Night is no longer a place but a companion—endless, familiar, and faithless. But also a hallway without end, lined with the ghosts of forgotten hours. I have wandered its corridors so long that even the fog bends to greet me, draping its lace across the earth like a widow's veil. The snow beneath my steps sighs in remembrance, and the wind hums its lonely hymn through iron gates long sealed. Time still passes by, yet the night remains the same: like the brush of a dying lover's hand—changing nothing, promising everything. A rosary of silence and sin: an endless liturgy. Even my shadow, once obedient and my faithful companion, has forgotten which of us came first, becoming weary of following me.
My hands remained hidden within my coat, pale against the dark, flawless as frost's own design. The world listened in reverent silence, the kind reserved for the dead or the devout. Once, I mistook silence for companionship; now it serves only as a mirror, faithful yet cruel, reflecting back the stillness that I have become. It shows no change, save for the slow gathering of dust upon the frame of eternity.
I wander through villages that forget their own names with the coming of dawn, where even the bells seem to toll out of habit rather than faith. I pass chapels whose altars have been surrendered to worms and rot, where the scent of incense lingers only as memory, decayed, familiar. The wolves remember these roads better than men do, and perhaps with greater reverence. Men perish, their prayers dissolve, and their houses crumble back into the soil. But the roads remain—faithful to no one, older than guilt, older than God.
Once, I found that tragic—the way the living vanish while the inanimate endures. Now, I find it orderly. Perhaps even merciful. There is a certain nobility in permanence, even when it belongs to ruin.
The snow watches me without judgment; it has seen too much to care. Its voice, soft beneath my boots, speaks of the countless nights I have walked this same path, the same way a priest might recite his prayers long after belief has withered. The wind, sharp, runs its fingers along the iron bars of forgotten gates, humming hymns that have outlived their gods.
I have grown accustomed to the devotion of silence—the way the world kneels before me, mistaking my stillness for power. But power fades. What remains is endurance. I have endured beyond meaning, beyond warmth, beyond even my shadow's loyalty. It lags behind now, weary of imitation.
Once, I thought eternity was a gift. Now, I see it for what it is: an inheritance of emptiness, wrapped in beauty to make the burden bearable.
The roses unfurled behind me as they always do—an obedient procession of crimson, coaxed from warm blood spilled upon indifferent snow. They bloom without permission, faithful witnesses to a ritual older than my memory. I never turn to look; I no longer need to. Beauty, to me, has become a formality—a bureaucracy of grace and gore, inevitable as breath, relentless as hunger.
Once, I thought such things miraculous. Now, they are as routine as decay. I have seen so many incarnations of the exquisite that the word itself has withered—thinned to parchment, drained of meaning. The world keeps offering me its wonders, and I have grown too ancient to be astonished. Roses, women, moonlight—each lovely, each transient, each already dead in my eyes before it fades.
Their fragrance clings to the air like memory refusing absolution, a sweetness so rich it almost feels cruel. Blood and bloom—twin confessions whispered by the earth, both equally eager to be forgiven. And still I walk on, leaving beauty in my wake like the residue of a sin I no longer repent.
Then she came from the fog—slowly, as if the night itself had decided to take human shape.
At first, I believed the night was making art, a cruel trick played by exhaustion and moonlight. The fog is a petty sculptor and has a way of sculpting phantoms for me—faces I almost remember, bodies that dissolve when I dare to blink. It has done this to me before, and I have let it be, because it costs nothing and I am generous with those luxuries that require nothing from me. But this vision did not vanish. The air shifted, hesitant, and the mist seemed to draw back from her form in admiration.
She emerged as though born from the breath of winter: pale, trembling, alive in a world that no longer knew the meaning of the word. The snow bent beneath her with the same tenderness it had long forgotten to offer the living. Her heart pressed palpably against the cold, a desperate drummer. The fog stepped aside, chastened. For a moment, I wondered if I had conjured her—not from desire, but from the sheer weight of loneliness, the way the dying conjure angels to forgive them.
She stood there—a small defiance against the vast indifference of the night. The moon gathered itself upon her hair, weaving dull gold into its strands, while the fog clung to her cloak like silk mourning its owner. Her eyes—clear, cautious, unbearably human—met mine, and something ancient in me recoiled, not in fear, but in recognition.
For centuries, I had walked through the world without witness. Even death no longer looked back at me. Yet in that single glance, the silence I had mastered began to tremble. The night, once obedient, seemed to hesitate—listening for something neither of us could yet name.
I had forgotten what it was to see and be seen in return. And it terrified me.
