A length of time passed before consciousness returned. Hours? Or had it been days or even weeks? There was no way of knowing. Darkness and terrible, crushing pain were the only sensations that he was able to perceive. That, and the occasional cracking and popping of countless tons of stone settling on top of him.

Ulrek Bathory had spent the past year scheming and fighting to make Castle Bathory his home and seat of power. It had instead become his tomb. Despite the savage duel with Solomon Kane, the wooden shiv stabbed into his heart, the column of stone collapsing upon him, the Vampire Prince was not yet slain. Perhaps Kane had narrowly missed the vampire's heart, or perhaps Ulrek was simply too powerful to be killed by a wooden stake. Whatever the case, Ulrek had survived, and had been swallowed by the collapsing castle. He had been pinned inside a claustrophobic cavity between two enormous slabs of stone. Sandwiched between two giant masses of rock in a cavity only inches apart, Ulrek's ribs had all been snapped. Had the remains of the castle fallen more neatly on top of him, Ulrek might have been crushed outright and granted the merciful release of death. God, it would seem, had [i]not[/i] willed that.

Consciousness returned to Ulrek Bathory and slowly his memories returned to him as well, as if he had found himself sleeping in an unfamiliar bed and tried to remember the previous day. The Siege of Castle Bathory, the Madness of the Capital, the explosions, the final battle with Solomon Kane, and then the ceiling of the throne room collapsing upon him. Slowly, the awful realization dawned on Ulrek: he was buried alive. A horrifying fate for anyone, but for a mortal man, relief would come eventually in the form of death. But for immortal vampires, there would be no such solace. The ruins of Castle Bathory would therefore entomb Ulrek for the rest of time. An eternity of agonizing solitude in the darkness, forever to be famished and suffocated. It was a Hell of the ambitious vampire's own making.

Lesser minds would have succumbed to immediate madness upon realizing such a fate. Weaker beings might have tried to simply will themselves to death through sheer determination. But even when faced with an eternity of agony in the void, Ulrek did not succumb, but instead listened in to the world beyond this smoldering rubble heap, seeking feverishly for any mortal mind to probe. There were precious few that Ulrek could even faintly perceive: straggling survivors of the devastation to the capital of the Lands Under Shadow. From such a distance, it was exceedingly difficult - as if he were listening to a conversation through a well-mortared wall. But with intense and purposeful focus, Ulrek proved able to probe the minds of some of the survivors far above him.

[hr]

Early-morning light filtered dimly through a thick haze of smoke, dust, and the ever-present overcast skies to which the Lands Under Shadow owed its name. Until recently, the Capital had been here - among the most populous and well-fortified cities in all the land. Now, the Capital was naught but a smoking maze of rubble, a forest of still-smoldering timbers of burnt houses and shops. The great firedust explosions had blasted out blackened craters and excavated winding ravines that had once been subterranean tunnels and catacombs. Displaced bricks and corpses littered the ground, both equally numberless. Castle Guards, Conscripts from the Weald, dwarves, horses, ogres, women, and children were all present among the lifeless, bloating corpses strewn across the ruined city now teeming with gluttonous flocks of ravens and seagulls. The dead counted easily over a hundred thousand, but some had miraculously survived the back-to-back catastrophes. The dust-caked survivors wound through the ruined city in shuffling lines winding down paths of least resistance through the rubble and debris out toward the cropland surrounding what remained of the Capital. Torpid and sullen processions of amnesiacs went down ash-caked pathways that had once been alleys and streets of the great city, either shocked into senselessness by the great cataclysm or willfully trying to forget that this ruin had once been their home.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z31Gp9u3qBg]((Finale listening))[/url]

One such procession wound its way around the edge of a great hill of pulverized limestone that had once been Castle Bathory. There were no cries of lamentation for the loss of their benevolent vampiric lords who had occupied the towering citadel that had stood here for centuries before; no fear for the warlords and barbarism that would descend upon these lordless lands as surely and voraciously as the carrionbirds feasting upon the corpses at their feet. Only hacking coughs as the surviving paupers trudged around the ruins of the castle.

Buried halfway up the trunk in fallen bricks, the ancient and gnarled holly tree planted in what had once been the courtyard of Castle Bathory had been battered but miraculously remained standing. Whole boughs had been sheared off by fallen debris from the citadel, but the gnarled bole remained, bearing a few stubborn and scraggly limbs of glossy holly leaves. But even the battered tree - now perhaps the tallest thing for several leagues - was not enough to steal the gaze of the sullen survivors from their dirt-caked feet. 

Not until a withered and ancient man, so old that he could scarcely walk, stopped in the sooty path through the boulders and rubble to regard the tree. Those walking behind him brushed past, uninterested in whatever had captivated the feeble-minded codger standing in their way. The wizened survivor ignored those bumping into his back to get by. He stood for some moments until something galvanized his feet. With a shaky, wobbling gait, the old man negotiated the rubble and boulders before him and approached the trunk of the holly tree.

The other survivors ambling past were now stopping to regard this old man hobbling up to the twisted and tortured trunk. Blue, cloudy eyes gazed down into the broken stone at his dusty, calloused feet. For a time, the main gazed at the ground in silence, as if carefully considering some crucial decision. A dozen survivors watched in confused silence as their fellow survivor finally laid his hand against the trunk of the holly. And as if enticed out by a knock at the door, a solitary bat clambered out from a knothole high up in the holly tree and fluttered off into the hazy morning sky.