Vampire Core: Reborn as the Hot Evil Vampire Lord, But I’m Socially Awkward

- [Azalea] -

“Thank you,” says Azalea, quietly staring at the skeleton standing there before her, holding a silver platter covered in what looks like a very exotic but well-made preparation of foods. “Did you make this yourself?”

The skeleton lifts a leg, standing there like an exotic bird as it tilts its head. “Just. For. Yooou~ kawaii priestess-chan!” it says, striking a variety of poses as it speaks. Azalea has no idea what half of those noises mean. It must be some foul undead language, or maybe a dementia of sorts? The poor wretch is likely mind-broken from an eternity of death. She would put the skeleton to rest, but… it almost feels like it isn’t her place to do so? But it’s clearly suffering from undead mania. It isn’t uncommon for the more intelligent undead monsters to lose their humanity and become sick and depraved as time passes.

The skeleton maid lifts a hand, covering one eye to ‘wink’ since it doesn’t have actual eyes anymore.

But it isn’t her place. This matter, just like with Inkume, is a conflict between her duties as a priestess and the confusing reality of her situation.

Leaning over, the maid sets the food down onto a small end table. “The kitchen is destroyed. The master has yet to repair it, so Fi-Fi had to improvise,” explains the skeleton, pointing at a char mark on some sort of cooked fillet. “Gomenasai!”

“It looks great. I appreciate it,” says Azalea, placing a hand on Fi-Fi’s arm as she sits down. Honestly, she’s starving. Between the blood loss, all the excitement, and just trying to stay warm in this old place, she’s been very weak on her feet. It looks a little weird, but it smells great. She can’t wait to dig in.

Azalea closes her eyes, folding her hands on her lap as she says a quiet prayer.

There’s a sound from nearby. “Ah, wait,” says the priestess, finishing. She looks over to the door that the skeleton is halfway through. “Can’t you stay a little while?” she asks.

The maid points at herself, looking around the room to make sure she’s the one being spoken to. “I must return to my duties, imouto-chan,” explains Fi-Fi, striking a pose. She spins her arms out, popping into several distinctly different movements at once. “Hard work is appreciated by the ma-ma-ma-maaasteeer~” sings the undead, clutching its hands over its heart.

God, the poor thing. It’s completely gone, isn’t it? It feels cruel.

Azalea lifts a hand to her mouth, as if hiding a whisper. Her other hand pats the chair next to her. “I’ll tell him that you were here and that you did great,” she promises. The skeleton seems to consider it, but then shakes its head.

“Slacking was harshly punished by the old master,” explains Fi-Fi, lowering her voice and leaning in and suddenly not seeming so playful anymore. “…You are lucky that he is not around anymore,” she warns in a low, foreboding tone. “Very lucky.”

Azalea looks at it, already sipping from some kind of small bowl of broth as she stares at the undead, which is hard to take seriously given its everything.

“It’s good, thank you. Do you like to sing?” asks the priestess, taking the hint from its playful nature. “Did you used to be a bard?”

Suddenly everything changes.

The frilly skeleton, standing by the door, almost leaps toward her and starts forming shapes with its arms as it strikes a stage of well-rehearsed poses. “F-I-F-I!” sings the skeleton, dancing through each individually sung letter. “Fi-Fi’s me and Fi-Fi’s I~!” it sings, leaning forward toward Azalea with its leg raised behind it. A finger lies out over its skull, as if pulling an imaginary eyelid downward. Azalea imagines if there was a tongue left, it would be sticking out her way childishly. The skeleton makes a heart with its hands, looking at her through the hole. “Your ultra kawaii onee-san Fi-Fi used to be an idol!” explains the skeleton. “People all around my world loved funny darling Fi-Fi~!” it explains, shaking its hips behind itself before blowing her some kisses. “Chu~ Chu~”

It’s too far gone to be saved.

Whatever remnants of its mind once existed are long since gone. Like an elder, lost in the fog of age, one can’t do anything else for them except to give them the kindness of indulgence. She doesn’t know what it’s talking about, but it seems excited.

Azalea, having set her bowl down, grabs its hand with both of hers. “That’s really great,” says the priestess, as if talking to an excited child. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?” she asks.

Fi-Fi looks over her shoulder back toward the door and then back to the priestess. “I cannot…”

“Well, would you sing me a song, please, at least?” asks Azalea, wanting to placate its torment just a little if she can. “Just while I eat.”

