"I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking about how that would feel from your side."
Lilliana shook her head too quickly.
"No, I…"
She stopped, corrected herself more quietly.
"I'm not angry with you."
He believed that.
What he did not believe was that it had not hurt.
She stared down at her own hands.
"As you guessed, I'm a dhampir. My mother is a vampire. My father was a bear-beastkin."
Her phrasing was neat, textbook-clean, the kind used when stating lineage for a formal record.
Soren stayed silent.
"I am telling you this," she continued, "because blood magic is not separate from any of it. For my kind, blood is tied to everything, survival, recovery, strength, instinct. A body like mine is built around that dependency whether I like it or not. But you are human, Soren, and there has never, to my knowledge, been a recorded case of a human using blood magic before, so I cannot assume your body will endure it in the same way."
The words were clinical, almost lecture-like, and if he had not been watching her so closely he might have missed how shallow her breathing had become.
Soren did not interrupt.
He had the distinct feeling that if he did, even gently, she might stop here and never reach what actually mattered.
"When I was younger, my mother handled our education personally. Mine, and my brother's."
A beat passed.
"She believed restraint had to be forced into the body before it could exist in the mind. She believed control came from deprivation."
Her mouth moved slightly around the last word, as though it tasted wrong.
"So she trained us accordingly."
Soren felt the unease in his chest sharpen.
"Trained?" he repeated, not because he needed clarification, but because he could tell she was using the safest word available.
Lilliana gave a tiny nod.
"Yes."
Her gaze had gone distant again, unfocused but not vague, like she was seeing something too clearly.
"She would deny us blood for long periods," she said. "Not because there was none available. Deliberately. She called it tolerance training. Endurance training. Sometimes control training, if she was in a kinder mood."
Kinder.
The word sat there like something diseased.
Soren's hands had curled into fists without him noticing.
Lilliana kept going as though she had not seen.
"We still attended lessons. We still trained physically. We still studied magic. We still had to present ourselves properly, answer properly, perform properly."
Her voice remained level, but the levelness was becoming effortful now, every sentence placed down with care rather than ease.
"The expectation was that if our bodies were failing, then our will simply had to be stronger."
She smiled then.
A small, brittle thing.
"It was considered refinement."
Soren looked at her profile, at the stillness she was forcing into her shoulders, at the way one ear twitched sharply and then flattened for half a second before she corrected it.
He wanted to tell her to stop if this was hurting her.
He wanted to ask why she was pushing herself through it.
He wanted to reach for her already.
Instead he stayed very still and let her speak, because instinct told him that stopping her at the surface would only trap her there again.
"The hunger people imagine is not really hunger," Lilliana said. "That word is too simple. Too ordinary. It sounds manageable."
Her fingers pressed more tightly together.
"It is not manageable. Not when it goes far enough."
The clinical tone faltered for the first time.
"It gets into everything," she said more quietly. "Your thoughts stop feeling like your own. Your body becomes… loud. Your mana destabilises. Your skin hurts. Your mouth hurts. Your heartbeat starts to sound unbearable. You can smell things you should not be able to smell, and every smell becomes wrong unless it is the one thing you are not allowed to have."
Soren's throat felt tight.
This was not explanation for its own sake.
This was memory wearing the shape of explanation because that was the only shape she could bear to give it.
"When it happened the first few times," Lilliana went on, eyes still fixed somewhere far from the room, "my father would interfere where he could. He wasn't always successful, but he tried."
Her voice softened at the mention of him, and for an instant that softness looked more dangerous than the strain had.
"My brother…" she began, then stopped.
Her hands were shaking now, lightly but visibly.
Soren turned fully towards her.
"Lilliana."
She inhaled sharply, as if only just realising he had spoken.
"I'm fine," she said at once.
He didn't answer that.
Because she wasn't, and they both knew it.
She swallowed.
"If I teach you blood magic, I need you to understand what happens when that line is crossed. A human has never used blood magic before, so I need to be thorough."
And the room, already tense, seemed to draw even tighter around them.
Her eyes remained fixed ahead, but her voice had changed.
The detached cadence was still there, still trying to hold, but it no longer sounded effortless.
It sounded built, assembled sentence by sentence out of discipline and habit, while something beneath it strained harder with each word.
