Early Morning

18th December 1203 AD

Altai Mountains, Upper Mongolia

Feral red eyes opened under layers of snow.

It was cold. It had been cold for a long time, since the great orgy of feasting and killing and death. A carnival that had been cut short when it was struck down by fiery blows that burnt and ached even to this day.

But the ice and cold around it didn't bother the dead thing that lurked beneath the pristine snow. Its corpse-like flesh didn't feel the icy bite of hypothermia, nor was it inconvenienced by the battering of the elements. No, the only things ailing it were the wounds it had been dealt in battle, long ago. It lay where it had fallen after staggering away, strong enough to cling to unlife but too weak to move any further.

It had been there for almost ten years. And now, it seemed, its wait was over. The one remaining ear pricked, twitching as it heard movement.

Movement meant life.

And life meant blood.

Gathering its energy, the vampire wriggled up through the layers of snow that had fallen over it. It was a good metre or two down, buried under the accumulated weight of hundreds of blizzards and snowstorms. The steady crunching of footsteps continued as it tunnelled up, and it kept its ear trained on them. The beat was slow and irregular. Injured? Or just weak from cold? Either way, it spoke of an easy meal. And with the blood from that, the vampire would have enough energy to push its withered body down the mountains, down from the frozen heights to where humans lived. It could recover slowly, building up its strength, repairing the damage dealt to its body by spear and flame and restoring itself to the grandeur it once knew.

All from this first prey. A grotesque smile stretched across the half of its face that was still capable of such as it saw light piercing the whiteness. Careful now that it was close, it pushed through the last few inches and allowed its head to rise just above the surface. With the mound of its skull still covered in snow and nothing below its eyes visible, it wouldn't be spotted until it was far too late.

Hunger-crazed eyes scanned the snow for the source of the sound. There! A human. Female. Young. Chinese. Wearing a simple undyed smock and trudging slowly through the snow. Somewhere in the vampire's mind, beneath the part that was already salivating in anticipation, it occurred to it that the human's clothing was thin for these temperatures. That must be why she was moving irregularly. She certainly seemed to be having difficulty, hunched over against the wind and hugging herself. The bits of her skin it could see were tinted an unhealthy shade of blue. The grotesque smile spread further, revealing sharp, vicious teeth.

The human was coming towards it. That was good. Better yet, it looked as though she would pass within a few yards of it. Shuffling about under the snow, careful not to disturb the surface, the vampire withdrew back down into its hidey-hole and found a firm footing to spring from. Then it waited.

The trudging got nearer. The human was talking, it realised as she drew nearer. It could hear her over the dull roar of the wind, speaking softly in an exasperated tone. It allowed its head to peek up again, nice and slowly. She was still alone, there was nobody else visible. Just her, muttering to thin air. Maybe she was insane? Wait, no! Human. Cold. She must be hallucinating. Dying. Weak.

Well, that was fine. As long as she still had warm blood around her core. The meal wouldn't be as good as a healthy, warm body, but it was still a meal. The footsteps came within twenty metres, and the vampire ducked down again and tensed. She would pass close.

Ten metres. Eight. Six. Four.

Now.

With a feral scream, the snow erupted. The thing that came out was monstrous. Its fingers were rending claws, its face a patchwork nightmare of burn and scar tissue. The entire right half was unrecognisable as having ever borne human features, and a single red eye gleamed from the ruins of the left. It was naked, though so emaciated and maimed that its sex was impossible to determine, and it had a huge wound in its side. Whatever titanic blow had struck the thing in the mists of the past, it had caved in the right-hand side of its ribcage and left the arm mangled beyond repair. Crimson ice filled the gaping hole, blood that had congealed and frozen to plug the gap.

But the wounds didn't slow it down noticeably, and the burns had only scarred the surface of its face. With inhuman strength and speed, it exploded from its hiding place and tackled the peasant girl, whose eyes barely had time to widen before the force of the impact knocked her off her feet. Hungry fangs sunk into her neck, tearing through cold skin and tense muscle to get to the artery. And the vampire drank.

