Five Years Later
Five years had passed since Arthur came into this world, and in those five years he had done his best to make sense of it.
The world he had been reborn into was called Threnodia.
It was a vast and dangerous place, home to many races, as his mother had eventually told him. Vampires, humans and others he was still learning the names of. He had not known any of this at first. He had spent his earliest months lying in a crib, thinking and observing and waiting, understanding almost nothing about where he was beyond the four walls of his room and the face of the woman who kept appearing above him.
It was only after he had spent a considerable amount of effort persuading Artoria to actually tell him something useful that the picture began to fill in. She had resisted longer than he had expected. She was protective in a way that went beyond what he thought was normal, guarding information about the world the way someone guards something dangerous, handing it out in careful pieces and watching his face each time to see how he took it.
When she finally told him there were many other races beyond the ones he had assumed, he had been genuinely shocked. Not the polite kind of shock. The kind that made him go quiet for a while.
It sounded like something out of a fantasy novel. Which, he had reminded himself, was exactly what it was. He was living inside one, apparently. And despite everything he had told himself in those first dark hours after his reincarnation, despite all the refusal and grief and the wish to simply not be here, something in him had quietly begun to look forward to seeing this world. The curiosity had crept in before he had given it permission.
But the thing that had stunned him most, the detail that had stopped him entirely when Artoria first mentioned it, was magic.
Magic was real.
He had sat with that for a couple of minutes the first time he heard it, turning it over, testing it against everything his previous life had told him about the world and how it worked. And then Artoria had proved it to him directly. She had gathered blood from nowhere visible and shaped it with her hands into a small figure, a toy, something soft and moving, and held it out toward him with the comfortable ease of someone doing something they had done ten thousand times before.
His first reaction had been disgust. Immediate, instinctive, the kind that lives in the stomach before the brain has time to weigh in. Blood was blood. He knew what it was, what it meant, the context it lived in. Even a neurosurgeon who had spent years with his hands inside open bodies had a line somewhere, and watching it float and reshape in the air in front of him had tripped something primal.
But then something strange happened.
The disgust was in his thoughts. It was not in his body.
His body felt nothing of the kind. He sat with the contradiction for a moment, genuinely puzzled, and then he understood. He was a vampire now. Whatever that meant for the deeper parts of how he perceived the world, it had already begun its work. And beyond that, he had been a neurosurgeon. He had seen blood in quantities that most people never encountered in a lifetime. He had worked around it, through it, with it, for years. The rational part of him, the part that had learned to be calm in the middle of things that should not be calm, had more immunity to it than he had given himself credit for.
The disgust faded. He watched the toy move. He filed the information away.
That, however, was not the part that had truly unsettled him.
What had truly unsettled him was discovering that he was drinking blood as casually as a person drinks juice.
He had known, in the abstract, that vampires fed on blood. Everyone knew that. It was one of the foundational facts of what a vampire was, present in every story, every film, every piece of fiction that had ever used them. When he reached the age of three, Artoria had introduced him to it properly, presenting a small bottle filled with red liquid and holding it toward him with the calm expectation of a mother offering a meal.
He had refused.
He had cried and screamed and turned his face away and made enough noise that Artoria had spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with him. He had not been able to explain, obviously. But he had known with complete certainty that he was not going to drink blood from a bottle. He did not know what creature it had come from. He had been human in his last life. He still thought of himself as human in any way that mattered, even now, even in this body. He was not going to do it.
That position lasted until Artoria opened the bottle.
The smell reached him before he could prepare for it. It hit him somewhere below rational thought, somewhere older than argument or decision, and his stomach responded immediately with a hunger so sharp it was almost painful. His eyes locked onto the bottle. He felt drool on his cheek. He felt his whole body pulling toward it against everything his mind was trying to say.
He felt afraid. And then he felt his own hands reach out and take the bottle.
He had expected it to be awful. He had steeled himself for something foul and wrong and deeply unpleasant, the kind of experience you endure while telling yourself it is necessary.
It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
Warm and rich and satisfying in a way that went all the way down, not just filling his stomach but settling something deeper, something that had been quietly restless and incomplete since the moment he woke up in this body. He drank faster than he meant to. Artoria watched with wide eyes as her son, who had spent the past hour screaming at the sight of the bottle, held it with both hands and drained it without stopping.
Arthur had understood something after that. His human morality was not going to survive this world intact. He could carry it, keep it in mind, use it as a compass, but he could not apply it wholesale to a body and a nature that operated by different rules. He was not human, at least not in the way his body understood itself. Pretending otherwise while everything around him moved differently was a losing argument he would only exhaust himself fighting.
He was not a monster for what his nature required. He had decided that and moved on.
There had been other adjustments. After drinking blood for the first time he had felt something shift in him, a quiet increase in strength that he noticed immediately, and small sharp fangs had begun forming not long after. Controlling them took practice. He bit Artoria accidentally more than once during regular feeding and received a firm spank across the back of the head each time, which he had to admit was fair.
