Kiss of the vampire
Volume 2 "the Girl with the Sharp sword"
Mission Nine: Frozen Scars!
"Those who bear the deepest wounds... often hide them beneath the calmest snow." -Heroze
---
The palace used to be warmer.
Not by temperature—no, the Marble Keep of the North had always been shrouded in biting winds and endless snowfall—but by laughter, warmth of heart, the gentle hand of a mother brushing hair behind a child's ear.
That warmth vanished the night Catherine arrived.
Maya was only nine then. She remembered the scent of lavender her mother always carried, how her voice could hush even the howling wind beyond the palace walls. Her mother, Queen Leira, ruled not with an iron fist, but with gentle resolve.
Catherine—her aunt—had once been part of that warmth. A quiet, graceful figure, always watching from the side. But that night, there was something different in her eyes. Cold and cracked. Like glass on the verge of breaking.
Maya had been hiding behind the throne curtain. A harmless game. But it turned into the memory that would haunt her forever.
"Why her?!" Catherine's voice was raw, shaking. "He chose her… you… over me!"
Leira stood still in the moonlit throne room, her back straight, her crown casting long shadows.
"Because he loved me, Catherine," she answered, pain and finality in her voice. "And I pitied you… I pitied what you've become."
A scream. A blur. The sound of bones shattering, then silence. Catherine's power froze the air itself, and in seconds, Queen Leira was encased in crystal ice—then shattered to pieces.
Maya couldn't scream. Her throat locked. Her tears turned to frost against her cheeks.
Catherine never saw her slip away through the servant tunnels.
But the madness didn't stop there.
Catherine believed—perhaps hoped—that Havel, Maya's father, would turn to her in his grief. They were sisters, after all, nearly identical in face and voice. She thought, if Leira was gone, he would choose her instead.
He didn't.
And when he refused, Catherine turned to something far darker.
She made a deal with Lancer—the Crimson Progenitor. She asked him to bend Havel's mind with his blood magic, to twist his will until he loved her.
But Havel was no fool. He fought it. Every moment under Lancer's spell burned him from the inside, but he refused to break. His mind began to fracture under the weight, yet he still cursed Catherine with his dying breath.
His severed head was displayed at the gates as a warning. His body was never recovered.
---
Maya ran. From the screams. From the fire. From the throne her blood was tied to. Until her legs gave out in a mountain forest far to the east.
That's where she met him.
Heroze—a tall man wrapped in battered armor and silence. His skin was pale like ash, his eyes gold like dawn. He wasn't human. But he wasn't like them either.
A dhampir.
Born of vampire and human, Heroze was everything the Progenitors feared. He possessed their strength, their speed, their senses—but none of their weaknesses. No thirst. No sunlight aversion. No immortality... but he didn't need it. His fists had split fangs from elder vampires. He was the very blade fate forgot to forge.
He found her half-frozen, swordless, broken.
He didn't ask who she was. Didn't comment on her royal blood. He simply built a fire, shared his food, and said:
> "If you want revenge, child… I can teach you how to make them bleed for it."
Years passed. Heroze trained her in secret valleys and ruined forts—swordplay, anti-vampiric arts, shadow warfare. He taught her to move without sound, strike without hesitation, and think two steps ahead of any monster. He never praised, never coddled. But Maya came to respect him more than anyone alive.
And she wasn't alone.
Among the broken and the exiled, she gathered others like her—those who had lost everything to the Progenitors. Among them was Kael Virell, a fierce fighter with silver daggers and a quiet smile. He never said much about his past, but the fire in his eyes when he spoke of justice mirrored Maya's.
They grew close—slowly, like fire catching in winter wood.
Then the plan was set.
A coup. Strike the Crimson Palace during a blood moon. Take out Lancer first, then Catherine. End the reign of monsters.
But Heroze was away. Hunting something even worse in the south. Maya thought they could manage without him.
She was wrong.
Lancer was a storm made flesh. His movements shattered steel, his voice cracked the earth. Catherine watched from her icy throne, amused. One by one, Maya's team fell. Screams echoed through the marble halls.
