Elara's voice was a ghost in the room, pulling them all back through the centuries to that sun-dappled memory of her childhood. She stared into her beer, but her eyes saw only the endless green of a world long dead.
(Flashback Continues)
Our Grove was a sanctuary, but it was not isolated. We knew there was a world beyond the great trees, a world of men who built castles of stone and drew lines in the dirt they called borders. We pitied them.
But one day, their world bled into ours.
I was the one who found him. He was an outsider, collapsed at the edge of the Grove, his leg pierced by a crude iron arrow and his fine clothes torn and bloodied. He was delirious with fever, but I was a child of Veridian. I felt no fear, only a deep, profound pity for this broken creature so far from its home. In my own foolish kindness, I ran to get my father.
My father, the High Priest, saw not an intruder, but a life in pain. He carried the man to our temple and, with the help of the other elders, mended his wounds. The regeneration we possessed could be shared, in small amounts, to heal others. It was a slow, draining process, but my father was a kind man. It was the worst mistake of his life.
The man's name was Lysandor. He told us he was the king of the neighbouring realm, ambushed by assassins. He stayed with us for a month, his strength returning day by day. He watched us with wide, wondrous eyes, calling our gift a miracle. He swore an oath of eternal friendship. We, in our naivety, believed him.
When he returned to his kingdom, we thought little of it. But he did not forget us.
He returned to the forest two moons later. He did not come alone. He came with an army clad in black iron, their faces grim and merciless. And with him was a mage, a withered man in grey robes whose eyes held the cold curiosity of a butcher.
Their goal was simple and monstrous. The king did not see our gift as a blessing of life; he saw it as a tool to cheat death. He wanted to harvest it, to collect the life force of my entire people and forge it into a crown of immortality for himself.
We were not warriors. We were healers, gardeners, and worshippers. We had no weapons, no concept of organised slaughter. The iron swords of the soldiers cut through us like a scythe through summer grass. They were easily defeated.
They herded the survivors, all of us, into the great temple at the heart of the Grove. The first thing they did was take a great hammer to the statue of our god, smashing the serene, carved face into a thousand pieces. Our faith was the first thing they killed.
I was thrown into a rough iron cage, small enough to be carried by two men. And from there, I watched the nightmare unfold. One by one, my people were dragged before the grey-robed mage. He would chant in a dry, rasping tongue, and I would see the life drain from them, a shimmering mist pulled from their bodies and funnelled into a great, dark crystal he held.
I saw my father and mother clinging to each other at the back of the crowd. When the soldiers came for them, they didn't fight. They walked to my cage, their hands reaching through the bars to touch my face.
"Do not harm her," my mother begged, tears streaming down her face. "Please, she is just a child."
"Take us, but spare our daughter," my father pleaded, his voice, once so strong with prayer, now broken with desperation.
The king, Lysandor, watched them with cold, dead eyes. "The child," he said to the mage, "is the final piece." He nodded to his guards.
They killed my mother first, a single, brutal sword stroke. Then they killed my father as he screamed my name. I watched their life force, so warm and familiar, torn from their bodies and fed to the hungry crystal.
But for me, the king had other things planned. They did the most monstrous thing of all. They tested their theory on me. They dragged my small, trembling body from the cage and laid me on the broken altar of my dead god.
"All of the energy, into the child," the king commanded. "Her regeneration is the strongest. She will be the vessel."
The mage held the crystal, now blazing with the stolen lives of my people, above my chest. He took a ritual dagger and stabbed me. The pain was blinding, but it was nothing compared to what came next. He pushed all the energy, all the agony and stolen life of my entire village, into the wound.
I was screaming. A sound no child should ever make. It was a pain unimaginable, a thousand deaths pouring into one small body, burning me from the inside out. My very soul was being rewritten in fire and agony. Through my tears, I could see the king and his mage looking down, not with pity, but with triumphant fascination. They laughed.
But as the last of the energy poured into me, something in the temple stirred. The shattered eye of the god's statue, lying amidst the rubble, flashed with a final, terrible, emerald light.
When I awoke, the world was fire. The Grove, my beautiful green home, was a raging inferno. The air was thick with ash and the smell of cooked meat. I pushed myself up from the altar, my small body no longer feeling pain, only a cold, hollow emptiness.
And I saw them. The soldiers. Lysandor's men were stumbling through the burning ruins, their skin grey and mottled, their eyes glowing with a mindless, hungry red light. They had been twisted by the profane magic, their souls scoured out and replaced with an eternal, gnawing hunger. Ghouls.
I caught my reflection in a pool of my parents' blood. I saw a monster. My eyes, once the colour of the forest floor, were now blazing red. When I opened my mouth to scream, I felt the sharp points of new fangs against my lips. I was no longer a Child of the Grove. I was a vampire.
A scream tore from my throat, a sound of pure, unadulterated grief for everything I had lost. I ran. I ran from the burning temple, from the grey monsters my enemies had become, from the monstrous reflection in the blood. I ran crying and crying.
And I just kept running.