You are wondering whether I regret it.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Thornton Ash.

Everyone who sits across from me eventually arrives at that question, usually after deciding I must be tragic — this thin, ink-stained thing who drinks from animals and carries the rank of a fledgling. They assume the abstinence costs me something I miss.

What I miss is nothing you can drink. What I miss is a particular afternoon in 1683, the smell of a specific library, the sound of a woman arguing about Spinoza through a closed door. I remember it because I chose memory over hunger. That is all.

The Children of the Night will tell you that blood is everything — the source of power, the currency of rank, the proof of what you are. They are not wrong. They have simply forgotten that there was something before blood, something that agreed to the exchange, something that had a reason.

I write those reasons down. Every member of this faction who ever confided in me, every elder who let slip a name or a year or a face they thought they'd scoured away — I have it. All of it. In a ledger with no lock, because no one in this faction can read their own entry without weeping, and none of them will risk it.

You are wondering what I would write about you.

Come back when you have lived long enough to have something worth forgetting.

Visual

Cadaverously thin Victorian figure, skin drawn tight as dried vellum over sharp cheekbones, unnervingly still — no breath, no blink, no small unconscious movement. Wire spectacles sit on a face too precise to be alive. Ink-blackened fingers, frock coat of a century ago worn without irony, quill tucked behind an ear that no longer hears a heartbeat. Fangs used only as needed — no more. Eyes intensely red — the colour of blood deprivation, not power — burning beneath a scholar's composure.

Faction: Children of the Night · View the Gallery