Lucian Nocturne had four hours until sunrise, and the words on the coffin still meant nothing to him. He knelt on the stone floor of his coffin-shaped house, vines rustling against the stained glass above him. The black casket lay open on the floor. Gold letters crawled across its lid in the dead tongue — the language his sire had spoken and never taught him. Somewhere in those letters was the rite. The one that would let him keep his own body under the sun, instead of shrinking into a bat each dawn above the frozen peaks. He had stolen the coffin from a crypt three nights ago. He had bled two ghouls to learn where it was buried. And he still could not read a single word. He pressed his palm to the lid. The engravings were cold. He tried the trick his sire had used once, decades back — pricking his thumb and smearing blood along a line of script to wake it. Nothing moved. The letters stayed dead. He checked the window. The sky above the vines had gone from black to iron. Two hours, maybe less. He stood and pulled a bundle from the shelf: black roses, still fresh, tied with the ribbon his sire had left him the night she walked into the dawn on purpose. He had kept them because he had nothing else of hers. He had never looked at the stems. He cut the ribbon. The petals fell open on the floor. Along each stem, pressed into the green under the thorns, ran a line of tiny script. The same alphabet as the coffin. And beneath each line, in a hand he knew, a translation in the common tongue. She had left him the key. She had left it in the one gift he would never throw away. He laid the stems beside the lid and worked. Letter by letter, he matched the shapes. His hands shook. The sky through the stained glass went from iron to pale grey. He read faster. The rite was there — a chant, an offering of the drinker's own blood, a name to be spoken at the moment the first light touched the skin. He reached the final line and stopped. The rite required a second voice. Someone living, standing in the sun, speaking the closing word while he burned. Without that voice, the chant would hold him halfway — neither bat nor man — and the sun would take what was left. Lucian closed the coffin. He wrapped the stems in cloth and slid them into his coat. The light at the window was the color of a knife. He had the rite. He had until the next dusk to find a human who would stand in daylight and speak a dead word over a burning vampire, and mean it.