That changes everything.

“Hai!” screams the skeleton, making more odd noises. Fi-Fi jumps the door, grabbing the old broom from against the wall and jumping up onto the bed. It holds it with both hands, as if trying to wrestle with a garden snake. But Azalea isn’t sure why it’s pressing the stem up toward its mouth. It seems very dedicated. “OHAYO, AKIHABARA!” it shouts, raising a hand before starting to tap with its foot and making a series of strange noises. “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!” begins the undead, counting down loudly with a hand in the air in a very theatrical fashion before it starts some kind of… wailing.

On the back of the bed atop a pillow rests a fairy — another guest of Inkume’s, as far as Azalea can tell — curled into a ball and covered with the edge of the blanket. She doesn’t seem to be capable of being bothered and just rolls over the other way.

Azalea watches in confused mesmerisation, not exactly sure what she’s just unleashed upon the world.

Staring, the priestess loudly slurps a noodle as the skeleton dances around on the bed.

This was a good deed, right?

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

Snatch floats behind him, pulling a curtain off of the wall nearby and quickly drapes it over a mirror. The ghost looks around herself in a sweaty panic that is actually very typical for her.

“Everything okay with you, Snatch?” asks Inkume, looking at her.

“Everything’s fine, Master!” screams the ghost back at him, quickly flying off down the hallway and vanishing, ripping more fabric off of the walls to take with her. Confused, he watches her go and then pops back in a second later from around the corner. “By the way, don’t look in the mirrors!” yells the ghost desperately.

The Vampire Lord stares at her. That’s pretty suspicious. “…I don’t have a reflection, Snatch,” he replies.

The ghost opens her mouth for a second and then closes it as her daze darts from side to side as she thinks. A second later, her eyes turn back his way. “Perfect! So you don’t need to,” she replies and then vanishes. “Just forget them! The Master is too beautiful to be seen in any of these poor, low-quality mirrors!” trails her voice down from the darkness, a trail of torn curtains and rugs flying after her.

He’s sure that this is going to come back to haunt him soon enough. But he’ll deal with this particular fiasco later. If he puts off rebuilding his library any longer, it might never happen.

Turning back, Inkume pulls open the tower door, finding himself standing on the precipice of a long drop where there ought to not be one. The castle library tower was destroyed long, long time ago. Now all that remains of it is this door and several others like it all along the height-span of this particular outer wall. The open world spans out before him toward the distant horizon, the forest bowing and leaning in many directions as a cold night wind passes over the moon-painted lands.

The Vampire Lord holds out his hands, feeling a dark energy collecting around his fingers and stretching outward down and up toward the gap next to his lair.

Something rattles down below, the forest stirring around the castle grounds as trees rip and bend way, pivoting to the sides as their roots are torn out and flung to the side. Old, ancient bricks that had been buried a millennium ago fly out from their deep graves in the old forest mud and stack on top of each other with a loud, heavy clamber. One after the other, row after row, they begin to stack together, and new ones fly out from the darkness, manifested from the ink of the night itself. Old and new weave through one another as stones and ropes shoot through the midnight air like bats — the same as the howling ghosts that fly from one star to the next as they try to escape their undeath.

The castle shakes, the ground beneath him rumbling. The glass windows shake and rattle like terrified bones. Dust and debris fall from the ceiling, and disturbed spiders and rats skitter and scatter in all directions.

The horizon vanishes from his sight as a circular wall expands from some wildly long distance below and then continues to spiral upward, further and further toward the night as if it were a spear heading toward Heaven itself — the appearance of such capped off by a sharp, conical point like a witch’s wide-brimmed hat. The inside of the tower, which he guesses to be twenty floors high, if not more, changes and fills as material floods in through many windows and doors all along the castle. The tower itself rotates and spins in place from its base like a person planting their feet and turning from side to side, which seems impossible for a structure of its size. It makes movements to accommodate the construction. Shelf for shelf, the walls begin to fill in with what look like hollow bones still missing their flesh. And then the meat starts to come.

Books.

