My feet glided over the concrete sidewalk using the ethereal cracks as my guide.
The walk to the cracks' origin point lasted around twenty minutes. As more time passed, my resolve got stronger, and I refused to turn back. Though it was a weakling's resolve, so take it as you will.
As I went, the streets slowly transformed around me. Gone were the pastel homes and unique decorations of my school's neighborhood. In their place were wide, busy streets and the heavy atmosphere of a bustling city. Glass-fronted stores with flickering neon signs. Restaurants exhaling warm, greasy smells. People weaving through crosswalks, heads down, earbuds in.
All signs of a world that buzzed with life. If not for the glow of the otherworldly cracks, I'm sure the scene would've been picturesque.
The deeper I followed the glowing lines, the more the traditional look of the city peeled away.
It was slow at first, and I hardly even noticed it, but with time, the shift became more apparent.
Traffic had thinned, the wide, busy road became small and unkempt, the easy-going faces of joggers disappeared, and the air of unspoken day-to-day joy slipped away. In its place came a growing uneasy feeling.
By the time I reached the outskirts of the district, I realized I hadn't seen another person in nearly ten minutes. The air smelled different here—less like the city, more like wet earth and rust.
Then I saw it.
The root of all the cracks was a graveyard, or to be more specific, someplace in the graveyard.
Even just looking at the exterior, it was clear that this place had been neglected for a long time.
The perimeter was enclosed by a crumbling red-brick wall that was about six feet tall, its surface stained dark with age and streaked with rain runoff. Vines had overtaken most of the wall, their thick tendrils snaking across the brick and hanging over the edges, while ants and beetles crawled undisturbed in the cracks. Dense bushes and overgrown shrubs pressed in around the graveyard's border, making it feel isolated from the surrounding world.
At the front stood a rusted iron gate, the metal warped and corroded with orange-red rust. It hung loosely on one hinge, groaning faintly whenever it swayed in the breeze.
Through its narrow bars, I could see bits of the interior of the graveyard. As expected, it was a mess of uneven terrain, dead leaves, and broken stone, with no clear paths remaining. All it being illuminated by the pale light of the fractures.
I shifted my body uncomfortably.
As I stood in front of the large gate, I couldn't keep down the feeling that this was a place that no man was ever meant to tread.
'It's like something straight out of a horror movie... I never even imagined that something like this existed in this city...'
All the resolve that I'd built suddenly went flying out the window as I looked at the desolate graveyard. The fact that the sun had nearly completely set didn't make the situation any better.
While it may have been my imagination, I swore that the silence was interrupted by a quiet groaning. At that moment, my heart could've jumped right out of my chest and taken a month-long vacation in the finest resort in Sweden.
Truly, the resolve of a weakling is such a fickle thing.
I scratched my head, and a grim expression flashed on my face.
My fingers hovered near the iron gate, not quite touching it. By this point, I could hear the beating of my heart resounding in my ears.
I brought my head down and stared at my unmoving feet.
It was only then that I realized that my entire body was shaking. I'd been so wrapped up in examining the graveyard that I never even noticed.
"Fear... I'm afraid..."
I clenched my fists, digging my nails firmly into the palms of my hands.
"Come on. You're the Dark King, for god's sake. You've defeated demons, witches, and all other forms of dastardly beasts. There isn't anything that you can't handle."
I plastered a large, pompous grin on my face as I stepped forward. Reaching out my right hand, I gripped the rusted bars of the gate. The metal was biting cold from the winter air. Rust flaked off on my fingers like dead skin.
Willing myself once more, I pushed the gate open.
A loud shrieking noise flooded the air and disturbed the eerie silence that the graveyard had enjoyed for decades.
I stepped forward, a mixture of fear and resolve in my every movement.
Rows of gravestones were at my sides, all of which were covered in thin blue lines, having been desecrated by the cracks. The remaining names were either scratched away, faded beyond recognition, or carved in an unreadable language.
As I walked, I noticed the sheer volume of the fractures had increased drastically compared to outside the walls of the graveyard. Not a single inch of the place had gone untouched by the abnormality. And I could see the reason for it with my own two eyes.
