Cancún Base, Quintana Roo, Mexico
The Caribbean midday sun beat down harshly on the exterior of the reinforced base in Cancún, but inside, in the command rooms lit by the cold glow of holographic screens and the glow of magical artifacts, a different darkness loomed. Dracula had retreated to a more shadowy corner, away from the bustle of preparations for the incursion into Hollow Earth, his red eyes gazing at the distant sea horizon where Cthulhu had emerged and, according to the Lyreans, had returned to a restless sleep.
The recent avalanche of news—Amitiel's surrender, the precarious victory of the Lyran factions, the enforced truce—had left a strange emptiness, an unnatural calm before the next, inevitable storm. It was in these moments of imposed stillness that the deepest and most disturbing thoughts tended to surface in his millennia-old mind.
What's really going on? he wondered, the phrase a silent echo in his conscience. The question wasn't about immediate tactics or shifting alliances, but about the very nature of this war. Just a few years, a few decades ago—a breath, a blink in the vastness of my existence—the world, in its brutality and petty ambitions, was... understandable. Mortal empires were born and died, plagues swept continents, human wars followed one another with bloody monotony. I navigated those currents, an apex predator in a predictable ecosystem.
He sighed, the sound almost inaudible. And now... now we have participated, almost without realizing how we got here, in a cosmic war that defies reason. Mad gods emerging from forgotten abysses, fallen angels issuing ultimatums from the farthest reaches of the solar system, star races fighting over the spoils of galactic empires, and we, the children of the night of Terra, alongside mortal mages and scientists, caught at the epicenter.
His mind went back to the beginning of this spiral of madness. At Merlin's call.
When the old wizard summoned me, Dracula recalled, I thought I understood the urgency, the nature of the conflict. Eleonora, his former protégé, his brilliant student, consumed by a darkness, turned into Nyx, a threat to the magical balance of the planet. A known, yet formidable, evil. I even considered that Merlin, in his eternal and dangerous fascination with the limits of time and reality, had perhaps crossed some forbidden threshold alongside other mages of his most secret order, thereby attracting some unexpected consequence, some echo of the Void.
I accepted his call. Yes, for our strange and ancient friendship of years, a relic forged in forgotten ages, in battles against common threats that now seemed like child's play. And also, I admit, for the challenge of facing the mighty Nyx, of testing my own strength against hers, of reaffirming my place in the hierarchy of shadows. I believed it was just another war, albeit one with a particularly virulent and personal magical component for the old mage.
A glimpse of his life before that call flickered in his memory, a vision of almost painful tranquility in its contrast to the present.
China... my last refuge before this madness. It wasn't a Gothic castle in the Carpathians, but a hidden palace, a jewel of impossible architecture nestled among the karst peaks of Guilin, or perhaps in a secret valley near the lakes of Hangzhou. Pagodas with roofs that seemed to float, built from dark, jet-polished woods, rose from gardens of unearthly beauty, where moonflowers glowed with their own light and cascades of pure water seemed to defy gravity, flowing upward at certain times of the lunar cycle. Courtyards were paved with jade and obsidian, inlaid with meteorite fragments that caught the starlight. His art collection spanned millennia, from Shang Dynasty bronzes to Zen master calligraphies that contained universes in a single stroke.
He lived in a... carefully cultivated peace, he recalled, and for a moment, the predatory mask cracked, revealing a deep fatigue. Far from the noisy and vulgar intrigues of European courts, from the lingering stench of their endless wars. It was a haven of aesthetic order, of contemplative beauty, of... a dark and refined serenity.
There, he wasn't just an exile or a legendary monster. He was a center of a different, subtler power. Yes, I was a great leader in my own quiet way, he thought. A black sun around which orbited other night-beings from the East, human artists whose genius fed on darkness and forbidden beauty, renegade Taoist philosophers seeking immortality in its strangest forms, and even some mandarins and silk and spice traders who sought my ancestral 'wisdom' or my
supernatural protection in exchange for... discreet services and unwavering loyalty.
And I left it all behind; the realization of that sacrifice, seen now in light of the cosmic scale of the current conflict, was almost overwhelming. My libraries of forbidden knowledge, accumulated over centuries. My gardens of eternal, silent pleasures. The intricate, delicate web of influence I had patiently woven for decades at the heart of the Celestial Empire... all abandoned, all vanished in an instant. Why? "Only at Merlin's call. An urgent request, yes. An old debt of honor, perhaps. The promise of a battle he painted as worthy, as necessary to prevent a known evil from consuming the magic of Terra."
Dracula straightened, the shadows in the Cancún laboratory seeming to cling to him more tightly. The irony was as vast as the cosmos. He had abandoned his paradise of shadows and silk for what he believed would be a necessary purge, a familiar dance with an understandable enemy. And now he found himself at the epicenter of a war of gods and monsters, where his own terrible evolution was merely a footnote in a saga of universal annihilation.
Merlin... he thought with a new, cold clarity. Did you truly know the magnitude of what was coming when you called me? Or were you as blind as I, believing we could simply prune the branches of a diseased tree, not realizing that its roots ran deep into the very heart of the Void? Years of friendship, loyalty, now seemed such fragile, such naive reasons to have traded his existence for this hell of endless revelations and terrors.