The first to see him was the vendor at the spice stall at the north entrance of Valdris.

A bat.

It flew over the entrance arch at normal speed, in a normal direction, with nothing in particular to distinguish it from any bat on any night.

She followed it with her eyes until it disappeared among the rooftops and went back to her work.

---

The guard on the north wall saw the next five. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Together, flying in the same direction, with the kind of coordination bats don’t normally have.

He frowned.

Followed them with his eyes.

They disappeared toward the center of the city.

Weird.

He mentally noted it and continued his rounds.

---

Aldric was finishing the report for a quest when the guard entered.

"Sir Aldric."

"What?"

"Bats."

Aldric looked up from the paper.

"How many?"

The guard hesitated.

"Before I left, there were... a lot."

---

In the central plaza of Valdris, the people still outside at that hour — night-shift hunters, the owner of Valdris Pot closing up his establishment, three merchants waiting for the dawn carriage — looked upward.

The sky over the city had movement.

Not stars.

Not clouds.

Dark movement.

Thousands of small points shifting with a direction too consistent to be natural migration and too numerous to be anything anyone in Valdris had seen before.

"Is it migration season?" one of the merchants said.

"There’s no bat season in this sector," said the nearest hunter, hand already on his sword hilt.

The movement in the sky increased.

Then, all at once, it began to descend.

---

The Valdris alarm bell rang for the second time in the north guard’s recent history — the first had been the day Serah and Kai arrived walking up the dirt road, and he had stopped his hand two centimeters from the metal.

This time he stopped nothing.

The sound filled the city.

People in the streets began to move — inward, toward buildings, toward anywhere with walls and a roof.

The night-shift hunters formed positions without needing orders, training muscle memory taking over before their brains finished processing what was happening.

Aldric came out of the guild with the report still in his hand.

He looked toward the central plaza.

The sky over Valdris was black with movement.

Thousands of bats descending in a spiral — not chaotic, a spiral — toward a specific point in the center of the plaza.

And at that point, where the first had arrived, something was taking shape.

---

It wasn’t fast.

It was deliberate.

The bats reached the central point and vanished — they didn’t fly away, they vanished, their mass becoming something that accumulated in the center like water filling an invisible mold.

First a silhouette.

Then a figure.

Then details — black hair to the waist, perfectly straight.

Skin that hadn’t seen direct sunlight in centuries.

A black dress with a structured corset and an elaborate silver pauldron on the right shoulder.

Black elbow-length gloves.

Silver feather earrings.

The last bats disappeared.

Lira opened her eyes.

Red.

Like blood.

She looked around with the expression of someone evaluating whether the space met or failed to meet the minimum standards required for her presence.

Apparently it met them, though barely.

---

To her right — where her right hand had been during the flight, because noble-rank vampires didn’t arrive alone — a similar but compressed process: a bat that expanded instead of accumulating, and where there had been an animal there was a woman. Tall, dark hair pulled back, vampire guard uniform with rank markings on the shoulder.

In the plaza and the side streets, the same process but inverse in complexity: each remaining bat expanded into a vampire.

One by one.

Simple.

Without the elaboration of Lira’s transformation.

Thirty vampires materialized in the central plaza of Valdris in ninety seconds.

Lira didn’t look at them.

She was looking at the humans.

"Who," she said,

"is the leader of this town?"

---

Aldric stepped forward.

He did it because no one else did, and someone had to, and he’d spent fifteen years being the person who took that step when no one else wanted to.

Before he could speak, someone else stepped forward.

Apparent thirties.

Build that suggested a life of specific physical labor.

Horizontal scar on the left jaw, the kind a blade leaves when someone turns their head at the right moment to make it less severe.

Sword on her back — not decorative, with wear on the grip.

The ruler of Valdris was named Vayne.

She now stood between Lira and the rest of the city with the specific posture of someone who has assessed the situation and decided it’s her problem to handle.

"Vampire territory," Vayne said, with the voice of someone accustomed to being heard without needing to repeat herself, "is eight hundred eighty kilometers to the west."

Her gray eyes didn’t blink against Lira’s red ones.

"What does a vampire noble want in human territory?"

Lira looked at her.

Looked at her like evaluating whether she was an obstacle or simply part of the landscape.

"This," Lira said, with the precision of someone choosing each word because she can afford to, "is not human territory."

Vayne didn’t respond.

"It’s the territory of a wet dog."

The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for everyone in the plaza to process what they’d just heard.

Vayne processed too.

"Serah," she said.

It wasn’t a question.

"You know her," Lira said, with something that wasn’t exactly approval but resembled it in form. "Good. Then you know who I’m looking for."

"And what do you want with her?"

"That," Lira said, with the elaborate patience of someone explaining something to someone who should understand it without explanation, "is a matter between entities operating on a level beyond anything you’ll ever reach."

Vayne didn’t move.

"You said you’re looking for someone else," she said.

Lira looked at her.

"The little piece of trash," she said, "that arrived in this territory out of nowhere accompanying the dog."

---

Aldric, who had been calculating the precise moment to intervene without making anything worse, chose that moment.

"If I may ask, Your Eminence," he said, with the tone he’d developed over fifteen years of managing situations not covered in any procedure manual, "what business do you have with those two?"

Lira turned toward him.

Looked at him.

Then, to everyone’s surprise — including Aldric’s — she smiled.

Not the smile of someone kind.

The smile of someone who’s just found what they were looking for.

"Look," she said, addressing the entire plaza with the gesture of someone presenting an example, "finally someone who knows how to recognize and behave before a noble."

Aldric said nothing.

"Your name," Lira said.

"Aldric. Guildmaster of Valdris."

"Aldric." She repeated it with the tone of someone filing away useful data. "Where are the two I’m looking for?"

"At this moment," Aldric said, "they’re on a mission in the northeastern sector."

"They haven’t returned yet." A pause.

"But I’m sure they won’t be long."

Lira considered this.

"Good," she said.

She turned toward the plaza with the naturalness of someone who has decided the space belongs to her because she’s decided to stay in it.

"I’ll wait."

Pause.

"But only a little."

Her red eyes swept over the closed stalls, the buildings with windows lit from inside by people who preferred not to be outside, Valdris Pot with the door ajar because the owner hadn’t finished deciding whether to close it or not.

"While we wait," Lira said, with the same naturalness she’d said everything else, "I suppose we’ll have to have something to eat."

Her tongue brushed lightly against the edge of a fang.

"We have until dawn."

---

The owner of Valdris Pot made his decision about the door.

He closed it.

---

Vayne hadn’t moved.

She was still in the same position between Lira and the rest of the plaza, feet shoulder-width apart and right hand ten centimeters from the sword hilt — not gripping, close. The difference between the two things was enough to communicate exactly what Vayne wanted to communicate.

"Or," Vayne said, "you could leave my city before this gets worse."

Lira looked at her.

And laughed.

Not the laugh of surprise.

The laugh of someone who’s just heard something they find genuinely amusing for reasons the other person probably doesn’t share.

"Interesting," she said.

Vayne lunged.

The sword came off her back in the same movement as the step forward — not two actions, one. The blade caught the light of the plaza torches in the full arc of the upward diagonal cut Vayne had used enough times to make it automatic.

Lira didn’t move.