I should have walked on. Mortals have long ceased to hold any novelty for me, their uses as predictable as the turning of seasons I no longer count. They are fragile instruments—built for trembling, for worship, for ruin—and I, long ago, tired of all three. But something in her stilled my apathy. Curiosity, that vulgar relic of youth, stirred in me once more, uninvited and insistent. It rose like the scent of wine long sealed and now, foolishly, uncorked.
She wore curiosity like a fragrance—the fragile, intoxicating question of whether freedom might prove more terrifying than captivity, whether survival could still mean surrender. Every inch of her seemed suspended between escape and surrender, as though she had already learned that both are forms of bondage.
She was not beautiful by courtly design—no jewel of artifice, no deliberate sin gilded for display. Hers was the beauty that aches: the kind born of endurance, the kind that survives because it must. Her wrists looked as though they'd learned to tremble and endure at once; her spine carried the memory of defiance even when her shoulders bowed. Her eyes—pale and too honest for deceit—were carved from the same frost that surrounded us, and yet they burned with a strange light, soft and stubborn.
Snow gathered upon her lashes, as though the storm itself sought to crown her. The wind touched her hair reverently before it passed. She smelled of roses and candle soot—of a house perfumed with secrets and silence, of corridors that punish noise, of hands that bruise beneath the guise of affection. There was another scent upon her too: the faint musk of a man—possession's scent, bitter and masculine, clinging to her like a curse that had forgotten its words.
I knew then that she had been owned. And I hated that I knew it.
There was something sacrilegious about the way she stood—delicate yet unbroken, breathing the same air that had long refused to acknowledge me. She did not yet understand what kind of creature watched her, nor that her mere existence had already trespassed into the quiet order I had built from centuries of indifference.
And still, I could not look away.
You should not be out here alone," I said, because that is what one says when one has already decided not to leave. The words were habit—armor forged from centuries of rehearsed detachment. Yet even as I spoke them, they trembled faintly, like a blade that remembers it was once a heart.
She answered as if she understood the futility of warning. "And yet, here you are."
Her voice did not tremble. It wove through the snow as though the world had been waiting for its sound—a melody threading itself through the white silence, daring it to listen.
When she spoke my name, it was not the way others had: not as a summons, nor as surrender, nor in the fevered gasp that so often precedes death. Vladimir. The sound of it from her lips was unfamiliar, almost fragile, as though she were testing the echo of a cathedral's dome, astonished that it still replied. My name has lived in a thousand mouths and died in each of them. Yet hers gave it a pulse. It tremored through me like a note too honest to ignore.
And then, her name. Evangelina. It is not a name—it is a vow, delicate and terrible, disguised as salvation. When it passed my lips, the air itself seemed to change temperature, as if the night had leaned closer to listen. The fog stilled, the snow paused mid-descent. I have spoken queen's names without consequence, murmured prayers I did not mean, cursed saints and kissed their bones—but this, this was different.
I am no poet; eternity has no use for them. Yet even I know when the world halts to bear witness to a binding. Something unseen threaded between us then—thin as breath, sharp as glass. Not a promise, not yet, but the threat of one.
Her name lingered on my tongue like the taste of confession, and I could not decide whether to spit it out or say it again.
She stood too near my shadow, close enough for the darkness to recognize her shape. She told me the truth without the burden of speech—truth written in small betrayals of the body. It clung to her skin in the violet bloom of a bruise tracing the fine bone of her ankle, in the taut line of her mouth where silence had long since grown its fangs. The scent of a man—familiar, possessive, vulgar—lingered upon her like an unwanted blessing. Not a lover's claim, but something colder, crueler. A signature written in fear.
Behind me, the roses brightened in their crimson silence, listening. Even beauty seemed to recoil, the air tensing as if it, too, understood the name of her suffering. I am not given to anger; anger is a mortal indulgence, loud and easily spent. I prefer quieter devastations. And yet, old recollections came to me wearing the face of wrath—memories of men who called themselves kings because no one dared to tell them they were cowards.
"I have seen men like him," I said, too evenly.
She raised her chin—not in defiance, but in the weary elegance of someone who has learned that resistance, too, can be a form of grace. That single motion carried the weight of inheritance and humiliation alike. It pleased me that she did not waste her breath in protest. I did not need to. Monsters recognize each other by scent.
Ownership—yes, I know that breed of sin well. It is the laziest cruelty, and therefore the most common. Men love to claim what they cannot create; it is the only way they convince themselves of power.
And there it was. The kind of honesty only the desperate or divine can manage. The kind that tempts even the damned to listen.
I smiled, but it was not kindness. It was the weary gesture of recognition—sorrow and appetite dressed as civility. "Then perhaps," I murmured, "you fear what you recognize."
