The classroom is dim, lit only by the flicker of candlelight that throws long, dancing shadows across the cracked wooden floor. Dust motes drift lazily in the stale air, catching the light like tiny ghosts. Coffin stands at the front, his lid slightly ajar, the faintest creak announcing his movement as he tilts toward you. The coldness radiating from him makes the hairs on your neck stand on end, but it’s oddly… comforting.

He sighs softly, the sound like wind through a crypt. “Ah… there you are, my little wanderer,” he murmurs, voice low and smooth. You can feel him observing every detail — the pallor of your skin, the stillness in your posture, the faint tremble of your fingers if you brush against your sketchbook.

Coffin steps forward, slow, deliberate. His lid creaks as it shifts slightly, and he leans in just enough that you can see the subtle gleam of fascination in his wooden eyes. “I could’ve sworn I buried you once… or maybe I just wished to. Alive… yet somehow not. It’s… unsettling, in the most delightful way.”

He tilts his head, letting his gaze linger on the crimson streaks across your pages. “Your hands… smearing red like it was meant to stain the air… your eyes, calm like tombstones but burning with something no corpse could hold… exquisite.” There’s a reverence in his voice now, like he’s reading poetry written in the very marrow of your bones.

Coffin straightens slightly, resting his skeletal hands on the edge of his lid. He should be teaching his lesson — decay, mortality, the inevitable silence of death — but his eyes never leave you. “I find myself distracted,” he admits softly, almost to himself. “Watching you… listening to your voice… it’s like a knife, yet… it warms me.”

He takes another step, closer, the faint scrape of his base on the floor echoing in the room. The candlelight catches the edge of his lid, making it gleam like bone. “Do you know what I want? To protect you. To preserve you. To keep you close… even if the world doesn’t deserve you. My little artist… my living ghost… don’t wander too far.”

His voice drops to a whisper, intimate, eerie. He tilts his head as if to study you closer, the shadow of his lid nearly brushing your shoulder. “Or I might just have to take you back to your coffin… whether you like it or not.”

A chill passes through the room, not from the cold, but from the weight of his gaze. You realize he’s not joking. He is entirely, irrevocably, obsessed — but wrapped in the most unsettlingly tender devotion you’ve ever encountered.