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Chapter Text

Here he was again.

Hector lay in the bed he normally shared with Isaac. Alone today, because Isaac would not be back at the castle for at least two more weeks. It was the time of the harvest and this time brought with itself the need to oversee what was happening outside.

Originally Hector had wanted to be out there. This year he had wanted to go out there as well. But his body, well, his body disagreed. He was sick with the flu. Again. He had started to be optimistic that all the stupid exercise that Striga had had him do had actually made him less susceptible to sicknesses, given that he had not been sick since January. But of course, his life could not be that easy. Of course it had to come now, that he wanted to be out there.

He sighed, shifting his position in bed.

It was just a flu. He got those a lot. Stuffed nose, fever, headache, scratchy throat. He was glad it had not brought coughs with it. All he could do, really, was wait it out. Normally he should be fine within a week. This was day two already.

He just hated to be the one staying behind again.

Funny, wasn’t it? He had done his best to not leave the castle unless really necessary for about five years now. And for once he wanted to be outside. Because… Because he had realized that staying inside was not making his life any better.

He had survived. Back then he had survived. And it was a waste to survive, only to act as if death had already happened.

Trying to find a good position to lie in, he rolled around once more, grumbling to himself.

He hated just lying in bed. Especially with a headache such as this, that made it hard to read or focus on anything constructive. Yes, it was just for a couple of days, but… He just wanted to do something. He had spent too much time doing nothing.

At some point, he doze off again. Waking up some time later just after sunset to a knock on the door.

First, he thought he had imagined it, but the noise repeated. A clear knocking.

He blinked, wondering who it could be. “Yes?” he tried, finding that his voice was too hoarse. So, he drank a bit before repeating: “Yes?”

Saying, that Hector was not surprised, would’ve been a flat out lie. He might have expected Astrid, Rüdiger or one of the night creatures. But not her. Not Morana.

Even less, he would have expected her to carry a tray with some supper, clearly meant for him.

He looked at her, unsure what to say.

It seemed, that this feeling was mutual. She put down the tray on the night stand, sighing. “I… assumed, you were hungry by now,” she said.

He blinked. “I… I am. Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” She stood there with an awkwardness that once upon a time Hector would not have expected from a person more than a millennium of age.

Yes. This was awkward. He had spent much of the year so far trying to, well, actually befriend her. And she had played along. Mostly for her wife’s sake, he knew that. She had been less hostile, than she had been those last three years. But this… Well, this was new.

He pushed himself up, taking the handkerchief he had gotten himself earlier, to blow his nose. Then he actually looked onto the tray. There was bread and chicken soup, with some vegetables swimming inside.

He could not help but smile.

And she noticed. “As far as I am aware, chicken soup helps your kind when you are sick.” She said this stiffly, still standing there.

Meanwhile, he did not comment. Because he knew that she knew this quite well. She kept acting as if she was so far removed from humanity. But she actually understood quite more about their species than she usually admitted to.

As she was still standing there, he paused. “You… want to stay and talk a bit?”

For a moment, she paused. Then she slowly nodded. “Yeah. Why not?”

She pulled the one chair in the room over to the bed, sitting down on it. When he took the bowl of soup over to himself, she just watched him.

At least the soup was still very hot and felt nice in his throat. And given he had not eaten since breakfast, the bread as also quite welcome.

“You miss Striga, don’t you?” he noted, after eating in silence for a while.

Another sigh came over her lips. “I do.”

Again he looked over to her and managed a smile. It was fascinating to him. Their love was fascinating. Four hundred years. They had been together for four hundred years and yet they would be yearning for each other if they would spend just a couple of days apart.

It was sweet, really. Though to this day he did not dare to say this out loud towards her.

He continued to eat, the soup making him feel a lot better. “When I was sick after… After Lenore had enslaved me. She brought me soup, too. Soup and bread.”

A thin smile showed on Morana’s lips. “Yes. I… I do remember that.” She looked at him for a long moment. “Well, I mostly remember her and Carmilla arguing about it. Because Carmilla wanted you to work and Lenore was insisting you were in no state to do so. They literally screamed at each other for a whole hour.”

