The Ruined Abbeys were a lonely sprawl of stone and shadow, the bones of faith long since surrendered to wind and ivy. The road here, a desolate vein of cracked cobbles, had been meant to bypass this place entirely. The Sanctum of Saint Odran lay ten days farther along by steam carriage, but Fredith Golf now stood, barely, at the altar of a church that had become a grave for saints and sinners alike.
The air was cold and heavy with damp, as though the abbey’s collapsed roof had allowed the sky to seep in. Shafts of wan light filtered through shattered rose windows, scattering across the nave like broken stained-glass prayers. Dust hung in the air, swirling around him in slow spirals. The scent of wet stone, blood, and long-extinguished incense clung to the ruined sanctuary.
Fredith dragged his ruined leg across the uneven floor, each step an effort that rattled through his ribs. His cassock, once black and dignified, hung in tatters, the sleeve torn and the collar darkened with blood. His red hair, usually braided in a neat coil, was now unbound and matted; strands clung to his sweat-slicked face. Deep gashes scored his arms and chest, and crimson dripped onto the stone, marking his path like a penitent’s confession.
He reached the altar, a slab of pale marble chipped and blackened by age, and half-collapsed against it. Above him, the great cross that had once crowned the abbey now sagged on its splintered beam, its top tilted toward the earth as though bowing in grief. Fredith let his forehead rest upon the cold stone of the altar, his breath coming in ragged bursts.
Father Calvus’ face lingered behind his eyelids. Only hours had passed, yet the memory felt carved into eternity: the village square choked with ash and screams, the smell of iron and smoke, Father Calvus’ blood—red as any mortal’s—spilling across the cracked bricks. Fredith had knelt beside him, hands slick, whispering prayers too frantic to be coherent. In that moment, the old priest had clutched his sleeve with fingers trembling and wet.
“Run—,” he had rasped, lips pale, voice a tremor of faith and pain. “Live to pray another day.”
Fredith had obeyed, and now shame burned hotter than his wounds.
Tears blurred his vision. He saw himself as a failure, a broken shepherd of the faithful and a useless sword of the Church. He had not finished the exorcism. He had not saved Father Calvus. Even now, the memory of what they faced chilled him: not two spirits, as the Bishop’s report had claimed, but twenty, and not minor ones but monstrous, their strength swollen by some ancient forbidden rite.
His fingers found the rosary at his throat—a string of beads slick with his own blood. He gripped it hard, the crucifix biting his palm. His shoulders trembled with each breath; he could not tell if it was pain or cold, guilt or grief.
Closing his eyes, he summoned what little voice he had left. “Lord,” he whispered, the sound rough as gravel. “Guide me, Your servant Fredith Golf. I feel helpless… grant me the strength to carry Your will, even if I must fall here.”
The prayer bled out of him, and with it went the last of his strength. His head lolled against the altar, the rosary slipping from his hand; the beads scattered across the blood-flecked stone like fallen tears.
He did not see the movement in the shadows.
Beyond the altar’s broken pillars, a figure stirred, a shape half-hidden and veiled by the ruin’s gloom. Its voice was soft yet rich, like velvet draped over steel, echoing through the hollow nave as though the stones themselves had found speech.
“Fredith Golf,” it murmured, twisting his words as a blacksmith twists iron. “I will guide you, helpless as you are. Give me your strength, and I shall carry you when you fall here.”
The sound slithered through the silence, almost a caress, almost a promise.
Fredith, unconscious, did not hear it. His body sagged fully against the altar, a lone figure beneath the crooked cross, while something unseen watched with patient, hungry eyes.
***
How many centuries had it been since the curse? Mylo could not be bothered to count anymore. Numbers blurred together, as meaningless as the withered bones he had stepped over through countless ruined lands. Yet the memory of that night still pulsed sharp within him, like a thorn buried too deep to be removed. The girl’s lifeless body, the warm bloom of her blood drying against his lips, and the wrinkled old woman who had appeared as if born from the shadows themselves. Her eyes had burned brighter than fire, her words like molten chains that wrapped around his very being.
He had laughed then—mocked her with that sharp, cruel grin of his. He remembered the snap of her neck beneath his fingers, remembered tossing her body to his pet beasts and hearing the crunch of old bones beneath ravenous jaws. How foolish she must have been to curse him, Mylo Spegill, one of the elite vampires who had long since grown immune to holy water, silver, and sanctified relics.
But her curse had lingered.
