PROLOGUE

Reader, do not pray.

I do not know who you are.

I do not know in which century you will find these pages, or whether your hands will be clean when you hold them. Perhaps you will be sitting beside a fire, convinced that the world beyond your home is still reasonable. Perhaps you will read them in some cold room beneath the earth, while something above you scratches at the door and breathes like a man remembering that he was once a beast. Perhaps you will open them out of curiosity, pride, or the need to know what no living soul should ever know.

If so, then you have already made your first mistake.

But closing them now would be the second.

My name is Morgana.

Once, they called me a healer. Some whispered that I was a saint, others that I was a witch, and the most honest among them called for me only when their child had stopped breathing or when a wound had blackened to the bone. People loved me while I saved their lives and hated me the moment they realised they did not understand the price of miracles. It has always been so with humankind. They want the light, but they do not want to know what must burn to make it.

I wrote this book so that it might remain after me as a warning, but warnings are fragile things. People read them only after blood has already reached the threshold.

So I will tell you plainly.

Do not seek God in this book.

He does not answer often here.

And when the silence stretches long enough, something else learns to answer in His place.

Many years ago, on a night that smelled of damp earth, iron and death, I tried to save a man named Jure Grando. He was broken, pale, and already half torn from the world. His soul clung to his body like a candle to its last thread of wax, and I, a fool with hands full of good intentions, believed I could deceive the thing that comes for us all.

I did not mean to create a monster.

That is a sentence criminals often whisper to themselves when sleep no longer comes.

I do not tell it to excuse myself. My hands are not clean. They never were again. Blood can be washed from skin, but not from memory, and mine is still bleeding.

That night, I did not open a door to Hell.

That would have been easier to forgive.

Hell, at least, has rules. Hierarchy. A hunger that knows its own name. What passed through my ritual was older than prayer and colder than punishment. It did not come with a roar. It did not shatter walls or set the heavens aflame. It came quietly, like a thought you should never have had, like a whisper spoken in your own voice, like a hand touching your shoulder in an empty room.

It entered him.

Jure.

The man I had tried to save.

And when he opened his eyes, I knew death had not lost.

It had merely been given a face.

From that night onward, blood was no longer merely blood. It became a language. A vow. A curse. It became a memory passed from body to body, from century to century, through children who never asked for the inheritance of their ancestors and through sinners who accepted it gladly. Vampires were born from hunger. Werewolves from chains. Witches from guilt. Humans from fear.

And fear is the most faithful religion humankind has ever created.

If you think these are only old stories, close the book and return to your safe world. Return to your walls, your screens, your lights that burn through the night to convince you that darkness no longer has any claim upon you. Tell yourself the monsters died in the Great Purge. Tell yourself flame, bullet and prayer were enough. Tell yourself Panonia is peaceful because the men who fear admitting the truth wrote it so, that peace sometimes means only that the predators are sleeping.

But know this.

They are waking.

Not all at once. Not loudly enough for the world to hear. First, the smells return. Wet earth in a locked room. Ash upon the tongue. The sound of claws where fingernails should be. Then come the dreams, the same dream inside different minds, the same red door, the same voice calling you by a name you have never told another soul.

And then comes the blood.

Always the blood.

Marsonia will pretend it is safe behind its walls. Guardians will stand at the gates with rifles in their hands and exhaustion in their eyes. Traders will bargain while sirens wail somewhere in the distance. Children will learn not to look north when the snow begins to fall black. People will laugh in taverns because laughter sometimes sounds like courage, especially when poured alongside cheap drink and cheaper lies.

Vampires will rise from their graves, beautiful as sickness and patient as hunger.

Werewolves will descend from the fog, carrying the rage of their ancestors in their bones.

Witches will open paths through forests that appear on no map.

And humans, as always, will realise too late that they were never at the top of the chain.

They were merely the loudest while the rest of the world remained silent.

I do not write this to save you. That arrogance died in me long before they began to burn my name. I write because there is a difference between a person who dies without knowing what found them and one who at least understands why the darkness knows their scent.

Within this book, you will find names that should never be spoken inside an empty house. You will find loves that should not have survived a single day, yet defied centuries. You will find hunters who became worse than the prey they pursued, saints with bloodied hands, queens carrying dead children in their hearts, monsters who still remember how to weep, and humans who have forgotten.

You will also find absences: places where a name was cut from the record so completely that later generations mistook the missing piece for proof it had never existed. Remember those gaps. History is often most dangerous where someone has taken the trouble to make it quiet.

You will find Lilith.

Not as a story told to frighten children.

Not as a statue, a myth, or some devil’s mother invoked by priests whenever they wish to fill their churches with fear.

You will find her as she is.

A wound in God’s creation.

The voice that answers when prayer fails.

The first mother of the hunger that learned to live in blood.

And if you ever hear her whisper, if your own blood grows warm in the middle of the night as though remembering something, do not comfort yourself with the thought that you are special. That is the trap. Everyone who heard her believed at first that they had been chosen.

They had not.

They were open.

And she does not enter through doors that are not already slightly ajar.

So listen carefully, reader.

Do not trust everyone who wears a cross.

Do not fear everyone who has fangs.

Do not turn your back on the man who laughs while loading a pistol with silver bullets, because men like that usually survive long enough to know something you do not.

And never, never follow a trail of blood if a child is crying at the end of the corridor.

It is not a child.

Not anymore.

This book is not holy.

It is a wound bound in leather.

If you open it, it will read you as well.

And by the time you finish the first page, something in the darkness will already know your name.

Welcome to Panonia.

Welcome to the The Dark World.

And may God forgive you for continuing to read.

Because I cannot.