Staying around the village more often, Iovetra might notice: A small group of bandits some distance into the hills, far enough out that they have shifted into actual mountains, ambushing caravans which come through! The riverbed the village relies on narrowing a little as weeds grow through the riverbed, slowing the water and shifting some of it elsewhere! Fewer hyenas! (There are more than zero hyenas, but the oasis has a pack every night or two, while she might spot a pack clustered around the river to drink only once a week.)

Bandits are genuinely confusing to Iovetra as a concept. There was some human infighting, when she was serving her once-master, but it was almost always because of resource scarcity or meddling from their vampiric overlords. And humans genuinely tended to view vampires as their enemy, to give them something of a unifying force. Anyone could have their lives ruined by a vampire's casual sadism, so human society was prepared to absorb strays without trouble, at least compared to what is... going on here. She's terribly curious, and kind of wants to ask them their reasons for stealing from their fellow man, especially when there's clearly abundance around them, but, well. She doesn't speak the language. (And learning to speak the language would be uncomfortable. At least via the traditional vampiric method. Maybe she could just... study the language like a normal person? Hm.) She will keep an eye on them, but otherwise not interfere unless it looks like they're going to do some murders.

The river's shifting is less confusing. Does the river seem to be shifting in an unwanted direction that might cause flooding towards either farmland or housing? Yes? Okay, then those weeds can stop that. As in, get burned through with cold spirit-fire that is anathema to life itself, and is not put out by petty things such as 'water.' Performing weeding services is perhaps a bit below the stereotypical vampire's dignity, but that doesn't mean she's not very good at it. She collects the remnants of the weeds, for returning to her castle for study and potential use in... something. She doesn't know what. Compost, if she can't figure out anything interesting to do with the scraps.

The lower number of hyenas for pets is kind of sad. She does make a point of finding some often enough, and giving pets and scritches and treats to the good boys and girls.

The bandits do not do any murders overnight while Iovetra is looking. 

Weeds: burn! They are absolutely average rooted weeds. Their remains are useful for anything she wants burnt river weeds for. The river clears and flows more rapidly, and the irrigation channels again fill with water.

The cave woman becomes more comfortable with Iovetra over the next few weeks. The food is clearly doing her good, though nursing the baby not so much. She eventually starts trying to get a few basic words across — her name is "Afra", the cliffs are "cliffs", the fire is "Gift", and so on.

Good for the bandits, but: she's watching you guys. Consider getting some goats to herd in the mountains, like real humans that are contributing to their own maintenance, instead of whatever this is.

See, but the weeds could have had some neat latent properties that she could tease out with careful application of vampiric magic! You never know unless you check!! Admittedly it would have been better to check before she killed them with her vampiric powers, but, you know, still.

Iovetra is amenable to learning the language the hard way! She gives her own name (Iovetra), and then with the help of some stick figure drawings to get her point across, what her species is. (Vampire. She's a vampire.) Otherwise, yeah, she'll be the one to learn Afra's language instead of the other way around, the woman has kind of enough to deal with without 'also learn a foreign language' being added to that list. This doesn't mean Iovetra's language lessons are particularly fast or get very far, in those next few weeks; she's both not very impatient to learn the language, and busy doing other things. But it does mean she can speak and understand a couple words, like "Hello," or "Goodbye" or various small numbers.

The caravan breaks down, and she assists them. Hyenas come and go to the oasis. The moon waxes and wanes and starts to wax once more.

The baby grows. Iovetra never gets to see it, but Afra does attempt to get across that his name is Uday.

And eventually, about six weeks after she arrived, Iovetra will note that something has changed in the village! It's not immediately clear what exactly it is that has happened, of course. Her gradually improving grasp of the basics of the language does not suffice to figure out what everyone here is saying. There's definitely something happening, though, and the villagers are clearly a mix of worried and enthusiastic.

... Concerning? But if the villagers are enthusiastic along with worried, then, well. Okay? She hopes it works out for them?

