The storm gathered over the mountains that night, lightning clawing across the sky like talons. Within the castle, the air grew heavy, as though the walls themselves anticipated something dreadful.Andrei remained in the library, bent over a great oak table where ancient tomes lay open. His lantern illuminated the curling script of forgotten languages, his lips moving silently as he traced words with ink-stained fingers. Dracula lingered in the shadows beyond the shelves, watching.
The sight stirred something perilous in him. The young scholar’s veins glowed in his vision like rivers of light beneath the skin. The steady rhythm of his pulse thudded in Dracula’s ears, louder than the thunder outside. It was not merely hunger that gnawed at him—it was obsession.
The beast within pressed its case: He is nothing but prey. You torment yourself with this masquerade of conversation. Take him. Taste him. One draught, and you will remember what it is to be alive.
Dracula closed his eyes, fighting the pull. He had lived long enough to know the consequences: the guilt, the silence after, the renewed loneliness. Andrei was not like the nameless travellers who stumbled into his domain. He had listened. He had dared to answer. Killing him would extinguish the fragile flame of something Dracula thought long dead: hope.
The storm raged louder. Andrei lifted his head from the book, rubbing his temples. His lips moved again, this time in words meant to be heard. “So much knowledge, hidden here… yet untouched. Why does no one come to read them, my lord?”
Dracula stepped from the shadows, his movement smooth as mist. “Because fear keeps men from wisdom,” he said. His voice was low, but it carried through the room like a hymn.
Andrei turned, smiling faintly despite his unease. “Then you guard treasures for no one. That seems a cruelty—to the books, and perhaps to yourself.”
Dracula studied him, torn between admiration and appetite. “Cruelty is the marrow of existence,” he murmured. “But perhaps you are right. Perhaps I hoard knowledge as I hoard time, and both rot beneath my hands.”
The scholar’s eyes softened. “You still speak like a man, my lord. Not a beast.”
The words should have soothed him. Instead, they ignited the thirst. Dracula’s throat burned, his fangs ached against his will. He stepped closer, so near that he could hear Andrei’s heartbeat as though it were his own.
Andrei froze, sensing the shift. “Count…” he whispered, uncertain if he addressed a man or a predator.
Dracula’s hand lifted, trembling. For one terrible moment, he hovered at the line between salvation and damnation. His human self begged him to retreat. The beast hissed for blood.
Then lightning split the sky, throwing both into stark illumination. Dracula saw not prey before him, but a mirror—of youth, of hunger for knowledge, of what he had once been. He tore himself back with a snarl, vanishing into shadow.
Andrei staggered, clutching the table, shaken but alive. The thunder swallowed his ragged breathing.
Alone in the darkness, Dracula whispered to himself, half in agony, half in awe:
“I am still a man… because I chose not to feed.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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