BXBX NOVEL Chapter 26: Painful Memory
Chapter 26: Painful Memory
Lucia slowly lowered her head towards her tail in defeat, cursing herself for being born with the lower half of a serpent.
"Quite easily disparaged aren\'t you, little snake?"
"EEEP!"
When Lucia last saw Indra, he had been several feet away from her leaning nonchalantly against a tree.
Upon hearing him so suddenly, she looked up to find his face directly in front of hers.
\'Too close! Too close! Too close!\' Lucia was so preoccupied with making sure that she did not instinctively bite him, she had forgotten all about the fact that he had somehow appeared in front of her impossibly quickly and without making so much as a single sound.
Indra found Lucia to be rather strange and fragile.
He\'d only wanted to observe Lucia a little more before speaking, but imagine his surprise when she suddenly put her head down and began releasing wave after wave of negative aura.
Even if they were not in contact for him to read her mind, her self deprecating thoughts were easily identifiable.
"W-Who is a little snake?" Lucia yelled with reddened cheeks.
Indra ignored her outburst and stared at her long tail with bright teal scales.
"Such a beautiful color..."
"Indeed! Her scales are quite lovely." Enyo agreed.
Lucia was stunned silly by the two strangers who were staring at her tail with an unseen intensity.
\'So he does not find me repulsive?\' Lucia\'s mood immediately improved.
With a bit more confidence than before, Lucia once again attempted to communicate with the strange man. "Umm I don\'t mean to be rude but... what exactly are you?"
The beautiful lamia just couldn\'t put her finger on it.
She knew he was not human, yet she could not place exactly what he was either. She might have mistaken him for a poltergeist as well, had he and Enyo\'s aura\'s not been completely different.
"Vampire." Indra replied without much thought as he continued to stare at Lucia\'s pretty scales.
"Vam.. What?" Lucia hadn\'t heard of anything like that before.
Then again, she was only eighteen years old and there were still a great many kinds of fallen that she hadn\'t heard of.
"Don\'t think about it too much. I am the last of my kind." The vampire finally couldn\'t resist and reached out to touch Lucia\'s smooth and cool scales.
Lucia let out a small yelp but otherwise, she made no effort to stop him.
Unsurprisingly, the sensation was every bit as pleasant as he\'d imagined it to be. It took a great deal of effort for him not to begin petting her outright.
\'He\'s all alone... I cannot imagine how lonely he must feel.\'
With a small smirk, Indra finally stopped petting the young snake woman.
He was not particularly bothered by the fact that he was the last of his kind, but Lucia\'s heartfelt concern for someone she\'d never met was touching.
"Why are you out here all alone and how did you end up injured?" Enyo suddenly asked.
It was at this moment Lucia realized she had not told her saviors anything about herself.
"Ah... There was a battle against one of the heroes and we... lost. I tried to get away, but a few the humans chased after me and fired arrows."
"I\'m sorry... that must have been very scary." Enyo comforted.
Lucia smiled helplessly, ashamed to admit just how afraid she had actually been.
She believed she was going to die out here all alone with no one to help her.
Her last moments of consciousness before passing out had been spent cursing her own weakness and desperately clinging to life.
"Can you tell us what this hero was like?" Enyo asked.
Immediately, a shudder ran down Lucia\'s spine.
"He was overwhelming. His sword arts and his arcane were both incredibly powerful. Princess Keran did not stand a chance..."
Enyo immediately twitched and she believed she may have misheard.
"I\'m sorry... did you say Keran?"
Lucia met the shocked eyes of Enyo and immediately became confused. "Yes... Princess Keran Garou, the daughter of the werewolf king."
Suddenly, Indra clutched his head as he was assaulted with a terrible and dull headache.
\'Keran?\'
\'I know that name...\'
\'No I don\'t.\'
\'Why is this happening?\'
A groan of pain escaped his lips as he fell backwards onto the ground.
"Indra!"
"H-Hey are you alright?!"
The girls immediately flew to his side and sought to comfort him, unfortunately he could not hear anything outside of the whispers in his own mind.
After a few minutes, Indra finally released his head and stared up at the two women giving him concerned faces.
"Did I scare-"
"Yes!" Enyo did not even bother to let him finish.
Indra chuckled lightly and patted her head. "I\'m sorry. I have no idea why I suddenly collapsed like that."
Enyo fell into a deep silence.
Her prince may have forgotten, but she knew very well what the name Keran meant to him in the past.
Before Indra could fully remove his hand from her head, he heard a thought that froze him to his very core.
"What do you mean she was my betrothed?"
"Eh!?!?" Lucia had done a pretty good job keeping silent until now but that sentence was absolutely one that she did not expect to hear.
With a sigh, Enyo began to explain the past between the princess of the werewolves and the third prince of vampires.
500 years ago, the Ascalon and the Garou reached a sort of understanding after centuries of feuding between the two.
To cement their new friendship, Indra and Keran were to be wed, linking the future king of vampires to the future queen of werewolves.
Indra and Keran spent a great deal of time together as young children in order to foster good relations.
From the time they were five years old, the two would run around and play together while getting into all sorts of mischief that Enyo usually had to apologize for.
When it was discovered that Indra did not have the aptitude for cultivation, his engagement to Keran was annulled.
Despite that, Keran would visit him regularly as she had already fallen in love with Indra and did not care if he couldn\'t cultivate.
Throughout the years, they continued to meet in secret and their love would only deepen.
For a while, Enyo was the only one who knew of their relationship, but when Keran suddenly stopped aging, their affair was discovered.
A speciality of the vampire race is that when they take a lover, they have the option to feed them their blood and cease their aging so the they may enjoy eternity together.
Indra was against it, but Keran had hoped that their abrupt defiance would force their parents to reinstate their engagement.
Unfortunately, her father was utterly furious.
The werewolf king forbid Keran from leaving castle grounds again and Indra never saw her after that.
His depression only worsened, and he began sleeping for decades at a time, unconcerned with the world around him.
Throughout all of this, Enyo was there the entire time.
She would spend a great many days consoling her broken hearted master.