Даниил Зверков – The Last Queen Of Noctyra: Awakening Of Aronella (страница 3)

Bones cracked. Her joints answered with pain, dull and aching and ancient. Her skin was cold to the touch, almost icy. She ran a hand over her face—her fingers met dry, cracked lips and hollow cheeks.

She lowered her feet to the floor and paused, trying to decide whether she could feel the support beneath them.

The floor was solid. Stone. Cold.

Good. Then she truly existed. This was not a dream.

She tried to stand.

Her legs buckled. She hit her knees against the stone and let out a muffled groan. Pain flashed through her—sharp, burning—and it was almost a relief. Pain was real. Living. Then she truly was alive.

She rose again, this time using the edge of the sarcophagus for support.

Stand.

She stood.

Her body was slowly returning to life, but with each second she felt more clearly that something within her had changed. The thread that had always bound her to the world had thinned almost to nothing. The familiar whisper that had accompanied her for millennia was gone.

She listened inwardly—and found only a blank wall of silence.

For the first time in all her endless life.

She took one step. Then another.

Her legs obeyed poorly, but they obeyed. She moved with one hand against the wall, leaving damp traces on the stone. Ahead, in the darkness, she could make out a passage.

She had to get out.

Had to see.

Had to understand.

The passage led into a corridor. The same one she had once crossed hundreds of times—broad, high, with columns lining both sides.

Now it was only ruin. The walls were cracked, roots pushing through the stone. It smelled of dampness, rot, and something else—a faintly sweet odor of decay she did not remember from before.

She went on.

Toward what had once been the Hall of Houses.

The corridor opened into a vast space where the ceiling vanished somewhere high in the darkness, and the walls seemed to spread outward as if trying to support an invisible dome.

Once, the rulers of the five great houses had gathered here.

She remembered the hall differently.

Five thrones had stood along the walls—black stone, silver inlay, the sigils of blood carved so intricately into their backs that they seemed alive. In the center of the chamber had lain a stone circle for council, polished smooth by the knees of thousands of vampires who had come here over the centuries. Above, a great fresco had stretched across the ceiling—the Tree of Blood spreading its branches over all who entered.

Now the fresco lay on the floor.

Fragments of stone, mixed with dust and bones, covered the space where the thrones had once stood. Of the five seats, only wreckage remained—an armrest with traces of silver, a leg still half intact, a backrest split clean in two, the sigil of House Velkaris barely visible.

The stone circle was cracked. A deep fissure split straight through its center, dropping into darkness below, where damp cold drifted upward.

She stepped into the hall.

Her footsteps sounded dull, swallowed by dust and rubble. She moved slowly through the ruins, trying to recognize what she had once known by heart.

Here had stood the throne of House Tharoven. She remembered Velzen, the lord of that house—broad-shouldered, taciturn, with eyes the color of old steel. He had spoken rarely in council, but when he did, he was heard.

The throne was shattered. Not even bone remained of Velzen.

Further on—House Morvath. Those who had always watched from beneath lowered brows, who smiled differently from the others. She had never loved them, but she had acknowledged their strength.

Debris. Dust. Emptiness.

House Nocterys. Keepers of secrets, silent shadows who moved through corridors so soundlessly that their presence could be guessed only by the faint chill they left in the air.

Of their throne, only a single leg remained, marked with a fading crescent.

House Drakoryn. Ancient and proud, old enough to remember the years when vampires had only just learned to build. They had looked down on the rest—and had earned the right.

Everything was dust.

She stopped in the center of the chamber, where her own throne had once stood. It was gone entirely—nothing left but a mound of black shards strewn across the floor, as though someone had broken it apart over and over until it was no more than gravel.

She bent and picked up one fragment.

Smooth. Cold. Traced with the remnants of silver inlay. Once it had been part of an armrest. She ran her finger along its edge. It was sharp as a blade.

Thousands of years, she whispered.

Her voice sounded muffled, alien. She had not spoken in seven hundred years, and now the words felt like stones in her mouth, heavy and useless.

She opened her fingers. The shard fell, clinked against the stone, and vanished among the others.

She lifted her head toward the sky.

There was no ceiling. Only a low, heavy grey sky hanging over the ruins so close it felt as though she might touch the clouds.

The upper levels of the tower had collapsed. Where her chambers, the throne room, the gallery of the First Circle had once stood, there was now only emptiness. Broken walls thrust upward like the snapped bones of some vast beast, reminders of the grandeur that had once stood here.

She went to the edge of the drop—to where a balcony had once been.

And froze.

The city that had spread at the foot of the mountain was gone.

Where palaces and temples of vampire civilization had once stood, where a thousand lights had glowed on warm nights, where music had spilled from windows and laughter had crossed the squares, there was now only wasteland.

Stone ruins overgrown with moss and grass. Fragments of walls jutting from the earth like rotten teeth. The skeletons of towers half swallowed by sand and time.

Everything was dead.

She stared at it for a long time, unable to look away.

How long?

The thought came again, but now she already knew the answer. It was in every cell of her body, every stilled vessel, every crack in her soul.

A long time.

Too long.

She had seen empires born and buried. She had watched rivers change course and mountains become plains. But for her city, her home, her people to vanish as if they had never existed—

that she could not accept.

She closed her eyes.

And tried to do what she had always been able to do—to feel blood.

Not her own. The blood of her people. The ancient blood of vampires that had once filled this world, pulsing in every city, every family, every being created from her.

She reached into the void like a blind thing searching for light.

Nothing.