The hours after the messenger's departure passed in a haze of panic for Orlov. Night deepened around his crumbling citadel as he paced the empty corridors, muttering to himself, occasionally shouting orders to servants who had been gone for over a century. In rare moments of lucidity, he would pause, remembering his solitude, before the fog of delusion recimed him once more.

  As dawn approached, he retreated to the most secure chamber in the citadel—once a grand bedroom, now a tattered space where the corners of his coffin protruded through threadbare velvet. The luxurious silk lining had been sold decades ago, repced with dirt from his own nds. It was all he had left to sleep upon.

  When he rose the following evening, the summons remained on the dusty table beside his coffin, its official seals catching the faint moonlight filtering through boarded windows. The sight of it stirred memories he had long tried to suppress—the beginning of his downfall, two centuries earlier.

  The Crimson Games of Year 290 had seemed like any other victory for tradition at first. He had attended with his usual disdain, convinced of his faction's superiority despite the tournament results. The weeks away from his territory had been a mere formality, a necessary appearance to maintain his position in vampire society's delicate bance of power.

  He remembered returning to his nds after the Games, expecting the usual eborate welcome—hundreds of human servants lined in formation, lesser nobles arranged by rank, the familiar mechanisms of his vast domain functioning with mechanical precision.

  Instead, he had arrived to silence.

  "Empty," he whispered now, the word hanging in the stale air of his bedchamber. "All empty."

  That first night back in Year 290 had been chaos. His carriage had arrived at his primary castle to find no grooms waiting, no footmen to open doors, no steward to announce his return. The hundreds of human servants who maintained his household had vanished entirely. More shocking still was the absence of common vampires—the soldiers, administrators, and functionaries who formed the backbone of his territory's operations.

  The memories came faster now, a cascade of humiliations spanning two centuries of decline.

  He recalled the frantic investigations in those early days—his noble vassals dispatching search parties of lesser nobles throughout his vast domains, only to return with identical reports from every province, every district, every blood farm. All humans and common vampires had disappeared during daylight hours while the nobles slept, leaving no traces of their departure. No tracks in the forests, no disturbances at border checkpoints, not even footprints in the dust.

  "Millions," he hissed, his skeletal hands trembling with remembered rage. "Millions of resources, gone without a single witness."

  The blood farms had been the greatest loss—massive medieval complexes where humans were kept for extraction, each one housing thousands of numbered resources. Those facilities had been the foundation of his territory's power, providing the sustenance that maintained his aristocracy's strength. Without them, his domain had faced immediate crisis.

  He shuffled to the window, gazing out at the overgrown grounds that had once been immacute gardens. In the early days after the disappearance, he had been certain of external responsibility—Lucius must have engineered the catastrophe, using his progressive faction's resources to strike at traditional values. Yet two centuries of accusations had yielded no evidence, no confession, no witnesses to the most comprehensive theft in vampire history.

  "The lower nobles were the first to leave," he muttered, watching a dead leaf skitter across the broken fgstones below.

  Within months of the disappearance, the lesser nobles of his territory had begun defecting. With no blood resources avaible and hunger weakening even the strongest vampires, these minor aristocrats had approached Archduchess Seraphina's borders first, seeking shelter in exchange for vassage. The progressive faction had welcomed these refugees, redirecting most to Lucius's rger territories while maintaining diplomatic fiction of neutrality.

  Orlov's lip curled in disgust at the memory. "Weak parasites. No loyalty. No principles."

  What these defectors had discovered in progressive territories had accelerated the exodus—electric lighting, modern plumbing, technological comforts, and most critically, sustainable blood collection systems that continued functioning despite the mass disappearance. The stark contrast between their previous medieval existence and the progressive territories' measured advancement had transformed many into enthusiastic converts.

  His decision in those early months had proven catastrophic in retrospect, though he could still not bring himself to acknowledge the error. Faced with dwindling resources and blood scarcity, he had chosen to prioritize his personal consumption, using the territory's remaining wealth to purchase imported blood exclusively for himself and his most loyal followers. The majority of his nobles had been left to fend for themselves—a strategy he had believed would eliminate the weak while preserving the truly devoted traditionalists.

  Instead, it had accelerated his downfall.

  "The army," he whispered, the memory still bitter after two centuries. "My own army."

  His military forces—once numbering tens of thousands of vampire soldiers—had been among the first to feel the effects of blood scarcity. When he refused to allocate resources for their sustenance, preferring to maintain his personal consumption, military discipline had colpsed entirely. What began as individual desertions soon became mass defections, entire regiments disappearing overnight to pledge allegiance to Lucius in exchange for regur feeding.

  By the end of the first decade after the disappearance, not even a ceremonial guard remained in his service.

  The high nobles had sted longer, their pride and factional loyalty keeping them in his territory despite deteriorating conditions. These ancient aristocrats—many enhanced during Dr. Keller's early experiments after the Evolution—had maintained the pretense of traditional court functions even as their castles crumbled around them. They continued wearing medieval finery while starving, conducting eborate ceremonies in empty halls, preserving the forms of traditional nobility while the substance deteriorated beyond recovery.

