What had not been luck was the length of her survival. It had been a while. She’d been… pragmatic was the word her sire liked to use. Sure, she was stuck in a horrible situation being used as food for a monstrously evil vampire, but the alternative was dying. The alternative was this monster draining someone else, and likely not being so careful about leaving enough to leave the victim alive. Yes, she was suffering, yes she was technically empowering a monster, but, well. He’d eat elsewhere anyway, and most importantly, she wanted to live. A horrible, wretched life was better than none. Probably she hadn’t put much stock in there being a comfortable afterlife, or maybe she was just a stubborn, spiteful bitch. It’s not really clear which. Both are plausible.

Either way, this meant fighting tooth and nail to stay alive. This meant asking politely if she could please have access to fresh water, and eating the horrible garbage that passed as food to a vampire that had long since forgotten what mortal hunger involved. This meant sensibly working out a schedule for how often she should be drained. Not for her comfort, of course, but for lengthening her life as much as possible. She would hold still and let herself be bitten, so the puncture marks on her neck wouldn’t turn into larger gashes if she tried to thrash away. After a while, his aim had gotten perfect enough to re-puncture the same marks each time. Less to heal over, that way.

Her sire spoke fondly of how she was even gracious enough to clean her neck, before and after the forced bloodletting. This likely was more for concern of infection than actual consideration of his preferences, but she never corrected him. There wasn’t any point, and this sort of affection did result in her second and immortal life.

Because when she inevitably did start to actually die (from infection, obviously), he decided he liked her enough to turn her. There were other reasons besides those, he thought she’d do a better job at keeping human victims alive, and she’d been pliant and practical and knowledgeable. She would make a fine servant (slave, really, but he preferred the term servant), a pet alchemist and a lovely vampire homemaker, keeping the human cattle alive and juicy for her master. Figuring out and making potions for him while he did more important things than measuring out exact ratios and caring for finicky and temperamental plants.

It’s a pity that he was right. Her memories of her early years of immortality are dreamy, confused things, but it’s clear enough that she was an excellent slave. The typical haze of bewitched adoration and enforced loyalty to their sire that most young vampires are trapped in saw to that. She didn’t have any chance of being anything else from the moment she awoke in her coffin. Even with her half remembered knowledge from another life, she was intelligent and insightful and naturally inclined to hard work. She was never one to stop trying to improve, both herself and the systems she played caretaker towards.

So she readily took care of the poor souls unlucky enough to replace her in the dungeon, and frankly did it much better. Fewer were lost to infection or other sickness, to malnutrition or suicide. Water and waste buckets were changed regularly, food was scheduled and fairly nutritious and reliable, the cells would be cleaned. Injuries, whether self inflicted or not, would be treated. Statistically speaking, the numbers were much better.

Of course, her master still killed them. Accidentally, by draining them too far, or too often despite her warnings, or purposefully, if he’d tired of their taste or found a better candidate. He’d begun by telling her she could have them for herself as a method of disposal, but then she’d done the naive and silly thing and let them go. Turned out to the mercies of the wilderness wasn’t much of a mercy, but it was all she could do. Then he’d patted her on the head and mused about her silly kindness, and told her that she couldn’t ever do that again. And then she couldn’t, anymore. Because it’d put him at risk, see.

So she hadn’t. It’s a twisted thing, the bond between sire and their turned. Concern for his safety really did factor in first, and she really had been sorry to have risked revealing the location of his lair with her silly ‘mercy.’ Instead the victims who had lost their luster just died. Still mostly by her master’s hand, but occasionally by hers. Never by draining them, though. She didn’t have much desire to partake in their blood, and besides, poison (if one got the dosage and type correct, anyway) was more merciful than a bite and blood loss.

