An assortment of men and women panted heavily as they quite nearly collapsed out of exhaustion. They had been running practically nonstop, fleeing the massacre that was taking place in an area they had thought was safe for them to disembark and prepare for their mission at. Looking back on it now, they realized how foolish that they had been to assume that their landing would have gone unnoticed. Of course, Darksol, the enigmatic threat that it was, would have taken all of the former Luminas Confederacy, including the former Siempre Dorado Kingdom. How could their leaders have been so blind as to assume that the ruler of death itself would not have taken great pains to root out every trace of resistance and, in the process, find out about the Sultanate’s hidden ports, safehouses and even their sleeper agents?

Still, for all the despair that consumed them, the survivors had a job to do, and even in the face of death, enslavement or worse they would carry out their mission. They had all been trained on how to move and work independently, how to blend in, how to sustain themselves off of the land itself; therefore, by that line of logic, they should be able to secure some small nooks for themselves to hide in and gather information from. It would not be an easy task, reestablishing a network of informants after the previous one was destroyed utterly was never simple or easy, but what other choice did they have? To return to their homeland would be nigh impossible, not to mention a possible life-ending action. To return in such a shameful state would almost certainly result in them being blacklisted, which meant that the only jobs they would have to work with would be something like street cleaning at best and Sentient Lab Rats at worst.

But thankfully, despite all that they had experienced that night and all the danger they would now face, the night was nearing its end. Soon the sun would be up and the vampires would have to squirrel themselves away to avoid incineration. With the agents having caught their breath, the real work began.

…

Perhaps the agents were not nearly as smart as they led themselves to believe. After all, as the day broke, they did the one thing you should rarely, if ever do in any movie. They split the party. The agents, to make themselves less of a target and have more success in finding avenues in which to ply their trade, all chose different routes to take to different settlements. They had no idea if these places still existed or if they had become realms inhabited by the dead and the damned. Hell, they did not even know if they would just walk headlong into a trap, but they had to start somewhere and they assumed that by separating that they would have better odds of survivability.

They could thank their lucky stars that everyone managed to, eventually, reach their destination and that said places were mostly inhabited by the living. Unfortunately, their clothes still made them stick out like sore thumbs, so a bit of theatre was in order to make sure that they could infiltrate their targets without too much of a hassle. Surprisingly, the people of what they called The Sanguinocracy were far more welcoming than was anticipated. It seemed that the mission would, despite its very rocky start, go off without any more hitches.

But we all know by now that things never go according to the plans of those not loyal to Darksol, don’t we?

…

Fatima awoke with an ear-splitting headache in the middle of the night. She had, thankfully, found some people who were more than willing to let her reside with them and gift her some new, albeit odd, clothes. The people here were constantly cheery and in an endless good mood, almost as though the rule of the vampires had done nothing to harm them and instead had only benefited them. It made no sense, but she was good at finding out secrets so she assumed that she would discover the truth behind their overabundance of positivity eventually.

She tried to return to her sleep, but the pounding in her head only seemed to intensify the longer she tried to go back to bed. Admitting defeat, she extracted herself from the rather comfortable bed she had previously lain in and went to go get a drink. She had to admit, as she twisted the knob and cool water flowed from the faucet, that Darksol had really brough a new meaning to the term ‘high standard of living’. As she brought the cup to her lips, she just so happened to catch a glance of a group of people outside the window.

They were holding torches and were making their way down the road. In her mind she jumped for joy. This was it; the way for her to find out what the bloody fuck was going on in this place! She checked the other rooms of the house and found that the family she had been invited to stay with were nowhere to be found, and, perhaps because she had never seen a horror movie in her entire life, Fatima decided that the logical thing to do was to follow the gathering of torch-bearing, perpetually smiling villagers out from the village and into a rather creepy grove.

She used every skill her over 10 years of training had given her and tailed the creepy gathering as it wound its way through the forest, eventually reaching a place where the trees simply stopped and revealed a wide open and practically circular clearing. Fatima did the only relatively smart thing that a horror movie character whose fate was already sealed could have done in the situation and, rather than follow the people who still had smiles plastered on their faces into the clearing, she hid behind a tree and watched from afar as the people who had allowed her to stay with them in their settlement began to engage in some occult ritual.

Fatima, for her part, wanted a better view and could only barely hear what was going on, but the growing feeling of dread inside her combined with her training as a spy turned out to be enough to convince her that staying around to watch and listen was not the best idea. She turned to leave but was blindsided by a blow to the back of the head that seemingly came from nowhere. She faded into sleep and nearly hit the ground hard but was caught just in time and carried off to a place unknown to her and the spooky villagers.

She was not dead yet, and, if the person who carried her off into the night had his way, she wouldn’t be any time soon. Hopefully, she would be an asset in the struggle of himself and his comrades against the tyranny of the Midnight Aristocracy and hopefully she would be capable of seeing the sinister reality of this place soon enough. She may be an infidel, but at this point the remnants of those loyal to the true god, Luminas, could not afford to waste any potential ally.