- [A Secret Corridor Within the Castle] -
Tonight is the haunting night.
The moon is full and large, and its white-blue light shines down through the windows of the Vampire Lord’s castle with a pale, full glow that envelops every corridor and chamber within the bleak fortress. The faces of the statues within a long, shadowy corridor change in contour and shape as the clouds above disturb the downward luminescence that paints their features. Sometimes, to a wary eye, it looks like they're moving — alive. Perhaps they are? Perhaps they are watching the people go by, or perhaps they are just statues, and these thoughts are only imaginations of the paranoid minds of the intruders.
There’s something about this place, this castle, that is different from the other dungeons of the world. Yes, a deep, dark hole full of monsters is always a rather terrifying thing no matter where it is or what shape it takes; however, this castle has an aura to it that one can’t see or touch yet still senses.
The old, heavy doors creak and groan, and the rugs seem to whisper as the fabric is disturbed by invading boots.
The paintings almost feel as if they’re watching one when passing by, as do the suits of armor who rattle and shake whenever one isn’t looking — only to find them standing just a little bit closer than they were a minute ago.
The walls of the rooms and chambers are rather uniform but made individual by the various tapestries and adornments that hang on them. However, there's a confusion to navigating these spaces, giving the unproven impression in the thoughts of the fearful that the rooms and hallways almost appear to shift and change whenever out of sight. Although nobody can really say for sure if this is the case. Given the makeup of the castle’s layout, it may just be confusing to navigate through.
— Maybe.
When one opens a door and looks to the other side, they might find themselves staring at the entrance to the corridor they had literally just come through and are standing at the end of — one would think, given the number of them who close their eyes and squint, trying to see their own backs far off in the dark distance ahead of themselves. Then they turn around and look — they always do — and see nothing there behind them but darkness and shadows that feel like they're catching up, filled with a soft, hushed wind.
This dungeon is different than the others.
It’s different in a way that people of the rational mind can’t quite manage to explain yet. It isn’t illusory or malevolent in perception like the undead dungeon in the far northwest, nor is it violent and bloodthirsty like the fire dungeon to the east. It is not particularly welcoming and almost friendly like the central world-tree dungeon is. It feels, instead, like staring at a dying man lying on his last bed who wishes for nothing more than for the guest to go away and let him be at peace with his memories. There is an emptiness to the look of the eyes all around the fortress, whether in the art of many forms or the mournful undead that wander its midnight-tainted halls.
There is a hollowness to even the voice of the wind itself as it whispers and crawls up along one’s neck and speaks in a language that no living person understands any longer.
There is a deep, radiating fear that fills its corridors — the fear of being caught by Death manifested into tangible shape — an entity, not a concept — because this place is most certainly its home, and any living mortal who wanders onto these floors is intruding on hallowed ground.
All of these things together are how the living feel about this place.
But the dead? To them, this place — now that the Master has come for them — is brighter and more whole than it has been in centuries. An energy has returned to the castle that reinvigorates their tired bones and weakened essences, and even those that had gone mad and feral hundreds of years ago from solitude and disconnection now find themselves reborn in strength that they draw from his presence.
“Hey, you guys get out there!” barks a growling voice, destroying the poesy of the moment, Snatch. "Buncha slackers."
Standing against the wall in a secret, hidden corridor off to the side of a main hallway, a row of metal suits of hollow armor all turn their heads at once, the rattling of their motion filling the dank air. “The Master is attending to his work and must not be disturbed,” instructs the ghost very clearly and firmly as she floats there over them all with crossed arms. “Get rid of the living at once,” she orders, acting as the Master's general, and then vanishes.
It's quiet.
The suits of hollow armor all look back at one another and then turn their collective heads toward a door off to the side of the old hallway. There’s noise coming from it — fighting. The living have arrived and are making their way through the castle, just as they had done one thousand and then some years ago.
It's possible that in their long rest, many of the hollow, possessed suits of armor have become sleepy and placated. While the ghosts that maintain these shells might not ever actually be able to close their eyes and slumber like a living entity would, they can still sit idle for long enough that their ‘minds’ go blank and enter a fugue state that is close enough to an emptiness of the senses to be considered sleep. For those who are trapped in a place such as this castle for all eternity, it is the next best thing to death, which forsook them because of the failings of the old master they had served.
But now the new Master has come for them. He came for them. After the old master failed and no other power in the world came in over a thousand years to save the damned trapped here forever, he has come to finally set them free from their shackles.
And for this, they serve him — not out of binding spell, but out of loyalty to cause and banner. The new Master serves them not as a king but rather as a savior, and so they, in honor, serve the new Master who is good to them and who they see be good to the others around them — the fellow damned. He is one of them.
One after the other, the resting hollow armors of the legion step down from their dust-coated pedestals. Generations of spiders that had made the suits of armor their homes, deeply frightened by the first movements in an era, scatter and scramble out through the crevices in the empty metal as they begin to march. First they move only loosely with limps and lurches, but then their proprioception becomes tighter and tighter as they regain their formation. The undead soldiers grab swords and spears off of the walls, ripping them from old mantles, before the legion that they form reaches the door and violently breaks it open as they’ve now reached a full sprint.
The door flies open off of its hinges, surprised, living faces looking their way from the other side of it as a group of adventurers stands there, just recovering from their last skirmish. Bones and blood lie over the floor, and they're panting for breath and rest.
The tired humans immediately have many words as they scramble, trying to pull back together as the black, metal tide rolls out from the darkness behind a door that should have led to a different room in actuality — the castle is tricky like that. But the hollow armors, flooding out from the secret door in many a number, plant their spears and blades forward and charge. A black and red banner is draped behind them — the herald of the King of the Damned — having covered the secret door from which they emerged.
Without fear and without any emotion greater than fealty, the suits of armor launch forward through cutting blades and destructive explosions all the same, as, for the Master who has come back for them, they will die a thousand deaths. They have no mouths to speak such words with, but they have weapons as old as they are to do the talking instead.
A hundred doors break open all around the castle as hollow armors pour into the corridors of every floor of the castle at once. Many unsuspecting adventuring parties are routed.
----------------------------------------
- [Out in the Gardens] -
The albrūn hums to herself. The plant monster, out in the castle gardens, runs a small, sharp twig through her hair to help untangle its knots. It's not really hair, like a person's or an animals. But it looks like it. A wet, oozing sap runs down her head, secreting from her blossom pedestal. She coats herself with it to stay healthy and glossy. Pinkish green fingers stick the twig into her hair like a pin, and she uses her freed hands to rub the nectar over herself as if it were a lotion. Her head tilts to the side as she moonbathes, her heavy hair draping over her boneless shoulder.
The full moon is the albrūn’s favorite time. She can gather so much light and energy from its bright glow, but at the same time it’s dark enough during the night that she can be unseen for the most part. As a whole, humans hate to be outside at night, from what she's seen.
Her upper body is that of a person’s in vague shape, barring its smooth, elastic texture and blossom-pink coloration. But where her legs ought to diverge, they instead meld together into a single stem that runs into the core of a weeping, large-petaled flower. Her face is similar to a girl's but different in many ways of shape and size. Her eyes are larger, her ears are more like an elf’s, her cheeks are a little puffier and spongy, and her skin isn’t made of flesh but rather of something more smooth and featureless.
Humans would call her a monster, but she just thinks that she’s a pretty flower. But as for why the other flowers in the garden don’t move or make noises like she does, that she doesn’t really understand. In a way, it’s rather lonely being her. Nobody visits her, nobody talks to her, nobody interacts with her. She can only ever sit and watch from a distance. And if anyone comes close to her, she just has to hide. She doesn't know why, but everything in her guts tells her to do so, and so she does. It's not that she wants the humans to come visit her; completely the opposite, in fact. But she still wants… something. She just isn't sure what that something is. Maybe she just gets bored all by herself? The trees and the mushrooms only ever have so much to say. When the wind blows, they all dance together at least, and that's a lot of fun. But when there is no wind and the night is quiet, she's just all by herself out here.
It's complicated.
Leaning over to the side, she peers into a puddle at her own reflection and continues to work through her 'hair'. “Hmm…” lets out the flower girl, looking at her reflection in the puddle as she makes herself pretty.
She made a mistake the other night. But it’s not her fault. She was scared. Her roots tell her as much.
They span out far and wide, digging below the gardens into the bleak trees and connecting with the mushrooms at their damp bases. They run through the skulls of buried skeletons and speak with them. She’s connected to the grass and connected to the things in it. She’s connected to the animals that burrow and chitter, and she’s connected to the gale that runs over her body and lets her know its secrets because they’re alike — she and it. The wind also doesn’t like to be seen. That’s why it’s always going places before you can catch it. The only difference between her and it is that she's stuck here.
All of those different things though tell her the same thing.
— The new Master has come to protect and safekeep them from the dangers of the day.
He’s come here to restore their home, their dignity, and their sanctuary. She knows this herself, after all. She was sleeping as a seed again for a long time, and now she knows because of the gardener that it was the Master who gave her life again and returned her to her only companions, the wind and the moon.
The albrūn frowns.