It’s sort of strange, to have little scraps of herself poking through the haze of madness. She made a point to always drink from animals, even rats. Actually, especially rats, they bred in sufficient numbers around her master’s crypts that she felt that she might as well do pest control while she was getting herself a meal. As she understood it, vampires that were strange enough to prefer animals usually preferred them wild and spirited. The taste, and the power gained from draining them, was better. She’d noticed this herself, but she didn’t particularly care. Why would she need to be stronger when all of her work was in a laboratory, or in a dungeon? Why care about the taste of blood when she was so dissociated from her body? Especially considering the necessary time investment for a potential payoff. One long and tedious excursion of running around in the woods for hours chasing blood scents until she maybe found something that might be worth it. Or not. More often, not. That's how it went, hunting in the woods. Sometimes there just wasn't anything worth the time investment.

Sex was both better and easier, anyway. A nice distraction without all of the necessary footwork, and with much more chance of the desired result. Her sire wasn’t terrible at it, all things considered. He really did like her, his convenient slave-alchemist. Keeping the homestead tidy and organized and the blood and potion vessels full. She’s pretty sure he considered her… something like his wife, by the end. Consort was the usual term, but he really did treasure her and think of her as part of himself. It’s why she outlived him.

He’d sent her to make him a secret safe haven. The humans had discovered a new flavor of magic, and the ever-simmering fires of discontent were flamed to yet another rebellion. He hadn’t been worried about that in particular, but the mess of troop movements and monster ravaging and general pillaging meant that no one would be likely to notice one little vampire slipping off to make a bolt hole for her master. In case of intrigue with other vampires, of course, not the silly pathetic livestock. She’d been taught the secrets of making a castle’s heart, the magical and powerful crown jewel of vampiric power and progress that made their half-living bastions near unassailable, and was sent off to make one. To offer up to him once this latest mess was sorted, a prize stolen from the drudgery of war, a quiet place for him to relocate his coffin to. Just in case.

Once her job was done, she would await his summoning, to her own coffin, bound to her blood and soul. From there, she’d lead him to their (his, really) new safe house. Until then, she’d sleep in what could be kindly described as a box, quieting her presence so much as to be invisible to anyone that might pass by. The castle itself was similarly beneath notice, a squat, overgrown thing, carefully nestled behind trees so old they might even be older than her sire. The perfect hideaway to await when all of this nonsense blew over.

Imagine her surprise and confusion when she awoke alone, in her coffin-shaped box.

It was the thirst that finally woke her; she was near-mad with it. More monster than man, in every sense of the word. She doesn’t remember what she ended up draining, it had certainly been a whole string of creatures, but it ended with her bent over an exsanguinated deer, trying to put together just how she’d got here.

Nothing made sense. This… was not how she was supposed to be awakened. Certainly not alone, vulnerable and starved and stranded in the bones of the long-dead castle that to her perception she’d just made. It had clearly been starved worse than she had, but that didn’t make sense either. It would have taken at least a century for it to use all of the blood essence she’d stored away to power it. Which meant that she’d been left in her box for that same century, which was just as bizarre. Her sire wasn’t one to just forget her, not for so long…

...But that wasn’t true, was it. Not when she reviewed the events that actually happened. She could remember plenty of times he’d said he’d be back at a certain time, and that certain time had slid and slid until it was a week, or perhaps a month later. It’s just that she couldn’t have held it against him. Couldn’t have held the information that he had anything but her best interests at heart in her mind. Couldn’t conceive of having any reason to be anything but perfectly loyal to him. Couldn’t really want things that were for herself. This implied that while her first assumption was based on a flawed premise, the idea that there was something more going on was probably true.

It’s just that the explanation was that he was probably dead. She… didn’t know how to feel about that.

Part of her almost wants to grieve. She remembered building her life around him, remembered loving him and serving him and being perfectly willing to die for him, if it came down to it. Now she felt nothing. Nothing at all. The other part of her, the logical part of her, took stock of her current situation and realized that she had every reason to hate him. Except there's no bubbling, simmering anger for the people she’d watched needlessly suffer. There's no horror at having killed some of them herself. No despair over the knowledge that she was now one of the monsters that had terrorized everyone she’d ever actually cared about without magical enforcement. Her own personal feelings aren't coming back in a great rush of stoppered emotions. She can guess at what they might be, if they were present, but they aren't. She's just… numb.

