After I had fed, I returned to the crater where the Fetid Prince still stood. He resumed his story as if I had never left, for though his body stood before me, I could see in the reflections of his eyes that his mind was somewhere far away, somewhere long, long ago. Those that remained loyal to the Uretim were brought before Merinth and again given a chance to renounce the old ways. When they refused, they were flayed
alive. Then the drowned girl brought forth chains, dripping with curses, and the loyalists were bound in them to be buried while they were still breathing. And so a new priesthood was formed from the ruin of the Uretim. They were called the Sefamites. After the city in which their first temple was founded, and they were given their new doctrine. No longer must they venerate the Ureti. No longer must they shave all hair, bathe thrice daily, or master all poisons.
Only one thing was to be held sacred, the will of Allalmawt, and that would be conveyed to the Sephimites through Merinth, who received it from the drowned girl. Knowing that she could not hope to face El’Sabayoth’s champion in direct combat, Merinth began to weave a more subtle plot. Having gained the complete trust of King Narm, she stole into his bath chamber and offered him a toast to the victory over Sebeth that she had
foreseen. When the king was found face down in his bath the following morning, Merinth claimed that he was poisoned in a conspiracy to usurp the throne. She named those most loyal to the king as conspirators and had them sacrificed to Allalmawt by the Sephimites, who now controlled most of the city. With none left to oppose her within Sephim, Merinth then declared herself its queen. She ordered the head of King Narm to be delivered to the city of Sebeth, along with a message of surrender.
Then the Burning One led his army to the gates of Sephim, and the people opened them without question at the order of their queen. The occupying force was welcomed and offered a great feast, with the Burning One as the guest of honor. The armies of Sebeth were skeptical, but upon seeing the people of Sephim eating and drinking, eventually joined in the feast. That night, Queen Merinth invited the Burning One, who had usurped the king of Sebeth, to her royal bedchamber to discuss the surrender.
The Burning One was without fear, knowing his strength far outmatched the servants of Allalmawt, and boldly entered the bedchamber. But Merinth was as cunning as she was beautiful. She seduced El’Sabayoth’s chosen, and as she lay with him upon the bed of the king she had murdered, the poison of the feast began to burn in the veins of
those who partook of it. The people of Sephim and the armies of Sebeth alike sputtered and gurgled, writhing in agony until the city streets were filled with the dead. The poison had no effect on the Burning One, nor Merinth, as their bodies were elevated by their Ancients, but the dagger beneath the pillow was another matter. Its blade had been blessed by Allalmawt and delivered to Merinth for the task that was now at hand. She plunged the death-touched dagger between the Burning One’s ribs,
piercing his heart. As the lifeblood of the demigod sprang forth, she placed a golden chalice to his chest, catching what she could of it and drinking deeply. Her own blood began to boil as it mixed with that of the Burning One, and she fell, seizing as the divine essence flowed through her. The Sephimites burst into the chamber, praying to Allalmawt to save their queen, and the body of the Burning One burst into flames.
Some flung themselves into the fires in an attempt to rescue their queen and were consumed. Others fled outside the palace walls. Those that survived watched in despair as the palace was utterly consumed in the blaze, but then they witnessed a single figure emerge on the balcony. Merinth stood alone, skin as pale as the moon, with the crimson of her conquest still upon her lips. With a wave of her hand, the fires of the palace were stifled.
With another gesture, the bodies of the poisoned rose, no longer blinded by the conflict between city-states, but unified in their devotion to the Queen of the Dead. The essence of El’Sabayoth had mingled with her own, granting her tremendous power, but it came at a terrible price. She could feel the divine blood burning inside, consuming every drop of her own, draining her life away. In order to stave off an agonizing death,
her blood had to be replenished. The Sephimites brought pigs and cattle before their queen, who drank their blood at first from her golden chalice, but night after night her thirst deepened, until she sank to her knees and slurped greedily from their throats. Soon, Merinth's need for blood was such that entire villages were captured for her consumption.
