CHAPTER SEVEN What the Elders Forgot
234 Words
They locked me beneath the chapel ruins—iron chains, salt carved into the floor, prayers etched into the stone. The villagers whispered through the cracks, calling me demon, witch, abomination.
My mother never came.
The hunger gnawed at me—not for blood. For something else. Sound. Heat. Life.
At midnight, the air split.
Astridr tore through the cellar wall like it was paper, stone exploding outward. Two guards lunged at him. He took one head clean off. The other screamed until he didn’t have a mouth to scream with anymore.
Astridr didn’t look at the bodies. He looked at me.
“They never told you the full pact,” he said, breaking my chains with a flick of his fingers.
“They fed us to spare themselves. But some bloodlines were… altered.”
“Altered how?” I asked.
He knelt, pressing his blood‑stained thumb to the mark glowing at my throat. It burned—and then opened.
I saw it then. Not memories. Not visions.
Truth.
Long ago, humans and vampires made more than a feeding agreement. They made keepers. Living seals. Humans who could stand between worlds, immune to turning, immune to compulsion.
Weapons that bled.
“You are not prey,” Astridr said softly. “You are the lock.”
The chapel above us began to shake.
The elders were coming.
And they were chanting my name.
- Writer