The blood of mortals, no matter how ripe, turned to ash on his tongue. The faithful, the very essence of what was once sweetest to him, now lay forever out of reach unless he drank them by proxy—never directly, never without trickery. He had endured centuries in such torment, an eternity gnawed by hunger and fury.
Tonight, the hunger led him here.
From above, through the pallid sweep of clouds, he had spotted the shape of a church ruined in a ghost town. Like a carcass of a forgotten saint, it stood crooked in the moonlight, its half-collapsed ceiling open to the stars. Mylo’s wings cut through the air with the fluid ease of centuries of practice, and with a final beat he descended, his bat form shifting mid-flight.
Bones elongated, flesh molded, cloth unraveled and reshaped. By the time his boots struck the cracked stone floor, he had already smoothed his laced gloves, his rings catching a cold glint of moonlight. A long fall of pale blue hair cascaded around his headdress, framing a face too beautiful to be mortal. The crimson of his suit, striped with ivory down the sleeves, shimmered with threads that seemed woven from old blood itself. The gold crosses he wore gleamed faintly beneath the shadowed ruins.
The church’s breath was one of desolation. Broken pews lay on their sides like fallen soldiers. The grand altar cross, snapped at its base, sagged forward as if in mourning, its tip nearly touching the dust-strewn floor. Stained glass lay shattered into dull jewels across the nave, their once-sacred light long extinguished. Cobwebs stretched like veils from stone to beam, as though the air itself had woven shrouds for the dead.
For five days, Mylo prowled the hollow town. Silence met him at every corner. Houses were gutted shells, markets nothing but piles of collapsed timber. Skeletons rested in their last poses of fear or prayer, yet no living humans stirred. His hunger gnawed, whispering and scratching at him from within.
And then he smelled it.
Blood.
Fresh. Close.
The scent struck him like a blow, flooding his senses. His fangs slid longer with an audible click, his hands trembled with the fever of anticipation. The last time he had tasted was weeks ago, when he’d tricked an orphan girl into a dance of shadows. That memory still haunted his tongue.
He stalked toward the altar again, every step silent as mist.
From behind a crumbling pillar, he watched.
The figure approaching was no knight nor soldier, yet he bore the look of a man who had walked through battle’s maw. His cassock was torn and blackened by soot, its embroidered cross half-burned away. Blood seeped from his leg, staining the fabric until it clung heavy and wet. His face was pale, lips cracked, but his hand clutched a rosary as though it were his final anchor.
“A priest,” Mylo whispered, amusement curling his lips upward. His voice was little more than a purr in the silence. “Oh, what luck the heavens send me.”
The priest staggered forward, dragging his wounded leg until he reached the broken altar. There, he collapsed to one knee. The beads of the rosary rattled faintly as his trembling hands clasped them tight. His eyes shut, brows furrowed—not in despair, but in stubborn prayer.
Mylo lingered behind the pillar, crimson eyes narrowing with something between hunger and fascination. His smile widened.
The words came soft, strained, carried on the priest’s weak breath:
“Lord… guide me, your servant Fredith Golf. I feel helpless… grant me the strength to carry Your will, even if I must fall here.”
Mylo’s grin split into sharp delight. His tongue ran over one fang as if savoring the flavor already.
“Fredith Golf…” he echoed, tasting the name. He let the priest’s prayer unravel into his own whisper, voice twined with dark silk. “I will guide you, helpless as you are. Give me your strength, and I shall carry you when you fall here.”
The prayer twisted like smoke. The priest’s body quivered, his grip loosening on the rosary. Then, with a hollow sigh, he collapsed fully, consciousness fleeing.
That was all the invitation Mylo required.
He stepped from behind the pillar with the unhurried grace of a predator who already knows the kill is his. The heels of his shoes clicked softly on stone. He knelt beside the fallen man, studying him. This priest was young, younger than most of those dour-faced clerics he had known. Beneath the filth and exhaustion, his features held a certain fragile beauty, almost angelic in their symmetry.
Mylo extended a gloved hand, brushing his fingers against a cut on the priest’s cheek. The warmth of the blood was faint but alive, pulsing weakly beneath his touch. His smile widened, then broke into laughter—a soft, rich sound echoing too loud in the dead church.
Leaning close, he let his breath fan against Fredith’s ear.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered, voice dripping with mock tenderness. “I won’t kill you. You’re far too perfect to be wasted.”
The ruin listened.
