The Vampire's Crimson Kiss (Editing)

Chapter 27/The Crimson crown

If you believed what they wrote about the blood god, she was a curious deity. The bite-born regarded themselves as the chosen people above everyone, natural-born. They said they had been chosen to bring dignity and civilization to the world. They had been personally selected by the blood god and led to that point to do her bidding. She delighted in giving weaknesses to them as much as she gave power. She had gifted them with power, control, beauty, and eternal youth, but she also cursed them with a desire for blood. The blood god herself would often punish her people for reasons only the mouth of Satan could explain. One of her punishments was forcing them to hide in the shadows for many years. The fall of humanity was the sign the punishment was over and the renaissance had begun.

As Mary led me through the concealed labyrinth that wound its way from the Duke's opulent chambers, I couldn't help but be ensnared by the enigmatic riddle he had presented – the promise of a queen, not a mere duchess.

"The Duke declared he would make me a queen, not a duchess. Do you have any idea what he could possibly mean?" I said as we moved through the grim, cobweb-filled space.

"Yeah, that's strange," Mary said. "The vampires harbor little reverence for the King of the Barren Lands, much like your own father would dismiss the king of the sheep. He might be thinking about obtaining the crimson crown one day."

"Could he?" I said as we passed another fork in the route.

"The crimson crown..." Mary began. "It's a potent emblem steeped in vampire lore. The thirteen covens of Albion all guess that one day, one coven will rule the others and hold the crown. So they all want to make sure they are the coven that comes out on top. So as soon as one coven becomes too strong, the others will come together to defeat it. The Council of the 13 covens gives them a place to do so."

"So why didn't they come together against the coven of Meridian in this war with the coven of Midnight?" I asked as we passed a partially foul-smelling location.

 "You're allowed to defend yourself," Mary said, looking back to me in the gloom. "It started before I was, shall we say, recruited. The Duke had been lucky; he had been poisoned by The Mortal Defiance along with Lord Mortal. The coven of midnight guessed the wrong assassin. They attacked us, and so the covens sat back, letting us both become weaker. That was before the Mortal Defiance and the King of the Barrenlands got involved. Again, the thirteen covens expect a coven to stand up to humans."

I knew the only way between the coven of the Meridian and the bunker of the coven of Midnight was through the south of the Barren lands. The vampires had occupied some towns of the south, so my father had no choice but to get involved. In practice, he had thought pushing back would work and not suck everyone into an ugly night war.

We turned a sharp corner. "And thanks to your tribute, the coven of the Meridan had the right to pass but not feed through the south of the Barren lands," Mary said.

"But was queen a slip of the tongue?" I said as we came to a stop.

We reached the exit. Mary peeked through the spy hole. With nothing there, we stepped out and dusted ourselves down. "The Duke, in my experience, always has a plan," Mary said. "He needs them. All the coven lords and dukes and barons want to wear the crimson crown. If he didn't sound like he wanted to, then the coven would replace him. I mean, why do you think the coven follows the Duke and not Malphas?"

"Malphas?" I said as we walked back to my rooms.

"Yeah, rumor is he ran the place a long time ago. The Duke replaced him," Mary said.

 "But I thought the Duke was the son of the last Duke," I said as we walked to the elevator.

"He is i think, but as a familiar, you don't get to learn everything about what happened here a while back."

Finally, Mary led us to a secret location and peeked through a spy hole, noticing no one. So we left and, now in a public space, took the least-used route to my rooms.

After I returned to my bed and was alone, I quickly retrieved the scrap I had stolen from the book of Edapus. The text was decaying, the original page was cracked and crumbling like mud drying in the sun. The hidden touch on my flesh both blurred the writing and made the page more desperate for more. The writing was poor to begin with, and the language was archaic. I looked over the text, beginning with what had been started on the previous page. "Commands the animals of the land and air..." The text began before being lost behind an arcane diagram fragment made worse by words I did not yet know.

'In the shadow-draped ____ of __ eternal existence, __ ___ encountered myriad mysteries, but none as perilous...' It began followed by a few torn words.

'... and beguiling as the human child gifted with the power to converse with and command the living. This child, a whisperer to beasts and birds, possesses an ability that defies the natural order, bending the wills of creatures great and ________ innocent yet potent desires. Beware, my kin, for such a child walks a path entwined with both enchantment and danger, a beacon ____ _ _ _ _____ ____. Their voice, __ siren call to the animal kingdom, can unravel the threads of our carefully woven secrecy, for the creatures of the earth hold no allegiance to the veils of shadow and silence __ __ ________ ____.'

This sounded like me, to me. There was a gap, and the text continued "...when found, the child and family should not be allowed to live. They should be burnt while gagged. Something ending in the sound 'tch,' which in the dark tongue were more words than I cared for. There was an annotation in another's handwriting about something called the Great Purge."

I looked at the text; they didn't like me and would kill me. So I guessed I would be quiet about this in case anyone got the wrong idea.