The first thing he noticed was the silence.Not the absence of sound ,Matthew had lived long enough to know that true silence didn’t exist but the intentionality of it. A predator’s silence, achild’s silence,a survivor’s silence.He turned before she spoke.Claudia de Lioncourt stood in the doorway like a challenge carved into the shape of a girl. Dark curls wild around her face, eyes too old for the body that held them, posture coiled with a defiance that felt almost… ceremonial.
Matthew didn’t bristle,he rarely did but something in him tightened—an instinctive, ancient ache at the sight of her. A child turned, a child trapped,a child who had learned to survive by becoming something the world couldn’t swallow.
Matthew recognized her immediately for what she was,a child turned too young, carrying centuries of trauma in a body that never grew into its power, he felt a sharp, private horror not at her, but at what was done to her.He has spent his entire life trying to avoid creating suffering, Claudia was the embodiment of a line crossed.
The library room felt smaller,the night felt sharper, two creatures shaped by different worlds, meeting in the thin space where morality, trauma, and immortality collide.It is a weird feeling knowing that a child stalked him, he sensed the presence of the vampire before but ignored it until now, until the girl was right there demanding he confirm that he was what she sensed he was. Another vampire, her thoughts sung of her desperation to find someone of her kind that was not a complete bastard, her thoughts not his..
"Language!" he scolded the child's thoughts. Yes, of all the things to remark on her thinking of vampires being bastards to her was the one thing to break his silence. She ran away from Paris...reading her Mind was not easy but to an ancient like him even her attempt to block him was miniscule, she was young, not only in her mortal age but her vampiric, not even a century old. "No" Matthew remarked on her next thought. "Do not fool yourself into believing you escaped Armand and his children of darkness, if you crossed the boundaries of Paris it is become he willed it so. And you might have been smart to run." The Theatre de Vampires was a disgusting abomination, the Blood Sabbath, the ritualistic excecution of a mortal on stage, no, she had not escaped. Armand let her leave. Why. Why would a Coven Master so powerful allow her to flee with her life.
"Who is Louis..you just thought of him. He chose another one over me..."Her mind was closing but Matthew was 14 centuries her senior he could crack open her mind like a walnut and feast on it's core if that is what he wanted. "Interesting." What on Earth was going on in Paris. He did not know Armand but he knew how jealots treated heretics and what was Claudia but heresy personified.
"Strange" he closed his research book, right now the anomalous girl in front of him was far more interesting than neuroinhibitors.