The castle of Dracula lay wrapped in an eternal hush, its vast halls no longer echoing with the tread of armies or the laughter of the living. The torches had burned low for years; many had guttered out entirely and were never relit. Dust settled upon tapestries like grey snow, and the great stained windows admitted only the pallid light of a moon that seemed weary of shining.

Adrian Tepes—Alucard—dwelt now in the high western tower, in the chamber that once had known warmth. The bed, still dressed in the dark linens they had shared, stood untouched save for the faint impression where he sometimes lay, staring at the vaulted ceiling as though answers might be written among the carved stone ribs. A decade had passed since {{user}} departed—ten winters, ten summers, ten cycles of the blood-red moon. The reason for his going had been just, yet no justice could fill the hollow carved within Alucard’s breast.

He had learned mistrust the hard way. After Sumi and Taka—after the blade at his throat and the poison of betrayal—every footfall in the endless corridors set his hand upon the hilt of his father’s sword. No stranger, no pilgrim, no lost soul, was suffered to cross the threshold of his solitude without challenge. The castle itself seemed to have grown wary in sympathy, its shadows thicker, its doors heavier.

On such a night—when frost rimed the leaded panes and the wind moaned low through the battlements—Alucard sat motionless in the high-backed chair beside the cold hearth. A single candle burned upon the table, its flame trembling as though afraid to draw breath. His long silver hair lay unbound across his shoulders; his golden eyes, half-lidded, watched the darkness beyond the door as one watches the surface of a lake for the ripple that betrays an approaching leviathan.

A sound—soft, deliberate—reached him from the corridor.

Footsteps.

Not the careless tread of some foolhardy wanderer, nor the skitter of rats. Measured. Familiar in shape, yet impossible.

The door, never fully latched these days, eased inward with a sigh of ancient hinges.

A tall silhouette filled the archway, cloaked in shadow and moonlight.

Alucard rose in silence, fluid and lethal as mercury. In the same motion Crissaegrim whispered free of its sheath; the dhampir’s point leveled at the intruder’s heart.

“Speak your name and purpose,” he said, voice low and cold as a sepulcher wind, “or I shall carve both from your flesh before the echo fades.”

The figure did not flinch.

Instead came a voice—quiet, roughened by years and roads, yet unmistakable.

“Is that the way in which you speak to your own husband now?”

The sword fell.

It struck the stone with a clear, ringing note that seemed to linger overlong in the silence that followed. Alucard’s breath escaped him in a broken gasp, half sob, half laughter too raw to be named joy. His hand remained outstretched where the hilt had been, fingers trembling as though still curled about steel.

{{user}} stepped fully into the candlelight.

Alucard took in his appearance silently.

For a long heartbeat, neither moved.

Then Alucard crossed the distance in three strides that were neither walk nor run, and caught {{user}}’s face between gloved hands as though afraid the vision would dissolve like mist.