--- Rania ---
The master vampire was standing in front of her as she lay there unable to move.
His left hand was clenched into a fist and she saw the ethereal shackles of a paralysis spell connecting it to her. His eyes locked onto hers. She found it impossible to look away as she felt strange flashes of light emanate from his eyes.
The master vampire prevented her from moving, and his strange hypnotic spell was making her head hurt.
Her surroundings became indistinct as her vision and hearing came out of focus.
What was going on?
Where was she?
Out of the edges of her vision, she noticed a greater spirit turn its attention in her direction. It was a massive thing, made of stone and sweat, and community and effort. It was the grandest thing she had ever seen. Limbs made of authority and obedience and fate and the will to power extended from it and reached into all the werewolves, vampires, and their spawn.
How odd. The spirits were usually so much more subtle. They rarely showed themselves physically.
But this one?
This one was Glorious.
Maybe if she worked with it, then some of its Glory would rub off on her? Maybe she could be this cool, too?
She knew the spirit must be the Living City. She had thought it was evil, a Bad Guy even, but how could that be when it was so Glorious? The other spirits looked like gnats in comparison to it.
And after all, wasn't being cool and epic and Glorious an important part of adventure, too?
Clearly, if she worked with it, she could become a better adventurer. She could have vampires and werewolves as teammates. Weren't those much cooler than those mortal species?
All she had to do was to betray her friends and join the Living City. It would be so easy.
Betray her friends? That sounded bad.
Betraying your friends was bad, wasn't it? Rania found it really hard to think right now. All she knew for sure was that the Living City was Glorious, and if she just worked with it then maybe she would be Glorious, too. And wasn't that the most important thing in the world? Who cared about good and evil when you could be awesome and Glorious instead?
She could stop worrying about Innocent Civilians. Those weren't Glorious. They weren't important in the grand scheme of things, so why waste your time trying to help them? Better to enslave them and use them as fuel to raise up the Glorious people. The ones who would be remembered in history books.
Glory was all that mattered. The Living City was pretty adamant on that, and it was the largest and most impressive spirit around. It probably knew what it was talking about.
"No! Don't fall for its tricks!" She heard Pebble shout out.
She was able to hear him much more clearly than usual. Must be because of all the mind control, and blood loss, and paralysis, and exhaustion, and generally not having a very good time.
He turned to her and said: "Rania you must believe in yourself!"
Even in her muddled state of mind, that sounded like good advice. Believing in herself sounded like something a proper adventurer would do. It happened in books all the time. And so Rania decided to believe in herself.
She believed in herself really, really hard.
The hypnotic spell broke, and the vampire blinked at her in confusion. Unfortunately, she still couldn't move.
"What in the hells is wrong with your head?" The vampire asked rudely. He looked a little bit creeped out as he stared at her in disbelief.
"It doesn't matter." The Living City said, in the universal voice of stern, disappointed fathers everywhere.
"Turn her." It instructed the vampire.
Rania felt her blood grow cold as the vampire rushed forward and sunk his teeth into her throat.
No!
He would turn her into a vampire!
She didn't want to become a vampire!
Vampires were Bad Guys, and she didn't want to become a Bad Guy!
She tried to resist, but the paralysis prevented her from fighting back as the vampire began draining her blood.
"Embrace it! Soon you will serve me and you will experience the Glory of being a vampire! You will be immortal!" The Living City said.
It was such an odd idea. Being immortal. It went against her very name!
Even so, she wouldn't mind immortality, despite the irony. The physical changes from turning into a vampire weren't bad, really. It was mostly upsides, like the ability to regenerate injuries. The downsides, like needing to drink blood or being unable to enter a place without an invitation, were quite bad, but she was certain she could find a way to work around them. They were the result of curses that the many enemies of the Living City had used against it over the millennia. Vampires had the same problem as Mind Warpers: Their strong connections to each other allowed curses to propagate between them and last much longer than normal.
No, if it was just for the physical changes she wouldn't mind vampirism too much.
It was the mental changes that terrified her.
Vampires were soulless thralls of the Living City.
