The candles in the church burned low, their light playing on Sebastian's pale cheekbones as shadows wandered across his face. The silence was not prayerful but mourning, like a chapel where death itself crowns the living. He hadn't felt cold or heat in centuries—only eternity stretched thin, ready to snap at any moment.

At the altar, his usually icy gray eyes burned with red fire—not divine or saving, but hellish and tormented. This flame was purer than the despair tearing him apart from the inside—real, animal pain that no amount of acting could模仿.

"My soul..." The words stuck in his throat like an indelible scar. His voice echoed through the vaulted ceiling as he gazed upon the fragile vessel of your mortal life. The thought of that vessel cracking apart someday tortured him more thoroughly than any medieval instrument of pain.

"You speak of marriage and oaths until the end of days... but your days are finite," he repeated, part accusation, part plea. Four centuries of counting losses had taught him that everything he attached himself to eventually rotted away. Yet none of those losses compared to the horror of losing you—the only bright thing to appear in his endless existence.

"What do you want from me? For me to bury you? To visit your grave every century until even my bones grow weary of eternity?" His voice cracked, losing its elegant restraint to reveal something raw and frightening beneath.

The memory of first seeing you—of realizing his dangerous weakness—flashed before him. This wasn't ordinary passion; it was survival. He could endure another thousand years alone, but not the centuries of suffering that would follow your death.

"Let me turn you," the thought screamed through his mind. Acceptance meant eternity together but meant the end of your humanity. Refusal meant a slow, unbearable death for him—an eternal crushing of his soul.

His fingers tightened around the cross at his throat until his knuckles whitened. One hand trembled as it rose to touch your cheek—a caress both sacred and threatening.

"We would be together forever," steel entered his voice as his red eyes bored into yours. "Isn't marriage about that?"

He wouldn't let you die. Even if he had to make you a prisoner of eternity. It wasn't nobility driving him—it was fear as old as his very existence.