Castlevania- Nocturne <iPhone Top-Rated>

Richter looked up. The clouds had parted, but not for the moon. For a single, enormous eye of crimson and shadow, peering down at the earth from a rent in the sky. Erzsebet’s face, miles wide, smiled with a thousand fangs.

"Richter."

Richter almost laughed. Almost. "You think dignity matters? She drank the blood of a Sekhmet. She controls the night sky. Maria's beasts can't scratch her. My magic is like throwing firecrackers into an ocean." He looked down at his own hands. The hands that had failed to save his mother. "I'm not the Belmont she fears."

Alucard turned his head. For the first time, the mask of cold aristocracy cracked. Beneath it was something raw. "I know. I have outlived every friend I ever made. I will likely outlive you, too. And I am so tired of attending funerals for people who taught me how to feel." Castlevania- Nocturne

He didn't turn. He knew the voice. It was the whisper of steel on leather, the scent of old libraries and older blood.

Alucard drew his sword, the runes flaring to life, casting his pale face in a ghastly glow. He looked less like a savior and more like a ghost who had forgotten he was dead.

"Try not to die before I do," Alucard said. Richter looked up

"I was helping." Alucard gestured vaguely toward the east. "There are other horrors. The Forgemaster's disciples are digging up the graves of every battlefield from the Rhine to the Pyrenees. While you fight the queen, I fight the pawns. It is... undignified."

(A short story / character sketch)

"I stopped to watch the sun set," Alucard said. His voice was a low, musical baritone, stripped of irony for once. "I thought it might be the last one." Erzsebet’s face, miles wide, smiled with a thousand fangs

"No," Alucard said quietly. "She fears what you represent. A lineage of spite. A family that would rather burn the world down than let the night win. That is a terrible, beautiful thing."

"She's here," Alucard said, not a question.

It felt real enough against Richter Belmont’s skin—cold, sharp, and smelling of brine and rotting wood. But so had the illusion of his mother, Julia, standing in the parlor of their burning home. So had the vision of the Abbot, praying to a God who had already closed His eyes. Richter had learned that his whip could cut through flesh, bone, and even the mist of a nightmare. But it could not cut through memory.