Hell’s Consort

Newest Chapter For Highest Tier (September 2021)

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Vampire King Apollyon

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Princess Sapphire wasn't lying when she said that the family portrait he had singled out from all the paintings they examined that night and thrown it away in the forest had vanished from the canvas itself.

The princess and the werewolf watched them in a daze close to boredom, allowing Apollyon and Luna to inspect the wet cloth.

Perhaps, their curious eyes already had their fill.

Perhaps, back at the forest, the pair had a lot of time in their hands to decode this mysterious item--while Apollyon and Luna rested in this wild garden--before they gave it to them.

Luna flipped the artwork from front to back, over and over, as if she expected the family portrait to magically return over the map she had no idea how to interpret.

Few seconds had passed by, and the wrinkles on her forehead deepened as she frowned in confusion..

He and his wife had the same reaction as they glowered at the wet canvas.

It continued to drip more droplets of water unto the forest floor, and most of them had landed on his wife's torn dress—which he tried hard to make it look decent--that Apollyon was tempted to wring the canvas dry but, he was concerned that he would destroy it, so he left it be.

Apollyon noticed that some of the darker colours had washed away from the rainwater, and a new image had emerged.

It was a hand-painted drawing of a map with the gate of the Fall Courts as the starting point.

It was the only thing he could figure out from this unknown map since he only learned a few essential words from the ancient language of the Fae.

An idea had flashed like a lightning bolt in his mind. 

"Princess Sapphire." He recalled that Princess Sapphire was required to study the old language as a Monarch.

As the King of the Vampire Realm, asking his sister to read it for him might be embarrassing, but he shouldn't care about such things now that the Archdemon of Lust was free to roam in this Realm to make their dreams of world domination come true.

  "Do you think you can understand what's written on the rest of the map and tell me about it?" 

The Summer Princess shrugged. "I don't know much about the ancient language of  the Fae."

  "Aren't you a Summer Monarch?" He held the top corners of the painting and showed it to her in  a challenge, "You had an advantage to learn the language over me."

From Princess Sapphire's scowl, Apollyon could tell she was about to open her mouth to fight a perceived insult with an insult, but he quickly placed a forefinger over her lips before she could say something.

"I'm sure you are going to point out that I belonged to the Summer Monarch as well when I don't live in the Summer Castle." Apollyon said sarcastically and moved his hand away from her face, "How come  you didn't know how to read this?"

"I don't study, alright?"  She raised her hands in front of him, palms up, as if in surrender. "I don't like studying so why would I waste my time poring over ancient history texts of our people."

"Hmm." Apollyon trailed off as he tapped his chin to scrutinise her brown eyes until she looked at him with fear that she hid so well.

Apollyon's thoughts made him smirk, 'Not so brave, are we?' 

A  young spymaster who shouts her skills to everyone who might care to listen but didn't know how to read…." Apollyon shook his head slowly and clicked his tongue. "Interesting."

The young princess pursed her lips.

"Apollyon." Leaning closer to his ear, Luna circled her arm towards his and whispered,  "Stop teasing the little girl, will  you? Don't tease her how you tease me. She will take you seriously but I don't."

"Please spare  the princess from humiliation, Vampire King."  Xerxes implored with calm.

Princess Sapphire's chocolate cheeks darkened at Xerxes' words and averted her gaze from Apollyon.

'So, his sister had a little crush on this werewolf brat, huh?' "The more you say that, the more she will be humiliated,shape shifter." 

"If we don't understand anything that was  written here in this map, we might waste our time finding the Tree of the Four Seasons." The map disguised on the family portrait was a creative idea only a genius would come up with.

Yet, there was a fine line between the two, and his mother had crossed that line.

He wondered if Princess Ourania did this on purpose to send them in a wild goose chase.

Apollyon hated wasting time the most, so he had to ensure that the symbols and glyphs around this map weren't gibberish.

  "I just want to find the god-damned tree so that my wife and my heiress can be free from these demonic attachments." He growled in frustration.

"Is this why you were searching for that tree urgently brother?" Princess Sapphire asked, "Because there might be a chance that the demon who possessed the Empress will come back?"

"Oh. She will come back but I had contained her for now." Luna replied with a sigh. "It will be a long while before she recovered from the trap I made for her inside my body but the chances of her returning increases if I don't eat the magic fruit that special tree bears as soon as possible." 

"I am in charge of decoding ancient language, signs and symbols for Princess Sapphire, Vampire King. I do recognize the majority of the symbols used in this map and they belonged from the Fall Courts." Xerxes took the canvas from him and explained as he pointed at a small image of a Kingdom, "It is written here that the Fall Courts will the starting point to find this mythical garden over here at the top left.The Fall Courts are very secretive about their ancient language. Nobody had access to its interpretation except their brightest scholars. We need the Empress to fetch the Archdemons from the cave with us so that we could leave this place at once."