The first thing he knew was sound.

A brittle, fibrous cracking, like dry branches underfoot, but close—too close—pressing in on his ears, in his lungs, in the cage of his ribs. The sound was everywhere and nowhere at once, scraping at him from the dark.

Dark.

He became aware of it next, a heavy, suffocating black that clung to his skin. There was no up or down, no sense of space. Just pressure. A weight along his chest and back and sides, as though the night itself had thickened and hardened around him.

He tried to breathe and something tore at his lips. They shuddered over the sharp edges of his teeth and the taste of stale dust and something coppery spread over his tongue.

Teeth. Fangs.

The realisation was slow, like everything else. His mind rose sluggishly from a deep, murky sleep, and the more it surfaced, the louder the cracking became.

He moved.

The motion was small at first—an instinctive twitch of fingers—and even that felt wrong. His joints were stiff as rusted hinges. His arms didn't quite feel like they belonged to him. When his fingertips brushed something close and rigid, a splintering creak answered the touch.

Confined. Boxed in.

His palms flattened, pushing outward. The material under his skin was rough and fibrous, packed tight against him. With each shove, it fractured and yielded in tiny, resisting increments.

Crack.

The sound crawled along his bones. It was oddly satisfying.

He pushed harder.

Something gave way above his face. Fragments rained down over his cheeks, his lips, into his hair. He turned his head and felt strands of it catch, silky and unexpectedly long, sliding over his neck and shoulders like water.

More pressure. More strain.

The enclosure resisted him with the stubbornness of something old and meant to stay shut. But the strength in his limbs grew with every heartbeat—if that steady, cold pulse in his chest could still be called that. He dug his fingers in and tore, ripping the encasing walls apart.

One last violent shove, and the top split open with a series of loud, dry cracks.

Air flooded over him.

It was cool and still. There was no wind, no scent of earth or rot, no breath of life at all. Just a flat, empty chill that washed over the pale skin of his face and throat.

He lay there for a moment, half-emerged from the shattered cocoon—or coffin, the word drifted through his mind with a strange familiarity—blinking into the black.

Except it wasn't entirely black.

Light existed here in a way that did not feel like light. It had no source he could see, no sun, no torch, no candle. Yet the darkness around him thinned slowly, reluctantly, until he could make out shapes and edges.

The inside of the… box… was lined with a strange, fibrous material, a cross between silk and bark, now torn and frayed where his fingers had clawed through. The cracked shell lay in broken segments around him like the husk of some enormous egg.

He shifted, and the motion sent knives of tightness through his limbs.

His knees bent with difficulty as he drew them toward his chest. His joints protested, creaking almost as loudly as the structure that had held him. It felt as if he had not moved in a very, very long time.

How long?

The thought surfaced, pale and insistent, but there was nothing to fasten it to. No memories to anchor it. Just the vague understanding that time had passed, and he had not been part of it.

He braced one hand on the box's edge and pushed himself upright.

The world swayed.

His body listed sideways, balance slipping away as though gravity had changed its mind. He caught himself with both hands, fingers gripping so tight that the edge splintered under his grasp. The sharp scent of broken wood—or whatever this material was—tickled his nose.

He swallowed, throat dry as dust.

Slowly, carefully, he swung his legs over the side and let his bare feet touch the floor.

Cold.

The surface underfoot was smooth and chill. It might have been stone, or glass, or something stranger still. It did not feel like earth. It had no give. It simply existed, unyielding and perfectly flat.

He tried to stand.

His first attempt barely counted. He managed to rise halfway before his knees buckled. His shoulder slammed into the box's rim, sending a new scatter of fragments across the floor. A curse almost formed on his lips, though no sound emerged.

Again.

He forced his legs to straighten, muscles trembling like those of a newborn foal. This time he made it all the way up. He wobbled, swayed, nearly pitched forward—but he did not fall.

He stood.

He became aware of his own body in pieces, observations drifting in like leaves on dark water. His height—neither short nor particularly tall—felt right, balanced. His limbs were lean, his hands long-fingered and pale.

He glanced down.

His skin was white, but not the colour of sickness. It held a faint, cool glow, as if the last remnants of moonlight had been trapped just beneath the surface. Veins traced faint, delicate lines along the backs of his hands, but there was no blue to them, no warmth. Only calm stillness.

His hair slid forward as he tilted his head, a curtain of white that brushed over his shoulders, smooth and fine. He lifted a lock between finger and thumb, studying it. Silken. Impossibly clean, as though no dust or time had touched it.

His tongue ran over the edges of his teeth.

The fangs were impossible to ignore. Two elongated canines, sharp and definite, resting just behind his lips. They did not feel foreign. They felt… normal. Correct. As if they had always belonged to his mouth.

