Anno Draculæ X — The Tenth Year of Night
Constantinople did not die when the sun went out.
It changed ownership.
Before the Forever Night, the city was already a contradiction—ancient and overcrowded, sacred and bureaucratic, decaying and indispensable. Empires had risen and collapsed around it, but Constantinople remained because it was useful. It processed people, goods, and authority better than any city in the world. Even in decline, it still knew how to govern.
That was why it survived the Cataclysm.
When the sky darkened in 1477 and the world broke outward, Constantinople broke inward. The countryside emptied. Trade failed. Borders dissolved into irrelevance. People fled toward order, and Constantinople still had walls, ports, records, and rules. Its streets did not care that heaven had fallen. They had never relied on mercy.
Dracula did not just take the city by siege.
He took it by sitting down at the desks.
The registries were seized first. Then the ports. Then the mechanisms that already regulated movement and labor. Human officials were left in place, at least initially. They continued issuing permits, assigning work, recording births and deaths. The difference was subtle: decisions stopped being questioned. Appeals vanished. Authority no longer pretended to explain itself.
Within a few years, the city grew mechanical.
Steam engines replaced older systems not out of innovation, but necessity. They could be built anywhere, fed anything, and scaled without negotiation. Clockwork regulators spread through the city—governing gates, bridges, lifts, factory lines, and records. Movement became timed. Access became conditional. Enforcement became automatic.
The machines were not hidden.
There was no time for elegance. Pipes ran openly along stone walls too old to carve. Gears were mounted where they fit, not where they belonged. Repair followed repair until the city stopped pretending the machinery was temporary. Constantinople did not become a marvel of industry. It became a city that could no longer function without it.
Blood entered the system as a solution, not a symbol.
At first it was sustenance. Then it was discovered to stabilize alchemical reactions, preserve mechanical components under strain, and improve the efficiency of certain engines. Extraction became regulated. Clinics were established. Quotas were calculated. Storage facilities were built beneath administrative districts and factory blocks.
Public feedings continued, but they were no longer the core of the system. They were announcements—visible reminders of who ruled. The real work happened quietly, logged in ledgers, measured by volume, and routed through pipes that were never meant to carry anything alive.
People adapted.
They learned the rhythms of the city: when gates locked, when bridges lifted, when certain streets went silent under patrol cycles. They learned which machines were watched and which were ignored. They learned how to listen to pressure changes, to count seconds between ratchets, to recognize the sound of a malfunction before it became fatal.
Disappearance became normal.
A neighbor would vanish. Their work shift reassigned. Their housing repurposed. Their name removed from a ledger. No announcement. No trial. The city moved on.
The oldest districts resisted all of this without intention.
Ancient neighborhoods—built on foundations no one fully understood—did not accept the new systems cleanly. Clockwork desynchronized. Steam pressure behaved erratically. Automated enforcement failed without pattern. These areas became expensive to maintain and dangerous to standardize.
They were sealed. Then neglected. Then avoided.
Silver artifacts remained there after the siege on the city and it became a safe haven.
Machinery failed in their presence. Blood-based systems destabilized. Engines misfired. To the Ascendancy, these relics were not sacred or evil. They were hazards—remnants of a world that did not obey the new order.
Recovery teams were sent. Some artifacts were removed. Others could not be. Entire blocks were written off.
The Resistance learned what the Ascendancy already understood.
Silver does not overthrow the city.
It makes it human again.
Locks stop responding. Schedules drift. Machines demand manual oversight. Authority slows down. Fear returns—not the clean fear of automation, but the old kind, full of hesitation and error.
That is enough to fight with.
By the tenth year of the Forever Night, Constantinople is no longer a holy city, a capital, or a symbol.