Remorse
The silence of the ducal tower whispered an insult to the storm raging inside Ash’s skull. In the sitting room bathed in an almost unreal lunar glow, he paced the floor, his leather boots beating a dull rhythm against the dark oak floorboards. A caged beast, prisoner of a luxury that had lost all its flavor.
The moon of Koldur, suspended like a frozen pearl in the black velvet of the night, cast elongated shadows that seemed to mock him. He didn’t see it. His eyes, usually so piercing, were clouded by the debris of his own guilt.
“Imunë, listen to me, I’m sorry, I acted to...” he murmured, his voice nothing but a hoarse crack in the emptiness of the room.
He stopped dead, his face turned toward a bookcase whose titles he no longer read. No. He had acted out of pure selfishness. He knew it. Imunë knew it. He searched for another phrasing, an arrangement of words that could, by some miracle, seal the gaping breach he had torn open in the young woman’s heart.
“I will give you everything,” he muttered to himself, addressing the shadow of a chair where she liked to sit. “And I will do whatever it takes to protect you.”
He shook his head, a bitter laugh escaping him. Pathetic. You do not build a sanctuary on a foundation of lies, and he had just been handed the most glaring proof of it. Ever since she had crossed the threshold of this tower to “get some fresh air,” the air itself seemed to have left his lungs. Every minute of her absence became a refined torture, a constant reminder that the aroma of vanilla and wet earth that obsessed him no longer inhabited these walls.
He resumed his pacing, hands clasped behind his back, the muscles in his shoulders tense enough to tear his fine silk shirt. He was already imagining her return. He pictured her walking in, her gaze still cold, that polar distance she had placed between them since their last conversation. He approached the window, pressing his palms flat against the cold stone sill. His nails scratched against the slate.
He lost himself in the contemplation of the snow-capped peaks in the distance, where the path plunged into the depths of the Koldur forest. He had ruined everything. Yes, he had orchestrated their capture in Ouroboros. And yes, he was also the instigator of the ambush that had led to Lyra’s death. Yes, he had initially thought he saw in Imunë an opportunity to avenge his sister, to satiate his own bitterness. He had clung to that, he had deluded himself into believing she was nothing more than the instrument of his dark designs.
Never had he been so wrong in his life.
His incredibly long life.
And now, he had to deal with the pain he had inflicted upon her, and his own suffering that awakened in a perfect echo of hers. The frost licking the windowpane seemed to want to creep right under his skin. Ash closed his eyes, but the darkness offered him no reprieve. Instead, Elysia’s face emerged from the shadows of his memory.
He imagined her there, standing in the corner of the room, watching him with those doe eyes she kept even when facing wolves. She would have hated the man he had become tonight. She, who cherished the light, would have abhorred this darkness he had methodically injected into Imunë’s life.
Is this your justice, my brother? the wind seemed to whisper against the stone. To destroy an innocent soul to soothe the ashes of another? You don’t know me at all.
He struck the windowsill with the flat of his hand, a dull thud that made the glass vibrate. He had convinced himself that Imunë’s sacrifice represented a mathematical necessity, a bloody equation where her pain would buy the peace of the dead. But the weight of his selfishness was now crushing him. Lyra was dead because of him, and even if the fate of that human mattered little to him, he owed it to the one who had stolen his heart to honor her memory: Imunë was living in the wake of a massacre he himself had drawn up.
For the first time in several millennia, the great vampire of Ancient Greece, the infallible predator, felt out of his depth. He, who had roamed the world, crossed centuries, and chained conquests together, was incapable of solving the enigma of a woman’s forgiveness. Every scenario he devised in his mind shattered against the wall of reality: how do you beg for trust when you were the one holding the knife?
He resolved to speak with her, to fall to his knees if necessary. But the contempt he had read in her eyes before she walked out was a barrier more insurmountable than any glacier. He was afraid. A visceral, human fear twisting his guts: what if she never came back? What if, out in that forest, she decided that the winter of Koldur was gentler than the deceptive warmth of his arms?
“By hell, let her hate me if she wants to, but let her come back to me!”
His voice, scathing, was instantly carried away by the icy biting wind rushing through the open window, lost in the sterile immensity of the steppe. Ash struck the stone ledge one last time, no longer out of despair, but with the fury of a man who refuses defeat. He had to change. He had to strip off his ancient conqueror’s arrogance to learn the language of redemption. He would hunt her down if he had to, he would crawl if he had to, but he would not let her fade into the frost like an illusion.
