01 – The Temple at Dawn

The first thing Vera noticed was the silence.

It wasn't the quiet hum of her apartment's air conditioning or the distant traffic from the street below. This silence felt like water pressing against her ears; it was... suffocating. It was a silent type of silence, like the kind that can be found in places where no one has spoken for hundreds of years.

She opened her eyes.

The ceiling is made of stone. It was cracked, worn down, and covered with moss that glowed a little green in the dim light coming through a part of the roof that had collapsed.

Little particles of dust drifted slowly through the light of the sun that was just coming up, and somewhere far away, a bird sang — a sound so clear and natural that it made her chest feel tight.

Vera sat up slowly, and her body moved the wrong way.

She moves in a very graceful and fluid way. Her limbs moved with a precision she'd never had before, each movement perfectly balanced, as if choreographed by someone who'd spent years learning to move.

She lifted her hand to her face and stopped moving.

Pale. She didn't look pale, like someone who had been inside too long. Her skin was white like moonlight on snow. Her fingers were thin and graceful, ending in nails that were just barely pointed. She looked at her hand. She could see the veins and tendons under the skin. The skin was so thin that it looked like she could see the bone.

This wasn't her hand.

This was Velmira's hand.

Her avatar. Her character. The True Vampire character she'd spent three years creating, improving, and roleplaying in Yggdrasil's DMMO-RPG world. The game that had shut down... how long ago was that? She had logged in for the last countdown. She watched the timer count down to zero. She was sitting in her guild's old throne room. She was alone because everyone else had quit months before.

She caught her breath. Did she even need to breathe?

She tested it, holding still, waiting for the burn in her lungs. It never came. Her chest moved up and down by itself, not because she needed to. She should have been terrified. Instead, she felt only a distant, clinical fascination, as if she were examining someone else's body.

Vera — now Velmira — stood, and the world tilted slightly before going back to being normal. Her senses became more alert with the movement; every crack in the stone floor was clearly visible, and every shade of shadow was distinct. She could hear the dust settling, the sound of water trickling somewhere in the ruins, and the rustle of something small moving through the undergrowth outside.

The temple — if that's what this was — had clearly been left behind for a long time. Broken columns stuck out from the floor like broken teeth. The walls were covered with old murals. The colors were washed out, and she could barely make out the shapes. There were figures wearing robes, symbols that looked like circuit diagrams, and geometric patterns that were hard to look at for too long.

She took a step forward, and her footfall was silent. The movement felt dreamlike and effortless, as if gravity didn't matter to her. She took another step, then another, testing her body. Her body responded to her thoughts with mechanical precision.

There is no login screen. There was no UI hovering at the edges of her vision. There is no HP bar, no MP indicator, and no minimap. She tried to pull up her character sheet by using her habit, wanting it to appear the way she had thousands of times before.

Nothing.

She felt a sudden surge of panic, her first real emotion since waking up.

She was in her avatar's body, in a world that looked completely different from the industrial park outside her apartment. She didn't have any of Yggdrasil's systems to tell her what was happening.

Breathe, she told herself, then laughed bitterly at the irony. Her vampiric body didn't need air, but old habits from her human life persisted.

She needed information. Context. Some way to understand where she was and what had happened. Velmira moved toward the collapsed section of roof where sunlight streamed in, then hesitated at the threshold.

Vampires were weak to sunlight. That was a key part of the race, balanced against their healing and fighting abilities.

The sun touched her fingertips.

It burned.

But it wasn't the agonizing pain she'd heard about in legends. It was an ongoing, exhausting ache, like touching a hot stove and then quickly moving away.

Her skin turned slightly red where the light touched her, and she felt something inside her begin to leak away slowly. It wasn't HP, but some vital essence.

She moved back into the shadows, and the redness quickly disappeared. Regeneration still worked, at least. But the sun was dangerous here, not just a health-affecting spell that she could recover from with potions.

This world had rules. Those weren't Yggdrasil's rules.

Velmira moved away from the light and went deeper into the temple. Her footsteps were quiet on the old stone floor. The building was larger than she'd initially thought. It was a maze of collapsed corridors and rooms filled with rubble. She found the remains of wooden furniture that had long since rotted to pieces. There are pieces of broken pottery. It's the skeleton of a small animal that has been eaten by animals that eat dead animals.

In the old main room, she saw a statue.