He frowned, or thought he did. The muscles of his face felt peculiar, as though they had been unused for too long.

Slowly, uneasily, he lifted his gaze from himself and looked outward.

The space around him was not a room, not in any way he understood. It was more like the idea of a room that had only half decided to exist. Walls hovered at the edges of his vision, sometimes close, sometimes distant, their surfaces shifting in texture and colour when he tried to focus on them. What might have been a ceiling seemed to be both there and not, a faint suggestion of boundary above his head.

The only thing that felt solid was the floor beneath his feet.

He took a step.

The motion was clumsy. His heel struck first, then the rest of his foot followed in a graceless roll that jolted up through his spine. He almost lost his balance again. His arms flailed slightly before he caught himself.

With that step, the world changed.

It was small at first—so small he might have thought he imagined it. The floor beneath him shifted from smooth, cold nothing to something with the faintest hint of texture, like worn stone touched by countless feet. A whisper of colour seeped in, a subtle gray that made the previously empty space feel a shade more real.

He drew in a sharp breath.

Another step.

This time he was ready for the awkwardness. His legs remembered a little more. The movement came easier, less jerky. As his foot met the ground, the transformation rippled out from the point of contact.

Lines appeared on the floor—faint, pale patterns that might have been tiles or etched sigils. The undefined walls gathered themselves, their surfaces pulling tight, becoming less fog and more structure. Pillars hinted at themselves in the distance, and what might have been archways flickered like thoughts on the verge of being spoken.

What… is this?

The thought came with a flicker of unease. His presence was doing this. He knew it without knowing how he knew. With each step, the world around him solidified, responding to him like a mirror unfinished until it had something to reflect.

He took a third step.

The hesitation lessened. His body adjusted, instincts waking up, tugging his movements into smoother lines. With that step, his balance improved; his posture straightened. He felt less like a stranger in his skin and more like someone returning to a home he'd once known well.

The environment answered.

The air cooled further, gaining a crispness that almost stung the inside of his nose. Shadows gathered more naturally, pooling in corners that now genuinely existed. A faint, distant echo reached him, as if some vast hall extended far beyond what he could see.

His footsteps began to make sound.

Not loud, but real. A soft tap, tap against the slowly forming floor, followed by the faint hiss of movement as he walked. The rhythm was clumsy at first, then steadied as he continued forward, step after step, each one easier than the last.

He spared a glance over his shoulder.

The remains of the cocoon-coffin lay behind him, now fully real: a long, pale structure resting on an elevated platform carved from dark stone. The fibrous shell had broken into clean, solid pieces, and the platform was surrounded by a faint circle of etched markings, as though part of a ritual or seal.

So that is where I began.

The thought carried a quiet weight. It was not comforting.

He turned back and kept walking.

With every step, his surroundings clarified.

The place resolved itself into something that resembled a grand hall, though it was strange and silent and not quite finished. Columns rose along either side of him, their surfaces carved with patterns that wriggled just out of true focus. The walls grew high and austere, smooth stone broken by tall recesses that might one day be windows, though for now they held only darkness.

He could feel his gait changing.

No longer was he stumbling. His steps lengthened, feet landing with surety and purpose. He began to move with an effortless grace that felt built into his bones. Balance settled into him, quiet and absolute.

His body remembered even if his mind did not.

He caught sight of his reflection in a ripple of polished stone along one wall.

He turned his head slightly, studying the face that looked back at him. Strong features, neither boyish nor old. A mouth made for frowning or smirking, currently doing neither. High cheekbones beneath pale, smooth skin that seemed untouched by time or blemish.

His hair fell around his shoulders, white as frost, gleaming softly even in the low, sourceless light. It framed his face and made the contrast of his eyes even more striking.

He stared into them.

The left eye was white—completely, unnervingly white—yet the pupil was there, distinct and sharp, like ink dropped into milk. It tracked his movements, reactive, alive. The surrounding iris held only the faintest suggestion of colour, a whisper of silver that came and went as he moved.

His right eye was something else entirely.

Black. Not just dark, not merely brown or charcoal, but deep, endless black, like a piece of night had been carved out and set into his skull. There was a pupil there too, if he looked closely enough, but it was only a slightly deeper void inside the rest. Staring into it felt like looking down a bottomless well.

He did not know if he had always looked like this.

He did not know who he was at all.

Names drifted at the edge of thought without forming. Images tried to surface—a hand grasping a sword hilt, the faint smell of incense, laughter echoing off high stone—but each dissolved before he could hold it.

He kept moving forward.

Around him, the hall adapted.

Torches appeared along the walls, though their flames were pale and did not consume their fuel, flickering without smoke. Their light did not behave like ordinary fire; it glowed with a muted, steady luminance that pushed back the gloom without truly warming it.

