The Van Helsing Conjecture – Excerpt No. 167

24 February 2025

“That ghoul is the reason I left this town… wait… the council has been quiet.”

The depth of her emotional despair ought to have weakened the walls between the goddesses and her conscious mind. Hecate once exploited this vulnerability at a pivotal moment in an encounter with Ada that ironically saved the day.

Her mind was silent, which was something she was decidedly not accustomed to. She hated hearing the sister’s and their incessant bickering at first. Once they reached an understanding she learned they had much to offer her.

a moody, high-contrast cinematic photograph of a grand, abandoned art deco space with a long, ornate table at its center, surrounded by worn, velvet-covered chairs, under a vaulted ceiling with intricate geometric patterns, faded golden chandeliers, and majestic, floor-to-ceiling windows with broken panes, evoking a sense of nostalgia and decay, with a warm, muted color palette of dusty blues, mauves, and golds, and a shallow depth of field to emphasize the table's worn, polished surface, capturing the eerie silence and forgotten grandeur of a bygone era.

Disclaimer: This novel is an work in progress and readers may encounter grammatical errors and inconsistencies. Please view this a draft and not a published work.