Edana walked back out into the entrance hall and realised immediately that if she wandered around alone she would get herself lost in an instant. She huffed out her annoyance and spun just in time to see Lucian leaning towards her.
“What do you want?” She demanded, backing away startled.
“To tour you around the castle of course; this will be your home once we are wed,” he told her, smirking.
“Let’s get this straight, right now, okay? Read my lips: we are not getting married!” She ground out between clenched teeth.
“Not even after that generous offer my father made?” He raised an eyebrow.
“You call that generous?” She asked sceptically.
“Yes, usually he would have just said ‘do what I say or else’, but for you he said ‘do what I say and I’ll give you something nice, or else’. It makes quite a difference really. Shall we?” He spread his arm out in the direction of one of the many passageways leading from the entrance hall.
“Fine,” she sighed, realising she was not going to win this. Being millennia old must have strengthened their patience. She guessed.
He waited for her to walk beside him before turning and walking off down a passageway.
“So how much do you know about vampyres?” He asked after a few minutes.
“How your grandfather, Amphioxus, was the origin of your race, how to turn a human vampyre, that you’re cold-blooded, but because you use twice the amount of your brain than humans do you can change your body temperature at will, that you can fly, that only natural borns can shape-shift, that you can eat human food but need blood to survive and that all vampyres share a soul and therefore a mental link but only natural borns are actually related,” she recited.
“Woah, okay, Miss Know-It-All, but not all natural borns are related: turned vampyres can procreate and give birth to natural borns as well; and we prefer the old terms, Inherits and Classicals, here, instead of the colloquialisms, ‘natural born’ and ‘turned vampyres’,” Lucian told her.
“Do your terms have old terms and colloquialisms?” Edana asked, looking up at an oil painting of a battle field, seconds before the two sides meet in combat.
“Yes. They are called old terms now, but they are actually the proper names. Natural borns are Inherits, turned vampyres are Classicals, newly turned vampyres or new bloods are Pales and rogues are called Gaunts. That is from the War of the Roses in the 1300s,” he added, pointing out the painting she was looking at. “How much do you know about Gaunts?”
“Weird, I didn’t know people were already using oils in the 1300s,” she commented thoughtfully. “And I’ve never heard of them, should I have?” She asked, turning from the painting for a moment to glance at Lucian.
“Well you already know that all vampyres share a single soul, though it would be better to say that all vampyres have a piece of my grandfather, Amphioxus’s, soul. Now we don’t a lot of laws, per se, though we do have a quite a few things that we discourage, but all our laws boil down to keeping our race a secret from mankind.”
“But why would you want to keep it a secret so badly?” Edana asked curiously. He laughed bitterly. Edana had now abandoned the painting and was staring at Lucian instead, listening avidly as they continued to navigate the castles many halls.
“Imagine the kind of chaos it would cause? The fear and envy. Vampyres are stronger, faster, smarter, and a lot more mentally adept. Never mind the religious issue. Old churches have indoctrinated people to believe that all vampyres are evil. Then of course, your government would want soldiers, your scientists would want to study us. And can you imagine the amount of people who would want us dead? Whether for revenge, sport or religious reasons; our safety would be compromised.” Edana nodded in agreement.
“But there are a lot of vampyres, Inherits and Classicals, who don’t agree with our laws. They feel that we have nothing to fear from humans, that we should use them for nothing more than food and for, excuse the pun, adding fresh blood to our bloodlines. They go through a ritual to purge all remnants of Amphioxus’s soul from their body, cutting themselves off from the rest of the vampyre community and our natural mind links. The ritual is such an unnatural act that it damages their minds and for some, even their bodies. A being that is meant to share its mind with many forcing that kind of isolation upon itself, damages the psyche.
“For Inherits, who were born with the link, the change is so drastic that it affects even their bodies, their skin becomes pale and sunken, their aversion to light increases to the point where it is completely unbearable, they can no longer touch human food, they become the vampyres of your human myths and legends. That’s why they originally became called Gaunts, because the first Gaunts were originally Inherits, before the change; they were named after their appearance.
“Classicals don’t undergo a physical change when they become Gaunts as their mind once belonged to a human, meaning they spent years with an individual consciousness, so the ritual isn’t too much of a traumatic experience.
“About five and a half thousand years ago, the Gaunts began banding together. They began making blood bonds amongst themselves to allow telepathic communication over long distances. They killed indiscriminately and even played with their food, as we call it, which basically means they wouldn’t put their victims into trances before they fed, instead purposefully tried to increase their fear as they felt the adrenaline added to the flavour. I’ve even heard stories about Gaunts who forced women’s bodies’ to lust after them – not their minds, just their bodies; meaning their minds remain petrified – so, they get the smell of their pheromones as well as the taste of the adrenaline. It’s supposed to be intoxicating, but highly addictive; the vampyric counterpart to human’s heroin. It became very big during those centuries, or so my father tells me. It was before my time after all.
“Thankfully, about 700 years later, the Gaunts realised that if they kept doing what they were doing, they would be killed off, as there were still so few of them. Those 700 years are where the myths and legends surrounding the human vampyres began. The beings in your books and movies are not vampyres, they are Gaunts.
“For a long while we thought the Gaunts had died off or given up, but it was wishful thinking. They had just decided to take a more strategic approach, rather than their animalistic one. They started approaching other vampyres, convincing them to become Gaunts, to fight for their cause. In the beginning, it was easy to tell the Gaunts from the rest of us, but now they prefer to use Classical Gaunts for recruiting, so we can’t tell who the Gaunts are just by looking at them. Thankfully, the damage the ritual does to their minds is sufficient enough to guarantee a slip up every now and then, so we do manage to catch a few of them, but they’re still making more than we’re catching.
“Which is where you come in. We have been fighting, what you humans would call, a civil war for the past five and a half thousand years, and while the Gaunts were still using their animalistic battle strategy, a prophecy was made. A prophecy about –”
“A prophecy about a human girl who will bring peace to your kingdom,” Edana interrupted him. “A prophecy about me.”
She now understood why the king was so desperate for her to ‘follow her destiny’, why everyone seemed so excited that ‘the girl from the prophecy’ had finally arrived. They just had to put the final nail in my coffin. She grumbled, before mentally laughing at the irony of that thought. How can I justify putting my friends' life in danger because I refused to help stop a war that’s been going on for this long, let alone because I refused to help stop a bunch of psycho-killers.
“I was born in 1993,” she sighed.
“What?” Lucian asked, raising both eyebrows at her.
“I was born in 1993, ‘she will arise at the last decade of a century’. You might not have found me in the 90s, but I was born in them.”