Alaric didn't remember the shipwreck. Only fragments—saltwater burning his lungs, the jagged teeth of rocks tearing into his side. Now, his immortality was a ghost, slipping through his fingers like sand.
The pain in his thumb—dull, throbbing—was proof of that. Mortal pain. Mortal exhaustion. Every brick he broke felt like a betrayal, as if his body mocked him for forgetting what he once was.
The vision struck without warning: water closing over his head, the crush of darkness, the certainty of drowning. He gasped, gripping the half-shattered brick so tight it split his palm anew. Blood dripped onto the cobblestones, vivid against the dust.
One of the laborers, a grizzled man named Vosk, clapped him on the shoulder. "Easy, lad. You'll grind yourself to bone at this rate."
Alaric blinked, disoriented. "I—I saw—"
Vosk snorted. "The sun's got you addled. Drink." He shoved a waterskin into Alaric's hands.
Alaric's fingers trembled. The weight of it—the urgency—was obscene. He'd spent centuries without craving clear liquid, yet now his throat burned like a desert crack. The first gulp was a revelation, coolness spreading, the ache dulling. He nearly whimpered.
Alaric stood in the harsh noon light, arms spread, face upturned—not flinching, not withering. The sun's rays carved golden lines across his shoulders, but instead of blistering, his skin drank it in like parched earth after rain.
Strength hummed beneath his veins, foreign and electric. Vosk dropped the hammer. "You're supposed to smoke in this, boy," he rasped.
Alaric exhaled slowly, watching the plume of dust curl from his lips—not smoke, but close enough to make his gut twist with memory. He rolled his tongue against the roof of his mouth, tasting copper and old ash.
Somewhere, in the buried wreck of his centuries, he'd once held smoke like a lover—inhaling it deep, letting it coil in his lungs until his undead flesh remembered warmth.
Across the city, a violin academy played slow nocturnes. The sound bled through Luna's crooked streets like syrup, thick and deliberate. Young vampires—too young to remember bloodlust as anything but a bedtime story—drew bows across strings with meticulous grace. Their fingers, pale as moth wings, fluttered without tremors.
Peaceful.
Practiced.
A lie wrapped in catgut and varnish.
In the courtyard of Valente Manor, Lunar Tears bloomed in defiance of the heat. Their petals—translucent as drowned skin—caught the twilight and held it. These weren't flowers; they were elegies given root.
Each blossom grew where a vampire had fallen to daylight, their ashes sewn into the soil by mourners who couldn't bear to let go entirely. Their silver pollen dusted every hem in the district.
The violin's lament curled through the garden like a ghost's fingers. It was a nocturne penned by 'Eris D'Aubigny', a composer whose lungs had been punctured by bayonets during the last Blood Truce.
His music survived.
The notes dripped from the strings of young Veyla's instrument—too slow for the rhythm of living hearts, too precise for anything born of mortal hands. She played as if plucking thorns from her own ribs.
Lunar Tears trembled on their stems. Their petals caught the sound and held it, translucent veins pulsing. Isabella reached out, her fingers hovering above a blossom. One brush, and it would shatter like spun sugar.
"They say these grew where Sylvanus burned," she murmured. "His ashes were scattered here. Along with Dracara's. Along with Maryata's." Her voice frayed at the edges. "Now they bloom where we bleed."
Alex's boot scuffed the gravel. "You're saying the flowers are—"
"Gravestones," Isabella finished. Her smile was a razor's edge. "The pretty ones always are."
A gust stirred the pollen. Silver dust spiraled up, catching in Alex's lashes. He blinked—once, twice—and the world fractured. For a heartbeat, he saw Luna City as it truly was, a carcass picked clean by time, its cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of fleeing footsteps, its towers leaning like exhausted sentinels.
Then the vision snapped shut.
Veyla's bow slipped.
A note screeched.
"Did you—" Alex rasped.
Isabella's fingers closed around his wrist. Her grip was colder than the grave. "Don't. Look. Away."
But it was too late. The city had already devoured the truth entirely.
The violin's lament seeped through Luna's cracks like ink through parchment—slow, inevitable. It coiled around the rusted hinges of attic windows where widows pressed their ears to the glass. It pooled in the hollows of laborers' collarbones as they hunched over steaming pipes.
The cobblestones remembered. They held the echoes of footsteps that would never return—soft clicks of polished boots, the whisper of cloaks dragging through mist. The city stood hollowed out, its spires like broken teeth against a bruise-colored sky. Moonlight, once a comfort, now pooled in the gutters like spilled milk.
A wind moved through the empty avenues, carrying the scent of burnt incense and damp velvet. The windows of the old blood taverns were shuttered, their signs swinging with a sound like bones tapping together.
The lamplights flickered weakly, casting long shadows that didn't belong to anyone living. Or undead.
A woman—no, a vampire—knelt in the middle of the square, her fingers pressed into the cracks between the stones where the ashes of her kin had settled.
She didn't weep.
Vampires didn't weep. But her shoulders trembled like a bridge about to collapse.
"They took the heart of us," she said to no one, or perhaps to the ghosts. Her voice was the scrape of a coffin lid. "Not the blood. Not the fangs. The laughter."
Behind her, a child—pale as a moth's wing, eyes too old for its face—picked up a discarded dagger, its edge still faintly humming with the memory of violence. "Do we bury them?" it asked.
The woman didn't turn. "Bury?" A dry chuckle. "Oh, little shadow. We ARE the burial."
And like that, the illusion shattered.
Because the child wasn't holding a dagger anymore. The blade had dissolved into ash—just like everything else in Luna City. The buildings, the cobblestones, even the wind—all of it disintegrating into silver-grey motes, swirling upward like reverse snowfall.
Alaric felt it first in his teeth—that humming vibration, like the world had been a violin string someone plucked too hard. His vision blurred at the edges. When he blinked, his eyelids scraped like sandpaper.
"Vosk?" He turned, but the old man was already half-gone, his outline smudging like charcoal. The hammer in his hand dripped molten metal, searing blackened trails into the disintegrating ground.
Vosk grinned, toothless and terrible. "Took you long enough to notice, boy."
Then he was dust.
Alaric stumbled back—straight into a figure standing behind him. Cold fingers closed around his wrist.
"Don't." Isabella's voice was a razor wrapped in silk. "Breathe."
But he couldn't. Because the air itself was unspooling—threads of reality pulling apart stitch by stitch. The violin academy's music slowed, warped, each note stretching into a groan.
Veyla's bow snapped.
The last sound Luna City ever made was a sigh.
And then—
—silence.
No, not silence.
Breathing.
Someone was breathing.
Alaric's own lungs burned. He gasped, curling forward—and that's when he saw it. The cobblestone beneath his knees wasn't dissolving. It was CHANGING. Veins of silver pulsed through the rock, branching out in jagged lightning patterns.
Isabella crouched beside him, her dress now the color of dried blood. "They lied," she whispered. "The flowers weren't graves."
Ahead, the last standing structure in the city—Valente Manor—cracked down the middle. From the fissure, something black and glistening unfurled.
Not roots.
Not vines.
But twisted, dark tendrils—like ancient, gnarled vines or blackened branches—reaching out with a life of their own.
"Do we run?" Alex asked, voice cracking.
Isabella stood, brushing pollen from her skirts. "No." She bared her teeth—not fangs, not anymore. Just teeth. Human teeth. "We wake up."
The tendrils twitched.
And Luna City screamed.