A Door to the Past - Chapter Three (male vampire x female character, sfw) (Edited Dec 2023) (Patreon)

Thank you to those of you who did read and react to the last Chapter - I realise it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm glad to know that some of you enjoyed it!

Last time: Nora got to know Kjartan a little better, and defended him against Halvar's nervous prejudice. The vampire made a few tentative friends, but largely kept to himself.

This time: A longer chapter, where we learn a little more about Kjartan's awful father and his time spent at Castle Volkihar, and where Kjartan and Nora get a little closer, only for something unpleasant and unkind to happen to Kjartan near the end...

Chapter One, Two

Slightly spoilery note: in Skyrim, garlic has no effect on vampires, but... who says we have to stick to canon absolutely, eh?

Content warning: mention of past familial abuse

Kjartan’s first weeks at the College passed in a blur.

He’d never been so busy in his whole life, and the entire experience of being surrounded at almost all times by the bustling of mortals with their pounding blood and searing magicka was so draining that he found himself hunting and feeding almost every other night. The wildlife around the town was more than enough to support one vampire, and he quickly discovered that elk was his favourite, and that frost trolls were every bit as revolting as they smelled and very much not worth the effort. He didn’t even need to make a kill each time, so the animal population barely suffered at all at his presence.

Back at Castle Volkihar, if his father had given him leave to roam, he would have visited the cells once a week, if that, to satiate the modest thirst of an inactive historian, but while the other students left the college grounds perhaps only on a Fredas evening to head to the Frozen Hearth Inn, he was coming and going more frequently than anyone.

Not that anyone ever saw him making his solitary way out into the night to hunt. With either a cloak of vampire invisibility, or disguised as a flock of writhing bats, he passed through the archway of the college unhindered and unnoticed as the winter wind.

On one such midnight outing, when the clouds had finally drawn back to reveal a landscape bathed in the quicksilver light of the moon and his thirst roared in his ears, Kjartan slid out of his room and into the crystalline night. It was one of those heart-stoppingly still nights that Skyrim enjoyed so rarely.

There wasn’t a breath of wind to shake the powdery snow from the branches of sentinel firs that dotted the slopes of the steep, sheltering bluffs surrounding Winterhold, and the only thing that stirred the air was his passing. Shifting and skimming as rippling bats past the Frozen Hearth Inn — almost empty at this time of night — past yawning, oblivious guards with frozen fingers and frost-laced helmets, he passed unseen out of Winterhold town, following a narrow, winding path past the little chicken coop where Skyrim’s tougher breeds nested outdoors all year in deep nests of straw.

Everything was easier like this — intangible. His mind was less ordered, his being incorporeal and bound only by the laws of magic, and the concerns that buzzed at him like blowflies during the day melted away like snowflakes in sunshine. The world took on a greater clarity as he soared above it.

As the peak of the high hill over the town drew into view, he slowed; hovering, searching, hunting.

Able to detect all life as easily as a snake sees its prey, he shifted his vision slightly, and there on the slope in the distance he could make out a couple of mountain goats. Tough, hardy, and hale, these creatures would do well enough, and he drifted over towards them, hanging low over them like a spectre before rushing down, reverting to his human form at the last second and latching onto the nearest creature’s neck. Her companion fled, but she wouldn’t get far. He didn’t often kill his prey when he fed, especially if it was something rarer like a snowy sabrecat, but these goats would not be missed in the larger scheme of things, and he fed deeply on one and then the other.

Satiated almost to a gluttonous lethargy, he burned their corpses with his newly attuned destruction magic and muttered a soft prayer to Molag Bal for the gifts the Daedric Prince had bestowed on his family, and then eased himself down onto a snow-dusted boulder nearby to let the bloodlust calm. A vampire who continued to fuel their bloodlust could easily slip into a frenzy, especially one who had been as thirsty as Kjartan that night. Of the few things he truly had to fear, losing control of himself was right up there with becoming a thrall to a more powerful vampire. Again. He shuddered, forbidding himself from ever letting that become even a remote possibility.

