Interlude

The ancient vampire had lain in the lead-lined stone crypt and slept in a deep dream for over three thousand years. It knew of events from the world above in its dreams. It was able to do this thanks to the gem fragments of the stone he had collected on orders from his master long ages before. Over time the fragments grew ever smaller and were spread further abroad around the world. With the sudden and unexpected rise of the Blood Queen, he received four complete souls in just a few hours time. With the influx of life energy without any warning he awoke fully for the first in ages. This world had so little magic of the order he was used to when compared to his home realm that he could barely function in his current state even with the new energy. He would have to guide and push this being, a woman no less, to be brutal and willing to kill as many as needed for him to make ready his escape from this world. In his dreams, one holder of a gem fragment had traveled to the Star Walk and left Gardallen with it. That shard was lost to him for all time.

Being awake now he was able to recall his mission. He had been sent to the Third Ring of the Nine Hells to recover a fragment from the Staff of Truth. The staff had been slightly damaged during a battle against a powerful Demon from the abyss. This shard would allow his master to spread his influence further outside his home realm of Bloodhaven. He ruled with absolute power in Bloodhaven, but he wanted more land, more slaves, more blood to feed on. With the gem he could rule over all his kind, no matter where they hid themselves.

He obtained the fragment of the staff with little difficulty. It was when he tried to return to the portal that would send him home he found a party of Bounty Hunters had been dispatched to wrest the gem from him. They had been hired by the Lord of the Nine Hells to recover the gem shard before it could be taken to Bloodhaven. This party of mortal and demi-mortals strangely enough were not evil, nor even overly greedy for their kind. The Lord of Evil had made it a straight cash job and they took it as work had been scarce in recent months. The ending of several major conflicts had seen to that. It was when the adventure group caught up to the Vampire agent as he was opening a portal back to his home realm that things went badly wrong for all of them.

The groups wizards and mages had attempted a cancellation spell on the portal just as he entered it. This caused it to lose its destination focus. Fortunately this sort of spell has many protective fail-safes built into it. Instead of being cast adrift to quickly die in the vacuum between worlds, the portal locked onto the first livable world it could find. So instead of exiting at the portal base in the castle, he was in an open field on a world that could barely support his life energy requirements. He quickly ran to a nearby fortress he could see on a nearby ridgeline. His flight spell had failed to even try to engage. He hoped the fortress on a ridge line could provide him with shelter until he could set up a new portal to his home with his prize. He felt a pull behind and knew immediately the party had followed him here as well. “Foolish mortals,” he thought out loud. “They will be hurting worse than me here.” He thought of another escape option and tried to find a landing dock for a Star Sailor. Nothing. Not a trace of the magic could be found of that slow but reliable form of transport between worlds. “What kind of world is this then?” He wondered. “Is it so far out or of so little notice that even the Star Sails had ignored it?”

It took close to an hour by his body’s clock to reach the summit and the gates. He could tell from the distance this world’s stars had moved, their day was longer. The residents of the castle posed little threat to him and seemed surprised by his presence. That is when he reached out to this world’s equivalent of the Vampire race. He found no trace at all of his kind on this world. This he found truly disturbing as his kind tended to be on every human-inhabited world known to date. He stepped into the first shadow along a stone wall he came to and vanished into it. As he moved through the fortress, he felt the strong presence of humans with enough life energy and blood to sustain him for sometime. He slid along the shadow in one corridor and into a room he felt one of them in. The human was a young woman, just entering her full bloom of womanhood. She felt him as he entered the room as a chill ran up and down her spine and spun towards the door to see who had entered. She didn’t see him at first but could feel his air- cooling presence.

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