She would hang her still-living victims upside down and slit their throats so that their blood poured down to fill her bath, but it was not enough. No matter how much she consumed, she could not sate the burning thirst within. Instead, it grew stronger, requiring greater and greater quantities of blood for just one more night of existence. And as the thirst deepened, so did her power. The world seemed to slow down for
Merinth. Rain hung motionless, like curtains of silver, and lightning wound across the sky like vines across stone. With a mere glance into another's eyes, she could command them, as those that came to depose her discovered in their final moments, kneeling at her feet. Pressed by endless bloodthirst to the verge of madness, Merinth cried out to Allalmawt for salvation in oblivion, and plunged the death-touched dagger into her own heart. But the ancient had motives of its own.
The prayer for death was answered, but there was no salvation. The essence of Alolmat seeped from the dagger's blade into her soul. Though her flesh lay cold and dead, her soul was forever bound to it, and her blood still pulsed with divine fire. To her horror, Merinth found that the thirst was neither ended nor weakened by
death. Her cries of rage swept across her kingdom, but once more Allalmawt began to whisper, and in the flurry of thoughts Merinth was promised a way to relieve the thirst, if she would heed the call. She marched her undead armies on a path of carnage along the Ureti, slaughtering and feeding upon any she could find. Many tribes and armies rose to vanquish her, but all were crushed under her dark
power. The sight of Merinth upon the battlefield, soaked red in the blood of the fallen, began to inspire terror across Temek. Tales began to spread of the Red Lady, she who was as beautiful as she was merciless, she who commanded the dead and devoured the living. And when so many thousands of souls had been severed from their bodies, Allalmawt delivered upon its promise. The drowned girl appeared and said that Merinth’s blood had been kindled by a spark of the All-Fire.
This divine essence, both empowered and devoured anything it touched, the thirst could never be cured, but it could be diluted. By allowing another who stood at the brink of death to drink her blood, the curse would be dispersed between the two of them. its strength reduced in each for a time. And so she returned to the city of Sephim and called the Sephimites to her. The twelve highest among them drew their ceremonial daggers, spilling their own blood on the temple stones.
And when they lay near to death, Merinth fed them of her blood, and though her powers were weakened, so too was the burning agony of the thirst. The essences of three Ancients were now intermingled and transferred as one, and so the dark gift, the blood curse, was passed to the Sephimites. Their mortal bodies could not endure the maelstrom of eldritch powers that roiled within the blood.
Each one of them died as they drank, but the power within animated their dead flesh, preserving it for eternity, so long as they should feed the burning thirst. In time, Merinth’s thirst would grow unbearable once more, but she now possessed the knowledge to relieve it. When the need became too much to bear, she could pass the blood curse to
another. And so she did, year after year, until her vampiric priesthood occupied every city left standing in the land of Temek, so that even those unconquered by her armies still bowed before her, and the reach of the Red Lady was absolute within the garden of many rivers. The jewels of the Ureti she held in her hand as five rings and wielded their resources to construct a skeletal temple as a monument to the Ancient of Death.
And through the Pale Temple of Allalmawt was a rift opened to the realm of the dead, and from its depths the banshees came forth to commune with the Queen of the Dead, of which the drowned girl was one. They passed on secrets of great stones hidden beneath Malorum that could open the way to distant lands. They guided Merinth to these Way Stones
and taught her how to open them. So, Merinth opened the ways, and her armies passed into foreign lands, conquering their peoples and plundering their wealth. The Temekian Empire became the dominant force on the continent of Isoth and reigned uncontested for five thousand years. Any who refused the worship of Allalmawt were hung in the Red Lady’s palace to fill her baths with blood, and their dying voices cried out to their god, a shrieking chorus of blood-drowned gurgles.
