(1710)
The wind rolled in cold from the northern cliffs, heavy with the scent of pine, ash, and ancient death. Somewhere beyond the tree line, wolves howled—not the kind that hunted deer, but those who once walked like men, broken and enslaved under the command of the one who now stood atop the ridge.
General Luxien Draxen barely moved.
His presence was still, unshaking. A statue of war carved from marble and shadow. The long, dark coat he wore fluttered gently in the wind, the deep crimson lining like spilled blood against the black. His hair, jet-black and bound loosely at the nape, glinted faintly beneath the moonlight. Tall, statuesque, and quiet as snowfall, he looked nothing like the demons the humans feared—and yet, he was far worse.
His skin was pale, like bone smoothed by time. His jaw sharp and expression unreadable. Only his eyes betrayed what he truly was—silver, but not like metal. They gleamed like ice pulled from the heart of a glacier, untouched by warmth or mercy. Cold. Endless.
His soldiers awaited his command. Vampires, draped in armor dark as night, eyes glowing faintly beneath their helms. Creatures bound to him through blood and fear.
"Burn it," Luxien said simply, his voice low, emotionless, as if he were commenting on the weather.
The captain gave a nod. Moments later, the shrill screech of orders echoed into the air, and the battalion descended like wolves. Not to fight. To destroy.
Luxien didn't need to watch. He already knew how it would end. These villages were the last traces of resistance. Of hope. He would erase every corner of human defiance and bring the empire to its knees. He wasn't doing this out of rage. Or vengeance.
He was doing it because he had to.
Because it was ordered.
Because mercy was a thing he buried centuries ago.
---
Several miles away, in a sun-dappled patch of earth where the trees parted wide enough to welcome the morning light, Maya Montrose knelt beside a crooked fig tree, her hands gently brushing dirt from its roots.
She laughed softly at something Stella said—probably a joke about Lena tripping into the flower bed again. The girls had spent the morning gathering herbs and gossiping, trying to forget how fragile everything had begun to feel lately. Whispers of war had started to slither in even here, this far south.
Maya pushed a strand of honey-brown hair behind her ear, smudging dirt across her cheek without realizing it. Her eyes, a soft hazel that caught green in the light, flicked upward as a sudden silence fell.
It was too still.
No birds. No wind. Just the hum of her pulse—and then the boom.
A low, distant roar cracked through the valley. Not thunder. Something... darker.
Her breath caught.
"What was that?" Stella asked, startled, her basket tumbling to the ground.
Lena turned toward the direction of the sound. "It came from the ridge—by the border wall."
Maya didn't speak. Her heart was already sprinting ahead of her body, pounding wildly in her chest.
The figs slipped from her hands. She stood, almost stumbling in the soil as her foot twisted awkwardly in the roots. She barely felt it. Her eyes were wide, trained on the rising plume of black smoke curling in the sky just above the trees.
Her home.
Her parents were there. Her little brother. The old weaver who always gave her extra ribbon. The baker who smelled of cinnamon and called her sunflower girl.
She didn't wait. She ran.
Branches tore at her arms as she darted through the forest. Her dress caught once—she yanked it free. Her lungs screamed, but she didn't stop. She couldn't. Every breath she took tasted more like smoke. Her heart felt like it might shatter from the inside out.
She burst through the final veil of trees—and then stopped so hard her knees nearly gave out.
No.
No, no, no.
The village was gone.
Ash coated the wind like snow. The air shimmered with heat, and the once-familiar cottages and homes had been reduced to blackened skeletons. Flames still licked the wooden frames of what used to be the schoolhouse. The well had collapsed into rubble.
Everything was burning.
She stumbled forward, trembling hands reaching out as if she could will the destruction away. Her home—what remained of it—was nothing more than a pile of cracked stone and char. Her mother's shawl lay crumpled near the threshold, half-buried in soot. She bent to pick it up, fingers shaking uncontrollably.
Maya turned in circles, looking for any sign of life. Anyone.
Nothing moved but the fire.
Then, a sound—metal clanking. Boots. Low growls.
She froze.
Through the settling smoke, dark figures moved. Not soldiers like the king's men. Not human at all.
Eyes glowed from beneath steel helms. Fangs flashed in the firelight. One of them dragged a young woman by the hair. Another carried sacks—too still to be grain.
They hadn't just destroyed her home.
They had taken the women. The living.
Maya's heart raced. She ducked behind a crumbled wall, biting hard on her knuckle to silence the sob that clawed up her throat. Her entire world had been razed in under an hour.
She should have died with them.
But she hadn't.
Now the nightmare had a face—and it was the one her people had spoken of in fear-soaked whispers.
The Vampire General.
Luxien Draxen.
A name carried on ash. A ghost who burned the world, one village at a time.
And Maya had just stepped into his path.
The heat clung to her skin like a fever.
Maya knelt in the ruins of her home, her fingers trembling as they tightened around the scorched edge of her mother's shawl. It smelled like smoke and earth and something else—grief, maybe. Grief had a scent, didn't it? Something sour and hollow that clawed into your throat and refused to leave.
Her knees ached where they pressed into the ash-coated ground, but she barely noticed. The world had narrowed into something quiet and sharp, like the pause between heartbeats before a scream.