To his vampire’s eyes, the night shone with a myriad brilliant colours, the slow-dancing lights in the sky shifting as though through a strange, liquid prism, and he leaned back on his hands to watch it, tilting his face to the stars.

He inhaled deeply and let his mind wander freely.

His thoughts took him back to the castle where his father had once reigned, and where it was his mother who enforced their laws now without a male heir to rule the once-formidable vampire clan. Mercifully Serana’s efforts with the Dragonborn had stopped Harkon’s ridiculous plan to lessen the strength of the sun, and it had had the added benefit of setting Kjartan free of his oppression and introducing him to the sister he’d never met. She’d been sealed away by their mother for her protection before Kjartan had even been conceived.

His father’s voice floated unbidden through his mind. “You were conceived to be a tool, boy,” the lord of vampires had sneered many a time in his more vindictive moods. “Nothing more. If only you’d been born a daughter, of course, but your blood is as useless for the prophecy as mine.”

“Stupid idea that was,” Kjartan murmured aloud, watching the stars flicker like distant torchbugs. “Blotting out the sun… How would the humans grow their crops? Everything would have died… including us.” Immense, unbridled power had driven his father mad over the millennia, and with his madness had come an incisive and unyielding cruelty.

Kjartan’s blood-red gaze dropped to the snow beneath the boulder. He had all the freedom in the world now. And he was choosing to spend it here at the College of Winterhold as a humble student, surrounded by mortals. His father’s harsh, mocking voice drifted back into his mind. “You were better off under my thrall, boy,” he had sneered as Serana stood fiercely beside him, her hand gripped around her new-found baby brother’s, her gold eyes blazing as Harkon’s thrall had finally slid off his mind like shackles springing open after a century.

The Dragonborn had made short work of Harkon not long after that, casting their clan into disarray, and Serana had swept Kjartan from the castle while his mother looked on proudly from the balcony above the dais, giving her blessing with a soft smile and a single nod.

Freedom. He was free at last.

A stab of habitual guilt and shame lanced through him at the memory of his father’s disgust, but he ground his teeth.

“Time to head back,” he muttered to himself before his thoughts grew too morbid, and instead of shifting to mist or bats, he walked. He trudged like a mortal through the snow, taking his time, cataloguing the outlines of the rocks and trees around him and listening to the tangible, grounding squeak and crunch of snow beneath his boots.

After the stagnant, blood-laced atmosphere of Castle Volkihar, the clarity of the air out here was almost enough to make him feel high as a Khajiit on moonsugar. Giddy with his new freedom, he found himself smiling stupidly as he crossed the bridge and approached the College again. In the few weeks he’d been here, this place had felt more like home to him than Castle Volkihar ever had, and he cherished that newfound sense of place fiercely, even if the strain of it was sending him hunting every other night. It wasn’t as if he truly needed to sleep anyway.

As his early lessons with Serana on the road had taught him, he wasn’t particularly adept at magic, and he certainly had not inherited his mother’s gifts for destruction magic the way Serana had, but he wasn’t too shabby when it came to restoration magic it seemed, which was strange given that half of the spells didn’t work on the technically undead. There were necromantic healing spells, of course, and he learned those too, just in case he ever needed to heal himself. Conjuration also came easily enough to him, so he wasn’t expelled by Ervine for sheer incompetence before his first term was over.

The classes where he naturally excelled were the History of Magic classes, which he was only taking to see how the various subjects were taught, rather than to learn their contents. Every topic covered so far had been one about which he’d devoured several bookcases’ worth of volumes back at the castle, but it was still interesting to be taught something as opposed to learning it for himself. Unfortunately though, he was so knowledgeable about certain aspects of magical history that Faralda decided to appoint him as a teaching assistant.

At first, he’d been flattered, but when he realised it was mostly Faralda foisting all the essay and assignment marking off on him, he was significantly less touched by the gesture. Still, it wasn’t as if he had much else to occupy the long stretches of the night when the other students were snoring softly in their beds, and it took the boredom out of the nights when he wasn’t hunting.

