Create a Story - Week 7

Had hoped to catch up from my week of recovery, but it didn't happen. This week is a fantasy story, coming in again at the 500 words I've been keeping the stories at. This one I think could have run longer, but it's a hard time for me at work. Maybe I'll come back to the idea another time. This one is from page 100 of the Create a Story prompt book. Curious to see if anyone guesses the prompt without the book though. The hard word to fit here was actually the most obvious. It didn't fit the story and so I'm sure some of you will pick it out.

Death’s Library

“Alarm in the crypt.”

Fabius Leonidus shrugged nervously. “Disarm the fences.”

“What?”

“Do it now.”

The cameras showed only darkness. He stilled the guards before they could turn on the floodlights, even as the fence alarms sounded.

“Sir!”

Power had a price.

“Leave it.”

“Why?”

Fabius turned and walked swiftly away from the control room. The library looked like any other. In some ways perhaps it was. Enough to seem the same, at least. His was a dynasty of ages. Ancient and free from the shackles of mortal power.

No mortal power.

He slid a book back and the wall of shelving slid back, silent as a whisper. He walked into the corridor and down the stair, the shelves sliding silently back into place as he descended. There was no faster way. Not for him. Step after step, deep into the darkness that been an unforgiving lure so many centuries ago.

He couldn’t help but remember that terror. The piercing pain of fangs. Horror and ecstasy. To suck the blood of a mortal was both, for the immortal who did it and the mortal who felt their life drain away. A mortal felt the call of death, the nearness of it, and yet the euphoria of the bite—even centuries could not erase the embarrassment.

When he’d descended far enough, he found what he’d expected. The coffin, a great stone sarcophagus, had been torn asunder. Now the master was awake, and hungry and seeking blood. The first after a waking always died. There was always a story in some tiny publication they weren’t able to suppress about a return of the great Dracula.

Dracula hadn’t been great. Dracula had been foolish.

Fabius shivered. He sought out the protected box that fed a line back up to the control room. “Initiate suppression protocol. Fence defences can be reactivated. No patrols on the grounds.”

They didn’t ask for identification. Even if they hadn’t recognized his voice, this phone rang on its own line, and was meant to be obeyed without question.

His climb back up to the library was slow. The ages of the world settled upon him like a mantle of concrete blocks, weighing down each step. Each one was a name he’d forced himself to remember. Name after name. Death after death. He had fed the master with his blood and his memories and the horror and pleasure had never stopped. For so many, for most everyone else, that horror meant pleasure, yes, but it was also death.

For him it had meant centuries of life in the service of death.

He knew every name. He spoke them, quietly, one after another, as he climbed, until he reached the library. He sat and he waited.

The library might look ordinary. But within the pages of every book were the greatest secrets the world knew. Secrets that came from around the world for him to catalog and place in the hands of his master at a whim. 

Death was coming.

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Again the 500 word limit here was more about being busy than anything. This story could have gone longer. I think a lot of folks would have wanted to meet the vampire and I think that might have been cool. I know I'm still a week behind. We'll see if I can catch that up, but I'm also trying to find the necessary time to get Fortune's Price out if I can. More soon!