Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

They waited for a season of dry leaves and late dusks.

They watched the borders, studying the mortal villages that clustered along the eastern fringe of the forest, where the shadow of the border mountains fell longest in the late afternoon and they watched the lamplighters who tended the iron lanterns hung on the wooden boundary posts.

All until the day that they could perhaps catch her unguarded...

Sela was fourteen summers old, with dirt under her short fingernails and hair the color of dried oats, usually tied back with a piece of frayed fishing twine.

Her father was the village lamplighter, an old man whose knees clicked when he walked, so it was Sela who carried the heavy brass can of whale oil and the burning wick-pole down the forest path every evening before the sun sank behind the mountains.

Her little brother Teo followed her everywhere.

He was six, with big, round brown eyes and teeth that were still coming in crooked, clutching the hem of her rough homespun tunic whenever the owl-calls sounded from the deep woods.

”Stay close, Teo,” Sela warned him, dipping her wick into the iron sconce hanging from the third boundary post. ”Father said the wolves are bold this autumn... The wind smells of frost.”

”I see a red light,” Teo whispered, pointing a small grubby finger toward the shadow of a fallen oak ten paces into the brush. ”Sela, look... In the briars... Two red stones.”

Sela froze.

A tall figure stepped out of the pine shadows with the silence of falling snow.

The creature wore a long trailing coat of black velvet stiff with silver embroidery, but the collar was pulled high, and beneath the wide brim of a dark hat, two eyes like stagnant wine burned in the twilight.

His skin was gray pulled tight over high cheekbones, his fingers impossibly long and tipped with blue-black nails like curved iron spikes.

Before Sela could draw breath to scream, the vampire moved.

SWISH!

One moment he was ten paces away, and the next he was standing right in front of them with the cold wind of his passage smelling like a crypt.

His long clawed fingers snapped shut around Teo’s throat, lifting the six-year-old clean off the pine needles.

Teo’s small boots kicked wildly at the empty air, his hands clawing at the icy wrist, a strangled choking whimper bubbling in his chest.

”A plump little wren,” the vampire whispered, his lips pulling back over long, needle-thin fangs, a wet rasp rattling in his throat. ”So warm. So full of noisy red blood...”

Sela didn’t think.

She swung the heavy brass can of burning whale oil with both hands, using all the leverage in her young shoulders, and smashed it directly across the vampire noble’s pale aristocratic face.

CRACK!

The brass seam split as the burning oil splashed across his cheeks, his eyes, and his fine velvet collar, igniting into a violent roaring ball of orange flame.

”AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

The vampire shrieked, an unholy gargling sound that rattled the dry leaves on the boughs.

SCREECH!

His grip loosened, and Teo dropped into the moss with a wet thump.

”RUN, TEO!” Sela screamed, grabbing her brother by the scruff of his collar and shoving him violently back toward the road. ”RUN TO THE ABBEY! DON’T LOOK BACK! RUN!”

Teo scrambled to his feet, crying in terror with his little legs pumping as fast as they could carry him down the dirt track toward the distant village bells.

The burning noble tore at his face with his claws, peeling away strips of charred gray skin, his wine-red eyes blazing with unbridled fury as he lunged toward the road to snatch the boy back.

Sela saw the long stride, saw the reaching claws, and knew Teo wouldn’t make thirty paces before those iron fingers snapped his spine.

She turned on her heel and hurled her burning wick-pole straight into the brush on the opposite side of the road.

”Over here, you ugly leech!” she shouted, her voice cracking with pure terror. ”Over here! I’m the one who burned your face!”

She bolted into the dense black pines.

The vampire whipped around, shaking the last embers from his cheekbones, and hissed into the shadows.

From the dark canopy above, three more silhouettes detached from the branches, dropping onto the moss with the soft rustle of falling leaves, however they didn’t pursue Teo.

...They didn’t even look down the road toward the village.

They slipped into the trees behind Sela with their boots making no sound on the mulch.

They hunted her for three nights.

Sela didn’t know it, but an ancient blood-noble could have crossed fifty yards and snapped her neck before her boots hit the earth a second time.

They stayed twenty paces back though.

Sometimes they drifted through the branches above her head, their black velvet coats brushing against the needles like the wings of giant bats.

Sometimes they walked slowly along the parallel ridge, allowing her to catch the pale gleam of their fangs and the low mocking sound of their laughter floating through the fog.

”Run faster, little bird,” a voice would purr from the mist. ”The night is long. Your little heart beats so loud... thump, thump, thump... like a tiny drum in the dark.”

Whenever she collapsed from exhaustion, curling into the hollow of an oak to weep, a twig would snap nearby.

A cold dead hand would rustle the fern fronds two feet from her face, forcing her to scramble to her feet on shredded bleeding soles, driving her onward through the briars.

They were herding her.

On the second night, Sela heard the abbey bells ringing far behind her, and she cried with relief, because it meant Teo had made it home then she wiped her face and kept running.

They pushed her north, away from the cultivated valleys, away from the bells of the abbey, driving her relentlessly toward a high, sunken hollow surrounded by ancient petrified standing stones.

It was a place where the sunlight had always fallen thin and watery, an ancient wound in the crust of the realm that the vampires had spent three hundred years preparing in secret.

On the third night, Sela could run no further.

Her rough homespun tunic was shredded into rags, soaked in sweat and her own blood from dozens of thorn-scratches.

Her bare feet were purple, swollen, and leaving sticky red prints on the frozen pine needles.

Her lungs burned like she’d swallowed dry lime with each breath coming as a ragged wheezing rattle that shook her thin ribs.

She stumbled over an exposed root and fell hard onto her hands and knees.

THUD!

