Long before the curse, long before names were forgotten, there were two souls born under a red moon. One was made to remember. The other — to forget.
In a world cloaked in eternal twilight, where the sun is but a myth and love is a deadly gamble, immortal houses vie for power, humans hunt shadows, and a single drop of cursed blood can rewrite fate.
Centuries Ago – Before the Great Sundering.
Long before he was a creature of the night, he was Aeonixx, a monk in a forgotten abbey perched on the edge of a windswept cliff. His faith was not in God, but in the sanctity of silence—the way candlelight pooled on stone floors, the psalms he scribed in ink mixed with crushed violets.
But the Black Plague came, and with it, a desperation that turned men into wolves. When the abbey's walls were breached by villagers screaming for miracles, Elias barricaded himself in the scriptorium, praying not for salvation, but for the strength to die unafraid, and welcoming the jaws of the reaper.
She found him there—Lysandra, a vampire whose existence was a heresy whispered in taverns. Her hair was the color of tarnished silver, her eyes two shards of glacial ice. She did not drink from him. Instead, she knelt beside his trembling body, her voice a blade wrapped in velvet: "You write of divine love, yet your hands shake without a hint of love from the divine. Let me show you a truth older than your scriptures." He refused her three times. On the fourth night, delirious with fever, he grasped her wrist and hissed, "Damn me. Bury me next to the divine that you ridicule."
The turning was not gentle. It was a wildfire in his veins, a renunciation of every vow. A fiery hunger set ablaze in his heart. A thirst for what he can never be again was set ablaze.
When he woke, Lysandra was gone, leaving only a parchment stained with his own blood.
"Immortality is not a gift," it read. "It is a question. Spend eternity answering it, welcome to the house of VALERIUS. Your name shall be Alexander Valerius, duke of the crimson castles in the western wastelands from now henceforth."
~ ALEXANDER'S POV
"A world I long to forget but still forced to acknowledge. I have power but why do I still feel ever so helpless. Even the very species I loathe haunts me, taunts me.
But I did ask for this, and this shall be my eternal torment. I f I remember her name it was Lysandra..... right that's it. I swear I'll find you and end this accursed existence with you."
~Alexander wandered the ruins of the abbey where he'd once prayed, its stones slick with moss and blood. The scriptorium where he'd inked psalms into parchment was now his deathbed and a haven for crows, their croaks echoing like the ghosts of hymns. He knelt, fingers brushing the grooves in the floor where Lysandra had knelt, her cold hands steadying his feverish body. "A question, not a gift," he muttered, her words a thorn in his throat.
He stood stand still while looking at the parchment he held in his hands and turned to look out past the mound of dead bodies that had piled up on the abbey's entrance.
"I guess my first destination is the western wastelands." Alexander stated as he undressed on of the dead bodies and changed his clothes to theirs.
He set out from the abbey to the western wastelands which were almost on the other side of the entire continent and for a recluse like him to even set foot outside the abbey was considered an achievement.
~The realm was divided into 15 distinct domains and each species had its domain and domain overlords. As for Alexander he was in the far most domain and on that occasionally suffered numerous wars due to their inferiority. To make it to the far most western wastelands, Alexander had to navigate past the human domains, witches domain and Lycans domain whilst still struggling to battle his hunger and thirst.
~ALEXANDER'S POV - The Thirst and hunger
The thirst arrived not as hunger, but as sacrilege.
I felt it first in the hollows of my teeth—a cold, insistent ache where fangs rooted themselves in the corrupted bone. My tongue become a traitor to the very body that housed it, mapping the sharpness with horrified fascination. The world bled into new dimensions: the thump-thump of a night watchman's pulse three streets away vibrated in my jaw; the scent of a baker's cut finger coiled in my nostrils like burnt sugar and iron. Every heartbeat was a drum summoning me to a feast that I could barely refuse to attend.
I starved myself.
I locked myself in stone rooms, press palms over ears to mute the symphony of veins and the heartbeats. But the thirst is cunning. It whispered in the silence: "Just a rat. Just a stray dog. No one would know. Just a sip from the fountain of youth." I tried crushing the thought, nails bite into my own flesh. The pain was a prayer—a reminder I still own my body, even as it mutinies my soul. The pain become divine and soon it turned into my faith.
Days blurred. My skin tightened like parchment over a tomb. Hunger carved hieroglyphs into my ribs. I started hallucinating:
Dew on grass become blood-drops.
A child's laughter echoed as the gurgle of a slit throat.
My own reflection in a moonlit puddle bared fangs I don't remember unsheathing.
I clutched onto relics of My humanity like rosary beads:
A locket with a curl of hair.
A book of poems I can no longer read without smelling ink as viscera.
The memory of sunlight—true sunlight—warming my mortal skin.
But the thirst sharpened it grew more fangs. It clawed up my throat, a living thing made of razors and need. My veins felt full of wasps. Saliva flooded my mouth, acidic and wrong. I retched, but only shadows spill out. My breath was fiery with hunger, the chains holding onto my humanity were breaking loose and scattering along with what was left.
I still remember that night....
the night I stumbled into the edge of the forest trying to get away from the villages.
A drunk man reeled toward me, stinking of rum and unwashed sorrow. His pulse drummed against his temple—a lure, a seductious river of blood . My body moved without consent. Pinning him felt effortless, like cradling smoke. His eyes widened, not with fear, but recognition. "Demon," he slurs.
My fangs descended.
The dam cracked.