Disclaimer: I do not own nor claim to own any of the Dark Series or Christine Feehan's intellectual property. I just own the OCs and have been really inspired by the Christine's work.

Author's Notes: Decided to re-elaborate on a project I abandoned a long time ago called "Dark Alter".

[Prelude: Empathy.]

'Our king has fallen! Our males have given themselves over to violence and war. Our father, mother, and brothers have been lost to this bloodshed! We cannot trust them to protect us. We sisters must safeguard each other now and flee!'

She recalled, word for word, the declaration of her oldest sister in crystalline clarity. Even though it was spoken over centuries ago, her keen memory was still sharp, and photographic like most possessed by her kind. This memory was a particularly nasty cut. It marked the end of her childhood. No longer would she, Silviana Comanici, frolic with her kin in the misty forests as silver deer. Or ever soar the midnight skies of her homeland inside the feathered body of an owl. She'd sing no more songs in the ancient tongue nor rest peacefully underground in the manner of her people. The fiery ravages of the Ottoman Turk war had consumed Europe. Including her beloved Carpathia. Silviana and the remaining Comanici sisters barely escaped with their lives intact, scattering across the globe as if dandelions with just their telepathic link to connect the spaces in-between them. That's how she wound up in the Americas. That's how Silviana eventually came to make Seattle her refuge.

Of course, when she arrived to this place it wasn't called 'Seattle'. And It certainly wasn't a roaring, honking, stinking metropolis either! It'd been the sacred, spiritual lands of the Duwamish and Xacuabs tribes. It'd been a swathe of vast, untouched, mountainous forest that kissed the cold northern Pacific Ocean. It'd been the only place that Silviana found remotely comparable to home. The air was clean and scented with sea salt. The soil was comfortable and mineral-rich, similar in property to Carpathia, and just as rejuvenative. On the first night Silviana spent nestled up in a loamy bed miles below the surface and heaved a contented sigh, she was sold on the idea of staying here longer than temporarily. On the second night, she built herself a territory protected by the strongest wards she knew, spells of heavy protection taught to her by her mother. The females of their were regarded as extremely precious and now with the unholy vampire spreading rampantly across the world, unclaimed females such as herself were hunted vigorously. One could never be too careful. On the third night settling into this foreign land, Silviana fell into a comatose sleep for she was completely depleted, and needed the healing which only deep earth could provide Carpathians. Weeks became months, months became years, years became decades. Decades became centuries...until her eyes fluttered open again. By the time she did, however, a city had risen up around her. A city named Seattle.

Can you imagine how disorientated and confused Silviana felt upon waking? She resurfaced from the nourishment of Carpathian slumber to find the native tribes vanished and large patches of pine wilderness gone. In their stead were metal skyscrapers, paved roads, noisy machines, and floods of humans! Humans everywhere! Humans hailing from every corner of the globe wearing strange and eccentric garments! Driving metallic monsters that belched putrid smoke! Humans flying and directing iron birds, challenging her kind's innate power with their own determined innovation! Mortal humans pushing buttons, manufacturing the elements, and speaking into tiny black screens which glowed like they contained a living flame underneath their sleek exteriors. Silviana was struck dumb with shock and disgust. The pristine nature so eerily close to her homelands had been replaced with the inorganic and surreal. To her, this drastic transformation felt like Carpathia destroyed all over, a nightmarish revision. Silviana remembered collapsing upon her knees and weeping tears of crimson blood at the terrible sight of it. She felt her innocence tragically lost once more. And begged the full moon hovering in the night sky, the only familiar aspect of reality that remained unchanged, for any kind of intervention. She telepathically reached out to touch the minds of her sisters, broadcasting a message for help, and received dead silence on the other ends of their unified bond. And the moon, who was so talkative before her stint as Rip Van Winkle, was now apathetically mute.

"How long have I slept?!" Silviana asked herself and God as she gaped at the dystopian nightmare realm that mankind had built while she was unconscious. To her, it'd been less than a week. To the natural flow of time, it'd been lifetimes.