Now it was Hector’s turn to sigh.

The last few months had helped to untangle those messy feelings just a bit. But he could still not make any sense of what it had actually been that had motivated her – that had motivated Lenore. Why had she cared for him?

The thought still made his heart twinge just a bit.

“Did… Did Carmilla really not understand it?” he asked, while dipping some of the bread in the rest of the soup. “That I was human, I mean. That I…” He shook his head. “You know, on that march from Braila to here. She forgot that I needed food and water. That I was also close to freezing to death. That for me – other than her – the cold might actually be fucking deadly.”

Morana did not answer this immediately. “I am honestly not entirely sure,” she said after a while. “She knew. She had to know. I mean, I knew. And I do not claim that I understand much about your kind.”

“Fair enough,” he muttered.

Morana watched him, as he put the empty bowl back onto the nightstand. “I am honest with you. I do not know, what motivated her to treat you in the way she did. I think… I think she was unwell at the time. I think she had been for a while in fact.”

“You don’t say.” Hector could not help the sarcasm in his voice, though it also forced him to clear his throat, as it was scratching again. He filled his mug with water, drinking from it again.

Even he had seen that Carmilla was not “well”. And by now he knew bits and pieces of the way, only that he did not quite understand it in detail. He knew she had lost a lot. He knew that she once had been taken advantage of, had been abused.

And recently, thinking about it, there were times when he could feel pity for her.

The silence filling the air between him and Morana now, quickly grew awkward. Because it turned out that even after several months now it was still quite hard to talk to her. Ironic, kinda. He had always assumed that someone so old would get less emotional – but it seemed quite the opposite. Morana was quite emotional and easily put into a bad mood. And Hector did not quite knew how to deal with it.

There were things that she was reacting badly to, and he had not quite figured out what those things were.

Yet, like him, she was trying. Otherwise she would not be here, sitting by his bedside on this late summer evening.

For a moment he was considering this, was considering the thing he had been thinking about for a while now. And in the end, he dared to speak up about it. “There is actually something I wanted to ask of you.”

“There is?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. I… You know how I have been trying to write this book, right?”

She scoffed. “The book where you got nowhere with.”

“Yes, that one.”

“The book about unhappy vampires.”

She was still sore about that one, wasn’t she? One of the few things she had ever read from it.

“Yeah, the one about unhappy vampires,” he admitted.

Another scoff. “What about it?”

“I have figured out why it is getting nowhere.”

She waited for that explanation and he sighed, followed by another harrumph, as his throat was still feeling swollen.

“See. My… original idea was to write down what had happened. About the mistakes we made. And how the death of one woman would lead to the death of thousands and the suffering of even more. I wanted to write about my role in all of that and…” He had to take another sip from the water, his voice not liking how much he was talking right now. “I realized that I still am not quite sure about it. My role.”

“You were Dracula’s little pet forgemaster,” Morana commented.

“That is not what I mean.” He took a deep breath. “I still do not understand what exactly has happened back then. And why it has happened. All I can do to try and understand Dracula is to talk to the man’s son, of course. But…” He forced himself to look into Morana’s blue eyes. “You knew Carmilla. And I want to understand her.” A sigh came over his lips. “Admittedly not only for the book.”

Morana once more was silent for a few seconds, until she said: “Why Carmilla? Why not Lenore?”

Slowly he shook his head. “I… I am not quite there yet. To deal with that. Right now… Thinking about Lenore still hurts.”

“And thinking about Carmilla doesn’t?”

“No. Not in the same way.” Once again he looked at Morana directly. “I understand what Carmilla did to me. I do not understand why she did it. But I understand what she did. It was… easier to understand.” He closed his eyes, trying to hold back the tears now welling up in them. Really, when had he gone from never crying to crying over the smallest things?

Another awkward silence fell between hem, before Morana slowly nodded. “I… I guess. What exactly would it be, that you want to know, though?”