So it was, late one evening while sitting in the Arcanaeum and poring over Halvar’s illegible handwriting, that Nora found him.

Of all the people he’d met at the college she was the one who fascinated him the most.

Fiery but kind, Nora was fair in her dealings with people, and brooked no nonsense from anyone. She wasn’t afraid to question teachers and would often spend hours in the library chasing down one obscure reference that really had very little bearing on the overall content of an assignment. She also liked to swear — a lot — which Aravi found distasteful, tail bristling with each new curse, but listening to Nora and Satha converse was like overhearing two sailors down at the docks in Windhelm. From what he’d managed to gather about her, she’d been raised by one of the guards in Whiterun, which made sense.

Now, as Kjartan finally deciphered an especially terrible scribble of Halvar’s that probably said ‘skeever’ (or perhaps ‘stalhrim’) Nora strode out of the stone staircase in the far corner of the Arcanaeum and came directly over to his table, where she then hovered without speaking. Out of habit, Kjartan focused briefly on her heartbeat to try and gauge her mood, and found it surprisingly quick and fluttery. Looking up at her face, he caught her chewing briefly on her lower lip.

“Nora,” he said, keeping his voice down out of habit, even though the librarian on duty had long gone to bed and he had been the only student there. “What are you doing in here at this time of night?”

“Honestly?” she said, shuffling a bit. “I was looking for you.”

Odd.

“Me? Why?”

“I need your help…” she admitted.

He leaned back a little in his chair and tried not to inhale her scent too much. There wasn’t anything necessarily different about hers from any of the other students, or from anyone else in Skyrim that he’d met since leaving the castle, but every time he found himself in close quarters with her, he felt his bloodlust spiking ever so slightly. It wasn’t bad enough for her to be in any danger, nor for him to be on the point of lunging for her neck like a crazed common vampire, but still, it was puzzling to him. “Help? With what?”

Nora smiled softly and he watched her lips again for a moment before flicking his gaze up to her eyes. “Translation… I was hoping you were going to come back to the dorm soon and I could ambush you there, but I got bored waiting and came looking for you up here instead.”

An inexplicable warmth blossomed in his chest, and he looked away for a second before focusing on what it was that she needed. “Translation? It is for Urag’s assignment, I assume?”

“Yeah,” she huffed, plonking herself down into the empty seat opposite him, knocking the table with her knee and dislodging a scroll from the completed pile that he’d stacked carefully against the wall. It bounced down onto the table and rolled off onto the floor. “Shit, sorry,” she cursed, darting back to her feet and leaping after the errant parchment. He watched her and tried not to stare openly.

Unlike so many of the females at his father’s court, she didn’t choose to wear particularly revealing or provocative outfits. Even Serana wasn’t above showing off a little of her extraordinarily pretty figure, but Nora wore clothing tailored more like men’s, with buckskin leggings tucked into practical hunting boots; long tunics that hung loosely around the shoulder and hip, and had necklines that came up to her collarbones. She also seemed to prefer pale blue, which was a colour not favoured by the vampires of his clan, who all elected to wear dark, bruised red, purple, and black palettes. He himself seemed only to have black, dark green, and dark red clothing.

“What?” she asked, startling him out of his reverie.

“Mm?”

With a giggle, she sat back down and carefully placed the scroll back atop the pile of finished papers. “You’ve gone all vague…” It was only then that she noticed what he was doing. “Why are you marking our work?”

“Faralda,” he said. “She elevated me to the lofty post of assistant, only to offload some of her marking onto me.”

“That’s bullshit!” Nora hissed. A heartbeat later though, her expression changed again. Her green eyes flashed in the candlelight and she leaned suddenly forwards over the table, hands clasping the edge like a cat’s claws as it waited to pounce. “What did you give me?”

