Finding my grandfather was not difficult. Magic and undead minions had built him a new palace in a remarkably short amount of time, up on a mountainside with views of lifeless stone and the spirits of poltergeists flitting about like birds, keening for attention.
It looked exactly like the castle I’d sent tumbling into the valley below it back in Zanzyr.
Exuding the aura of an undead wasn’t that hard, given I was already a dhampir. That was mostly just in case, as I had little problem flitting about and avoiding their attention. They had slightly different senses than humans, but once you knew how they worked, it was fine.
Also, there were living beings here, all Tomb-Tainted and bound to arise as undead once they died. That even included the dhampir, born of vampires and mortals, although any such natural death could be a very long time off, as dhampirs could easily live a thousand years.
I was not a good example of that, but I knew my genetics, and, well, my father was over a century old, and looked to be in his twenties, as rakishly handsome as ever.
When grandfather entered his study and closed the door behind him, he turned around calmly and froze into the unnatural unbreathing stillness of the undead.
I’d never met him, only seen him once or twice in Parliament. I had seen my uncle, the Marquis Boris Bludevich-Jubvanyl, and the family resemblance was indeed there. Indeed, some of the darkly handsome, broodingly classic features of the Master Vampire seemed to pass through to progeny normal or vampiric.
His eyes were flushing with blood, but could not match the natural ruby of my own, nor my black sclera.
He had on classic Barovian attire: a short black cloak lined with crimson silk, a very proper long dark suit, white gloves and shirt, black vest, red pochette, the whole arrangement, impeccably tailored to a frame that was slender because vampires needed carry no fat and few organs, only blood.
I assumed undead politics would be very long-winded and merciless, and he was a relative newcomer here. So his first thought would be that I was either an assassin, or a secret plotter come to speak with him.
Then, of course, he recognized me. I could see the thoughts running through his head: a Master Vampire, over five hundred years old, gifted with power most mortals never saw, let alone a vampire. His spellcasting ability rivaled or exceeded that of many liches, and doubtless he had many plans and Contingencies and artful ways to escape and preserve his life.
I was not concerned about it.
“Edgina Bludevich-Jubvanyl,” he stated in his magnificent rolling Barovian accent, brought from the ancient hills of what was now Kairokos and the Hellenic peoples who lived there. The tension in his stance reduced under an iron will as he rolled his shoulders, staring at me, just the tiniest use of his Gaze causing a spark to ignite in the air and warning him not to try any funny business that way.
I saw him glance away, and frown.
“Yes, your connections to your servants have all gone quiet. They will only think you are ignoring them if they choose to bother you, which I assume you’ve trained them well not to.” I gestured to the comfortable chair opposite me, the goblets already out, and the wine ready. “Please sit.”
He only paused a moment, staring at me for daring to command him… and then realized the power dynamics were completely not in his favor.
“A descendant who has surpassed me,” he murmured in some surprise. With elegant flair and perfect manners, he stepped to the table, plucked up the wine, and uncorked it with pure strength effortlessly. He took a sniff of it, raised an interested eyebrow, and poured generously into both of our glasses.
It wasn’t holy water, and no amount of alcohol or mundane poison would affect a vampire.
He sat down precisely and raised the glass in a toast to me. “To family!” he stated simply, and I inclined my head to toast him back.
His tasting was refined and measured, swirling around his mouth, his fangs sliding forth uninhibited. “Extraordinary. What is this vintage?” he breathed at last, holding the crimson up to the light to measure it, clearly interested.
“It is a nonesuch, a variant on elven Pure Spring wine. To the tears of elven women who have lost those they loved is added a drop of blood of their dearly departed.
“You are tasting regret, and sorrow, and love that calls across the tides of time and space to bind souls together.”
A crimson tear started down the side of his nose as his breath caught in his throat. I watched and waited as he let it fall, scarlet against his pale olive skin, onto the small table between us, staining the white cloth very crimson.
“It… has been a very long time since I felt such things, grand-daughter,” the former Prince Morphail told me, staring at his glass.
“I felt it appropriate for you to go out in an elven manner, grandfather,” I responded calmly, taking a sip of the wine for myself. The blood was nothing but enjoyable, given my ancestry, but there was no negative energy attached to it, I had made sure of it.
“I see. Are you so certain it will be that simple?” he asked archly.
“I am over four thousand years older than you, grandfather.” He had the grace to blink at me in shock. “I have been traveling in time. Getting back here from the past the long way gives one a great deal of time to improve.”
“I… see.” As an undead, he knew age meant power, and I clearly had not slacked off in the slightest. “Tell me, did you kill Boris?” he asked me directly.
