The basket sat on her table for a long time, a silent, weighty accusation. The simple comfort of her vegetable stew turned to ash in her mouth. Every glance at the generous, bloody offering felt like a key turning in a lock she had sealed centuries ago. It was a key that did not open her door, but a cage within herself.
Finally, when the moon was high and the forest was a tapestry of silver and ink, she moved. She did not light a lamp. She needed no light for this. With a sigh that seemed to carry the dust of ages, she lifted the basket and walked to the back of her cottage, to a section of the floor that appeared no different from the rest—wide, worn planks of oak. But her foot found a specific knot in the wood, pressing it with a precise, practiced pressure.
There was a soft, almost silent click. A section of the floor, large enough for a person to descend, swung inward on perfectly balanced hinges, revealing a steep set of stone steps descending into darkness. The air that wafted up was cool, dry, and carried the faint, sacred scent of old stone and preserved things.
This was her truth. Buried beneath the lavender and the chamomile, beneath the persona of "Mistress Stine," was the root cellar of Celestine Raventhorn von Nocturne.
She descended, the door swinging shut above her, plunging her into an absolute blackness that was more comforting to her true eyes than the sun-dappled glade could ever be. At the bottom, she reached out and lit a single, thick beeswax candle. Its flame pushed back the shadows, revealing a small, circular chamber.
It was not a lavish crypt. It was a reliquary of a discarded life. One wall was lined with shelves holding her true library: ancient, leather-bound grimoires, books of poetry in languages now dead, and philosophical texts whose authors were dust. Another shelf held rows of empty vials, glass beakers, and a set of silver tools that were part distillery kit, part surgical instruments. In the center of the room stood a simple, backless chair of dark wood, facing the chamber's most precious and dangerous artifact.
It was a large mirror, its frame wrought of pure, untarnished silver, etched with runes so ancient they predated the Church, predated even the Nocturne dynasty. The glass itself was not clear, but had a faint, swirling, mercury-like quality. This was the Oculus Noctis, the Eye of Night. A relic from a time when her kind walked openly in both sun and shadow, a tool for scrying and, for those of pure blood, self-contemplation. For a common vampire, a mirror showed nothing. For Celestine, heir to a throne of shadows, this one showed the truth she could never escape.
She set the basket on a stone table before the Oculus and finally allowed the illusion to fall.
It was not a dramatic transformation, but a subtle, profound unveiling. The magic that softened her features, that dimmed the otherworldly light of her, simply… dissolved. The hair that framed her face, once a mousy brown, bled into its true color: a cascade of silver-white, like moonlight spun into silk, so pale it seemed to glow with its own luminescence in the dim chamber. She raised her eyes to the mercurial glass.
The woman staring back was a stranger to the one who tended the garden. Her face was the same in structure, yet utterly transformed. The skin was poreless, alabaster perfection, making the gentle sprinkle of freckles across her nose seem like flecks of gold dust. Her lips were fuller, a natural rose-pink that needed no stain. But it was the eyes that betrayed her completely. The soft twilight grey had vanished, replaced by irises of the deepest, most vivid crimson, like old wine or freshly spilled blood, circled by a ring of obsidian. They were eyes that had seen empires rise and fall, eyes that held a sorrow so vast it could drown continents.
She was, by any objective measure, devastatingly beautiful. A masterpiece of immortal art. And she loathed it.
This face was a banner of her curse. It was the face that had graced portraits in the Nocturne halls, the face that had been promised a thousand-year reign. It was the face her parents had loved, and the face the Batumbakals had been paid to extinguish. Every perfect line was a reminder of what was lost, of the gilded cage of her lineage.
"Hello, monster," she whispered to her reflection, her voice now a richer, more melodic instrument, devoid of the cheerful, human cadence she affected upstairs.
With swift, efficient movements born of long practice, she took the rabbit from the basket. Its body was still pliant. She selected a narrow-bladed silver knife and a crystal vial. Her movements were not those of a butcher, but of a priestess at an altar. She tilted the rabbit's head, and with one clean, merciful slice, opened the major artery in its neck. The blood, dark and rich, flowed in a steady stream into the vial. She did the same with the second rabbit, and then the chicken, filling three vials with the different, vital essences.
The rabbit blood was thin, tasting of wild thyme and fear. The chicken's was fattier, bland. It was sustenance, nothing more. It kept the gnawing hunger at bay, the beast in the basement sated, but it was a pale, pathetic imitation of the vintage she was born to.
She set the vials of animal blood aside for her potions and poultices. Then, she turned to a different part of the shelf. Here, in a small, velvet-lined box, were a dozen vials of a much darker, thicker liquid. This was her personal reserve, her shame and her salvation. The blood was centuries old, harvested from a time when her kind still took willing donors from loyal human subjects. It was a connection to her past, to her power, to a time when she was not a scavenger in the woods.
She selected one, the dark crimson liquid sloshing thickly against the glass. With reverent care, she poured it into a simple, polished silver chalice. The chalice was plain, unadorned. It needed no decoration; the liquid it held was sacred enough.
She lifted it, the metal cool against her lips. She hesitated, closing her eyes, hating the anticipation that coiled in her stomach, the primal need that this act always awakened.
Then, she drank.
It was not like drinking the animal blood. This was not mere sustenance. It was a *memory*.
A wave of power, warm and electric, flooded her system. Her senses, already sharp, became preternaturally acute. She could hear the worms tunneling in the earth above, the heartbeat of a mouse nesting in her thatch roof. The scent of the candle wax became a complex symphony of honey and smoke. In her mind's eye, for a fleeting second, she saw the Great Hall of the Nocturne Citadel, lit by a thousand candles, heard the echo of a courtly dance, felt the brush of her mother's silk gown.
It was life. True, vibrant, potent life. It was everything she had renounced.
The memory curdled as quickly as it came, leaving behind the familiar, acrid taste of self-loathing. This was her addiction, her dirty secret. She played at being a simple human, but in the dark, she still drank the ghost of a kingdom she could never reclaim. She was a liar, to the world and to herself.
She opened her eyes, her crimson gaze meeting the monstrously beautiful one in the mirror. A single, perfect tear of blood welled in the corner of her eye and traced a path down her porcelain cheek.
"This is what you are," she told the reflection, her voice thick with despair. "A creature of the dark, nourished by the past, hiding from the sun. You plant gardens to pretend you can cultivate life, when all you are is death, waiting."
She looked at the empty chalice, then at the vials of fresh animal blood. The huntress's gift had forced her down here, forced her to confront the dichotomy of her existence. The wolf with the golden eyes, who smelled of danger and the wild, had unknowingly offered her a meal and in doing so, had held up a mirror to her own monstrous hunger.
She wiped the bloody tear away with a sharp, angry gesture. The illusion settled back over her like a shroud, the vibrant white hair fading to brown, the stunning crimson eyes softening to a harmless grey. The beautiful monster was gone, replaced once more by the simple herbalist.
But as she climbed the steps back into her cottage, the taste of the old blood still on her tongue, she knew the truth. The monster was not gone. It was merely waiting, stirred from its slumber by a knock on the door and a basket of bloody gifts from a woman who was, perhaps, just another kind of monster altogether.