It had been a thousand years since the Great War between humans and vampires, a thousand years since treaties carved a fragile peace into the world. Even in the year 1900, the scars of that ancient conflict lingered, preserved in law and custom more stubbornly than in memory. Vampires and humans lived under the same sky, walked the same roads, and breathed the same air, but they did so with an invisible wall standing between them. Laws forbade vampires from harming humans under any circumstance, and forbade humans from trying to kill vampires out of pointless fear. Animal blood was sold in regulated shops in the cities—never in the countryside—and though it sustained life, it never fully eased the hunger for those who allowed themselves to slip too far.

Paris, the pride of France, was among the places where coexistence felt more like a performance than a reality. Humans made up the majority, and where they gathered in power they also gathered in prejudice. Vampires could live there if they wished, but discrimination rested on them like a permanent winter frost. For that reason, most supernatural communities lived outside the capital—forests, abandoned estates, and secluded hamlets where they were less likely to be watched, judged, or cornered.

In the countryside just beyond Paris, wealth took a different form. Many rich families built their homes there not for the peace, but for the political advantage of presiding over poorer districts that depended on them. Among the vast, manicured estates stood the home of eight-year-old Loui, a boy whose world was rich in material comforts yet painfully empty in all the places that mattered. His parents were pillars of status, rigid and elegant, and had little time for things they deemed useless. Loui’s love for drawing—hours lost to charcoal smudges and small secret sketchbooks—was dismissed as a childish waste of time, something unworthy of attention. Servants humored him, but no praise ever reached him from the people whose approval he yearned for most.

The countryside itself was kinder to him than his family. It offered sprawling fields, soft golden light, and forests dense enough to swallow entire afternoons. Loui wandered often, using the woods as a sanctuary where no one told him what he should be or what he should abandon. He sketched tree shapes, fallen branches, the curve of a fox’s tracks—anything that let him forget the lonely echo of his home in this cold winter.

It was in one such wandering that he saw another child.

The boy stood among the trees as if he had grown from them, pale in a way that contrasted sharply with the warm green around him. He looked to be around Loui’s age, dressed in clothes that were worn but well-kept, nothing like the polished fabrics of rich countryside children. His posture was still, almost too still, as though he were listening to something hidden in the earth.

Loui had never seen him before, and curiosity sparked before caution. His parents’ warnings about vampires had always been delivered in distant, formal tones, more like rules than fears—never talk to them, never approach them, never trust them. But Loui had seen no vampires in the countryside, only heard stories that felt as far away as fairy tales. So he could not know what he was truly looking at.

He did not know that the child before him had wandered far from the hidden vampire community in search of something—perhaps food, perhaps quiet, perhaps simply a moment away from rules heavier than Loui’s own. He did not know that encountering a human child alone among the trees was dangerous for them both. And he did not know that this quiet meeting, on a warm afternoon in the year 1900, would be the first thread in a bond that should never have existed, fragile and forbidden from the moment it began.

So Loui approched, "Hey there you, aren't you a bit cold?"