Scarlet Soul

Chapter 4: Blood

Chapter 4

Edrich and Kayla have only been travelling for a few days but the speed they progressed in dropped drastically with every tick of the clock. The boy found no shortage of water in the rich forest but none of the plants they went by were edible and no animals crossed their path. They were, obviously, avoiding the predator walking peacefully beside him, humming a melody that he has never heard from her before. Unlike the song she sang earlier, the melody of this one was sweet yet very sorrowful, like a bittersweet love song that the singer would not dare present to their beloved in fear of hurting her.

It fit their surroundings perfectly. The trees were wearing a deep shade of red, welcoming winter in the most festive of their gowns and wielding the color proudly, like a trophy or a crown. The wind was the one thing that did not fear Kayla and it was the source of most of the sounds around them in not all of them- a harmony of sounds that were nothing like one another accompanied the enchanting voice that Edrich has grown to fear more than anything else about the vampire.

Kayla was not blind to her partner's needs- she remembered that, unlike her, humans had to eat frequently. In that aspect, being a vampire was very simple: her body could process the essence found in human blood and maintain the limbs that should have been lifeless for a very long time now. Due to her "special circumstances", Kayla needed blood more frequently than the rest of her kind- three or four days without consuming a drop of blood were all she could handle without losing the ability to think rationally.

Edrich noticed something curious about that, too. All vampires kept their humanity to a certain degree but Kayla seemed to have protected more of it than most- the fact that he was still alive was proof of that. A vampire would normally think nothing of honor or gratitude but not only has Kayla spared his life... she also planned on saving his. Edrich never believed that he can live through the trauma his essence-regen system went through. An essence crystal may delay the impending doom but there was a dead end in the continuation of the path he was walking up until now and he could feel it. The Nuns could save him, no doubt, and they will certainly be willing to- saving lives was the duty of the strange underground organization, after all.

Kayla did not speak as much as Edrich expected her to. When she did, the girl told him stories of places he had never been to, describing them surprisingly well given that there was no word of color or shape in her description. She spoke of a sun that shone so bright that she felt as if her skin was burning, of mountains that stretched far above the clouds and water that tasted sweeter than the nectar of a peach. The boy enjoyed the tales about the ocean and the sand that would caress one's feet so gently that it would tickle them. He loved how she explained the sensation of having scalding grains of sand seep through the gap between her hallux and her long toe slowly, patiently, leaving a trail of sensitive skin behind.

He would've asked her to stick to those but, well, he wasn't one for asking or talking in general. He listened to her and pretended that he was not waiting for one of these stories to make an appearance but he knew that he was lying to himself. Once again he was a slave to his stubbornness and inability to speak, once again held back by this undeniably odd burden.

As a child, Edrich was rather talkative- in fact, the only reason why he knew so many different things that a boy his age would not normally care for was because he never stopped asking questions. At first, they were stupid questions: "does looking on a drawing of the sun hurt your eyes?" and "can birds fly to the moons?" were questions he repeated a thousand times a day until someone gave him a satisfying answer with an equally satisfying explanation. Soon enough "why is the sky blue?" has turned into "how come trees do not die during the night, when there is no sunshine?" and then into "what caused the Great War?" and "how did the king sieze the throne?"