Three weeks had passed since the curse took hold, and Azerin was beginning to understand why humans aged so quickly. Every day brought new aches, new limitations, new reminders of his mortality. His clothes—once fine garments befitting a king—had deteriorated into rags that barely protected him from the elements. His hair, no longer maintained by supernatural vitality, had grown unruly and unkempt. His face bore the gaunt look of someone learning to survive on whatever sustenance the wilderness provided.
But it was the nights that were the worst. In the darkness, when his body finally succumbed to the exhaustion that seemed to be his constant companion, the memories came in full force.
Eleanor Blackwood. Seventeen years old. Brown hair, green eyes. She begged me to spare her younger brother. I killed him first, just to watch her break.
He jerked awake, his heart racing with a rhythm that his mortal body couldn't quite seem to regulate. The memory had been so vivid, so immediate, that for a moment he could still smell the smoke from the burning village, could still hear the child's final cry. But now, instead of the cold satisfaction he had felt at the time, there was only horror and a guilt so profound it felt like a physical weight pressing down on his chest.
This was the true cruelty of Elara's curse, he was beginning to realize. Not just the loss of power, but the forced empathy. Every cruel act, every casual murder, every moment of unnecessary brutality—all of it was being revisited with the full emotional impact that his vampiric nature had previously filtered out. He was experiencing his own history as if he were both perpetrator and victim, and the psychological toll was becoming almost unbearable.
During the day, he kept to the edges of human civilization, close enough to observe but far enough to remain hidden. He had become a student of humanity by necessity, watching their daily routines with the intensity of someone trying to decode a foreign language. The way they moved, the rhythms of their lives, the casual interactions that seemed so natural to them but felt like elaborate choreography to his inexperienced eyes.
From his hiding place in the forest, he could see a small farming community going about its business. Children played in the dirt roads, their laughter carrying on the morning breeze. Women hung laundry on lines, chatting with neighbors over garden fences. Men worked the fields, their movements efficient and practiced. It was all so... normal. So peaceful. So utterly at odds with the world of violence and terror he had created.
One particular family caught his attention—a young couple with two small children, a boy and a girl who couldn't be more than five or six years old. He watched them through the days, studying their interactions with the fascination of an anthropologist. The way the father ruffled his son's hair when he returned from the fields. The way the mother sang while she cooked, her voice floating through the open windows of their modest home. The way the children ran to their parents with scraped knees and wounded pride, seeking comfort that was freely given.
Did I have that once? Before the turning, before the centuries of darkness—was I part of something like this?
The fragments of his human memories were so distant, so overlaid with centuries of vampiric existence, that he could barely access them. But watching this family stirred something deep and long-buried, a sense of loss for something he couldn't quite name.
His vampiric instincts, while no longer backed by supernatural power, remained frustratingly intact. He could still sense the pulse of blood through human veins when he got close enough, could still identify the subtle scents that marked fear, arousal, sickness, health. His body might be human now, but his mind retained the hunting knowledge of a millennium-old predator. It was like being a wolf raised among sheep, constantly aware of how easy it would be to—
He cut off that line of thought, physically shaking his head as if he could dislodge the unwanted impulses. Every time his mind drifted toward violence, toward the easy solutions that power and cruelty provided, another memory would surface. Another face from his past, another life cut short, another family destroyed by his casual malice.
Robert Ashford. A blacksmith who had refused to forge weapons for Azerin's army without fair payment. Azerin had forced him to watch as his forge was torn apart, his life's work destroyed, before killing him slowly with his own tools.
Margaret Sinclair. A young mother who had tried to hide her infant son from Azerin's raiders. He had found them anyway, drawn by the child's crying, and had...
The nausea that followed these recovered memories was becoming as much a part of his daily routine as hunger and thirst. His human body seemed determined to rebel against the knowledge of what he had done, as if physical revulsion could somehow undo centuries of accumulated atrocity.
By the fourth week, desperation had driven him to more direct action. His attempts at foraging were keeping him alive, barely, but his body was clearly not thriving on a diet of wild berries, roots, and the occasional bird's egg he managed to find. He needed real food, and real food required either money or theft.