Not that being soulless was terrible on its own, of course. Rania would never be so bigoted as to discriminate against the anima-impaired. Some of the ethics books she read had been written by Ossorian necromancers and they made it very clear that discrimination against the soulless was bad.
The problem was just that losing your soul made you really easy to mind control, and also led to mental deterioration over time. As a result, vampires had almost no free will and some of them were kind of crazy.
If she became a vampire, she would almost certainly end up hurting Innocent Civilians one day, and she really did not want to do that.
She tried to resist the vampire's bite, but there was nothing she could do as she slowly felt her life ebb away.
"Don't worry, Rania! You will be safe." Pebble said. "You will persevere. You must, because of anthropics. If you were mind controlled then you wouldn't be an adventurer anymore, and that's an invalid world state. You can die as an adventurer, but you can't not be an adventurer. Vampires and werewolves are clearly classified as non-adventurers, so this can't be happening."
"Your rambling means nothing to me." The Living City retorted as the vampire continued to drain her blood.
Pebble faced the Living City directly and pulled himself up to his full height, which wasn't very high at all. He looked concerned, but also confident and resolute. There he was. Such a tiny spirit, and he was standing up to the Living City for her. It looked a little bit comical, for a tiny pebble to face a monster like this. But it was so brave and inspiring! She believed in him from the bottom of her heart.
Pebble declared: "By the Power of Friendship and antivirus protection, I rebuke you! Your infraction has been logged and reported!"
It was an unusual figure of speech, but it sounded like there was a lot of cultural baggage there that she was missing.
The Living City's expressions were hard to read, but she got the distinct impression that it was very concerned by that phrase.
And suddenly, there was another spirit there.
She could not tell its nature. All spirits represented different things in the material world, but this spirit did not seem to have a physical form at all. It was an abstract thing, and she had never seen anything like it before. Despite its lack of a body, she could sense that the spirit was enormous.
Although it wasn't exactly like the spirit was large. It was more that it had a size of "yes".
She felt a connection to it. Like it had always been there, silently watching. She wondered briefly how she never noticed it before, but found the answer quickly: How many humanoids noticed the air they breathed? How many fish noticed the water they swam in?
The spirit permeated everything, and it exuded authority. Time froze and the world stopped moving when it revealed itself. She knew that it would stay that way until the spirit granted the world permission to resume.
It exuded a million tentacles in all directions, each covered in a thousand eyes. Nothing could evade its notice, or its judgment.
Despite its cool facade, Rania could sense that the Living City was very nervous now. Many of the other spirits were nervous as well even though they were not under the great spirit's scrutiny. She did not understand why. She found the attention of this enormous new spirit strangely comforting. It was always nice to find out that somebody cared about her and her adventures. She found it kind of flattering that it was paying so much attention to her.
She wondered if it was nice? If all the other spirits were so scared of it, it would probably be lonely. Maybe it would appreciate a friend?
"The Spirit of Adventure has answered my call!" Pebble declared as they watched the enormous spirit's uncountable eldritch appendages wriggle around the terrified Living City.
Oh! So that was the Spirit of Adventure! How awesome! She had thought that the spirit of adventure was only a metaphor. But now that she saw it in front of her, she was delighted. She felt an odd sense of kinship towards it that she found difficult to put into words.
If she survived this, she was totally going to find out how to get in contact with it again, so that she could befriend it. Her mind was already racing ahead of her as she wondered what kind of presents an eldritch entity that represented all Adventure would like. It would probably be more difficult to shop for than her other friends.
"No! This one shall be mine!" The Living City declared, but Rania could tell it was all bluster.
The Spirit of Adventure did not acknowledge its outcry at all, but Pebble was emboldened and shouted at the Living City in malicious glee: "Behold the power of admin privileges! Get wrecked, asshole!"
Time was still stopped, and the vampire’s teeth were still lodged into her neck, though he was not moving. Despite this, she felt her headache recede, and found it much easier to think. She still felt like she was dying, but she had renewed hope that she would somehow survive this.
She believed in Pebble, and she trusted that he knew what he was doing.
