Vampire?

“An astounding observation,” I say drily, “truly.”

“Ya can’t deny it.” She tosses her wings back airily. “Ya got red eyes with zips, ya can’t die, and ya can suck up blood. And it’s all cos Princess-lady’s chains made ya a vampire. So she’s the vampire queen.”

Sister’s gaze goes rather flat, and I tilt my head, a flicker of irony turning up the corner of my mouth. “Interesting theory.”

In a way, she’s not wrong, either....

“Do you know where the legend of vampires comes from?” I continue, carefully working at more crusted cuts. “Those who were once human, bound to their master, living undying through the blood of others.”

“Angrila.” Akir is the one who blurts it out, funnily enough. He shrugs under my raised eyebrow. “Jea’s always been interested in it.”

Has he? I don’t remember him talking about it much, in all the time I knew him, though that wasn’t as long as I knew most of the others. Gesturing him on invitingly, I demur, “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Ah, he could explain it better.” A small smile flickers across his face as he scratches at his dark hair. “So, back when the Angrilan empire was still there, and not just a desert, they were really into the forbidden. Impure fire, shaping living things, blood arts, trying to change things from one thing to another—you name it, and they did it. Blood arts, though, that they used to make themselves more powerful, and live longer. By taking others’ blood.”

“Wait, so that really is why those guys got eaten by fissure devils? Because they was evil?”

“Nobody actually knows. Some say they were blessed by the spirits. Others say they were cursed....”

My gaze drifts to sister, and her shuttered expression as she watches Akir go off-track, arms neatly folded in her sleeves. “Excuse me, what does this have to do with my guardian being injured, again?”

“But Akir was just about to tell us of the Angrilans’ hubris,” I muse.

She looks at me for a long moment. “Some of them survived, seeing as we have ancestors there. Who’s to say they truly fell?”

“An empire of bones isn’t much of an empire,” I say softly. “I think that’s telling enough.”

It’s always interesting, seeing the subtle flicker of expressions on this young Haimilia’s face. Perhaps the sister who sent me back started here, thinking that merely a scattered few surviving is somehow a victory. We won’t have the luxury of even that.

History always repeats itself. Especially when it’s forgotten.

“Are you going to tell me what happened, or not?” she finally asks.

“Nothing, really.” I throw a gesture in the general direction of the cellar, housed further over and safely sealed shut. “Our immissure friend chose to be a slippery eel and threw in some blood to taint the mix. It made me rather ill.”

“Is that... all?” She narrows her eyes at me, a faint tweak in the chain as if she’s testing for anything more. “No evil essence?”

“No.”

“He was real sick though. Shoulda seen all the blood.”

“Contrary to popular belief—” I toss my sodden cloth at Sels’s face, somehow managing to land it “—blood isn’t good for one to consume, whether one ‘can’ or not.”

“Hey!” She whips her head, flicking it off and hissing at me. “So what’d happen if I bit ya and drank ya blood, huh?”

“You’d feel sick until it either came up again, or you digested it.”

“Ew. Why ya gotta put it like that.”

“Well then, I’m glad to see you’re well.” Sister turns stiffly, gliding back to the door. “Seeing as I have many important preparations to make, I shall leave you to it.”

A surprise that she showed up at all. With her gone, I turn back to making sure Meil doesn’t burst a vein when she sees me, Yoive winning a hesitant Akir over with his perfectly-brewed tea I can no longer stomach, and Sels rolling around annoying everyone in utter boredom. Better than her going outside, from the sound of a rainshower passing over the mountain. Knowing her, she’d come back in with a frog, trekking muddy prints everywhere.

The gentle warmth of the brazier and the lick of a soft, damp cloth over my skin is almost enough to lull me into a haze.

So much so, I nearly startle when the door smacks open.

“You damned dolt of a man!”

A pouch hits me in the side of the neck with a savage accuracy one has to see to believe.

“How have you lost the art of self-preservation so damned thoroughly— isn’t two hundred years enough for you to finally get it through your thick skull? Or do you really need someone to force you to take care of yourself?”

“I’m not even covered in blood, anymore,” I protest weakly, to my own damnation.

“Yes, I can see that.” Meil’s hand carves like a knife towards the bowl in front of me. “Seeing how that’s more blood than water.”

...I’m tired. “Ah.”

She sighs with the force of a gale, kneeling and flicking the mask off before I can blink, grey eyes running over me with a scalpel’s precision, the chilled back of her hand against my forehead almost startling. “You’re pale, too cold—if you catch a fever again for lack of blood, it’ll be your own fault.”

“Mf.”

With a frown, her hand shifts to the scars, in spite of my twitch. “And these are too warm.”

“So long as they’re not glowing, or otherwise stranger than normal, it’s fine.” I lean back slightly. “Or burning your hand.”

It can be hard to get rid of every trace, after all. But I can’t feel them burning, and Meil only takes her hand away with an appeased frown, rather than a scorched hiss. “No, it’s only feverishly warm. With anyone else I’d say they’re infected. More importantly, how exactly did you wind up doing this—and I’m going to say right now that I don’t believe this ‘swallowing blood’ explanation of Jeanu’s as the whole cause, not with that scarring on your arms, which are far fresher than the last ones I treated.”

“I had to let them bleed, to help let out the other blood.”

“They’re self-inflicted, aren’t they.”

“I can’t slip anything past you.” I smile.

She stabs me in the bare ribs. “Using your own blood as a weapon is a terrible idea. However useful it is, it can’t be healthy, or sustainable. What happens when you use too much of it throwing around whips and whatnot—?”

“I usually fall unconscious,” I answer her rhetorical question, gathering the new shirt Yoive left me to protect my bare skin from further assault. “But I’ve gotten quite good at knowing my limits before that happens. I promise you won’t have to yell at me for nearly killing myself over that, this time.”

“But maybe ya could—”

I flick a thin cord around Sels’s bill. “I think that joke’s gone past stale, don’t you?”

“MmGHF!”

Meil regards that cord like it’s a snake that just sprouted from my skin. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

“It’s not much.” I twirl it back, leaving Sels pouting—quite a feat with only a bill. “I shouldn’t need to use this trick for a while, in any case. Unless Ilempo plans to make a push soon.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Akir puts in, shaking his head, and points to his teabowl. “By the way, your servant makes the best tea I’ve ever tasted. Sure you don’t want some?”

“I’m still reacquiring a taste for it.”

Meil narrows her eyes at that. “You can reacquire a taste for food, too. I don’t care if you can feed off that immissure somehow, ichor by itself can’t sustain you.”

“Well, I can’t argue with my healer, can I?”

Never could.

Ξ-Ξϟ†ϟΞ-Ξ

The timeline of a month to sister’s grand instatement has drawn closer than I thought, barely a few weeks until the city is full of magistrates, their entourages, and everyone else who plans to come for the event. Not that it hasn’t already begun to fill.

Despite the impending festivities, the mood of the city seems somber, from the top of the cliff. The snatches I catch when the others drop in only seem to confirm that. A strange malaise.

Once, I was a hero to these people. I forget that.

The evening sun glints between these fingers, worn and calloused, too old for these young hands. One day they will be as rough as I knew them, and the world will forget.

Ilempo can’t use the rumours of a curse to harm us, this time. No secrets spilling over into riots and distrust of the Imperial family itself. No fallen prince-heir redeemed in death, fighting the general of a devil he failed to defeat.

And yet, they don’t move on. They aren’t happy.

I hear the whispers as I work to regain my strength, waiting for the immissure to run out of human blood, doing my best to consume as much of Yoive’s wonder-soup and food as I can, listening to Akir’s tales of his happy mother while Sels gobbles the rice cakes she sent, and feeling a strange dread approach. No matter what I do, or how much news of nothing—apart from Treeline’s recovery—I hear, it refuses to leave.

Until one day Yoive turns up with an outfit folded in his arms, and a message. A message I feel a burning need to confirm in person. Sister, of course, only turns from me with the smugness of having finally achieved a victory, once I get there.

“Of course you’re to attend personally. You are my Guardian, are you not?”

It seems my premonitions were right.