All around her was a consuming shadow, one that coiled its evil tendrils around her neck, suffocating, drowning her in the terrible embrace of fell darkness. It was alive, aware, slinking from corner to corner of the graveyard, ducking behind gravestones, snaking into the earth itself, a blackness that swallowed up even the gentle luminescence of the moon.
Mosrael reveled in the darkness, in the frigid mist, in the death and decay of the grave. Only here, in the company of the dead, did she feel truly at home. She was, from a distance, a strikingly beautiful girl, with ebon hair and alabaster skin, skin enshrouded in what could only be described as liquid shadows. Her eyes, spheres that reflected oblivion, endless voids of violet, glittered with pure malice. Some thought her beautiful. Others had the sense to stay well away from her, hearing tales from the elders, of vampires and geists.
The truth was far more horrifying.
Darkness was all she knew. She had been born from it, and with it she had stayed throughout her miserable existence. For twelve hours a day, she hid, pursued by the hated sunlight, and when night fell, she would come to the village graveyards and walk amongst them, her perfect, marble hands tracing invisible lines upon each grave. In circles upon circles she walked, the shadows moving with her as though in a macabre pantomime.
She knew each of the graves by heart, each tomb, each crypt. She could hear them whispering in her ears, murmuring, begging for release. She talked to them, soothing them with her honey-sweet words, comforting them, promising that their time would come. She longed to be with them, to embrace Death, to drink its black nectar.
Death was peaceful. Easy. Mosrael's life was much harder.
And so Time passed, through endless winters, through her endless journey, until twelve generations had withered, decrepit and dead, and buried under the bitter earth. The village, built so long ago, had flowered and bloomed into a wondrous city, teeming with life, and love.
Mosrael despised it.
The city had begun to grow exponentially, as refugees, numbering in the thousands, fled from the south from the wars. It was decreed that the ancestral graveyard, a sad, lonely patch of dirt to the east, was to house the refugees. After all… who was concerned with it?
A fate more terrible than the war was coming for them.
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