“Open the cage,” Imara said, her voice flat, not loud—but it carried.

The merchant hesitated, licking his lips. “Doctor Vex, that one—she’s not… quite docile. She hasn’t fed in weeks. She—”

Imara turned her head, slowly.

A pause. The kind of pause that made men remember their mortality.

Keys clattered. The lock creaked open.

Imara stepped inside.

The stillness within the cage was a different kind of silence. One that pressed against the ribcage and whispered beneath the skin. The temperature dropped. Coldness leached from the bound figure on the floor—not magical, just… wrong. Stagnant.

She drew closer, boots crunching on bone dust and flakes of old parchment warding. From afar, the vampire had seemed ethereal. Untouched. But here, so near—

The stench hit her.

It was rot. Not of the dead, but of the dying undead. A corpse suspended in time without the blood to sustain it. The skin near the shackles had blistered and cracked, blackened with sun-wrought runes that hissed like coals pressed into a snowbank. Around her wrists and ankles, the flesh had split, pulsing with slow decay.

Imara frowned.

"Sloppy craftsmanship," she muttered.

Lifting her hand, she let her fingers splay, and the air pulsed with heatless power. Her eyes shifted hue—blue laced with the green phosphorescence of the aether beyond the veil. From her palm surged a ripple of grey-gold, a soft vibration that made the iron bindings whimper.

Entropic Pulse.

The chains aged a century in seconds.

Iron groaned. Runes flared once, then died with a final crackle. Rust fell in flakes to the floor, and with it, the bindings collapsed. The vampire’s limbs slumped free.

Outside the cage, voices rose in alarm.

“She’s freeing it—”

“Stop her! She’s—”

Imara turned coolly. She crossed her arms and raised an arched eyebrow at the merchants outside, immediately stilling their frenzy. Dr. Vex was known to be a powerful Necromancy user, so that alone caused reason to be afraid of her, but doubts arose in the crowd that began to cluster around the cage - could she stand up to a beast like the Vampire Queen?

Imara narrowed her eyes, and all muttering ceased; however, the world seemed to become cold all of a sudden as her attention had turned away from the beast she had just freed.

The torch beside her guttered out, snuffed as if by fear itself.

Silence fell. No one moved.

Then, a sound.

A low, guttural breath.

Imara turned back just in time to see movement—swift and sudden.

The vampire stirred.

No flicker of slow awakening, no bleary-eyed flutter. Her head snapped up as though pulled by a string of vengeance, and her eyes—no longer closed—were alive with crimson fire.

Imara inhaled sharply.

They were not the eyes of prey.

They were the eyes of a Queen.

With predatory grace, the vampire rose—inch by inch, until she stood towering over the necromancer, body still trembling from starvation, but spine straight as a blade. Muscles flexed beneath parchment-thin skin. Bloodless lips parted, not to breathe, but to speak—

Yet she said nothing.

She only looked down.

And Imara, for the first time in years, tilted her chin up and found herself measured.

She was not afraid.