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There is no way to tell day from night. The castle is a creature of chaos that morphs and changes all within its walls on capricious whims. Dreams will occasionally slither through the cracks in the mortar.
Alucard observes the candle he's placed on the low table. A small white wedge of flame stands silent sentry in the darkness. The glow is steady, unnaturally so; it neither flickers nor ebbs.
This darkness is warm, sheltering. Not unlike the arms of his mother.
Alucard finds himself slipping. His nerves snap alive; his fist tightens around the hilt of the wretched sword he'd had to plunder from a carcass like a common thief.
A summer's day, once. His parents' only quarrel.
Father insisted he'd burn. Mother laughed for his enduring worry. He is not so very delicate, you know. He will need to become acquainted with us lowly creatures who cavort in the light.
Father's growl tapered into a softer huff as he grasped her hand. Never call yourself such.
He kept one arm tucked over his eyes while he crossed the threshold with Mother.
"Now, now." Her laughter sang songs to his sensitive ears. The silence here feels to him an echo of its grave. "It won't bite."
"Father says—"
"He knows not everything in this world, little prince. Come, look."
A startling crimson blossom greeted him. At first he thought Mother must have cut her palm with the small kitchen knife she carried on her girtle-belt, as she would sometimes do when he was a wailing babe.
No; it was not the thin trickle he once suckled from. It was a rose, each petal variegated as though chiseled by the hand of a master sculptor.
She offered him its quiet perfume. Reaching forth with tentative fingertips, he brushed the soft red silk.
It stirred in him a strange hunger: some quiet, indefinable urge.
Mother's smile waned. "My boy," she said, her voice a lullaby from a long-ago tale.
He preferred the comforting rhythm of his mother's heartbeat to the unsettling stillness that inhabited his father's. An innocent error.
When he was a child, drowsing in the royal lap cushioned by velvet and brocaded silks, Father used to pretend. To mimic the cadence of breath. But the warm blood his heart refused to pump eluded him.
"He cannot flee what he is." Father, a shadow on the wall, his silhouette resisting even a flicker on the flagstone. "My dearest, you cannot place these foolish notions in his head. It will confuse him."
"As you are yourself confused?"
Father laughed, the sound bitter iron.
"Will you sing?" Mother asked, after eternities had passed.
"He can hardly bear my touch." Hollowness crept into Father's words. "My voice—"
"Please, for his sake. It will fill the emptiness."
She lived. A name in a scroll, the one he loved before Mother. He had preserved her in a pristine sheaf within the last page of a spellbook.
Excepting herself and Mathias, all other names in the genealogy had been magically erased; a single unbroken bridge connected two isolated islands. It is this scroll Alucard had been studying before sleep took him.
Elisabetha.
He had once made the arrogant mistake of asking.
A noble and beautiful lady, said Mother, with a touch of smile as one might recount a fond memory - if a little worn at the edges.
Father's hand slowly crushed into a fist. One by one each finger curled inward and remained locked, an impenetrable manacle poised on the armrest. The tendon in his wrist jutted; the anemic white knuckles stood implacable peaks, as though the bone might shed its taut covering of skin.
And yet Alucard could not say his foolish young heart stuttered until the moment Father uncurled his fist. Four stark punctures, black crescent moons, grinned from the flesh.
Sing to him.
Culcă-te, puiuţ micuţ,
Scoală-te mărişoruţ.
Culcă-te şi te abuă
Până mâine-n dalbă ziuă.
Şi te culcă şi adormi
Până mâine-n dalbe zori.
Go to asleep, my tiny baby,
Try to sleep, and get asleep
Till the white dawns break the day.
Then wake up as a grown child.
Till tomorrow at the white dawns.
Father. A question he dared not poise, a stagnance he deigned never to break with a single quivering breath. Would you not have done it for my sake?
Go, Father would say. Bring your mother back to me. She likes to wander.
He departed from the castle like mist, unseen and unfelt.
Dutiful son, honor-bound prince. Your heart bloodless porcelain, a monstrosity of fragile beauty. You know not the suffering that awaits you.
Your mother.
(my darling)
Behold her.
(remember my words)
Her bruises, grotesque blossoms raised from the stones they threw.
(do not hate them)
Look.
(for theirs)
The blood speckled in her pale hair. Her bound wrists broken from chafing on the rope. Her eye swollen shut, weeping.
(is already)
Do not shield yours.
(a hard lot)
They forfeited trial. Strung her up on their god's wooden rack like an animal.
Do you understand, my bright one?
I do.
But...
I think, Father, it is your human side that hates.