Anyway, she's got a tiny cave family to feed, so while she's concerned and attentive about the Something that is Happening, she has bigger priorities. Like acquiring food for a human without overhunting the local rodent population, stealing enough eggs to be noticed and missed, or neglecting important nutrients valuable to a mother who is breastfeeding. And she can only do any of this foraging at night, because otherwise she'll burn to death in the sun, with this comparative complete lack of cover! Look, she's a busy vampire, okay, if the Something that is Happening wants her to care about it, it'll have to make itself more apparent than ambient village anxiety.

And about a week later it does, from an unexpected angle. Are there any animals within Iovetra's castle? What is the nearby desert wildlife's impression of that area?

There are no animals within, no - which is admittedly rather strange, it'd make such a good hiding place from the sun, and there's an entire garden of potential food, right there, near the outside, only contained in a glass garden. There are even vines of what look to be some kind of rose, growing on the outside, perfectly available for something to nibble on, but they're untouched. The opinion of the local herbivores is that there is something odd about those plants, something that might be poison, and none of them have worked up the bravery to venture to that particular lair.

The desert wildlife thinks there's a new predator in the area. It has a wide hunting ground, and is faster than any hawks they've ever heard of, and it rips its prey out of the ground from its burrows. It leaves only the smell of a strange, clean death, and no bones for scavengers to pick through. Traces of blood aren't even left, the prey is just gone. A ghost of the night, is the consensus, for it is entirely nocturnal.

Also, the castle itself is alive, and can be touched by Daine's wild magic, if that's relevant. It's a strange living thing, its mind echoing through the stone walls and veins pumping with some kind of strange magic, but it was a wolf, once.

That is interesting! Is the castle happy with its lot? Any objections to being a castle? She can share the feeling of the wind in its fur and the moonlight on its back, and she offers to spin that into a dream for it to revisit whenever it wants. Even if it is happy, it might miss being a wolf sometimes.

There is a ponderous pause, like the slow grinding of gears. The mind that comes is strange, and the voice that matches it is stranger - it doesn't have the power of the divine behind it, but it is not a living thing of flesh. It does not seem unhappy with its lot, and there's no longing for something else, and no response to the offer of the wolf-dream.

"... You are not my mistress," is the reply that comes.

It's a little confused by the offer (why would it wish to be something it no longer is?), and the strongest emotion is a sort of - guarded nature, a wariness towards the unknown. There's a feeling that it failed, before, and it will not fail to strange magic again. "I will not let you inside my walls."

Well. If it says so.

An hour passes before the next oddity.

Chirp! Chirp! Roughly how does the outermost level of magic on the castle work?

Well, you see, it is a living magical creature, and its walls are strengthened magically, and can move as muscles on a stone beast. They're not moving right now, though, they're braced and prepared for repelling hostile magic, entry, or some other attack.

Also?

"MOOOOOM."

(The castle does not literally say 'mom.' But this is the flavor of its alert to its mistress.)

Hmmm. Fine. No poking that way.

...are there any illusions on the castle? Is there anything invisible?

There are no illusions on the outside of the castle. Nothing outside is invisible, either.

Anything inside the castle is NONE OF HER BUSINESS, thank you.

Elsewhere, a vampire abruptly stops where she was listening to the village. She returns to her coffin, and gets to asking her castle what, exactly, is happening.

"IDK something's poking at my walls and I don't like it!!!!!!"

Poor castle. She pats one of its walls, soothes it by telling it that it's doing great, and then goes to look out a window in the directed location to see what exactly is poking at her castle's walls.

A thirty-inch-long... baby lizard with a crocodile head?... sits on a curled-up tail, whistling and chirping at the walls of the castle. Nothing visible seems to be happening.

"Make it stooooooop, I don't like it!!!!!"

She's working on it, it'll be okay, if this creature continues upsetting you, she will threaten it with violence. Pat, pat, you're a good castle, she loves you very much.

These windows can, in fact, open. Her castle is understandably hesitant to open the window very far, what with there being a strange thing outside poking at it, but Iovetra reasonably points out that it doesn't have to open a window far enough for the little - creature? - to get through.

"Hello!" calls Iovetra, through the tiny crack in the window, carefully staying out of the ray of sunlight. She is using some of the few words she knows in the native language. "Stop!"

She'd say please, but, well. She doesn't know the word please in this language yet.