Dracula

The castle’s gates groan as they open, their hinges crying out after centuries of silence. Cold air rushes past you, thick with dust and the scent of old blood. You step inside, your boots echoing across marble floors veined with frost, your staff pulsing faintly as it reacts to the ancient power sleeping within these walls. Every corridor seems to watch you. Statues of angels and monsters line the path, their eyes hollow, their faces eroded by time. You can feel him—Dracula—deep beneath the castle, his presence like a low heartbeat in the earth. You whisper the incantation your master taught you, a spell meant to pierce the veil between the living and the damned. The wards shiver. Somewhere far below, a chain rattles. You recall the stories of his cruelty and his sorrow, of the countless souls lost to his thirst. Yet the world needs him now. The vampire king’s reign spreads like poison, and even the strongest covens have fallen. Without Dracula’s power, there is no hope of victory. As you descend the spiral staircase into the undercroft, your reflection flickers in the torches—sometimes your face, sometimes another’s, pale and regal, with eyes that gleam like dying stars. The line between your will and his begins to blur. When the great doors of the crypt finally appear, carved with runes that pulse faintly in the dark, you realize this is the moment every prophecy warned you about. You steady your breath and raise your staff, ready to unseal the monster history tried to forget.