I stopped in front of it and looked up. There it was, the origin of the cracks.
There was a small wooden shed near the back of the graveyard. From it, all the fractures had spread out like roots of a tree. The wood it had been constructed from was rotten and old. Whatever color it had when it was first constructed had long faded into a murky dark red that blended in perfectly with the early night.
I took a slow breath through my nose. The air was heavy here. Not with fog, not with moisture, but with something else that I couldn't describe. It was like nothing that I'd experienced before. Like every cell in my body was being gently touched all at once.
My shoes crunched over a warped wooden step at the foot of the shed, and I stood at the door.
I raised a hand to knock—and paused.
Why knock?
It's not like this was someone's home. I let out a dry, nervous chuckle grabbing onto the shed's rusted latch.
Exercising as much caution as humanly possible, I opened one of the shed's doors. What met my gaze was an unexpected sight, for a second time that day, a sight that one could only hope to see once in their entire life.
The shed was completely empty, save for one single feature. A striking black coffin.
Crafted from the darkest wood, polished to an alluring sheen, it radiated the grand esteem of an enigmatic sovereign. Its sleek, elongated structure is adorned with intricate carvings of gothic beauty, depicting swirling vines, dragons, and serpents. Ornate fittings of blackened silver and wrought iron, featuring motifs of bats and roses. At the center of the coffin was a crest—a bat crowned with a blood-red jewel.
The coffin was laid on the floor of the shed and from the ground it was laid upon, the blue cracks spread out like the roots of a tree. Inching closer, I was overcome with the mystique of the coffin. I examined it and looked over it until I'd admired every detail that was etched on it.
"Amazing."
That was the only word that came to my mind.
The sight was mystifying. Such craftsmanship was beyond world-class; it was a marvel in and of itself. My hand, without thinking, reached out and touched the coffin.
The instant that my skin made contact with the finely crafted wood of the coffin, black sparks flew out from the point of contact.
"What the-!" I exclaimed, recoiling instinctively from the unsettling display. My body reacted with the agility of a startled cat. I leaped backwards and fell to the ground a few feet away from the coffin.
That dormant blood-red gem at the coffin's center flared awake, pulsing like a furious heart. The glow swelled until it flooded the room with a crimson light that drowned out the blue of the cracks.
Strange, otherworldly sounds reverberated off the walls, filling the air with an eerie melody that sent shivers down my spine.
As though responding to some sort of otherworldly summons, the edges of the coffin began spawning fierce winds.
I raised one arm in an attempt to protect my face from the powerful hurricane of winds. Even still, I kept one eye open in an attempt to witness whatever it was that was taking place.
The lid of the coffin began to shift. It was slow and deliberate, as if the coffin itself was reluctant to surrender whatever it held inside.
As the lid to the coffin opened further, a torrent of energy was released. Black lightning crackled and surged throughout the room as if eager to finally escape from its age-old confines.
The lid fell to the floor with a final, thunderous thud.
Then, a dark silhouette rose from inside the black box.
At first, the howling winds and crackling lightning obscured the figure, but when the storm eased and it finally came into view, my eyes widened in disbelief.
Sitting up in the coffin was a nude woman.
At first, all I could do was stare.
My eyes, no, any mortal eyes graced with the honor of seeing her would find themselves absolutely smitten.
There, nestled within the confines of the ancient sarcophagus, lay a woman of unearthly beauty.
Her skin was alabaster white, without a single blemish, like a porcelain statue painted by gods. Her fiery red hair cascaded down her body in a messy brilliance, paired with the most dazzling scarlet eyes. Her naked figure was also the thing of dreams, perfectly enticing to anyone, man or woman.
Awestruck, I couldn't take my eyes off her, it was as though she radiated some divine royal glow. But, it wasn't just her beauty that left me speechless, it was the silence itself as well.
There wasn't a single sound or noise to disrupt that moment in time. It was like the world itself needed a second to catch its breath.
Turning her head to the side, the woman glared at me with her ruby eyes. The piercing force of her gaze seemed to cut through me.
By all means, she seemed unimpressed and uninterested. In her eyes lay an anger, perhaps one that had found itself nestled in her heart for as long as she'd been in that coffin.
