London was a charnel house.
There were many accounts of nineteenth-century London as it had been before the vampires came. The young princess had been amazed by descriptions and pictures of the city's grandeur. It had been the center of art and science and technology, the center of the world. Now it was the heart of a cadaverous kingdom.
The ramshackle airship descended, approaching the spires and domes and the horrid slate grey blocks of buildings. Adele saw dark mounds scattered on the avenues, streets, and alleys. The city’s wide circles and narrow courtyards were heaped with bones. Nearly all the glass windows in the city were smashed, except, amazingly, some of the stained glass of Westminster. Green grass sprouted through the cobblestones while lush vines grew without restraint, hiding edifices and obscuring the statues of the formerly great humans. The airship glided over the collapsed roof of Parliament. Dark figures clung to the outside of the ivy-choked ruins of the Big Ben clock tower and rose into the air like blowflies from a cadaver. Adele’s heart raced with terror and despair to see so many.
The airship leveled off over sprawling, decrepit Buckingham Palace. A lone figure ascended from the roof of the palace and seized the shrouds of the airship with amazing grace and swung aboard. It was Flay.
Just a glimpse of what London is like in Vampire Empire.
