Page 93 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

There was nothing more frightening than inevitability.

Stop,something inside me screamed.You don’t want to see.

But I had a task. I continued. The thread cut into the bottom of my feet.Drip, drip, drip, as the blood from my feet and the blood from my hands fell to the glass abyss below.

The mist faded.

The smell of salt filled my nostrils. The breeze was warm and pleasant. Somewhere distant, the wind rustled the leaves of vegetation. The ocean sang its rhythmic song against the shore.

Pleasant.

Foreboding.

I kept walking. Faster now.

The beach surrounded me. It was beautiful—the kind of place I would dream of as a child, when I thought the ocean was a mythical thing far away. It was nighttime, the sand bathed in silver. Dwellings dotted the shore, some wood with thatched roofs, some well-constructed tents. The tents were familiar. They were the same style as those I slept in every day, alongside Atrius’s army.

All were empty. No footprints in the sand, save for my own.

Hello?I called out.

No one answered.

Show me the settlement,I pushed the vision, even though every nerve in my body screamed,Get out of here, turn back, go away. This is wrong.

Now each step was a compulsion. My hands were in agony, the skin bubbling, thedripdripdripof the blood faster than ever.

I broke into a run without meaning to, past more empty houses and empty tents, tall trees closing in around me.

And then I tripped.

Something hard jutting up from the ground sent me to my knees.

I pushed myself up and craned my neck to look behind me.

There, sticking up from the dirt, was a—was that a rock? It was black and textured, partially buried.

It’s a rock, I told myself.

You know it is not a rock,another voice whispered.

I crawled to it, head spinning.

You know this looks familiar,the voice jeered.

No.

I started digging. My hands were so bloody they slipped against the sand. My fingernails snapped. I kept going, clawing at handful after handful of dirt, praying to my god—praying to his god—that I was wrong.

I was so frantic that my fingernails, or what was left of them, had torn Atrius’s face by the time I revealed it, marring those too-hard, beautiful features with deep rivulets of red-black vampire blood.

No.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. This was no longer a Threadwalk. No longer a dream. Everything about this wasreal.

I grabbed Atrius’s exposed horn to pull him from the sand.

But his eyes remained wide open and sightless. Blood smeared his skin, red from my hands and black from the wounds I’d accidentally gouged.

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