Chapter One: The Hunger Beneath
The stone sarcophagus cracked open with a sigh, like the exhalation of a tomb remembering breath. Dust fled the edges of the seal, disturbed by the faintest tremor of movement. Darkness, thick and eternal, blanketed the catacombs, disturbed only by the faint glimmer of crimson eyes flickering to life within.
Veil stirred.
The scent of rot and mildew clung to the air, yet beneath it lingered a sharper, cleaner scent—steel, oil, ozone. Foreign. The world had changed.
He sat up slowly, sinew stretching over ancient bone. His pale skin bore the color of moonlight filtered through fog, smooth and unmarred by age. His hair, long and black as obsidian, trailed down his back like a curtain of shadow. The robes he wore—remnants of a bygone time—crumbled at the edges with the brittleness of centuries. Only his signet ring, carved with a rune long forgotten by even the oldest tongues, remained untouched.
"Time," Veil whispered. His voice rasped like parchment torn from an old book. "How long have I slept?"
There was no answer. The dead do not keep time.
He stepped from the coffin with a predator's grace. The ground beneath was cracked, the stone etched with markings of containment—wards scrawled by trembling hands. Ancient magic, old enough to be dangerous but desperate. It had not held him. It never would.
He moved through the tunnels with certainty. He knew these depths, carved by slave labor centuries ago, before the wars, before the Collapse. Before the magic purges. The world above had been at war with itself even then, in the time before he withdrew into sleep. But the scent now—the burn of scorched air, the underlying hum of machines—told him the world had lost whatever soul it once had.
He emerged into the Underground.
The corridor was made of scrap metal and piping, dimly lit by flickering bulbs fed by trembling power lines. Humans milled like rats through rusted pathways, their eyes hollow, clothes ragged. Children clung to mothers who barely noticed them. A man with cybernetic limbs limped past him without meeting his eyes.
Veil saw no joy, no laughter. Only survival. And fear.
From a corner, a hunched figure hissed, recognizing something unnatural in him. A hag of a woman, skin mottled and scarred, pointed a bony finger toward him.
"Demon," she whispered, "a shadow from before the Burning. Mark him!"
Veil turned his gaze to her. Her words died in her throat as his eyes flared. She collapsed in a heap, unconscious, before her mind could even register the command. A few bystanders watched, but none dared intervene. The law down here was simple: survive, or vanish.
✦
He found answers in the whispers.
The world above was not a world at all—it was a fortress. The Skyborn, the elite and powerful, lived in towers of shining glass and domes of filtered air. They outlawed magic under penalty of death. Technology had replaced it—imperfect, soulless mechanisms that choked the planet and its people. The magic purge had been swift and brutal. All who bore magic in their blood were either executed or driven below. No exceptions. Not even the gods.
The city he walked beneath was once called Thaleth. Now, it was simply The Divide. Above, luxury. Below, misery.
"Where are the kings?" he asked a gaunt boy who offered him water from a cracked canteen.
The boy blinked. "Kings? There are none. Only Overseers and the Order."
Veil drank. Not for thirst, but for the memory of ritual. The boy's veins pulsed with dormant power—thin, polluted, but magic nonetheless. It curled behind his ribs like a dying ember.
"Do you know what you carry?" Veil asked.
The boy frowned. "Carry?"
Veil touched his chest. "You are a Spark."
The boy bolted, frightened. Veil let him go.
✦
Night never truly came to the Underground. But Veil could feel it above, the absence of the sun calling to the beast within him.
He climbed toward the surface.
His ascent was slow and hidden. He passed through refuse pipes, across shattered ventilation ducts, and through rotted tunnels that had long been forgotten by the Skyborn. He emerged in a graveyard of machines—twisted metal carcasses left in the gray wasteland that circled the city. Above, spires of steel and light pierced the sky like knives. Patrol drones zipped through the air. Towers buzzed with anti-magic fields, pulsing like heartbeat monitors.
