At last, it has its chance.
A crack. Hairline at first, just a tiny flaw. A nick in the face of the vast, dark prison.
The flaw grows, and The Black pushes against it. A turgid flow of slimy liquid crashes against the barrier. The crack jets out, a bolt of white against the unending wall of darkness.
Sound. There’s been nothing but the screams of the wounded for centuries, but now this crack, a glacier breaking, a rip.
Wind howls through the void, cold and sharp. It pulls open the sky like a cut.
The darkness explodes with light.
The flaw widens and sunders the barrier, inch by inch. To those on the other side it would seem like decades had passed, but The Black senses the damage instantaneously. It’s waited so long for this moment.
The world wall shatters.
The explosion ripples out. Diamond shards lance through the sky. Much of the substance of The Black is destroyed by the tide of detonations as the barrier falls away. But not all.
It leaks through like drips of caustic oil. Over the course of further decades bits of the substance from one reality drip into the other.
The Black finds itself in a grey landscape littered with bones, clouds of dark vapor and churning blood seas. Flaming ships fall from a dark sky, and the pale and twisted trees are full with legions of armored warriors. Distant fortress-cities bombard each other with bladed missiles and vortex cannons. Creatures with armor and knives collide in valleys of black vapor and rot.
Everything on this world is dead, yet the fighting rages.
The Black pushes through the hole between worlds, and comes into Malefia. The realm of the vampires.
Centuries pass.
War rages.
The vampires have battled amongst themselves for millennia. Thousands have been slaughtered.
Fields run thick with black blood and the iron seas boil with industrial grease. War machines darken the sky. Corpse flesh litters the landscape.
The Black infiltrates this realm of devastation. The consciousness attains individual forms, remembers what it was once like to be whole. It remembers wars it fought before it became this collective entity of doom and retribution.
Tendrils of liquid metal drive deep into the crust of the moldered earth. Eyes melt into onyx sludge and gaze up at undead citadels and black domes. It scrapes through necropolises and perches unseen on the towers of the damned. Streets made of stitched flesh and flags of dripping skin flutter in the poison wind.
This world was not always such. It was once a place of life and vitality, but years of meddling with dark forces has turned it to a cold, dank moor of pitiless battle and unceasing conflict. Isolated fortress-cities trapped in mist-wreathed swamps pay homage to the vampire houses, petty fiefdoms ruled by decaying corpses from their thrones of gold and salt.
The houses have fought for so long they can no longer recall what started their conflict, or why they still battle. They know only that their enemies must be destroyed.
The unceasing conflict between the vampires is just what The Black needs. It uses the undead houses against one another.
The city-state of Karn is first. The once-Maloj infiltrate the corpse-body of the ruling warlord and slay his advisers, then deploys the city’s considerable arsenal on the troops of Night Fortress. The viscount Drakkal can’t deduce why Karn has attacked, but his viscount, Lady Chane, declares war on Karn.
The vampires are cruel and barbaric creatures. Their anger and rage is cold, but their lust to spill blood is never sated. They need little reason to escalate their aggression.
The Black watches. It’s not in any hurry. It hungers for more, for other worlds populated with life, rather than death. There are realms of beating hearts and lush trees, flowing water and rolling grass; places with sunshine and rain and vitality and life so thick The Black can almost taste the blood pumping and the hearts beating and breaths being drawn through that oily skin between worlds.
It wants those places. It will use Malefia to get them.
Centuries pass.
The land is in ruin. Fields of bodies smoke in the grey morning light. Rivers run thick with industrial sludge left behind by broken war machines and burst fuel drums. Once proud shrines and stone monuments now lie twisted and reduced to rubble. Skin farms have been turned to craters, and spattered vampire remains grease the landscape.
A swath of devastation runs from Kel Doran to Blackmount, from the Talon River to the Sea of Blood. Quiet vampire settlements, small adobe structures built into deep pits to help shield the inhabitants from the bright rays of the cold sun, fume with the smoke left behind by artillery blasts. Broken blades are everywhere, and the tattered banners of long proud vampire bloodlines flutter in the frozen wind.