Wind had learned to crawl through it in soft, patient ways, under the splintered doors, along ribs of beam and truss, through the cracked throat of the bell tower where a bell once hung and thundered. Moonlight fell through a hundred broken panes of stained glass, their saints and martyrs reduced to jewel-toned shards that threw fractured blessings across the nave. Dust lifted and settled with each breath the place remembered to take.
Mylo stood in the center aisle, a figure in red among the ash-gray bones of the church. The long tails of his coat trailed the floor like strokes of fresh lacquer, sweeping thin crescents in the powdery grime. He paused where the sconce of a pillar had toppled and left its iron shadow on the tile. At his feet lay the young priest, betrayed by linen and blood.
Fredith’s cassock was ripped where claws or knives had been careless. A dark stain flowered close to the ribs, sticky and slow. The skin beneath was paler than wax, yet heat still moved there, faint and mortal, like an ember choked by ash.
Mylo’s gloved hand hovered above that warmth without quite daring to rest. It had been a long time since simple breath and simple pulse had been within reach. He felt the old ache flex inside him, the hunger he wore like a quiet ring beneath his ribs. He steadied it; patience was a blade he knew how to use.
A small sound, plaster settling or stone sighing, clicked through the nave. He turned his head, listening past it. No footsteps, no whisper of wings, only ruins and their loneliness. The silver crosses at his throat caught a sliver of moonlight and made cold, clean points of light against the blood-dark lapel.
He rose soundlessly.
The dust accepted him without argument as he stepped back and made space around the body, drawing the room’s attention into a cleared circle. He lifted one hand, palm open to the floor. The air trembled, then stilled, as if the church thought better of breathing while he worked.
Mylo lowered his hand, palm open to the cracked tiles. From his fingertips, shadows bled outward like dark ink through water, finding the seams between stones and curling into deliberate arcs. The lines met and joined, weaving themselves into a circle that breathed with faint light.
A bluish shimmer rose from the pattern, deepening to the hue of moonlight trapped beneath a frozen lake. Symbols flickered where the arcs crossed, alive for an instant before sinking into stillness. The air thickened; even the wind outside seemed to hold its breath. The church began to hum softly, its old bones aware that a name older than prayer was being spoken again.
Mylo stepped into the circle and crouched beside Fredith once more, strands of pale hair slipping over his shoulder to brush the priest’s face. He inhaled once, wholly. When he opened his eyes, the red there did not merely catch light; it returned it, deeper, like wine held to a window at dusk.
His mouth shaped three small doors.
“By shadow, bind.
By blood, claim.
By breath, entwine.”
The syllables went out as ripples over still water, and wherever they passed, the glow sharpened. The outer rim of the circle beat softly, one slow pulse, then another. From the lace of the sigils, a silver mist uncoiled and climbed, thin and tender, wrapping Fredith’s limbs, his throat, the narrow rise of his chest. It looked like smoke and behaved like silk.
Fredith’s fingers twitched, the movement skipping up through tendon and sleeve. His mouth parted, a thin gasp met the air and returned to him, surprised to find itself.
Mylo watched with the stillness of statues, a calm that was not mercy but craft. The hunger in his hands trembled and he stilled it by a small effort, thumb and forefinger pressed together. His right hand lifted and hovered above the priest’s heart.
The ring answered his distance. Energy gathered at that one point, as if the room had learned a trick of focus. Heat chimed through the air without flame. Fredith’s back arched a fraction; blue fire, no more than a bruise of light, ran along the veins beneath his throat.
His breath came quick then, shallow and uneven, as if it needed to rush before someone could forbid it.
Mylo’s gaze softened in a way that meant nothing kind. It was the regard of a man who has commissioned a portrait and finds, at last, the mouth nearly right. He adjusted his hand the slightest degree, and the circle obeyed.
A final rotation shivered through the sigils. Their light thinned, tightened, and sank. Symbols collapsed into thread, and thread found a needle, and a thousand needles found their one cloth. They pierced the priest without blood or bruise and vanished into him like rain into thirsty ground. For a moment the floor kept a memory of them, scorched veins sketching outward, mapping the place where an absence had been filled, then even that faded.
Silence returned, clean as bone.
Fredith lay quiet in it. The rise and fall of his chest steadied into small, sharp tremors, like a bird bringing its wings back under command. A dust mote drifted through a bar of moonlight and struck one of the tiny glass saints, spilling a cut of color onto the young man’s brow.
Mylo lifted his hand. The circle was gone. The cold had teeth again. Yet the room did not feel empty; it felt populated by an agreement the stones themselves understood.