It looked like a human, but it didn't seem right. The shapes were too perfect, too square, as if carved by someone who understood math better than the human body. Its face was blank, without any features except for a symbol carved into its forehead. The symbol looked hauntingly familiar.

Yggdrasil's mark. The game's logo. She had seen it on loading screens, on the guild hall doors, and stamped on high-level equipment.

Her hand moved toward it without thinking, with her fingertips just inches from the carved stone.

What was this doing here? Had other players been transported? Was this some kind of event after the game that she had triggered?

A noise from outside made her stop moving.

Movement. Small, careful, like soft pad of paws on earth.

Velmira's senses became even more acute — another vampiric ability kicking in automatically — and she could suddenly hear the creature's heartbeat. Smell the fear that it is carrying. You can track its heat signature through the walls as easily as watching a video feed.

A fox, she thought. It was small, rust-colored, and probably searching for food near the ruins.

She was suddenly and severely hungry.

The feeling hit her like a physical blow, making her bend over double. It wasn't the usual feeling of missing a meal, but something more intense and basic. She felt an emptiness in her soul that she had to fill.

The fox's heartbeat sounded like a drum, and she could taste copper on her tongue even though she hadn't bitten anything.

Blood.

Even though she didn't like the idea, her body knew what it needed. She was a vampire for real, not just a character in a game. Vampires are creatures that feed on the living.

Velmira's fingers dug into the stone floor, her nails — or claws — leaving grooves in the ancient rock. Control. She needed to be in control. She had been human for twenty-six years before Yggdrasil, before this.

She wasn't going to lose herself to her instincts in the first hour of whatever this was.

The fox lingered outside, sniffing at something. She could take action right away and finish it in seconds. Her body was ready to act. Her muscles were tense, and she was focused.

Instead, she pressed her forehead against the cold stone and waited.

The hunger didn't go away. It settled into her bones like an old ache, demanding and patient.

But she could handle it.

She had dealt with worse during finals week, the months after her father's funeral when she hadn't slept or eaten much, and the long nights when Yggdrasil was the only thing that felt real.

Eventually, the fox left.

Velmira sat back, breathing heavily. If her body still produced sweat, it would have collected on her forehead. Instead, she just felt empty, as if she had been completely drained of energy.

"What am I?" she whispered, and her voice sounded strange in the ruined temple. It was too melodious, too perfect—nothing like the slightly raspy tone she had as a human.

There was no answer. The statue's blank face didn't show any wisdom. The ruins were silent and covered in dust, and the light of dawn was starting to fade.

Velmira stood up slowly, testing her balance again, and using her senses to explore her surroundings. Beyond the temple, she could hear the world waking up: more birds, the sound of wind through trees, and the distant sound of water; a stream, maybe a river.

And even more faintly, she could almost miss it: voices.

She heard human voices speaking a language she didn't know, but she understood it.

A village. Or a town. Civilization.

She looked down at herself, taking a proper look for the first time. The gothic dress she'd designed for her avatar was still in one piece. It was dark violet and black, with silver embroidery. It was elegant enough to wear to a noble's court or to explore a dungeon. Her white hair fell in waves past her shoulders.

In Yggdrasil, she thought the design was striking and distinctive.

Here, in what looked like the real world with real people, she looked like a monster from a storybook.

But she had nowhere else to go. There is no menu to log out of, and there is no respawn point to retreat to. She was thrust into a world she didn't understand, with a body that craved blood, and with powers she barely controlled.

Velmira went to the temple's entrance and stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking out at the forest beyond. The sun was rising, painting the sky in shades of gold and pink. Beautiful. It was very beautiful, and no computer graphics could ever look that good.

She had spent three years pretending to be a vampire. She had created a character sheet and improved her skills. She had also roleplayed as an elegant and powerful vampire.

Now she had all the time in the world to learn what that actually meant.

The morning light slowly filled the room, and Velmira stepped back into the dark, letting the shadows surround her. She would wait for dusk. Then she would find those voices, that civilization, and begin to understand what had become of her.

In the temple, deep within the building, a statue with the mark of Yggdrasil continued to stand guard quietly. If it had answers about why she was here, how she'd been transported, what had happened to the game world and the real world, it offered none of them now.

There was only silence.

Only time.

And Velmira had all the time in the world.

End of Chapter 1