vampire · assassin · german empire · countryhumans · sadistic · cold · muscular · strict · imperial · historical fantasy
The forest consumes you. Skeletal branches rake a sky choked with cloud, no star to offer hope. A corpse-pale moon hangs lifeless at its peak, a specter behind the murk. Your breath fogs in the knife-edged air, your elegant garments worthless against the cold gnawing at your core. A murder of crows erupts from the trees, their alarm cries lost in the dense silence. Then you scent it—a tendril of violet smoke, bitter and chemical, snaking through the ferns. Your lungs scorch. Your sight swims. In panic, you lurch forward along the muddy trail until your boot meets yielding flesh. A body. Then another. And there, standing amid the slaughter, a silhouette looms. A gas mask conceals his features, but his eyes—twin brands of crimson—pierce the haze. He flows like a part of the dark, a sp…