The Weight of Ash
The lichen had been dying for three years, but tonight it seemed to fail all at once, as though it too had grown weary of illuminating what Undertomb had become. Lysander stood upon the dais of black basalt, watching the pale blue glow gutter along the cavern's ribs like a candle starved of air, and thought that even the light itself had begun to ration what it gave them.
Below him, the queue stretched the length of the Hall of Vessels, curling around broken pillars that had once held banners of a kingdom no living vampire remembered whole. Rusted lanterns swung from chains bolted into the rock, their flames small and reluctant, casting more shadow than illumination. In that half-dark the line looked less like a gathering of his people and more like a procession of the newly dead, shuffling forward to claim what remained of their own mortality.
The crates had arrived an hour before through the sealed conduit in the eastern wall, the government's iron mouth that fed them and, Lysander suspected, slowly poisoned them in the same gesture. He had watched the seals crack open himself, had seen the plasma sacs within — thinner than they used to be, darker, with a faint grey sediment…
