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The Swiss dawn arrived the way it always did in the Greyhollow valley - quietly, without apology, dragging pale gold light across the mountain ridges and spilling it down into the pines like something poured slowly from a pitcher. Mist clung to the lower pastures. The farmhouse, sprawling and old and expensive in the way that only things maintained rather than built are expensive, sat at the centre of the property like a stone that had simply always been there.
Edmund Ashworth stood at the kitchen window with a cup of tea he didn't need - he hadn't needed anything as pedestrian as tea in the entirety of his existence, having entered the world already something considerably more than human - but old habits, much like old vampires, proved extremely difficult to kill.
He was a slight figure in the morning light. Short, narrow-shouldered, with the kind of build that people had always charitably called wiry and less charitably called underfed, though the irony of that particular observation had never been lost on him. His hair was a mess of pale blonde curls that he'd given up taming sometime around 1987, and his face - angular, fine-boned, arrestingly young in the way that it had always been and would always remain - wore an expression of calm amusement that felt as natural to him as breathing did to lesser creatures. Bright blue eyes swept across the rear pasture.
Or rather: what remained of it.