"My brother was older than me," Lilliana said. "Not by much, but enough that he always tried to act as though he was the one who should endure things first."
A faint, brittle smile touched her mouth, there and gone almost immediately.
"He used to stand a little in front of me during lessons, even when there was no point to it. As if the gesture itself could protect me. It could not, of course, but he kept doing it anyway."
Soren said nothing.
He was afraid that if he spoke too soon, even softly, she might retreat behind that careful politeness again, and he had the growing, awful sense that she had needed to say this for a very long time.
"At first," she continued, "we both survived the training the same way. We counted. We distracted ourselves. We tried not to breathe too deeply. We learned to keep still when stillness hurt less than moving. We learned not to look at servants for too long. Not to stay near injured guards. Not to let our thoughts circle the wrong thing."
Her fingers twisted together in her lap.
"It sounds absurd when I say it like that," she said, gaze still unfocused, "but your world becomes very small when your body is screaming at you. There are only rules. There is only control. There is only the next moment, and the next, and the next."
Her breathing had grown shallower again.
"The worst part wasn't even the pain. It was what it did to your mind. The humiliation of it. The disgust. Knowing what you were becoming every hour it continued, and knowing that if you failed to stop it, you would prove her right."
Soren's hands were clenched so tightly now that his nails bit into his palms.
Lilliana didn't seem to notice.
"My mother believed that if a child of her blood lost control," she said, her tone hardening in a way that did not feel intentional, "then that weakness deserved to be seen. Corrected. Burned out."
She paused, then gave a tiny shake of her head as though trying to smooth her own voice back down.
"So whenever one of us started to slip too far, it didn't make her stop. It made her watch more closely."
Soren felt cold all at once.
He had known, in the abstract, that blood magic and vampirism carried uglier edges than most people wanted to dwell on.
He had known Lilliana's reaction the other day had come from trauma rather than simple caution.
He had even guessed some of the shape of it.
It still had not prepared him for hearing her say it.
"She wanted to see whether discipline would hold," Lilliana said quietly. "Whether breeding would hold. Whether training would hold."
The next breath she drew trembled slightly.
"My brother lasted longer than I did, usually. He was stronger than me. Better at hiding it. Better at smiling through it."
Her lips tightened.
The room was very still.
Then, in that same controlled voice, the one trying so hard to stay detached, she spoke again.
"One winter, she kept us without blood long enough that the signs stopped being subtle."
Soren's chest tightened.
Lilliana's gaze dropped to her own hands as if she couldn't keep staring into the middle distance any longer.
"He was shaking even when he sat still. His skin kept tearing at the corners of his mouth. His eyes…"
She stopped, and when she began again her voice was thinner.
"They were changing. Not fully, not yet, but enough that I could see it. Enough that he knew I could see it."
Her hands had started trembling properly now, fine shakes she could no longer hide by holding still.
"He told me not to look frightened."
A strained breath left her, not quite a laugh and not quite anything else.
"He said if I looked frightened, she would know how bad it was."
Lilliana swallowed again, but this time it did not seem to help.
"I remember he was trying very hard to speak normally. Even then… Even when his voice kept catching. Even when he had to stop between sentences because his teeth—"
She cut herself off, shut her eyes briefly, then opened them again.
"He kept apologising. For frightening me. For making it obvious."
Her composure slipped a little further on the last two words.
Soren turned towards her fully now, one hand lifting a fraction before he forced himself not to grab at her too quickly.
She kept talking.
"That was the point where it should have ended. It should have been enough. Anyone with eyes would have seen it was enough."
Her fingers tightened so hard that the knuckles had gone pale.
"But she wanted to know whether he would hold out. Whether he would prove worthy of the blood he had been born with."
The detached frame she had wrapped around the story was cracking now.
It was still there, but no longer whole.
"So she kept going," Lilliana said.
There was a pause.
Then another.
When she spoke again, the words came more unevenly.
"He stopped being able to stand properly. Then he stopped being able to answer when spoken to straight away. Then there were moments when he… when he looked at people and I could tell he wasn't seeing them as people anymore."
Soren shut his eyes for a second.
Not because he could not bear to look at her, but because if he kept looking at the strain in her face while imagining what she was describing, he wasn't sure he would manage to stay silent.