Artoria, for all her warmth toward him, had been infuriatingly selective about what she taught him. Every time he asked for books, wanting to understand this world in full and wanting it quickly since he had been capable of reading since birth, she would deflect. She told him he would learn what he needed at his first class. She told him there was no rush. She hugged him until he ran out of energy to argue, which was an effective if deeply undignified strategy.
It had maddened him. He had information-starved himself through the first five years of his life, catching pieces from conversation and context and whatever he could observe from his room, and it was nowhere near enough. But Artoria would not be moved on the subject.
He had waited.
Another thing that had settled into his awareness over those years was the existence of his siblings. Nine of them, perhaps all older, none of whom he had ever been in the same room with. He had known about them the way you know about weather still building somewhere beyond the horizon. The knowledge sat there, attached to no face, no voice, nothing real. Just a number.
Nine.
It felt strange to think of them as siblings. The word belonged to Elizabeth. It had always belonged to Elizabeth. Applying it to nine strangers in the same house felt foreign and uncomfortable in a way that did not entirely go away no matter how many times he turned the thought over.
***
He was currently seated on the couch in his room, a cup of tea in one hand and a glass of blood sitting untouched on the table beside him. His blond hair had grown longer over the years, the bangs now reaching his forehead. He wore a black shirt of fine material with black pants and black shoes. Everything in his wardrobe was some shade of black. He had stopped questioning that.
He found himself quietly amused by the image. A vampire sitting on a couch drinking tea.
Well, he thought, a vampire needs to feed more than one kind of hunger.
He had learned that early. Vampires did not live on blood alone. They could eat ordinary food, meat and fish and whatever else the kitchen produced, and it would sustain them reasonably well. But blood was what fed the deeper part of what they were. It was what made a vampire grow stronger, sharpened the senses, kept everything running at the level it was supposed to run. You could go without it for a while. You would feel the absence like a dullness, a faint wrongness spreading through everything until you addressed it.
He set the teacup down carefully on its plate and let his thoughts move to his bloodline.
His father had sealed his Original bloodline on the night he was born. That much he understood clearly. The what and the how were plain. What he had not yet worked out to his satisfaction was who exactly his father had been protecting him from.
By others, had Vladimir meant people outside the family?
Arthur shook his head slowly. "That cannot be right."
He said it quietly, testing the logic. "Why would my own family target me?"
Families were protection. That was the fundamental principle. You did not turn on your own blood, your own children, your own kin, unless something had broken entirely. Unless the family itself was something other than what families were supposed to be.
The thought arrived before he could stop it.
A slow chill settled along his spine.
"Wait." He almost whispered it. "There is no way I was born into one of those families where relatives murder each other, is there?"
He sat with that for a moment.
His intuition, which had not been wrong once in either of his lives, said nothing reassuring.
"I sincerely hope not." He reached for his tea and took a long sip.
He stood and moved to the large window.
Below him the garden stretched out, full of red roses arranged in careful rows between paths of dark stone. Beyond the garden the buildings of the estate rose in sharp angles, every one of them black, heavy, built from stone that seemed to pull light inward and offer nothing back. There was not a single warm colour anywhere his eye could land. No wood that had not been stained dark, no fabric that was not crimson or black or some shade between the two, no surface that looked like it had ever been chosen for comfort.
They really committed, he thought, studying it all with the calm appreciation of someone observing a very dedicated aesthetic. Gothic to their core. Every last one of them.
He turned from the window.
Today was finally the first day of class where he would learn more about this family and perhaps this world. All children were required to attend.
But suddenly his intuition was making noise again. That same steady, quiet pressure at the back of his awareness that had not once been wrong. It was telling him clearly that today was not going to go smoothly.
He put it aside. Panicking before he walked through the door served nothing at all.
Whatever is coming, I will face it when it arrives.
Knock. Knock.
He let whatever had been sitting on his face settle back into the calm and unreadable expression he wore by default before he answered. It came on its own by now, automatic, like a door swinging shut.
"Come in."
The door opened. A tall dark-skinned man in a black and white suit entered the room and crossed it in long, measured strides, stopping three meters behind Arthur and bowing with his hands folded behind his back. His white hair shifted just slightly with the gesture.
Noah. His mother's personal shadow, reassigned to him in her absence and serving, in practical terms, as his babysitter. Arthur had no complaints about the arrangement. Noah was quiet, kept his distance, and did not have a habit of appearing without notice and attempting to embrace him at length, which put him considerably ahead of Artoria in terms of day-to-day livability.
"Good morning, young master." No inflection in Noah's voice. There never was. "It is time for your class."
Arthur turned from the window.
"I see." He held Noah's gaze for a moment. "Take me there."
"As you wish."
Noah moved first, walking to the door and pulling it open, stepping aside and waiting. Arthur walked through. Noah drew the door shut behind them without a sound.
The corridor stretched ahead, long and dark, black stone running in both directions under cold and low light. Their footsteps were the only sound.
Arthur fell into step.
Right then, he thought, following Noah into the hall. Let's go meet my new siblings.
******
Fixed some stuff permanently now, I can now move with the story, more chapters coming later on:)