Empire of Vampires ✔️

Chapter Nineteen

1814

They gathered around on the dewy grass as she was lowered into the ground. The sky was a bright scarlet the morning after her ghastly murder, but by afternoon the suns had saturated into a beautiful rosy hue that cast streams of glowing pinkish light on to her open grave. The priest gave a morbid sermon, speaking of the evils of the world and cruel humanity. 

'We are born of dust and when we die, we return to dust. We're all sinners, each one of us,' he claimed, raising his open palms to the sky. 'We all gather here today to bury our loved one. We will walk away from this grave but Lady Marienne Cleremont of the Hawthorne Cleremont's will die in this place,' he loudly proclaimed, 'And it will be so.'

'And it will be so,' the congregation chorused. Their customs dictated that they declare the finalized ending of her life. It was a superstition they believed would help her pass on to the next world, instead of remaining undead in theirs.

Her mother wept as she thought of the ruin of the marriage that would have helped their family climb the social ladder. Marienne had been her only daughter; her only hope of a trade with a family as wealthy as the Kenworthy's.

Lord Charles Kenworthy walked up to the grave to deliver the end of her eulogy. His face was wet with crocodile tears; when he spoke his voice was choked with feigned emotion.

'Lady Marienne was my heart, my love, and my intended wife. Her fate was unjust and I will not stand for it.' He looked down at the congregation with determination in his eyes. 'I swear to each and every one of you, and to her family, that I will avenge your young daughter.'

Danyel watched silently from the shadows. He felt sick at this false declaration. When he had found Lady Marienne dying at Kenworthy's hand the night before, Danyel had gone through an internal struggle. He had finally gone against his better judgement and turned her once her tormentors had left.

In all the millennia that he'd been alive, Danyel had never felt the need to involve himself in the mundane and pointless life of humans. But as he watched the beautiful young girl being beaten to death, he had felt an anger and a need for justice that he had never felt before. Not even when he had his terrifying visions.

Once he bit her, he had heard a search party running down the street. They were led by Charles Kenworthy. The man who killed her. He had given an incredible performance of shock and despair once he came across the limp body lying in the street. Charles had leaned over her corpse and wrapped his arms around it, loudly weeping and swearing an oath to find her justice.

Another party member, her brother, Danyel assumed, had fallen to pieces at the sight of her still figure. He'd fallen to the ground, unable to breathe or move. He had eventually been carried away by one of the men, along with his sister's corpse.

Charles coolly tossed dirt on the grave of the undead girl. For a moment, his emerald ring shone scarlet. As red as the crimson suns. The ather slipped like dust through his fingers and settled on the wooden casket.

Her parents followed suit with more of her distant family. There were a few sniffles here and there but they all left once it was over. They went back to their own lives now that hers had ended.

The one person who really cared hadn't shown up. He was too weak to cope with his loss; couldn't even bear to say his final goodbyes. James had been unable to speak ever since he heard the news. He felt numb and horrifyingly conscious at the same time; both shivering and paralyzed.

He tumbled himself from the carriage on the way to the funeral and ran, and ran, and ran. He ran to the cliffs they had played on as children. It stood tall and ominous against the scarlet skies, its dark rocks devoid of any greenery or serenity. It no longer looked like the safe haven of their youth, but like the menacing memorialization of their fate.

James stumbled onto its highest peak, falling to his knees in wreaking sobs as he clutched at the rocks. His palms were scraped in blood from the scraggly stones and his face lay on the ground at the edge of the cliff, streaked in mud.

Looking over the cliff he saw the angry dark ocean, roiling and crashing beneath him. The sound of it filled his head, deafening all other thought. He screamed into the furious waves. The waves screamed back. They crashed against the cliffside, challenging him to plunge into their darkness.

Not for the first time, he imagined joining his sister. He could hear her voice inside of his head. Her laughter echoed through his otherwise empty mind. His only solace was now gone from this world.

He didn't believe in there being another. 

James wished he did believe in something more; a next life. Another existence. Maybe, it would have made the loss easier to bear, if he could imagine her soul was still alive. Souls were another thing he didn't believe in. 

It can be lonely sometimes when you believe in nothing. A nihilistic existence where everything was pointless and death was the only escape. James imagined that the crippling need to take his own life was rooted in the despondent loneliness that came with the refusal to believe in a higher force.

James wanted more than anything to believe. He wanted to ignore his own doubts and uncertainties and follow some faith, any faith, in a state of blissful ignorance. He'd tried his entire life to force some kind of belief into himself that would help him get through the hardships. 

His attempts only found himself burning with hatred for an unjust and unmerciful Goddess. It was a truly spiritual state; to want to believe in something so badly and yet not be able to.

Assigning the wretched boy with the miserable label of being Antifaith, thereby proved only his intense, clawing, hunger for faith.

James gazed off the edge of the cliff.