The irony of the King of the Sacred Blood being reduced to petty larceny was not lost on him. Under cover of darkness, he slipped into the outskirts of the farming community, targeting homes where families had retired for the evening. A loaf of bread here, some dried meat there, careful always to take only what he needed and never enough to cause real hardship.
But even these small crimes carried a weight they never would have before. Each stolen morsel came with the knowledge that he was taking food from families who worked hard for everything they had. He found himself leaving small tokens in return when he could—pretty stones, carved bits of wood, anything that might have some small value to offset his theft.
What am I becoming? A century ago, I would have taken everything and burned the house down for good measure. Now I'm leaving apology gifts like some sort of reformed criminal.
It was during one of these nighttime forays that he encountered her. Not the family he had been watching, but a young woman returning late from what appeared to be a birthing—he could smell the blood and birth-waters on her clothes, could see the exhaustion in her movements. A midwife, perhaps, or a healer of some kind.
She saw him as he emerged from behind her neighbor's house, a stolen loaf of bread still warm in his hands. Their eyes met across the moonlit yard, and for a frozen moment, neither moved. She was young, perhaps twenty-five, with the practical bearing of someone accustomed to hard work and difficult choices. Her dark hair was pulled back in a simple braid, and her clothes were the sturdy, well-mended garments of someone who valued function over fashion.
He expected her to scream, to run, to raise the alarm. Instead, she looked at him with a steady gaze that seemed to take in everything—his ragged appearance, the stolen bread, the haunted look that he was increasingly certain marked his features.
"You're hungry," she said simply, her voice carrying a matter-of-fact compassion that hit him like a physical blow.
Azerin couldn't speak. His throat worked soundlessly, a thousand responses fighting for voice. Denial, threat, explanation, plea—all of them tangled together into silence.
She stepped closer, and he caught her scent more clearly. Herbs and soap, honest sweat, and underneath it all, the simple human warmth that had once been nothing more to him than the promise of prey. Now it carried connotations he couldn't begin to process.
"Put that back," she said, nodding toward the bread. "Come with me."
Every instinct screamed at him to run, to disappear back into the forest before this encounter could become more complicated. But his treacherous human body, weakened by weeks of inadequate nutrition and constant exposure, chose that moment to betray him. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen if she hadn't stepped forward to catch his arm.
The touch was electric, not with supernatural power but with simple human contact. How long had it been since someone had touched him without fear, without hatred, without the intention to cause harm? The question was so alien that his mind couldn't quite process it.
"Sarah Whitmore," she said, introducing herself as if they had met at a market rather than during his attempted theft. "And you are clearly someone who has forgotten how to ask for help."
She led him to her own small cottage, settled him at a worn wooden table, and set about preparing a simple meal with the efficient movements of someone accustomed to caring for others. Bread—not stolen, but freely given. Soup that smelled of vegetables and herbs and things his body craved. Milk that was fresh and clean and utterly without the metallic taste that had defined his diet for so long.
As he ate—trying to maintain some dignity while his body demanded he consume everything in sight—she watched him with the clinical attention of someone trained to assess physical condition.
"How long since you've had a proper meal?" she asked.
"Weeks," he managed, his voice rusty from disuse.
"Mmm. And when did you last sleep somewhere safe?"
The question caught him off guard. Safe. When had anywhere been safe for him? Even during his reign of power, safety had been a foreign concept—there had always been challengers, always threats, always the need for constant vigilance. But she meant something different, something simpler. When had he last slept without fear of exposure, of cold, of discovery?
"I don't remember," he admitted.
She nodded as if this confirmed something she had already suspected. "There's a barn behind the house. Clean straw, protection from the weather. You can stay there tonight, but tomorrow you'll need to decide what kind of man you want to be."
The words hit him with unexpected force. What kind of man did he want to be? For centuries, the answer would have been simple—he wanted to be powerful, feared, unopposed. But those weren't options anymore, and for the first time, he was forced to consider alternatives.
As he settled into the clean straw of Sarah Whitmore's barn, surrounded by the peaceful sounds of a rural night, Azerin found himself facing a question that terrified him more than any curse or enemy ever had:
If he wasn't the monster he had been, who was he supposed to become?