He spun around with a sharp movement, his velvet cloak sweeping the floor, his eyes burning with this newfound resolve. He was going to go out, find her beneath the black pines, and force destiny’s hand once again.
The door leaf groaned, letting Sandro in, cutting off his momentum with sovereign brutality.
The vampire froze. His lifelong servant’s attitude did not sit well with him; there was an unusual heaviness in his posture, a slumping of the shoulders that clashed with his usual discipline. Sandro wouldn’t look him in the eye. His blood-red eyes remained fixed on the oak flagstones, his expression darker than a stormy night.
“Sir,” he said softly, in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of a tomb.
Ash stopped dead in the middle of the room. A mute alarm rang through his veins. His first thought, blinding and aggressive, flew to his enemies.
“Yes? What is going on?” Ash articulated, his voice turning razor-sharp. “A new offensive? A raid?”
Sandro finally looked up. What Ash read on his face hit him harder than a stake straight to the chest. It wasn’t the nervousness of combat, but the devastation of failure.
“Sir...” Sandro began, hesitating, searching for words that did not exist to soften the blade he was about to twist. “It concerns Miss Imunë.”
At that name, Ash felt his insides twist in a violent spasm. Had he still possessed a living heart of flesh and blood, it would have raced to the point of bursting, hammering against his ribs with the force of a battering ram. The cold in the room suddenly seemed trivial compared to the ice gripping his very being.
“Sir, I do not know how to tell you this, but... she has disappeared.”
The world tilted. Ash didn’t blink, but a sensation of immense cold, an age-old shiver, spread through every cell of his already dead body. The silence that followed was more terrifying than a scream.
“What do you mean?” Ash finally managed to articulate, his voice nothing more than a cavernous breath. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
He closed the distance to Sandro, his predator’s aura radiating a static electricity that made the air crackle. Sandro did not shy away, locking his gaze with a solemn gravity.
“Nowhere to be found, sir. Roxanne tracked her footprints in the fresh snow. But the trail abruptly ends at the edge of the forest, right where the path widens toward the plains. And from what she could read in the snow... she was abducted.”
The disbelief that had been boiling inside Ash just seconds earlier gave way to an icy fury. That word—abducted—rang in his mind like a death knell.
“Abducted? By whom?” he spat, his features warped by a mixture of rage and an anxiety that crushed his lungs.
Mentally, he reviewed the list of his enemies. The vampires had retreated, licking their wounds after the failure of their last assault. Ymir, that old snake, had retreated to his lair, undoubtedly to prepare his next strike with the patience of the damned. The Council had been severed, but the void it left behind concealed a nest of vipers.
Without waiting for an answer, Ash pushed past Sandro with a sharp stride, nearly knocking him over in his haste. He was consumed, devoured by the need to act, for blood and for answers.
“Where is Hakon? We need to launch a search party immediately!” he thundered, plunging down the stairs.
“Sir, the sun will be up soon!” Sandro warned, matching his pace, looking particularly alarmed.
Ash didn’t slow down. His boots hammered against the stone slabs in a frantic race toward the command room.
“Then have Hakon send the humans! There must be patrols capable of tracking in the daylight, aren’t there? Do we have any idea of a direction?”
“Sir, I beg you, do not make any hasty decisions,” Sandro tried again, his hand resting briefly on his master’s shoulder to temper him.
Ash stopped dead and pivoted, his scarlet red eyes burning with a deranged gleam.
“I cannot abandon her, Sandro! Especially not after our... last conversation! I can’t...”
His voice wavered slightly, but Ash was already walking again. They finally emerged into the main hall, a vast vaulted room where the darkness fought against the dying embers in the hearth. Hakon was already there, his massive silhouette leaning over a heavy table displaying a complex map of the Koldur tunnels and surrounding area. Roxanne stood by his side, her red eyes sparkling like two wicked rubies in the pallor of her porcelain face.
“I shouldn’t have left her alone...” she was murmuring to Hakon, her voice heavy with bitter regret, at the exact moment Ash blew into the room like a storm.
Silence fell brutally over the assembly. Every gaze converged on him, his silhouette carved out against the shadow of the vestibule, like a god of war whose world had just collapsed.
Ash sliced through the room, approaching Roxanne with an intensity that made the air tremble. His features remained carved in marble, but his eyes burned with a fire that demanded answers.
