In the wilderness, there was a cave. Far removed from bastions of civilisation. Far from any fortress meant to face tides of monsters. In the depths of a dessert old enough to perhaps remember the death of gods, stood a vampire just as ancient.

And Krevo stared at his hand in wonder. Then stepped out fully. Into the ray of sunlight. Warmth touched his flesh and tried to seep inside. The revealed bits of his skin took the heat in as they quickly began to smolder. He would no longer burn away but sunburns would form quite quickly. The sensation of warmth was not all that much in all honesty, even for the first time. It reminded him of barely dodging away from dragonfire.

Maybe he just didn’t get it. Some quirk of the mortal mind that made them so overly inclined to enjoy sunlight. Perhaps it was the affirmation of safety from the things which lurked in the night. Then of course Krevo would feel no such thing.

Nights were his sole domain now. Well… mostly. He was still figuring out how he would either reach the moon or convince it to physically descent from the firmament so that he could devour it. Not to mention the stars. Difficult to pluck even to this day stubborn and cowardly as they were. But for the most part, he could be considered the only true ruler of the Night.

Of course, Krevo cared nothing for that. He would let his kin squabble over the corpse of his sister’s meaningless kingdom and see if someone worth devouring emerged from it.

The smell of millennia old sand tickled his nostrils as he watched time pass. It reminded him of youth. Of times when he and Temna huddle underground in the day and hunted in the night. Where they were so weak that anything even barely magical would result in growth. When the wars between gods grew worse and worse. In days where a mountain they had seen in the distance before dawn could be reduced to dust before nightfall came by an errant strike from a battle.

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Still a long way to go before Krevo could match that. Until he could remember those days and know that he would have been able to devour the very gods were they still alive. Sun no longer scared him and he needed no sleep. That made him far less vulnerable than before. And able to act during both day and night.

After all, survival of the fittest had ruled the world lands since times immemorial. Once in a while something truly mighty would dominate a stretch of land. And since there was a chance, it then turned into a question of scale. The wilderness was many times larger than the mapped civilised world and Krevo was perhaps deeper than a humanoid being had ever stepped with any hope of return. Yet still, everything failed to present the slightest threat to him as he looked up at his prey, returning to its cave.

The ancient sphinx seemed mighty displeased as the puny little things sitting below it. Reginald immediately recognised that it lacked the understanding of how small things could be more dangerous than large. It was still intelligent… the lack of civilisation and danger just did not allow it to develop it into something truly sapient. And it probably wouldn’t be very filling.

Even so, Krevo shook his head as he ripped into the thing’s mind. He checked just in case but it was indeed not worth fighting head on. It would not provide a challenge in neither skill nor raw power. Since that was the case, Krevo simply collapsed its mind, letting it fall to the ground to be eaten. Blood like a vampire, soul like a reaver, heart like a ghoul. They were barely enough to add a fragment of a drop to the oceans of his power. Then he moved on.

Day and night he hunted. Sought things worth killing… and found disappointingly few. Nothing that threatened him, nothing that allowed him to fear and properly grow. But that was fine. He would keep at it for a whole longer. A few years perhaps. Then, he would look somewhere else. The oceans supposedly hid great horrors; he could dig far below even the deepest dwarven mine to see if any of their myths held merit; or perhaps explore what, if anything, hid beyond the firmament. He was far from a god yet and progress was glacial. But when needed, Krevo could be the most patient being in the world.