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Perhaps to some, it would have been the most natural thing in the world.

For a True Vampire to marry their Seneschal, a person whose life was bound to theirs until the end of their lives, made the kind of sense that any child who had ever read a fairy tale could understand.

But fairy tales were the only places anyone could think of where vampires found love at all.

The Four Deaths were legends, some might even call them boogeymen, creatures that were all but spectres of death itself.

A Seneschal was supposed to act like Death’s servant in the world of the living, but in most fairy tales that included such a figure, they were little different than loyal hounds, side characters in the story who appeared as heralds for their mighty masters.

In the history of the Vale of Mists, since Nyrielle’s birth, only one True Vampire had ever brought a Seneschal to visit, and that had been nearly two hundred years ago, not long after Nyrielle’s birth, when Bardas, the Jaws of Death, last paid a visit.

Few records of that visit had survived the fall of the Vale, and what records remained made little mention of the man from the Black Striped Clan who followed at Bardas’s side beyond his name and his clan.

But as the crowd looked at the Mother of Trees, kneeling before the Harbinger of Death with tears in her eyes, they were shocked to find those tears answered by faintly pinkish tears running down Lady Nyrielle’s alabaster cheek, though the powerful vampire didn’t seem to be aware of them at all.

"I thought my heart died more than a hundred years ago," Nyrielle said as she lowered herself to one knee, refusing to stand while her lover knelt.

"I thought it burned to ash when the Lothians tore our home apart and set fire to everyone and everything I had ever held dear.

I thought that I would never know love again. "

"But with you, my darling," she said, clutching tightly to Ashlynn’s hands, "I feel so much more than just love. When you are in danger, I am afraid. When you are insulted, I am enraged. And when you are victorious, my heart is filled with warmth and pride."

For months, Nyrielle had tried to answer a question that had plagued her entire life. Had she always been capable of this kind of love, or was it only because she fed on Ashlynn that she could feel so deeply?

Her teacher, Shubnalu, had once said that True Vampires were born without real emotions.

He believed that they only learned to imitate the feelings of others during their early years as children and that the sooner they cast off the thin, ’false feelings’ of their childhood, the sooner they could take their proper place in the world.

At the time, Nyrielle disagreed vehemently with her mentor.

She knew that she loved both her parents and her grandsire, even if Torbin was Eldritch while her parents had been human, and she found small joys and little sorrows in countless things.

The fall of the Vale and the death of her parents had been so painful that she still believed that her feelings had to be real, but in the long years since then, those feelings faded more and more each year.

When Ashlynn entered her life, however, everything that had been sealed in her heart, all of the feelings she’d thought she’d lost, surged to the surface once again.

Caught in the rising tide, Nyrielle asked herself again and again, was this real?

Was this the way she was always meant to be, and she’d just forgotten? Or was it new?

Now that she knelt among the cedar boughs, holding her lover’s hands and staring into her emerald eyes from just inches away, she realized that it didn’t matter where the feelings came from. They were real, and those real feelings mattered more to her than any nation, any clan, or any throne.

Moving slowly, as if she were afraid that Ashlynn was made of porcelain, she drew her lover’s fingers to her lips, kissing her delicate digits gently before opening her mouth to reveal her long, sharp fangs.

With a gentle bite on Ashlynn’s ring finger, Nyrielle drew out a single drop of blood, licking it off her finger as though it were a drop of honey and smiling sweetly at the taste.

"Your blood flows through my veins," Nyrielle said.

"Just as my blood formed an unbreakable bond between us.

Everything that is mine is also yours, my lands, my throne, my heart and soul," she said as she wrapped her wings gently around Ashlynn before standing and pulling her lover to her feet with her.

"Let it all blend together, and let nothing ever come between the love we share," she declared. Her heart pounded in her chest, and in the back of her mind, a voice whispered that there were other things that should be said in this moment, but Nyrielle couldn’t bring herself to care.

Right now, Nyrielle stood surrounded by the closest people to family she had.

Her great-uncles, Tausau and Savis, might not have any blood relation to her, but they had been like brothers to her grandsire, Torbin, and in their presence, she felt a ghost of her grandsire, savoring this moment in pride at what she had found.

On the other side, Thane, Ignatious, and Zedya stood like beloved children, watching their maker find happiness that had been denied to her for longer than any of them had been vampires.

In front of those people, nothing mattered but Ashlynn and the purest demonstration of her love she could offer.

Gently, Nyrielle pulled Ashlynn into a soft embrace, leaning down to brush her lips across Ashlynn’s.

For a moment, there was nothing more to the kiss than that, just a soft, tentative brush of lips while their bodies pressed together, feeling each other’s warmth through the layers of silk and brocade between them.

It was Ashlynn who took the kiss further, raising up on her tiptoes to capture Nyrielle’s lower lip between her lips, drawing her deeper into the kiss and teasing at her soft, velvety lips with her tongue.

Darkness spilled from Nyrielle’s wings, wrapping around them like a soft cloak as hunger mixed with desire, driving the kiss even deeper.

Ashlyn’s arms wrapped around Nyrielle’s lithe figure, pressing her closer as her tongue danced with Nyrielle’s between the sharpness of the vampire’s fangs.

A faint rivulet flowed down Ashlynn’s chin as Nyrielle pricked her with a fang, but neither woman noticed as they lost themselves completely in the surge of power and pleasure that swept all other thoughts from their minds.

Right now, they had each other, and that was the only thing that mattered.