Chapter 40: The Beetle Song’s Proprietress
The moon was still high up in the air and the sky was blanketed by stars. Crickets chirped as they ca out the front door of the manor house.
Carn finally saw the trees that she had seen out the windows earlier. The whole manor was surrounded by trees, sitting in a clearing. A stone path paved the way through the forest, winding through the trees and disappearing around a bend.
“This place is kind of small, isn’t it? I expected the place you live in to be more grand,” Carn said.
Victoria nodded. “A lot of visitors say that, but I’m not interested in moving anywhere else when I don’t need it. Plus, I like the quiet. Co on, let’s go to the city.”
Her wings fluttered and Victoria lifted up into the air, leaving Carn behind.
“Wait, I can’t fly!” Carn shouted, running after her.
“But I saw you fly when you landed in the seat,” Victoria pointed out, turning to look down at her from the sky. “You really can’t?”
“No. It was an accident…”
“You’re so helpless. Just put mana into your wings. Our wings are natural constructions for flight spells,” Victoria said, spinning through the air and flying in loops. “It might be confusing at first.”
Doing as she was told, Carn first tried to put undead mana into her wings, but all it did was do the sa thing as it did for the rest of her body—make it tougher to hurt. It looks like only blood mana will work.
With the addition of blood mana, her body suddenly felt light. The extra limbs on her back felt a little strange to be using actively, but she got used to the controls quite quickly. She gave her wings an experintal flap and yelped as her body suddenly lifted into the air, flipping and tumbling, only slowing down when Victoria flew over and steadied her.
“This is…difficult,” she admitted. “It feels so strange.”
“Almost everyone except a few devils have trouble with it at first but you’ll learn quite quickly. It’s in your blood after all. Co on, let’s not waste anymore moonlight.” Victoria let go of her but kept a grip on her hand. “For now, just try to keep aloft. I’ll pull you until you’re ready to try it on your own.”
Carn nodded, desperately flapping her wings. Surprisingly, the movents of her wings didn’t matter so much as her intentions of what to do. As long as she thought about maintaining her position in the air, she was fine, but the mont she tried to change direction, she’d veer off wildly off course, taking Victoria with her until Victoria managed to stop the both of them.
The forest in front of the manor wasn’t very wide. It would have only taken half an hour or so of walking to get through, so it was a simple privacy barrier for Victoria. As such, with the speed of their flight, they easily passed over the trees and reached the city situated a little beyond the forest.
The irony of the first real city she sees after becoming a vampire being a city of demons did not escape her. It even made sense, in a twisted kind of way. Despite it being in the middle of the night, the city was still bustling. The figures of the people still out and about after dark was illuminated by street lanterns and lights spilling out of windows.
Had Carn been in any city in human territory, the city would be locked down after curfew and almost like a ghost city.
“Why is everyone still awake?” she asked Victoria, who was flying beside her.
By now, she could fly by herself even if Victoria didn’t hold her hand. However, she could only fly in a straight line and even the slightest chance in direction requires a lengthy deliberation to avoid sending herself spinning away again.
“Why not? Unlike humans, every race can see just fine in the dark. Being princesses of the night, is it strange that our cities will still be awake after the sun has set?” Victoria asked. “Humans are the odd ones out.”
They descended down onto one of the busier streets—a market street, instantly attracting the attention of many of the pedestrians.
“Oh! Lady Victoria, it’s rare for you to be out here so late!” one of the demons called. It was a fluffy fox-like demon with a long snout and squinty eyes, dressed in colorful, thick clothes.
At the sa ti, another demon, a pretty long-eared woman with blonde hair leaned out from behind her large stall, holding a bottle of sloshing liquid. “The moon sure is pretty isn’t it? Do you want so wine on the house, Lady?”
“How could you offer sothing so low quality to her? Lady Victoria, my wine is imported directly from the Auraefir vineyards!” a second elf shouted, raising her own bottle. “Please accept it!”
Carn shrank as the originally busy streets burst into activity and all sorts of demons began trying to offer their wares to Victoria for free.
It was quite scary how popular Victoria was. Even though she herself was quite popular and received a lot of attention when she attended Church parades and event processions in Moltrost, the attention she received was always muted and filled with a hint of worship.
It was different from the intimate popularity that Victoria enjoyed.
Just who was Victoria?
She had originally planned to lie low, but Victoria attracted way too much attention. As her companion, Carn was naturally picked out from the crowd as well.
“Oh? Lady Victoria, is she another guest of yours?” A short bearded man around the sa height as Carn peered at them.
“A guest? Who is she? Who is she? Introduce her to us!”
“Look, her hair!”
“Her hair!”
The mont soone pointed out how Carn’s hair was not entirely silver, a ripple of silence spread through the crowd as they began to discuss among themselves before resuming their shouting.
A golden-eyed woman with thick, wild hair and a pair of ears sticking up from the top of her head was one of the loudest, easily being heard over the rest of the crowd. “Leave it to our lady to be able to capture soone like that.”
Capture?