"The physician said it had gone too far," she whispered. "My father said it had gone too far. I knew it had gone too far. He knew it had gone too far."
Her breath hitched.
"But she still—"
The sentence failed.
Lilliana pressed her lips together, trying to regain control over them.
When she continued, it was with visible effort.
"He was starving," she said. "Starving. Dying by inches in a house full of blood he was forbidden to touch."
Soren felt something vicious rise in his chest so fast it almost made him dizzy.
Lilliana's voice trembled.
"And when a vampire is starved that far, the body keeps trying to live. It doesn't stop simply because the mind is breaking. It keeps reaching. It keeps stripping away whatever it can. Thought, restraint, memory, everything that isn't hunger becomes less important than hunger."
Her shoulders had curled inward without her seeming to notice.
"That is what a ghoul is," she said, and now there was no lecture-like distance left in the words at all, only someone trying to force herself to say them cleanly. "Not some separate creature. It is what is left when the starvation wins."
Soren stared at her.
She hadn't cried yet.
That somehow made it worse.
"He turned," Lilliana said.
The words were small.
"He turned in front of me."
Her voice cracked.
For a moment she said nothing else, and Soren could hear the faintest unsteadiness in her breathing, hear how carefully she was trying to keep each inhale from breaking apart.
Then the rest came in pieces.
"He was still my brother when it began. He was looking at me, and I think he was trying to say my name."
She pressed a hand over her mouth for a second, lowered it again, failed to hide the tremor in her fingers.
"And then he was not. There was nothing in his eyes except hunger. Nothing. Just that."
The room seemed to contract around the words.
"He was so thin," she whispered. "That's what I remember most, more than the blood, more than the screaming, more than any of it. He was so thin, and he was still trying to endure it, and by the time it stopped being called endurance and became what it was, there was almost nothing of him left to save."
Soren could not stay still anymore.
"Professor—"
"I couldn't help him," she said, too quickly, speaking over him as if she already knew what he had been going to say and could not bear to hear it. "I was there and I couldn't help him. I could smell it, and I could hear him, and I knew exactly what was happening, and I still could not help him."
Her words were no longer neat or measured.
The control had not vanished entirely, but it was failing, overwhelmed by the force of what was coming through it.
"My father tried," she said, tears finally gathering in her eyes though she still blinked them back with stubborn, frantic effort. "He tried, but by then… by then…"
She broke off again.
Soren moved before he could think better of it, turning more towards her, not touching yet, just close enough that she could feel he was there.
Lilliana shook her head once, sharply, as though angry with herself.
"He died starving," she said, and the sentence came out rawer than anything before it. "That is what happened. He starved until he became a ghoul, and then what was left of him died like that."
The last two words fractured.
Her hand flew to her mouth again.
For a second she managed one more breath, one more useless attempt to pull herself back together.
"My mother called it unfortunate," she whispered.
That did it.
Something in her expression crumpled so suddenly it was almost frightening to watch.
Her mouth trembled, her eyes squeezed shut, and when she dragged in her next breath it came uneven and shaking.
Soren reached for her then.
Not abruptly, not thoughtlessly, but with the same careful certainty he would have used approaching a wounded animal he was afraid of startling, one hand hovering at her shoulder first, giving her the space to pull away if she wanted to.
She didn't.
If anything, the moment his hand touched her shoulder, some last rigid piece of her gave out.
"I'm sorry," she said, though the words dissolved into a broken exhale. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—I meant to explain this properly, I just—"
"You don't need to apologise," Soren said quietly, immediately, because the idea of her apologising for this felt unbearable.
She gave a strained little shake of her head that only made the tears spill over properly.
"I do," she said, voice breaking harder. "I invited you here and I wanted to be calm, I wanted to tell you this properly, I had a reason, I had a proper reason prepared and now I'm—"
"No."
He said it more firmly than before.
Lilliana looked at him, startled through her tears.
And Soren, who had come here already worried, already unable to leave this alone, felt that worry twist into something sharper and much more painful as he looked at her trying to hold herself accountable for falling apart over the memory of her brother starving to death in front of her.
"There's no reason for you to apologise, none of what happened is your fault" he said.
The words were steady, but there was strain in them too now.
————「❤︎」————