Between the columns, banners unfurled, deep crimson and black, though their insignias blurred when he tried to make sense of them. Every symbol felt like it should be recognisable, but they all slid away, as though his mind refused to accept the shapes.

He tried to count his steps, to measure the distance he travelled between the place he'd begun and wherever he was going, but it soon became meaningless. The hall seemed to stretch or compress around him at will, paying more attention to his motion than to any fixed geometry.

Still, he had the sense of approaching something.

A focal point. A destination.

He became conscious of an idea before he saw it: a door. The thought of it appeared in his mind like a whisper, and with that thought came the certainty that it existed ahead of him, that it had always existed, waiting for him to wake.

His spine straightened.

He walked with the easy, certain stride of someone who knew his own power. Whatever fog had clouded his senses at first now thinned to a distant haze. His muscles responded without protest. His bare feet made no sound at all now, as if the hall had grown used to his presence and chosen not to protest.

With each step, his surroundings grew more grounded, more elaborate.

The floor settled into black stone veined with subtle silver, each slab fitting perfectly into the next. The columns became solid pillars of polished dark marble. The banners along the walls stilled, their imagery sharpening into something almost legible. Candles appeared on hard-edged niches, flames steady and unwavering.

The air grew thick with a faint, metallic tang. Not fresh blood, but the memory of it.

He did not know how he recognised the scent, but he did. It comforted and unsettled him in equal measure.

As he walked, he found his hands resting more naturally at his sides, fingers curved in an almost imperious relaxation. His shoulders rolled back. His chin lifted. He cut a shape through the half-born hall, and the hall hurried to finish itself around him.

There was no doubt now.

His presence was altering this place.

It was as though it had lain dormant or unfinished, waiting for its occupant. For him. With every step he took, some slumbering magic in its bones stirred and remembered what it was supposed to be.

There.

The door waited at the end of the hall.

It rose out of the darkness, tall and imposing. Unlike the rest of the space, it had never been half-formed. It had always been real.

Black wood—or something like it—framed in iron bands that winds of age had not touched. Strange sigils traced themselves along its surface, lines of faint, silvery light that wove and twisted into patterns too intricate to follow. They throbbed softly, like a heartbeat.

He slowed as he approached, not because he feared it, but because something like instinct told him that this mattered. That whatever lay beyond that threshold was important. That stepping through would mean accepting… something.

His thoughts brushed the sigils, and they flared in response.

The glow brightened, tracing over the door in a rapid, restless dance. The iron bands vibrated with a low, humming note that thrummed in his bones. The floor beneath his feet shivered, not in fear, but in recognition.

He stepped up to it until he was close enough to reach out and touch the wood.

Had he done this before?

A faint impression of repetition tugged at his mind. The sense of a cycle. Sleep. Waking. Walking this hall. Reaching this door. The details were blurred by time or magic—or both—but the underlying rhythm remained.

His hand hovered near the surface of the door, pale fingers only a breath away from the cool, dark material. The sigils shimmered more intensely where his presence neared, crowding towards his skin like moths to flame.

He felt no breath in his lungs, and yet his chest rose and fell in a slow, measured motion. He did not need to breathe. The knowledge arrived as simply and quietly as anything else had.

Vampire.

The word formed coolly in his mind, without drama. It fit his fangs, his pallor, the stillness of his heart, the way the air carried no warmth for him. It locked into place.

Yes. That was what he was.

What that meant, precisely, and how he had become so, remained hidden. But it was something, a sliver of identity in the emptiness.

He extended his hand, ready to push the door open.

Before his fingers could touch it, the iron bands shuddered. The humming grew louder, deepening to a note on the edge of sound. The sigils flared, then sank into the surface of the door, disappearing like ink into skin.

With a quiet, decisive click, the lock inside turned of its own accord.

The door moved.

It did not swing inward, as he expected, but pulled away from him, opening outward from the other side. The motion was smooth and controlled, not hurried—like the gesture of someone who had been prepared, who had been waiting for exactly this moment.

Light spilled in from beyond the threshold.

This light was different from the strange, sourceless glow of the hall. It was softer but clearer, casting sharp, clean edges around the doorway. It painted his hair in a halo of pale silver and deepened the shadows beneath his eyes.

A figure stood framed in that light.

Its outline resolved gradually: humanoid, robed, posture held in a careful, graceful bow that never quite lost its strength. The face was partially obscured by the angle and the glow, but he could see the hint of sharp features, the curve of a mouth set in a controlled, reverent expression.

The figure's head inclined a fraction lower.

When the voice came, it was smooth and assured, carrying the weight of ritual and deep familiarity. It wrapped around the title as though it had been spoken many times before, over many years—or centuries.

"Greetings, Lord."