use the remaining mana only for newborns within Morris, to stretch the tribe’s time like a drawn bowstring.
Meanwhile, they must chase new sources of mana, or break the hateful veil that smothers the sky.
She drafted a bare-bones plan for Morris’s next years, then handed the city’s workings and external trade to her lieutenants. After that, she locked herself in the pool where every Vampire is born, seeking a new engine for the tribe’s continuance.
She returned to the place that holds the ancestors’ sweat. Every blood-born Vampire has their memories taken by the True Ancestor; that rule was carved to let people live, not drift lost.
Otherwise, leaving aside the shock of such a birth, the grind of millennia would sand their souls down to dust.
There was another reason—to feed the True Ancestor. No matter what name you grant it, it remains a part of the Grim Reaper, and the god of death is greedy with the past, stripping it like bark.
Elasha remembered a book in the Royal Library of Morris. It said the best gift to the Nameless One wasn’t one death after another.
It was forgetting.
She can’t forget the first time she saw that line. She wasn’t even born then. Morris wasn’t yet what it is, and the ancestors had only just built this pool.
The royal of that time finished the book, then carved the line into the stone lip like a vow.
Death isn’t the safe departure of life. Forgetting is.
Elasha stood within the blood pool. Power in her blood lifted her feet like gentle hands, and her thin body stood atop the scarlet surface like a petal on a pond.
She reached out and brushed the carved words, then repeated them in her heart like prayer.
A bold thought rose, hot and bright.
Even if everyone in Morris forgets, even if all Spuiset forgets, even if the continent, the sky, and the sea forget the infant’s name, Elasha will not forget its true name.
Vampires split from the Necromancer Cultists after the Cataclysm, and only a few thousand years have passed since they arrived here.
For an individual, a few thousand years feels ancient; even carrying the memory of every royal before her, Elasha could feel the past slipping from her fingers like dry sand.
A soul is fragile. Under long time’s wind, it shatters like thin glass.
But for a species, a few thousand years isn’t long. It’s not enough to grow a new trait or climb from decline to splendor.
Vampires are newborns. They may be the youngest tribe on the continent, as young as the two brothers split at the Cataclysm, while the humans holding the far west carry deeper history.
A newborn tribe—yes, even if their forebears worshiped the Nameless One; even if they inherited most research on the Grim Reaper’s authority, Elasha still wondered how the Vampires managed, in mere decades and without any god, to wield a divine shard—one cut from the strongest god of death.
She felt she had found the answer. Not only to how they lived by the True Ancestor, but to why the True Ancestor’s mana was failing at a pace no one foresaw.
Before the blood-soaked infant was named the Vampire True Ancestor, it bore a louder title—
Untimely Death.
