The Vampire's Harvest

54

You pull the rope from your waist and lay it across your palms. You close your eyes, unable to concentrate with the sight of ravenous monsters clawing their way toward you. You chant with the rapid beat of your heart, hopeful the tremor in your voice won't affect the strength of your spell. You feel the cord grow hot in your hands before it rises up and follows through on your command to bolster the ward. You pry your eyelids open, terrified of what awaits you, but also eager to find the consequences of your spell.

You marvel as the rope elongates and begins to form a ring along the inner edge of the ward. Coiling round and round, it forms a barrier like an upturned basket. For a moment there is silence and darkness. Relief seeps into your bones and spreads through your muscles. You feel a smile touching the corners of your mouth.

And then the harsh light breaks through.

The ward has fallen and though your basket shelter felt secure, the material of the rope is no match against the sharpened steel of the drones' swords. Stabbing and tearing, the fortress around you is torn asunder and you realize the few seconds it will take for them to breakthrough is the last gift you'll have, your one last chance to savor life. You take a breath as your knees give out and the drones surge forward.

They don't hesitate for even a moment, seizing you from beneath your arms, they drag you along with them as they continue straight on for the door. Outside a battle rages. While you distracted their drones, the vampires were ambushed by the pack of werewolves that Gianette had spoken of. It looks like the wolves are winning too.

You think that perhaps you have hope, that perhaps you will live to see the rise of the sun. However, with the drones available to support the vampires' numbers, the tide of battle shifts. As the drones march forward, pulling you across the rough cobblestone as they do, the pack is overwhelmed. You think you might just die beneath the heavy corpse of a thrashed werewolf, but before your captor drone can meet a wolf in battle, you are pulled away, by cold, desperate hands. You turn to see a vampire with her stomach torn open and her organs spilling out.

She'll survive. So long as she still has her head on her shoulders, she'll keep living. The problem is she will be easy pickings for a werewolf if she remains disemboweled and she'll suffer endlessly until a wolf finally takes mercy and snaps her head from her neck. Of course, this will be of little concern if she feasts on a human and uses their blood to fast track her healing abilities.

Before you can even scream, she has her fangs upon your neck. Tugging and sucking, she wrenches the blood from you with a ravenous thirst. Your vision blots out in a field of dots and your breath slows to a wheezing rasp.

Yet, you don't die.

After she's removed the majority of your blood, only the last drop remains. She casts you aside and pulls her organs back in as her skin knits itself together again. Her poison takes a hold of you before she's returns to her feet and jumps back into the fray. You lumber forward, following a directive burning in the back of your skull. Against your will, you lash out at the nearest wolf, slaughtering any that oppose the vampires.

You remain a quiet observer lost behind your eyes -- conscious, but incapable of altering the flow of time before you. You weep as you crush the throat of a wolf whose blonde fur reminds you of your sister's hair, yet no tears drip down your cheek.

You cried out for mercy, begging for death when the duke approached you after the battle and asked you to tell him where the coven was, yet your pale lips told him everything and soon Ferris was hunted down and executed along with the others.

You live out immortality screaming from the back of your skull until even that fragment of yourself loses all sense of being. You become a drone through and through. Dead to the world, yet still existing in it.

***

You've found one of the unsuccessful endings for this branch of the story... Why not go back and see if you can find the right item to fortify your ward?