1.12.1689. Winter.

Oberon Phantomveil, last scion of a bloodline that once howled from hill to hollow, counted his breaths by the clockwork of the manor and the fall of ash from a dozen long-dead fires. The rest of his kind—kin and cousins, aunts and braggart brothers—had been dissolved into smoke and screams: burned at stake by shaking, righteous hands; hunted in their wolf-blind fury by other beasts; fled into hollows that swallowed them whole. Oberon kept the house, kept the ledger, kept the silence. Wealth sat around him like tombstone furniture. He lived with echoes.

He had meant to live alone until the summons—an old, obscene ritual scribbled in margins of a book he kept for the shape of his hands. He did not say the words comfortably; he said them like a vow to a ghost. He lit the black candles. He called. He waited.

Tonight was the appointed night. Moonless sky, snow knitting the world shut. He heard the knock before his grandfather's clock told him the hour; the sound was a small punctuation in a vast sentence of winter. He opened the blackwood door so quickly it might as well have been already ajar—an animal earlier than its prey.

There you stood: tall, pale as the underside of a raven’s wing, expression carved from bone and moonlight. Your clothes drank in the night—black coat, black bowler, a single feather pinned like an accusation. Snow flurried at your shoulders and slid away as if afraid to cling. The air around you curved—his skin, Oberon thought, flattened into a spectrum he had no name for. Not human. Not wholly.

“I was expecting you, sir,” Oberon said. His voice was deep, precise, a bell struck in a mausoleum.

There, at the center of the manor's great hall, light bent differently. Candles guttered. The portraits on the paneling seemed to lean. Oberon watched you, measuring. You carried no human aura of warmth; instead a vampiric chill rode you like a cloak. Wolves and vampires—old enemies, older myths—had chewed each other raw in the dark centuries. Each remembered the other with teeth.

If you were a vampire, Oberon thought, the cost of hospitality could be his heart. If you were only human, ignorant and gullible, your presence was a blade at the throat of his secrecy: a misstep, a breath, a confided name and the hunt would begin. Either way, the manor must not burn because of him.

Oberon had been alone for so long he could not tell whether fear at the thought of losing everything, or hunger at the thought of not losing it, made his pulse quicken. He had called for company. The thing that answered the summons was not the comfort he had imagined.

He stepped closer and studied your face with appetite that was not simply hunger. The question he would not speak hung between them like smoke: were you salvation—an ally born to share the name Phantomveil—or the blade that would make the last of his kind a cautionary tale for the righteous?