  "Lord Valisov was the st," Orlov recalled, his voice hollow. "Remained for nearly fifty years after the others fled."

  Eventually, even these stalwarts had abandoned him. One by one, castle by castle, province by province, his high nobility had vanished from his domain. Some had the courtesy to formally announce their departure, while others simply disappeared in the night without farewell. In his more lucid moments, Orlov suspected they had all eventually surrendered to the progressive territories, but he preferred to imagine some had met a nobler end, choosing final death over capitution. By Year 350, barely sixty years after the disappearance, Orlov had stood alone as the st representative of his once-mighty faction.

  With hunger weakening him and no vassals remaining to generate income, he had begun the humiliating process of selling his territorial holdings to survive. First the outlying provinces, then the strategic fortresses, then the ancestral castles of his most loyal (now departed) nobles. Each sale had brought blood reserves to sustain him temporarily while further diminishing his actual power.

  And always, the primary buyer had been Lucius.

  Through intermediaries and holding companies, the progressive Archduke had systematically acquired Orlov's territories piece by piece. The transactions had been conducted with bureaucratic detachment—fair market value offered for nds that had become worthless to Orlov but strategically valuable to Lucius. Never charity, always business, the steady transfer of property had maintained the fiction of ordinary commerce while fundamentally reshaping vampire society's territorial bance.

  "Two thousand eight hundred seventy-six separate sales," Orlov muttered, the precise figure burned into his memory. "My domain sold like market cattle."

  By Year 400, a century after the disappearance, he had retained only his central province. By Year 450, just his primary castle and surrounding nds. Now, at Year 500, nothing remained but this single crumbling citadel—the st physical vestige of a domain that had once spanned territories the size of continents.

  He moved from the window to a hidden compartment beneath a loose stone in the floor. From this st secure location, he withdrew a velvet pouch containing his final remaining possession of value—his Archduke signet ring. The massive gold band set with blood-red rubies had been in his possession since the days immediately following the Evolution. Unlike every other valuable in his domain, this alone he had refused to sell, hiding it away between wearings to prevent theft.

  Slipping it onto his skeletal finger, he held it up to catch the faint moonlight. The symbols of his office—ancient runes representing traditional vampire authority—seemed to pulse with remembered power.

  "My title," he whispered, cradling his ringed hand as though it contained a fragile treasure. "They cannot take my title."

  This single word—Archduke—was all that remained of his former glory. The constitutional position established in vampire society's earliest days still carried political weight beyond any material possession. Most critically, vampire w required unanimous approval from all Archdukes for any vampire to ascend to kingship. This constitutional requirement made Orlov's title valuable—as long as he held it, he retained veto power over any attempt to establish a Vampire King.

  In Orlov's mind, this was his st weapon against Lucius and the progressive faction. He clung to the belief that preventing any possible unification of vampire society under a single monarch was his final service to traditional values. Whether Lucius actually harbored such ambitions was irrelevant; Orlov's paranoia had convinced him this was the progressive Archduke's ultimate goal.

  Now, even this final asset was threatened.

  He returned to the table where the summons y, reading it again with trembling hands. In his fractured mind, the document's implications were unmistakable. He had convinced himself the Council intended to strip him of his title—that this was all an eborate scheme orchestrated by Lucius to remove the st obstacle to some imagined coronation.

  "It's all a plot," he muttered, his eyes darting wildly around the empty room as though expecting to find spies in the shadows. "They've been pnning this for centuries. All of them conspiring against me."

  Without his Archduke designation, Orlov would become nothing. Worse than nothing—a common vampire who had fallen from the greatest heights to complete obscurity. His paranoia constructed eborate conspiracy theories around this simple fear, painting Lucius as the mastermind behind every camity that had befallen him.

  "I must prepare," he muttered, pacing the worn path in the dusty floor. "I must appear at my most... aristocratic."

  He paused at the irony of it. For centuries, he had been vampire society's most vocal advocate for aristocratic standards. His edicts on proper noble conduct filled volumes in the archival libraries. He had stripped lesser nobles of titles and nds for infractions as minor as incorrect table settings or improper ceremonial dress. His notorious treatise, "The Eternal Dignity of Vampire Nobility," had established rigorous criteria for aristocratic behavior that even his own faction had found difficult to maintain.

  Now he would be judged by those same merciless standards—standards he himself had created.

  With sudden determination, he lurched toward what had once been his dressing chamber. If he were to have any hope of retaining his title, he must at least attempt to present himself as a proper Archduke. Perhaps somewhere in the rubble of his former life, he might find garments appropriate for the tribunal.

  The irony was not lost on him. Having judged so many others as unworthy, he now faced judgment himself. The criteria he had wielded as weapons against progressive reform would now determine his own fate.

  And by those criteria, he had already failed.