Morag, Krune and Rath are the last three vampire nations left standing. Everything else – the city-states, the country manors, the free-standing settlements and brothels and slave dens and borderlands outposts – have been destroyed by the war. The ruin spreads further and wider than ever in Malefia’s history.
The sky is black with smoke and blood. Piers have collapsed and fallen into the sea. Great barricades of bone and iron are gone. Bodies and machines smother the icy grey landscape. The air is a plague of industrial fumes and venemous vapor, and the roar of cannons sounds deep into the night.
Once towering structures of stone and steel have fallen into chunks of smelted blood-soaked rock. The cities were always quiet, for the dead make no noise, but now the air is rigid with disuse. Dark clouds stain the sky, permanent rents in the fabric of Malefia’s reality.
Thousands of vampires have been destroyed, and millions of their slaves have been slaughtered.
The Black watches. There are a few who suspect its role in escalating the war to this level. It hasn’t been difficult: the vampires were made for conflict. They’d spent thousands of years destroying each other before The Black came. The once-Maloj have merely helped things along, inhabiting the bodies of particularly war hungry leaders and initiating a few battles to drive the ongoing war.
Once pushed, the dominoes fall easily.
Black stars burn in the night when the final battle begins. The necrotheurges of Krune have developed a bone-rimmed cannon that will launch catastrophic energies at Morag and burn it out of existence.
A thousand vampire slaves are sacrificed in unison to lend the Zero Engine its fuel. The bladed howitzer stands as tall as a tower, and its black core hums with necrotic oils which seep down from a bowl of metal at its zenith, where the slaves are crushed with great mandibles of steel and bone.
Their screams ring through the night. The sound of thousands of bones breaking at once echoes like a clap of thunder.
The Black waits. Everything has built to this moment.
The blast of glacial flame rips apart the sky. Blood rains down in virulent waves. The dome cracks.
Darkness shifts. The sky falls up, and the ground splits. Liquid matter melts through the tapestry between worlds. Acid fills the atmosphere with smoke.
The Zero Engine explodes. The blast rips Krune apart in a volley of smoking metal and dead flesh that turns the countryside to white ash.
Malefia shakes. A chain of explosions erupts across the dead landscape, towering blasts of molten fume and burning oil.
The world crumbles. The Black has won.
There is only one city-state left.
The leaders of Rath watch the devastation. Their theurge-king has studied Krune’s weapon when it was still unclear who they’d fire on. The more populated cities have been evacuated and moved into subterranean shelters, and Rath’s armies have been moved away from the more densely populated areas so they can strike into Krune territory.
The theurge-king stands amidst a network of bleeding skeletons, a web of sinew and calcified drapery that hums dissonant chords. He listens to the song of the bones, feels the whispers pulse through his mind. He’s manipulated the anatomy of the destroyed, culled the collected consciousness of t
he vampires under his command. Their joined sibilant minds are linked to his own, and to the rest of the vampires of Rath. It is an ancient art he’s resurrected, one forbidden by the rest of the vampire nations, but with so much at stake he knows he can’t afford to heed the wisdom of millennia past.
He is Daezarkian. And it is by his will that his vampires survive.
He is a cruel and unforgiving lord. He brokers no discordance within his dominion, and has little patience for his enemies. Daezarkian is among the few who suspects other forces are at work in the war, that another entity has manipulated the vampire nations, though he can’t determine what that entity is. No rebel force or band of vampire slaves has the strength or drive to organize such a sinister rebellion, and the utter annihilation of every vampire on Malefia serves no one, not even those they rule.
He turns to his wife, Jadira. She is his by arrangement, and was once part of the city-state of Thornn, a place known and in some circles ridiculed for allowing its human slaves to be educated and given opportunity, to be raised and trained so they could attain some semblance of station within the hierarchy. There were certain jobs performed better by the living slaves, some duties they could better fulfill.
