Chapter 3
The ancient vampire swirls his golden chalice, watching the deep red blood simmer. He drinks, smacking his lips contentedly, and draws another piece of parchment onto the table.
For a moment, he reflects on everything he has written thus far: the discovery of vampires in the mountain caves, the formation of Olhav and Nuhav, the genesis of the Five Ministries that hold an iron grip over the mountainous vampire city and the grasslands human city below it.
Alacine Mortis has been central to his story. As a human, she bore a child to an aristocrat named Odael Zey. Nobleman Odael was discarded after Alacine and her son were turned thirty years later by a vampire named Kavorin Mortis.
Alacine saw greater possibilities with Kavorin, taking his surname as her own to prove her loyalty to the rapidly building Five Ministries, of which Kavorin was a part.
She and Nobleblood Kavorin were integral in the Sixth Ministry, the Knowledge Ward, meeting its end, to keep less prudent and intelligent vampires from ever knowing the truth of how Olhav came to be.
With an ignorant populace, the Five Ministries could make the city formerly known as Old Haven seem as old and ancient as they needed. The leaders could be the wolves in the sheep pens, controlling all aspects of vampiric life—and human life, by proxy—from the shadows.
Kavorin Mortis, and by association his wife Alacine, were essential in housing the secrets of Olhav, with Kavorin becoming the nation’s first Spymaster.
Now, the vampire at his worn oak table draws a new section at the top of his fresh page, writing, “70 YEARS AGO,” opting for a fifty-year jump from where he left off.
Olhav saw relative peace for fifty years under the leadership of the Five Ministries and its royals. Humans were beaten down, kept in check, forced into lives of squalor in Nuhav, while also providing needed sustenance for the growing vampire population in Olhav.
A vast military was formed in the newly sanctioned Military Ward.
A strange faith to twisted deities collectively known as the Damned began to take root in the city.
The zealous followers of this dark faith were etched out a section of Olhav of their own, called the Faith Ward.
Kavorin Mortis took control of the Intelligence Ward, to keep eyes and ears on everything in and around the Olhavian Peaks, growing his web by the year.
Vampires opened their trade routes to those foolish enough to traffic goods across the mountain passes, calling this district the Commerce Ward.
And in the center of it all, the Judgment Ward loomed over every aspect of Olhavian life, the epicenter of the city’s government.
Because what is a government if not a system meant to control?
During those fifty years of prosperity, Alacine Mortis and her son acted as agents of Spymaster Kavorin.
And then, quite promptly, the first rebellion arrived, seventy years ago.
It was not the first uprising, of course, since those have been a continual affair since Olhav’s founding.
Yet it was the first to exert any sort of real threat to the leadership of the Five Ministries, due to one simple fact: These rebels had silver.
They called themselves the Silverknights. What began as a ragtag group of anarchists in Nuhav became a fledgling threat and then a stalwart revolution against their vampiric overlords.
The Silverknights, as imagined by their name, had managed to craft weapons of silver after sneaking the ore out of the mines for years. The powder keg finally exploded on a fateful day when three high-ranking Olhavian officials were assassinated by the weapons.
Discovering the weakness of the vampires opened the floodgates for more death and destruction. Over the following decade, the Silverknights of Nuhav became as notorious as the Five Ministries of Olhav. And almost as powerful.
What signaled a new beginning in Olhav, however, was not the transient violence and intermittent Silverknight attacks.
It was a relationship formed in the shadows.
The man’s name was Heskel Angul. A handsome man, by all accounts, Heskel was a Silverknight of middling rank who rose to that of a captain.
Never a general or leader in his own right, Alacine Mortis nonetheless found opportunity and the strangest, most bewildering thing of all in this man . . . affection.
Their tryst began in secret, as these things usually do.
Ever ambitious, Noblewife Alacine had become bored with her master, Kavorin.
There are no records of how Alacine and Heskel met, which comes as no surprise to this historian.
What can be said, from firsthand accounts, is the hot-blooded seduction between the Silverknight and the powerful vampiress was earnest and true.
For the first time since she had been a human, Alacine found an ambitious, like-minded spirit in Heskel Angul. The fact they came from enemy factions was irrelevant—also as these things usually go.
Things came to a head ten years into their clandestine relationship, when Alacine became pregnant with Heskel’s child. In an attempt to provide an alibi, Alacine claimed Kavorin as the father once her belly began to swell.
It was possible, of course, since Alacine still performed her wifely duties with her husband.
Spymaster Kavorin, however, had built a harem of young women and men of his own, and was often seen cavorting with said harem.
This humiliation irked Alacine greatly. It may have even led to Alacine straying and landing in Heskel’s arms.
Since she and her son had been turned by Kavorin Mortis, Alacine could not simply kill her nobleblood husband and be done with it, due to his bloodbond over her. So she turned to more secretive affairs to grow her web.
Whatever the inner politics of hers and Heskel’s relationship, once Alacine’s child was born, it became clear the half-blood whelp was not Kavorin’s child.
This, some sixty years ago, expedited the intensity of Alacine Mortis’ relationships.
She told Kavorin his son had died in childbirth.
She was forced to hide the dhampir whelp away, secreting him to where no one could find him: Nuhav.
Heskel Angul even took in the child for a time, despite the pale skin.
As this was happening, Alacine’s fullblood son—murderer of his human father fifty years prior—found his own thralls and acquaintances to fill his time. He distanced himself from his mother while she gallivanted discreetly with her Silverknight mate.
It should be said, and should come as no surprise to the reader of this history, that this half-blood child between human Heskel Angul and vampiress Alacine Mortis was given a name in the dialect of his Silverknight father—an act of resistance in its own right.
Alacine named her son Lukain.