Carn looked over at Victoria who didn’t seem fazed at all being in the center of so much attention. Instead, she took it in stride, rejecting the offers one by one and replying to so of the especially loud ones.
Victoria turned to the lion woman. “No, you misunderstand. Camilla here isn’t a guest. She’s my daughter.”
“Ohhh!”
“Lady Camilla!”
Wincing as the number of eyes on her instantly multiplied, Carn pulled on Victoria’s sleeves. Luckily, Victoria knew what she was trying to say and quickly excused herself before taking into the sky, leaving the people on the streets behind.
Although Carn saw many people with wings in the crowd, none of them were rude enough to chase after them.
Carn’s heart pounded from the excitent earlier. Everything was so loud and happened in such close quarters that it overloaded her mind. It’s not like she’s never been at the center of attention before, but during those monts, she always wore her armor and hid her face behind her helt.
The helt helped distance her from the crowd, not to ntion that as a templar, she had been an inviolable existence to the citizens.
What had happened just then was a first for her.
“How do you feel?” Victoria asked.
“A bit overwheld,” Carn admitted. “There’s just so many people. Do you visit the city often?”
“It’s not usually that bad, since I tend to visit during the day. As a result, the citizens are more or less used to . It’s only when I visit at night that things like that happen.”
“I see…”
Victoria really was popular. It wasn’t a popularity derived from reputation, like hers as a templar had been, but one that was born of charisma and personal connections. Carn had thought that Victoria was rely a noble like the ones she saw in human society, aloof and arrogant, but while Victoria acted arrogant, she was also quite down to earth. The more she got to know Victoria, the more impressed she was.
“Tell more about this city,” she said.
They were currently flying toward a less busy place.
“Of course. This city is called Irinoth. I established it myself and watched it grow bit by bit, which is why everyone’s so familiar with ,” Victoria said. “Is there anything you want to know in particular?”
“Population…maybe?”
“Last ti I checked, there were only around twenty thousand or so,” Victoria replied.
Oh. It could have just been the proximity, but it seed like the place was way too busy to only have twenty thousand people, but perhaps the excitent inflated the numbers a bit. A hundred loud people always seed more nurous than a hundred silent ones after all.
Still, there were so many different demon races…although ‘demon’ may not be the best thing to call them anymore. In that short mont in the crowd, Carn spotted multiple different kinds of shifters—animal races, a lot of elves, a few dwarves, so gnos, five devils, a bit of lesser vampires, and a few giants…but no humans.
Irinoth itself seed like a blend of cultures with inconsistent architecture styles, but that itself showcased the diversity that made up its population. Victoria and Carn landed in a relatively quiet district that had a large amount of trees of wood and stone.
She saw a few elves wandering the streets, coming and going from the shops. After a bit of thinking, Victoria led them toward a building with the beetle drawing carved on a board hanging over the door.
It looked to be a restaurant.
“There’s so many races here. Is Irinoth the exception or the norm?” Carn asked.
“I’d say both. Newer places like mine tend to have a lot of mixing, but larger, more traditional cities tend to mostly consist of a single race. Also, the race itself matters. Because of how we vampire nobles reproduce, our cities tend to be the most diverse of all the races while the elental races still tend to be relatively monolithic.”
Victoria patiently began to explain the intricacies of population and culture of the races to Carn while Carn listened attentively.
Thanks to her previous human-centric ntality, she had lumped all the other races together and called them demons. In reality, demonkind consisted of dozens if not hundreds of individual races that broke up into their own individual internal cultures and factions.
Perhaps it was ignorance that bred her initial hatred of all things non-human.
“Welco to the Beetle Song,” ca a clear song-like voice from inside the restaurant as Victoria pushed into the building, ringing a bell installed on the door.
The inside of the restaurant was beautifully lit with soft green lines, and wooden furniture that seed to grow out of the floor itself.
A tall elf with her long hair braided and hanging over her shoulder on one side ca out from the back. Hidden behind her apron, clad in a muted forest brown dress was a curvy figure and a large chest.
She was holding a board in her hands. “Oh, it’s just you, Vi.”
“I’m still a custor, you know. Besides, it’s not just today. I brought soone with .”
The elf turned to Carn curtsied before holding out the board she held to Carn. “My, a rare vampire guest. Nice to et you; I’m the proprietress of the humble Beetle Song, Yirene.”
Carn had a bad feeling about this elf. She reminded her of soone.
Victoria took the board from Carn’s hands. “Yirene, this is Camilla, my daughter.”
“Ah, so that’s why you spent so long hiding away at ho,” Yirene said. “No wonder Islda wouldn’t let through. Welco to the family, Camilla. What were you?”
“Human…wait, family?” Carn asked. She looked again at Yirene’s hair and eyes, but she couldn’t see any silver or red. The elf’s…oh.
Seeing realization dawn on Carn when her eyes widened, Victoria laughed. “Correct. Yirene is my sister.”
Suddenly, the bad feeling Carn felt from Yirene began to make sense. Yirene was going to be rather difficult to handle, just like Victoria. She shivered.
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