Timeless warrior

Chapter1

Thorne

As a vampire, I, Thorne Dupont of the Dupont family, am tasked with remembering what humans forget. My story begins in the fifteen hundreds, though I was unaware of its weight at the time. I was born into power, fear, and whispered horror. The Dupont estate rose beyond Paris, its iron gates like blackened ribs against the gray winter sky. People crossed themselves in the taverns and churches alike at the mention of our name. As a boy, I thought it was because of wealth. I would later learn it was because of hunger.

I was born in 1498, during a winter so cruel it froze the Seine. My mother, pale and solemn, said I never cried as an infant, only stared—wide-eyed, silent—as if watching a world I did not belong to. My father, Lucien Dupont, was elegance and cruelty carved into flesh. He never raised a hand to me. His gaze alone could make men bow, plead, and tremble. From him, I inherited height, dark hair, and a curse that would keep me forever young while centuries rotted around me.

Candlelight educated me. Latin, philosophy, swordsmanship, the art of deception—all taught as naturally as breathing. The church praised our devotion. The crown hailed our loyalty. Yet, in the dead of night, the halls echoed with silent screams that never reached the world beyond. I was forbidden to wander the lower corridors. Curiosity, however, is the greatest sin of youth. One night, no older than twelve, I followed the soft, tortured weeping and found a man chained to the cold stone, eyes hollow, pulse fluttering beneath pale skin. My father found me there. He did not scold. He merely said, “You will understand soon.”

That understanding came on my seventeenth birthday. The night I died.

The ritual was ancient—older than France itself. Beneath the estate, in a chamber carved with symbols that pulsed red as if alive, my family gathered. My mother pressed a trembling kiss to my forehead. Tears slid down her pale cheeks, for she had endured this death centuries before. My father slit his palm and pressed it to my lips. The blood was fire. It burned through veins, stole my breath, stopped my heart. I screamed—then nothing.

When I awoke, the world was sharper, louder, more intoxicating. Every heartbeat in the estate thundered in my ears. The scent of blood danced in the air. I was no longer Thorne the boy—I was Thorne the eternal. My father smiled at last, and I understood fear, power, and hunger all at once.

The early years of immortality were drenched in violence. Europe bled and screamed; war flared like open wounds. Vampires fed freely amid chaos. I walked through plague-ridden villages untouched by disease, rode with mercenaries, learned how fragile humans were, how easily they could be bent, broken, erased. Power thrummed within me, but it could not fill the hollow that immortality sharpens—the endless loneliness that stretches across centuries.

Everything changed in 1523.

It was a rain-soaked night on the outskirts of Paris when I first saw Marina. She worked in a small tavern where soldiers, travelers, and those wishing to disappear gathered. I entered only to escape the storm. Destiny waited behind the bar.

Marina had dark, flowing hair, pale skin, lips red as spilled wine—but it was her eyes that shattered me. One jade green, one amber gold. Two souls, two truths, reflected in the same gaze. She did not flinch. She did not bow. She smiled.

“Evening,” I said, trying to steady the chaos of my own blood.

“Evening,” she replied, and the sound of her voice anchored something inside me. She treated me like a man, not a monster.

Night after night, I returned. I listened to her laugh, memorized the cadence of her heartbeat, watched her wipe tables, learn her steps by memory. I could have ended her life in a heartbeat. Instead, I offered protection, conversation, coin. She spoke of dreams—leaving Paris, seeing the sea. I never told her what I was. But I suspected she already knew. Some souls recognize the unnatural.

Love, I learned, is the most dangerous hunger of all.

The Hunter Organization found us before I could choose her over my kind. They had existed as long as vampires had—trained by church and crown to exterminate creatures like me. They burned taverns, slaughtered innocents, called it righteousness. One night, fire consumed her tavern. Marina was gone.

I hunted them, slaughtering three hunters before dawn, but it was not enough. They left her alive—barely—as bait. When I found her, broken and bleeding, she whispered my name, unafraid.

“Turn me,” I begged, desperation lacing my voice. “Let me save you from them. From death.”

She touched my face with trembling hands. “If loving you makes me a monster,” she whispered, “then I choose death.”

The sun rose as I held her. She died in my arms.

I have lived four centuries since that night. Kingdoms fell. Empires crumbled. The Dupont family persists—diminished, hunted, hidden. I remain.

Immortality is no gift. It is a sentence. To remember, to lose, to endure. To watch what you loved burn and never feel the heat.

And this… is only the beginning of my story.

Immortality is no gift. It is a sentence. A sentence etched deep into the soul, carved with relentless precision by time itself. To remember every fragment, every face, every whispered promise—only to watch it slip through your fingers like smoke. To lose everything you once held sacred, again and again, until the weight of absence becomes an unbearable ache that no eternity can soothe. To endure the endless march of years, the shifting tides of empires and empires of memories, all while standing as an unyielding sentinel to a world that changes and forgets. To watch what you loved burn and never feel the heat—never feel the searing agony of loss because your heart has long since been numbed by centuries of sorrow.

This existence is a cruel paradox. To live beyond time is to be trapped between endless beginnings and inevitable ends. Each dawn brings a new chapter of solitude, every dusk the cruel reminder that you remain while everything else fades. Faces you cherished, voices once vibrant, laughter that once filled the night—all silenced, all gone. And yet, you remain. Immortal. Alone.

And this… this is only the beginning of my story.

The storm outside raged on, a tempest mirroring the chaos within. Thunder shattered the night like the roar of a thousand forgotten battles, lightning illuminating the haunted depths of my soul. I stood on the precipice of a fate I could neither escape nor fully embrace. The threads of destiny wound tighter around me, pulling me toward a path paved with shadows and fire.

I thought I had learned to bear the weight of eternity, but meeting her—Marina—shattered the fragile walls I had built. Her presence was a spark in the endless night, a flicker of warmth in a heart long frozen. Yet, she was more than a mere mortal; she carried within her the power to reshape worlds, to awaken forces long buried beneath the ashes of time.

The Order hunts her. They see her as a threat, a harbinger of ruin. Their weapons, forged in ancient fires and blessed by sacred rites, are aimed to sever what fate has intertwined. And I—bound by blood and shadow—must protect her, even as the darkness within me threatens to consume what little light remains.

I am no hero. I am a prisoner of my own making, shackled by memories that burn brighter than any flame. But for her, for the fragile hope she embodies, I will face the abyss. I will confront the demons that haunt the night and the ghosts of my past. Because in this endless existence, perhaps there is still a chance for redemption—if only I dare to grasp it.

The road ahead is fraught with peril. Ancient prophecies whisper of wars that will rend the very fabric of reality, of kingdoms that will fall and rise again in blood and fire. The balance between life and death, shadow and light, teeters on a knife’s edge. And at its center stands the child of divided blood—the key to salvation or annihilation.

I do not know what awaits us in the darkness. But I know this: immortality may be a sentence, but it is also a burden I will bear for her. For Marina. For the fragile hope that flickers like a candle in the storm.

This is only the beginning. The night is far from over. And my story—our story—has only just begun to unfold.