"The monument they built to your defeat is taller than th throne was."
That is the very first thing the First Queen tells me.
I do not speak immediately, taking my time to process things before I act.
It is just how I am built.
I lie there on the floor and breathe in the unfamiliar air.
The three women standing over me do not rush over me.
They know me far too well and give me space.
That quiet patience tells me they remember exactly who I am.
I need to check my own physical condition first.
Five centuries locked in a suspended void leaves a serious mark on a person.
I am definitely weakened.
My vampire physiology kept my body perfectly preserved, but the magic of the seal drained something fundamental directly from my blood.
I am maybe thirty percent of what I used to be, and I deduce this instantly.
The air simply feels too different against my skin.
Back in the old days, I could feel every single heartbeat in the entire capital city.
Now? I extend my senses outward and hit a mental wall.
I can feel maybe a hundred meters around me.
Beyond that is just static.
I keep my face completely blank since they do not need to know I am vulnerable.
I finally sit up and look at the queens one by one.
The First Queen stands in the center; her long black hair is pinned back perfectly straight.
She is composed, holding a small leather folder like she has been preparing for this exact meeting for five hundred years.
She is ready with a report.
But something is different about her.
Her dark eyes look older in ways that have nothing to do with vampire aging. It is a tired look of someone who has seen too many terrible things.
I notice it immediately and seal it away in my head.
The Second Queen is standing right beside her.
Her red hair falls over her face in tangled knots.
She is the feral one who is physically here, but her mind seems barely present in the room.
She doesn't speak; instead, she steps way too close to me, leans down, and sniffs my neck.
There is something fundamentally broken inside her now.
It wasn't there before, and the weird part is it makes me feel unexpectedly uncomfortable.
Five centuries ago, I wouldn't have cared at all if she lost her mind and would have just ignored it.
Now, it bothers me; the change in my own emotions is strange.
Then I look at the Third Queen.
Her short blonde hair is tucked neatly behind her ears. She came to wake me up, but she is hesitating. I can tell from her body language.
She is positioned right near the exit of the chamber. Her feet are pointed toward the door.
"Isolde," I say, just her name, and watch her flinch.
Then her shoulders drop as she makes up her mind and decides to stay.
I stand up slowly, stretching my arms and my legs, trying to assert my control over my own body again.
"Give me the report," I say to the First Queen.
She starts briefing me on five hundred years of missing history.
I listen to her while I test my grip strength.
Receiving the information against the backdrop of my physical recovery keeps me focused.
"The coalition celebrated after you were sealed," she says. "They built monuments and named their children after the heroes of the sealing. They wrote you into all their history books as the ultimate warning about unchecked power."
"Did their little alliance last?" I ask while stretching my neck.
"For about sixty years," she replies.
"They actually had a golden age. It was genuinely better. It was peaceful. They built a strong society on their shared victory over you."
"And then?"
"Then the old grudges returned."
She tells me how the grand alliance finally fractured.
It broke along the exact same fault lines it always had.
The elves turned on the dwarves as humans turned on the beastkin.
There were four major world wars over the last four centuries among the coalition races.
"Each war was uglier than anything you ever did," the First Queen says.
Her voice is completely flat.
"Because they were wars of betrayal rather than conquest."
I keep walking in small circles, testing my balance.
"What happened to our kind?"
Her black eyes harden.
"We lost everything systematically."
She explains the fall of the vampires. With me sealed away, our people lost all political protection.
Then they lost their territorial rights and basic freedoms.
The other races figured out something terrible.
Vampiric blood has highly commercial applications. It has intense healing properties and physical enhancing properties.
The economics of that dark discovery did the rest.
The coalition started hunting the vampires. They put my people in cages and harvested us.
What slavery couldn't justify, their new ideology did, and what their ideology couldn't justify, the pure economics did.
We became livestock.
A commodity to be bought and sold.
I stop stretching for a second and look down at my pale hands.
'My people turned into cattle,' I think to myself.
'They drained my kingdom dry for profit.'
"There is one more thing," the First Queen says.
She actually sounds nervous now.
"Go on," I tell her.
"Sixty years ago, something new arrived. Nine entities. They are not from Mephilia. They are not from any plane anyone recognizes."
'The tremors,' I think, remembering feeling those massive shockwaves in the dark.
"They call themselves the Supreme Devils," she continues.
"But they didn't come to conquer us; instead, they came to settle."
She explains how each of the nine devils took a specific region of the continent.
They displaced whatever kings ruled the place and implemented a system of total control.
Their rule is so normalized that most people living under it today have never known anything else.
They just accept the devils as facts of life.
I listen to all of this.
My face shows absolutely zero expression.
Inside, my mind is working fast to process the reality of this new world.
My grand kingdom is gone, vampires are treated like cattle, and nine random gods are sitting comfortably on the continent I used to own.
I look at the three queens standing in front of me in the ruined chamber.
"Alright," I say simply.
"Get me a clean shirt."