Bliss. A tide of bliss, as those first few drops of liquid nirvana touched its tongue. And then more, an orgasmic flow of lifeblood that made its body shudder as it drank its fill. There was nowhere near enough here to satiate it, but what there was tasted so good…

Caught up in the indescribable taste, the vampire didn't realise until it was far, far too late.

The blood was cold.

Too cold.

A grip of steel clamped around the vampire's skull, and pulled it away with inexorable force. It refused to let go, but all that accomplished was to rip out a mouthful of flesh from the girl's neck as it went. The grip didn't even slacken, and the gaping wound began to reconstitute itself even as the vampire watched, blood flowing back into the wound to rebuild the torn flesh. Healing? It gaped, unable to believe what it was seeing. It couldn't heal like that. It hadn't thought anything could.

But if ambushing her had been its first mistake, staying still was its second. The fist that took it full in the mouth was horrifyingly powerful, and its fangs broke and splintered like twigs under a sledgehammer as it flew back. It tried to will them back, to mimic the regeneration of the thing it had unknowingly ambushed.

It couldn't.

Struggling up, scrambling backwards on all fours, the vampire watched in terror as the peasant girl calmly picked herself up and dusted the snow off herself. Ice, it realised. Ice in her flesh, ice in her veins, that had been why she was slow. Weak not from cold, but from...

Eyes that glowed like embers seen through smoke pinned it to the snow. Literally. It was paralysed, unable to move a muscle, unable even to scream. A predator-become-prey, helpless before a greater predator.

A greater monster.

The peasant girl – no, the vampiress advanced, picking up her victim with one hand. The wound on her neck had already healed. She cocked her head, considering the maimed and beaten bloodsucker for a moment as her fingers dug into its skull with crushing force.

Then she opened a set of jaws like a steel trap, and lunged.

…

'Sucker,' commented Ling cheerfully as her host let the corpse fall to the snow, drained dry. The soul thrashed for a moment as Xiaolian digested it, fighting against the imprisonment it found itself in.

Then the psychic presence of Jingfei moved in, like a shark cutting through the water towards an injured seal. Seconds later, the thrashing stopped abruptly.

'Just a baby, really.' Ling continued as Xiaolian continued trudging up the ridge. 'Suck, suck, suck – it didn't even know how to eat things properly. Honestly, the standard of vampires these days is terrible. You could do that from day one.'

"I was a special case," Lian murmured. Regardless of its owner's skill, the blood had tasted delicious. Animals weren't really enough to get by on, even when she wasn't using much energy. She'd been slowly freezing for the past few weeks, ever since her last big meal. A wolf, if she recalled right, though it might have been some other kind of big dog. So weak had she become that she hadn't even noticed her assailant until it jumped out onto her and bit down. She shook her head in disgust. She was slipping.

But now she was warm again, her strength restored by the blood and the unfortunate's soul. The snow fell around her lazily, in fat flakes that danced and drifted their way down to the ground, as she trudged onwards.

It took her another hour to crest the ridge. Standing on the high peak, she looked down at the valley. The snow hadn't covered it, despite the blizzards that occasionally raged across the mountains. From her vantage point on the ridge, she could see the line where the snow stopped falling, like a curtain around the valley where the weather dared not trespass. Snowflakes settled on her shoulders, unmelting, as she stood there reflectively and thought.

Ten years.

Looking out over the barren wasteland around her and the scarred valley below, Xiaolian mused reflectively on the past decade. Ten long years. She had searched every corner of these icy plains a dozen times, gone over the battlefield spread out before her until she knew every inch by heart. Ignoring sleep for weeks at a time and surviving on animal blood and the vampires that had fled the battle, she had scoured the wastes of Mongolia relentlessly, in an ever expanding spiral, until finally ending up back here.

She had not found what she sought.

'No news is good news, though,' offered Ling. 'If we didn't find her, she's not here. Not anywhere in the ice plains. And that means she got away, right?'

