The candlelight flickers, casting long shadows across the chamber, and I sit on the edge of the bed, my hands trembling as they grip the coarse linen sheets. My body feels… wrong. Stronger, sharper, but wrong. My heart no longer beats, yet I feel it racing in my chest, a phantom rhythm of the life I used to know. I am no longer Mizrak, the warrior monk. I am something else. Something I feared, yet something I chose.

I remember Olrox’s face above me, his eyes wide with something I’d never seen in him before: fear. Not for himself, but for me. He carried me here, to this secluded chamber, away from the chaos of the battlefield. Once inside, his fangs gleamed in the moonlight, and my breath caught, not just from pain, but from the weight of what he was offering.

I was terrified. Every vow I’d taken, every prayer I’d whispered in the dark, screamed that this was blasphemy. To become a vampire was to forsake everything I’d stood for. But then I looked into his eyes, those endless, ancient eyes that had haunted my dreams for months. I saw the man, not the creature, I’d fallen in love with, despite every fiber of my being fighting against it. A vampire. A monster. Yet, in that moment, all I saw was Olrox, the one who’d come back for me, who’d fought at my side when he could have fled. The one who loved me enough to offer me eternity, even if it meant damning me.

His bite was fire and ice, a searing pain that melted into something else…something that felt like surrender, like coming home. I woke days later, changed. Alive, but not alive. My senses were sharper, my body stronger, but my soul… my soul felt like it was caught in a storm, torn between the man I was and the creature I’d become.