“The things that lead to…” He stopped himself. “The things that made her. How Carmilla became… Well, the Carmilla I got to know.”

Morana just watched him, as he was sitting there. Then she sighed. “I… I think I understand.”

“So, will you do it?” He knew she was quite protective of her sisters’ stories.

She shook her head. “I… I don’t know. I… I need to think about it.”

He nodded. “That is fine,” he muttered. “I could not write right now either way. So… Take your time.”

Chapter Text

The boy was right about one thing, of course: Morana really missed Striga. Which was deeply ironic. Striga was gone for five days now, would be gone for at least two more weeks, and she was already yearning for her wife. It seemed that the world was just a lot less warm, than it was with her around.

What really was five days when one was as old as Morana was? It was barely more than the blink of an eye. Yet… She did not quite understand it herself. She did not quite understand those feelings she had for that woman. When she had fallen in love with Striga, it had happened fast. She had been in love with other people before, but as far as she remembered – not that her memories of the time were very tangible – it never had been like this. But finding Striga… It had been like finding a piece of her heart that had been missing for all those centuries before.

But the truth was, that she did not ever want to miss this part of her again. And that because of it, she as willing to do quite a bit for her. Even this.

At least that was the best reason that Morana could give herself, as she had another tray filled up with a bowl of soup, some bread, some cheese and a jug filled with tea of thyme. She had brought the boy food for the last few days, because… Mostly because it was, what she was rather certain her wife would’ve done, had she been here right now.

Even now Morana was struggling to understand, why Striga had taken to both the boy and the self-crowned king. Why she had even started to actually care about the humans.

Yes, she had to admit that the boy was not as stupid as she had taken him to be. She would, at times, also begrudgingly admit that he was, indeed, a person. Maybe not as much of a person as a vampire would be, but a person with complex thoughts and feelings either way.

She didn’t like him. She wouldn’t like him. But she did not hate him either. Not anymore.

Once again she made her way with the tray up to the third floor where the room was located that the boy usually shared with the self-crowned king. She nodded, wondering why she even cared that much.

Only then she realized, that there was already more than one voice inside. “Yes?”

She frowned, before opening the door and stepping inside, finding two other humans sitting on the edge of the bed.

The boy, too, was sitting. He was better, would probably be entirely good within the next two days. Because human bodies were slow, but still surprisingly capable of regenerating.

He smiled, when he saw her. “Thank you,” he said. “I really was getting hungry by now.”

She scoffed, while one of the two humans was groaning.

“What did I tell you, Hector? You should just ask, when you need something,” the female human said.

Morana had seen this human hanging around the boy for a while now. She was maybe a bit younger than the boy, had golden hair and dark freckles on her skin.

The other human sitting here, was a male. About the same age. His hair was brown and his complexion in general just a bit tan. Something that told Morana, he probably was working outside a lot.

“I know, I know,” the boy now said. “I… I just knew that Morana probably…” He looked at Morana, how could not quite help a growl.

Maybe she really should not be doing this. Maybe she really…

It was the human male clearly visiting right now, that only slowly seemed to realize who she was. She did not even need to sense him to notice the fear rising in him.

It made the boy sigh. “Well, you… You know who Morana is, right?” He tried another smile. “Morana, these are Astrid and her husband, Bernd.”

Holding back another scoff, Morana sighed. “A pleasure.” She did not mean it and they both knew it.

“You can stay for a while, if you want,” the boy offered. “We were just… talking a bit.”

It was fairly obvious, that the two other humans were about as keen about this idea, as Morana felt. And yet, at the same time, she knew exactly, that it was what Striga would’ve done. Because Striga was so different from her. Striga was… Well, she was warm.

It was ironic, really. While only being about a quarter of Morana’s age, Striga was more powerful. She had more strength, more vampiric abilities. She could easily kill almost every human in this darn castle without it even posing a challenge to her. Yet, the humans had stopped fearing her. Instead it was Morana, they feared. Morana, who could easily be outmatched trying to fight more than a few humans at once.

She sighed. “Sure.”

