For more than a month since the last coordinated attack, the Lithaar had completely vanished.
There were no signs.No movement beneath the ground.No attacks against the Mother Tree… nor its roots.
It was too perfect.
A silence like this didn't fit.
It felt more like the pause before a storm.
On the surface, life did not stop—it degraded. Skirmishes between carnivorous and herbivorous semihumans erupted almost daily, brief and bloody, the routine of hunters and hunted.
Sometimes the carnivores won. Other times, the herbivores managed to prevail.
That's how it was. Nature gave no explanations, only opportunities.
Meanwhile, in the mountain, the forest kept advancing.
Slowly, but impossible to stop.
Where once there was only rock and barren soil, the Mother Tree had made an entire forest grow over the desolate mountain.
The roots kept claiming more land.
Massive trees began spreading around the main trunk, growing to heights the elves had never seen in Zarhama.
Over time, many began relocating their homes into the branches and natural platforms formed between the trees.
The ancient mana flowing from the roots seeped into the earth, feeding the vegetation.
And that same vegetation began to feed the humans.
Fruits, roots, leaves, and crops grew at a speed impossible elsewhere on the continent.
From time to time, we still hunted meat.
The herbivorous semihumans still looked at us with suspicion when we crossed paths, but they rarely said anything.
We did not attack their tribes.
Most of the time, we hunted solitary animals far from their territories.
Each passing day, the world tilted a little more toward something that could no longer be undone.
In that context of false calm and accumulated tension, the room was in complete silence, broken only by the irregular crackling of a wisp-fire torch embedded in the wall. The greenish light made the shadows seem alive.
Dayana stood in front of Lusian, but she was not the proud warrior everyone knew. She had left her armor and cloak outside that room. Only a thin, fragile, almost improper silk covered her, revealing a pale, overly light skin—almost translucent… as if life itself was slowly withdrawing from her.
"Lusian…" she whispered.
Her voice trembled.
She tried to control it, but couldn't fully hide it. The instinct was there, visible in her breathing, in the tension of her body.
The thirst.
The hunger.
A vampire couldn't hide it completely.
She fell to her knees in front of him, gripping the edges of his tunic like someone clinging to an anchor before drowning. Her red eyes were clouded, strained, consumed by a need that was no longer desire alone, but something far more primal.
"I feel empty," she said. "The echo of those bells… the light rising from the Lithaar…" she swallowed. "It's withering me. Without you, I'm just a walking corpse."
Lusian looked down at her with that steady calm that sometimes felt harsher than anger itself.
"I've told you already, Dayana," he replied without raising his voice. "I'm not something you can feed on whenever you want. And I don't like being bitten."
She let out a short, broken laugh—half mockery, half sob. With a slow, deliberate motion, she let the silk slip from her shoulders until it fell to the ground.
She stood naked. A direct provocation. She knew exactly what she was doing—her beauty was a weapon, and she never hesitated to use it.
"It's not just thirst, idiot," she replied, briefly regaining her usual sharpness. "Your blood is the only thing that keeps me from fading away. The mana in this place doesn't work for me… only your blood."
She looked up at him. Her eyes burned with a need she no longer tried to hide.
Lusian sighed. But his eyes were honest, just like his body, swallowing dryly.
It wasn't annoyance. It was the sigh of someone who knows he has already lost a battle against his own compassion.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her up, forcing her to sit on his lap. The contrast was immediate: Dayana's cold, silky fragility against Lusian's dense, dark, grounded presence, as if the night itself were holding her.
"Just a little," he warned, pulling aside the fabric from his neck. "And no permanent marks. If Elizabeth sees another hole in my shirts…"
Dayana let out a soft, victorious sound. She wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in the curve of his shoulder. She didn't bite immediately. First, she inhaled.
The scent of contained storm.Of ancient emptiness.Of something that should not exist… but did.
"You're grumpy," she murmured against his skin. "But you're the best taste I've ever had."
When her fangs finally pierced his skin, the sound that escaped Dayana was not a cry of attack, but a broken, almost reverent sigh. Her body reacted before her mind: the accumulated tension found release, and her hips moved instinctively, seeking something real as his essence flooded her.
The blood of the demigod—filled with dark mana and fragments of divinity—flowed into her, and the change was immediate. Her skin regained its glow, her muscles tightened, her aura expanded in visible waves. An electric energy surged between them, as if the world had shrunk around that point.
Lusian, despite all his complaints, wrapped his arms around her and held her firmly as she stole a fragment of his essence. The war, the Dieciocho Chosen, the Lithaar… everything dissolved in a shared heartbeat.
Only warmth remained.And the silent pact.
Dayana pulled back just a centimeter. Her lips were stained with a silver-red hue that didn't belong to any mortal world. She looked at him with renewed, lively mischief.
"You know?" she said, tracing his chest with a sharp nail. "Now that I've got energy… I think there are other ways to thank you that don't involve your veins."
Lusian raised an eyebrow. A faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"Oh yeah? I thought you were 'weak.'"
"I'm a vampire, Lusian," she replied, pushing him gently back onto the blankets as she climbed over him, her gaze sharp and predatory. "We lie to get what we want."
She leaned in slowly.
"And right now… I want you.All night."
The moans that followed spilled through the room without restraint, vibrating against the walls like a living echo. The sensation of surrender, of being overtaken by something larger than herself, stretched her mind to its limit. For a dangerous moment, Dayana stood one step away from completely losing herself in that delicious vertigo.