True fear gnawed into her tender, rapidly-beating heart. Tormenting queries without answer coiled around her inner dialogue. They prevented Silviana from rejoining the deep earth, and utilizing that oblivious Carpathian sleep. 'What had become of her dear sisters?', 'Were there any of her kind left?', 'What kind of world had she awoken to?' and 'What was it that woke her?' were prime narrative examples. So for awhile, she sat in the tiny park that humans had constructed on top of her sanctum, and tried to gain some of her former composure. She was a Carpathian, after all! She was from an ancient race forged by nature itself. She was a raven-haired goddess wielding powers that could halt armies! She was from a noble family and her father had dutifully served their people's king, Vladimir Dubrinsky! Despite these facts, Silviana felt no less empowered, or assured of the future. She started to cry like a babe all over again. She was an alien to this weird, buzzing, electric kingdom that was overwhelming to her usually keen senses...which is why Silviana missed all of the warning signs of impending danger.

The silver moonlight drenching this city park in illumination was suddenly choked out by a legion of bruised cumulonimbus clouds. They quickly spread across the firmament, unleashing cold rain, and casting everything underneath their masses in inky darkness. A thick layer of eerie mist developed an inch off the ground and almost seemed to coil up her long legs and around her petite waistline. The lamp posts nearby flickered violently as if shuddering. Perhaps they were sensing, way ahead of Silviana, the unholy abomination crawling along the grass towards her. She saw it's hungry, pitless, burning eyes and gaunt face too late to escape the clutches of a hunting vampire. It had probably sensed her awakening from miles away and came snooping for answers. The time Silviana had spent shedding tears instead of keeping psychic vigilance had damned her soul. She was prey and soon she would be food. Or possibly an enslaved thrall of this rotted creature.

"Don't be afraid, little sweetling." The vampire crooned, attempting to dull her senses, and streamline the kill.

It then tried to cast a shape-changing glamour upon it's own reeking figure into something less grotesque. A vision of it's previous self before giving into the forbidden fruit of murder-lust which all Carpathian men are tempted with the longer they lived unmated. This was an insidious vampire tactic to subdue a juicy morsel. Silviana was a Carpathian female however, pure of heart, and the light of their species. Thus she couldn't be fooled by such deceptions. She could plainly see it's true colors radiating through whatever pleasant mask it wore and turned up her nose in absolute disgust of it. She tried to use a burst of supernatural speed to avoid the grasp of it's clawed hands but failed to save herself. Soon the vampire had Silviana wrapped up helplessly in the steel-trap-circle of it's arms, caught like a little fly, and just as assuredly fucked. She let out a pathetic little cry as the vampire licked her cheek lasciviously, milking the trauma of her last moments truly alive, for terror added flavor to their victim's blood when they feasted on it. Silviana had prayed for her passing to be swift and painless.

Fate. evidently, had other plans. Because Spyridon Ardeal, seasoned distributor of Carpathian justice, dispatched the vampire before it's rancid teeth ever grazed her tender flesh. He'd been hunting this vampire for six months without luck and Silviana's awakening, by serendipity or destiny, had catalyzed it's undoing by sheer virtue of being excellent bait. The temptation presented by an unclaimed Carpathian female was just too much to resist. Silvianna recollected how scrambled, frayed, and shocked she felt after barely surviving a legitimate vampire attack. And also how exhilarated, intoxicated, and aroused she was the minute Spyridon and her locked gazes, feeling the threads of their soul immediately intertwining, in spite of being total strangers to each other. Silvianna recalled, feeling by feeling, how nearly dying and meeting one's true life mate could shake the foundations of one's personal world. The way Spyridon had shook hers. Even though it'd been more than a decade, Silviana not only possessed a keen memory but a strong sense of empathy and so...when her daughter walked through their door with a traumatized psychic, she immediately opened her heart, and home to the human.

And Silviana would figure out how to explain their sudden human guest to Spyridon somehow.

...

So yeah, anyways, there it is! If you like it or want me to keep going with this, please let me know by leaving a review.