Illuminating the Dark Prince

Prologue- The Crimson Crowning (Pt. 1)

The ill-fated prince, barely yet a man, was laying upon a sacrificial alter before her. The tips of his menacing twin swords poked out from beneath his long, sprawled out, dark hair, on either side of his shirtless body. A grotesque crown, forged by his deceased father's fingerbones, twitched angrily upon his head, while a stony expression of honor and determination was cast like a shadow over his handsomely formed features. Black blood oozed from his poorly bandaged stump wrists. His hands had already been removed so that the next in line for the Tenverian throne could be crowned.

"Are you ready, my son?" The queen apathetically asked, flashing her sharp teeth and fangs.

The undead prince's crimson eyes uncannily shifted to meet her gaze, like the haunting stare of specter. "My mother, Queen Cerindier, I was born ready to die feeding the jaws of Malsanguis." His deep voice was laced with a strong sense of duty, yet hollow.

A wicked smirk danced across her face, as she dramatically unsheathed her athame, revealing a malignantly gnarled blade. The glowering black clouds ominously swirled above her, while the raging sea roared behind them. 

"Citizens of Tenveriel!" Queen Cerindier's orotund voice rang through the air, silencing every murmur, screech, and growl. There was an unquiet silence. The air thick with suffocating tension and anxiousness. "The crimson moon is soon to arise! And so the time has come yet again to appease the mighty serpent, Malsanguis!" 

The crowd began to boisterously cheer like a bunch of crazed barbarians, with a few unfortunate souls getting savagely torn apart in the uproarious commotion. The queen looked out over the sea, stoically watching the horizon as a crimson crescent began to slowly ascend between the clouds and sea like the twin horns of a devil. It's bloodied tusks gave off no light, yet it stood out boldly against the obsidian sky. It's reflection rippled across the dark glossy oceanwaters, arousing the ancient one below.

And as the blood moon sinisterly arose, the queen turned towards her son and slowly lifted the dagger above her head. "Malsanguis... Malsanguis... Malsanguis..." She began to chant in a foreboding otherworldly rhythm. 

"Malsanguis... Malsanguis... Malsanguis!" The citizens of Tenveriel began to sinisterly chant along with her, with the harrowing pounding of the drums adding to their ominous canticle. 

"Malsanguis!" She passionately shouted as she forcefully stabbed down into her son's bare chest. 

The prince screamed out in pained agony, convulsing as his mother violently sliced him open. She grinned as she ripped through the decaying flesh his abdomen, causing his blackened blood to ooze out all over the alter. It dripped in rivulets off the edges and trickled down to the cold stones below. Then, with a cruel gleam in her deathly eyes, the queen began to ritualistically remove his putrid organs one by one. They made squishing and squelching noises as she carelessly discarded them to the ground beside her.

Once the prince had been properly hollowed out, she took a few steps over towards a sacred vessel which rested proudly upon a malevolent looking plinth. Inside it's intricately engraved basin, made from black crystalline stone, was a plethora of dead alien sea creatures surrounding a sacred relic, The Ophidian Orb. Ancient and powerful energy leached out from the glossy black orb, and into the small oceanic corpses. This was done to deceive the mighty serpent.

The queens clawed hand slowly slid into the slimy vessel, becoming coated with black goo as she grabbed the squishy rotten sea creatures. Unbothered by their putrescent odor, she meticulously stuffed them into the deceased prince's lacerated remains. Once his hollow cavity was overflowing, the queen chanted an otherworldly incantation over him, then formally stepped away.