"No, I have not heard of it. What is it?"
Raviel's smile retained a certain warmth and gentleness as he quietly listened to the young woman's answer of ignorance.
He put his silverware back on the table and assumed the pose of a storyteller.
"You see, where I am from, in Lumine, we are still very much religious. There hasn't been a decline like here in Praussuria. The king himself is God's chosen.
For the longest time, the Church has been unable to contact God Himself or to receive a direct response from Him. Therefore, they made a plan to achieve their objectives.
They tried to artificially create angels!"
Anastasia's face expressed an element of surprise, but not shock. She did not know a lot about the Church's usual doings and experiences, but she had a feeling of unease as Raviel explained.
"Obviously, the experience failed and they never were able to communicate directly with God, but it still left a mark on a lot of people."
A question spawned in her mind while listening to the Count's story.
"They made it public?"
It felt weird to her that the church would voluntarily give away its secret experiments to the public. If she too decided to produce divine beings by her own hands, clearly and blatantly in a blasphemous manner such as the Church's, she would try to hide it as best as she could.
So why did the Count know about this experiment? Wouldn't it be restricted knowledge to those who worked for the Resurian Church at the time? It was all very bizarre to her.
"They didn't, but it was easy enough to notice something was wrong at the time. Well, I didn't think it was that bad, to be honest, but my brother would probably tell you otherwise."
Anastasia looked at Count Dumas with a twisted look of incomprehension. She tried looking beyond his gentle eyes and features, but they seemed to hide nothing behind them, which should've put her more at ease.
But for some reason, she couldn't help but feel the same thing as she did when thinking about Vlad. Like her very soul being alarmed by something she could not see with her own eyes.
She may have possessed the ability to sense things, but it wasn't all that useful when you couldn't tell what was wrong.
At first, he thought that Raviel was lying through his teeth, but now, seeing the man's face, she was unsure about it.
The story he was telling might've been real, in fact.
But the more she thought, the more the sensation of unease grew, and the less she knew what was wrong with the situation.
She quickly discarded the theory of Raviel lying; she did not believe that this could be the cause of the premonition.
She looked around her, servants, nobles, food, drinks, and architecture, but nothing seemed out of place to her eyes.
The only thing that was warning her about the coming danger was her soul, and it did not possess eyes to tell her what was wrong.
Everything in this hall could be the element that was causing this pain.
She had no idea what was wrong right now, and this feeling was unbearable for her.
"Why are you telling me this?" Her face was cold as ice, still semi-focused on their discussion and more bothered by the inner sense of danger she received.
"Why? I don't really know, I thought you would be interested in matters like this, considering your name." His face was full of question marks as he observed the lady.
Again.
My name has been brought up twice now, a coincidence?
Everything around her became bizarre and out of the ordinary. She felt like the listener of a big orchestra or the spectator of a grand play.
No, the feeling was different from that.
She was the actor in the play.
She felt like a puppet on a string, being controlled by something, while having the illusion of freedom.
Anastasia soon realized something.
She was no God.
She was no angel.
At the end of the day, she could be easily controlled by other beings, humans or not.
Something will go wrong.
I'm sure of it now.
Sweat dropped down her forehead as the pain grew continuously, without any stopping in sight.
Suddenly, the feeling came to a stop, and she turned her head towards the window to her right.
CRASH!
She observed in slow motion as a foot dropped to the window and made it explode, glass shattering and flying in all directions, and cutting her cheek on the way.
Blood dropped down her face as she looked in a daze at the now broken window.
A man in a dark hood flew through the glass window and jumped to the middle of the room, leaving glass throughout the entire banquet hall.
It took a few seconds before anyone made a sound.
But as soon as the people at the banquet realized what was going on, chaos erupted.
The servants were quick to get to the door, but the man was faster.
He pulled out a dagger and cut open the manservant's throat in front of everyone.
Blood pooled down his body as he tried to grab and cover his fatal wound with his bare hands without any hope of survival.
His body soon collapsed to the ground, and his hands stopped trying to salvage the little blood he had left in his body.
A female servant next to him also dropped to her knees, not of her own will; it seemed her legs gave out while observing the gory scenery.
The man with the hood laughed madly as he licked the blood on his weapon, which was now a crimson color.
The gesture made Anastasia get a glimpse of the attacker's appearance.
It was a man with soft features and without a lot of masculine features. He was undeniably a man, but lacked the masculine aura of the Sun God or the look of a father Dmitri possessed.
The murderer's hair was messy and dark; it was not very long but not very short either.
His skin was ghostly pale, and his tongue was now covered in sticky red substance.
The man's eyes were of an unnatural scarlet color, and his look screamed famine. He was completely under the influence of blood craving.
His teeth, long and white, resembled those of a very well-known mystical creature.
A vampire?