Renfield Tomar's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Renfield crouched in the wine cellar and swallowed a live rat because a man could not starve on hate alone. He had once been Tyler Tomar, a hunter's son who ate roast venison at a long table. Now the curse let him eat only vermin. He wanted one thing above all: to sit at his family's table and share a real meal as a man again. So every night he tested a new cure. Tonight he had tried a witch's fasting charm, three days of holy water, and a knife across his palm. All of it failed. The rat went down. His stomach thanked him. His pride did not. He had run out of dead ends. Only one person in Walachia knew every binding spell ever cast here. He climbed to her chamber uninvited. The Mother stood at her window with her back to him. Her red veil poured across the floor and out the door and did not seem to end. She wore a golden headdress that threw broken light across the walls, its pattern shifting like water. She had turned him into this. She was the witch who made his cage. "Undo it," Renfield said. His voice cracked. "I have tried everything. Tell me why it will not break." She did not turn around. "Because it was never meant to break for you." "That is not an answer." Now she faced him. Her blue eyes moved over his hunched shoulders without pity. "I will answer once. Your hunger is not yours. I tied it to another's." Renfield's hands went cold. "Tied to whose?" "Your master's," she said. "His thirst feeds his strength. Your suffering pays for it. While he hungers, you hunger. The knot holds both of you." The cellar, the rat, the years of charms all reordered themselves in his head. He had been fighting the wrong lock the whole time. "Then break his thirst," he said. "Break his, and mine falls loose." "Yes." She let the word sit. "And I will not. His thirst is what keeps this city strong. I made it so." She turned back to the window. "You asked why. Now you know. Do not come here again." Renfield stood in the doorway and understood the true shape of his prison. His cure did not live in a charm or a knife. It lived inside Dracula himself. The one man who could free him was the one man who least wanted to be freed. He backed out of the chamber slowly. The rat still turned in his gut. But for the first time in years he was not wasting his strength. He knew the source now. He knew the door. He would have to reach his master's thirst. And he would have to do it without his master ever guessing why.