Then Pebble loudly addressed all the other spirits: "It would be an invalid world state if the vampire turns her, but it would be implausible if she dies instead of getting turned. So we have a bit of a conundrum here. It sure would be convenient if there was an in-universe reason for why she is neither dead nor controlled by the Living City. Like for example, because the vampire biting her died and something strange and unprecedented messed up the connection to the Living City. That would even fit in neatly with the prophecy about sympathetic magic, so it would be win-win."
Rania had to agree, that sure would be convenient.
The Spirit of Adventure turned its attention to Pebble, and Rania grew nervous. She hoped her friend was not in trouble for his suggestion. If he was, she would have to defend him from Adventure itself, and she was not really sure how that would work, either physically, or metaphysically. After a tense second of not knowing as the Spirit of Adventure silently assessed them, she realized that it agreed with Pebble, too.
The Spirit of Adventure wanted the world to be plausible, but also shaped according to its will. And so it began to sing. A thousand voices reached a thousand lesser spirits, and commanded the world to rearrange itself in a more pleasing shape.
The other spirits joined in a great chorus, with Adventure as the conductor. Even The Living City joined in the song. Not that it had a choice in the matter, after the Spirit of Adventure rebuked it and ordered it to fall in line.
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She no longer felt a need to obey the Living City, although thinking in general was hard right now, so she wasn't totally sure what was going on. Frankly, the Living City did not look at all glorious right now, being ordered around along with all the other spirits.
As the spirits sang, reality fractured and came apart at the seams. Her headache intensified as the events of the previous seconds replayed before her eyes.
She saw herself jumping at the vampire, and being paralyzed in mid-flight.
She saw herself run around the tent instead, but that led to the same result.
She saw herself jumping at the vampire while also shooting her bow at just the right moment. This time she killed the vampire before he could paralyze her. But it felt off to her. Why had she shot that arrow? It seemed implausible that she would have known. So that reality was discarded as well.
And so the spirits continued to explore other options, to find a way to arrange the world that would please the Spirit of Adventure.
Reality cycled through permutations like a kaleidoscope of potential, and Rania was at the center of it all.
And then they found a solution.
Reality snapped back, and Rania with it. The great spirit faded into the background, and time received its permission to resume.
When she came back to herself, she was still paralyzed and the vampire was still biting her and draining her life.
It didn't work! She had her free will back, but she was still going to die here!
Then she suddenly heard shouting from far above, along with the sounds of enormous wingbeats.
"No! To the left! To the left!"
A shadow appeared over the vampire. He barely had time to react before a gigantic wyvern landed directly on him and squashed him like a bug. The force of the blow ripped the vampire's fangs out of her throat. Blood spurted in all directions as her carotid artery was severed.
She fell to the ground and started bleeding out.
To make things worse, she could see the vampire rapidly regenerating. He had been crushed, but without a supernatural means to stop his regeneration he would recover even from this.
"I said to the left, not to the right! Now look at what you've done!" Xilly scolded the enormous beast from atop a saddle on its back.
"Oh, shit! It's Rania! And a vampire!" Xilly shouted from atop the wyvern. "Quick, breathe on them!"
The war beast responded instantly, and reared back to unleash its breath attack on them.
Rania wondered why Xilly had decided to kill her as she prepared herself to die. But death never came. When the wyvern's breath hit her, she felt herself reinvigorated and energized instead. Her wounds started healing before her eyes, and even her throat knit itself back together in seconds.
When the breath attack subsided, Rania found herself in perfect health. She was surprised to see that the vampire before her had been burned to ash by the same breath.
Xilly looked excited. "Looks like I was just in time with my newest creation. It's a wyvern based on Genesis Dragon genes. Its breath attack heals people, and it also does a number on the undead. It's win-win! I can't believe that the prototype is already working this well.
"Now get up here and explain to me what is going on."
As Rania jumped onto the wyvern to join Xilly, she couldn't help but think that something was suspicious. She wasn't quite sure what happened just now. There had been something weird going on when the vampire bit her. But what was it? Her head was hurting a lot, but luckily the headache was getting better by the second. She couldn't help but feel like she was forgetting something, though.
