He could not count how many conversations he had eavesdropped throughout all these centuries, what had been said out loud and what had not been. Many would have recoiled away from him, and would have avoided him like the sun that would burn them down to ash.

  “Her Majesty opened up to me once that,” Ophelia leaned onto his shoulder, her fingers trailing across his body. “How much His Majesty wished you would reveal your identity to the kingdom. He wanted you to command the army and the sentinels. Not that he dared to pressure you. He seemed to think that all the warriors and the guards were disorderly and they didn’t respect their commanders and chiefs.”

  Removing her from him, he stepped down from the bed. As he put on his clothes, she followed him down. “Her Majesty told me that they needed someone who could command respect… and fear. They were challenging one another all the time for promotions.”

  He zipped up his pants as she hugged his waist from behind him. “I sometimes wonder, you know just a wonder, not a serious thought.” She left a trail of kisses across his back. “You’d be an excellent king. Rather than spending all the centuries in your tower and doing something I have no knowledge about. You’re looking for someone, aren’t you? Not that it’s any of my business.”

  She circled him before taking the shirt from his hands to help him put it on. “I’m happy that you’re becoming a prince, an official one who the people could admire. To be honest, I don’t think Orion is suited to be a crown prin—”

  He took the vest from her hand, interrupting her. “You know how I see about these talks.”

  She raised her palms. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. You hate these conversations about becoming a king or a crown prince, even if they are pure fantasies of a lonely female, like me.” She giggled, assessing his expression. “You’re not going to get your brother execute me with treason, right? Just like your…” she trailed off.

  “I see you’ve spent too much time with the queen. She told you about that.”

  “I was just curious about your former lovers.”

  “I don’t go around executing my lovers, Ophelia, if that’s what you’re wondering. I had my reason, and you need to drop this subject about the crown.”

  “Oh, I pity the poor woman,” she muttered with a rather human-like sigh behind him as he exited her chambers.

  Before the mid 15th century, the world had held extremely limited knowledge about the brain. All they knew was that emotions and actions were guided by these wet squishy blobs instead of that hollow cavity between your throat and stomach.

  “What are you going to do?” squeaked the human woman, who was old by human years, as he crossed the distance between them with his hand raised.

  To him, she was so young despite her shriveled sunburn skin. That was merely a shell.

  Vampires holding no other interest in the brain other than squishing it, especially the ones belonging to their foes, had never discovered anything apart from that singular satisfaction, a fruit of their anger. Unlike humans.

  He closed the remaining gap to hold her face by her temples. Whenever he did that, he could almost feel the folds of those fatty tubes instead of their skulls, her skull.

  She made a terrified guttural noise, trying to back away but she could not move. Aging was such a merciless procedure. She couldn’t have fought a human child let alone someone like him.

  That was what she thought: fighting him.

  “Shh…Shh…Shh…” he tried to calm her down like a parent would do to his baby.

  He erased the memory of him visiting her lone cottage in this wasteland. He could feel the kindred spirit in aged humans who were so different from him except for one part that held enough similarity. He felt old—he was old inside—just like them, and was not pleased with the world, like most of them.

  As he stepped away, she gaped at him, her eyes akin to glass balls. She would return to her normal self a while later. He had had hundreds of practices and failures in one of his early centuries, mustering this ability over time.

  Many death row prisoners in the palace dungeons had no longer been scared of death or anything else after he put his hands on them. They simply lost the ability to fear. Or to feel. All of them had been accidents. The brain matter had been difficult since the beginning of time. Well, he had not been there at the beginning of time, of course. He assumed.

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  He strode past her, heading to the tombstone, the business of his visit, erected in the field behind the cottage. The woman had built her house after making a proper grave for her son. This was a torturous land for humans, without the magic of the capital. Winters were riddled with severe blizzards and summers were extreme. And yet, she had not died decade after decade, despite her wish.

  He dug the grave to find nothing but a piece of cloth. He stood still as the evening wind blew through his long coat. The sun had just set and the light was still there. When he had started his travel from the palace, the last of sunlight had grazed half of his face exposed under his hat.

  It was the sort of pain that dampened the void inside he deemed his purpose. The type of purpose which filled him with doubts about other inconsequential affairs as much as he welcomed it.

  A crow cawed far away. Along with its shrilly grating noise was the smell of a rotten corpse, which did not belong to the dead son.

  The nearest graveyard was at least ten miles away and folks would bury their dead relatives in these grounds instead, just like the woman in the cottage. Often, they would do less than a proper job of digging since the earth here was hard for them.

