Chapter 64: Bloodfall Requiem
Manasseh clutched the black-root ball at her hand to her chest as she stumbled herself through the street, the marbles on her step indicating her closeness to the mansion, as the vampire’s sought of an end was finally, finally within sight.
The gate was a taunting metaphor for humanity’s purge on vampires and for vampires’ humiliation as a predator being cast out. Manasseh chuckled, finding it funny that she would retain rooms for sentimentality.
If only Alice had attacked sooner...would she have embarked on this useless journey for her clan’s recovery? If the anomaly that is the hero’s boundless strength was readied against her clans before she was born, would she still witness the rosery reds of her mother’s coffin, here to release her people’s corpses to rest a proper death, here to only awaken them again for her selfish desires not to ’waste her sacrifices’?
Yet her lips merely curled up, each tissue of her cheek’s movement smiled a hatred that no longer burns but instead embers in desperation, each fribre of her muscle creaked a disgust that no longer coils but boils a comfort she has grown tired of despising.
Perhaps this is what humans call fate. Manasseh sighed as she grasped open the gate, to avenge, to end, to cower before her despair caught up to her.
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I never learn a mansion could be so peaceful, even under a catastrophic disaster. Adrei remarked as she tapped the hallways with her scepter, each step sinking her plump waist further, yet her bones cackled with newfound vigor as her hair was stranded grey-green instead of pure whiteness, signs of corruption leaving behind the elder, as an avenger within an empty husk.
Each step was a measured delay for the inevitable, yet also a precise hurriedness as a protector of Rouen. She knew she was coming, from the benigned’s whispering in the gust, flowery sweetness ever licking at her lips, even with the drippling malice and promise of vengance souring her numbness of the mind.
And so, she arrived before the backdoor. Opening it revealed not a garden, but a mere wasteland of forlorn ashes and ice glitters, small arcs of ungrown flowers tinting a small hint of return to life on the ground, even after witnessing divine destructions, as a particular rune still pulsed red on the dead soil, weeping? No, it didn’t weep, it merely waited, not for assurance, but for acceptance of whatever the result might be, just as Adil did now, and....