#*artorian

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The only knowledge I have of others are stories and gossip shared with a scowl and curse over drinks at feasts. Other vampires are not like the Family, they tell me. Uncivilised, spreading the gift like it's a virus; like something caught from a dog or rutting with a dunmer slave. He finds me at the arena in the bright heat of day. Crows are cheering for the victor but the dark-skinned elf  is all I can see. He smiles at me and for a moment I forget my name. 

He is the first I have met, and the first that has lasted more than a week in our lands. I try not to spend time with him. I've a son to raise, and a duty to the Septi. If he wasn't a dumner. If he wasn't an outsider. Perhaps we could have been friends. I take him as a lover instead. I am careful. The Family will smell him on me if I am not.

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I told my father. He has less grey hair than I have now, and I know I've put it off for far too long. My son is twenty. He wants the change and I know I let him down. Father is furious. He told me I had shamed the family and broken the bloodline. He demands proof. I show him the delicate puntures on my arm. No other soul will see the dozen others beneath my clothes, on my chest, at the base of my neck, on the inside of my thigh.

There's sweat on my brow and no colour in my cheeks- it's not too late to cure the gift and take it away, but they won't. They'll want me to live a few centuries at least with the knowledge that I let an elf break a chain three eras in the making. I tell them it is worth it. It would have been, if he had not left me by the next morning. I have not slept in an empty bed in ten years. The name is all I have now. I stay a Septus to spite them all.

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He is not there to help me as I die. I dream of him drawing the blade across my throat and drinking deep; I dream of being alone in the dark and he offers me a hand and a candle to light my way. When I reach where I am going, he is waiting. He smiles at me. He sets the hounds on me. I wake in the night and fall asleep only to dream it all again.

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Father is gone. Slain by beasts from the gates of Oblivion that half of the Family fell fighting. Had it been our Prince to lay seige to the mortal world, perhaps we might have joined him, but it was not Coldharbour on the other side of those infernal mirrors. We helped keep the world safe.

But now I find a letter at my door with the Septus seal. It's carried by an Imperial, who took it from an argonian, who held it for my son. Oblivion opened and closed but my world is only now collapsing. The tremour in the earth we all felt was the price elves paid for forsaking their gods. A cataclysm crashing from the sky and wiping out a country, but I do not care. My son was buried in the eye of that storm and all he thought to write in his letter was, "I found him."

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I don’t have to look. He finds me. I return to our fortress home in the highlands to the smell of silver and blood. The castle lies empty. Servants, good and honest mortal folk, are slaughtered like lambs on an altar. The halls are quiet. Five generations of the Family should be laughing and living but I only find one.

He stands over their corpses with a knife in his hands. "I'm here to free you," he tells me. Three hundred years too late. My nephews. Nieces. Their children and children's children. Eternity ahead of them slashed away and condensed down to the drip, drip, drip of blood from a silver blade. There is but one child left, living and warm and crying in her bed. I shield her from him. He laughs at me for defending her, a tiny, mewling thing.

Artoria. She was named for me; I cannot let her die.

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I keep him in the darkest reaches of the castle until he is starving. I chain him in the courtyard. I drink and I make myself stand to listen to him beg until the sun crests over the fortress walls.