"I shouldn't have been so trusting of them; now look at my predicament," I muttered under my breath, gritting my teeth to bear the pain and trying to keep any tremor from my voice.
Remembering the cold glint in Alvin's eyes when I told him about my expedition and his insistence on hiring mercenaries to come with me all came to make sense in what I have come to believe are my final moments. Damn him and his fucking obsession over his wife.
The place I went to explore was an abandoned church in a desolate town far removed from civilization, and that is how I came to find these catacombs.
"Where are you, Lexy?" one of them called out, a woman, in a singsong voice, making my blood run cold.
"Damn, how come I didn't see this coming? Now I'm running around in these damn catacombs with a bullet lodged in my thigh." I leaned against the damp stone wall, trying to catch what was probably my last breath. Looking down and seeing my blood flowing nonstop from the wound on my thigh, I took hold of my sleeve, pulling hard on it, tearing the fabric. I wrapped it tightly around my wound, trying to slow down the bleeding.
"There is nowhere to run. Just give up, and we will make it a quick and easy death for you." My heart skipped a beat hearing the echoes of the emotionless, cold, and detached voice of the leader. I held my tongue before I could give a retort.
He was basically telling me to offer my head on a silver platter. How about he offered his head? I would very much be overjoyed.
I staggered forward, trying to put as much distance as I could between me and the mercenaries hunting me like an animal.
I kept moving, trying my best to keep pace and hopefully my life. I walked on for what felt like an eternity but was only two minutes and met a dead end. I felt my hope disappear, my heart drop.
"Fuck, why does this have to be here and now?" I tried backtracking, trying to get to the next bend before they did, and that's when I met them. The leader came first, his eyes betraying his violent nature, and the others came around the bend. They were dressed in black and carrying guns.
"Ah, there you are. We thought you had fled from us." The other two laughed at the joke. They all knew clearly there was nowhere for me to run. I glared at them, my hand shaking with rage. I now understood why they wanted us to avoid all the cities and towns on the way here.
"I guess it's time to meet your maker. Aren't you overjoyed?" he said with a stupid grin on his face as he raised the gun to point at me. I gave the trio my middle finger, and the gun fired.
There was a brief flash of pain.
Then everything went dark. My last thought was: at least I died with a bit of dignity, and it was quick.
FEW MOMENTS LATER
My consciousness came to me slowly at first; then the next thing I knew, I was awake. The feel of the cold, hard ground under me made me know I wasn't in the underworld, because I was pretty sure that was where I was supposed to be, but no, I'm really alive.
"How am I still alive?" The thought came to me slowly as my brain was still adjusting to the concept of its survival after it had a visit by a bullet. I could feel, but I couldn't move a muscle or talk. I stared at the walls of the catacombs above me. That was when I heard a voice.
"I know you are confused, but this is only a recording, so listen closely. You have been turned into a vampire, yes, a vampire. I don't know which era this is, but I'm assuming the vampire realm is still hidden, as are the contingency plans I put in place to prevent them from conquering the world. Now, about vampires: the curse was placed on me by the forces that ruled the cosmos itself; the sun became my enemy and the night became my solace. With the curse came strength and speed on par with the werewolves, and healing far surpassing theirs, making me immortal, and finally powerful magicks. Any magic in the hands of a vampire is stronger. I would think the upper echelons of human society still hide magic from its commoners because of what happened in the SOM ERA, making them the weakest but still the most populous of all the races. But races such as dwarfs, elves, werewolves, dragons, and many more have access to specializations and are more attuned to certain types of magicks that make their use of those powers easier, but vampires have superseded all that due to our long lives.
"My wish, as the most powerful mage, mage scholar, and The One honoured by all, was to bring back my wife from the clutches of nothingness. Taking death essence from the clutches of death itself, essence of life from the heavens, and primordial energy from chaos caused a disruption to the flow of the death and life cycle and reawakened chaos itself, but I still continued my pursuit. At the end, my mortal coil got contaminated as a result of messing with forces that brought about existence itself. I got cursed by death, my soul shall never pass through the cycle of reincarnation. It was not like I was going to die, joke's on them. The heavens banned me from life for eternity, and chaos came for its due. I was left in an accursed state, shunned by death and life.
"I became the UNHONOURED and punished by chaos.
The contamination got hold of my beloved apprentice; he became a vampire.
Seeing that the change brought out nothing but the darkness that everybody tries to hide in one's mind, I couldn't do that to my wife.
"Letting my apprentice go with the curse in his blood turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes. I went into isolation, and when I came back, the vampire society had grown into something to be reckoned with, and their king, my apprentice. As my time to stay in this realm was coming to an end, I created a new batch of vampires to infiltrate his court and act as a stone in his way to world domination. I left the progeny bloodline so that a new progenitor can be awakened to oppose my former apprentice's rule.
"I am sorry."