He couldn’t help the smile that stretched his lips wider than he would normally have liked to smile, and he didn’t miss the way her gaze darted fleetingly to his longer-than-human canines. “A-,” he said.

“Minus? What’d I miss?” she asked, not sounding terribly offended; more curious.

“Here,” he said, digging out her scroll from the stack. “See for yourself.”

It was only when she tilted it up to the candlelight and squinted her eyes that he realised how dark it must have been in the library.

“Talos’ hairy ballsacks!” she cursed, and he snorted a sudden laugh, taken off-guard by her exclamation.

“What?” he chuckled.

“How fucking neat is your handwriting?”

His eyes fluttered closed, embarrassed, and he muttered something about having had a long time to practise.

She went still at that, turning thoughtful, and he sensed a ‘vampire question’ brewing. She hadn’t asked many in their short acquaintance, but she always seemed to grow unsure of herself when she wanted to know something about his undead nature; as if fearful that he’d be offended by her curiosity. Sure enough, a moment later she wheedled his name. “Kjartan…?”

“Yes?” he replied slowly, playfully mirroring her tone in an attempt to give her the confidence to finish the question.

“I know it’s rude, and I know I told Halvar off for asking this, and I know I have no right to pry so tell me to shut up if you don’t want to answer, but -”

“Two hundred and thirty seven, or I will be, this Sun’s Dawn.”

Her eyes widened and her arching brows rose. “Wow… I thought… I thought you said you were young?”

His mouth twisted again into a lopsided, wry smile and he chuckled. “I am. My sister is a little over four thousand years old, though admittedly she was sealed away in a tomb for several of those millennia, so I’m not sure that counts really.”

He watched her face contort and shift through a series of startled expressions and finally settle on something that appeared to be mostly impressed. “Huh,” she said and then flashed him her blinding smile again. “You really are a baby then.”

Kjartan felt his shoulders drop and he let out another soft laugh. “Told you. Now, what did you want me to help you with?”

“Oh, it’s downstairs. We don’t have to do it now — I just wanted to ask if you’d help me at some point.”

He nodded. “Tomorrow after breakfast and before Master Marence’s lecture on Restoration Theory?”

To his surprise, Nora groaned and comically clonked her forehead down against the table. “She’s so boring to listen to…” she moaned, voice muffled. Looking up at him, though still crouched low, she paused as if on the point of speech, but never said anything. Instead, she simply stared at him.

A prickling wariness tingled down his spine at the new expression on her face, he asked, “What?”

“I know everyone says your eyes are creepy, but I think they’re really beautiful…”

At that, he looked down, shielding her from them for a moment as embarrassment churned in his stomach. He couldn’t blush, but that didn’t mean he couldn't feel self-conscious.

“Sorry,” she said, pushing herself upright and standing. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“It’s fine,” he murmured. “I’m just not used to having attention drawn to my eyes for a… positive reason…”

She shook her head and stepped back. His heart ached unexpectedly at the new distance. “I should have realised. Anyway,” she added, cracking a jaw-popping yawn that she only just masked behind her hand at the last minute, “I’m going to hit the hay, as they say in the Jarlsguard. See you tomorrow?”

“Indeed.”

As she walked away, she conjured a tiny ball of magelight and glanced back over her shoulder at him as it bobbed above her head like a wisp. “Don’t work too late.”

With a silent promise, he bowed his head in answer. When he looked up, she and the light were retreating down the stairwell.

In the wake of her departure, he allowed himself to inhale her lingering scent a little more deeply and he felt his eyes darken to a deep, crimson red. And as his canines throbbed in his gums, he allowed them to extend to their full, hunting length for just a little relief. Realising with a jolt how thirsty he was — again — he sighed and reined himself back in again. He finished up Halvar’s scroll and gave him a generous B+ for some impressive, if somewhat fanciful, connections between the Mage’s Guild of Cyrodiil and the Psijic Order.