Perhaps the better word would be lost. She didn’t have anywhere to go, or anything to do, or any reason to do it.

Bereft of direction, she drifts back to the bones of the castle she had built for a dead man, where she’d awoken, starving and mad and blessed with the mercy of not being able to think. And now she could. It was a great and terrible thing, after so long without.

It occurs to her that if she wanted to die, this would be the perfect opportunity to manage it. There is no comfortable, barely perceptible tug of a coffin to catch her if she died. No place to reform herself and rise again anew. If she steps out into sunlight and lets herself catch fire, that would be it. She would be gone. But she's not sure if she wants that or not, and it seems awfully permanent.

Instead, she sits in the desiccated corpse of the place she’d given life with her very own hands, at the bidding of a man she now feels nothing for, and tries to figure out what she feels now. It's so hard to tell. The bones of the thing she'd created bring more reaction to her than her own misfortune. To her perception, it had just been alive, and now it was clearly long dead. She'd created it, and it had lived, abandoned like a babe in the woods, until it had starved, all alone. What happened to it didn't seem... fair. Or real. But there was its heart, desiccated and empty and dead, more real than anything in her head.

It hurts, seeing it like that. Distantly, she realizes that... she doesn't like it. She feels like she had some kind of connection with it. Or perhaps the better word would be responsibility. If it belonged to anyone at all, it was probably hers. Her master had never stepped foot in this place that she’d carefully picked out for him. He gave the order to create it, but he’d had nothing to do with any of the particulars. She had been the one to find where to nestle it, the one to build it, gathering stone and wood and essence with her own hands, the one to nourish the living castle’s heart until it beat strong and steady and filled with potential. And she had been with it, in a twisted sort of way, while it died, sleeping as the heart beat its last.

It's strangely comforting, to think that at least it hadn't died alone.

Right then. That settles that. No 'probably' about it. It was hers. Now to figure out what to do about that.

... Her first and immediate impulse is to try and rekindle the heart. Do her best to immediately remake the thing that was broken in front of her. But breathing life back into a dead heart is about as difficult as making a new one. Also a risk, depending on what sort of world she's woken up to. It might be very dangerous to draw attention to herself. Her master is dead, and she had no idea how it happened, or what risk she was under, or what the world was like at all. She's very vulnerable, and as her long slumber had so clearly demonstrated, a castle heart without a master to feed it was doomed.

She definitely wants to, though. It's the first thing she could really properly feel, after so long thinking through muck. Just... she needs to be smart about it. It wouldn't undo this death if she were to bring it back, only to get it killed again with her short-sightedness. It'd just be another disservice. Another wrong on the great, unsorted pile at her feet. There are more than enough of those for her taste as it is.

Out of sheer sentimentality, she reaches out to the cold, grey crucible that had once overflown with power. The once-heart, now an inert hunk of rock. It was long cold; any faint traces of magic had dissipated decades ago, probably.

"Sorry," she tells it softly. She's not sure if she's apologizing for its death, or for not immediately jumping to attempting to bring it back. Either felt like an injustice against it. Maybe she's apologizing for both.

Then she stands and begins trying to figure out how the world had changed while she slept.

The woods are... different. She hadn't had the cognizance to notice it, when she'd awoken half-starved in its depths, but this place had been fundamentally changed. It feels... wild now. Cursed, maybe. Magic saturates the life around her in a way it hadn't with the dead castle's heart. Unnatural chilly mist clung to the space between trees that looked a bit more twisted than they once had. Some had even sprouted thorns. The trees themselves, not the foliage that covered them, though that wasn't particularly friendly, either.

Neither were the creatures. Before her slumber, she'd been able to drift past the native wildlife without any trouble. They'd noticed her, certainly, but most animals wouldn't dare purposefully tangle with an obvious predator. These ones, though? Oh, they dared. They more than dared. They seemed to be of the opinion that she could be hunted.

