Chapter 4: A Feared Future Comes to Pass!
My father told me that living humans are nothing more than food. My mother told me that the dead humans are nothing more than toys. He was a vampire, and she was a necromancer. I was their offspring. I inherited all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses. Nothing could have made my parents happier. They taught me about the world—the ways of the vampire and the necromancer, the instincts of our monster heritage, and the unshakeable, eternal hostility that existed between us and humans.
My parents were kind. My memories of our life together, just the three of us, all those centuries ago, are memories of happiness. But when humans killed my parents, those happy days came to an end.
I was ten years old. My parents had been murdered, and their energies returned to the earth. They were gone. When I look back on things, it was only natural that things ended the way they did. My parents had gone too far. They had shirked the natural order of the food chain and taken human lives for fun.
All I had left once they were gone was the books my mother left me, the village my father had ruled over, and the manor in which the three of us had lived. I was at a loss for what to do. Revenge? The people who killed my parents had died in their efforts, so there was nobody else to take vengeance upon. It was meaningless. For days, I could do nothing but cry.
And yet the manor was far too big for me alone, and nothing made me lonelier than sleeping in my bed, entirely alone. I was the descendant of a vampire, a creature of the night, and somehow, I had grown afraid of the dark.
But what else was there? I was lonely.
I hungered for contact, for connection. I felt starved of it.
Unable to bear my solitude, I tampered with the memories of the villagers my father had controlled. I lived among them as a young girl. The first thing that struck me during this time was just how weak they all were. The children cried at the tiniest of injuries. The adults could be left broken all too easily when attacked by monsters.
But when I was with them, my loneliness disappeared.
First, I was the youngest daughter of a village family. Then I was a young girl living on her own. Then the older sister of a girl who had lost her parents. Then an owl watching over the village. Then the daughter of another family. Then the guardian of a girl with no relatives at all. By my seventh life in the village, I was a woman who had lost her husband.
I controlled the memories of the villagers and became one of them. In that way, three hundred years passed. I mastered three sorcery hexes and read almost the entirety of my mother’s book collection. But I grew bored of the small world that was the manor and the village. Although I tried to sate this by kidnapping passing travelers and listening to their tales, even that had its limits. I craved further stimulation. Everyone I met lived ordinary lives. It bored me. I wanted the sort of tales that would make my heart race.
And so, when such people came, I simply had to have them. A healer from another world, and a time-reading princess with incredibly rare powers of precognition? I would have them at any and all costs. Or so I thought.
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But now I was a mess. “I’m just going to end up like my parents,” I muttered, coughing.
I was so beaten up I could barely move. All the magic in the world didn’t mean a thing when your body was practically in pieces. It took everything I had just to sit up, but even then, the only part of me I had any real control over was my right arm. The dragon was so powerful that just holding me in its grasp had broken almost every bone in my body.
How did Usato manage to keep getting up after all of those attacks?
I’d been crushed and tossed into the manor like trash, but when I thought about how much more of a beating Usato had taken, I was once again reminded that the guy was anything but an ordinary human.
“And he even defeated the damned thing . . .” I uttered.
The ominous, overbearing presence of the dragon had disappeared just moments ago. I felt some relief at the fact that it was gone. I leaned back against the fractured wall. It was weird to feel relieved at having the ace up my sleeve annihilated, but I couldn’t deny that that’s how I felt. I was the idiot who brought that thing back to life. I was the idiot who put myself here in the position I was now, all broken and beaten up.
They’re coming here, I just know it. They’re coming to slay me. To slay the “monster.”
I chuckled at myself and the state I was in. In the end, I was no different from my parents, who had used humans as their personal toys and paid the price for it. I had used both the living and the dead to capture visitors and imprison them, only to erase their memories and let them go when I grew bored. I didn’t think I’d done anything that was too worthy of revenge, but all the same, it was along the same path that my parents had once walked themselves.
“I’m alone again, just like when it all started,” I muttered.
I wanted nothing more than to just disappear. Everything had gone to plan up until the dragon. I had just never expected the dragon to be so bloodthirsty, so cruel, and so hungry for destruction. I had severely underestimated it. I had assumed it was little more than a soulless corpse, abandoned for centuries.
It might sound like an excuse, but until then, I’d never seen or even heard of a corpse with a soul. Souls made their homes in living bodies. Souls were the life that moved them, and so bodies were their vessels. Without one, you could not have the other.
“Someone, somehow . . . they bound that dragon’s soul to this world,” I stated.
Ordinarily, such a thing was impossible, but it was the only possible answer. People had existed who could do such things. It was in the legend of the hero. With such incredible power, he had even sealed away the Demon Lord. If the record of the hero’s past was true, then sealing away a soul would not have been outside the realm of his abilities. But there was no way to confirm that anymore.
“Not that it makes any difference to me. Not anymore . . .” I muttered.
There was no point in thinking about someone who died hundreds of years ago. In the end, I’d been rash and thoughtless, and as a result, I’d nearly lost my village entirely. That was all that mattered.
“I’m worthless.”
As the words left my mouth, I recalled a long-forgotten memory from when I had been left here, in this manor, all on my own. I saw myself crying and afraid of being alone, having lost the parents I relied on for everything.
What will happen to the village if the girl known as Nea vanishes completely?
The thought flitted across my mind, and all I could do was laugh at myself. It made me sad, and it hurt, but still I had to laugh.
“How stupid,” I uttered.
Nea had never even really existed in the first place. If she vanished, nothing would happen. It was just like I’d said. I was worthless. Nobody needed me. There was no point in using the village any further or raising any of its dead—not when my own demise was the only thing waiting for me on the horizon.
That was when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I gulped as the sound echoed, growing closer. I couldn’t run, not in the state I was in. So instead, I wiped at my eyes with my one good arm, and I closed them to await my fate.