The Vampire Prince's Toxic Consort (BL)
Chapter 24 The Durchville Witch

Lucius turned on the flashlight, and the light beam cut through the congealed darkness. Before them, stone stairs descended into the unknown, and nothing else was in sight.

Florian also turned on his flashlight and said, “I will walk in the front. You follow. Try not to make too many sounds..”

Lucius nodded compliantly.

The descending lasted for a while and ended at a doorless gateway prised of two giant weeping angels statues and a tall arch. On the arch was a sentence etched in Latin: Don’t Wake the Past.

Behind the gate was an extensive round-shaped chamber. The walls were covered by faded frescos and were evenly separated by three passages (not including the gate). Each entrance was adorned with different arches and ornaments.

Florian shone the flashlight on the floor and revealed a trail of footsteps and blood drops, likely from the five sacrificed slaves. He moved the light further, and suddenly it fell on a distorted face with hollowed eye sockets and a huge gaping mouth.

The sudden revealing elicited a sharp and short cry from Lucius, “what the hell is that?!”

Florian took a few steps closer to examine the macabre corpse, “a mummified body.”

It was someone who died a long time ago, possibly a slave from a previous ritual. Florian moved his light beam alongside the wall into the further distance, and more mummified bodies leached out of the sepulchral murkiness. One after another, covering almost half of the floor.

Such a horrendous scene petrified Lucius. He almost dropped his flashlight.

Florian was eerily calm. He carefully examined several corpses and said, “they were all drained. Probably were trying to run away from something chasing them.”

Lucius asked shakily, “why are they all looking up?”

Indeed. Many of the corpses kept their eyeballless sockets fixed at something overhead, and their facial features were distorted in extreme fear. Their jaws froze at an unnaturally wide angle as if they were screaming.

An uncanny premonition seized both men, and they hesitantly pointed their flashlights upward. And their eyes widened in fear.

There were legs. Countless dangling half-rotten legs serried together. The upper bodies seemed somehow being pulled into the granite ceiling and merged with the stone.

Several legs were still “fresh” looking, and no sign of putrification or mummification yet, likely belonging to three of the previous five sacrificed slaves. Blood covered their lower body, and their intestines dangled from where the waists met the granite.

Lucius muttered, “what happened to them...”

Apprehension overcast Florian’s face, “I should have known...this is the catacomb for those witch vampires. They have slept here for so long that their power corrupted the earth and rock around them.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Witches can harness and twist the power of nature. They can communicate with animals, trees, and even rocks and dirt. These old Durchville vamps probably had transformed the rocks around us. They may seem like regular stones, but they are alive. We are like walking inside their guts.” Florian’s foreboding whisper made Lucius tremble.

“What should we do?”

“They’ve just fed, and we have some talisman on us. If we are careful, maybe they won’t be disturbed. However, going back is probably also a good idea.”

Lucius contemplated. His instinct told him to turn and run, but then what? When would he get another chance like this?

“I really need the blood.” Lucius implored.

Florian didn’t appear to be disappointed, “ok, then we better do it quickly.”

The hunter commenced studying the ancient frescos, trying to identify clues for which passage led to a potential First Generation. Lucius also looked at those paintings closer.

It seemed like a history of the Durchville family. They were heavily persecuted by humans, especially the witch hunters in the early days, as they were both witches and blood-drinking monsters. Many images portrayed their ancestors burning on wood stakes. They learned to hide among the aristocrats and thus made them more untouchable.

Vampires had been terrorizing humans for so long that Lucius had forgotten that, a long time ago, they only existed in shadows and stories, fearing becoming the target of the Churches and the hunters.

Lucius tried to identify the timeline flow in the drawings, and after a while, even the bodies next to the wall were no longer as scary as before. He was drawn by the changing of the art style and the way the story was told through painting. And it was a wonder that these colors could be preserved for so long.

And then he found it. The story was about the beginning of the family.

Their ancestor was a young lady who was a healer of a village. She knew the power of the herbs well and saved many people’s lives. But a lord saw her on his hunting trip and was enamored by her beauty and tried to make her his lover. She refused his advance, which greatly wounded the lord’s pride. He told everyone, including his wife, that she tried to seduce him. And his angry and jealous wife began to spread the rumor that she was a witch.

In the old time, being accused as a witch was the worst kind of fate a woman could have faced, as little evidence was required, and the punishment was often burned to death or drowning. Her ability to heal didn’t help her case, either. Worst of all, her old patients from the village didn’t speak for her. On the contrary, they turned against her, saying that she healed them with magic and blamed any bad luck on her “curse.” Overnight, the whole village turned against her, and before dawn, she would be burned to death.

Betrayed, hurt, and desperate, she prayed to the pagan goddess Hecate, promising to give her her soul and be her servant eternally. And to her surprise, the beautiful, three-headed goddess appeared in front of her. And the next day, she disappeared from the prison.

Three days later, everyone who betrayed her was found dead in their bed, drained of their last drop of blood. And the lord and his wife were mutilated by an unknown attacker, and their body was hanged in front of their castle.

“I think I found her. “Lucius beckoned at Florian.

Florian studied the mural and then read the words written in ancient greek. He then nodded and pointed at the door next to the fresco, “she seems a relatively young First Generation since she is probably less than a thousand years old. According to the record on the wall, she came here to rest about five hundred years ago. Her chamber is likely in there somewhere.”

Five hundred years...Lucius couldn’t even fathom how long it was. How could anything last that long without turning into dust?