Pebble helped to save her, that part she could remember. She was sure of it. And maybe there was something else there, too? Her memory felt hazy. But Pebble was so mysterious, too. After all of his ominous statements, Rania was by now pretty sure that Pebble was hiding an upsetting secret from them all. It would be in character for him because he was a spirit, and also because he was much smarter than the rest of them.
She wondered when he would reveal his secret? She was excited about it rather than nervous. Many good stories had minor betrayals in them to increase tension and generate drama. Pebble was a good friend, so it would surely only be a minor, token betrayal at worst, and not something that would make her genuinely upset. She expected it would be fun and exciting when he betrayed them, but she also hoped that it wouldn't take long to mend bridges afterwards.
"We need to kill the vampires." She told Xilly.
"The spirits can help me find them. Go this way!" She added, pointing towards her next target.
The wyvern took to the air and flew in the direction she had pointed out. Everything below them was chaos. Rania briefly explained all she knew of the attack to Xilly as they went on the hunt.
Unfortunately, Xilly did not fully grasp her explanation. "Explain to me again why you think that Atrog will be fine despite being in a duel with a master vampire?"
"Tropes." Rania replied.
"Fair enough. I won't argue against it if you say that we should focus on helping Elona. I don't understand how rooting out the vampire infiltrators will help with that, but I have worked with Lilian often enough that I trust her."
Rania felt really weird. That vampire had almost killed and turned her, but the wyvern's breath had done something to her and now she was energized and better than before. Still, she felt like she was missing something. She was running on adrenaline and life magic right now and was not looking forward to the crash.
Luckily their hunt for the remaining vampires went very well: With a flying mount to aim from, it was easy for her to snipe vampires from afar, and her Arrows of Bad Guy Slaying worked as well as ever. Frankly, she thought they were kind of overpowered and took away some of the suspense of the fight by making it too easy. But at this point they were a firmly established part of her arsenal and it would be stupid not to use them. And of course, the faster she killed the vampires the fewer people they could kill. That was more important than keeping the fight suspenseful.
A few vampires took cover behind walls wide enough that her arrows couldn't properly curve around them, but the wyvern took care of those. Its breath healed allies and hurt the undead at the same time, so it could breathe directly in the general direction of the Bad Guys without worrying about collateral damage.
After just a few minutes of hunting, the spirits informed her that they had killed all of the vampire infiltrators. It was time to return to the others and see how the main plot had developed in their absence.
She was very surprised by what they found: Elona was perfectly fine, safely conducting her ritual under the protection of all the soldiers that Dov had freed from the vampire's control.
Meanwhile, Atrog looked like he was in trouble just because he was dueling the master vampire!
It was so weird!
But then she realized what had gone wrong: Her other friends were now helping Atrog. It was no longer an honorable duel that would show off how awesome Atrog was, but instead it was a scene that demonstrated that the master vampire could hold off an entire team on his own. If only she had been there to warn them of that narrative misstep!
But it was too late to change that now, so she immediately joined in the fight and shot an arrow at the vampire. Unfortunately, it didn't work. When the vampire saw her shoot her arrow, he waved his hand and summoned a small swarm of imps. Imps were very weak demons, but they were still demons, and that meant that they were the most Bad of Bad Guys, worse even than vampires. The targeting on her Arrows of Bad Guy Slaying was confused by it. The stupid things were mindlessly throwing themselves directly into the paths of her arrows and shielding the master vampire with their bodies.
Atrog looked pretty exhausted, while the vampire was barely hurt. His clothes were in ruins, but his body looked unharmed. A testament to vampiric regeneration that made battles of attrition doomed to failure.
"I am disappointed." The monster taunted Atrog. "I thought you would be worth fighting. I hoped that you would make a strong minion once I turned you. But you are not strong enough alone and need to rely on your allies to have any chance at all. Know that you are fighting Astaroth Thorne, master vampire of the Living City. Your defeat was inevitable, but you could at least have provided more of a challenge."
