[color=92278f][i]“The dark feels warmer than it should… like it… knows me…”[/i][/color]

Pleasant, almost lyrical somniloquies slipped from the bed-headed princess’s lips in soft, stuttering breaths. Thin traces of dried blood crusted at the corners of her mouth. A subtle smile settled on her slumbering face. At last, her hunger was sated. Her arms crossed over her breast as she nestled in. It was the first true sleep she had known since the Château’s landing.

At her coffin’s foot, a man who could only be assumed to be a butler trainee left slumped, head resting in a pool of blood beside an iron-banded coffer. Twin punctures on his neck, paired with unblinking, glassy eyes, made it clear he had no struggle left.  His dead stare greeted the returning shadow in Lazarel in the doorway. The prince patiently waited for his younger sister to fall into a deep sleep so he could find the connection between her earlier antics and his elder sister, Elara. Lustery black heels squelched against the blood-soaked plush carpet as he approached.

[color=92278f][i]“Can I rest… just for a moment… I am… tired… I am scared… I...”[/i][/color]

Luthienne was asleep, but her body was aware of her brother's presence. Murmurs, far more introspective than she ever liked to be, unraveled, revealing thoughts she kept buried even from herself. As her lips parted, the faintest glint from her elongated, razor-sharp canines caught the withering lights of the coffin-side candelabrum.

[color=92278f][i]“She will take my life… I know she will… but what is death, in the end?[/i][/color]

[color=a187be][i]….[/i][/color]

[color=a187be][i]….[/i][/color]

[color=92278f][i]Far worse than I imagined?”[/i][/color]


The young vampress’ voice took on a conversational tone. It was now clear to the prince. Someone else or [i]thing[/i] was there.

Lazarel’s heart raced, even through his ice-cold veins, and for a brief, unmistakable moment uncharacteristic of him, he hesitated, silver thorned chain dangling as he knelt on one. His multiple ringed fingers carefully lifted the slain butler's head like it was a newly fallen fruit. The prince lodged his thumbs into the butler’s sockets for grip until he heard a squelching pop, sharp nails digging into the back of the head. Lazarel split the skull’s occiput like an egg. There was no regal or dignified way to do this. Enacting a [i]Brahmaparusha Rite[/i], his teeth grew more serrated than they already were, many overlapping like the maw of a goblin shark. 

His pointed tongue traced the grooves of the gyri before voraciously rending the juicy nervous tissue from the bloody, makeshift bowl the skull had become. The flesh, still warm with the residue of stolen life, retained more than memories. The flavor of everything was clear. From the butler’s final thoughts to the wound left in his psyche when Luthienne’s fangs pierced his left carotid.

For every mortal drained, there remained a faint but unbroken tether for a short period of time back to the undead that fed. Lazarel latched on and followed that spiritual thread. To walk that line meant, ultimately, trespassing into another’s domain. This was no wise endeavor to attempt, but it was precisely what Lazarel intended to do. He did not knock; The door to the princess's mind flew off the hinges.

Her room kaleidoscopically folded upon itself, dissolving into a milky dreamscape. The prince waded through the fog, seemingly unnoticed, as distant muffles became clearer with each tread forward. The prince started to make out the shape of two individuals before him.

[color=92278f][i]“... Mother … will … I see her…?”[/i][/color]

[color=a187be][i]“…You will not follow her into that place… I will not allow… Your sister decieves you…”[/i][/color]

The form coaxing Luthienne was a slender, wispy, unstable phantasm, like a body formed from memory. Its limbs undulated long and short with a posture elegant one moment and impossibly obtuse the next. It didn’t necessarily have skin—just a shifting texture, like lavender flames fluttering in oscillopsia. Even so, it held the unmistakable silhouette of a woman… though that, perhaps, was merely the shape it chose to present itself as.

[color=92278f][i]“… If she finds her way into my dreams again, I will not let her leave them… [/i][b][i]Anyone.[/i][/b][i]”[/i][/color]