“Did you realize she was missing long ago?” he asked, his voice strangely calm, carrying a coldness far more fearsome than his outbursts of rage.
Roxanne held his gaze, though her porcelain face looked ready to shatter.
“I saw that she wasn’t coming back,” she explained in a flat, almost lifeless voice. “So I went looking for her. Just as I stepped outside, Hades was coming back from the edge of the woods. His behavior was unnatural, frantic. It took me a while to calm him down, but he led me back to where he came from.”
Ash clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white. His gaze pivoted to Hakon, who had not taken his eyes off the map. The vampire furrowed his brows, his face marked by an unusual gravity.
“I went there immediately, the moment Roxanne alerted me,” Hakon stated. “I just got back. The signs are unmistakable: she must have been knocked out or fainted from shock. I found drag marks of a body pulled across the ground, between the trees, before they were replaced by hoofprints. At least three mounts, judging by how deep they sank into the earth.”
Ash pulled himself up to his full height, his aura of command wrapping around him like armor.
“We must leave. Immediately.”
“The sun is rising, Cassian,” Hakon replied in a tone that brokered no argument.
“So what?” roared Ash, whose patience had just completely burned away.
“I will not risk the lives of our people,” Hakon cut in, wielding an authority equal to his own. “If we are to launch a proper hunt, we wait until nightfall.”
Ash wanted to protest, his face warped by fierce displeasure, ready to bypass protocol and charge out alone into the dawning light, but Hakon gave him no time to break the silence.
“That is not all.”
An unpleasant shiver replaced Ash’s anger.
“What now?”
“The forest was empty,” Hakon continued in a muffled voice. “Between our victory against the Council and the evacuation of the wounded, the area was secured. All the men are gone; the vampires fell back. I personally checked the perimeters: there were no traces of strangers prowling around our walls.”
Ash narrowed his eyes, suspicion beginning to sprout in his mind like a poison.
“What exactly are you insinuating?”
Hakon finally straightened up and planted his gaze into that of his sovereign. It was a deep red gaze, nourished by centuries of battles and blood, one that never blinked in the face of the truth, however brutal it might be.
“I mean that Imunë was not captured by an enemy from the outside, Ash. She was taken by someone from within the Citadel. Someone who knew our patrol routes. Someone who was already among us.”
He paused briefly.
“A traitor.”
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCENTS
OLFACTORY FILE N°109: DRIED MEAT
Technical Designation: Fibres-Nomades | Category: Survival / Carnal
“A piece of dried meat is not merely a makeshift food ration. It is a concentrate of brute strength, an absolute necessity for preserving the faint glow of mortal bodies. Long before men built their glass cages, it was the scent of sustenance, and it will be that of salvation.”
SENSORY PROFILE
TOP NOTE (The Instinctive): An acrid and primal salinity. It is the heavy salt that assaults the taste buds, a dry bite that saturates the air and awakens the animal, initially masking the warmth of life beneath a sterile crust.
HEART NOTE (The Preserved): An effluvium of cold smoke and congealed blood. It is the smell of muscle fiber deprived of its water, a perfume of desiccated iron and wild venison where life was stopped dead so as not to rot.
BASE NOTE (The Essence): A note of ancient dust and suspended death. It is not a mere emanation, but a tenacious sensation of emptiness, the moment protein turns to stone beneath the unforgiving sun of the wastelands.
TACTICAL ANALYSIS
Utilizing the earth as a conduit of truth:
The Ashen Rationing: In survivor camps, the smells of dehydration dominate. I must filter out the salt and the soot of makeshift smokehouses to isolate the pulse of a still-warm heart lurking behind the barricades.
The Wake of the Dead Hunt: The dust desert attempts to conceal the human cattle beneath an armor of salt and starvation. Tracking becomes deceptive there, as the prey’s wake blends with the shreds of dried flesh they carry to cheat their own agony.
✍️ TRACKING NOTE
“I have known eras when fresh meat flowed freely on every street corner, long before the great conflagration came and scorched it all. Today, it smells of salt and smoke, a stillborn perfume attempting to defy my own eternity. In the wastelands, this scent is a decoy that assaults my millennial senses. I prefer the purity of a beating vein, where the fluid still runs free. For here, beneath the ashen sky, survival smells of dust, and I am nothing but a starving predator waiting for blood to finally rehydrate this desiccated world.”