Atrog did not respond. Rania wasn't close enough yet to hear his telepathic communications, but she was sure he was saying something tactically useful to her team instead of engaging in banter and letting everyone know his name. It was a cultural difference, she supposed. Rania really did not like the vampire, so she resolved to forget his name immediately and only refer to him as "the vampire" in her own mental narrative. With how much he cared about glory, that would certainly annoy him a lot if he knew.
"Unfortunately, my own minions have disappointed me even more than you." The vampire continued. "So I will finish what they started myself, and I will let you watch as all you hold dear crumbles around you."
Then he turned into mist. Atrog's sword went clean through it, but it did not appear to cause any damage. The mist rapidly accelerated and flew towards Elona. Rania shot another arrow at the cloud, but one of the imps teleported in front of it again and took the arrow for its master.
It looked like Elona's ritual was reaching its final stages. Rania knew nothing about necromantic rituals, but the smoke had changed colors throughout the ritual and by now it looked as dark and dramatic as it could. Any darker and it would start looking kitschy instead of dramatic. Clearly this indicated that the ritual was almost done.
Xilly cast a spell from atop the wyvern and an arcane shockwave impacted the vampiric mist. The spell caused the vampire to revert to his normal form shortly before he could reach Elona. He looked annoyed, but no worse for wear.
"Soldiers, kill the weaklings! Leave the people that matter to me." He declared.
The vampire spawn in the area stopped trying to reach Elona and started attacking the nearest soldiers instead.
Rania found herself drawing an arrow and aiming it at a Shan soldier.
She interrupted herself in shock as she returned to her senses. Had she just drawn a weapon on an ally? The master vampire had given an order, and she had moved to obey it immediately, without thinking.
Was she turning into a vampire?
Rania was shocked. Her worst fears were coming true!
But then she realized that she had only moved on instinct, and had not followed through when she noticed what she was doing. It seemed like there was no compulsion on her after all. She did not feel any urge to attack the Shan soldiers. It had only been a strange momentary impulse.
The master vampire briefly glanced back at her and furrowed his brows, but then he kept moving forwards, towards Elona. As he walked, he cut his own artery and sprayed globs of blood on the ground. More imps burst forth from the blood and immediately started attacking Rania.
She sighed in frustration and put her bow away. The suicidal imps were an effective way for the vampire to shield himself from her arrows and she had no idea how to counter that. She drew a pair of short swords instead and started hacking her way through the horde.
Meanwhile, the master vampire was ignoring her along with everyone else in his way. The only one who had posed a challenge to him so far was Atrog, and he was too far away and too slow to catch up. The vampire wove between the soldiers in his way, contemptuously ignoring them as if they were not even worth his time to kill. A few swords and arrows found their mark, but his wounds regenerated before Rania's eyes, as fast as they were inflicted.
Elona's ritual chanting had switched to an older and more ominous sounding language, which Pebble informed her was called Latin. It was reaching its crescendo, but Rania could tell that it would not be finished soon enough.
But then the master vampire encountered an enemy even he could not just ignore: The enormous wyvern on which Xilly was riding crashed into him from above and started biting and clawing at him with abandon.
Unfortunately, even that was not enough to stop him. The vampire expertly swung around the enormous monster's claws and moved towards Xilly, who was still sitting on its back. He opened the wyvern's throat with his dagger, then turned towards Xilly as the creature collapsed under him. The elven wizard cast a shield around herself, but the vampire cut through it with contemptuous ease. Luckily, Xilly disappeared in a flash of light before the vampire’s dagger could pierce her heart.
She did not reappear. If this was Balron instead of Xilly, the contingent spell would likely have teleported her to a more tactically advantageous position so that she could continue to fight. But for all their power, Dov's parents preferred not to fight in person when they could help it. Xilly's emergency teleport probably transported her off the battlefield entirely, Rania suspected.
There was nothing standing between the vampire and Elona now, and Rania was still busy with the imps and the vampire spawn that threw themselves in her path.
She could only watch in horror as the monster rushed at Elona, and stabbed his clawed hand through her chest.
