He never stopped staring into the middle-distance, even as the wood creaked and warped under the weight of... whatever Valerian was.
He felt the familiar heat rise within his breast, the urge to strike him down where he stood. That had been the objective, right? That had been his sole goal during their petty little proxy war.
But despite the flash of anger, the burn it engendered, it was distant. Separate. It didn't motivate his limbs any more, or his voice. That kind of passion was linked to a heart, and a soul. There wasn't much of either left within Guillaume d'Anjou.
"Maybe I'm not even here, Val," he rasped out, taking another pull from the bottle, not even looking at the other vampire, before he passed the bottle wordlessly. "Maybe I'm a ghost, haunting your life and reminding you of exactly what you've done."
He paused.
"Maybe I'm just a monument to all of your sins."
He sat quietly after that, looking out over the water, his feet moving with the wind. And, not for the first time, he remarked to himself about how very little spurred him on now. How the tiniest iota of emotional response flickered out.
"Or maybe I'm just a shadow," he said. "A reflection, a refraction, against the light that you seem to e casting so very brightly now."
He smiled, his lips pulling back ovr his teeth, but there was no humour there.