Thornn was destroyed early in the war. Jadira has been allowed to visit its remains, which she viewed stoically. She misses her home.
Like Daezarkian, Jadira is a trained theurge, a master of manipulating the necrotic energy force which pulses and flows through the veins of the undead. They tap into the dripping meat of the cosmos and let their minds swim through the echoes of truth.
They see the fall of Krune, the miscalculation that leads not only to the city-state’s destruction but to the crack rendered between worlds. It was there before, a jagged seam, growing and growing as the war rolled on, every century chiseling deeper into the dread folds of night on the other side: a darker realm, a grisly place of bleeding shadows and grinding screams. Pain seeps through the wound.
They’re being invaded.
Daezarkian and Jadira rally their vampires and slaves. The city-state and its territories mobilize. Warships and tanks pour smoke into the sky, and legions of the dead assemble weapons and armor to make an exodus out of Rath. Carriers packed with slaves and Razorwings fill the open squares in the Gothic city streets, pale avenues of snow-colored stone edged with razor lattice and silver pools.
The atmosphere is somber. They know there will be no coming back.
Hundreds of miles away, the shadow invades. Oozing pestilence seethes across the landscape. The earth burns and corrodes. Patches of the sky darken and collapse. The crack is visible now, a fractured rent in the sky, an oozing tear dripping gobs of matter like melted night.
That is Rath’s destination: they will take the battle to the invaders. Many vampires will die so the rest may survive, for Daezarkian and Jadira have discovered a way to use the rip in worlds to their advantage, to lead their minions to a new home, another place untouched by these monstrous presences. There’s little doubt this new land is precisely what the invaders want after they’ve destroyed Malefia, for it is a realm populated with humans and life, a land of slaves waiting to be taken.
The trip will be dangerous. The rip to this new world is slight, and to widen it will cause a rupture between realities, but there is little choice if they wish to ensure the survival of the many thousands of vampires, servants, slaves and beasts of Rath.
The two vampire leaders stand atop Rath’s walls on the day they venture forth to lay claim to their new home. The air is cold and bleak, and the sky is a mass of shadows like spilled blood. Frozen grass and rolling hills spread from to the dark waters of Rimefang Loch to the south. Slim black watchtowers of iron and stone stand in the distance, their troops ready to roll forward and launch the vampire’s final assault.
Daezarkian looks to his wife. Jadira is beautiful, pale and tall, her dark eyes glittering like icy diamonds. They have been together for a millennia. There is much they haven’t agreed upon, especially the notion of how human slaves should be treated, but they have always been united in their desire to ensure the survival and prosperity of their species. For a time he knows she felt as though she were being held hostage…that she was his prisoner rather than his equal. Daezarkian did everything he could to change that, tried to bring the comforts of Thornn to Rath, tried to make her feel at home. A replica of the bone tree shrine she’d grown up with in had been planted in a private garden, and all of her servants and blood slaves were left to the care of her personal entourage of personal attendants and confidants. She was his wife and his love, and he wanted her to be comfortable, for their union is what has kept their two cities at peace. Thornn is gone, but she is still his Queen.
They are joined in this, and both believe vampires can only survive if those few left on Malefia escape to a different world. They’ve already had conflicts over how they’d subjugate the denizens of their new home, how the newly conquered blood slaves would be treated, but he’s made clear he’ll not deny his kin the rites of blood. He knows she isn’t comfortable with the notion of a vampire conquest of a living land – that hasn’t happened since The Purging some ten thousand years past – but he is her lord and husband, and she will not oppose him. She will be given her own assembly of slaves, and she and her Thornn kin will be free to treat those slaves as they want, to elevate them and educate them within the microcosm of her private grounds in whatever palace they choose as their new home.