As she stirred from her slumber, the beautiful woman parted her lips. She spoke, but I simply couldn't understand a single word. The language was unlike any that I'd ever heard before.
"Katsuak tlakatl."
The woman extended her right hand toward me, and all at once, a primal feeling of danger flooded my body.
Suddenly, my body felt locked in place. Every instinct screamed at me to turn tail and run away, but my body refused to move. I was stuck watching and waiting for her every move.
The white palm of her hand began to heat up, transforming into a bright red hue. Some sort of power swirled at her fingertips, and I could only tremble as that power grew more and more.
It bloomed at the center of her palm, expanding out in threads of red energy that began to spiral and weave together. The threads came together, coalescing into a sphere of powerful heat. The temperature within the shed began to spike as the orb in her hand grew larger and larger.
Soon, it formed into a fireball so large that it couldn't see the woman casting the spell behind it.
Its searing heat could even be felt from where I was sitting. I could feel the hairs on my arms singe, my skin prickle and tighten. In a futile attempt at defense, I raised both my arms. The fire pulsed with hunger, seeking to engulf all that stood before it.
In her eyes was every intent to burn me to ash.
I yelled, "H-Hold on! Just wait!"
The blaze somehow grew even stronger still until the woman had a miniature sun at her fingertips.
Just then, the flame faltered and flickered.
It shifted from a perfectly formed orb of destruction to an ill-kept mass of red fury.
Like a candle in the wind, the flame grew unstable. Its development seemed to move in reverse. Slowly, it became smaller and smaller.
Soon, it was no more than a tiny flame, and then even that completely dissipated.
The sudden absence of heat left goosebumps crawling across my skin. My breath caught. I slowly lowered my arms, only to find the crimson-haired woman staring down at her empty palm with narrowed eyes and a faint sneer.
For some reason, the power that she'd attempted to summon had failed her.
Before I could ponder, the woman rose from her resting place with an eerie grace, her movements fluid and unhurried. She marched toward me, her naked body swaying ever so lightly with every step.
Once she stood over me, she meekly looked down at me with disregard. In her mind, gears were turning.
She stopped before me, silent, her expression unreadable. Then, without warning, her hand seized the front of my shirt and yanked me upright as if I weighed nothing.
Then, in one fell swoop, she pressed me close to her naked body. A jumble of emotions bounced around inside me. There was a mix of awe, dread, and something else that I couldn't quite describe. But any form of excitement would disappear once I looked at her face. At that moment, my heart sank.
Her mouth was open wide, and a pair of shimmering, elongated fangs were on full display.
Then I understood her true nature. As she plunged her fangs into me, I understood.
"A vampire."
As her fangs pierced my neck, I could feel every drop of blood that was being pulled out of my body. There was an odd chilly sensation that swept the tips of my limbs, and an odd bliss from where her fangs punctured me. As she held and fed off me, I was locked into a trance-like state.
At that moment, as the world around us faded into insignificance, I knew that my fate had become inexorably entwined with hers.
The world tilted. My thoughts were scattered.
Then, just as I began to fade, she pulled her lips away from my neck and pushed me back slightly.
Much of my energy had been extracted from my body, and I may have wandered onto the other side if it weren't for the warmth of her vampiric embrace.
"Human. What is your name?"
Looking up, I was shocked. It seems that she took more than just my blood in our exchange. Due to a mixture of my drowsiness and nervousness, I answered with the first thing to come to mind.
"I am Dark King, Veri! Of all humans that exist in this era, I am by far the bravest, the strongest, and most elegant. Vampires like you don't scare me in the slightest. I've got thousands of the most powerful men in the world at my beck and call!"
Her crimson eyes studied me for a long moment. That unreadable expression remained.
"I see... Well, Veri, I shall ignore your insolence on this one occasion. Any who dares don the title of 'king' or anything of the sort in my presence is nothing more than an ignorant fool. This is my land, and I shall be reclaiming it soon."
"Yeah... Well, what's your name then?"
For the first time, an expression other than hatred or indifference graced the beautiful woman's face. The edges of her lips curled upward and formed into a strikingly dazzling smile.
"Cacophony, the Vampire Empress."