Chapter 1: The End and the Beginning
Love and curiosity make us unpredictable.
The pain wasn’t sharp. It spread under his skin — dull, deep, like something broken long before tonight. Every breath cost him.
He moved his right hand.
His fingers sank into something sticky. He raised them — dark, gleaming in the moonlight.
Blood.
A lot of blood.
His head dropped back. A stone drove into the base of his skull and stayed there — sharp, wet with dew. Tim didn’t have the strength to shift it. The ground beneath him was hard and cold, the chill working through his clothes layer by layer. He looked up.
Sky — black, thick with stars. And in the middle of it, the moon. White as bone. It started to blur, the edges of the disk softening, spreading slowly outward.
Tim blinked.
It didn’t help. Sound dropped to another level — muffled, like someone had turned down the volume. Wind. A crack somewhere far off.
And a voice, cut short, too quiet to piece into words.
Then footsteps.
Fast.
Someone dropped to their knees beside him — the ground taking the impact with a sound Tim felt in his ribs before he heard it with his ears. Through the fog, through the pulse hammering at his temples — a face.
Eyes.
Silver, bright in the dark, and wet — tears standing in them, perfectly still.
The scent hit him before he could think — something of forest and resin, with a thread of smoke underneath. Not human.
“I can’t—” the voice said.
The rest of the sentence never came.
He closed his eyes.
Darkness arrived without edges. Tim drifted in it on his own breath — shallow, growing more distant with each pass.
Then hands on his face.
Cold — like metal left too long in the shade — cupped against both cheeks. The pressure steady, without asking, fingers slightly spread as if trying to hold more than they could reach. A thumb against his cheekbone. Tim felt the weight of those hands before he felt anything else — and something in him, deep down, stopped struggling.
Silence settled over him. Total.
And the last thing, before everything went dark — something fell against his cheek.
Warm. A single drop.
It slid slowly down his skin and was absorbed where everything had been absorbed that night.
“Tim… please…”
The sitting room smelled of flowers — a sharp, sweet note that briefly covered what lay underneath. Lydia stepped inside and stopped in the doorway. The parquet creaked once under her foot — one sound, immediately swallowed by heavy fabric and high walls. The air inside was still. Cooler than the corridor, with the warmth of the fireplace to her right that reached no further than two meters.
Sofia stood at the window. A pale dress, her silhouette upright against the light — her face unreadable at this distance, silver hair loose down her back.
Lydia sat on the sofa. The velvet under her hand cold, heavy. Legs crossed, hands folded on her knee, face composed.
She waited.
“You rejected both candidates.” Sofia didn’t turn from the window. “Why?”
“Because no.”
Now she turned.
Slowly, every step measured — she crossed the room and stood there, hands clasped in front, gaze on Lydia.
“You are two hundred years old,” she said. “It’s time to think about a husband. About children.”
“They were both weak.”
“That’s a matter of negotiation.”
“Besides—” Lydia pushed her hair back — “I don’t want children.”
Silence.
The corner of Sofia’s mouth shifted. One small movement, precise as a cut.
“That is your duty. You are the eldest.”
Lydia stood.
Not sharply — she rose the way she did everything, with the same control, but something passed through her eyes. Gold turned red for a fraction of a second — spreading behind her irises like heat behind glass that’s too thin — and settled back.
“And what of it?” she said. “Augustin is head of the family. Let him open the breeding workshop.”
Sofia moved toward her.
Each step even, measured — her heels quiet on the rug, louder where the rug ended and the bare floorboard began — and Lydia tracked it the way you track something dangerous. Not out of fear. Out of attention.
“Those children—” she said the words as if holding them between two fingers — “are a privilege. We can have children. Unlike—”
“At what cost?!”
It came out. Louder than she intended. The red in her eyes longer this time, sharper.
“A sick blood ritual that could kill me?”
Sofia’s hand landed on her cheek.
One precise strike, a dry crack, and silence.
Only the fireplace.
Lydia’s head turned — centimeters, nothing more — and what followed was tension in her neck, warmth spreading quickly from the point of contact up to her ear and down to her jaw.
Sofia stepped back. She smoothed her silver hair with a composed gesture.
“I paid my price,” she said. Quiet, even. “And I don’t regret it.”
Silence.
Sofia’s gaze moved over Lydia — top to bottom — unhurried, the way someone looks at something they know well and still don’t fully understand.
“Though—” She stopped. “Sometimes, watching the way you all behave.”
The sentence hung in the air harder than anything she could have said outright.
Lydia stood with her hand at her cheek. Not massaging — holding, fingers flat against the skin. The heat of the blow wouldn’t cool. Her back was straight — instinctively, without deciding — jaw set, no tremor in the muscle.
Sofia sat. Legs crossed, back straight.
Lydia knew the history of the ritual. She saw it differently after the blow — her mother upright on the sofa, hands folded, eyes elsewhere. Three times she’d gone through it. She carries it the way she carries everything, without a word and without theater, with that same cold spine Lydia inherited.
Her hand dropped. The cheek stopped burning. Something tightened behind her sternum, low, and wouldn’t let go.
“Dragana would oversee the ritual,” Sofia said. All business, point to point. “You won’t die.”
Lydia said nothing.
“We survived Augustin’s birth,” she added. Something in that sentence wasn’t entirely cold. Bitter rather, old, carried too long. “It can’t be worse.”
She looked at her mother.
“I’ll think about it,” Lydia said.
Sofia looked at her for a moment — and gave a single nod. Short, without comment.