This was a mistake. Whatever changes these creatures had gone through, however they'd ceased to be ordinary animals in favor of twisted monstrosities made to kill, she was still a vampire. Vampires had access to magic, and she had enough knowledge of its use to get by. She was unarmed, but her nails could be claws, and her claws were quite sharp. Even without them, she could use the magic fueling her existence to directly summon blasts of energy to destroy anything that tried to kill her, or to teleport herself a short distance away from danger. It meant she'd need to eat sooner rather than later, but that was clearly not going to be a problem. These creatures lived and bled like any other, and they tasted better than rats.

And also, it was... pleasant, to destroy them. A nice exercise, and fulfilling work. Usually creatures weren't this rabid; they just wanted to live, the same as anything else. But these maddened monsters seemed to live only to kill. There was no desire to build a den to sleep in, no instinctive drive for the future. Just fight, and kill, and eat, and spawn more to do the same. Weapons of war, perhaps, who had slipped the leash and bred out of control.

She roams around and kills enough to get a good feel for her surroundings, and for how truly isolated she is. It begins to dawn on her that she is well and truly isolated from everything but the extremely murderous local fauna. Apparently, the spot she'd picked was a damn good one. The most noteworthy neighbors were to her south; a rather ravenous nest of spiders. They were vicious and bloodthirsty little things, but they had a more organized nest than the other hapless monsters that were roaming around. There was a swamp with a concerning amount of ambient magic to the east, but nothing obvious and dominating as another castle heart. Just... a lingering magical mist that made her a little nervous. It would be good camouflage, though, as long as she made sure her own castle stayed small and economic. Honestly, it was a better spot to hide a living castle now than it had been when she'd first came here, however many centuries it had been since she slept.

And she did want to get started on that castle heart sooner rather than later, for more reasons than sentimentality. At the moment, she's very vulnerable. Without a proper coffin set up, she's vulnerable to death and the same sort of domination her sire had her shackled under. Death was not so scary as a new enslavement. Not that she'd be as easy to ensnare now while awake as she had been when she was still turning in her first coffin, but the fear is still very fresh. The safest place to put a bit of herself to retreat to would be behind living castle walls. It's not like she was going to be particularly hurting for power to feed it, here. Without anything to immediately threaten it, with a lovely layer of ambient mist flavored magic to conceal it, and with the proof that this spot had already protected her so well for so long... well. She didn't have any more reason to delay.

She doesn't have a complete understanding of magic, but she does know that life is one of its greatest sources. This power of life fuels her in undeath; she drinks blood to live, but it's the power in that blood that she's really being fueled from. Vampires, being a carefully balanced and elegant creation, are built only to take that fuel from that direct source. But she can only be so full. So: whenever she killed things by means other than draining them personally, she was wasting power.

Or she would be, if she hadn't been taught to catch, convert, and compress it into a more easily stored form called blood essence. This blood essence then goes into a little glass marble, and steadily fills with glowing red power as more is poured into it. Each one holds many dozens of lives' worth of power on it before it starts getting close to 'full,' so they're quite efficient. She can't use the collected essence personally, not after the conversion, but it was better than letting it go entirely to waste. Besides, it was exactly the sort of thing that her castle would eat. Castle hearts were designed to gather up all of the unused power that a vampire couldn't use, in the name of efficiency. Blood essence was just the one her sire had taught her, for this very reason. As she understood it, all kinds of things would get dumped into the castle's heart to fuel it, it really wasn't very picky. Waste not, want not, and all. An efficient vampire is a powerful vampire.

With this power, the castle heart would give something like life to the things connected to it. This usually meant doing all sorts of tedious things that a vampire lord would find beneath them, like sweeping, cleaning windows, weaving cloth, tanning hide, or smelting ores. More complicated tasks, like her own specialization in alchemy, were harder to have a living castle do, but not necessarily impossible. It just required a longer list of instructions, and more power to fuel it. Her master's castle had taken over her duties when she'd gone to make his sanctuary; it couldn't come up with anything new like she could, but it could follow recipes just fine. Not that she was going to ask it to do anything complicated and obvious anytime soon. That could potentially draw attention, and she still doesn't have a particularly good feel for the world she's awoken to. But enchanted walls that refuse to fall, and doors that refuse to open to anyone but her are straightforward enough, and not particularly obvious.

