Awakening the Sleeper

For centuries Vampires have been the creatures of nightmare, beings who expose fear and unease from deep within the human heart. This is my take on this ancient nightmare, the pure, spiritual vampire, the one who waits in the dark, who sleeps for centuries until an unwitting victim stumbles into her nest, never to be heard of again.

"You stumble along the dirt pathway, sodden with the rain, your feet sinking with each step further into the quagmire beneath you. A sudden flash of lightning, bursting through the sky like a spear of light in an otherwise shadowy abyss, illuminates the clearing around you.
In the brief second of skyward radiance you sight some refuge, a great crumbling ruin, its façade overgrown with all manner of greenery which almost obscures the entrance in a tangled web of vines and creepers. You stumble toward the opening, struggling to crawl through the plants, exhaustion clawing at your mind, willing you to give in, to give up and lay down in the rain, to drown yourself in the mud.
You shake your head and carry on, eventually bursting through into a gloomy interior, the smell of dust and mildew hangs in the air, the whiff of ancient decay is so potent that you begin to think you may have discovered the tomb of a long dead civilisation. Striking a match you look around at the broken jumble of pillars, lying against one another like rag-dolls discarded carelessly by some great child. It is only when you have looked around that you notice the silence, a great echoing absence of noise, save for the burning of the match, your breath as it whistles from your lungs and the thud… thud… thud… of your heart.
You stand there for some minutes, a sense of unease slowly creeping, then building, in your head. Suddenly a scrape of something upon stone breaks your reverie, echoing from the corridor up ahead. You know that you should just stay where you are but something possesses your mind and you wander toward the noise.
A beam of cold, sickly green light, filters down from the ceiling, directly over a bath of what appears to be roiling blood, pieces of coagulated material and flesh rising to the surface every now and again. Tendrils of smoke, or mist- you are not sure- creep around the room, clouding your senses.
From the bath rises a creature, a woman of such strange features she sets your already taught nerves to shattering. As she rises from the bath, the blood flowing from her body, bursting into the air around her, she lets forth a scream of pure anguish, misery and hatred defined. You know this to sound be the herald of your doom. For you know what this thing is, this vision of death hovering before you. It is the woman they sent you to find, the one known as Doncella de la Muerte, the Maiden of Blood, the Devourer of Mankind."


Made using DAZ3D, LuxRender and Reality. Blood and smoke by Rons Brushes, set is DM's Fantasy Bath.
Redo of an earlier piece ([link]), just fixed it with a bit of postwork (in GIMP) cause I always thought that the first one looked a little empty. Sorry, again the contrast doesn't seem to have worked on some computers and the image looks a little dark, I apologise for this as it takes away from the overall image (for one on my other computer I can't even see the mist/smoke...).