Page 1 of Fallen Nocturne

Part I

Once Upon a Broken Oath

Prologue Sebastian

The tourists are thinning out.

Only a handful remain to wander the grounds in the last light of evening. Near the eastern gate, a couple reads one of the plaques in hushed voices while a woman turns through a guidebook from a nearby bench. Beneath the gargoyles, another tourist raises his phone and shifts from side to side, searching for an angle that might finally produce a photograph worth keeping.

None of them know what this place is. None of them know what I am.

Morsvyenn rises around me in its ruin. The sky above shifts from copper to deep violet as the last of the sun drops past the hills, visible through what remains of the roofless great hall. Velvet ropes cordon off the remaining walls. Plaques in three languages offer the humans a history that is almost entirely wrong. I stopped to read one on my way in. The errors were impressive in their confidence.

A gift shop sits at the base of the eastern tower. I passed it earlier and looked through the window. Painted figurines with exaggerated fangs. Mugs printed with the castle in garish purple ink. A snow globe with a miniature replica of this fortress inside, shaken to produce a small blizzard over battlements that bear almost no resemblance to the real thing.

Vlad built that tower.

Forty years he spent on it, hauling stones himself when the builders could not meet his standards. I used to watch him from the courtyard at night, his dark hair tied back, wearing that particular expression he reserved for work that mattered. The same look he brought to his library, to his wars, to everything he decided deserved his full attention.

The humans have turned it into a ticket booth. They file through in lines during the day and photograph themselves in front of what remains. Vlad once told me humans are stupid. I disagreed with him then.

I have since revised my position.

The courtyard opens ahead of me. Weeds press through the cracks in the stone and the fountain at the center has been dry for centuries. This is where Han hosted his musicians after the kingdom was ours. He brought them from every corner of the known world, lured them with silver and wine and the promise of an audience who would never tire of listening. Strings and drums and flutes carved from bone. On clear nights the sound carried through the valley and even the villages below would pause to hear it.

Han had a gift for finding beautiful things. He also had a gift for losing interest in them. But music held him longer than most pleasures did.

My gardens are gone entirely. I grew them along the western wall where the afternoon light was warmest. It took me decades to coax the soil into yielding anything. The climate here is unkind to the plants I knew from home. None of that effort remains. Not a root. Not a single green thing.

Home. I have not thought of that word in a very long time.

The kingdom came later. Before Morsvyenn, before the glory and the gardens and the feasts in this great hall, there was Lilith. There was only ever Lilith.

Five of us.

Five cursed men pulled from our lives and drowned in a pool of blood and dark magic. She chose each of us for a reason. Arescaine, Ruth and Vlad for their strength as warriors. Han for his beauty. Me for my mind.

She wanted a scholar. Someone who could study the old texts and unlock the secrets she could not reach alone. She baited me with a question I could not resist.

Is there life after death?

I wanted to know. That was enough for her. She killed me in a ritual and brought me back as something else. The answer to my question turned out to be yes, though not in any form I would have chosen.

We served her. We killed for her. We conquered territories, broke kingdoms and filled her coffers with gold and blood. She rewarded obedience with pain and disobedience with worse. There was no pleasing the woman.

During those years of servitude I found Gwyn.

What she was to me cannot be contained in a few sentences. Gwyn was human, brave and bright, with red hair that caught the light like flame and freckles scattered across her skin like stars. Her beauty was undeniable, but it was her curiosity and quiet courage that held me.

She could read and write better than most nobility because I taught her myself.

Gwyn loved me. I know that with a certainty that will outlast everything else I have ever known.

Vlad killed her on Lilith’s order. A mercy, for Ruthven would have done worse to my lover. I tasted human blood for the last time while holding Gwyn after she died. The hunger has repulsed me ever since.

I do not feed on humans anymore.

We sealed Lilith the moment Vlad’s loyalty swayed. Arescaine designed the binding. He is the strategist among us, the one who sees the full board when the rest of us are staring at individual pieces. He chose a night when Ruth was away. I did not understand the decision at the time. Ruth could fight and we needed every advantage we could muster. But Arescaine loved his blood brother more than anything. He would not risk Ruth facing the fallout if we failed.