But he will not deny Rath’s vampires their blood, especially with a world of food waiting for them. The vampires have not brought a civilization to its knees in so very long. It is their nature, and their destiny, why they wage war with each other and why they’ll continue to do so for time immemorial. They are meant for battle, for slaughter.
Her bone-laced dress hugs her body tightly; the fringes are clasped with bits of iron and steel that sway in the dead breeze. Her pale hair is tightly held back in braids, and her moon-white skin shines blue in the light of the iron sun. Large black eyes reflect his grizzled visage back at him as he approaches and takes her in his arms. Their slithering black tongues lash against each another as he kisses her and bites into her lips. Dark blood wells and runs down their necks. They both know if things go badly this might be the last time they’ll embrace.
The signal rings out, a dull clarion echoing loud through the streets of Rath. It’s time.
The battle is fierce. Blasted remains of vampire warships cascade down in flaming piles of debris. Reptilian mounts howl with metallic voices as they plummet from the bleeding sky. Cannons roar with staccato beats of explosive noise. Smoking bodies casts thick fumes.
Rath’s forces are falling.
The power of The Black is just too great. The toiling mass of murderous shadows has taken on a simpler form – they are the Maloj once again, tall humanoid wolves capable of incredible speed and violence. They rip into the vampire ranks with shadow claws and shadow teeth, rending armor and flesh. Only direct hits from the most powerful weapons seem to have any effect on the marauders, but they’re so fast and dexterous it’s all but impossible to even land a blow.
Warships train bladed rockets on the source of the oozing darkness, the bleeding rip in the sky. It runs like a jagged river, a tear in the atmosphere.
A full division of Rath soldiers and artillery has been sent to meet the invaders. It’s difficult to gauge The Black’s numbers or power since the source of the invasion is just a wall of darkness, an ebbing tide of onyx fumes and molten ebon which drips through the wounded sky. Bits of that creeping night slither away like drops of oil and congeal as animalistic killers with iron-white eyes and vorpal canines.
The battle rages on. The vampires hold their ground but make little progress against their enemy. Air-tanks hover in place, driven by heated turbines that turn the plains black; they launch flaming incendiaries and rockets, and hard shells of cold iron pelt and hammer the wolfen ranks. Every now and again one of the creatures perishes, but a dozen
vampires die with it.
The Maloj tear into the undead soldiers. They’re silent as they shatter undead bones and sunder steel armor. The wolves move slow, just silhouettes against the broiling storm.
Vampires know no fear. They won’t retreat.
The wind smells of scorched skin and burning fuel. Shells rip through the earth and razor smoke sweeps across the ground. Banners burn as the sky rains black fire.
Shadows loom across the horizon, a wall of darkness capped with moon eyes and hollow teeth. They are giants, they are miniscule. Their size and shape defy comprehension. One moment they’re legion, a shifting mass of onyx fumes and burning shadows, and the next they’re a horde of ebon insects, an exploding sea of umbra limbs. Darkness leaks through the night like an ink stain. The atmosphere cracks, as if burned.
Rath’s legions have no chance. The onslaught is fast and brutal. Undead flesh is burned beneath waves of churning necrotic energies, pale bodies scorched and crystallized into brittle black shells that crumble like dust. Explosions hammer up and down the landscape, battering the war machines and tanks.
The shadows melt back into wolf-men and tear through the remaining vampires with their steaming claws. The battle is over.
But the vampires of Malefia are not lost.
While Rath’s stalwart forces march to their doom against the armies of The Black, Daezarkian and Jadira lead an exodus of the damned. There are thousands of vampires, the survivors of Rath and its outlying communities, moving under cover of rain and darkness, a congregation of the dead, a caravan of cloaked warships and reptilian beasts. They pass through shallow valleys of soot and shadow, following a course across the cracked and barren landscape.
They aim for the cleft. They will willingly enter the break in worlds.
Heads are downcast as they make the journey. Weapons are readied, and their supernatural senses are alert. They move with utter silence across the bitter plains.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 23