Creation of a living castle requires a living sacrifice. As she understands it, the consciousness is not transferred, but the spark is still necessary. One cannot make a truly living thing from only dead materials, or so her sire had said. Maybe if she had more time and education, she could figure out a better way to give a castle heart its life that involved a bit less blood sacrifice, but, well. It's not like her sire had sat her down and explained the theory so that she could come up with something involving sacrificing plant life to bring a castle to life. Still: she is not wanting for materials to work from, here. There are still plenty of ravenous maddened monsters running through these misty, twisted woods. It is, as far as she can tell, a mercy to give them stillness.

She grabs one shaped sort of like a large wolf, and she drags it to the dead heart that she'll make beat again. Then she pins it in place, and channels magic into its heart while it writhes and struggles to either bite her, or escape. When the foundations of the power centralized in the heart have been correctly shaped and look stable, she then rips it, still living, out of the creature. The living heart goes floating above the worn stone pedestal that held another one, ages ago, and she continues feeding it magic and building it into the proper shape. This heart is for this place, it is connected to this place, its body is one of this stone and it might not breathe, but it lives all the same. The tiny spark is fanned with the collected essence she's gathered, growing in size and in power strength, until at last it is an inferno, and will live without her.

... That was more unpleasant than it had been last time. The whole... ripping the living heart out of a creature, thing. Yes, yes, it really seemed to be made out of murderous rage and pain, and she was definitely going to kill it anyway, but. Still. She doesn't particularly want to continue magical research in this vein. It's... upsetting.

She doesn't regret doing it, exactly, but. She'd really rather not do it again, either.

Anyway. Now that it's alive, she's going to see to there being more than just a pedestal with a glowing heart with rivers of blood essence flowing around it. Kind of obvious, that.

A lot of the walls are still here from when she first built them, even if they're not exactly in the best condition anymore. She extends the 'body' of the living castle out to them with a twist of will, then collects stray stones to fill in the many, many cracks. With a castle heart to direct the materials, she can crush the rocks to dust with her hands, and have the rubble fill and reform into unblemished stone. This is more magically expensive than setting up something for cutting the stone into proper shapes and then moving it there, but she did most of the work already, and she was never after anything large and imposing. It won't even be as large as it had been when she'd slept; then her sire had wanted properly functioning infrastructure and an impressive hall and a place to keep prisoners for their blood. She does not want anything so ambitious, at least not yet. A little stone mausoleum, to house her even smaller coffin, with a sturdy door. That's all. For now, anyway, she could always add more later.

She then surveys her work.

... Hm. Not as obvious as the glowing castle heart, brazenly sitting out in the open, but. The pale unblemished stone is still a bit too ostentatious for her liking. Can she... extend the heart's claim to plants as well, have something to cover the walls to make it look as abandoned and overgrown as the rest of it...?

With proper visualization and understanding of the flora she wants, from cuttings and seeds of the same, why yes, she can. It's an expense to make vines grow with magic, but she has rather a lot of blood essence stored up. Most importantly, they're not notably magical once they're there, and they really do help disguise her little sanctuary. More green in a great sea of greenery and mist, instead of pale, unblemished grey, standing out against the rest. Also, they're kind of pretty, and she can arrange them however she wants. Being pretty up close won't change that they're good for camouflage at a distance, but it will make her happy.

Next will be the coffin. This will be more of a time investment than the living castle, and it's a bit more dangerous. See, she was never exactly taught how to make herself a new coffin to bind to. It's just... something vampires are able to do. Are designed to do, actually, as a safety precaution. But only with one. She wouldn't have been able to manage it at all, if she were still tied to the one she'd been turned in, but clearly it's been destroyed. The bit of her soul that had been tied to it has returned to her, and everything's regenerated back. In theory, she can just... rip it back off and tie it anew. So, she'll just do some educated guesswork about a process she doesn't fully understand, involving her own soul, and if she messes it up, she will possibly rip it apart and maybe actually die. Or drive herself mad or something. Cheerful.

