This Is My Town

Prologue

She sat with her right leg crossed over her left, poised upright in her throne of white concrete. Well, it was as strong as concrete, anyway, and worked perfectly to support her as a seat of fear. Classically, it was made out of bones. The bones of the other Vampires that had tried and failed to step up against her and put a stop to her evil reign of terror. The Vampires and the Nonsept, as a whole in fact. She always saw them coming; she had a way of predicting when an attack against her was made. If they knew her real, name, however, things would be a lot easier. You see, if any of the other Vampires knew who she truly was, things would be different. For starters, she would be dead. They would have killed her long ago, at those rare few times she wasn't on her guard, but it was at those times when they paid the least attention to her at all. Only she knew why, but they didn't. And they never would.

With a deep, heavy sigh, she rose from the bones nestled beneath her and she narrowed those blood red eyes of hers that also belonged to any other Vampire in Frate. Except the Royals, of course. Those of royal blood had eyes the colour of the richest gold you could imagine, but not even they came into Montilo. No, they stayed in their own city, cooped up in that wretched palace of theirs in Crinya, the biggest city in Frate, where it was safe because they knew that this monster that resided in Montilo was stronger than them. They knew that she could not be bested. Especially not by a bunch of golden eyed weaklings like themselves. After all, they held onto only the political power in Frate. The rest of that power was with the one they all feared, whom no one had even met yet. Well, figuratively speaking, of course. Plenty had met this monster of a Vampire, but none had lived to tell the tale.

She stepped down from the platform her throne resided on with her pale, bare feet dragging across the concrete of the room. Her long, dead straight hair fell over her shoulders and down her back in the blackest of waves and hug loosely around her body because of its length. Her cherry-red eyes showed nothing but the fact she was a Vampire, and the long, tight dress she was wearing matched the colour of her eyes with ease. Her feet showed from beneath the base of the dress as she continued down the platform, stopping at the base. She couldn't have looked a day older than thirty, but her features were flawless and had been for around three hundred years, much longer than any other Vampire's age expectancy. There was a loud groaning noise, but she didn't know where it was coming from.

Suddenly, the two double doors that led into the throne room burst open and in stumbled an old, frail man whose clothes had seen better days. Actually, his whole existence had seen better days. He was whimpering between two Nonsept, and the woman smiled.

The Nonsept of Frate are basically the damned. Everyone gets transformed from mortal to immortal before or on their tenth birthday, but sometimes the process is scorned. When the metamorphosis takes place, they call it the Initiation because it's when they turn from life to death. It's a funny thing, you know. The way Frate functioned was one of instability, and yet everyone was fine with it. Vampires here work in interesting ways. They turn, they age and they stop aging once they reached fifty. By this time, they'd live on for another hundred years if they didn't get their head torn off by the guards, and then they would die after one hundred and fifty years of already being dead. Unless you become a Nonsept, because they die as soon as they strike thirty years of existence. During the time of aging for a Vampire, however, they could chose to find the person they are meant to be with; their soul mate. If they ever found them, it was only with them that offspring could be made, which was another thing that startled her. How could death create life? It was possible, obviously, as it had been happening for centuries, but the logic of it all still struck her mightily.

How could something so horrid and dreadful be the reason behind life? It was because of death, as you may know, that life was still in existence. Here, in Frate, there was no wall separating the living from the dead. They all lived together, in the most peaceful harmony any other place could dare muster. Mortals were born, they changed by the time they were ten, they reproduced themselves to make more mortal children, and then the process starts over again. A cycle of death and life.