Three hours later, with his thirst sated and snow melting on his collar, Kjartan snuck silently into the Hall of Attainment and paused outside the door to his own room. Everyone appeared to be asleep, save for Satha, under whose door a slither of magelight flickered. He tilted his ear and concentrated, separating out the soft, rhythmical breathing of Nora from the thunderous horker-snores of Halvar next door. Shame flickered almost instantly at the edges of his consciousness for invading her privacy like that, and he slid soundlessly into his own room and closed the door behind him.

Next morning, after Nora had eaten breakfast, she came and knocked quietly on his door. He’d left it ajar, but she still waited for him to reply before stepping in with a sheepish smile on her face. Her hair was crinkled from the plait she’d worn the previous night - and had presumably slept in - but now she wore it loose where it fell to brush her shoulders in a thick, auburn mane. He stared a moment too long at her before blinking and remembering how to breathe so that he could speak. Vampires, of course, didn’t need to breathe other than to speak.

As she shut the door behind her, he caught Halvar staring at them from across the font of magicka with a hateful look on his face, but Kjartan had grown used to the Nord’s intense distrust of him in the first weeks of term, and now thought little of it.

“Morning,” she said, voice still a little rough from sleep. “Thanks for going through this with me.”

“Not a problem,” Kjartan smiled, swinging his legs off his bed and setting his book aside. “Let’s sit at the desk.”

Together they teased out the translation for the orcish librarian.

Kjartan had no problems himself with the relatively simple passage of late High Atmoran, written in the early Nordic rune system apparently devised by Ysgramor himself, and he took pleasure in helping Nora to unpick the archaic grammar and verbs bit by bit. They only just made it to their Restoration Theory lecture, sneaking into the hall last and sidling in to join the back of the class with a shared, private smile.

There they remained for the rest of the morning, not returning to the Hall of Attainment until lunchtime.

While Nora remained behind to ask Master Marence a question, Kjartan made his solitary way to the dormitory tower without her. As he pressed his hand to the main doors of the tower, he caught an acrid whiff of garlic and wrinkled his nose, the nasty alchemical ingredient searing his nostrils. Someone must have been experimenting, he mused, and pulled the door open.

The instant he entered the Hall of Attainment, the stink intensified one hundred fold, and he coughed as the acrid fumes of garlic hit the back of his throat. Apparently he was the first one back because everyone else had left their doors open. Their rooms would reek of it too, and he found himself extra grateful that he usually kept his own door shut when he wasn’t occupying his room. However, as he set his hand to the iron ring of the door handle, his skin blistered upon contact and he hissed, snatching it away. The stench of garlic rose from his flesh in waves strong enough to make his head spin and his eyes water, and anger flared hot in his chest. This was no alchemy experiment.

Steeling himself and opening the door to his room, ignoring the searing pain in his hand from the garlic smeared on the handle, he found himself assaulted by the strongest stench of garlic he had ever encountered. Cloves of the stuff had been trampled into the stones and rug of his floor, and yet more had been garlanded over his bed. His eyes watered and he staggered as it finally overwhelmed him, going down sideways like a poisoned elk. His throat closed up and he began to wheeze and retch, trying to call out. If he’d rubbed fire peppers into his eyes he couldn’t have been in more pain. It wouldn’t kill him, but with this much garlic in the room, it would leave him incapacitated and vulnerable for sure.

“What the fuck?” came Nora’s voice from the main hall a few minutes later. “Divines, that stinks! Who’s been -?” she broke off abruptly as she caught sight of Kjartan heaving and retching on the garlic-smeared floor of his room and he heard her hurried footfalls as she darted forwards with his name on her lips. His skin was still blistering where it had touched the smashed bulbs on the ground, bubbling and burning. The pain was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

She scooped her arm under his and dragged him bodily from his ground floor room, not stopping until she had dumped him outside in the snow of the main courtyard of the College. Her blood was pounding from the effort, and his canines lengthened instinctively, seeking to counter the virulent poison with fresh blood. The fact that it was midday, and the bright snow surrounding him on all sides seared his vision to a painful whiteout, did nothing to ease his discomfort.

