Chapter 2
The vampire leans back in his seat, pleased with the first section of his work. He knows the importance of these writings and hopes the historical truth will find its way into the right hands.
“All in good time,” he mutters to himself, and then sits forward to lift his quill and dip it into the inkwell. A new piece of parchment finds its way onto his worn oak desk. He flattens the page, muses for a moment, and resumes writing.
Within thirty years of the discovery of vampires hidden in the depths of the silver mines, the face of Haven changed. It isn’t long before the inner workings of the city drastically transform.
The wave begins at the bottom, starting with the miners themselves, who are turned by these vile seductresses into bloodthirsty beasts.
The ripple effect moves to the foremen next, then the overseers and exporters, before eventually creeping its way into the very heart of Havian society: the gentry.
It must be noted: The wave of vampire infestations did not simply move laterally within the mountain city. It was a horizontal shift—a sweeping out of the invasion that reached the southern and northern kingdoms vying for control over the high mountain peaks fixed between their borders.
Nary ten years passed before both kingdoms were on the verge of crumbling. Long gone was the sense of everlasting prosperity from the shining city atop the mountains. The kingdoms fought with themselves, internally trying to keep the baying of the hounds from overwhelming them.
Alas, no society is ever safe for long from creeping death. Vampires cared nothing for the architecture of the kingdoms or the landscape of Haven. Those who escaped the massacre upon the mountains fled south, creating a city of humans to defend against the vampiric incursion threatening them.
Stalwart defenders rose up. The vampires allowed this new city to be built because they were busy conquering the old one.
When it was all said and done, nearly one hundred twenty years ago, two new factions emerged from the settled dust: Old Haven above, home to the vampires; New Haven below, home to the humans.
The names of these cities were simplified into Olhav and Nuhav, with the Nuhavian humans erecting barriers to fruitlessly try and ward off their stronger undead overlords.
While Nuhav was being trampled underfoot by the incessant wave of darkness, inside the once-royal city of Olhav was no different. A system of order and control slowly emerged, with the strongest vampires killing off contenders and rivals to form their own factions within the city.
This wretched governmental body would become known as the Five Ministries. Still a fledgling enterprise in these ancient days, there were at first six vying districts, with rapidly changing leaders based on assassinations, usurpations, and uprisings.
Noblewife Alacine Zey was at the forefront of these conflicts, inserting herself where a typical noblewoman would never be allowed to roam in years prior.
Nobleman Odael Zey, her husband, had no clear understanding of Alacine’s intentions during this time.
He simply cheered his wife’s many conflicts behind the scenes.
For you see, Alacine had found another man during this time. A sheer incubus of a vampire, who promised Alacine great things if the human woman joined his dark legion. By this point, during the initial dalliance of Alacine and this vampiric man, humans had not completely given up on Olhav yet.
This was the folly of Nobleman Odael Zey, a self-righteous and arrogant human. By contrast, the vampire Kavorin Mortis, who sought Alacine’s hand, was quite cunning and wise to see a beautifully dark future with Alacine at his side.
And so it was, Alacine turned on her husband of thirty years. No longer a spry twenty-year-old, the fifty-year-old woman gleefully allowed Kavorin Mortis to turn her into one of his wretched kind.
The great travesty in all this came when Alacine allowed her single child, her son, to be turned by Kavorin as well. The boy was no longer a boy, now a hale, handsome man of thirty summers with ambitions of his own—now trapped forevermore as a pale-skinned angel of death.
Together, mother and son plotted. As the Five Ministries began its rise, Kavorin Mortis saw an opening—an opening he shared with Noblewife Alacine.
With blackened hearts, it did not take much for Alacine to convince her newly made vampiric son to slay his very own father.
Nobleman Odael Zey’s end came with a flashing knife across the throat one dreary evening, his bulging eyes unsettled to find his own son as his patricidal murderer.
Thus, Alacine remarried to her new master, Kavorin Mortis, and took his name as her own. Showing guile and strength in equal parts, Kavorin took his place among the initial seats of the Six Ministries.
It was Alacine’s idea, from the shadows, with Kavorin as her figurehead—as well as a few others, including a wicked pureblood called Aramastun Wyvox—to eradicate the sixth seat, murder its overlord, and settle on Five Ministries in all.
The Knowledge Ward and all its importance was erased, so the history of the vampiric uprising in Olhav could always be concealed and shaped how the leaders of the movement wanted.
Without history, without precedence, the Five Ministries could have easily been one hundred or one thousand years old. No one really knew. No one questioned it. That was the point. The Five Ministries simply existed, without anyone questioning its genesis.
Before long, only the eldest humans living in Nuhav remembered a time before the vampires.
It took ten years in total for the Five Ministries to command a stranglehold over Olhav. The once-human nobility of the city had become a vampiric cabal. Their wave of destruction carried down the Olhavian Peaks, keeping the fledgling city of Nuhav underfoot.
The leaders of the human uprising—the last breaths of resistance once beginning innocuously in the silver mines—were either killed or turned themselves.
The vampires on the mountain realized an irony about the walled city beneath them, prompting them to allow Nuhav to remain standing: The very walls once erected to keep the vampires out could easily be used to keep the humans in, and thus create an everlasting supply of food for the vampires to drain.
Nuhav’s folly was thinking walls could protect them from their vampiric overlords. The people who founded the city never considered that they were not forging a safe haven from vampires . . . they were building their own prison and slaughterhouse.
Overlord Kavorin was a founding member of the Five Ministries, greatly lauded as a leader and fixture in the emerging nobleblood society.
Cunning and ruthless though he was, Kavorin Mortis’ error lay in a simple truth, blinded by his own arrogance and ego: His wife was smarter, more ambitious, and more ruthless than even him.
Alacine Mortis would not stay relegated to her noble husband’s shadow for long. Decades would pass in relative “peace,” without any major conflict disrupting the leadership in Olhav . . .
. . . Until another man would arrive who would threaten the dominion of the Five Ministries and the safety of everyone caught in Alacine Mortis’ growing web . . .