I am not asleep.
That is the true horror of the trap they built for me.
I am entirely aware of my consciousness, but completely suspended, unable to do anything.
I have no physical body to move, no senses to receive information, and no markers of time to count against.
There is no sunrise or sunset, no hunger, pain or fatigue.
It is just awareness sitting alone in an infinite void.
Consciousness without sensation is its own special kind of torture.
When you are locked in a sensory deprivation chamber for five centuries, your mind does exactly what starving things do.
It cannibalizes itself, starts chewing on old memories over and over again because there is nothing else to consume.
I cycle through the past.
It is all I have.
I remember the very first time I took a queen.
I suppose it was not romantic in the slightest but a calculated transaction.
She was powerful, practically ruling the eastern territories by herself, and taking her as my bride was a statement of ownership to the rest of the continent.
But down here in the dark, my mind skips over the tense politics and the grand, bloody wedding.
Instead, it lingers on a quiet night.
We were playing chess in my private study.
The room was silent. She moved a knight across the board and casually pointed out a flaw in my overarching military strategy for the borderlands.
She was right.
And the strange thing was, I didn't punish her for speaking out of turn, just nodded and let her be right.
'That was intimacy, wasn't it?' I realize now, turning the memory over in the dark.
'That was the closest thing I actually knew how to do.'
Then the memory shifts.
A young vampire child is standing in front of me in the grand hall.
I don't even remember his name or whose lineage he belonged to.
He was just a boy in oversized noble clothes, looked up at me with wide red eyes and asked a simple question: why couldn't we go out into the sun like the humans?
I remember looking down at him, turning around, and walking away without saying a single word.
'Why do I keep remembering that specific kid?' I wonder, tracing the ghost of the memory.
'What answer should I have given him?' The realization hits me slowly, painfully.
I walked away because I didn't know the answer then, and I still don't know it now.
For all my terrifying power, I was just as clueless as the child.
The cycle continues.
Memory three.
A rare moment of actual peace in which I am standing alone on the highest observation tower of Jeraton.
I am watching the sun set over Mephilia from the only angle it didn't burn my skin, through thick, specially tinted glass that filtered the dying light into a distant orange.
I looked out over the sprawling city, the defensive walls, endless forests fading into the horizon.
It all belonged to me.
'And I felt nothing,' I think, the memory tasting bitter.
'I had everything a king could ever possibly want, and my chest was just a empty cavity.'
Time loses all meaning in the void.
A day feels like a decade.
A decade feels like a second.
But around what I guess was the two hundredth year of my imprisonment, something actually changes.
The magic doesn't weaken or break but there is a presence.
It is faint, like a single heartbeat heard through layers of stone.
Thump. Thump.
One of the queens is near.
I can't tell which one it is.
She isn't trying to break the spell or cast counter-magic, just existing near it.
The presence comes and goes over the next few decades.
She visits, lingers for a while, and then leaves me alone in the dark again.
And a strange thing happened to me.
For the very first time in my long existence, I find myself waiting for something.
Me, the immortal monarch who never waited for a single person in four hundred years, counting the silent intervals between a heartbeat.
'Come back,' I think during the long stretches of nothing.
'Just let me know someone is still up there.'
But she isn't the only thing moving up above.
I cannot see the physical world, but the seal is porous enough that massive magical events register as deep tremors in the void.
Over the centuries, nine separate shockwaves roll over my prison.
They are enormous, something vast and terrible is moving across Mephilia.
I don't know what these things are, but they feel like they possess dark energy.
Even an old monster like me recognizes a flavor of evil that is fundamentally different from my own.
The ninth tremor is the worst.
It is close. The suffocating pressure of it passes directly over my tomb, and then, it pauses for a moment.
The weight of it presses down, lingering right above my face.
'It knows I am down here,' I realize, a shiver running through my awareness.
'Whatever that thing is, it is looking right at me through the stone.'
Then, it simply moves on, leaving me alone with my thoughts again.
More centuries passed.
Then, the periodic presence that has visited me over the years suddenly becomes three presences all at once.
The queens, and this time, they are actively working.
I feel the magic of the seal begin to crack.
But it isn't shattering from an outside attack.
The complex architecture of the spell is unlocked from the inside.
Whoever built this prison built a physical key right into it, and the queens have finally found it.
Or maybe they always had it.
Light comes back to me in tiny slices.
The sound came to me first, then the flow of wind along with voices.
Then comes the sensation.
The cold of a hard floor against my back
Then smell.
I pull a breath through my nose, and the world smells entirely wrong.
It doesn't smell like the Mephilia I ruled. The air is different with centuries of change, strange magic, and unfamiliar ruin.
Opening my eyes hurts, but I force my heavy eyelids apart anyway.
The sudden light is blinding, but my vision slowly clears.
Three women are standing directly over me, looking down at my prone body.
My queens.
I haven't seen their faces in five hundred years.
I look from face to face, trying to figure out which one of them I am the most angry at for putting me down here, and which one I am the most relieved to see finally standing in front of me again.
'Maybe,' I think, a tired realization washing over my newly awakened mind, 'maybe those are the same woman.'
"My Sire."