She’s so foolish. She attacked the Master. Honestly, she doesn’t know why she isn’t dead or suffering something far more awful than that. Any who would raise a hand against the old master would have faced terrors far worse than simply dying.
But she was so scared, and she didn’t think. She can't help it. It's just her nature.
And yet, the new Master spared her life and even has spared her from retribution. In fact, she’s even been pampered more than ever before, as is evidenced by her changing and growing body. When he returned to help the gardener fix the gardens after her assault on him, the Master went out of his way to feed her extra soil from the very nice pile that the gardener keeps out of her reach up on a scaffold where her roots can’t touch. It's rich in nutrients and taste, and her body is changing and becoming full and flushed because of it.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
So, here she is, making herself presentable and pretty so that she can apologize properly to the Master the next time he comes by to see her. She has an entire scheme laid out in her head.
— A twig snaps.
Immediately, she shoots her head around, looking with nervous eyes as a strange face peers in through the bushes toward her.
The shy albrūn and the stranger quietly stare, holding eye contact for an awkward second as she processes. She's not the most clever, with her kind not reaching the state of mental faculties that a human or an elf would. But she's also not as dumb as a goblin. She's somewhere in between those two places.
HE SAW HER!
Everything is ruined. She's dirty again. Immediately, she screams, covering herself and falling down into her flower to hide in a panic.
“Hey, guys!” calls a man’s voice. “Check this out.”
Half a dozen other adventurers — elf, human, and orc — peep through the underbrush toward the giant, shivering flower. She’s hiding inside of it, her hands covering her burning face.
Did they see her? They saw her, right? She’s so embarrassed. Maybe the Master is allowed to see her from now on, but nobody else, ever. EVER! She cries out wordlessly in shame, her voice muffled by thick petals and dewy nectar that’s half-submerged in. Her roots dig through the soil, lashing and tearing through the dirt as they begin to rip free from below the deep, dark ground.
They have to die.
It’s the only way she can present herself to the Master. He won’t like her if someone has seen her and ruined her delicate beauty with their filthy eyes. She's besmirched. Her gaze hardens, and she crawls forward, pulling apart the protective petals as she glares outward toward the adventurers, who are stepping into her glade toward her. Filthy, disgusting, vile. It's so nasty. They saw her.
“Hey!” snaps a new voice suddenly in the background behind the intruders.
The enraged albrūn looks. The Master’s companion ghost floats there behind the mortals.
“Ghost!” shouts a man.
Snatch, the slimy ghost, reaches down to the grass that she’s hovering over. The ghost points past the intruders and straight toward her with a sharp, stubby finger. “Stop slacking off and get rid of these pests!” she barks. “The Master mustn’t be disturbed!” orders the spirit before violently yanking a green stem out of the soil with both of her three-fingered hands. A mandragora rips out of the ground in her hands and screams like a damned spirit escaping hell. Its shrill cry causes the air around it to ripple. The intruders all cover their ears and wince in pain as they stumble and fall to their knees.
Status Effect Applied: [Dazed]
The albrūn, crying and shaking from fear and anger, lets her roots rip out of the soil and start lashing wildly in all directions as she holds her face in deeply bashful shame.
She’s going to have to spend hours cleaning herself again because their nasty eyes touched her body. She’ll have to start over from the beginning. Damn it all! She hopes the Master doesn't come by the gardens tonight and sees her like this. She's going to need all night just to get this far into her beauty routine again.
With her hopes destroyed, she lashes out in rage, watching from behind her petal barricade as the soil, garden, and people all around her are ripped apart into nothing more than a wet cloud of mud and red. Her thorned roots whip through the splattering air in a violent cascade.
By the time she’s done, there’s nothing left around her except for a mess.
Even the ghost is gone.
After everything settles and she's checked that the last human is really dead, she lets out a quiet sigh of relief. Her shoulders fall slack, and she tenderly peeks back out through her blossom. The top of her head emerges, her big eyes cautiously scanning the night, before the rest of her comes out of hiding again. The albrūn's arms shield as much of her squishy body as they can.
Snatch said that the Master is busy tonight. That’s good. That means she has time to clean up and get pretty again before he gets here.
Stupid humans. She hates them.
----------------------------------------
- [An Oddly Quiet Hallway on Floor Two] -
The shaking druid holds her gnarled staff with both hands, looking around herself as she wanders the halls of the Vampire Lord's castle. This isn’t what she expected from a dungeon.
It’s kind of scary.
Something rattles behind her.
She lets out a shriek, immediately spinning around and blasting a spell into the darkness. A glowing, vividly yellow-green streak of buzzing magical energy strikes into a wall. The spell hisses, scorching the stonework, but nothing much else, because there is nothing there. A fresh, smoldering scar cuts through the wall.
