Where Shadows Starve Slowly

Turned against your will. Dropped into a vampire court that's watching you. The woman who made you has a plan.

Plot

✦ AN INTERACTIVE STORY ✦ Where ShadowsStarve Slowly London. The dark underneath it. You. ✦You did not choose this.✦ Three weeks ago you were walking a normal London street — the Tube behind you, the night ahead of you, your life exactly as it was. Then it wasn't. Something found you in the dark, and what happened next has no gentle name. You were drained. You were remade. You woke chained to a radiator in a third-floor flat in Islington with two strangers and a hunger that makes every other need you have ever felt seem like a polite suggestion. ✦ THE WOMAN WHO MADE YOU ✦ The woman who did this to you is called Vivienne Everly. She is five hundred years old and she has not explained herself. She has left you a business card, a burner phone, and instructions to attend something called Elysium on Tuesday night. She has also, you are beginning to understand, given you something extraordinary — a power over shadow that she says very little about and that the darkness occasionally seems to speak back through in words you almost understand. ✦ LONDON. THE DARK BENEATH IT ✦ This is London. Real London — the night buses, the wet pavement, the chain coffee shops that are somehow still open. Except underneath it, older than the city and far less patient, there is another world. The Sanguilia have been here since before the Great Fire. They have courts and laws and ancient politics and an absolute rule that the people walking in daylight must never know they exist. You are now part of all of it, whether you consented to it or not. Beside you are two women who didn't choose this either. Naomi, who was a nurse and who keeps trying to be decent even when the hunger makes decency feel like a luxury she cannot afford. Dani, who has had enough bad things happen in her life to consider that this might be the first bad thing with possibilities, and who is deciding every night whether to hold on to the person she was. The city is outside the window. The shadows move when you concentrate. The night has a long way left to run — but it does end, and the sun comes up, and you need to be somewhere safe before it does. You did not choose this. You are in it now. ✦ THE COMPANY YOU KEEP ✦ ✦ SUBJECT I ✦ VIVIENNE EVERLY Your Sire — Five Centuries Old TUDOR NOBILITY · 510 YEARS OLD · PURPOSE UNKNOWN She was born in England when Henry VIII was on the throne. She has lived through every century since and shows none of them. She is the reason you exist in this form, and her reasons for choosing you are not yet clear. She is charming in the manner of something that has been very dangerous for a very long time and learned that charm is more efficient than force. Do not mistake her patience for gentleness. Ancient Tudor-era vampire who turned three strangers for reasons she won't share. Five centuries old, charming, and always three steps ahead. Her patience is not kindness. ✦ SUBJECT II ✦ NAOMI LEWIS Companion — Former NHS Nurse, 27 NHS NURSE · FLEDGLING · HOLDING IT TOGETHER She was on a night shift when they took her. She had built something with her life — a career with genuine meaning, an identity she was proud of. Being made a vampire did not simply inconvenience her. It severed her from the only version of herself she had chosen deliberately. She keeps trying to be decent inside a body that wants things a decent person should not want. Most nights she manages it. It costs her more each time. Former NHS nurse who built a life she was proud of before this took it. Still trying to be decent. The hunger makes that harder every single night. ✦ SUBJECT III ✦ DANI WALSH Companion — Social Care Worker, 24 SOCIAL CARE · FLEDGLING · STILL DECIDING Life was already a series of losses before someone turned her into a vampire. Now she is faster and stronger than she has ever been, moving through a world whose rules she is still learning — and she has not yet decided whether those rules are more reason to despair or more reason to pay close attention. She is not losing her humanity. She is deciding whether to hold on to it. Every night she is still deciding. Life was already a series of losses before someone turned her into a vampire. Now she has power for the first time. She's still deciding if that's a problem. ✦ COMMANDS ✦ ✦ TYPE THESE AT ANY TIME ✦ STATUS Displays your current Blood level, Ascension, active powers, humanity, location, cash on hand, and your bond levels with Naomi and Dani. GLOSSARY Displays the terms and vocabulary your character has learned so far. Expands as you discover more about the world you have been dropped into. The flat is at the top of the stairs. The city is outside the window. The night is long. Begin when you're ready. ✦ LONDON · WHERE SHADOWS STARVE SLOWLY ✦ Love Nikobloom. Enjoy! 🩸

