The Lady Applecott was more cautious than he thought. She didn't open one of the many terrace doors to which she surely had a key, instead removing an unassuming part of a stone ornament and using that to unlock what didn't look like a door at all, simply a bit of wood-framed clouded glass right in the corner. She replaced the secret key and he could tell, when their eyes met, that she resented sharing this particular secret with him. He wondered idly whether she would find another secret to replace it, once - and if - normalcy would return to her life.
This would be the last of his idle thoughts for a while, for after setting foot inside what turned out to be a narrow, dimly lit and unfurnished corridor, Vampire Lord Crayve began to feel tense. Not the tenseness of the Lady Applecott, of course, who briskly lead the way ahead of him, maneuvering several of these corridors alongside heavily carpeted staircases spreading across floors. As if all the walls were hollow, a network of passages hidden from sight. He was tense because, at long last, his search was nearing its end.
The Tome of UnDeath.
Word of its emergence had appeared across the twilit circles, but it had been unreachable, confined to the obscenely rich and powerful and scrupulous. Augustus Applecott had allegedly procured it from an underground auction. Though it had been difficult information to find, the historic sum paid at that auction had loosened otherwise unyielding tongues. To most, the Tome was first and foremost a historic curio, made enticing by its reputation. More fools them.
The Lady Applecott claimed that she knew nothing of this purchase, but she had not shown any signs of surprise. She noted that she had not seen her uncle for at least a week, and that when she last dined with him, he had seemed unusually excited. Crucially, she had also confirmed that her uncle had expressed sporadic interest in the occult, though from her tone as she said this, Vampire Lord Crayve inferred that he was not alone in this proclivity.
Whether or not, and to what extent, she told the truth, he did not care. If rumours were true, Augustus Applecott would crumble before him, not out of cowardice or fear, but reverence. He would have the Tome. It was only a matter of time.
In order to reach the study of her uncle, the Lady Applecott had lead him across so many hidden corridors that he had no notion of where in the mansion it was that they emerged. They continued down more hallways, proper ones now, five times the width, and decked out with excess off-putting even to him. She was visibly nervous, stepping as noiselessly as she could, and always tilting forward whenever they took a turn. As if she were trespassing down her own halls. He followed with the silence of decades of practice.
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She knocked at the heavy door with a timidness unique to children when they fear displeasing a strict guardian. She knocked again, barely louder, but finally seemed to be willing to take her chances. By this hour, surely her uncle would be in his bedchambers.
Augustus Applecott's study itself looked magnificent and unused. A door stood out by being left ajar, casting a strip of light across the otherwise unlit room. Had it been closed, the opulence of the study would have all but obscured it from casual view. The Lady Applecott froze in place. Most lights across the mansion had been lit, though dimly. The brightness of this room could only indicate the presence of someone who needed it so. Vampire Lord Crayve straightened to his full height and strode towards the door, flinging it open with determination.
He saw what could not have further contrasted the sterile, lifeless study if it tried. The room was littered with sheets of paper and carelessly placed books. The walls consisted of bookshelves, but the books they contained were irregular, some piled some tilted over, heavy leather-bound volumes next to dainty felt ones, folders next to paper bound by string. An armchair, a few reading tables, and a desk were strewn across the room as if an afterthought. Nothing about this room was designed to impress, nor even to stroke the ego of its custodian. Said custodian being starkly, disappointingly, absent.
Vampire Lord Crayve tried not to slump at this revelation, instead making his way to the most impressive-looking books he saw. Surely one of them would be the Tome. He flung all the disappointments to the floor. Every title he read, every paragraph he skimmed, related to the occult. Some felt more out of place than others - The Stoats Of Winhale Forest & By What Force They Grow So Large - but if it so much as touched upon the workings of unknown powers, the unexplored deemed by so many of the learned men and women to be unexplorable, it could be found here. He recognized several texts he himself had studied, both the blatantly spurious and the incomprehensibly obscure, the niche but popular as well as the outlawed. Most texts were heavily annotated. Not all the scribbles had been written by the same hand.
The Lady Applecott had severely undersold her uncle's proclivity. Augustus Applecott was indeed unusually partial to the studies of the occult. This room was a shrine to his obsession. It was no wonder that he had been interested in the Tome of UnDeath, no wonder that he had paid what even to him must have felt like a fortune to get his hands on it. But it was not here. Of course it wasn't. He would have locked it away, guarding it jealously. Or would he have devoured it and scribbled all over its margins, like he had with everything else? Had he taken it to his bed, sleeping better knowing it was safely under his pillow?
He turned and was ready to tear the man from his sleep, manifest his nightmares right before his eyes. But he stopped when he saw the Lady Applecott who had entered the room, seemingly unfamiliar to her, only enough to pick something from the floor with a trembling hand. It was a quill, but instead of a nib it was tipped by a tiny, razor-sharp blade. The blade was coated in blood.
Vampire Lord Crayve was familiar with blood. He could tell that it was not fresh, but neither was it old. There was a scroll of parchment on the floor next to where the blood quill had lain, and he picked it up to find a very poor attempt at using the blade to write, resulting in a cut and blood-soaked page, illegible and useless.
The blood, however, was very useful. The cut must have been very deep, and there was nowhere near enough blood in this room to account for it.
Fuelled by eagerness, Vampire Lord Crayve launched into action. He dropped to the floor in a crouch, sniffing and glaring at the carpet. Stains. He was in luck.
The hunt was on.