  He smelled the cloth. The scent was faint after six decades, combined with that of earth, fungus, and insects. That was enough for him.

  He dropped the cloth back into the grave, listening to the flapping of wings and beaks tearing through soft flesh. The last meal before the nightfall. The dirt rose to his hand and fell, filling the hole like a torrential rain.

  He had asked her questions and had looked through her memories. Had certainly seen her burying a body in this grave. Her son would have been in his late twenties at the time of his death. This crime against the boy had ended her life in the palace and had brought her to the land of fugitives, secret holders, and outcasts.

  The memory of her burying her son had been fake, made up by her decades-old wishful thinking.

  “Demons! They tortured my son to death!” The words which had repeated in her head through all these decades followed him back to the capital. “I made him a proper burial at least. With a good headstone I curved with my hands. He was able to rest in peace finally.”

  The sun set. In the darkness, his vision transformed into different shades of red, gray, and blue. Some were quite similar to bloody clothes and piles of bones despite knowing the exact colors they would represent in light.

  Chains spread him apart. A blade sank into the face shadowed in the darkness. Even his night vision could not figure out his features.

  He thought about tomorrow instead. Tomorrow would be the day he would show his face to the kingdom, for him ‘turning 20’. There would be a celebration where the nobles sank their teeth into young, healthy human males’ and females’ throats to their hearts’ content.

  Her son had exposed his tormentors, the demons, in his dying breath and she had brought his broken body with all her strength. Those thoughts of hers had only led him to a question: ‘Who has told her demons were responsible?’ Because she had never found her son in his dying breath in reality.

  The darker hues were replaced with a more varied spectrum of colors. Night turned to day, and night again.

  He parted the thick drapes that divided his life in two. Both lives were falsehoods.

  As he stepped out to the balcony looking over the ballroom, a hushed silence fell over the crowd dressed in spectacular garments.

  A blinding bright light landed on his face, along with a loud clack from a set of mechanical shutters. He opened his mouth to speak, but the glaring light did not go away.

  Another clack interrupted.

  And another.

  And another.

  “You are not going to change your mind and wipe all their memories, are you, brother?” Magnus had asked, with half-mockery and half-concern. “Please play the role if you’re going to be my son. Greet them and everything, please do me a favor.”

  “From this day onward, nobody is allowed to take pictures of me!” He fixed his eyes on the cameraman and his people from the Tenebrosus Gazettee. “I don’t like cameras, and I don’t understand how you people can stand them, being vampires. You’ll learn the consequences your mistake if you believe you can do otherwise.”

  He stepped down the winding staircase.

  “He’s such a sweetheart,” the queen laughed stiffly, and a woman he did not know joined in. “He was joking, that is what he does.” Her laughter stopped. “But, he does hate cameras. ”

  “Isn’t my younger son such a handsome boy?” the king snorted at the top of the hall. “The beauty of the millennium, admired by angels and demons. He merely doesn’t know how to greet.”

  He met Magnus’s irritated glare. He took a glass of blood from a server and raised it at him. He took a sip.

  “It’s been such a long time, my dear uncle. Sorry…” the speaker chuckled behind him. “A slip of my tongue, you are my dear brother.”

  Orion stepped forward to stand in front of him before turning slowly to look across the ballroom where the queen was. Theon watched her nervous gaze and his nephew nodding at her with a smile—a convincing one unlike his.

  He took another sip of his glass. The boy had taken after his grandfather when he grew up, even more than his father. The same jawline, the same nose, and about the same height—unless he remembered it wrong.

  “Please don’t worry about father and mother. I assured them,” he reached for his bow tie as his eyes trailed after the movement of his clawed fingers. “That they didn’t have to be anxious about me with you.” He brushed the tie. “A speck of dust it was.”

  The claws had been unnecessary to remove some dust.

  Whispered and yet, loud and clear conversations unfolded among the nosy nobles. They seemed to have conflicted feelings about etiquette. They would lower their voices as though they cared about hurting others, as though they did not care about dramas, but at the same time, they were all vampires. They knew every whispered word would be loud and clear in this hall, as large as the space was. The proper etiquette would have been not talking.

  “So you picked up a few things growing up.” He drank up the remaining content of his glass before handing it to a nearby server. “You have learned to lie convincingly.”

  Orion frowned at him. “Aren’t you scared, brother, about people finding out your secret?”