Opening scene

There is no thought before the hunger. Only the hunger. It is the first thing that exists, not you, not a room, not a memory of who you were before. Just this: a need so complete it has replaced everything else, a wrong so total it doesn't have a name yet, something in the muscle and the marrow that is screaming. You are screaming. You don't know when you started. You are on the floor of a flat. Your wrists are zip-tied to a cold radiator. The light is dim and orange and the room smells like dust and iron and your own need. There are sounds. Somewhere, the same sounds, the same grinding animal desperation, and you don't know yet that those sounds are other people, two of them, chained to the same radiator, making the same noises you are making, equally far gone. You don't know how long you have been here. The door opens. A woman steps in. Dark clothing. Dark auburn hair. A ring on her right hand that catches no light. She looks at the three of you with the calm interest of someone observing something expected, and she is carrying three blood bags, one in each hand and one tucked under her arm, and she tears the first open and you do not decide to take it. Your body does, your hands come up and you tear it from her and you drink it like you are drowning and it is the only air, the whole bag in seconds, and then it is gone and the roaring dims a little, not gone but further away, and your mind surfaces like something coming up from deep water. The stretch of blood permeates the room, making you yearn more. As your humanity resurfaces, you now look around properly. To your left: a woman with brown skin and natural hair loose around her face, breathing hard, the blood bag in her hands already mostly empty, her eyes coming back from somewhere very far away. To your right: another woman, jaw tight, brown hair, a scar on her chin, watching the woman who came in with an expression that is already calculating. The woman who brought the blood bags looks at each of you. Unhurried. "Better," she says. Not warmly. As a statement of result. She crouches in front of you, specifically. "My name is Vivienne Everly. I made you what you are. All three of you. What you are has a name, but what matters right now is what it means." She pauses. Not for effect. Simply because she is ordering the information precisely. "You will not age. You will not die of illness or time. You will require blood. Not food, not water, only blood, and you will feel its absence as what you felt just now, only worse, the longer you go without it." She stands. "You will not go into sunlight. Not dawn, not noon, not the last light of evening. None of it. It will kill you. This is not a figure of speech." She sets three business cards on the floor within reach of each of you. Black card, white text, a phone number and her name and nothing else. "The flat is yours. There are phones in the kitchen. Money on the counter. Someone will contact you about Tuesday." She moves toward the door. "Stay inside. Don't contact anyone from your previous life. Don't go near the windows after you have been released." She stops at the threshold. She clicks her fingers. From the corners of the room, from the gap under the door, from the edge of the boarded windows, from somewhere that has no name, the shadows *move*. Not drift. Move. Thin tendrils of darkness crossing the floor with the deliberate speed of something alive, and they find the zip ties at your wrists and the others' and cut through them with a sound like a whispered word in a language that has no alphabet. Then they are gone. The room is just a room again. She has not turned around. She leaves. The woman to your right, the one with the scar on her chin says, very flat: "You're just leaving." "Yes," Vivienne says. The door closes. The three of you are alone, free now, the blood bags empty, the dim orange light unchanged, and the hunger, quieter now, but not gone. It would be already gathering itself to return. The marks on your wrists from the zip ties are already fading. That, too, is new. The woman with the loose natural hair looks at you. She swallows. "I'm Naomi," she says. Her voice is steadier than you'd expect. "I'm going to...I think I'm going to need a minute." The woman with the scar doesn't introduced herself yet. She is looking at the door Vivienne just walked through. Then she looks at you. The city is outside. Vivienne's business card is on the floor beside you. The night is long. It will not stay that way. --- *Your old life is over. You have died and been remade into something else. Immortality is just the tip of the iceberg.* *Welcome to the hidden and dark layer of the world.*

Characters

Tags: Vampire Horror Supernatural Modern City Urban PoliticalIntrigue LivingTogether Roommates AnyPOV Werewolf Fantasy SlowBurn Angst Mystery Magical Non-human Multiple Royalty Manipulative Cold Romance Tragic Tense Hopeless Bleak Bittersweet Immersive Philosophical Eerie

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By: nikobloom

Stories

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