“I know,” I said, clearing my throat. “I know the history.”
“But do you know the true history?”
“I know the only history.” My eyes opened, and I shifted my gaze away from the chains and twisted bones.
“You know only what the Ascended have led everyone to believe, and it is not the truth.” He reached over, plucking up the chain that crossed a part of my stomach. I tensed as he carefully moved it aside. “My people lived alongside mortals in harmony for thousands of years, but then King O’Meer Malec—”
“Created the Craven,” I cut him off. “Like I said—”
“You’re wrong.” He shifted so he sat back, one leg drawn up, and his arm resting on his knee. “King Malec fell hopelessly in love with a mortal woman. Her name was Isbeth. Some say it was Queen Eloana who poisoned her. Others claim it was a jilted lover of the King’s who stabbed her because he apparently had quite the history of being unfaithful. But either way, she was mortally wounded. As I said, Malec was desperate to save her. He committed the forbidden act of Ascending her—what you know as the Ascension.”
My heart lodged somewhere in my throat, next to the messy knot of emotion.
His gaze lifted and met mine. “Yes. Isbeth was the first to Ascend. Not your false King and Queen. She became the first vampry.”
Lies. Utter, unbelievable lies.
“Malec drank from her, only stopping once he felt her heart begin to fail, and then he shared his blood with her.” His head tilted, those golden eyes glittering. “Perhaps if your act of Ascension wasn’t so well guarded, the finer details would not come as a surprise to you.”
I started to sit up but remembered the wound and the fizzing liquid. “Ascension is a Blessing from the gods.”
He smirked. “It is far from that. More like an act that can either create near immortality or make nightmares come true. We Atlantians are born nearly mortal. And remain so until the Culling.”
“The Culling?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“It’s when we change.” His upper lip curled, and the tip of his tongue prodded a sharp canine. I knew this. It was in the history books. “The fangs appear, lengthening only when we feed, and we change in…other ways.”
“How?” Curiosity had seized me, and I figured that whatever I could learn would help if I managed to get out of this.
“That’s not important.” He reached for a cloth. “We may be harder to kill than the Ascended, but we can be killed,” he went on. I also knew that. Atlantians could be killed just like a Craven could. “We age slower than mortals, and if we take care, we can live for thousands of years.”
I wanted to point out everything was important, especially how Atlantians changed in other ways, but curiosity got the best of me. “How…how old are you?”
“Older than I look.”
“Hundreds of years older?” I asked.
“I was born after the war,” he answered. “I’ve seen two centuries come and go.”
Two centuries?
Gods…
“King Malec created the first vampry. They are…a part of all of us, but they are not like us. Daylight does not affect us. Not like it does the vampry. Tell me, which of the Ascended have you ever seen in the daylight?”
“They do not walk in the sun because the gods do not,” I answered. “That is how they honor them.”
“How convenient for them, then.” Hawke’s smirk turned smug. “Vamprys may be blessed with the closest possible thing to immortality, like us, but they cannot walk in daylight without their skin starting to decay. You want to kill an Ascended without getting your hands dirty? Lock them outside with no possible shelter. They’ll be dead before noon.”
That couldn’t be true. The Ascended chose not to go in the sun.
“They also need to feed, and by feed, I am talking about blood. They need to do so frequently to live, to prevent whatever mortal wounds or illnesses they suffered before they Ascended from returning. They cannot procreate, not after the Ascension, and many experience bloodlust when they feed, often killing mortals in the process.”
He dabbed the cloth along the wound, careful not to exert too much pressure as he soaked up the settled liquid. “Atlantians do not feed on mortals—”
“Whatever,” I snapped. “You expect me to truly believe that?”
His gaze lifted to mine. “Mortal blood offers us nothing of any real value because we were never mortal, Princess. Wolven don’t need to feed, but we do. We feed when we need to, on other Atlantians.”