In all his long years inside Sancta Vedelia, Sirius had never once entertained the idea of forming a real bond with anyone there.

He had been sent to conquer the place. That was the beginning and end of his purpose, his mother’s order, carved into him before he ever set foot on that soil. Everything he did, every decision he made, every careful move across those centuries was oriented toward that single destination. The founding of Raven House had been part of it, a patient investment that paid faster than even he had anticipated. The House rose through Sancta Vedelia’s ranks with quiet speed, accumulating prestige and influence quite fast. By any measure, it was one of his finest achievements.

And then the waiting. Body after body, decade after decade, he watched the continent breathe and shift and argue with itself, nudging things here and there, pulling at threads when it served him, letting things move when that served him better. He had time. He had always had time. And Sancta Vedelia, for all the contempt he had performed toward it, had intrigued him far more than he was willing to admit. There was something alive in it, stubborn and complicated and layered in ways that a place built by mortals had no right to be.

But he kept his distance from its people. That was a rule he had never broken, or never allowed himself to break fully. Closeness was a liability in a place you intended to destroy. He had acquaintances across the centuries, a handful of connections that passed for friendships in the way that shadows pass for shelter, present, briefly useful, and ultimately meaningless. He forgot most of them before they were cold.

He would never have predicted Amael Falkrona.

Their first meeting had been strange enough, a night-visit to a child’s room that ended with a broken spine and a neck snapped by the most terrifying woman he had ever encountered, all while that same child lay in bed counting calmly to ten. He had left that room in pieces, in more ways than one. And yet something from that conversation had stayed with him.

When they met again years later, Amael older, standing somewhere in Sancta Vedelia with that same calm in his eyes as when he was a child, Sirius had been caught off guard. Not by his presence exactly, but by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a confrontation. It wasn’t a trap, or a negotiation, or any of the things it logically should have been. Amael had simply come because he was curious. Because their conversation years ago had apparently never quite ended for him either.

As for how he had been found, how Amael had known which face belonged to him despite all the bodies he had cycled through Sirius had his suspicions. He never confirmed them, but every instinct he had pointed to Belle Falkrona. One look from those silver eyes, and he imagined she had simply memorized his mana signature the way other people memorized faces, easily and permanently.

She may have even traced the seed of corruption he carried, the mark that allowed him to pass from vessel to vessel. The thought that she had known where he was all along, and had chosen to do nothing after that first night, was a bit frightening regardless.

But he understood, eventually, that Amael had come of his own accord. Not as his mother’s instrument. Not as a trap set by Horus. He had simply come because something in him had grown curious about Sirius’s life, the same way Sirius had found himself thinking about the Vampire Witch, drawn toward a strange existence without fully understanding why.

And so, against every instinct and every rule he had ever set for himself, Sirius found a friend.

It was an odd thing to name. Their meetings were infrequent, a handful of times, spread across stretches of ordinary life, in corners of Sancta Vedelia where no one paid attention to two men talking quietly. They would sit and exchange accounts of what they’d done, what they’d seen, what the world had looked like from their respective edges of it. There was no ceremony to it. No performance.

Just honest conversation between each other in secrecy.

And with each meeting, Sirius felt the ground beneath his original purpose grow a little less solid. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Amael never argued with him directly. He was far too clever for that. Instead he talked, about perspective, about the centuries spent in service to someone else’s vision, about what it meant to actually live inside one’s own life rather than simply executing a design handed down from above. He used Sirius’s own history against him, gently and without malice, turning his centuries of experience into a mirror that reflected something Sirius had long since stopped looking for. He was being guided, and he knew it. He saw the shape of it clearly, Amael’s intentions laid out plainly enough that only a fool could have missed it.

But he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

That was the disarming part. Amael wasn’t manipulating him toward something sinister, if anything, Sirius had already been a dead man walking the moment Belle Falkrona first laid eyes on him. His continued existence in Sancta Vedelia was, in all likelihood, something Amael had quietly ensured. He had already been discovered, already been marked. The fact that Horus hadn’t descended on him, that Belle hadn’t tracked down every vessel he occupied and snapped its neck in turn, that was not an accident. That was Amael’s doing, one way or another.

And knowing that, paradoxically, made Sirius trust him more. Not less.

There was something about Amael that Sirius had rarely encountered in his long and largely empty life.

Intelligence, certainly. But more than that, a clarity of mind that coexisted with chaos. The man carried enormous confusion about who he was, what he carried within him, where the line between himself and Samael Eveningstar actually fell and yet his values were unambiguous. His goals were clean. He knew what he cared about and he held it without apology. That combination was something Sirius had never managed himself, and he envied it more than he ever said aloud.

Perhaps that was why Amael’s advice finally took root. Perhaps that was why Sirius had begun, slowly and then all at once, to do something he had never done in five hundred years.

He started living for himself.

It was a small thing at first. A preference honored here, a choice made for no reason other than that it pleased him, a small act of selfhood carved out of a life that had been entirely oriented around obligation. But small things grow when they are tended. And Sirius found, to his own quiet surprise, that selfhood was not a thin thing once you let it exist. It was grand and demanding and complicated and his.

Unfortunately, giving a man freedom after centuries of captivity does not always produce the outcome one imagines.

Freedom, given to someone who has never truly held it, someone whose sense of self was built entirely around service, around duty, around another person’s purpose has a way of becoming something unpredictable. Something the person who gave it never fully intended and cannot easily take back.

And Sirius, for the first time in a very long life, was beginning to understand exactly what he wanted.