Blood rituals, the great banquet

Quetzal's words about the forced sacrifices and the dark tribute paid by the Spanish conquistadors to "Wandering Stars" echoed in Dracula's mind with the force of a forgotten echo. The Mayan leader spoke of a distant past, of horrors committed in the name of alien gods and the ambition of empires. For Merlin and Aria, it was a horrifying revelation about the depth of cosmic corruption in Earth's history. For Dracula, it was something more. It was a personal memory, slowly emerging from the mists of the centuries.

Spilled blood... tribute... the Dzules...

His mind drifted back to the opulent but bloody fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. He and his ilk had survived, even thrived, thanks to the relentless carnage of the Old Continent: religious wars, dynastic struggles, the Black Death and its aftermath... an almost inexhaustible feast for the children of the night. Europe, he thought with a cold detachment, a slaughterhouse of ambitions. The blood of princes, soldiers, and peasants fertilized the fields, and we reaped in the shadows. A brutal survival, yes, but predictable.

But then his memory focused with particular sharpness on a period of unusual prosperity for his own finances and... livelihood. The rise of the Spanish Empire. He recalled his surprisingly lucrative business dealings with the courts of Ferdinand and Isabella, and later, with Charles V. He, the Prince of Wallachia, now an enigmatic merchant of the shadows, supplied them with rare spices from the East, among them the prized pepper, whose value rivaled that of precious metals.

And Spain paid generously, Dracula remembered. Gold. Silver. Jewels of a luster and purity that spoke of a New World brimming with riches. And sometimes... sometimes there were 'special gifts' for such a valued partner.

The memory grew more vivid: the discreet emissaries from the Spanish court, the nightly deliveries to their residences in Seville or Toledo. Not just chests of coins, but casks as well. Sealed casks containing a dark, thick liquid. Blood. Fresh. Abundant. Of exceptional, almost intoxicating quality.

"Donations from pious convents for our distinguished guests," they had once told him with servile smiles. "Surpluses from field hospitals after glorious victories in the Indies."

Dracula, in his arrogance as the apex predator, had never questioned the provenance much. Why would he? Blood was a rare and valuable commodity. Whether the devout Spaniards were so generous, or so hypocritical, he wasn't going to inquire. It was just another benefit of dealing with an empire at the height of its power.

But now, Quetzal's words – "the lifeblood snatched in forced rituals," "to feed the conquistadors' star masters," "the blood that stained our pyramids" – struck Dracula with the force of a blasphemous revelation.

That blood... The realization pierced him, cold and sharp as the ice of the abyss. The 'exceptional quality'... the 'abundance'... These weren't surpluses! These weren't pious donations! This was the blood of this continent. The lifeblood of indigenous peoples, spilled in forced rituals to satiate the alien gods the Spaniards secretly served, or to fulfill the quotas of their dark pacts.

And he, Dracula, the Prince of the Night, the scourge of empires, had directly benefited from that cosmic and colonial atrocity. The gold and silver that had filled his coffers were tainted with it. The blood that had strengthened his lineage during that period came from the suffering and sacrifice of a people enslaved not just by men, but by horrors from beyond the stars.

He felt no guilt in the human sense. Guilt was an emotion he had long since discarded. But he felt a deep, icy irony. A kind of cosmic nausea. He, who had thought of himself as a master of predation, had been, unwittingly, a secondhand consumer in a far vaster and more monstrous food chain. A scavenger, almost, feeding on the leftovers of the feasts of alien entities and the brutality of a human empire.

The revelation didn't humanize him, but it did add a layer of bitter understanding to his already cynical view of the universe. The hypocrisy of the Spanish conquistadors, who massacred in the name of their god while serving others far darker, now seemed almost trivial compared to the scale of the cosmic exploitation Quetzal had revealed.

He looked at the Mayan leader, no longer just as a potential pawn or exotic sorcerer, but as the survivor of a horror that now, in some twisted way, implicated him as well. Dracula's distrust didn't disappear—it never did completely—but it was tempered by a new and complex thread of understanding. The war they were waging now was no longer It was only for the survival of the Earth; it was, for Dracula, a confrontation with the deepest, darkest layers of a story in which he had unwittingly played a small but ignominious part.