One Midnight in Kiev

The Russian plains are an empty place. Great, barren, fields of stubbled grass and empty ground stretching off into the endless distance to occasionally run aground against the great and craggy mountains. It is a cold place, and rarely warm, even in the relatively balmy weather of the year 1238. Little marks its great and empty spaces save the occasional farm, or tiny struggling hamlet.

And Kiev.

Kiev, the first and greatest city that barren land has known, built from quarried rock and transported wood. Compared to Cordova of the wast or great Constantinople to the south, it was a crude place, crafted by barbarian hands. But it had dreamed of better things. First port of trade before all the empty plains of Russia, gateway to a land larger than the whole of Europe er ten thousand people lived here, working, struggling to make a city, to bring prosperity to the desperate folk of the land. The rulers schemed, the merchants traded, and the common folk struggled on in bovine indifference to the schemes of their social betters.

But those days are gone.

Kiev is now dead.

Where once walls stood in defiance to the bland natural chaos of the plains, where churches rang their imported bells, and where the manor houses of the rich once stood, there is only broken rubble. They have come from all the depths of the utter east, charging and screaming in battle frenzy unequaled by the Danes, Vikings, or even the ancient Huns. Kiev is dead now. In their fury, the Mongols did not just sack it, did not burn it, they leveled it. Pulverized it into ash. The dead, unburied and rotting, cover the great plain, decaying where they fell.

It is an unquiet necropolis now as its fifteen thousand dead, the defenders and the attackers, lie rotting on the fields of Kiev. Singly and in piles they blanket the plain, spread out around the great charred spot where Kiev once stood, not even fragments of the wall still standing.

And here is where he kneels, amid the blackened chaos of his city. The ashes of his home clutched in blackened hands. Around him the carrion birds and the fierce wolves rip and tear at the bodies, growing fat with bounty unimaginable in their animal minds. But none come near him, for they know their master, and give him space.

Bloody tears track down a face black with age and crushed with grief. And as he begins to scream up into the black sky, for even the moon has been blotted out by the smoke from dying Kiev, the carrion eaters squeal with terror and flee into the midnight black. For these are the screams of an insane death and none among the living can bear it.

The Last Vampire of Kiev mourns his city.