Fallen Nocturne (Elven Fantasy Romance #5)

Prologue Sebastian

The tourists are thinning out.

Only a handful remain to wander the grounds in the last light of evening.

Near the eastern gate, a couple reads one of the plaques in hushed voices while a woman turns through a guidebook from a nearby bench.

Beneath the gargoyles, another tourist raises his phone and shifts from side to side, searching for an angle that might finally produce a photograph worth keeping.

None of them know what this place is. None of them know what I am.

Morsvyenn rises around me in its ruin. The sky above shifts from copper to deep violet as the last of the sun drops past the hills, visible through what remains of the roofless great hall.

Velvet ropes cordon off the remaining walls.

Plaques in three languages offer the humans a history that is almost entirely wrong.

I stopped to read one on my way in. The errors were impressive in their confidence.

A gift shop sits at the base of the eastern tower.

I passed it earlier and looked through the window.

Painted figurines with exaggerated fangs.

Mugs printed with the castle in garish purple ink.

A snow globe with a miniature replica of this fortress inside, shaken to produce a small blizzard over battlements that bear almost no resemblance to the real thing.

Vlad built that tower.

Forty years he spent on it, hauling stones himself when the builders could not meet his standards.

I used to watch him from the courtyard at night, his dark hair tied back, wearing that particular expression he reserved for work that mattered.

The same look he brought to his library, to his wars, to everything he decided deserved his full attention.

The humans have turned it into a ticket booth. They file through in lines during the day and photograph themselves in front of what remains. Vlad once told me humans are stupid. I disagreed with him then.

I have since revised my position.

The courtyard opens ahead of me. Weeds press through the cracks in the stone and the fountain at the center has been dry for centuries.

This is where Han hosted his musicians after the kingdom was ours.

He brought them from every corner of the known world, lured them with silver and wine and the promise of an audience who would never tire of listening.

Strings and drums and flutes carved from bone.

On clear nights the sound carried through the valley and even the villages below would pause to hear it.

Han had a gift for finding beautiful things. He also had a gift for losing interest in them. But music held him longer than most pleasures did.

My gardens are gone entirely. I grew them along the western wall where the afternoon light was warmest. It took me decades to coax the soil into yielding anything. The climate here is unkind to the plants I knew from home. None of that effort remains. Not a root. Not a single green thing.

Home. I have not thought of that word in a very long time.

The kingdom came later. Before Morsvyenn, before the glory and the gardens and the feasts in this great hall, there was Lilith. There was only ever Lilith.

Five of us.

Five cursed men pulled from our lives and drowned in a pool of blood and dark magic. She chose each of us for a reason. Arescaine, Ruth and Vlad for their strength as warriors. Han for his beauty. Me for my mind.

She wanted a scholar. Someone who could study the old texts and unlock the secrets she could not reach alone. She baited me with a question I could not resist.

Is there life after death?

I wanted to know. That was enough for her. She killed me in a ritual and brought me back as something else. The answer to my question turned out to be yes, though not in any form I would have chosen.

We served her. We killed for her. We conquered territories, broke kingdoms and filled her coffers with gold and blood. She rewarded obedience with pain and disobedience with worse. There was no pleasing the woman.

During those years of servitude I found Gwyn.

What she was to me cannot be contained in a few sentences. Gwyn was human, brave and bright, with red hair that caught the light like flame and freckles scattered across her skin like stars. Her beauty was undeniable, but it was her curiosity and quiet courage that held me.

She could read and write better than most nobility because I taught her myself.

Gwyn loved me. I know that with a certainty that will outlast everything else I have ever known.

Vlad killed her on Lilith’s order. A mercy, for Ruthven would have done worse to my lover. I tasted human blood for the last time while holding Gwyn after she died. The hunger has repulsed me ever since.

I do not feed on humans anymore.

We sealed Lilith the moment Vlad’s loyalty swayed.

Arescaine designed the binding. He is the strategist among us, the one who sees the full board when the rest of us are staring at individual pieces.