She pressed the shawl to her chest and stared blankly at the scorched skeleton of her cottage. The stone hearth was still there—cracked, blackened—but still standing. That was where her mother used to hum in the mornings, twisting bread dough with flour-dusted hands. That was where her father mended boots and sang off-key lullabies.
Gone. All of it.
Maya didn't cry.
Not at first.
She sat there with the smoke rising around her, letting the silence stretch so tight it buzzed in her ears. Her lips parted slightly, her breath shallow. She wanted to scream, to tear at the earth, to do something—anything—but the weight of it all had pinned her in place.
Then she whispered, barely more than a breath, "I'll make them pay."
Her voice surprised her. It didn't tremble. It was small, yes. But steady.
She didn't know who "they" were—only that they had done this. That something wicked had swept through her life like a scythe, and she had nothing left to lose. No one left to love.
Only revenge.
But fate, cruel as it was, hadn't finished with her yet.
---
She heard the footsteps too late.
The sound of boots crunching through debris sent her scrambling to her feet, fingers still clenched around the shawl. She turned, ready to run, but steel and shadow were already closing in from both sides.
Stella and Lena had followed her, maybe hoping to help or just not willing to leave her behind. They appeared behind the crumbled wall, breathless and wide-eyed.
"Maya—" Stella began, but the words caught in her throat as a figure stepped between them.
A vampire soldier.
His armor was dark and glossy like oiled stone, his eyes glowing faintly with the eerie hunger of the undead. He was young, or at least wore a young face—but there was nothing human left in his gaze. He raised a clawed gauntlet and gestured sharply.
"Seize them."
The others moved fast.
Hands grabbed at Maya's arms. She twisted, shoved, kicked hard against one of their knees, and earned a grunt of pain—but there were too many. They weren't human, and they weren't gentle. Her feet skidded in the ash as they tried to drag her back, but she fought like a cornered animal.
"I'm not going with you!" she shouted. "I'd rather burn than be your prisoner!"
One of the soldiers sneered and yanked hard on her wrist. Maya's eyes flared.
Then—something shifted.
She didn't know how or why, but as her heart pounded, she felt a strange heat crawl up the back of her spine. Her breath hitched. A pulse—no, a surge—rushed through her chest and outward like an invisible ripple of pressure.
The soldier closest to her—tall, with a black mark on his cheek—suddenly screamed.
He dropped her as if scalded, staggering back, clutching his head with both hands. His knees buckled, and he crumpled to the ground with a strangled gasp.
"What in the hell—?" another soldier shouted.
Maya blinked, stunned. She hadn't touched him.
The other soldiers reacted instantly—too fast, too violently.
"Witch," one of them hissed.
"No," said another, "something worse."
Before Maya could speak, before she could even step back, two of them lunged—not at her, but at Stella and Lena.
"No!" Maya shrieked, but it was too late.
Steel flashed. Blood sprayed. The sound of it—a wet, slicing crunch—was too loud, too final.
Stella collapsed to the ground first, her body folding like a broken doll, eyes wide in shock. Lena screamed once before the blade found her chest, and then her mouth just hung open, blood bubbling from her lips as she dropped beside her.
Maya screamed. A full, ragged, soul-twisting scream.
She fell to her knees between them, her hands reaching out uselessly. The warm blood soaked into the hem of her dress and splattered across her chest. Her fingers curled against Lena's shoulder—but there was no heartbeat. Nothing.
Gone.
Again.
The world tilted.
Maya turned her head toward the soldiers, her face streaked with soot and blood and something feral. "You monsters," she choked out. "You'll regret this. Every single one of you."
But her defiance meant nothing.
Two of them grabbed her again, this time binding her wrists roughly with black leather cords laced in silver thread. The same one who had accused her of being a witch leaned in, his breath foul.
"You're lucky he wants to see you," he spat. "If it were up to me, you'd be ash like the others."
They hauled her away, dragging her across the ruins of her home, past the corpses of her friends, past her old life, past the edge of the trees where the wind no longer smelled like figs but like death and cold metal.
---
Later – Inside Luxien's Fortress
The report came at dusk.
Luxien stood on the palace balcony, overlooking the snow-veiled mountains beyond the northern wall. His mind was quiet, yet ever open—always tuned to the thoughts beneath the surface of those around him. The curse of his kind. Or perhaps his particular gift.
The soldier knelt behind him.
"My Lord," he said. "The village has been destroyed. No survivors—except one."
Luxien didn't turn. "A woman?"
"Yes," the soldier confirmed. "Young. Stubborn. She fought. Injured one of our own with no weapon. The others say she… released something. A force. We don't know what she is. But…"
He hesitated.
Luxien's voice was ice. "But what?"
"She didn't cry, my Lord. Not when we took her. Not even after her friends were killed. She looked at us like she wanted to burn us alive."
Finally, Luxien turned.
His silver eyes gleamed beneath the dim light of the chamber, unreadable, yet focused now.
"Bring her to me," he said. "Unharmed. And prepare the binding chamber."
He could already sense it—the flicker of something strange, buried beneath her human skin. And something else, just faint enough to catch like a whisper at the edge of his mind.
A presence.
Familiar. Dangerous.
The girl had a scent. A memory. A thread from another life.
He would find out what she was.
And why the echo of her heartbeat stirred something in him he'd sworn centuries ago to bury.