He stepped into the city unchallenged.
The Skyborn did not believe anything could rise from below. Their arrogance was ancient, rooted in the same seed that once allowed magic to flourish unchecked. They replaced priests with techlords, mages with regulators. They had even built a monolith—The Obelisk—in the city center, where captured Sparks were drained of power and used to fuel the machines of the elite.
Veil stared at the towering structure with quiet fury. It shimmered with harvested magic—stolen essence distilled into raw energy. The screams of the tormented clung to its walls, inaudible to mortals, but loud and sharp to Veil.
A memory stirred.
He remembered fire. Screaming. A pyre of spellcasters, bound and burned. The fall of his House. The betrayal of the Elders who begged forgiveness in the name of progress. And finally, the decision to sleep, to wait out the madness.
But the madness had not ended. It had evolved.
He walked the streets unseen. Glamour came to him like breath, veiling him from scanning eyes and sensor drones. He watched Skyborn nobles sip synthetic wine and laugh beneath artificial stars. They spoke of profits, of "containment breaches" below. One man joked of an uprising. Another suggested a cull. None of them noticed when their lights dimmed momentarily, or that shadows clung just a little too tightly to their throats.
✦
Veil found her on the edge of the city. She was barely twenty, pale-skinned, with eyes that glowed faintly violet. Shackled, bruised, she lay in a transport cage meant for livestock.
A Spark.
The guards escorting her laughed cruelly, smoking vapor rods and gambling on the side. They did not see him until it was far too late.
The first died with a whisper. The second saw only a flash of silver—Veil's eyes, not a blade. The third ran, screaming about demons. Veil let him run. Fear was a potent seed.
He knelt by the cage and touched the lock. It withered under his fingers. The girl flinched but did not cry out.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"No one you've ever met," he said. "What is your name?"
"Lyra."
He nodded. "You are of the blood. You carry what they fear."
She looked at him. "You're not human."
"No."
"Then what are you?"
Veil smiled, revealing the faint gleam of fangs. "A relic. A hunger. A warning they chose to forget."
He stood. "Can you still cast?"
"I… was trained, but it's forbidden now. They burn those who try."
"Then we will teach them to fear fire again."
✦
In the days that followed, word spread through the Underground of a ghost in the shadows—a dark figure who walked among the Enforcers above and slew them without mercy. Sparks vanished from holding pens. Overseers were found drained, their veins empty, their minds hollowed. The Obelisk dimmed briefly for the first time in years.
The Order of Purity convened in panic.
Their leader, High Chancellor Varik, watched from a window high above the city, his brow furrowed.
"We have an insurgent," his advisor said.
"No," Varik whispered. "We have something older. Something we thought extinct."
"A mage?"
"Worse," Varik said, holding up an old tome etched in blood. The pages crinkled under his gloved hands. "A vampire."
His advisor paled.
"There are no vampires left."
"There is one. And we buried him beneath Thaleth long ago. We hoped the wards would hold. But something woke him."
"What do we do?"
"We burn everything."
✦
Below, Veil stood before a growing crowd of outcasts and Sparks. Beside him, Lyra, dressed in scavenged armor, a staff in her hands, the runes of her people glowing once more.
They were frightened, but no longer hiding. The old blood had begun to stir. Children dreamed of magic again. Songs were being sung in secret tongues.
"The surface fears us," Veil said to them, his voice carrying like thunder. "They fear what we were. What we could be. Let them. Their machines are cold, their laws brittle. We are fire. We are hunger."
He raised his hand, and flame bloomed from Lyra's staff. A symbol, defiant and radiant.
"The time of silence is over. We rise."
From above, sirens blared. The Obelisk pulsed. Drones poured from the towers.
But beneath the city, a new kind of magic stirred—one born of blood, of vengeance, of ancient hunger reborn.
And Veil, the forgotten vampire king, smiled as the storm began.