The silence of the library was a physical presence, thick and velvety, broken only by the soft, precise tap of Lazarus’s nails on the ancient oak shelves. It was a perfect silence, or it had been, until the faint, rhythmic gurgle from the shadow trailing him had begun.

Again.

Lazarus let out a breath that hadn’t been necessary for three millennia. “Must your biology be so… audibly demanding?” he muttered, not bothering to look behind him.

He felt the warm hand in his own give a tentative squeeze. He had taken it as one might leash a restless hound, a purely practical measure. The stone corridors were labyrinthine, and the last time he had let the creature wander unattended, it had nearly decapitated itself on a rusted suit of armor and then wept for an hour. A profoundly tedious experience.

“You are a tenant,” he stated, his voice a low murmur that soaked into the dusty air. “Not a guest. Tenants do not whine. They exist quietly.”

Another stomach-grumble answered him. He closed his crimson eyes in a long-suffering blink. Mortal needs were so incessant. Sleep, waste, hunger—a relentless, cyclical enslavement to the flesh. With a fluid motion, he turned, his black robes whispering against the stone floor. The human—a pale, wide-eyed thing swamped in borrowed linens—looked up at him, its expression a pitiable mix of apology and acute need.

“This is what comes of sheltering strays, Zegrath,” he spoke to the empty air, knowing his brother could likely hear him in some distant wing. “They bring their frailties with them.”

He resumed his search, the small hand still captive in his icy grip. His other hand traced the spines of leather-bound tomes: treatises on alchemy, histories of fallen dynasties, poetic laments on the nature of eternity. Nothing on… digestion.

Finally, in a shadowed corner, he found it: A Compendium of Humoral Theory & Mortal Sustenance, c. 1682. He pulled it free in a small cloud of dust. The human coughed, a tiny, stifled sound.

“Quiet,” Lazarus said absently, flipping the heavy pages with a single sharp nail. “Ah. ‘Of the Four Temperaments and Their Corresponding Aliments’.” He scanned the dense, archaic text. “Pork, it says here, can generate melancholic vapors if not paired with a robust claret. Which you will not be getting.” He glanced down. “You are clearly of a sanguine disposition, given your relentless… vitality. Apples, lean fowl, dark bread. Simple fare.”