Why does she want to do this again? Oh, right, she wants to continue to have free will.

As it is now, she could be directly ensnared if someone managed to subdue her. At least with a coffin, she would only be ensnared if they subdued her and found her and stuffed her back in her associated soul box so that all of her was there to dominate. She's aware from her somewhat spotty education that access to the magic soul box isn't a free ticket to domination. There wouldn't be enough there to bind her. Just enough to give her a place to run to if someone tried, or if someone just directly destroyed her body so thoroughly she needed to reform. In theory it could maybe give someone else the ability to summon her, because her own master could summon her to a coffin, but... she thinks... that had more do do with how she was already bound. She'd been summoned to her coffin before, and it felt like... like he was using the piece of her to tell the rest of her to voluntarily return. Which she doesn't think was out of kindness or affection or anything, because she'd sometimes take a bit to stop what she was doing in order to properly come when called. It annoyed him. He absolutely would have directly dragged her back if it were an option, self delusions of love be damned.

At least, she thinks. From her current and incomplete magical knowledge. Look, she's going to have to do so much research, okay, it is no longer acceptable to just take her master at his word and agree to stay focused on what he found convenient for her to learn. But, thinking through this logically, her sire had a coffin. He wasn't himself bound by anyone. Vampires lords were themselves the ones to design the things they'd eventually become. It would make sense if it were easy to bind a newly created vampire, but not so easy to bind one that's running around with free will and in multiple places and having opinions and whatnot. That's just... logical. So it's probably how it works. She thinks. Maybe.

Regardless of all of those terrifying experimental bits, she does in fact need to at least make the stone box that will become her coffin. Off she goes, to gather up stone with which to shape it. It will, at the very least, be a prettier coffin than the one she turned in.

Some more ruined bits of the ambitious predecessor castle get knocked to pieces, and those pieces get dragged back to her little mini-castle. Then, she considers if she really wants to have her soul box sitting out here, in the comparative open. Or, for that matter, if she wants to do her risky and vulnerably self soul surgery out here, in the comparative open. Sure, there's a set of walls and a door in the way, but. ... She's got more self preservation instincts now. So. Time to not have any of this happening out in the open. She removes a bit of floor and begins the tedious and unpleasant process of digging out a basement. The castle heart can't help her with this; the dirt and rock and whatever else is down here isn't predictable enough to let the castle do the 'thinking.' And, since she doesn't know exactly what's there either, it's kind of hard to tell it where its 'body' is. At least with her knowledge, it'd be super expensive and possibly easy to detect with magic. There's probably a better way to do this than just directly digging it out herself with her hands, but, well. She doesn't know it. So. Digging in the dirt with her hands it is.

After she's dug out a basement, she drags the collected rock down to properly give it walls and a floor. This is done with a mix of directly moving it into place with vampiric strength and having the castle heart reshape the details to get everything tidily sealed. Soon enough, she's got a plain, unadorned room, and a set of stairs leading down. A proper and vain vampire lord would then probably put some kind of fancy locking mechanism over the stairs, but she doesn't have the technical know-how to make something complicatedly mechanical, and something magical would be obvious. So: she makes a stone slab, big enough to only be moveable by vampiric strength, and puts it directly over the staircase. The whole thing can just look like a perfectly ordinary bit of floor. If it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid. With a bit of artful decorative patterning in the stone floor, it even blends in perfectly well.

Then she hops down into her dark little basement with all of her planned soul experiment materials, and drags the stone panel back into place over the entrance. It's pitch black, but she's a vampire, she doesn't use light to see. Her eyes literally glow in the dark.

So, she doesn't see how he could reasonably have dragged his coffin all the way from his then-current castle to the sanctuary he'd planned to put it. To match, he'd also given her a list of materials to gather that weren't allocated to anything in particular. Therefore, he was probably going to remove his bit of soul from the one he was bound to, and then make another one in the appropriate location. She thinks this would have worked, if he'd had the knowledge to avoid ripping his soul up too much. And he probably did, since he made and bound her.