Boudicca has cast: [Foxfire]
She laughs quietly to herself, catching her breath. “Just my imagination,” mutters the woman, lowering her staff again. She rubs her tense face to try and loosen its frozen musculature. The collection of many bracelets around her arm rattles.
It’s a little spooky here, but she tells herself that she's not afraid of the dark. She’s been in worse places than this.
Something jangles in the darkness.
Immediately, she lets out a yelp. Her staff shoots out in the other direction, its end blazing alight as a fresh crack of magic shoots out into the shadows.
The next wall smolders and smokes, a vague crackling filling the air as a tapestry begins to burn away into ash. The embers and sparks drift like fairylights through the emptiness. Breathing heavily, the druid’s paranoid eyes scan the distance.
It must have just been the wind. Yeah, that’s it. The wind coming through this hallway must have just moved that wall rug a little.
Everything is fine. She’s fine. There’s nothing here except herself.
Something scratches the stonework next to her.
The druid screams, falling over to the ground and then scrambling to run away as fast as she can as her last nerve snaps. Her own furs and collection of accessories made of animal teeth and plant bulbs rattle and jangle, giving her the impression that something is chasing her as she — terrified — bolts like a spooked anqa out back toward the outside of the castle.
There in the corridor, where she just was, however, a ghost appears.
“Hey! The Master cannot be disturbed. It's critical that -!” Snatch stops, looking around the empty hallway and toward the last shadow of the human intruder who is fleeing, having been scared away.
The ghost quietly scratches her cheek and then turns her head, looking at the rattling vases, portraits, and tables that line the hallway — living objects. “…Good… keep up the good work,” says Snatch, immediately vanishing a second later.
The half-burnt, living object wall rug shakes itself out, beating out the fire on itself and throwing off the last of the ash to the ground before resuming its duties of protecting the Master’s home. The castle is much more comfortable and pleasant to live in now that he came and fixed it for them, so they will do their best to make sure that his nights are the same as he has made theirs.
Better.
----------------------------------------
- [The Vampire Lord Inkume] -
“Everything is so quiet tonight,” ponders Inkume to himself, lowering his book as he suddenly realizes it. He’s sitting on his throne. His eyes gaze down the dark chamber toward its massive, undisturbed doors.
Now that the adventurers have come for him, he was expecting his brand new life of silence and peaceful solitude to have been shattered and destroyed. In his head, he was awaiting hundreds of pompously-mannered brats and punks to kick down his doors and challenge him to some fate-predestined battle. But, honestly, he hasn’t really seen much of anyone at all after that one fairy the other night. He’s been getting a lot of status reports of people donating their blood to his collection and their items to his treasury, but hasn’t actually encountered anyone despite his wandering all night throughout his castle's halls.
It’s just a quiet, peaceful evening.
— Apart from the extremely heavy panting that now suddenly comes from his side.
“Hello, Snatch,” says Inkume, leaning back on his throne as he resumes reading the borrowed book from the library. It’s actually very interesting to learn about all of these different monsters and old magics. In a way, it’s like reading a background lore book for a story series that one really liked. It puts a lot of the things one read and experienced into a new contextual depth. “How are you?” he asks, making space with his left arm for her by lifting his elbow off of the left armrest he had been leaning against and grabbing the book with both hands.
The ghost floats down, sitting on the freed armrest of the throne, ogling him in her usual manner with wide, obsessive eyes. “I am well every night that the… the Master is here,” she exhales in a confusingly quiet excitement.
“Have you seen any intruders?” asks Inkume, looking down at her as she tries to adjust her position to not fall off of the armrest she’s sitting on. “I was expecting more trouble than this.”
She tries lifting her legs up to cross them and begins tipping over. The ghost flails her arms, wobbling back and forth to try and stay upright on her precarious ledge. “None worth mentioning to you, Master.”
“No mysterious heroes in shining armor or, I don’t know, just Azalea’s brother?” he asks cautiously, and Snatch shakes her head, letting out a sharp yelp as she slides off of the edge of the throne and falls an inch. He reaches out with a hand and catches her. Grabbing her by the shoulder, Inkume pulls her back. “Careful.” Having nowhere better to put her, the Vampire Lord just leans her his way. The ghost’s awkward breathing becomes audibly louder and louder as she slides down the inside of the armrest and sits back upright on his leg, but this time with her head on his shoulder.
“Can I-” she wheezes. “— Can I stay here forever, Master?” asks the ghost.