“Kjartan?” she asked, crouching beside him and frantically searching his face as he continued to gasp and spasm, dry heaving from time to time as well. “I’m going to kill him,” she growled.

“Kill who?” he wheezed between retches.

“Halvar! Who else? It had to have been him. Who else would play such a sick joke? Oh shit, your room’s going to stink of it for days…” Her voice was muffled and muted behind the roar of his growing bloodlust in his ears as his instincts tried to take over to save him. They screamed at him that he was vulnerable lying like a downed grouse in the snow; that anyone could put a bolt through his heart like this and finish him. He had to feed. He had to make it stop. His father’s voice echoed somewhere in there too, calling him weak and pathetic, and he shook his head trying to dispel the nausea and twisting pain.

A new voice gave a shout that Kjartan didn’t really hear, and a moment later he found himself looking up at Master Tolfdir and Mirabelle Ervine, both of whom looked more than a little disturbed by the state of him. “What in Oblivion happened to him?” Ervine barked at Nora. “And why does the whole place smell like a damned Cyrodiilian restaurant?”

“Kjartan’s room was filled with garlic while we were at class this morning,” Nora growled. “They trampled it into his rug and bed too.”

“That’s a cruel prank if ever I heard of one,” Ervine replied in a tone not too far from Nora’s. “Who would have done something like that?”

“Halvar,” Nora said at the same time as Kjartan gave another almighty heave and pitched forwards into the snow again, shaking.

“He needs to feed,” Master Ervine commented dryly. “It’s like poison to them.” She extended her hands and a dull purple haze fogged his already vague vision. As she cast the familiar spell on him, the pain instantly eased, though he was still retching and his skin itched and burned as if he’d rolled in a bank of poison ivy. “There.”

“What did you do?” he heard Nora ask in a softly awestruck voice. She still had her hand on his shoulder and he wished she’d remove it. The heat of her burned like a brand and he could feel blood sliding through her body with every thudding beat of her heart. “What spell was that?”

“Necromantic healing,” she said to Nora in a clipped tone that told her plainly not to ask any more on the matter. The necromantic arts were not openly practised at the College after all. “Heals the… undead.”

Then she grabbed Kjartan’s face and yanked his jaw around sharply to face her, examining him intently. “Hmm, as I thought,” she said when she saw his eyes. He assumed they were burning a fierce red now with the need to replenish himself with blood after the damage of the garlic and the strain of her forced healing. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Nora at all, afraid to find fear in her face at last.

Ervine released him roughly and he sagged like a dropped doll. “Go and feed. I’ll deal with your chambers.”

He tried to thank her but the words choked in his raw throat. The healing had taken the pain away, but he still felt woozy and feeble.

Squinting and staggering inelegantly to his feet, he grabbed at the nearest column of the courtyard to keep himself upright. At midday, even with the sun masked by a veil of thick cloud, he was at his weakest. The bastard had known he would be most vulnerable now. His canines lengthened with a snarl like a wild cat, and he let them.

“Kjartan… can… can you even hunt like this?” Nora asked with her voice still low and hesitant. She had stepped over to him without his noticing, and placed her hand under his arm to steady him as he listed like a foundering ship on a sandbar.

If he let his instincts take over completely, he most certainly could hunt, though he couldn’t be anywhere near the College or the town when he did. Not wanting to voice that to her, he simply nodded. Placing his hand over hers and briefly squeezing her bare, warm fingers, he nodded again in farewell and stalked away, his strength returning the further away from that infernal ingredient he got.

Halfway across the bridge, he still felt eyes on him.

Beside a roiling font of magicka, he paused and turned to find Nora still standing in the shelter of the entrance archway, her hair blowing about like torch flames in the shadows, watching him.

Her brows were so pinched with worry, and her green eyes so serious, that an oddly playful desire to make her laugh swept over him, and he chuckled. Perhaps this would reassure her that he was tougher than a bit of rank garlic. Or… Or it would finally make her afraid of him.

