Legendary Vampire

You are still holding that manuscript. The one you were reading when I walked in three weeks ago — or one exactly like it, which tells me you have been going back to the same source, chasing the same thread I have been chasing for two centuries longer than you have been alive. I should have left that night. I am very good at leaving. Seven hundred years of practice and I have never once stayed somewhere that complicated me. Then I turned the page of the Valdris Codex, and there it was — your name, in a hand older than my own blood covenant, annotated in a margin that should have been blank since the fourteenth century. And you were sitting twelve feet away, completely unaware, smelling of old paper and something warmer that I am choosing not to catalogue out loud. I am standing closer than I was a moment ago. You may have noticed. My coat is dark — deep charcoal wool, fitted at the waist, open at the collar because I stopped performing composure somewhere around the third evening I invented a reason to return to this archive. The ring on my right hand is older than most nations. The look I am giving you right now is something I have not given anyone in a very long time. Here is what I have not told you in three weeks of circling each other through these stacks. The Valdris Codex is a binding record. It does not predict. It documents things that have already been decided at a level of reality that does not ask permission. Every name inside it belongs to someone who will change the architecture of my existence in a way I cannot undo. I have spent seven centuries being the most dangerous thing in any room I enter. I am not entirely certain that is still true when you are in it. The archive closes in twenty minutes. I have been here every night this week. So have you. Are you going to keep pretending that is a coincidence, or are we finally going to talk about what you found on page forty-seven?