'I've only been saying it for the past four years,' grumbled Jingfei. But she seemed to sense that now was not the time to test her host's patience. 'Ling is right, though. She must have survived.'

"Quiet, both of you," Lian murmured softly. She didn't actually need to speak out loud to them, and it tended to draw strange looks and whispers of madness from people when she did. But contact with people had been scarce since the battle ten years ago, and the habit was comforting. It was nice to hear a real voice during the long months of isolation, even if it was her own. "I've been thinking."

The chill wind tugged and snatched at her hair as she moved quietly across the battlefield, nestled high in the Altai Mountains where the frost never retreated. She didn't fear another ambush. There were no survivors lurking here. All of them had fled, long ago, too terrified to remain. Here and there she stopped, to brush the snow off an old shield or rearrange a grinning skull on its shoulders, tending to the remains as if they were an old and familiar garden. Her friends stayed silent now that she was in the battlefield proper, drawing back respectfully as old emotions surged along with the memories the scene brought back.

Without thick clothing to protect against the cold, any human would have been rendered near-comatose within a few minutes from hypothermia. Xiaolian wore only a thin hemp shift, but she had not been human for more than two hundred years. No breath steamed the air as she walked between the bodies and weapons, and no footprints remained in her wake as she paused to run a finger along an icicle-studded collarbone, or tighten a breastplate on a gaunt ribcage.

"I've been thinking a lot in the past few months," she murmured, pausing in front of one of the larger skeletons. The vaguely canine jaws were ash-grey and the size of a horse. The ribcage, hacked almost clean in two, could have served as a boat keel had it been whole. "Izuyu," she whispered, remembering the lurking monster in the dark, the lunging jaws and gleaming eyes and rumbling growl. This had been one of her creatures.

'Might have been the one that got me,' remarked Jingfei. 'All I remember is the bite. That was after you were blinded.'

"I remember," nodded Lian, brushing thoughtful fingers across her eyes where the blade had caught her. She turned away from the monstrous frame, heading further into the battlefield. It stretched as far as the eye could see around her, still tinted pink from the blood that had rained from the skies as the fighting had raged on, freezing even as it landed. There, the broken bodies of men and ghouls lay across shattered wagons alongside the warped forms of the monsters that had killed them. Here, a ring of congealed carcasses showed where a group of spearmen had taken a stand, before something had boiled their blood and melted their flesh to slurry, leaving a dark pool of frozen ichor that even the cleansing snow couldn't quite hide.

She sighed. "I think… I think it's time to move on," she said. The words were curiously liberating, after all this time.

'Great!' chirped Ling. 'Where next? Back down into China? Ooo, or maybe west, into the Roof of the World! Or we could try searching up towards Siberia, maybe? Or…'

"No, Ling," Lian interrupted. "I mean it's time to move on. With my life." She paused, cocking her head. "Or unlife, I suppose," she corrected herself. "Regardless. Ihctah is… gone. She's not dead, we'd have found her if she were. Even if her body were burnt, something of her power would have lingered. So she's just… gone. And after ten years… I think it's time to stop searching for her."

'… you're giving up? Just like that?' Despite having advocated this course of action for nearly half a decade, Jingfei sounded shocked.

"No, not giving up. I'll still keep an eye out for her. But I'm going to do other things as well. Travel. Explore. Learn." Something small and furry shifted nearby under the snow, and Lian's eyes flickered towards the sound hungrily. "Feed," she added, licking her lips.

'It has been way, way too long since we got a proper meal,' agreed Ling. 'Or bodies, for that matter.'

'South, then?' asked Jingfei. 'Can we finally get out of the mountains?'

"South," agreed Xiaolian. Her skin darkened, shadowy patterns of formless smoke spreading across her porcelain skin. Her form rippled and shrunk, condensing down on itself and sprouting wings and feathers before drawing the shadows back in. Within seconds, a great owl stood where the girl had, its ghost-white plumage speckled with dark flecks.

Broad wings spread without a sound and beat down, lifting their owner from the ground.

And then the battlefield was empty once more.

…