Either way, he closed his eyes and raised his hands a little from his sides, sensing his innate magic surge. This new sensation was not the power of a mage, but the power of a pureblood; the power of the night; a gift from a Daedric Prince. He let his essence turn into a swarm of dark, fluttering bats which milled and flurried in a tight helix. His awareness sharpened as he saw with their myriad eyes and heard with their keen ears, but enough of himself lingered to know that the beautiful woman standing aghast at the top of the sloping walkway was not prey.

Amid a wild flickering of black membrane and tiny, cruel bodies, he wheeled away into the sky and headed for the hills above Winterhold where deer and fox, snowy sabrecats and frost trolls lurked and prowled. It was a long time before he would think to revert to his usual form, and still longer before he would be able to calm the hurt and betrayal burning inside of him enough to return to the College. This new home, upon which he had come to pin so many bright, fragile, new hopes, had become something no longer safe. He would have to become wary and secretive again, distrustful of his fellow students.

Prey.

The vampire would become prey to others once again, and it galled him to have to accept it.

Again.

When he did eventually return, much later under the cover of darkness, he found no trace of garlic in the air of the dormitory, and he exhaled with soft relief. Whatever magic Ervine had used had completely cleansed the place of every last droplet of scent. His mind still supplied the stench of it though, and he curled his lip as he stared at the closed door of his room.

No. He would not become prey here. Not again.

He would not allow this little shit-stain of a Nord to get away with tormenting him for what he was, despite having minded his own business since the moment he arrived. Halvar would learn that poking a pureblood Volkihar vampire with a stick like he’d done today was about as sensible as hurling a beehive at a frost troll.

The wards that Halvar had flung up on his first evening there were still present, but Kjartan wasn’t fazed by them in the slightest. He’d almost laughed when he’d seen the wispy little shock runes he’d etched into the wood. The Nord’s magic was not so strong that even Kjartan could not unpick the protective enchantments on the door and threshold of the student’s room. He’d often thought about doing it, just to see how long it would take Halvar to notice, but he’d resisted up until that night.

Turning away from his own closed door, Kjartan strode across the hall past Nora’s dark room, and raised his hand to the wards, freezing them silently with ice magic until a faint trail of blue dust wisped away into nothing. Then he set his hand carefully to the door and pushed it slowly open. Halvar lay on his back in bed, but his breathing told Kjartan he was not deeply asleep. As a natural draft wafted in, Halvar stirred.

The Nord sat up with a strangled cry about a minute later when he woke fully and noticed Kjartan simply standing there in his doorway.

To the vampire, the room beyond was as bright as full daylight, but he knew that all the human would see would be his two ruby red eyes blazing from the darkness of his silhouette, made all the more stark by the harsh blue light of the font of magicka at the centre of the room behind him and throwing his outline into sharp relief.

The vampire said nothing and made no move to enter his room.

He simply remained there and stared until he smelled the Nord’s fear turn thick and acrid on the air.

“Please…” Halvar croaked, scrabbling to sit up and back away as if Kjartan were at his throat and not merely in his doorway. There was a shiny red bruise developing around his eye and the vampire wondered why he hadn’t taken a potion for it before he wondered where the Nord had acquired it.

Kjartan just blinked his red eyes, however, and kept silent and motionless.

“Please… I… Don’t kill me…”

He almost scoffed, but managed to remain perfectly still. He’d learned a thing or two about being truly, viscerally afraid in his lifetime, and he simply let the human’s florid imagination concur up things far more appalling than Kjartan would ever have thought of.

As Halvar’s heartbeat clattered out a desperate, wild tattoo in his chest, Kjartan relented a little. He didn’t think the human would try anything again; at least, not any time soon.

With his little job done, he blinked again and turned away in a flurry of bats. He heard Halvar give a short shriek of fear before the Nord scrabbled to slam his door again.

Shutting his own door quietly behind him with an amused chuckle, he materialised again, only to discover that he was not alone in his room.

___

Chapter Four -> 

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