"Your sword practise is getting lazy, Queen Serena!" Ithuriel chimes mockingly, taking a blazon swing at my hand of arms.
"I thought you were supposed to have practised these past few months, but it seems you have been slacking!"
Scoffing, I bounce back, my heels digging into the dirt, the earthy smells catching in my nose and lingering on the tip of my tongue. I cough.
The clearing is bright and wide, ringed with furred trees that sway with the little lives of bustling Faey folk. The amber glow of the dying sun is just beginning to douse the tips of the leaves with a glorious warmth and high above our heads, the distant giggles of little angels playing tag resound in my ears. I raise up my sword.
"Well, you're pretty mediocre yourself," I shoot back with a toothy grin, wiggling my eyebrows at the white-haired angel before me. His bare chest is a seal of alabaster, enclosing the pack of muscles underneath his skin- which I notice is doused in sweat and chuckle again.
Lazy, huh?
I point the tip at my sword at him.
"Besides, you are the one who is sweating, not me,"
Standing there for a moment, he returns my smile, and I watch as the strands of his long hair flicker over the red bear paw tattoo of a warrior angel below his right eye.
I don't even recall the point where his sword got to my throat.
"Lazy," he repeats, as though reading my mind. "We'll practise more tomorrow."
With one swift motion, he sheaths his sword into its scabbard, the tips of his feathery wings uplifting in the wind. "Or distracted," he adds quickly with a frown, realising not for the first time today that perhaps he shouldn't address a Queen in such a manner. I wave it off.
"Distracted," I affirm, sheathing my own sword with a satisfying 'shing'. I raise my head with a grimace. "None of our warriors have returned from the vampire's capital of Sezeria and it's been over a month. No letters, no signs, just… silence. I don't think they can be anything other than dead at this point." If Ithuriel is thinking something, he doesn't show it. For a moment I linger, then, seeing that he has nothing to say, continue:
"It's just, I wish I could do something, I want to be out there, Ithuriel, doing something." I catch his eye and something glitters in their silvery-gold depths. He looks stern.
I have trained every day with Ithuriel since I was eight to kill vampires. For twenty years of my life I have been brought up learning to kill, to trick, to hunt, but never in my life have I been allowed past the grove surrounding the Illistrae clan's borders. That's where the safety stops, and the danger starts. That's where the vampires are.
To me, it had always seemed pointless. What good is training a Queen if she can't even serve her people? But deep down, I know why. I have no successor, I'm the last royal of the angels; If I die, everyone else dies, too. Then there will be no one to fight the vampires at all.
Jamming my fist into an angry ball, I breathe a heavy sigh.
"I hate it, being stuck here. I can't leave, I can't fight. You know just as well as I do that unless we actually make a move, then all this is just going to continue for heaven knows how long. Centuries? Millennia? None of it is getting us closer to getting back the eternal flame, to winning this war." Still, he remains stoically silent.
I flop down onto my knees and start tearing angrily at the grass, the sword at my side pressing firmly at my hip. Perhaps not the most Queenly of actions, but neither is sneaking out to play at sword fighting with your best friend.
Above us, the voices of the angel children fade as the sun recedes reluctantly behind a distant cloud. A chill comes over me and I shiver, pulling my two pairs of feathery wings protectively around myself. It was only now that I was beginning to regret wearing such light combat clothing.
"You know what the council would say," Ithuriel sighs at last, his tone matter of factly. I chew the inside on my cheek, refusing to look at him.
"I know," I grumble. Of course I know what the council would say, but that doesn't make me any less bitter. I need to be here for our clan, and with so few of us left these days, it's no wonder. More and more angels are disappearing. Soon there won't be any of us left at all.
Sometimes our scouts find them beyond the borders of our land: a huge ring of silver fillings and holy enchantments cast by the guardian angels and divinists. Just before the Great Forest. Angels who were too daring, who let themselves get too close. We find them, strung up in trees, gore spilling out, throats ripped open by a dozen pairs of fangs. Bloody kisses on their mouths, their lifeless eyes staring into darkness as their bodies drain of blood, fading gold to sickly scarlet.
Sometimes, we find wings too. Crudely ripped off the backs of angels, flesh and tendons hanging limp from their decapitated sockets, decaying and heaving with maggots. Crimson stained feathers, strewn limply through the bushes that get found by little bird-like sprites who use them for decoration. The borders of our land have seen so much blood, it's a wonder the grass doesn't blossom red.
If I went out there, chances are I would never come back.
***
3000 years ago, back when the Angels ruled over all of Faey, the vampires came. It was on the anniversary of the Angel Queen's coronation- Queen Celeste was her name, Serena's great Grandmother. A banquet was held for the folk all over the land; the angels of the Illistrae clan were generous, all were welcome to their home to dance the night away in garments of royal splendour.
So, naturally, the vampires appeared too. Some say there were ten, others only three. Serena had always imagined there were five, because five vampires seemed like the right amount to an eight year old child, just enough that it wasn't completely scary.
She had heard the story so many times that it seemed more of a myth than the truth- the way the strange horned creatures had waltzed in, their eyes glowing like rubies, their tongues sharp as silver. No-one really knew how they got there. Some say they were demons summoned from hell. Others say they simply just appeared.
But this small group of creatures were to become the royal vampires of Sezeria- they just didn't know it yet. So Serena had imagined them as princes and princesses, beautiful, but dangerous, the same way she hoped herself to be. Legend says they were made of darkness, and travelled in shadows. Shadows that seeped from the very essence of their beings, from their sharp features, right to their fine pointed ears. Their words the sweet, honeyed, tones of a soft pigeon's coo, their eyes a ruby glow of passionate fire which danced with the flames of lust and blood, unpredictable, alluring.
They enchanted people, sometimes purposely, sometimes not. All the same, they were monsters underneath, that's what the council had told her.
She'd often secretly wondered what it would be like to dance with a vampire, to be so in love with one you might forget they could kill you in a heartbeat. Serena had never been in love, but still she imagined. Between sword practise and magic casting, she would sneak off to practise the waltz with Ithuriel. Though no matter how often he asked, she would never tell him why she liked to dance so much, or that it was never him she imagined dancing with.
She loved the vampires almost as much as she hated them. They were free, beautifully perfect creatures who danced through the night, who flirted and kissed, who killed with a smile still on their faces. So when she was dancing, if only for a moment, she could let herself forget that she should be afraid. Perhaps if she had been more scared then, she wouldn't have wanted to leave so desperately now.
They were perfect, beautiful, deadly. The finest killing machines Faey had ever seen: Dancing through the night like a plague, silently draining each life through thick blood and pulsing veins, one swift snap of each neck, one more light extinguished. Bodies were left strung up on trees, limp like dolls, blood staining the grass like a fine mist. It was a perfect massacre.
All to acquire one of the two sacred artefacts that would grant them the power the angels had, the one they so desperately craved, enclosed within the eternal flame. The power of life and creation.
By the morning, almost everyone was dead, and the vampires had gone. The silent killers, Celeste had called them. She was one of the few that had been left alive; some say the creatures took pity on her. They probably wished they hadn't.