With a heavy step, Lucian reentered his room, his gaze lingering on the dried bloodstains scattered across the floor… His expression remained blank.. Though his eyes showed unease.
He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to look away. There would be time to deal with that later. Right now, he felt his body screamed for rest and recovery.
Whatever that Relic the Sanctum need… I need it first, maybe I could stop them or use it against them. Before they unleash the hell beneath Ebonhaven.
Lucian layed back onto his worn bed, interlocking his fingers above his chest. He took one deep breath, then another, as the silence thickened around him. He couldn't shake the thoughts.
Is searching for the relic truly the answer, or is it just another attempt to escape his past? What if the Crimson Sanctum gets to the relic before me? Will he be strong enough to stop them?
The moment he fell asleep, he felt a strange weight pressed in from all sides. The darkness in the room crept closer. His limbs felt leaden, his breath shallow. He tried to cry out, but no sound left his lips… he was pulled into a dark mind space.
He was dreaming he didn't have control… it was where he haven't been to in a long time, the surrounding changed his dream felt real… to real.
Lucian found himself standing in a dim, ruinous corridor bathed in a dull crimson hue. The air was thick of a coppery stench of blood. His vision pulsed, red and wild.
He could feel it… a insatiable hunger, gnawing at his core.
No… not here again.
The Bronze Chapel... A place burned to the ground decades ago… Under mysterious circumstances, yet still alive in his memories.
"Ahh!"
A scream echoed down the corridor.
Lucian's head snapped to the left... His body moved, but not by his will. He was no longer in control… Trapped within his own mind, he's a spectator behind his own eyes.
Not this dream again. Why won't you go away?!
He could see one of his subordinates a vampire loyal, staggered back, he cluched his throat. His eyes were wide filled with betrayal and disbelief as blood dripped between his fingers.
Lucian looked down in horror at his trembling hands... His own claws soaked in blood.
No. No, this isn't me. This isn't who I am.
Another subordinate fell. Their eyes widened, pleading, accusing.
Lucian's hands flew to his temples, nails digging into his skin. He tried to stop, to scream, to tear himself out of this nightmare. But his body wasn't lisening. He could only hear his thoughts.
But there somewhere, buried deep inside, a ominous voice whispered.
"This is who you are. A vampire. A killer. A Hunter. It's how it suppose to be… Embrace it."
He believed this wasn't real he was stronger than this. But his body showed something different. Weakness.
Lucian's body moved again, fluid and brutal. He slaughtered them… his own people one by one. Blood sprayed. Bones cracked. Flesh tore beneath his claws. His fangs sank into their warm throats. Splattered against his face, even as horror twisted his soul deep, unable to stop.
His subroutines screams faded into silence. The area was painted in blood of death… And yet, his hunger remained.
He stumbled, outside the chapel, the city covered by pale moonlight. Lucian's body slipped between shadows, invisible and unstoppable. Into homes. Ended lives.
A woman gasped awoke, she froze in place. Her husband stirred beside her… as she loomed over them.
No! You will not touch them!
His mind screamed, but his body lunged forward.
"Stop. Don't do this!"
In that moment. Cries filled the air, multiple doors slammed. Screams echoed. Panic spread like wildfire. People fled into the streets, and Lucian could only watch, trapped behind his own eyes.
You are not a monster. You are in control.
"Then why is there a pile of corpses at your feet?"
He tried to wake up. He clawed at his mind, fighting to break free, but his nightmare had no end.
…
A choked gasp escaped him as he sat up, chest heaving. Sweat plastered his shirt to his skin… even his sheets were soaked.
He stared at his blood-stained hands, now clean but still shaking.
"This will never go away," he whispered, his voice was hollow. "I deserve it… My mistakes caused it. All of it. Even the deaths of the innocents."
He slowly rose, he gripped the edge of the bed to steady himself.
Whatever happened… I have to move forward. Forget it… somehow. Still… the graveyard Sam mentioned… maybe that's where I'll find answers about Halcyon and the Sanctum arrival. She spent so much time with me… but would she really abandon them without a reason?
They had to have tricked Halcyon into coming here… but she here for her own reasoning?
…
Ebonhaven return covered by darkness. Most citizens, wary of the night, remained behind locked doors… Some houses were even boarded their dark windows shut.
Lucian passed by some boarded homes, toward the graveyard the werewolf leader Sam had told him about. He knew the exact location… He'd navigated the first and second layer of Ebonhaven before… but the third? That was a different world. Each part had it's different danger, and it's culture of its people.
Layer One's the surface mess… humans, a few wandering supernaturals. But layer Two? That's where the real chaos lives. That where I work. Full of monsters, and still… people like Randall survive… Special humans. Like Halcyon.
He needed to head to layer two, he couldn't enter the third even if he tried, he was for sure to die, reasonable it's was because his lessen of strength.
It was quite, insane for him to even decided to go there because, he barely even had explored the second layer.
Layer Three is known as the Hollow Throat, because screams echo from it nightly, and sound lingers unnaturally long…it's said only the dead can hear what's truly being said.
If Sam was to come here for his revenge…shouldn't there be werewolves here…yet it seem empty. Why is it that, no types of creatures here?
Lucian halted and stared at a old, rusted halfway connected gate that was constantly creaking erriely…
The rusted creaking graveyard gate is known as "Widow's Rattle," rumored to only open when the person approaching has blood on their hands.
"There no one ever here…how can there possible be a relic." He said out.
Is the relic hidden here for a reason, or is it just a cruel trap set for anyone foolish enough to search for it?
He started to even, think back about Halcyon, because it had to a relic as one of the reseason she here. If that it its dangerous for her to be looking to for something lke that, when the crimson sanctum searching to.
I can't lose Sunny too but I have to focus on survival before we can work thing out.
Not long after. Lucian had a been aimlessly walking for a minute finding nothing, he felt that he had a sudden misstep and everything around him, went dark.
What Lucian didn't know, that he was looking at the wrong graveyard… as it another graveyard.
…
Deep down into the third level of the underworld. Inside another more darker, Graveyard stood Halcyon above a gravestone.
A thick fog rolled over the crumbling tombstones... The moon barely pierces through the gnarled tree branches, casting eerie shadows that seem to shift with every step.
She moved through, the graveyard her eyes kept darting about as she fixed her weapons and her clothes.
"Damn… Nyxirath better don't return. Can't have you stopping me… I have no problem killing all of you."
She continued forward before coming across a tombstone, that peeked her interest.
She knelt before the tombstone, her fingers brushed against the person named that had the inscriptions, glowing… despite being worn down by time… But just as her fingers start to dig, a whisper slithered through the wind… a sound that does not belong.
Halcyon froze… she saw a shadow ghost moved, she gripped her daggee tigher… she heard it released a low guttural "GROWL."
At that moment, though she didn't see at first she saw a pair of gleaming, hollow eyes and twisted limbs flashed before her.
Without a single thought nor breath she flung her dagger… a perfect shot at the spirit… the blade embed it into the spirit chest pinned it against a tomb wall… it let a screech that more alive that spirit as it body erupted into ash… showed it wasn't really a spirit.
Halcyon flicked her wrist, as she approached the dagger pulling it out…Her eyes settle back on the tomb. The relic is near. She knew that…
Before the tombstone was a old a warrior and that creature used it glowing powerful inscriptions to kill people that approached