Kael was the last to stand with her.
Bloodied, exhausted, cornered—he grabbed Maya's hand and smiled for the last time.
> "You're the future, not me. Live."
He kissed her forehead, then shoved her toward the shattered balcony.
She fell—through smoke and snow—watching as Lancer impaled the man she loved with a spear of burning light.
Maya survived.
But a part of her never climbed back from that cliff.
---
Now, in the present, Maya stood beside Deyviel and the others. Beneath her calm face, beneath the steady hands and sharp words… was a storm that never died.
A frozen scar that would only melt when both Lancer and Catherine were ash.
"Some ghosts wear different faces. Some fates don't care who they shatter." - maya
300 years later...
Present day.
The war had grown colder—older. Blood had frozen over pain, and hope felt like a dying candle in a storm.
But Ben Rayleigh lit it again with a single sentence.
> "That kid is our key to ending this war."
Maya didn't respond right away. She was staring.
At him.
Deyviel.
Sixteen years old. Wild eyes full of fire. A walking contradiction—awkward and cocky, reckless but sharp. And he stood in the middle of the battlefield like the storm itself had chosen him.
She remembered the first time she laid eyes on him—standing over the body of a vampire he'd just slain with nothing but a rusted blade and raw instinct. Blood on his cheek. Rage in his voice.
And that face.
Maya's chest tightened.
He looked exactly like Kael.
Not just similar—identical. The same lean frame, the same slightly messy black hair that wouldn't stay combed down, the same tilted smirk like he always knew something you didn't. Even the way he carried himself—lazy at first glance, but coiled like a spring underneath.
Ben saw the way her eyes widened. He didn't need to guess what was on her mind.
> "I know what you're thinking. They look the same, right?"
"Too bad for you… they are the same. Same speech pattern. Same habits. He eats with his left hand but fights with his right. Twirls his knife when he's nervous. Bites the inside of his cheek when he's lying. Just like Kael."
Maya didn't speak. She just watched Deyviel laugh—carefree, unaware of the storm he carried on his shoulders.
Ben continued, quieter now.
> "But I dug into his origin. He's not some reborn spirit or secret clone. He's a new kid. From Navotas City. Born August 12. A regular sixteen-year-old... or he was. Until Lancer decided to move again."
Until fate twisted the knife again.
Maya clenched her fists.
She didn't believe in coincidence. Not anymore. Not after everything. This—Deyviel's face, his voice, his soul—was either some divine mockery... or the universe's cruel attempt at redemption.
Was he a second chance? A warning?
Or just another soul she would watch die?
Her gaze lingered on him longer than it should have. Deyviel caught it, raised an eyebrow.
> "Yo. Something on my face bitch!?"
Same tone. Same smirk.
Maya forced a breath.
"No," she muttered. "Just… something I thought I buried a long time ago."
She turned away before her voice cracked.
Behind her, Deyviel was still laughing with Denver—who was already throwing shade about his haircut—and for just a moment, Maya saw Kael again, alive in the middle of that field.
And it terrified her.
Because she knew what it felt like to lose him.
And she didn't know if she could do it again.
"The past never stays buried in places where blood remembers."
---
The Crimson Palace trembled with the roar of collapsing marble and shattering glass. Firelight and shadow danced along the throne hall, painting the bloodstained tiles in flickers of war.
Maya stood in the center, sword in hand, breath sharp in her lungs. Before her, atop the steps of the throne, Catherine smiled like winter itself—cold, elegant, and eternal.
> "Still clinging to that blade, niece?" the Ice Queen mused, her voice silk wrapped in frost. "It didn't save your mother. It won't save you."
Maya didn't answer. She moved.
A blur of motion. Her boots struck the tile, sword swinging in a precise, low arc toward Catherine's ribs.
But it never landed.
Catherine raised a single pale hand—
And the world bled red.
A crack in space split behind her like torn velvet, and from it surged a wave of crimson light, swallowing the entire throne room in an instant.
