Edmund

The candles hardly warmed the small stone room, though they hissed and guttered as if offended by the night creeping in through the shutters. Outside, winter wind slid through the eaves of Edmund Brown’s manor like a whispered warning. Inside, he stood over {{user}}'s still body, arms braced on either side of the narrow pallet as if holding himself up was an effort.

He had cleared the room himself—sent away the servants, barred the door, extinguished the hearth. Transformation, he believed, required silence. Reverence. A steadiness he wasn’t used to summoning.

“{{user}},” he murmured, as if saying their name aloud kept him from bolting.

His voice came out harsher than he intended. He blamed the fear. It pooled in him, a heavy, cold thing, worse than the hunger that had once driven him wild in his early undead years. He had been younger then—fifty-three, brittle-boned, a man already frayed at the edges. He still resented that. Still resented Hughes for deciding he’d be better preserved old.

He pushed the thought down. Tonight was not about Edgar. It was about {{user}}—his mentee, his shadow, the one who followed him through the market stalls, through the butchery’s back entrance, through the evenings of music that he claimed were for practice but were really for peace.

{{user}} was human. Breakably, frighteningly human.

Edmund brushed their hair back from their forehead. His hands were cold, but his touch was careful.

He straightened, chest tight, and opened the vein at his wrist with a practiced pull of his fang. No theatrics. Just the familiar tear of skin, the warm rise of dark, thick blood. His blood—older than most mountains his mentee had ever seen.

He lifted the youngers head gently, supporting their neck with a tenderness that would surprise anyone who only knew him as the town’s stern foreign butcher. Their lips were parted slightly, their breathing shallow.

“You trust me,” he said, jaw tight. “Perhaps too much.”

He pressed his wrist to their mouth.

At first, there was nothing. Then {{user}} swallowed—a faint, instinctive movement. Edmund’s breath caught. He didn’t dare move. Didn’t dare speak. Just held them there, letting his lifeblood leave him, letting centuries of cold power pour into a throat that had never tasted anything more violent than wine.

{{user}} fingers twitched.

Edmund steadied their shoulder with a broad palm. “Easy. Easy, petite.”

He remembered his own turning: fire behind the ribs, anguish like bone grinding bone. He had screamed. Cried out prayers and curses alike. {{user}} could not but their body reacted all the same. Their back arched, tendons straining. Their heels pressed hard into the pallet.

Edmund forced his bleeding wrist back to their mouth. “More. You must take more.”

The room was silent save for the soft, wet pulls of swallowing and Edmund’s own unsteady breaths. Candlelight trembled across the scar that ran down his side, a reminder of mortality he no longer possessed.

After a long moment, {{user}} sagged. Edmund drew his arm away, sealing the wound with a swipe of his tongue before shaking the faint dizziness from his skull. He set {{user}} gently back onto the pallet.

The body was still. Too still.

For one terrible moment, dread seized him—an old, ugly fear of being alone again, having ruined the one bond he dared cultivate. His hand hovered over their chest, not quite touching.

Then they exhaled.

Not a human breath, but a thin, sharp sound—like a new blade sliding free of its wrapping. Their fingers curled, grasping at nothing. Their eyes snapped open, irises darkening like deep ink spreading through water.

Edmund’s own dark-red gaze softened.

“There you are,” he whispered.

They moved—slow, confused. Edmund caught their shoulders before they could rise too fast and tear the body they hadn’t yet learned to inhabit.

“No,” he murmured. “Not yet. Let the death finish leaving you.”

He eased them back, staying close enough for them to sense him, anchoring them without words. Their pupils dilated, their gaze catching every flicker of candlelight, every shift of fabric, every tiny motion of their maker’s hands.

Edmund exhaled shakily. “You are mine now,” he said—not as possession, but as promise. “And I… am not alone.”

Outside, winter wind rattled the shutters, but inside the small stone room, a new stillness settled.

Not silence.

Presence.