From the future, I ask myself: How long should I pretend? How long must I stay hidden from her—this girl who sees through every carefully constructed mask, who unknowingly threatens to unravel everything I have ever been?
The question haunts me, lingering like a shadow between day and night.
I do not yet know the answer.
Present:
Avegar leaned closer to the mirror above the cracked sink in the dim dorm bathroom. The mirror had a jagged corner where silver backing peeled away, warping his reflection into something not quite human. He studied it anyway, almost daring it to tell him the truth.
The morning light, filtered through frosted glass, painted his face in ghostly hues—soft and cold like the memory of snow. He tilted his chin, fingers tracing the delicate arch of a scar that ran from his right cheekbone to just beneath his jaw. It pulsed faintly under his touch, like a closed wound that remembered how to bleed.
A souvenir from a time he didn't talk about. Not even with his brothers.
It was a line drawn by fire and blades and choices. Choices made when he was too young to understand what eternity would cost. Before his body had learned to ache for more than just blood. Before he'd learned to miss what he never truly had.
He didn't hide the scar, but he didn't explain it either. People assumed it was a childhood accident. That was easier than the truth. Easier than trying to describe betrayal in a language mortals could understand.
His long nose, sharp cheekbones, and slightly gaunt face made him look like a forgotten oil painting. Or perhaps something abandoned in a cathedral's shadows—elegant, but not quite warm. The scar, though, gave it character. Or so one of his past crushes had said before disappearing like smoke in the wind.
They always disappeared.
A kiss behind a dorm staircase. A shared cigarette after midnight. Then silence.
Sometimes it was boys—quiet boys with fingers stained in ink, or loud ones who laughed too hard and never looked back. Sometimes it was girls. He didn't chase any of them. He let each memory fade like smoke curling through a keyhole.
Avegar knew he liked men. Had always known, in that quiet, shapeless way you know your own reflection even when the mirror lies. But attraction had always felt like a ghost in his ribs—real, but never solid. Never safe. He understood impermanence better than they ever had.
He adjusted his scarf, letting the fringe fall over the collar of his black coat. His brown hair was unruly as always—unkempt, windswept, falling in strands across his eyes. The mess comforted him. It blurred things.
Made him less real.
Shadows suited him.
They dulled the parts of him that still burned.
They let him feel like no one was watching, even when eyes lingered too long.
Atelier 7 was carved from old stone and tall windows. The room itself felt ancient, like a forgotten monastery that had decided to become an art school. Dust floated in beams of light like silver ghosts. Shelves groaned with sketchbooks, and canvases lined the walls like sentinels waiting to be born.
There was a smell that clung to everything—oils, turpentine, smudged charcoal, aged paper. It was the scent of dreams half-finished and truths half-buried.
Students wandered in, yawning and stretching, dragging their portfolios behind them like burdens or shields. Some whispered greetings; others grunted and collapsed into chairs. Each of them carried stories in their eyes. Unspoken. Unformed. Avegar recognized that kind of silence.
He had his usual spot by the arched window, where the sunlight didn't quite reach him. He liked watching the city from that angle—the rooftops, the curling smoke from the bakery below, the occasional blur of a sparrow in flight.
His easel stood ready, the canvas still blank. He hadn't painted anything real in days. Just underlayers. Bones. Ghosts of trees. He told himself it was technical practice, but he knew better.
Sometimes he feared putting too much of himself into the canvas.
Because then someone might see.
Then the door swung open.
And the air changed.
Elvira stepped into the room like she belonged to another story entirely. One where girls wore boots made for silence and carried storms in their eyes.
He dipped his brush in umber again, but didn't paint.
Her voice, low and casual, struck him like a blade wrapped in silk.
He hated how it made something shift in him. He didn't want it to.
Elvira stirred thoughts he hadn't made room for—hadn't expected. Not desire exactly. Not yet. But something dangerous. Something unfamiliar. He knew what it was to want, to ache quietly for the curve of a boy's neck, the roughness of a calloused palm. But this?
This was different.
Elvira wasn't safe either.
Not because she was a girl.
But because she saw him.
Avegar noticed everything about her, though he tried not to. The way her sweater hung loose around her frame, sleeves pushed to her elbows like she'd been fighting with the world and refused to surrender.
The streaks of red in her black hair glinted like embers when she turned. And her eyes—sharp, blue, assessing—like she was always asking a question no one had the answer to.
He dropped his gaze to his canvas, as if that could protect him from whatever she might stir.
She didn't see him—at first.
Anna followed her in, frowning, shuffling a satchel full of graphite pencils and overly labeled supplies.
"I swear it was on my desk last night," Anna muttered.
"It's probably under your stack of perfectly aligned charcoal sticks," Elvira said, half-smiling as she dropped her bag with deliberate drama.
Avegar didn't laugh, but the corners of his mouth almost twitched.
Elvira was chaos framed in symmetry. Everything about her seemed deliberate, yet constantly on the edge of unraveling. She was poetry read backwards. Wild logic.