His heart nearly fluttering, Inkume watches as the shelves begin to fill themselves. Old tomes that were buried and hidden around the castle fly from their secret shelters and refuges, returning to their long-awaited home, and others more begin to appear by the second. The books manifest out of the castle’s magic; he can feel it draining from his body. Shelf after shelf, floor after floor, it fills out. The center of the tower is hollow and empty from top to bottom, with circular inner balconies making up every level of it. Only criss-crossing stairways connect one floor of the library to the other, but not in a sensical pattern. Instead, they weave in manic fashion, with one floor connected to another ten above it, which is connected to the one three below, and so on all throughout the entire mess of a structure.

Lanterns burst to light with a dull orange shine one after the other as a pattern of fire rises up from the depths toward the very raftered peak of the ceiling below the tower’s lid.

Inkume steps inside, looking around at what may well be an actual eternity’s worth of literature.

He’s made it.

It’s over.

He’s finally done. He has everything he needs to retire now as a made man, right?

The Vampire Lord stands at the edge of a library balcony and looks over down toward its deepest pit in the center.

Something stirs down there, a shape.

There, on the lowest ground floor of the library, moves a shadow of sorts. It looks almost like a pool of water, but it isn’t liquid. Perplexed, the Vampire Lord watches as a form emerges from the hole.

A shadow.

It begins to rise, pressing up and up, past one floor and then the next. It isn’t a flood; rather, it’s a very slender stick of a thing. At first he thinks it’s some kind of tendril, perhaps. But then it rises past him too, growing higher and longer by the second until it reaches the tower ceiling and bends downward.

It has arms and hands but no fingers. It has two long, thin legs but no feet or knees. It has no features of a body but has a whole that resembles the idea of a person. It’s a shadow, stretched long and thin and rubbed into vagueness — except it isn’t transparent. Rather, it’s a deep, inky black that can’t be peered through.

The only defining features it has are the long, slit mouth cast from side to side over its face and its two inset, hollow eyes that seem more like holes pressed halfway through dough than sockets.

A pungent, metallic smell fills the air as the waspy, thin giant bends downward with jointless posture, its contorted body weaving through a hundred staircases as blackness drips down around it.

It’s ink. The thing — it isn’t a shadow or something sort of flesh. It’s made entirely out of liquid ink.

A face the size of the moon in the night sky leans forward toward him, and its toothless, inset puppet’s mouth almost seems to smile as it lifts a long, dripping hand over its mouth as if to shush him.

The Vampire Lord looks at the creature, sensing a danger to its presence. While he’s encountered a lot of things in this new life, this one feels different. It isn’t something like a skeleton, a zombie, or a wolf in the forest. This… entity, is older and more obscure than something that can't be called something as base as ‘a monster’.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Inkume. I need a book,” says the master of the castle, looking at the giant that squats down before him to reach eye level. “— Please.”

“Hush,” whispers the thing, its voice sounding like a vapor of smoke past his ears, like a rush of wind past the window at midnight that one would think to be a voice for only a second before realizing that it was just illusory. It shushes him and slowly looks around the library as it does so, with a gaze that is almost… well, he isn’t sure, unnervingly playful. It starts to squat down lower, its giant head vanishing into the abyss as it sinks. But all the while, as it does so, it holds its hand over its mouth and continues to hiss for silence.

Inkume raises an eyebrow, watching it go. Did he just get shushed by his own minion? Is it allowed to do that?

Perplexed at the lack of servitude that he has perhaps been getting used to, the Vampire Lord looks around and then sees the sign.

[Notice]

This library is a quiet zone! Please be considerate of others and refrain from talking while within the library.

All borrowed books must be returned in person. All late fees must be paid on time, in full.

Everyone gets three chances.

— Hush

There’s an old, dried, bloody hand print on it, smeared over the letters.

Oh. He supposes ‘Hush’ is the librarian’s name. How… fitting.

Inkume watches it bending and turning as it weaves around the tower — elongated. He watches in fascination as it bends and twists. It feels wrong. The librarian has a tangible dread to its quiet presence that none of the other ghosts or spirits in the castle have. It finds something and then slowly weaves its way back through the tower, until a moment later his sight is obscured by ink.

Between its massive hands, it holds a comparatively tiny book that it sets down on a table and slides his way.

The Vampire Lord watches as the creature flips open the cover to the first page inside and presses its hand down into it. A second later, it slides it over the table toward him, with only a single legible imprint having been altered. His name has been added to the list of borrowers inside of its front cover, just below a note.

[Due Date]

Two weeks.

Late or damaged books must be compensated without exception.

Picking it up, he looks at the cover.

