Dawn came too soon and too bright, stabbing through Azerin's closed eyelids with a persistence that spoke of humanity's unfortunate relationship with daylight. He had managed to find shelter in a small cave, more of an overhang really, that provided minimal protection from the elements. His body had apparently decided that sleeping on stone was an experience worth complaining about at length—every joint ached, every muscle protested, and there was a persistent crick in his neck that no amount of careful movement seemed to alleviate.
How do humans manage this? Every morning feeling like they've been trampled by horses?
The simple act of standing required a level of conscious effort that was both humiliating and terrifying. His legs shook with weakness, and he had to brace himself against the cave wall to avoid collapsing back to the ground. The smooth, effortless grace that had been as natural as breathing for over a thousand years was gone, replaced by the clumsy, uncertain movements of someone learning to inhabit their own body.
Hunger gnawed at his stomach with increasing urgency. Not the elegant, almost aesthetic thirst for blood that had sustained his vampiric form, but something base and demanding and entirely undignified. His mouth was dry, his throat parched, and there was a hollow sensation in his chest that he gradually recognized as the human body's way of insisting on regular fuel.
Water. He needed water. The realization struck him as both obvious and revolutionary—for centuries, the only liquid he had required was blood, and even that had been more about power than sustenance. Now his body was making demands that felt foreign and urgent, biological imperatives that brooked no argument.
The sound of running water reached his ears—human ears now, he reminded himself, limited in their range but apparently more sensitive to certain frequencies. Following the sound required navigating terrain that would have been trivial for his vampire form but now presented genuine challenges. Roots caught his feet, loose stones shifted treacherously under his weight, and branches that he would have moved through like smoke now left scratches on his arms and face.
When he finally reached the stream, the sight of clear, flowing water triggered a response so intense it startled him. He fell to his knees at the water's edge, cupping the liquid in his hands and drinking with an eagerness that bordered on desperation. The water was cold, clean, and utterly without the complexity of flavor he had grown accustomed to in blood. It was simple, pure, and somehow exactly what his body craved.
As he drank, he caught sight of his reflection in the water and froze. The face looking back at him was recognizably his own, but changed in ways both subtle and profound. The otherworldly luminescence was gone, the slightly inhuman perfection of his features now softened into something more approachable. His eyes, once silver as moonlight, had darkened to a more human gray-blue. His skin, while still pale, no longer held the marble-like quality that had marked him as something beyond mortal ken.
He looked... human. Tired, disheveled, and entirely mortal, but undeniably human.
Is this what I was before? Before the turning, before the centuries of power and cruelty? Was there ever a time when I looked at the world through these eyes?
The memories of his human life were distant, buried under centuries of immortal existence. He could remember fragments—a name, a face, the feeling of sunlight on skin that hadn't feared its touch. But those memories felt like stories he had heard about someone else, disconnected from the reality of his current existence.
Movement in the forest around him triggered instincts that were still sharp despite his transformation. Someone was approaching—multiple someones, judging by the sounds. His body tensed automatically, preparing for flight or fight, but when he tried to call upon the shadows that had always answered his summons, nothing happened. No darkness rose to cloak him, no supernatural speed flooded his limbs. He was as exposed and vulnerable as any human wanderer.
Voices reached him through the trees, speaking in the local dialect with the easy familiarity of people who belonged here. Farmers, perhaps, or hunters checking their traps. Normal people going about their normal lives, unaware that they were about to encounter something that had once been their natural predator.
Panic flooded through him—a new sensation, sharp and immediate and utterly foreign to someone who had spent centuries as the apex predator in any situation. His heart rate spiked, his breathing became rapid and shallow, and his hands began to shake with what he dimly recognized as adrenaline.
I could kill them. Even without my powers, I still remember how to fight, how to—
The thought died as one of Elara's implanted memories surfaced unbidden—a farming family he had slaughtered for no reason other than convenience, their bodies left to rot in their own fields. The echo of their terror crashed over him with such force that he actually staggered, bile rising in his throat.
No. He couldn't. Wouldn't. The very idea of adding to the mountain of corpses he had already created made his newly mortal stomach lurch with revulsion. But that left him with an even more terrifying option—retreat. Running away like prey, like the very humans he had hunted for sport.
The voices were getting closer. Azerin forced himself to move, slipping away from the stream with movements that felt clumsy and loud to his own ears. Every snapping twig, every rustling leaf seemed to announce his presence with the subtlety of a trumpet blast. How did humans manage to move through the world when they were so impossibly noisy?
He managed to put some distance between himself and the approaching voices, but the encounter left him shaken in ways that had nothing to do with physical weakness. For the first time in over a millennium, he had been afraid—truly, genuinely afraid. Not of pain or defeat, but of discovery, of confrontation, of the possibility that someone might look at him and see... what? What was he now?
As the day wore on, his body continued to educate him in the harsh realities of mortal existence. The sun, which had never been more than a minor inconvenience to his vampiric form, now seemed determined to leach every drop of moisture from his skin. His feet, unaccustomed to extended walking without supernatural endurance, began to blister inside his boots. His stomach continued its insistent demands for food, growing more urgent with each passing hour.
By afternoon, he had managed to find and consume some wild berries that looked familiar, though their taste was unlike anything he remembered. Sweet, tart, with an complexity of flavor that blood had never possessed. His body seemed to approve of them, the gnawing hunger abating slightly, but he knew this was only a temporary reprieve.
As evening approached, bringing with it the promise of another cold night, Azerin found himself facing a truth he had been avoiding all day. This was his life now. Not a temporary setback to be endured until his power returned, but his new reality. He was human, with all the vulnerability and limitation that entailed. The sooner he accepted that, the sooner he could begin to figure out how to survive in a world he had only ever seen from the perspective of a predator.
The irony was bitter and complete. The King of the Sacred Blood, reduced to scavenging for berries and hiding from the very people he had once ruled through terror. But as he settled down for another uncomfortable night in the wilderness, Azerin found himself thinking not of his lost power, but of the farmer's family from his recovered memory. Their faces were clear now, more real than they had ever been when he was the monster who killed them.
Perhaps Elara had been right. Perhaps this wasn't punishment—it was education. And the first lesson was the most basic of all:
Learn to be human, or die trying