"Hasty to die, aren't we?"
His cold touch against her warm body seared her sense of speech. Dark hair strands fell over his cataclysmic grey eyes peering into hers. Elowen's gaze meandered to avoid contact and instead ended up skimming over his prominent collarbones and chiseled cold chest. As soon as she registered his semi-nudity, her eyes pressed close.
"H-haste makes waste," she stuttered, "I don't want to die w-wastefully." Elowen hated her tongue for not rolling as planned. To think she was more eloquent in front of the King and Queen now felt like a far fetched dream.
"How productive of you," the man couldn't help the snicker that escaped his lips as he helped her back to the ground and sped backwards to put some distance between them.
Elowen's hammering heart and flushed body found much solace as the cold rooftop air embraced the emptiness he left behind.
"We mustn't delay the ritual. It might not seem so but we have eyes and ears around us," the man informed, his voice oddly deep and calming to Elowen's flustered senses.
"Wouldn't expect otherwise," she said with a firm nod then patted her palms against her thighs, awkwardly, "But...I don't really know how to go about it."
The man, with his hands on his belt buckle, stilled upon the revelation. "Oh? Oh, Astrid, makes sense. I missed your arrival so she skipped the guiding, understandably so," he whispered to himself.
The stars surrounding the crimson moon had begun to twinkle a red glare onto the pond. The man infront cleared his throat, almost human-like, to gain attention.
"I am Prince Valen Sythar, the heir to Valoria," the man introduced himself with a curt bow and a hand over his heart, "And as per ritual," he said as he walked towards her, "A human princess, also known as the Centennial Blood Bride," he held out a hand and urged, with his eyes, for her to do the same, "That is you, Princess Elowen Calyx, has consented to be sacrificed at the Blood Moon's altar for peace and safety of Eidryn. Am I correct?"
'Consented was hardly accurate. Destined? Too fancy. Fated? Too flowery. Thrusted upon? Yeah, that sounds about right.' Elowen thought, though these tangents hardly mattered on the topic. So, she held out her right hand as he did and said, "Yes, I consent."
Valen took her hand in his and turned them to face the pond. He rested the back of her hand over two of his fingers and pressed his thumb in the centre of her palm. "It might hurt a little, hold onto me if you're scared," he said as the clean cut nail of his thumb suddenly began growing sharper and longer against the skin of her palm.
Elowen clenched her teeth and shook her head upon his offer. Maybe if he had a shirt on, the thought would have been more in consideration because Elowen would rather bleed in pain than grab his bare arms and embarasses herself just moments before her death.
The nail pressed deeper into her palm and drew blood. Elowen withdrew a slight gasp as Valen instructed, "Close your fist." She closed her fingers around his thumb and he held her hand as a stream of blood bled into the pond, creating new ripples of fate.
Valen chanted something under his breath, a language Elowen couldn't decipher, and as soon as he let go of her hand Elowen's wound was healed. He did not have to heal her but the small gesture felt like a gust of kindness in a desert of cruelty.
"Able bodied and a consenting will are necessary for the ritual," Valen clarified just as small whispers of smile threatened the corners of Elowen's lips.
"Oh-" she uttered, dumbly.
"Now we will have to soak in the pond until the scarlet moon wanes, as you must know, it is to stabilize the yin and yang of Eidryn."
'Hence the stripping,' Elowen thought as she nodded her head in understanding. Suddenly, her eyes widened at the implication of her own thoughts. 'STRIPPING?!' Her head swatted to Valen and surely, he was unbuckling his pants with no concern whatsoever. Flustered, Elowen flipped her head away.
"A-ah, do I, of course, right? Have to partake in this?"
A gust of wind brushed past her and in the blink of a moment, Valen was in the scarlet tinted pond, soaking with his bare chest out for depraved sight. He ran a wet had through his dark locks and shrugged, "It is what is necessary."
Eidryn was a land of many a species living together in a forced pact of harmony brought out of mutual loss. The Mortal Empire, Imania, consisted of the Fae Continent Sylvaris, the great waterfolk ridge called Aquor's Spine, Lykorra Peninsula of the Shapeshifters and the landlocked human kingdom of Calythia.
As the weakest of the Mortal Empire's quadrant, it was Calythia who was destined to sacrifice a princess, at the end of every century, in order to be at peace with Dark Realm of Nocverra. Failing to do so would end in upheaval of the Nexus, and quite possibly the end of the world.
"Heh," Elowen scoffed and briefly considered the hygiene issues of bathing in a pond with her blood but the rushing thought of her eventual death subsided the concerns. She looked down at her shirt and flared pants, sighed heavily, then proceeded to unbutton the collar of her shirt.
For a sacred and centennial ritual, her hosts were pretty lax with the planning. The least they could have offered her were a small sette to keep clothes on and a bathrobe to wear after. Was it too much of a consideration? Then again, her thoughts were with the Valoria Vampires as context.
The glaring scarlet eyes of the second prince invaded her memory.
Elowen did not bother to undo her pants and entered the water. She rested her back against the pond's edge with only her face out for sight. The water was lukewarm and comforting around her heightened senses; Elowen could have almost enjoyed it if not for Prince Valen, at hand.
"What's next?" She asked.
He coughed to clear his throat before answering, "We wait for the waning."
"Ah..." Elowen nodded. The silence gnawed at her soul, "Sounds a bit boring, does it not?"
"I don't know, it's my first time trying," Valen shrugged, a hint of amusement in his tone.
Elowen's sight was stuck at the darkened skies but from her forced peripheral vision she witnessed Valen resting his elbows on the pond's edge while he threw his head back to stretch. The young princess gulped as water trickled down his prominent adam's apple on a leisurely pace.
"I liked your carriage," Valen commented after a minute or a century, Elowen wasn't sure.
"Hu-" she almost gulped the bloody water, "Ah, thank you, I engineered it," Elowen strung together a sentence before embarassing herself, "How, I mean, where did you see it though?"
"While working, through a window," the Prince shrugged, "How did you calibrate human inventions with fae artefacts though? It is quite brilliant." He referred to the elongated pentagonal stone hovering on top of her carriage and powering it.
"Heh, this and that," Elowen smiled, "I liked getting into new stuff ever since I was a kid. It is because I—"
Horror dawned on Elowen as she pursued her lips. She had almost uttered it out and put all of Mortal Empire at stake. Involuntarily, her hands reached the back of her waist, concealed underneath the high waistband of the pants, and her fingers felt for the familiar bump on it.
"You must have been an important asset to Calythia," Valen whispered under his breath.
"Heh," Elowen said awkwardly, "No, no, I was just selfish in my pursuits. No body knows, of course," Elowen nodded. Any and all of her intrests were merely a liability to Calythia's treasury.
"The blood ritual takes place over the span of a week. You shall be sacrificed seven days from now...is there something you want to do before that? Anything you regret or expect?"
Elowen flipped her head to look at him. His words were barely above a whisper, his eyes were hooded and his head was titled just enough for his hair to curtain his face from her partial nudity.
"A-are you, no, I mean, why do you ask?" Elowen gulped, for sure, she couldn't get ahead of herself.
"Even though there is a certain comfort in knowing one's destiny, the weight of bearing its knowledge might wear us down someday. Now that you are so close to accomplishing it, I wish to alleviate some of that weight."
"But...why?"
Suddenly, he looked up, his grey eyes zoning into hers. Elowen backed up, flattening herself against the pond's stony edges for it felt like Valen was closing in.
"Why because we're married now. I am bathing in your blood, afterall."
At that moment, Elowen realised that she should have brushed up on vampire lore before sending herself to be eaten.
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