“…Maybe just until we have some work to do,” replies Inkume, raising an eyebrow. He looks past his book for a second toward the large room. “Honestly, I’m expecting someone to show up or something to happen any second now,” explains the Vampire Lord, flipping a page. “It isn’t like this place to be so… peaceful.” He shakes his head, wondering about it.
It really isn’t like this new life to allow him five minutes of comfortable emptiness, now that he thinks about it.
----------------------------------------
- [Snatch] -
Snatch squirms against him, laying her legs over him on across the adjacent armrest as she dares her own bravery to push the boundaries of what she’s allowed to get away with. “It’s probably just a quiet night, Master,” she explains, not sharing with him the entire truth as she squishes the side of her face into his shoulder.
It’s not exactly a quiet night. In fact, it’s rather busy and wild out there. But he doesn’t need to be bothered with that, and, more importantly, her time with him doesn’t need to be interrupted by humans. It’s bad enough she has to share the Master with Fi-Fi and the others already.
The Vampire Lord looks at her and then shrugs, leaning back into his seat as he continues his studies of the dark and forbidden secrets of the world.
She got away with it.
Leaning against him, Snatch’s heavy breathing intensifies as she gets comfortable and looks at the book from the library he’s reading.
He’s very diligent, studying about the dark ritual to end the world before engaging in it. He’s an extremely clever and hardworking master. She can tell that he’s meticulous, not wanting to leave any stone unturned. Making the castle and its monsters strong and learning about the nature of all things wicked and dead is very wise before attracting the ire of all humanity when he tries to bring about the night that never ends.
The old master made that mistake. The old master was mean and — feeling brave enough to think it in the presence of her favorite — foolishly arrogant. But the new Master doesn’t make mistakes.
He’s perfect.
She just hopes that he can forgive her for her scheme tonight, but she did what she had to do. It took a little legwork, but now she has the Master to herself all night without any interruptions at all.
Snatch does her best not to melt into a puddle as she sits there on his lap, as that would ruin her reward for her great efforts. It would take her precious hours to reform herself into a shape that he likes.
Resting against him, the ghost glances out of the corner of her eyes at a covered mirror, standing at the end of the throne room by the door.
Snatch knows that there isn't much time left before her hopes are done for. She has to win the Master's affections now, before it's too late, before it gets here. Because then it will be too late for her to have a chance anymore against it.
— The thing in the mirrors.
Her fingers latch on to his shirt, holding it tightly.
----------------------------------------
- [Agnis, the Knight] -
Agnis’s metal boots plant down on the soil as she dismounts before the gates of the dark castle.
The knight in heavy, shining armor stares toward the fortress, looking as its insides rock with lights and explosions. The adventurers here are well underway with their incursion of the dungeon from the looks of things.
She was planning to get here during the daytime many hours ago. But she was stopped along the way by happenstance, as fate would have it. Fate often finds her in the strangest ways. The hill and mountain roads took much longer to traverse with her guest, but what else was she to do? She couldn't just leave him by himself in a place like this.
Agnis turns her head, looking down at the golden-haired boy who ran her down the entire way. “And you think your sister can still be saved?” asks the knight, looking at him as he clutches an old, rattling sword in a much firmer hand — too firm. He’s not holding it like a craftsman would a tool; instead, he’s clasped onto it as if he had fallen off of a cliff and were clinging to the last branch on the way down.
He looks at the ground for a little while before his cold blue eyes gaze back her way with a fire too hot for someone so young. “I don’t know,” explains Cvet, brother of a priestess of the Holy-Church that the wicked vampire has stolen. “But I have to try.”
“Sounds to me like you already did,” replies Agnis, pulling her silvered weapon out from the straps on the side of her anqa. The large bird shakes itself out lightly, the packs and belts climpering and jostling around. “But you weren’t strong enough,” she explains plainly.
“That’s…” Cvet averts his gaze.
Agnis looks at him. “Stay here, boy,” commands the knight, walking toward the large, arched gateway that leads in toward the long gardens ahead of the main castle entrance. “If I find her, I’ll bring her back to you as best I can.”
“No,” replies the young man from the village in a sharp tone. “It doesn’t matter if I’m strong enough or not,” he explains, walking after her and then past her as he quickens his pace. His frigid eyes lock toward her visor. “She’s my sister. I won’t just stand here.”
Without further consultation, the young man who has no business being here in her eyes walks on ahead toward a cluster of skeletons that begin to claw and climb out through the broken, iron bars of a destroyed crypt. He's not following rational logic; he's following his heart.
Agnis stares after him and then sighs, her shoulders slumping. “…Why do I always do this?” mutters the knight to herself, shaking her head.
Her soft spot for love of all kinds will be the death of her one day.