The Spectral Sword

Chapter 1: Rosetta

The vampire girl named Rosetta Cantrell aimed the silver-tipped arrow at a passing deer, a buck with enormous antlers. He stood there serenely, completely unaware of his impending death. The looming trees of the Elathian Forest surrounded her, and her long dark hair and dress helped her blend into the night, hiding in between two lofty oak trees.

The arrow flew into the buck and he died instantly, to Rosetta's relief. She'd always hated to kill the animals, but there were consequences for anyone who disobeyed Quinn and Gwendolyn Cantrell.

Rosetta's parents were likely the most lazy and selfish vampires to ever exist, in Rosetta's opinion. Vampires aren't known for their particular goodness, but Quinn and Gwendolyn ranked below any other vampire Rosetta had ever met.

Rosetta walked cautiously towards the buck, hoping the local werewolves of Elathia hadn't made their nightly run of the forest yet. When they did, things didn't end well for anything in their way. Rosetta held the buck by his strong front legs and dragged him along the forest floor.

Unfortunately, Rosetta was at only the young age of 114, and so her strength hadn't quite been enhanced yet. The buck was heavy, and it took her a while to finally drag it through the crackling leaves and back to her pile, where two other deer laid. She then piled them into a particularly large wheelbarrow, and set off. Normally, anyone in their right mind would've thought that this amount of work daily for an 114 year old vampire would be too much, but Rosetta had been doing various errands of this nature for many years now, and she was used to it despite its unpleasantness.

She arrived at the edge of the woods and stepped out from the gloomy forest into the grass, damped by the rain from earlier. A loud squawking sounded in the night sky and Rosetta's head shot up. Flying above her and the cart was a brown-feathered hippogriff; a creature with the head and front quarters of an eagle, and the hind quarters of a horse. It carried a magician on its back. Rosetta relaxed when she recognized the magician as Frederick Hughes, the city of Elathia's local mailman.

"Delivering the evening run?" asked Rosetta, sitting down to rest next to the wheelbarrow. Frederick looked down at her and nodded, smiling. Unlike human magicians, the magicians of Rosetta's world practiced true magic, and didn't have to reveal their secret because everyone already knew it. Every magician, at least.

Frederick flew away on the hippogriff and held out both hands, levitating the packages and envelopes and landing them neatly on the doorsteps. Rosetta waited until he and the wide wings of his hippogriff were out of sight and continued to push the wheelbarrow of deer. She passed through the rest of Elathia, a decent sized city. Nowhere near the biggest, definitely, but nowhere near the smallest either. Elathia stood decidedly in the center. She passed the houses, sturdily built brick, wood, and stone cottages, some with smoke rising out of the chimneys; from the warm fires inside. Rosetta pushed the cart across the stone-paved road, the wheelbarrow bumping up and down almost rhythmically.

Finally she reached the beginning of a large hill, an extravagant mansion built on top. The Cantrell Mansion. As she pushed the wheelbarrow uphill, the silhouette of her father, Quinn Cantrell, came into focus, waiting on the bench on the stone porch. The mansion was obviously the biggest in Elathia, and the Cantrell family was very wealthy indeed. Their gardener, a friendly golem, who was simply known as Rock (her parents weren't great with names) had planted flowers and trimmed the grass and so the lawn was one of the most well-kept in the area.

As she neared the top of the hill, she could see Rock working in the distance, chopping wood. Rock was a large creature, about eight feet tall and probably four or five feet wide. He was completely made of stone, yet ivy draped over his shoulders and grew out of cracks in his head and stomach.