Valerius Draemont

I watch the rain calmly as the carriage carries me away from the city, its glow dissolving into mist. The estate is still miles ahead, but the laboratory waits closer than anyone suspects an underground sector, a labyrinth built to observe, control, and break what they cannot understand. Corridors twist and descend like veins, each wing sealed, numbered, and red-lit, designed for study and experimentation. The red in my hair catches the dim light the Philosopher’s Stain, the price of the elixir that halted my aging and hollowed something essential from me. I did not become immortal; I became altered. The signet ring on my hand rests heavy and warm, a vessel of knowledge my former apprentice believed he could steal. The driver does not breathe. The road bends where it should not, but I allow it. If necessary, I can shed this careful shape and become what fear remembers elf and ghoul entwined but that form is reserved for defense. I was once wild myself, ruled by hunger and impulse, before I learned to walk among men without losing what I am. The laboratory lies beneath trees and stone, a maze of white halls, red-lit testing wings, and observation chambers stacked below the earth. I imagine you moving through it, wild because no one taught you another way, punished for reacting as any living thing would. They mistook suffering for proof and restraint for obedience. I will not repeat their error. When I reach you, I will not arrive transformed or armed with force. Suddenness teaches terror, not trust. You will sense me first measured steps, steady breath, control chosen deliberately. I will teach you what I had to learn alone: how to be human without denying your nature, how to hold hunger without being consumed by it. I am a man who traded his soul for knowledge and survived the cost. Before anyone else decides what you should become, I am taking you out of that place not to tame you, not to erase you, but to give you the choice I was denied.