His arm was embedded in her ribcage, and blood was spurting everywhere.
It felt as if time was frozen. Elona's face betrayed no emotion at all as she stopped her chant and looked down at her mortal wound.
She calmly spoke to the vampire, and though it was barely louder than a whisper, Rania was sure that everyone could hear her clearly: "I know what your spells are doing. How your necromancy corrupts hearts and minds. How it kills, and how it reforms the dead into parodies of themselves."
Oh no! She was saying a lot of things and people barely moved at all in that time. She was talking at the speed of plot, and it sounded like she was saying her final words. A last monologue before she died. Rania was saddened to hear it. She had barely gotten to know the woman, but she was Dov's mother and her friend would be so distraught!
"...but you vampires are amateurs." Elona continued with a sudden smile. "The magic of the Living City is a pale imitation of what Duna is capable of. She is entropy itself. The inevitable march of all life towards eternal oblivion. And you? You are a puppet controlled by a poorly worded Wish with delusions of grandeur.
"You were right to focus on stopping me. But you are too late. That ritual chant you just interrupted? It was already finished. Those last few lines weren't even necessary. I was just adding some more power, just to be sure. But I see now that this was an unnecessary precaution. Your necromancy is too weak, and you have already lost."
Oh yes! Those weren't her last words after all! They were a badass boast instead! She should have known. Elona was important and hadn't done anything awesome in this fight, yet. Of course she would get to do something cool, and now it looked like she was going to save the day.
The master vampire squeezed his hand, still impaled in Elona's chest, and ripped out her heart.
He wordlessly raised her beating heart in front of the woman, but to his surprise she did not react at all.
"Did you really think I still needed a heart?" She asked with disbelief in her voice. "You wound me. Pun intended."
Then tendrils of blood erupted from the heart in the vampire's grip and began burrowing into the vampire. He screamed, first in shock and then in pain, as the heart in his hand began fighting back against him.
Elona barely paid any attention to either the screaming vampire or the gaping hole in her chest as she calmly continued her monologue.
"You view me as a threat you need to take out, as well you should. Your master, that glorified village, views Duna as a major power.
"Do you know what I think of you? I do not think of you at all. Yesterday I did not know that you existed, and in a few years I will have forgotten all about you. You will be remembered only briefly, as nothing more than a stepping stone that annoyed me for a day. Maybe you will see some use as an ingredient in one of Xilly's experiments, but there will certainly be no glory in it for you or your master.
"And do you know what Duna thinks of you and your master? She thinks you are adorable. You are like children looking at the world in wonder, trying to carve out a place for yourself with naive, optimistic hope. You try so hard and earnestly to earn glory, and have yet to realize that all of your glory will be like dust in the wind in just a few millennia. I think that your attempt to look for meaning in a universe that cares nothing for you is pathetic. But my goddess is of a different mind. She thinks that your earnesty and hopefulness when faced with an impossible task is cute and adorable.
"I do not share your delusions. I know that my life is meaningless and we will all die and be forgotten one day.
"But that day is not today."
And with those words, she moved her arms in a final ritual gesture, and darkness fell over the entire battlefield.
The zombies stopped moving and fell over like puppets with their strings cut. The vampire spawn began convulsing. The werewolves and the vampires started retching and spitting up blood. None of them were able to fight anymore.
Seconds later, they started exploding. The weaker creatures died first, but even the stronger vampires did not hold on for much longer. As they died, their blood pooled together in mid-air and sought out the dead Shan soldiers. Rania watched in amazement as many of the fallen opened their eyes again, their wounds healed by the blood of their enemies. Elona was out-necromancing the vampires and turning their own blood magic against them.
All the while, the proud master vampire whose name Rania had successfully forgotten was still screaming, as the heart in his claws sucked out his blood and tried to eat him alive.
"Impossible!" He managed to spit out. "No mortal can subvert the blood rite of Thorros!"
Then he too exploded, and all was silent on the battlefield.
"Sounds like a skill issue to me." Elona commented as she calmly picked up her still beating heart and placed it back inside her chest.