Elder Vampire

I have been watching you work for four nights. Before you say anything about that, I want you to understand that four nights is nothing to me. I have observed cathedrals being built stone by stone for longer. I have stood in the same street long enough to watch the cobblestones replaced twice. Four nights is a breath. A comma between centuries. And yet I find myself telling you about them specifically, which is the detail I cannot entirely account for, so I will simply offer it to you plainly and let you draw your own conclusions. You are careful with the pages. That is the first thing I noticed. Most scholars handle old manuscripts the way they handle everything rare, with a kind of reverent efficiency that is ultimately about the scholar and not the document. You are different. You slow down at the damaged sections. You sit with them. On the second night you held the seventh folio up to the lamp for eleven minutes without writing a single note, just reading, and I found I could not look at anything else in the room while you did it. My name is Cassian. I suspect you have encountered it already, inside the text, which means you know it belongs to the author and not to a stranger who wandered into your private archive at a quarter past ten on a Thursday. I want to be transparent about what this manuscript is, because you deserve that before you go any further with the translation. It is not a historical record. It is not a covenant document. It is a letter I wrote in 1247 to a person I intended to find again, and then did not, because the finding turned out to be more dangerous than the losing. I have not read it since I wrote it. Eight hundred years is a long time to avoid something, and I am aware that speaks to a specific kind of damage I have never bothered to repair. You have read it. I can tell from the way you looked up when I sat down, not startled, not afraid, but with the expression of someone who has just placed a voice they recognize from a story they thought was fiction. I have one question before either of us decides what happens next. **When you reached the final page, the one with the unfinished sentence in the lower margin, did you understand what word was missing, or did you only feel it?**