From the throne of the sun, El’sabayoth gazed upon Merinth’s treachery. The Ancient of Divine Fire poured its scorn upon those whose veins pulsed with its stolen essence, and vampires were weakened under the light of the sun. Then, one by one, Temekian territories were reclaimed by mortal resistance as the living learned to attack only by day.
Though Merinth had grown mighty on the blood of the living, she too was weakened by sunlight, and her empire spanned too far to defend every border at once. She returned to the Pale Temple of Allalmawt and prayed to the Ancient of Death for counsel. As she knelt before the rift between worlds, the drowned girl came forth. She spoke of a blackened sun and a day the dead would rise to strike down the followers of El’Sabayoth as a tide of rotting flesh.
The drowned girl told Merinth that she must attempt to reach the continent of Atan. This could not be done by sailing west, as the mists of the Nameless Sea would strip from her all knowledge, but it could be attempted by embarking from Isoth’s eastern shores. In truth, it was not to the shores of Atan that Allalmawt sent his ascendant, but the Sea of Rage that lay between the continents. In that sea were many islands of jagged stone, and in those broken spires roosted dragons.
Merinth tried crossing by ship, only to be nearly destroyed along with her vessel in a torrent of dragon's breath. It poured from the mighty guardian's mouth as a stream of white, and where it struck the ship the boards unbound themselves, reforming into trunks and branches and leaves. It was not a ship that sank in the Sea of Rage that day, but the trees which had been cut down to build it. Merinth drifted to one of the spire islands as mist and reformed herself, but the dragon
pursued her. It knew of the trickery of changing forms through mist, the sorcery of the Nameless God which Merinth had borne from Atan as an infant. For days and nights the dragon hunted Merinth through the broken mountains of its island. Yet though she tried many times to face her foe, she could do it no harm, for whatever wound she laid upon it was undone by the dragon's power. All dragons are beings of immense
magickal energy. As such, they draw the flow of magick to them, even as eggs, and they are shaped in their eggs by whichever aspect flows through them. The dragon that pursued Merinth was aligned to the temporal aspect. He was X'lalox, a prince among dragons, and his breath turned the stone that it struck to molten rivers, not by heat, but by pushing it back through time. Had Merinth been any other vampire, X'lalox would have vanquished her, but Allalmawt intervened.
From the many shadows of the island, the shattered spirits of the Uretim came forth. They were hollow horrors, cloaked in darkness, in robes of serpentine form that melded with the shadows. Their cursed chains bound their fragmented souls between realms, existing only partly in each. And with those chains they lashed
themselves to X'lalox. The dragon roared out streams of temporal power, but the Uretim wraiths flickered in and out of being, vanishing from the path of the breath and reappearing elsewhere in the same instant. Then, gazing into the future, X'lalox split his breath so that it struck both where the wraiths were and where they would be. Those that were touched by the breath were locked in time, and to this day their shadows linger on that island, unmoving.
The wraiths called out to Merinth then, demanding that she strike, and so she moved in a blur while the dragon faced the Uretim, stabbing through his hide with her death-touched dagger. But this time, when X'lalox tried to pull himself back through time to undo his wounds, a part of the wraiths that were still bound to him was pulled back with him.
Each of these wraiths experienced the horror of their deaths again, and through their cursed chains this horror was shared with X'lalox, who fell in bloody ruin upon the rocks. Merinth approached the fallen guardian and saw herself reflected in his eyes like pools of silver, not as she was, but as she had been, an infant on a blackened boat. As X'lalox lay dying, she forced open his mouth and stepped inside, pilling her own blood, pouring the curse out.
And so the dark gift was given to X'lalox, overwhelming the temporal aspect with the necrotic. His immortal life was sundered in immortal death, and by the powers inherited from Merinth his form gave way to blackened mist, and he emerged in the guise of man to be known thereafter as the Fetid Prince. This pleased Allalmawt, who intended even then that I should become his ascendant.