She did not contradict me. She only breathed, and the night, eager to claim the last word, sighed its approval through the trees. The wind curled between us like a witness that understood too much.
For a moment, I envied her fear. It was something alive.
She turned her gaze toward the trail of blood-roses blooming in my wake, and in the hush that followed, she asked why. Mortals always do. Their questions are not for understanding but for offering—a ritual meant to please what they fear.
I told her the truth, because truth, when spoken without apology, is the most elegant cruelty. "Blood," I said, "is honest."
It is the only witness that cannot lie. In courts, reputation bends to vanity; in churches, hunger kneels and calls itself faith; in beds, love imitates redemption. But blood—it never confuses performance for gospel. It speaks plainly, even when it stains. When I said that it remembers me, she looked at me as though I had confessed to loneliness. I had not. Loneliness is a mortal indulgence. What I practice is absence—more deliberate, more disciplined, less forgiving.
Still—when I brushed a single strand of hair from her cheek, my hand betrayed me. It trembled, almost imperceptibly, a rebellion I refused to acknowledge. I have not felt warmth in hundreds of winters, and yet she breathed as if my nearness carried it. Her breath ghosted across my knuckles, and for the smallest moment, I believed it did.
Her eyes lifted to mine—clear, fragile, and unbearably knowing. There was no fear in them, only recognition. She saw it—the ache that lingers where relief should live, the yearning that has learned to disguise itself as composure. I have taught that anatomy before, to queens wrapped in silk and to men who prayed on their knees for a death they could name love. But she learned it in a single breath, without needing to be told.
When she asked whether she would lose herself near me, I nearly laughed. The question is ancient. Mortals cling to the illusion of self as though it were a relic of divinity—something that cannot rot, something that will not bleed. But the self is only a temporary arrangement of hunger and memory. "You will lose what was never yours to keep," I told her, "and gain truth."
She heard ruin. She was not wrong.
Truth is ruin, measured and precise. It does not destroy out of cruelty, but out of order—cleaving illusion from flesh the way a surgeon separates faith from pulse.
I watched her then, and for the first time in centuries, I wondered whether ruin might also be capable of tenderness.
I proposed a masquerade because theater is the only sanctuary left for creatures like us. It protects what it cannot save. "We will play lovers," I said, and the snow, in its infinite obedience, listened devoutly—as if eager to record the script in frost. The wind held its breath, and even the moon paused its descent, curious to see how far deception might resemble devotion.
She did not hesitate. "Then let us deceive God together."
Blasphemy has never sounded so tender. For an instant, the centuries folded in on themselves, and I forgot the weight of my own endurance. It is indecent, what certain sentences do to history—how a single mortal voice can unravel time with something as small as defiance. Her words moved through me like a pulse that did not belong, something I had almost forgotten how to recognize.
Then she offered me her brother's eyes.
I should have refused—not out of virtue, but precision. They were too exact a gift, too intimate in their understanding. She had already learned the shape of my hunger without being taught. The living sometimes do this: they map another's soul by cataloging its sins.
"Why not yours?" I asked, if only to measure her conviction.
And in that instant, I saw them—her eyes, clear as melting amber, trembling with something between sorrow and surrender. They were the most beautiful jewels I had ever beheld, though no gem could mimic that warmth. They carried the gold of honey poured through sunlight, the hue of autumn leaves dying beautifully, the soft ache of summer when it forgets to end. I have seen treasures locked behind glass, crowns drenched in blood, and stars drowning in the black—but none of them held such radiance. I think, perhaps, that is what the sun must be like. What light must be like, if ever it loved what it touched. Her eyes were my first sunrise in hundreds of years, and for the first time, I mourned the loss of daylight.
She lifted her face as if to a chalice. "Because mine tells a story not yet finished."
A dangerous answer.
I have never cared for stories; they demand too much faith, too much patience. They require one to wait for meaning, and I am a creature of immediacy. I have found that blood dries more predictably than narrative ever concludes. Yet she spoke her words with the calm of liturgy, and something in me—something unwise—listened.
She wore that sentence like a blade polished by prayer, gleaming not with threat but with inevitability. I should have been unmoved. Instead, I found myself curious.
Curiosity—how vulgar, how undignified a thing in creatures who have outlived wonder. And yet, it stirred in me, patient and poisonous, like the first taste of wine after centuries of ash.
It was not her offer that unsettled me, but her understanding—that she had looked at the monster before her and discerned not death, but purpose. That she had seen my appetite and chosen to speak to it, rather than flee.
Curiosity is unbecoming in me, yes. But it is also the first step toward hunger.
And hunger, when refined, becomes devotion.