Her chin struck a flat gray stone.

She tried to push herself up, but her arms gave way, trembling uncontrollably.

Around her, the four vampires stepped out from behind the petrified pillars of the clearing, forming a silent mocking semicircle.

They didn’t strike her down like she expected... They just stood there, crossing their long arms, smiling with cruel patient anticipation.

Sela lifted her head, looking up at the black sky through the tangle of branches.

The stars were gone and the clouds hung low, heavy with the coming snow.

’T-teo... did you make it back?’

She wondered if he was sitting by the big stone hearth, eating warm porridge, crying for his sister who had gone into the woods.

She squeezed her eyes shut, clutched two handfuls of freezing pine mulch, and let out the cry that had lived in her throat since the first boundary lamp went out.

”Please,” she wept with her voice breaking on the cold stone. ”Please... it’s so dark... The shadows have teeth out here... Mother said you listen to the little ones... Please... where are you? Golden Lady... Sun Mother... please come... It’s so dark... It’s so cold... Please come...”

Far above the realm, hovering on the western edge of the world, Lilianel stood at the crest of the twilight ridge.

The great solar disk had already dipped below the rim of the earth.

The sky around her was turning a deep bruised violet, the cooling air whispering through her golden hair as she prepared for her slow routine descent behind the western mountains.

Her light was at its lowest ebb with the long shadows of the mountains creeping across her skin like cold iron bars.

Every ancient divine instinct woven into her immortal marrow screamed at her to hold her ground.

’Wait,’ The instinct whispered, cold and ancient as the bedrock. ’The light is fading... The shadows are long. In one hour the realm turns to midnight, and your strength will be halved so wait for the dawn. Rise at the sixth hour and bathe the eastern ridge in glory... You can’t chase every field mouse in the dark.’

Lilianel clenched her small fists.

The nails of her fingers bit deep into her palms, drawing tiny glowing beads of pure golden ichor that sizzled against the stone beneath her feet.

She could hear the voice.

It came from a child, broken and bleeding, weeping into the freezing mud, begging the Sun Mother to keep the teeth away.

It was almost the very same prayer that had brought her into the world... Three thousand years ago, a woman freezing alone in a black cave had whispered those same words into the dark, and they were the first thing Lilianel had ever heard.

She’d never once ignored that.

In three thousand years of dawn and dusk, when a mortal voice called her name with their whole heart, she’d never turned her back to wait for a more convenient hour.

”I’m the sun,” Lilianel whispered through her teeth, her golden eyes blazing with sudden furious fire that burned away the twilight chill. ”I won’t wait for the morning to save my children.”

She didn’t wait another heartbeat.

Lilianel folded her arms against her ribs, kicked off the high western terrace, and drove herself downward like a falling star, tearing through the cloud ceiling in a roaring jagged trail of blinding celestial gold.

WHOOOOSH!

The sky over the eastern forest split wide open.

A pillar of liquid sunlight blasted down through the pine branches, turning the cold mist to instantaneous steam, incinerating the high needles, and slamming into the center of the sunken clearing with the concussive roar of an erupting volcano.

BOOOM!

The four vampires didn’t even flinch...

The two nobles standing directly in front of the bleeding girl simply took three languid, synchronized steps to the left and right, parting like dark curtains on a stage.

They wanted her to see.

Lilianel dropped to her knees in the center of the smoking crater, her golden mane swirling around her shoulders with her skin radiating heat that set the surrounding ferns on fire.

”I’m here!” Lilianel called out, her voice bright, ringing, and breathless with urgency. ”I’m here, little one, the daylight is—”

Her voice choked as the words died in her throat, turning to ash.

Sela lay on the flat gray stone three feet away.

A jagged, three-foot stake of petrified ironwood was driven straight through her spine, pinning her thin torso to the rock beneath her.

The blood had already pooled in the hollows of the stone, turning cold in the night air.

The vampires had driven it in minutes before the light tore through the clouds, leaving her alive just long enough to draw the sun down into the pit.

”No...” Lilianel gasped, lunging forward on her knees.

She caught the girl’s shoulders, lifting Sela’s thin, ragged frame against her chest.

Lilianel poured her warmth into the dying child and she didn’t hold back at all.

”You have to live...”

Pure radiant solar mana surged from her palms, soaking into Sela’s torn tunic, flooding her broken chest, trying with desperate frantic fury to knit the severed flesh, to restart the cold silent pulse in her throat however it wasn’t enough.

The mortal body was too fragile... The spirit was already slipping past the threshold, sliding away like water through sun-warmed fingers.

Sela’s eyelids fluttered open, reflecting the golden face bending over her.

A tiny weak smile touched the girl’s cracked blood-stained lips.

Her small hand, covered in pine mulch and dried blood, rose an inch from the stone, her trembling fingers lightly brushing the golden hair tumbling across Lilianel’s cheek.

”You came...” Sela whispered, her breath rattling like dry leaves against the goddess’s ear. ”You’re so warm... like the hearth at home... tell Teo... I’m sorry I left him...”

The small hand went limp.

It slipped from Lilianel’s cheek, falling into the dark pool on the stone with a soft wet slap.

SPLAT!

The light in the child’s eyes went out.

Lilianel knelt in the center of the clearing with the dead girl cradled against her chest, the wild golden hair falling over her face like a shroud.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, a strange hollow ache tearing through her chest, deeper and more agonizing than any wound a blade had ever carved into her flesh.

”I came,” Lilianel whispered to the silent woods, her voice cracking into a ragged helpless sob. ”I came... I’m here... please, look at me...”

From the edge of the clearing, a dry clicking sound answered her grief.

CLACK!

CLACK!

The four vampires were applauding.