The Awakening

I woke to a velvet darkness so thick it felt alive. Too dense to be empty. My mouth tasted like rust and pennies.

Coppery. Acrid. Wrong.

Across the room, a single lamp guttered in the far corner. It danced reluctantly, casting shadows that flickered across the stone like broken things trying to escape their confines.

The air was suffocating. Not just thick but rank. Stale with age and saturated with something ancient, the scent of time and decay seeped deep into the stone, a cloying stench of something organic. The kind of decay that burrows into your bones.

My head throbbed, and a dull, rhythmic throb accompanied every beat of my heart.

I shifted, tried to lift my arm. Nothing. It wouldn't obey. My legs, the same. The effort to rise summoned a flare of white hot agony that scalded every nerve ending.

I choked the instinctive cry down, trying to swallow. Pain knifed through my throat like barbed wire. Raw. Torn and burned like I screamed for hours.

My lips peeled apart with a sticky sound, wet with something that still bled or had just barely clotted.

They felt bruised. Kissed hard or chewed through. My tongue felt thick and foreign. The metallic, bitter taste clung to everything.

Then I tasted blood.

Coppery. Warm. Unmistakable.

Mine.

No.

Not mine.

The thought cut clean through the haze like a blade.

With it came a splintered memory. Disjointed. Half-formed.

Fast, sharp and uninvited.

Vivid. A blur of movement. A glint of silver. An arc of light. Then- spray. Deep red. Arterial. Not blood from a cut.

Then nothing.

My stomach lurched. Nausea twisted low in my gut. I tried to sit up. Muscles shrieked. My ribs felt bruised. My spine a column of pain. My limbs didn't just ache. They remembered something.

This wasn't a hangover. Or the dull afterburn of a wild night. This agony was raw, fresh and deep.

I had been dragged.

A memory of hands. Impersonal and practiced. Not kind. Not cruel. Efficient. I hadn't been violated.

I had been handled.

Repositioned. Washed. Dressed. Arranged.

Like a doll. A prop.

Made presentable for what I didn't know.

Every trace of my party makeup, gone. My fingernails, once glitter-tipped, were bare and scrubbed raw.

I wore an unfamiliar thin shift and a rough overshirt that didn't belong to me. The fabric was coarse, its weave crude, and the seams were unusual.

I didn't belong in this room. Hell, I wasn't sure I even belonged in this body. It felt more like a hollowed shell than a home.

A soft shuffle and scuff of footfall drew my attention. My gaze jerked toward the doorway.

A figure appeared framed by the flickering light.

And then I saw her.

A figure, tall and still. The way she stood, regal and motionless.

Female. I thought she was female, or something shaped like one. Her hair was as coal black, arranged and gathered into coils. Her eyes were equally black, resembling the bottomless pools in an ancient lake—pitch dark and unreadable.

She stared at me, her gaze not the least curious but evaluative, as if I were a specimen.

"I need to speak with whoever's in charge of this damned dung-" My voice cracked. The taste of blood was back, hotter now.

The woman's lips drew into a thin line. "You arrive bathed in my master's blood." Her voice was distant, precise, and unyielding. Like cathedral bells. "And you dare make demands?"

My heart raced, bile creeping up my throat. "I know nothing of your owner. And certainly, didn't come here willingly," I rasped, wobbling as I attempted to stand. "I was taken."

A flicker of expression. Amusement? Pity? Tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Then you're more fortunate than most."

I pulled the shift tighter around me, ignoring the frisson of pain that shot up my arms as I kept trying to move.

"There was a house. That man. The one with eyes like flame. He-" I choked.

The memory tore through me.

His teeth. Gleaming. Perfect. Pressed against the soft curve of my neck. The slow way he inhaled. Savouring it in a ritualistic way.

I relived the powerlessness as he grazed the softest parts of my neck. The way he leaned in, a promise of pain wrapped in silk.

A shudder coursed through me. I remembered the pressure, the precision. The reverence in the way he went to bite.

And then-

A second presence. A force of light. Violence wrapped in shadow and sanctity.

It didn't just kill him. It unmade him.

Judgment made flesh. Raw and unfettered righteous rage. My knees gave out. I sank, the sound tore from me somewhere deeper than grief.

She watched. Her expression shifted, only slightly, but enough—a crease in her armour.

"So, you remember more than most," she said. Her voice frost now. Quiet. Final.

"I demand to know what is happening." My voice shook with fear and fury, the action leaving me so weak that the stone floor tilted beneath me. "Now, or I will leave."

She almost smiled. "You're welcome to try. Though I doubt you'll make it far."

The light shifted behind her. Her shadow lengthened, and for the first time, I saw her. Severe cheekbones, translucent skin so pale as though it had never seen the light of day. Her jaw was sharp. "What is your name, child?" she asked, soft steel under the velvet voice.

I bristled at the word child, refusing to dignify her with an answer.

She tilted her head, studying me. "Very well. I will call you Prudence, a virtue you sorely lack but may yet lack. Perhaps the name will instruct you."

She turned away. Dismissive. Like closing a book mid-sentence.

I blinked and scoffed, unable to control my thoughts. "What a perfectly stupid name."

"And yet...oddly fitting." She turned to leave, the heavy door groaned eerily as it shut behind her.

The clang of a gate closing behind her felt like a stone rolling across my tomb.

That was the moment everything changed.

Not when I woke bleeding, or when the shadows moved.

Not even when I tasted someone else's death in my mouth.

This was just the beginning, the last breath of life as I'd known it.

Before the bastard marked me and fed me to his kin.