His hands, always steady with a brush, now hovered above the canvas like he'd forgotten how to move.
He dipped his brush in umber again, but didn't paint.
Her voice, low and casual, struck him like a blade wrapped in silk.
"You're the quiet one, huh?"
He turned, too fast.
"I guess," he said, and cursed the rasp in his voice.
"You always look like you're trying to vanish into your own paintings."
He blinked. "Maybe I am."
She leaned slightly closer, inspecting his canvas. "You paint bones."
"They remember things the living forget."
That made her pause.
She looked at him, really looked. Not in the way students glance or judge, but as though she were assembling a profile from scattered fragments. She wasn't just curious. She was searching.
"Most people avoid bones," she murmured. "They scare them."
"I'm not most people," he echoed softly.
Her gaze lingered, then shifted to the scar on his cheek. She didn't stare the way others did—no pity, no discomfort.
"Nice scar," she said. Not mocking. Not flirtatious. Just true.
Avegar flinched all the same. "Most people don't mention it."
She smirked, but it was sad around the edges. "I'm not most people."
The class began. Brushes stirred in jars. Water whispered in metal cups. Canvas stretched under the pressure of intention.
Avegar painted in layers. Veins beneath bark. Ribs beneath branches. He didn't sketch outlines anymore—he carved inward. His strokes were precise but haunted, like he was trying to unearth something that had been buried long before he was born.
Elvira didn't paint like that.
She attacked the canvas like it had wronged her. Bold color splashes. Chaos controlled by instinct. Her brush sang with rebellion, and her hands bore the stains of impulse. Magenta on her knuckles. Blue near her collarbone. Yellow in her hair, like starlight had decided to rest there.
He tried not to watch her.
Failed.
She leaned closer once, just before lunch break, and whispered, "You hold your brush like it's a confession."
Avegar's heart stuttered. "Maybe it is."
Their eyes met—just long enough to say something without speaking. Then the moment broke, shattered by the clang of someone dropping a palette across the room.
By midweek, her presence had lodged itself into his routines. She sat beside him more often than not. Asked quiet questions. Told stranger stories.
"Elvira," she said, leaning back against the tall window, legs folded like origami. "It means 'truth-speaker' in some old language. Or ghost. Depending who you ask."
Avegar didn't know which meaning suited her more.
They stayed behind that Thursday.
The atelier emptied slowly—students peeling off like leaves, fading into the early dusk. Rain had started while they painted, and now it whispered against the high glass windows.
Outside, streetlights flickered on, casting golden halos over puddles.
Elvira tucked her phone into a cracked speaker dock and scrolled through her music. Her fingers moved with idle purpose, like she was choosing a spell.
"Wanna hear something weirdly beautiful?" she asked.
He nodded.
She pressed play.
A soft, aching melody spilled into the room. Strings first—plucked like water droplets—then a voice, distant and low, humming a lullaby that felt older than the walls around them.
Avegar froze.
The song clawed at something deep in him, something he thought he'd buried with his name. It was a melody not of this century, not of this world. Not meant to survive the fire that ended his childhood.
But here it was.
That voice. That cadence. The rise and fall of grief disguised as love.
"Angel," Elvira said, almost dreamily. "My mom used to sing it. Said it played when she first kissed her fiancé. She believed music left fingerprints on time."
Avegar's hands trembled.
"I know this song," he whispered.
Elvira turned toward him, curious. "Yeah?"
His voice thickened. "My mother… sang it too."
She watched him carefully, and he couldn't tell if she saw the truth in his face. Something flickered behind her eyes—recognition or memory or perhaps an instinct she hadn't named yet.
He looked away.
The room swelled with the lullaby. Rain softened outside. Time felt as if it had been stretched thin.
"I've always wondered," she said suddenly, "why songs can hurt."
Avegar swallowed hard. "Because the ones we remember… are the ones we bled for."
She didn't speak again for a long while. She then disappeared while looking for something to clean the studio with. She'll be on watch all night — one of the teachers asked her to.
That night, something cracked.
It began subtly. A shift in pressure. A shiver in the lamps. The silence grew too loud, as if the room itself was holding its breath.
Avegar stood, the hairs on his arms rising. The atmosphere turned dense, electric—like a thunderstorm crouching just behind the ceiling.
The atelier door groaned open.
And Evan stepped through.
He didn't belong here. Not in this time, this place. He wore the dynasty's black—sleek, regal, edged in silver—and it clung to him like smoke. His skin shimmered with moonlight. His eyes—once soft in some distant life—burned crimson now.
"Avegar," his brother said, voice sharp as glass.
Avegar's spine stiffened. He felt the shift in his blood, the old command pulsing through his veins. But he stood his ground.
"You were sent here to find the queen, not play student," Evan said.
"I know what I'm doing," Avegar said, quiet but firm.
Evan stepped closer, disdain curling his lip. "You forget yourself. The dynasty grows impatient. She is near—I can feel her."
"I just need more time."
"You've had months."
"Time," Avegar snapped, "is different when you're trying not to break her."