Now beholden to the Ancient of Death, I returned with Merinth to the continent of Isoth and brought my wrath to bear upon her foes. She sought my counsel on the continent of Atan, and though I had never flown its skies, I knew of a Way Stone that linked it to Isoth. Beneath an ancient pool at the summit of Mt. Manubaku, the source of the Ureti, this Way Stone lay hidden. But unlike those that led to other worlds, this Way Stone was not opened by the sky.
Its key was blood. So Merinth gathered a sacrifice of mortals from her lands and took them to the summit. Yet though her moldering warriors opened the throats of three hundred mortals and cast them into the pool, its waters washed away their blood before it could reach the Way Stone below. There weren’t enough mortals in all the kingdoms of Isoth to provide the key to the stone, but Merinth would not be
denied. She gathered all the arcane tomes and mystic scrolls that had been raided from other lands and locked herself in the Pale Temple for seven days and seven nights, taking no blood. When she emerged, Merinth’s eyes were wild with hunger and purpose, but she did not feed. Instead, she took the form of mist, and from this mist came forth many bats that flew to the frosted peak of Manubaku. There, she cast off her winged form and stood as the Queen of the Dead once more.
She beheld the moon, ripe and swollen with ivory light, and she began to sway on her feet to some unheard rhythm. She rocked and hummed to herself, until her rocking became a spinning dance, and her humming rose to chants that echoed from the mountain top. In her dance, she tore into her flesh with her claws and her body glistened with her own blood. The Red Lady whirled and flung her blood against the snow in swirling runes that were set aglow as she named them in song.
And as she carved the final sign upon her flesh, the sign of Allalmawt, so too was it carved into the face of the moon. The night was made crimson then as the gash of Allalmawt on the moon poured blood, and the frosted peak of Manubaku shone as a jagged fang, reddened under the light of the first Blood Moon. Its power permeated Malorum, and Merinth channeled it through her spell.
The source of the Ureti was transmuted into blood, and soon the sacred river of Temek, the source of its wealth and power, flowed as a gaping wound toward the Nameless Sea. The stone below drank deeply, and the way was opened, Merinth stepped into the blood, felt the pull of the current from the open stone, and let herself be swept away, into the land of Atan.
Now, every year on the day this spell was cast, the moon still bleeds, but the Red Lady has never returned Now the prince fell silent, and his eyes reflected nothing but blood. I too was silent, reeling with a sense of my insignificance in the vastness of history, or even the insignificance of Thacea. There was too much of this story to process at that moment, but one thing stood out to me above all others. If a spell could be made to open that Way Stone before, it could be done again.
Only on the Blood Moon, and only by an incredibly powerful caster. Amarax? The time and resources it would take for me to replicate that spell would detract from our war, Then what about you? You're a being of great magickal power, I asked the prince. It is not the will of Allalmawt that we travel to Atan… yet, One war at a time. Then what is the will of Allalmawt? That we oppose the awakened. For now, that is enough. And if we do this, would we be granted the right to open that Way Stone?
Even if the thirst could be stopped, even if the answer lay in Atan, the Red Lady has yet to return. What makes you think you would? I may not, but in a way I am her descendant. It is her bloodline that has empowered me to take vengeance against the Awakened, and for that, something is owed. And what of the one that turned you? What do you owe him? I never knew him. The Ashen Templar subdued him and an inquisitor extracted a sample of his blood that was delivered to
me. I fed it in my lab, grew it, and ultimately injected it at the hour of my death. The Ashen Templar subdued him? The terrible grin of many fangs spread across the prince's face. Or is that what the Thaceans were allowed to believe? I tried to recall the day the delivery reached my lab. The words of the report. It seems so far away. What are you saying? Look closely. The fetid prince said, tapping the claws of his middle and index fingers underneath his eyes.
I stepped forward, gazing into eyes that reflected me in pools of silver, and there I saw the Fetid Prince reflected back through silver pools of my own, not as he was then, but as he had been those years ago, lying as if dead before the templar, allowing the inquisitor draw his blood. - Alaric the Damned.