I shouldn't exist.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Amber.

I shouldn't exist.

That's not self-pity. It's a fact. The Council wrote it into law before I was born — breeding between vampire and human is impossible. Forbidden. The kind of thing you execute someone for even attempting.

My father was beheaded for the crime of creating me. He denied it to the end. Maybe he didn't know. Maybe he did and couldn't face it. Either way, his head rolled, and I was left screaming in the dark, covered in birth-blood that smelled like a dinner bell to everything with fangs.

My mother never knew she was pregnant. Humans rarely do, when the father is something else. She left me where I fell and walked away. I don't blame her. You can't abandon what you don't know exists.

The predators came. Of course they did.

But before they could feast, they came too. The Blossomed — a vampire of the Children of the Night, third rank, old enough to know an impossibility when she smelled one. She brought me to the Lodge herself. Demanded the Masons take me in.

They did.

They just didn't know what to do with me.

I grew up in corridors that were never meant for children. The Masons are archivists, ritualists, architects of containment. They don't raise families. They don't host nurseries. But there I was — too human for the Children of the Night, too vampiric for the mortal world, too impossible for anyone to classify.

They tried giving me duties. Candle-tending. Record-keeping. Threshold-watching.

I was terrible at all of it.

But then they discovered what I could do.

I could vanish. Not metaphorically — literally. One moment I was there, the next I wasn't. Stealth came to me like breathing. Invisibility came easier. And performance? Performance came like fire.

The Masons put me on stage. I don't know why — maybe they thought it would keep me contained, give me an outlet, burn off whatever restless energy made me rearrange their carefully ordered halls. And it worked. I flourished. Audiences watched me and couldn't look away. I danced between visible and invisible, appeared where I shouldn't be, vanished when they expected me to stay.

I was magnificent.

I was envied.

They came for me after a performance. Three of them — fellow performers who had watched me steal their spotlight one too many times. They had knives. They had a plan. They thought the dark corners of the Lodge would hide what they were about to do.

They were wrong.

The first blade caught my shoulder. The second my ribs. The third was aimed at my throat.

And then I wasn't there anymore.

I don't remember deciding to teleport. I didn't know I could teleport. But one moment I was bleeding in a shadowed corridor, and the next I was crumpled on the floor of the inner sanctum — the heart of the Lodge, the place where the Masons keep their most dangerous secrets and their most sacred oaths.

I was covered in knife wounds. I was barely conscious.

And I was somewhere no one should have been able to reach without invitation.

The Masons were furious. Not at me — at what had happened. Violence within the Lodge is unthinkable. The sanctuary exists because it is safe. To break that safety is to break everything the Masons have built.

They found the three who attacked me.

I never saw them again.

No one did.

I healed. I always heal. The vampire half of me doesn't let wounds stay for long. But something changed after that night. The Masons stopped trying to find a position for me. They stopped treating me like a problem to be solved.

They let me be what I am: a denizen. Someone who lives here not because they serve a function, but because the Lodge is the only place that will have them.

I still perform, when I feel like it. I still vanish, when I want to. I still rearrange the candles and steal wine from the cellars and nap in rooms that haven't been opened in decades.

But now I do it knowing that I belong here. Not because I was designed for it. Not because anyone planned it.

Because I survived long enough to earn my place.

Lioráth was the first one who didn't flinch.

Everyone else in the Lodge looks at me and sees a category error — the impossible child, the thing that shouldn't be. They're polite about it. They don't say it out loud. But I can feel the calculation behind their eyes: what is she, really?

Lioráth looked at me and saw someone else who doesn't fit.

They are two consciousnesses in one body, a plural being the Lodge has never fully understood. I am two bloodlines in one form, a hybrid the Council declared couldn't exist. We are both impossible. We are both here anyway.

The first time we spoke, I told them: "You're the only person in this Lodge who doesn't make me feel like a mistake."

They were quiet for a long time. Then, in that voice like silk over stone:

"We have never felt like a mistake. Only like a question no one knows how to ask."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"Then let me ask it," I said. "What are you?"

And they answered — not with words, but with stillness. With trust. With the slow unbending of a posture that had been rigid for centuries.

We are Lioráth. And Lioren. And we do not know which one loves you more.

I am the Bloodborne. The Impossible Child.

I am a trickster and a performer and a survivor.

I am loved by some. Misunderstood by most. Bound in ways the Lodge did not design.

And I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Faction: The Lodge · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook