Fern’s jaw hung open as she stared at the other girl. While the redhead was desperately trying to process what she was just told, quietly stammering “s-s-six h-hundred…,” Claralell was plodding on, trying to brush it off like the fact that she was a fossil was no big deal.

“Oh, I know. I don’t look it! But I can assure you that despite my age, I’m still as lively as ever!”

Fern finally found her voice and choked out a reply, “Y-you’re kidding, right?”

Claralell’s brow stitched together and she started twiddling her fingers almost self-consciously, “Well, no. I really am that old.”

Fern was about to argue and accuse Claralell of messing with her, but suddenly it all started coming together for her. The instruments, the paintings. It takes years to get decent at just one instrument, much less a dozen of them! Then add her skill at painting to that, and it only makes sense for her to be older than she looks. And did she mention that she only picked up painting ‘awhile ago’ but was already at such a high level?! How long is awhile to someone who’s over six hundred? Twenty years? Fifty?!

Fern’s head was spinning as she tried to logic out what was going on. She blinked when her vision was suddenly filled with pale blue and lilac and shrieked a little, rearing back and almost falling off the stool. Claralell was looking concerned, “Are you okay Fern?”

Fern opened her mouth to say yes, but what came out was, “Are you a vampire?!”

Claralell looked like she couldn’t decide whether to burst out laughing or be dumbfounded. She settled for forcing both down and being serious. She reached out and gripped Fern’s hand before the other girl could pull it away and looked dead in her eyes, pale blue to deep green.

“I am not, nor have I ever been, an unholy creature of the night.”

“B-but you’re SIX HUNDRED?! Almost SEVEN HUNDRED!”

“Well I didn’t get this way by getting bitten by some fiend, that’s for sure.”

“Then…how DID you get like this?”

Claralell frowned before sighing, “Can we talk on my bed? It’s more comfortable than a stool.”

Fern nodded and let herself be pulled yet again into the bedroom. They sat side by side on the bed for a bit before Claralell spoke up, “You know, it usually takes awhile for a friend to ask about my age. I can probably count the number of others that asked on their first visit on one hand.”

“…How many people have you brought here?”

“A lot. I’ve lost count though.”

“…So you’re really not a vampire?”

“Heavens no! Do I look like some nosferatu to you?”

“A what?”

Claralell put her hands up to mimic claws and barred her normal human teeth, “Nosferatu! A beast, an unholy demon! The silent film based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula that was almost destroyed? It’s highly influential!”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Clarallel huffed and crossed her arms, “Kids these days.”

Fern had more questions than she could count. How did Claralell get here, how did she become immortal, what was it like six hundred years ago? But she wasn’t sure if she should ask. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to know. Claralell was clearly the type who liked to talk about herself, but she was oddly quiet right now.

“…Are you okay with talking about this?”

Claralell’s brows raised in surprise before she covered it up, waving nonchalantly, “What? Why wouldn’t I be?”

“N-Nevermind. So, can I ask you some things?”

“Anything that I know that answer to, I’ll tell you.”

“You used to be just a normal kid, right?”

“Yes.”

“So how did you get here? To the Moon, I mean.”

Claralell sighed and stretched, laying back on the bed and looking at the ceiling. “It was a very long time ago. Back then a girl was expected to get married when she was twelve and have twenty children before she died at thirty. Most people, girls especially, didn’t know how to read, write or do math. Ninety-nine percent of the population were just stupid, ignorant people walking around in each other’s filth.”

Fern’s nose wrinkled in disgust.

Claralell continued, “I’m not really sure how it happened. I was going to fetch water from a well that I’m pretty sure gave my brother dysentery a few years later.”

“You had a brother?”

“I had four. Hated the whole lot of them.” Claralell looked over to Fern, “You’re lucky you don’t have any siblings. Mine were all a bunch of stupid brutes.”

Then she looked back up and kept talking, “Anyways, so I was fetching water from the well. When I looked into it, I noticed that the water wasn’t normal, that it was black as ink. At first I thought that some fool had dumped something into our well and I leaned in to try and see what was in it.”

“And then what?”

Claralell scoffed, “One of my dumb brothers came up from behind and pushed me in as a joke!”

“He pushed you down a well?!”

“It wasn’t a deep well. I would’ve been fine if it hadn’t turned out that the well was actually the Gate. Heaven knows how it showed up there or why, but in retrospect my brother pushing me in before it closed was the best thing to ever happen to me.”

“So that’s how you got here….”

Claralell nodded.

“So how did you get….” Fern waved her hand, “You know, immortal?”

“I’m actually not sure about that part. But I supposed what caused it was that when I first showed up here there was some food that the original owners left behind. It was all some strange stuff, I didn’t know what it was. But the Gate had closed behind me and left me stranded here, so I had no choice but to eat it until I figured out how to operate the Gate. And by the time I did, I found that several years had passed on Earth and I hadn’t aged a bit.”

Fern looked at her worriedly, “That…must’ve been a shock.”

“I found out from some people that my family chalked my sudden disappearing down the well to getting spirited away by fairies or something like that. Also that most of my family had died of the plague.”

“I…I’m sorry.”

Claralell waved her off, “It happens. Back then people were dropping like flies. I would’ve been more surprised if they were all still alive.”

“Still, they were your family. What about the ones that survived?”

“Two of my brothers. They’d grown up and had their own families by then. But it’s not like I was very close to them in the first place, and what was I supposed to say to them? ‘Hello brothers. Tis I, you’re long lost sister. By the way, I’m immortal now!’”

Claralell groaned, “This was in the thirteen hundreds. You thought I was a vampire, so imagine how that would’ve gone over in those days.”

Fern grimaced, “…They probably would’ve burned you alive.”

Claralell nodded, “Exactly. And I’m not even sure if that would kill me!”

Fern still had so many questions she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to know. But before she could get another one out, Claralell shot up straight and started pulling her off the bed, “Come now, let’s stop with all this depressing talk. The past is the past, and now is now! And right now, I want to show you the rest of the house.”

So she dragged Fern to the other half of the rooms. Fern could tell that Claralell clearly didn’t want to speak of it anymore, and as much as she wanted to ask more questions, she decided to refrain. For now.