During his long life, Niran had changed hundreds of names, nicknames, and passports, but the first name his father had given him was tattooed on the forearm of his left hand in the ancient language of vampires. When people asked him the meaning of the hieroglyphs, he either remained silent or made up stories about protective runes. They usually laughed and called him superstitious. At such moments, Niran looked at them with a long, unblinking stare until the jerks' smiles turned into a mask of fear and incomprehension. He had lived one thousand eight hundred and seventeen years and he’d forgotten what it was like to be naive even before the formation of Thailand as a state. The fear of other people's opinions and sidelong glances had been lost there too. In so many years the last vestiges of human feeling had disappeared from his heart and it had turned to stone, especially after his first hunt. Nowadays it's not such a problem to get blood. But in ancient times, their clan was involved in all kinds of clashes, conflicts, travelled a lot. No one dared call him superstitious when he was part of the force that spawned an uncountable number of legends.
Niran. His name means "eternity." An absurd name for a mortal vampire. The average lifespan of a vampire was around seven hundred years, after which their body began to age rapidly and crumble into dust. Those who crossed the seven-century mark became the chosen ones. There used to be three hundred of them worldwide. There is no one left by now… except for Niran. It is their duty to the race in their clans to fulfil their destiny and take up the throne of the Vampire King. Humans were not as fool as many of his tribesmen suggested. Most people didn’t believe they existed, but the few fanatics began to hunt them down. Of course, Niran wasn't afraid of sunlight, garlic, or crosses as it`s portrayed in movies. But he can be killed by ripping his head off or stabbing him in the chest with an aspen stake. He was only slightly tougher than the average human. However, he was immune to disease, recovered many times faster, and, of course, did not age.
The fate of the vampire is not as favourable as it may seem at first glance from the outside. Over the years, their hearts that didn't beat ceased to feel much of anything, except the ever-present hunger. Feeding required the life of a human. Completely draining someone`s blood fed them for no more than seven days. By the fifth day, they were already feeling thirsty again. Niran was exhausted of it. Feeding turned vampires into natural addicts. Only the thought of the next hunt encouraged him to jump down from the roof. In the modern world, they had to hunt in the poorest countries, constantly changing locations. Nowadays Niran was negotiating a blood buyback from the local hospitals for large sums of money. He had saved up enough through the years for another eternal life. As the chosen one, he didn’t know when his time would come. All those like him have died violently. He's been hiding in the tropics for almost two hundred years. Old books still referenced a "Thai vampire" lingering in the jungles south of Bangladesh.
"Such idiots."
Niran stood shirtless in front of a metal basin filled with ice-cold water and stared at his reflection. No, washing his face didn't cheer him up at all. He was passed out in bed like a light bulb and woke up exactly seven hours later or when danger approached. Regardless, drowsiness was not familiar feeling to him, as were dreams with their colorful images. For the last hundred years, he'd become accustomed to Thai culture - more precisely the self-maintenance. Although he didn’t sweat, and his skin didn’t shine from natural secretions, but washing his face had become part of a daily ritual.
He scooped up the water, leaning slightly forward. The muscles beneath his paper-pale skin began to tense and roll. He enjoyed physical activity. In the past, his survival often depended on it. Now, if he'd been starving for over a month, the ribs were showing through on his torso and the vertebrae could be counted. Niran accidentally wet his wavy black hair, forgetting to tie it into a short ponytail at the back of his head. He grabbed a white towel and wiped his face. His indifferent gaze examined over than the thousand years old beauty in the reflection. Nothing new. But today, things were about to change.
Niran stood in the small room only in the black trousers with an unbuckled belt. The space around him was so tiny he could cross from one wall to another in three full steps. A table and a futon without a blanket comprised his sparse furnishings. The free space around him was filled with incense burners emitting the scent of jasmine. No, Niran didn’t worship any gods, he just liked the smell. He had traveled so much he couldn`t say exactly which religion or philosophy was resonated with him. As an immortal being, he could hardly argue about the presence or absence of higher powers. Vampires didn’t believe in an afterlife. Death was not something to fear at the end of a long journey on earth, it was something to look forward to.
He slowly fastened his belt, clearing his mind of distractions. This was an important point of the ritual to summon the Marked one. Niran had waited too long, sacrificed too many people.
The vampire priestess was a rare phenomenon, almost as rare as the Marked one. She could be found by scent by the Chosen one and willingly or forcibly made to seek out his Marked one. The Marked Ones were humans born with a special type of blood. On the night when the planets and stars aligned properly, a vampire could consume the blood of a Marked one to the last drop, gaining the ability to infect mortals. Vampires couldn’t have children; turning people into new vampires was their sole method of breeding of their species. A vampire who completed this ritual would gain the power to infect others for exactly one year and could attack humans and turn them. The activity of the vampire hunters caused that any vampire at all hadn`t reached their Marked ones. Thus, Niran’s race had dwindled down to nothing. He was the last. Unwanted and misunderstood by no one. His glance swept around the room, than he snorted and walked out.