The materials he'd asked for are her first hint about how to proceed. He'd asked for three diamonds, of a very specific size and quality. One large, two smaller. When she'd asked why, he declined to explain, and instead condescended to her about how she would see soon enough. (Ugh. Prick.) Fortunately for her, the passage of time didn't damage the ones she'd already found and cut. They're still available for use, and thus, in the basement with her. Then it was bones, and blood essence, and wood and stone. Only the former is really indicative, the latter three might have just been for general building materials if he took issue with her design choices.

Her second hint is her knowledge of her own previous coffin, and of the empty coffins her sire kept around 'just in case.' She didn't make any of them, but she could... sort of feel what hers was doing. And also, you know. Literally see it, inside and outside. Combined with seeing the inert coffins, she thinks she has a decent shot of remaking it from memory, with a bit of (or a lot of) trial and error. It wasn't particularly complicated in its construction. There was definitely an ivory material of some kind, alongside the stone, which with her earlier information was probably bone. The bone seemed to mark the boundaries of where her body would be created, and... did something for rebuilding it... which she can't exactly describe, but could recognize the shape of. The diamonds, she thinks, are something related to containing the bit of soul. There was definitely something in the coffin that held the bit of her that was there, and she'd never gotten a look at it, but it was relatively small and centralized. There being three diamonds is a bit confusing, but... maybe it'll start to be obvious as she works.

She makes the coffin itself first, without any of the complicated and risky soul business. It's harder than it looks, and takes a lot of trial and error. She needs to leave to drain something to replenish her magic stores to keep trying, until eventually, she has the hang of the enchantment right. It... looks like it did. Magically, anyway, the design of the structure itself is much prettier and more tasteful. The enchantments, the important parts, feel the same. It feels... secure and like it would be restful, if she were just connected to it.

It is not clear how to be connected to it.

Damn. She was kind of hoping this would become more obvious once she had the coffin in front of her.

Right, well. Three diamonds, and her soul. The big one is... probably for holding the bit of her? But she's got no idea what the other two could possibly be used for. It would probably be smart to lay off the maniacal self soul experimentation until she has a better understanding of what's going on, but...

... A vampire can live through the destruction of their coffin. The bit of soul tied to it dissipates, but... she think the soul will heal, given time. Hers did. So long as she doesn't do too much damage to herself, she thinks it will ultimately be okay. Or maybe she's just trying to justify the thing she already really wants to do, because she does not want to get dominated again. And would, in fact, rather accidentally kill or maim or drive herself insane in this basement of hers than risk that happening. So. Yeah. She guesses she is going to be doing this very stupid thing of hers.

Her teleportation magic involves a bit of soul manipulation. It's more like pulling her physical form in to her soul-self for a bit, and then moving, and then releasing it back out, but it's still soul manipulation. It involves a lot of only focusing on the shape of her soul, and nothing else. And... she's teleported both when tied to a coffin, and now that she's free, so. She should be able to perceive which part of her soul-self was what attached. This seems like a promising line of investigation, at the very least. For a while, she spends time teleporting back and forth, getting a good feel for the shape of her soul, and comparing it now to what it had once been. It... definitely feels like there's more there than had been before. And the part that's there is fairly obviously... other. It's her, but it's her like a, a. There isn't an equivalent body part to describe it, like a something-that-could-be-detached. If she could remove her own hand and then still move it after, maybe.

She should probably be more hesitant about this. But it feels like she's tugging at the thread that would cause this whole cloth to unravel, and she can't leave it undone. This is a thing she can figure out. It hadn't occurred to her that it's been so long since she's had a good puzzle to solve, it's all just been 'make this potion work better' or menial labor or the like. It's retrospectively obvious, that she was bored out of her mind, but apparently she'd gotten used to it. Now she's a starving woman who has tasted food for the first time, and for the life of her, she cannot put it down.

The detachable bit of her soul is detached in record time. It's not difficult or painful, clearly this is what it's meant to do. It then fits ever so snugly and perfectly in the large diamond, like blood essence in a glass marble. The diamond loses its clear color, instead taking on a teal glow. Okay. Big diamond accounted for. Now what are the little ones about??