[The Schwarzwasser Gospel — A Chronicle of all Things Horrific]

{Written by Witch Krokant}

A compact, handy compilation tome written by a witch of the old world. Filled with knowledge of the world’s most obscure creatures and forbidden magics, this book tells of the many secrets of the black arts. Acting as an introductory book of a larger series of works to come, this short overview is meant to offer broad — but shallow — insight for fledgling witches, creeps, lightkillers, monsters, and everything else that sneaks and crawls.

Are you a terrible wretch, cursed and hated by all of humanity? Do you want to end the world and all of its troubles? Then this book is for you!

“This work is dedicated to my dearest treasure, whom I married and yet somehow still love to this day.”

~ Krokant

Weight: 1.2kg Value: [Priceless]

Inkume raises an eyebrow. He was hoping for something more fantastical and fun. The Vampire Lord opens the book, flipping through a few pages. Actually, it’s very well done for a handwritten book. The lettering is clear and legible, and there are some very nice illustrations of monsters and dungeons.

It almost reminds him of a guidebook for a tabletop game in his old life, actually. Maybe this will be fun to peek through for a night or two? Not that he’s getting tired of Enfangled, but it’ll be good to spice life up a little.

He opens his mouth to thank the librarian.

— Its massive, blank face is hovering inches away from him; its hands run around to the sides where his eyes wouldn’t see them coming. It snuck closer while he wasn’t looking, being distracted by the book.

Feeling his gaze on it, it slowly slips back, its eyes never leaving his as it returns to the center of the tower and smiles.

The Vampire Lord closes his mouth, saying his thanks instead by giving the creature a silent nod as he holds up the book somewhat. Then he quickly and quietly makes his way out of the tower. Holding his new book, Inkume closes the door firmly behind him and then lets out a loud sigh.

There was a lot of tension in the air there for a second.

Looking up, he stares at the mirror that Snatch had covered before. The old fabric has fallen off of it and down to the ground, revealing the glass to him. He assumes it happened during the shaking of the reconstruction.

[Adventurer Defeated!]

A random collection of their items has been automatically absorbed by the castle’s treasury.

• Two [Obol]s have been added to the treasury!

• [Iron Sword] has been added to the treasury!

“Oh,” mutters the Vampire Lord idly.

It looks like some humans have arrived again tonight. He supposes this is going to be a new normal occurrence. As long as they don’t get far enough to bother him, it’s fine, he supposes. That’s just what life is now. Besides.

— The reincarnated man lifts his eyes.

He’s going to make himself a fine night tonight! Quickly, with his new book under his arm, he heads down toward the cellar. As for the mirror behind him, well, it does nothing at all. It would be rather strange for a plain old mirror to do anything else.

Humming to himself, he walks into the cellar.

[{Reactivated} The Wine Cellar]

{Blood Ooze Spawning Zone}

A large underground room that is filled with endless rows of thousands of unlabeled, currently empty glass cylinders stored in slanted wooden shelves down in the dark basement.

Your castle is a realm of terrible nightmares, many of which cannot be differentiated from reality.

Room Effect:

• {Toggle} [Fill Her Up]: Every time an adventurer is defeated by your dungeon’s traps or monsters, they will be able to pay with a bottle’s worth of their blood in exchange for being spared and warped outside of the dungeon.

The room is active. Monsters are actively spawning here!

Ah, fantastic. Inkume looks down around himself at the cellar door, down in the basement toward the direction a skeleton had run screaming last time he was down here. A large, underground room stretches out before him, full to the brim with shelves full of empty, dusty bottles.

But here near the door are a few of them that seem full.

He picks one up, shaking it around to inside at the sloshing liquid. It’s labeled.

“Human. Male. Age twenty-seven,” he reads off. “Wizard. High adrenaline.” He pulls off the cork, smelling the contents. “Oh. Heavy,” he remarks and pops the cork back in. It’s almost a little too savory. He’s just after something light, he feels like. That fairy last night was very potent.

His fingers run through the shelf, picking up another bottle. This one seems new. It must be from whoever just died a minute ago.

{Normal Quality} [Bottled Blood]

A well-stored 600mL bottle of blood, taken from a living body.

Race: Dark Elf Gender: Female

Age: Nineteen. Class: Archer.

