He is not, then, one enamoured with the idea of eternal life, and all by itself, that is a curious thing indeed. There are reasons aplenty to fear death, most of all for a man of faith, for the rules of faith are strict and relentless; Celeste remembers this well. Salvation had not been in the cards for her, well before she offered her blood, and drank deep of that of her maker in turn.

More curious is the offer, and his inclination is so clear that she already licks her lips. She must tread carefully now, but she is greedy by nature, and often unwilling to compromise on her multitude of desires.

"Killing takes a toll, good sir, even on my kind." She does not mean guilt and damnation, those she has grown immune to. Yet she has chosen to preserver her beauty eternally, and a budding pile of corpses in her wake tends to rob her of the admiration she craves. It is difficult to snake her way into the embrace of better society to begin with; it is all the more difficult when its members keep vanishing, only to turn up bloodless a little while later. Time and time again, she must leave a city, invent herself anew, start over, only to vanish again, a cycle as old as she is by now. It is an effort, she would rather stay a little longer. "I would take the offer, and be grateful for it."

So long as the blood is strong, this she does not say. He looks healthy, though, smells clean and good, and she remembers a mortal affection she once held for a man now dead for a good century, who had carried in him that same seriousness and that same devotion she has begun to see in him. "I am called Celeste," for it is pretty and French, and she had liked France, before the revolution had made it so grim a place to be of any sort of respectable blood.