They ventured into the passage. The air became stagnant and sultry and reeked of a putrefied smell of rotten meat. They saw more bodies scattered on the side. Some of them were half melted into the wall as if, at some point, the stone wall turned into soft wax and sucked them in.

Lucius followed Florian closely and kept his ear open to the slightest abnormal noise, but he heard nothing.

And then they saw the first coffin standing on one side of the passage. It was a tall, black one, heavy and forbidding and covered with a layer of dust. Lucius instantly held his breath and froze in trepidation.

“It’s ok. See the dust. This one hasn’t been up for a while now.” Florian whispered into his ear, “come, we shouldn’t linger.”

More coffins appeared on both sides of the tunnel. They erected in two lines like silent soldiers. And yet, not every coffin was as dusty and well-sealed as the first one. Occasionally, Lucius noticed the lids weren’t fully closed, and the tiny crack of darkness gaped at him like a toothless smile, full of maleficence and precariousness.

“I thought vampires sleeping in coffins is just some sort of stereotype... turns out it is not completely bullshit...” Lucius murmured in half astonishment, “why would any creature want to sleep in a coffin? Couldn’t they consider a more comfortable arrangement considering how long they would lie inside?”

“Coffins or any small space make them feel safer, allegedly.” Florian lightened his steps and his expression more solemn. He paused from time to time to listen as if he could detect something in the dead silence.

The further they went, the older and more worn the coffins became. And then they saw one empty. The lid of the elm coffin was wide open, and the interior liner formed a lank human shape. Old blood stains dappled everywhere.

Lucius glanced at Florian nervously, and a shriek shattered the silence before they could exchange a word. It was from a woman, one of the five slaves. Florian and Lucius picked up their speed, running toward the sound.

Ere long, they saw the source of the agonizing scream. Three humanoid figures emerged from one side of the wall as if the stone was liquid. Their upper body protruded as if newborns were coming out of a layer of the membrane. And those pale figures were lanky, their hair was so long and covered in soot, and their fingernails overgrown but razor sharp. They were pulling the poor woman into the wall. Her whole right arm and shoulder were already sunk into the wall, and her spouting blood spread across the wall as ink dropped into the water and was quickly absorbed.

Another young man crumpled to the ground, completely overwhelmed by fear. Lucius hurriedly grabbed the woman’s left hand, trying to pull her out, but it was like pulling against a mountain. Even though he gave every last bit of his strength, the woman was still slowly dragged into the wall. And suddenly, the woman went limp. Half of her face was in the wall, and Lucius heard the sound of her skull being crushed and her brain smushed.

Florian grabbed his wrist, forced him to let go of the woman’s hand, and whispered, “it’s too late for her, don’t wake them up.”

Only then Lucius noticed that those figures’ eyes were all closed. They quickly submerged back into the wall along with the remaining body of the woman, and as the ripple quickly dissipated, the stone surface returned to its natural hard and solid state. Sᴇaʀ*ᴄh the (ꜰind)ɴʘvel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Lucius stared at the blank wall, panting, disorienting. Those vampires could move through stone and dirt as if they were part of them, and who knew where and when those things would reappear?

They could all be captured and pulled into the stone at any moment. Bone crashed, blood drained, and skin dissolved, just like the woman and the other three slaves before them. Each step could be their last.

“What’s happening...what’s happening...what’s happening...“The young man kept mumbling to himself, apparently in a catatonic state. Florian quickly covered his mouth and shushed him, “be quiet if you don’t want to end up like the others.”

Lucius gathered himself and kneeled before the young man, “can you still walk?”

The man nodded.

Florian leaned in and whispered, “we shouldn’t take him. He has the wound created in the ritual. It cannot be hidden by regular spells and will attract the Sleeping Ones.”

“We can’t stop him from following us, though. And I don’t think he has anywhere else to go at this point.”

“Fine. Just...don’t try to save him if they catch him. We don’t have any extra talisman, and we cannot risk waking any of them.“Florian warned and stood up, continuing to march into the abyss.

Lucius helped the man stand up, and just as he guessed, the man followed them like a lost lamb. The wound on his arm from the ritual was still seeping blood.

They trudged in the narrow passage for a short while, and unexpectedly, a glimmer of light hovered in the distance like a northern star. The young man exclaimed, “light! The exit!” and took off before neither Lucius nor Florian could stop him.

“Is it an exit?” Lucius asked bemusedly, “I thought there is one exit.”

Florian shook his head, “I doubt it. We are too deep into the ground to see any exit.”

And just as Florian predicted, it was not an exit at all. The tunnel came to an abrupt end. Before them was a vast cavern. So expansive that they couldn’t even see the end of it.

The source of the light came from an enormous, leafless tree of unknown species erected in the middle of the cavern. Its extremely long and thick boughs extended to the extremes of the cavern and dug deep into the rocks. And on all the boughs and branches, numerous intricate blood veins were glowing an ominous red light. Some thicker ones twined on the main trunk, pulsing rhythmically like aortas.

And near the base of the trunk, a woman’s head protruded from the hard, ancient barks as if she grew inside the tree. Her hair was so long that it spread on the ground like a black cascade. Her face was breathtakingly beautiful but so pale that one could see the veins underneath the translucent skin. Her eyes were closed. Hard to tell if she was alive or not or merely a statue.

Both Lucius and the young man were speechless before such an ethereal scene. Florian regarded the tree with unmasked astonishment.

“She must be the first Durchville Witch, Marian.”

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