Adrenaline: None

Total Magical Potency: Very Weak

He pulls off the cork and smells it. This one is almost… basic, in a pleasant way. It’s not overpowering, having a rather subtle and simplistic note of…

The Vampire Lord takes a deep smell.

— Cherry ash and herbal wood.

Lovely.

He corks the bottle and puts it under his arm before making his way back up. Somewhere along the staircase, he stops and thinks about how ominous and evil he must have just looked down there, sniffing blood from wine bottles like a psychopath, but what else is he supposed to do?

That’s just life, now.

There’s a sloshing sound from the side. Inkume looks back for a moment, staring at a red globular mass that is lurching over the floor. It looks like a crimson red jelly with some rather unsavory chunks floating around inside of it — some of which are bone and skull-shaped. The red mess prods around the cellar, poking a slimy tendril into odd crevices here and there, such as between the shelves or the holes of uncorked bottles, as if looking for something.

~ [Blood Ooze] ~

A Blood Ooze.

Oozes are corrosive living masses consisting of a wet, gelatinous body that fails to maintain any rigid structure. Whereas their cousin monsters, slimes, are acidic and hunt by absorbing and eating away their prey, oozes in counter usually consist of toxins, poisons, or other dangerous substances that will afflict a variety of status afflictions on whatever they touch. Suffocation is an ooze’s primary method of killing — they will wrap themselves around the legs of their target in an attempt to reach and envelop their head.

If not possible, an ooze will instead attempt to invade a body via any openings and poison it from the inside out.

Once killed, an ooze will crawl into their victim’s corpse and slowly absorb their nutrients from their vulnerable insides over a process of several days.

This particular specimen is a blood ooze, consisting of a mass of coagulated blood from many sources that has gone fetid. Given its varied make-up stemming from many sources of varying magical caliber, it is dangerously volatile and prone to exploding on magical impact. Blood oozes will attract predators to their location as the primary method of hunting before scavenging the remains.

Type: Nature {Ooze} Rank: D

Common Drop: Blood Clot Rare Drop: Rare Blood in a Jar

Having a pleasant time, Inkume makes his way to his bath.

Book? in hand. Wine? Poured. Water? Hot. Life? Better than ever.

The Vampire Lord, his clothes laid out behind him, lets out a content sigh as he slips down below the hot, bubbling water of the bath, his swirling wine glass full of dark-elf blood in one hand and his new book in the other as he takes a well-earned night off. Dense steam fills the air, obscuring his sight.

— There’s a bit of an odd smell in the bath tonight? Maybe Fi-Fi used some new soap or something. He’ll have to ask her.

It’s been a wild sprint these last few weeks, what with all of the chaos and work, but it feels like he’s finally reached the end now. The castle is getting to the point where it can run itself, can’t it? It feels like it.

He lets out a comfortable sigh, taking a sip of the blood and letting it roll over his tongue. Interesting. “I like the way dark-elves taste,” mutters Inkume, who is definitely not evil, to himself. He takes another sip.

[Experience Points Gained]

You have drank a sip of blood from a heavy-hearted dark-elven archer!

It’s magical properties are very weak. You will need to drink considerably more to level-up further.

It’s interesting how blood varies in taste in so many ways.

He stretches out his legs, his eyes scanning over the page of the book as he starts reading.

There’s something there.

“What the…?” mutters Inkume, side-eyeing the water as his feet press out and touch some kind of gross blockage below the water that stops him from stretching out. He makes a face, not sure what it is.

He pokes again.

The bath explodes, water blasting toward the ceiling and out over the open-faced edge down over the castle’s side. It’s all he can do to shield the book from the water at the last second, as a massive creature bursts out from below the water, letting out a furious snarl.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” growls a furious voice.

Inkume sits there, water splashing back down around them, as he stares at a massive wolf’s snout. The steam clearing from the spray reveals the rest of its giant, shaggy body resting in the water.

The wolf, except this time she’s reverted back to the state of a gigantic canine. That would explain the smell in the air. It's the smell of wet fur.

Shaking his soaked hair out, glistening dewdrops of water catching the moonlight as they fly majestically from his beautiful face like twinkling starlight, the Vampire Lord looks at her. “Taking a bath. In my castle,” he explains, leaning back. Not sure about the decorum of the situation, given that she’s transformed into a wolf and not a person, he decides to nonetheless not stare too closely. Maybe it’s a contextual matter. Instead, he lifts his new book up over his face and pretends to read, as if she weren’t interesting to him in the least. “As you are too.”