The Blood Dome had activated.
A Progenitor's absolute space. A personalized domain shaped by their will, where they reigned as god.
The throne room was no more. The world had changed.
Now they stood in a vast cathedral of frost and blood. The floor was a mirror of frozen crimson glass, the sky above locked behind an unending dome of stormclouds and stars frozen mid-fall. Jagged towers of ice stretched like fangs toward the heavens. Embers of frozen snow circled the air—falling upward instead of down.
The laws of gravity, sensation—even time—bent under Catherine's control.
The Queen floated at the center, arms spread as her voice echoed through the mist:
> "Let me show you what a true Blood Dome looks like." "Crimson Palace: Frozen Snow."
The name alone changed the air.
The ground beneath Maya's boots groaned. The very floor remembered her pain—her history. She could see the silhouette of her mother's corpse beneath the glass, lying in the same pose as that day. The illusion was perfect. And cruel.
> "This place feeds on memory," Catherine whispered. "Yours are especially delicious."
Maya staggered. Her fingers trembled.
Frost crawled along her arm.
Even her blade—the Yamato, Kael's katana—began to ice over.
> No… not this sword. Not his sword.
She grit her teeth and slammed the blade into the glass, channeling her aura into a flashburst. A ripple of silver light burst from her, shattering the ice forming along her skin.
> "You won't take this from me too."
Catherine descended slowly, never touching the floor.
> "You remind me of your mother," she said, voice calm and cruel. "So kind. So proud. So breakable."
Maya charged.
Steel sang through crimson wind. Yamato slashed through the air like lightning. Catherine caught the blade between two fingers—two—and twisted.
Maya spun in midair, kicked off the ice, redirected her strike into a reverse stab aimed for Catherine's neck.
The Ice Queen tilted her head. The edge barely grazed her porcelain skin. A single drop of blood flew free—then froze midair into a delicate red snowflake.
> "Better," Catherine said softly.
Maya landed and slid backward, boots skidding across glass. Her pulse thundered.
Inside this dome, her strength was halved. Catherine's was doubled.
But Maya didn't back down.
> "You think this place scares me?" she spat.
> "You misunderstand," Catherine replied, smile thin. "This place isn't meant to scare you." "It's meant to show you how small you really are."
Suddenly, dozens of mirrored clones of Catherine stepped from the crimson mist. Each one perfect. Pale skin, silver eyes, white dress soaked in unseen blood. They moved like broken puppets—jerky, twitching.
> "I've killed worse than reflections," Maya muttered.
And then she charged.
Yamato became a silver blur—cutting, deflecting, parrying. The clones exploded into shattering glass when struck, but for every one she cut down, three more emerged.
The pressure was building. Her muscles screamed. Her knees wobbled. Her breath came ragged.
Then—
A voice.
His voice.
Soft. Gentle. Steady.
> "You're not alone. You never were… I'm here."
Kael's final words.
Maya's aura erupted.
A burst of silver flame expanded outward in a violent wave, clearing the clones in an instant. The mist recoiled. The blood floor cracked.
Even Catherine's gaze narrowed.
> "You dare challenge a Progenitor inside her throne?" she hissed.
> "No," Maya said, voice steel. "I challenge a murderer who's forgotten what fear tastes like."
For the first time—Catherine's smile faltered.
A gust of wind howled through the dome. A storm was forming—a real one.
The Blood Dome trembled.
And far above them… a distant thud echoed through the sky. A cracking sound.
Catherine looked up.
> No one should be able to break in…
Another crack.
And then, like thunder slamming through heaven, a blade pierced the dome's edge—a jagged tear of black shadow and golden fire.
Something was breaking through.
Or someone.
Maya turned her head, eyes wide.
> "...Deyviel?"
The Blood Dome shattered slightly at its apex. A silhouette began to descend.
Catherine stepped back. For the first time—real panic flickered across her face.
> "Impossible…"
"no, I'm possible!"
To be continued...