He chose a night when Ruth was away. I did not understand the decision at the time.

Ruth could fight and we needed every advantage we could muster.

But Arescaine loved his blood brother more than anything.

He would not risk Ruth facing the fallout if we failed.

We did not fail.

Vlad’s hatred of Lilith had ripened over the years. A stroke of luck, that slow souring in him. When the moment came he did not hesitate. The four of us bound the enchantress in her own magic and sealed her in a tomb beneath the earth.

I will never forget the silence after. The air tasted different without her presence in it.

Ruth wept for Lilith. Arescaine told him what we had done and I watched from a distance as his face collapsed.

He sat on the steps of what would become this great hall and cried like the boy he had once been, before the pool of blood and the centuries of cruelty that followed.

I do not know what he mourned. The loss of Lilith’s protection, perhaps.

The terror of a world without her leash.

Ruth has always been the most afraid of us. Fear in him takes the shape of cruelty.

The rest of us mourned nothing. For the first time since Lilith dragged us from our mortal lives, we were free of her. Free to decide what we would become without her hand around our throats.

Morsvyenn empire rose from that freedom.

We had land and power and no mistress to answer to.

Arescaine governed. Vlad fortified and filled the library with scrolls from every kingdom he conquered.

Han entertained. I healed the sick in the lower wards, tended my gardens, read by candlelight until the wicks burned to nothing.

Ruth punished.

His cruelties escalated in the absence of Lilith’s restraint.

Public flayings. Heated iron shoes in the forge.

He called it justice. No one dared correct him and the rest of us looked the other way for longer than we should have.

During those years, Vlad discovered how our descendants could be created.

A human drained close to death and buried before their final breath might rise again as a vampire, bound by blood to the one who made them.

Ruth became obsessed with repeating the process. He tried again and again, impatient with every failure. Most of the bodies he buried rose empty, driven by hunger without reason or memory. They were not vampires. They were ghouls wearing the remains of the people they had once been.

We destroyed each one before it could escape into the surrounding villages. I told Ruth to stop. Arescaine ordered him to stop. Even Vlad warned him that the transformation required control and precision rather than cruelty.

Ruth continued in secret until one of his victims finally rose with a mind and will of its own. He had created his first true offspring. After that, there was no stopping him.

It was glorious for a time. I will not pretend otherwise.

We held court in this very hall and the torches burned so bright the room felt like daylight.

I can still see it if I close my eyes. The firelight on the stone, the sound of Han’s musicians drifting from the courtyard, Vlad’s low voice reciting something from one of his scrolls.

Arescaine at the head of the long table with a goblet in his hand and the weight of the kingdom resting easy on his shoulders.

We were monstrous. We were magnificent. For a while those two things felt like the same thing.

Then Elena died.

Vlad’s human wife. I never knew her well.

I watched what her death did to him. The man who built the eastern tower with his bare hands could not be bothered to stand.

His grief turned blind and directionless.

He stopped reading and he stopped building.

Violence became the only language left to him and he spoke it without aim or reason.

The four of us sealed him. It was Arescaine’s decision and we all agreed.

We entrusted the binding to a demon lord named Balthazar.

Vlad cannot be released without all four of us consenting.

I think about that sometimes. Four keys held by four Strigons scattered across the world.

One of them is a sadist who would sooner watch everything burn than cooperate with anyone.

The kingdom was never the same after Vlad. Our library went dark and the tower stood empty. Something essential had left Morsvyenn and what remained was just stone and habit.

Ruth grew worse still. Without Vlad to match his appetite for violence he turned inward, fed on his own domain. His punishments became spectacles. He tortured prisoners for days in the courtyard and called it entertainment.

I went to Arescaine.

Come with us. Han and I are leaving. There is nothing left here.

He refused.

Ruth is his blood brother. They were born from the same womb in their human lives and Arescaine has never been able to abandon him. Not even after everything. He looked at me with those steady ancient eyes and said he would stay.