Evan's expression twisted. "She's not her anymore."
"But she could be," Avegar said, voice breaking. "I see echoes. Fragments."
"She's human," Evan spat. "And when I find her, I will burn the mortal shell away."
Avegar's hands clenched. "If you hurt her—"
"Then do your job," Evan snarled. "Or I'll do it for you."
Elvira, half-hidden behind a curtain of draped canvas, froze. Her eyes followed the sound.
With a hiss of displaced air, Evan vanished. Shadow and wind scattered into the rafters.
The silence that followed was not peace. It was aftermath.
Avegar staggered, body seizing under a storm of change. Bones cracked. His coat shimmered, warped. Wings, dark and whisper-thin, unfolded like forgotten paper.
His eyes blackened. Fangs edged his smile.
And Elvira saw.
She didn't scream. She didn't run.
She watched.
And that terrified him more than if she had fled.
Because something in him wanted her to stay.
And that wasn't supposed to happen.
He didn't understand the pull. The way her gaze made him feel undone. He had never looked at a girl and wondered what it would mean if she reached for him. Until now.
Until her.
It wasn't like the boys before—fast touches and fading laughter. This was slower. Deeper. More dangerous.
It wasn't about gender.
It was about recognition.
Her eyes were wide, her fingers trembling against the curtain, but she did not look away.
Avegar stood fully transformed, breathing hard, half-exposed in the lamplight.
And her voice, when it came, was quiet.
"He's like me," she whispered.
•••
Elvira lay awake, staring at the ceiling as if it might give her answers. Her breath moved slow but uneven, like it didn't quite trust her lungs. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw it again.
The wings.
The fangs.
Avegar.
Not just quiet, scarred, elegant Avegar—but something else entirely. Something she should have been terrified of.
And maybe she was. But that wasn't all.
There had been a strange beauty to it. A darkness woven through his bones, through the shimmer of his coat turning to shadow, his eyes blackening like glass under a storm. It hadn't looked human. It hadn't looked safe.
But it had looked like him.
She bit the inside of her cheek, hard enough to feel the sting, the taste of copper. Her mind replayed every detail, over and over—how his body had cracked as if remembering a forgotten shape, how he had looked as if the change hurt, not just physically but in some deep, soul-breaking way.
And still, even then, part of her hadn't wanted to run.
Part of her had wanted to reach out and ask: Who are you really? What have you become—or what were you all along?
The scar made more sense now. The shadows. The way he avoided direct sun. The way he looked at people like he was listening to something only he could hear.
Vampire wasn't the right word.
It was older than that. More tragic. As if he didn't choose the darkness so much as it was carved into him.
Her thoughts drifted to the lullaby.
The one her mother used to sing on stormy nights, when the lights flickered and the wind howled past the windows. A haunting melody, older than the language she spoke. When Elvira was little, she thought it was just a sad song. But now…
Avegar knew it.
He had recognized it instantly.
That couldn't be coincidence.
And that opened a door she didn't want to look through—but couldn't close either.
Her mother had always been careful with the past. Pictures missing. Names never spoken. Locked drawers. Stories cut short. Her mother's eyes had once welled with tears when Elvira asked about the lullaby, saying only, "Some songs were never meant for this world."
And now Avegar, the boy who painted with trembling hands and eyes full of sorrow, knew every note.
Could it be…?
Was he her brother?
The question made her flinch.
If he was—if they shared blood, even distantly—then everything she felt was wrong. The pull, the fascination, the way she found herself holding her breath when he walked into the room. Her body reacted before logic had the chance to interrupt.
But there was no resemblance. No proof. Just a melody. A scar. A feeling.
Still, the horror of that possibility wouldn't let her go.
And yet... worse was the alternative.
What if he wasn't her brother?
What if he was from the other dynasty—the one her mother had only ever alluded to in half-warnings and unfinished sentences? The other bloodline. The hidden one. The enemy.
Her clan's silence hadn't just been about shame. It had been about danger.
Her stomach twisted, cold dread rising like bile. Her heart pounded. It wasn't fear of Avegar exactly. It was fear of what she might be walking into. What she might already be part of.
She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. No. It's not real. It's a joke. You're spiraling.
But that sick, swooping feeling in her gut wouldn't go away. Her instincts were screaming something she didn't want to hear.
A soft buzz shook her from the spiral. Her mother's phone, left face down on the windowsill, glowed faintly in the dark.
A message.
Elvira blinked. Her mother never got texts this late. Cautious, she sat up, the blanket falling to her waist, and leaned forward to check the screen.
Unknown Number
> I'm Avegar's ex. I know who you are.
We need to talk.
Her breath hitched.
Another buzz.
Incoming Call.
She didn't think. She just answered.
"…Hello?" Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
There was a pause. Static. Then a voice—masculine, law, sharp, urgent.
"You're not safe," he said. "They know who your mother is. And they know you saw him."
Elvira's skin went ice-cold.
"Who is this?" she asked, voice shaking.
But the call had already ended.
---