The ritual to find the Marked one would begin precisely at midnight on the full moon. The location was an ordinary rectangular building with three rooms: for the priestess, her sisters, Niran, and the place for the ritual itself. In the main hall the vampire took a long look around. Empty, apart from more jasmine incense holders and a meter-diameter bowl of silver-colored water on a stone pedestal in front of him. Behind the basin stood his priestess—Naam. Niran rolled his eyes, but otherwise he refused to show emotions. The young woman was wearing ordinary blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a bright printed design. To make things worse, she was chewing gum, and the first sound to meet his ears was the obnoxious bang of her bubble. Thankfully for her, Naam gulped her gum down as soon as she saw his expression. Her sisters were not very smart either. They had worn matching black skirts, paired with pink sweaters. Four centuries ago, when he'd done this ritual before, the priestesses had all been monks, their bodies clad in ceremonial robes . Niran wanted to ignore their appearance, but he couldn`t held back.
“I can't understand,” he said, his voice dangerously low, his fangs grew visibly larger, and the priestess gulped. “Why you all didn’t come naked?”
“Well, sister, uh… you didn’t tell us we were supposed to be naked!” one of her sisters, San, gave the impression of a person of borderline intellectual ability. Then, she lowered her voice in the concern. “Seriously, did anyone else get the vibe this might be—like—the start of a porno shoot or something? Bet there’s cameras hiding somewhere..."
“Say one more word,” Niran warned emotionlessly, “and I’ll tear out your throat.”
“P’Niran,” Naam tried to save her sister from a very real threat, “please don’t pay attention to her. You know a buffalo kicked her in the head when she was young. Let's better start the preparations for the ritual! The moon will be full soon, and it's dangerous to wait any longer. You might not make it in time for the parade of planets,” she made a ‘wai’ gesture and bowed.
“Begin. I can’t stand the sight of you," he said in an icy tone.
"The power given to me by the moon and the stars," Naam began. Five small pouches lay on the table nearby. She took something red from one of them. "We offer you the strength and might of this world in exchange for knowledge." She dropped a red porous stone into the bowl. "Coral as the strength of the sea..." From another pouch, a dandelion was emerged. "A flower that the wind catches ..." Then, from a third, she took a tiny bottle. "Water, roaming on the sky..." In the fourth pouch was black sand. "Earth scorched in hell's flames..." From the fifth, a metallic orb. "A fragment of a mighty blade. And finally..." She turned her gaze to Niran. "The blood of a vampire." She folded her hands in a ‘wai’ gesture, bowing slightly, as did her sisters. "P' Niran, please..."
He bit his hand with his long fangs and clenched it into a fist. A few drops of blood fell into the water.
The ritual itself wasn’t difficult. Especially now. Getting the coral on the peninsula wasn’t difficult, nor finding a dandelion, rainwater, or a piece of a metal blade. But volcanic ash… that was always the tricky part. Niran and his half-witted team of priestesses had spent a couple of months collecting the items needed for the ritual. For the first time, he was thankful to vampire`s nature for the dead heart. Otherwise, it likely would have stopped from rage during their journey to the nearest volcano.
The silver-colored water in the bowl began to clear. And, as in the past, it shimmered with moonlight coming directly from a hole in the wall. Back then, the “image” was as vivid as a modern television screen. But now, it was flickering. A moment later, the water started bubbling and splashing violently. Niran took a step back, glancing up at the moon and then at Naam.
"What’s happening?! Did you morons mess this up somehow?!" he barely restrained himself from killing them.
"No, no, no, great lord vampire, we did everything as you instructed," San began to talk. "I ordered the coral, gathered the water, Nong’Ji found the dandelion and the blade! And we went to the volcano together with you!"
"I ordered the coral from Amazon… It was closer than the market!" San screamed. "What rain, the water from a puddle—isn’t that rainwater? Where else would it come from?"
"And how could a puddle form during the dry season?!" He swung at her, ready to end her miserable life. "You’ve ruined everything! How dare you all! I’ve been waiting for this moment and all of you destroyed it all! My race will die out because of a plastic coral from Amazon!"
"But the seller promised…—" San started.
"P' Niran! Wait… The bowl is showing something, an image is appearing," Naam interrupted him, stopping him from committing a justified murder. She decided she'd deal with her sister later anyway.
Sure enough, the image was getting clearer. But before, Niran had seen a person. He was walking, eating, or sleeping. It was possible to examine him from every side. Now an unfamiliar building appeared in front of him from every perspective, then began to recede into entire row of buildings. If not for the crowds of people wearing matching attire—clearly not children, and with uniforms that looked distinctly un-school-like—he wouldn’t have guessed what the bowl was trying to show. It had to be a university. But Niran had never seen this one before. The image kept changing until some sort of emblem resembling a coin came into view. In its center, if he wasn’t mistaken, stood Varuna, the god of rain, encircled by lotus petals. Just as the image began to fade, the dark chamber was briefly illuminated by a phone flash, followed by the echo of a camera shutter against the stone walls. San took a picture.
" Did I deserve to live?" she asked with a crooked smile.
"The most painful one of all."
He hitted the bowl, shattering it into two pieces as the girls screamed. Thanks to their incompetence, he has to search not a specific person, but hung arouns the entire university and search for the Marked one by himself. Typically, he could identify a Marked one by their unique scent nd eyes colour. the. But the scent wasn’t detectable from more than a meter away, and the violet shimmer of his iris only appeared under very specific lighting conditions.
Putting on his oversized, sleeveless black leather jacket, he headed for the exit. Niran, the Chosen one, the sole survivor of the vampire race, was about to enroll himself in a university. Like an absolute idiot. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but to go so far..... Not suppose.
"At least I hope I don’t have to actually apply…"
The door slammed behind him.
Comments (0)
See all