“You got a problem with that?” she asks, a towering, soaked head of fur visible behind his book and looming his way. “I’ll bite you in half. We’ll see if you need to wash then, pretty boy.”

Why can’t he ever just have a minute?

He’d better settle the situation fast. Last time he won their fight by a fluke. The last thing he wants is to start a new one now. Inkume lifts his eyes past the edges of the book, looking at the massive wolf starting to snarl her fangs.

He’s noticing that different people respond differently to different things.

— That seems obvious, of course. But for someone as socially inexperienced as him, it’s a revelation, almost. Snatch thrives on praise and attention but explodes at the tiniest criticism. Azalea seems to love helping and doing her own thing and seems happiest when one lets her. Matthew-Cray-Anthony has taught him well on how to initiate and steer conversations with these two. But the wolf whose name he doesn’t know is different. She’s an angry, strong, forward-facing person who doesn’t have time for words. In her world, flowery language and the delicate dance of the tongue are weak nonsense. She responds on a personal level, not to hims-and-haws but to the authority of power. She has a hierarchy-based personality type.

Inkume flips a page of the book, looking at it in remarked surprise, and then glances up to her as she growls, leaning in closer and closer. He’s not sure if he isn’t pushing his luck beyond belief with this idea.

“Sit,” commands the horrific Vampire Lord, saying nothing more than that in a tone so plain, bored, and unbothered that he may as well have just been reading it out loud from the book in his hands. His eyes stay locked to it, but he watches in the periphery with a hidden terror that he’s about to be eaten alive like a goon.

She recoils almost immediately, the wolf’s entire body flinching together, her raised lip dropping back over the exposed teeth. The tension in her body vanishes, and the giant wolf slowly — perhaps unexpectedly — begins to lower itself down again.

That actually worked?

“We’ve settled this already,” he explains quietly but firmly, his eyes darting over the page and not looking at her for a moment more. “I have no qualms about having you here,” says the Vampire Lord. “I’m glad, even. My castle needs more beautiful things in it,” he adds, staring straight up into her gigantic, yellow eyes that begin to soften and become weak, vulnerable things. Unable to hold contact, the wolf’s long face breaks and quickly looks away as some human embarrassment comes through. Inkume looks back to his book. “But if you stay in my home, then you will not defy me.” He leans back again against the wall of the bath. “Accept my terms or leave.”

Almost petrified, he sits there and pretends to read. It’s a good thing he can’t sweat, but the steam in here is running down his face, and it feels just like it.

The massive wolf gives way and slowly lowers herself down onto all fours, submerging her head beneath the water. “S—” she starts, just making the noise that seems impossible for her to follow up through. The water of the bath sloshes around. The wooden duck that belongs to the pool is rising and falling along the crest of a wave. “I’m sorry, Ma- Ma…aster,” concedes the prideful wolf goddess, having great trouble with either of those last two words as if they simply didn’t belong to her vocabulary before now.

It sounded very difficult.

She lowers her head down, a large snout resting just above the water at his side.

Inkume reaches out with his idle hand, scratching the top of her head behind her ear as he stares into his book with a quaking terror in the deepest abyssal pit of his heart as he pulls off the finishing blow of his horrific act of verbal dominance, which is what he needs to do to end this once and for all. But he doesn’t know if he has the strength to do it. It’s too much.

— It’s too cringe.

But he has to. There’s no choice.

Inkume opens his mouth and looks at her with an unbothered smile. “Good girl,” says the Vampire Lord placatingly, before returning to the single page of his book that he’s been boring holes into with his eyes for the last two minutes straight.

This is it. It’s over. He’s never coming back from this one.

He’d think he crossed the line and went too far, but apparently not. The wolf goddess doesn’t reply, her face lowering deeply below the water until its almost hidden away within the bath’s foam and soap. But a massive, wagging tail on the other end sloshes the water around in a turbulent maelstrom.

How the fuck did that work?

Inkume takes a sip of his wine and looks back at the page of the new book that really saved his kiester from becoming a chew-toy just now.

Chapter 01 - Ancient Gods and Their Tricky Personalities. (Or: How to Deal with an Angry Wolf at your Door)

It’s no Matthew-Cray-Anthony, but it’s clearly good enough to get the job done. The Vampire Lord wonders what else he can learn from this.