He returned home before the sun began its descent, the afternoon sky smeared in pale amber.
From the outside, his house looked unchanged—quiet, unassuming, framed by ivy and weathered stone.
But the air around it had shifted.
As he stepped inside, the silence greeted him like an old friend. Yet even silence could carry tension, and today… it sat heavier than usual.
He placed the book on his table, its pages now closed but not forgotten.
The presence hadn't vanished. It was moving—carefully, deliberately.
If it hadn't stirred the spiritual threads woven into the land, he might not have sensed it at all.
But something about it was wrong.
Not chaotic, like Tilda had been in the early days. Not desperate. This thing was patient.
Watching.
He lit a candle—not out of need, but habit. Its glow threw long shadows across the room.
He stepped into his small garden, a sanctuary wrapped in roses and herbs.
He plucked a withered leaf and rubbed it between his fingers.
It crumbled too easily.
That plant had been thriving just two days ago.
He knelt by the soil. It was damp… yet brittle.
Rotting from the roots.
He stood slowly. Not a sound broke the stillness. Even the birds were quiet.
It had touched here. Just lightly. A test.
The sigils carved into the wooden beams hummed faintly when he re-entered the house.
Protection, warding—old things, older than even him. They'd held fast for centuries.
Now they stirred.
That night, he wandered again.
Not as a man among men, but as shadow, as silence.
He passed doorways left slightly ajar. Houses where laughter had once echoed now held an unfamiliar hush.
A child cried behind shuttered windows, the sound sharp, sudden, as if startled from sleep.
He saw her—
An old woman kneeling at her threshold, muttering something into the dirt. Salt ringed her doorway. Her hands shook, her breath came fast.
She wasn't possessed. But she'd felt it.
Something brushing her soul like cold fingers.
The vampire stepped back, eyes narrowing. It wasn't attacking. Not yet. No violence. No overt possession. Just… planting itself.
Like a seed.
Like a curse learning the pattern of the land before it blooms.
He watched the stars.
Even they seemed duller tonight.
The next morning arrived without song.
No chirping sparrows at the window. No rustling breeze through the pine trees. Just silence—thick and unyielding.
He sat by the window with his book unopened, fingers curled around a cup he never drank from.
The ancient runes on the pages blurred in his sight, forgotten. His thoughts weren't with ink and parchment anymore.
Something was wrong with the wind.
It moved like breath across a dying body—light, then still. Restless. Uneven.
By midday, he was on the move again.
The village wore the same face: quiet homes, market stalls, the occasional chatter of neighbors.
But it was all… forced. Offbeat. Like an orchestra playing with one broken instrument, and no one noticing but him.
Children stumbled without reason.
A black cat hissed at an empty alley.
A priest walked past with his robes inside out—unknowingly, nervously wiping his hands over and over again.
He watched. Listened. Not with his ears—but with the still part of his mind, the place where shadows whisper and the world beneath the surface hums.
"Like a spider laying its web beneath floorboards—silent, invisible, inevitable."
Not a ghost.
Not a demon.
This… thing… was older.
Its power didn't roar. It pulsed, steady and invisible, the way a predator's breath aligns with its prey before the pounce.
That night, he returned to his home and sat beneath the old archway where vines had dried without cause. He placed his hand on the soil. Again, the rot.
It wasn't poisoning the land—it was preparing it.
The ward on his door blinked once—just a pulse of soft red light.
Then silence.
He didn't move. Only stared.
It had touched the edge of his protection.
Just to test him.
A whisper slipped through the air, too soft for human ears:
"You sense me."
He did not respond.
He simply stood, eyes glowing faintly crimson in the candlelit dark.
Not afraid.
But no longer alone.
The scream came again.
Sharp.
Desperate.
Far off—somewhere beyond the trees, past the still hills blanketed in mist.
He froze, the ancient book in his lap sliding to the floor without a sound. His ears twitched, and his pupils narrowed to slits. The wind had shifted.
Another scream, thinner now, like it was being dragged into the ground.
He was already out the door.
The cold air didn't bother him. His cloak snapped behind him as he moved through the night like a shadow with purpose, feet barely touching the ground. Trees blurred past. Branches dared not touch him.
By the time he reached the village edge, dawn was only a whisper behind the hills. Faint gray light washed over rooftops, but the air was thick with something older than fear.
He smelled it before he saw it—
Blood. But tainted. Not from a clean wound. Not human pain.
This was something else.
He slowed his steps as the murmurs of villagers grew louder. Hushed, frantic voices circled the heart of the square where a small crowd had gathered, pale faces lit by oil lanterns. Their eyes were wide, but no one dared approach the man lying in the dirt.
He was young—barely in his twenties. But his body looked emptied.
Mouth slack. Blood trailing from his lips like ink.
"His limbs bent as if frozen mid-spasm, fingers curled inwards like broken claws, face locked in an expression of mute horror. though death had interrupted something mid-movement.
But what held the vampire's eyes was the mark.
On the man's neck, low behind the jaw—a single puncture wound.
Not like a fang.
More like a… nail. Or a claw. It didn't pierce skin so much as burrow into it. And it pulsed faintly—like the dark had left a piece of itself behind.
One of the women sobbed nearby. "He was just going to fetch water... No one saw anything… He—he just screamed—"
The vampire crouched beside the body.
He didn't touch the wound. He didn't need to.
The energy coiled inside it. Dark magic. Raw. Spiritual. It wasn't just physical damage—it had tried to take something.
A signature.
A mark.
He's been touched, the vampire thought. By something that shouldn't be walking this world.
He stood slowly.
The villagers stared at him, wordless, trusting—because even though none of them truly knew him, they always turned to him when the unnatural crept in.
He said nothing.
"What good would the truth do? The weight of it might break them—and he wasn't ready to carry their fear too."
Not yet.
He turned away from the square, the pulse of that magic still humming in his bones. It wasn't random. It had a purpose.
And now it had a message.
He began walking.
Not back home.
But toward the forest.
Whatever had done this—wasn't done yet.
"This wasn't the last scream. It was only the first."
"The forest would not give him answers. But it would show him the face of what had come."