“He made the choice of attacking me after my graduation, and I eliminated him later for it,” I confirmed calmly. “I am also responsible for dropping the castle off the mountain and into the valley. Thank you, by the way, for requesting the Well from your master. It proved vital to the deaths of him and HIS former master.”
He stared at me as if I’d grown another head. “You cannot be that powerful…” he whispered, but his words lacked proper force.
“Do you know that any sun, chilled or not, has the capacity to go nova if the wrong things ignite within it? And that the output of that star, in that moment, is like a million years of sunlight, delivered all at once?” I asked him, putting back my drink and draining it, before depositing the goblet gently upon the table. “Drink up, grandfather. Your last moments should be remembering your love and your regrets, not your hatred.”
I got up, walked to the wan and pale sunlight, less powerful than even moonlight, and vanished from his study like a dream that was not there.
Mordai Bludevich-Jubvanyl rose to his feet, his goblet in one hand and the bottle of nonesuch wine in the other. He stepped to the window of his study, staring out there at the dead sun hanging there, giving a pathetic excuse for light to this world.
His regrets. His loves. They all flooded back to him.
Of his family. His lands. His brother. The wars, the beasts, the priests whose mewling could not save his people.
The offer and the promise of time and power to avenge their deaths, to take vengeance.
Taking his beloved brother with him, and making him a slave for centuries thereby.
All the vampires he’d converted, so many sparking a thought and emotion in him that was crushed as each blossomed to hate under his ruthless commands and control of them.
The abandoning of the gods of his people. The flight. The new land in Zanzyr, the endless masquerade and hiding of his years in a farce that did not fool the powerful, but as long as he was a master of magic, they and their laws did not care.
He even remembered Boraz’s mother, a lovely noblewoman who had been easily seduced by a Master Vampire with centuries of experience at the craft. She had not even known when he sent in the second, a living retainer, to take his place and beget a child upon her… a child who would be born a dhampir when his mother was painlessly drained to death and became a vampire, a blood tie stronger than mere heredity of flesh.
Love had turned to hate for becoming a slave to him, and in the end he had to destroy her, like all the other lovers he’d had across the centuries. His son had despised him, only fear of his mother’s fate stopping him from blabbing family secrets across all the lands, until he had been sealed away in the dungeons, bound in stone and silenced until something appropriate might be done about him.
His only living son.
His only living grand-daughter, by a Shaden elf, of all things.
Four thousand years older than he.
Crimson tracks fell down his cheeks as he drank, and relived five hundred years of undeath, trapped in a body that would not age, would not change, healed rapidly… and thirsted. A thirst not even the most powerful magic could truly sate.
And yet he’d been willing to fight for Zanzyr, for the sanctuary he’d made of Transyvia and the undead who could live there with no clerics hunting them down to be killed by divine power and mandates.
He had wrought many beautiful things. He had sponsored talented wizards, been patron to artists, lavished coin upon those with culture and refinement and politeness, yet behind the facade he had felt little to nothing for his noble behavior.
He had watched the mortals he knew, even the wizards, wither with age and die away, or fall to magic’s grasp, either pushing their power or it being turned upon them for the deeds they had done.
Some he’d called friends, others peers, rivals, servants, and enemies.
All dead.
Dead, like his beloved brother, freed from Mordai’s domination after all these centuries, unable to let him go, unable to risk letting go what his brother knew and knowing revenge would follow in one form or another… because it always had before, and vampires could not truly love any longer.
Only thirst for it.
There were dark ripples spreading across the sun. They seemed to be igniting around the edges.
Mordai dropped the goblet and raised the bottle to his lips, as might a soldier thirsting after a long day of battle, desperate and needing a drink, thirsting, trying to quench a desire he could never fill.
For an instant, the sky was full of light, and bloody eyes beheld the true glory of The Light.
And then Erebar, the Mausoleum Realm of Nyx, and the countless cryptworlds that floated in orbits around the cold white stars at their center, died.
Technically, white dwarf stars weren’t supposed to explode. That was what was supposed to happen BEFORE the white dwarf was made, the remnants of it collapsing back into the cold, dead center.
Nyx had never allowed a true sun to shine here, but the white dwarves here all had energy, all had potential.
Poking them was nothing for a certain Greater Goddess of the Sun.
The quiet worlds, home to many billions of undead souls created across many worlds and ages of time, died as The Light swept up, over, and around them, burning whole worlds and planets away with the force of their eruptions. The nine suns and thousands of worlds died together in a fire and light that simply wasn’t supposed to happen in a realm tied to Entropy… and yet managed to do so regardless.
There was no warning, no chance to react. There was just a popping in the sky, and then true sunlight hammered into the worlds hard enough to ignite any atmosphere, melt their surfaces and miles of the mantle to lava that streamed past into space, only for the following shockwave of the eruption to tear the liquefied planets completely apart.