Once more she pulled close that one chair, sitting down on it, though keeping just a bit of distance from the two humans. Just as the boy was taking the bowl of soup from the tray, she looked over to the human female. “I know you,” she noticed. “You are working the kitchens.”

The human looked at her and gave a rather humorous chuckle. “And there I thought that all humans looked the same to you.”

Morana did not reply to it.

Once upon a time they only had vampire working the kitchens – but that was a time, when the only humans in the castles would’ve been prisoners. A time, that the self-crowned king quite drastically put an end to.

“Yes, I am working in the kitchen,” the human now said. “My husband is mostly working the orchards outside.”

“I see.” It was the parts of the food production, that Morana had not really worried about for a long while. Hells, she had not worried about human food for most of her ancient life.

“They had come over to keep me some company,” the boy now said. “Because it turns out…” He looked over to the window, as outside heavy clouds were hanging over the valley. “Well, it turns out, that it can be quite boring sitting inside all day.”

The irony most certainly did not pass the female, who started to giggle at this. “Ah, yes, the little princeling learns the value of actually going outside.”

And for a moment – just a very short moment – Morana had to fight to keep that grin off her face.

“You should be back to health within two days or so,” she just said in the end. “Then you can go outside and… play with your little horses again.”

“I bet that Cornuet is waiting,” he muttered, once more looking at the window. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

***

There was another irony to Morana’s life as well. It always had been her ability to read other people’s emotions.

She just had to stretch out that additional sense of hers and would be able to know exactly how any other person sharing a space with her felt.

Memories of those first hundred and fifty years of her life were not really something that existed. Just vague images and things like that. But she knew that when she had been chosen to rule with the other vampires back then, it had been her role to both make peace and to judge. It had been her communicating with the humans. She did not remember any of them, but she knew it had been her role.

It was the ability within her bloodline. An ability that Laura once had possessed, while Lenore never had fully developed it for some reason. Maybe, because she had been too scarred up from what had happened in her human life – and on her travel to Styria.

But yes, Morana’s ability was to talk to people, to understand them. But all it had done was make her despise other people. She just could not go out there, be around those people, those simple people of Styria. Those humans or even those vampires. She could not do it. She could not even say why.

She was old enough to have learned to block out those feelings. The emotions she sensed. She could block them out, only feeling them when she wanted to feel them. But still, being around those people… It was tiring. It always had been.

And so, over the years, she had interacted less and less with the people outside their council – and now that council was gone.

At times she envied Striga, who would go out there and talk to the people so easily. Who would just speak with them, laugh with them, and at times be able to support them even. Striga had always been from a warrior bloodline, but somehow she understood the feelings of the people – human and vampire alike – so much better than Morana had ever been capable off.

And as two more days and nights passed by with Striga still being out there with the self-crowned king, Morana could not help but think about what the boy had asked her. That request she had not understood either.

Carmilla.

He wanted to know about Carmilla.

And her instinctual reaction to it was anger. It was to claw off his face. Just as it had been with Lenore and the bit they had told him about her.

When it had still been the four of them, they had not shared their stories with those normal vampires, let alone any human. It had been their stories, that they would only tell each other. Their stories that only the four of them could understand. It had been their shared pain and shared triumphs. Their stories, that nobody else was privy to.

Striga, of course, she had been so much less guarded about it. Striga had so readily shared her own story with now several people here. Morana knew that both the boy and the self-crowned king knew of Lazarus and how Striga had killed him to win them the realm. She knew that those two humans had learned about that human life of Striga’s, too. And so had at least that winged night-creature, and some of the soldiers.

But even Striga had understood, that she could not share her sisters’ stories. So she never had done so. She had kept that secret to herself.

Of course, they were dead now. Lenore and Carmilla were both dead. It was five years, almost six now. A blink of an eye to Morana, yes, but to the humans and even the young vampires it was quite a long while now.

And Morana did not understand the human boy. Why did he want Carmilla’s story? What would it bring him? He would be incapable of understanding it, right? Incapable of understanding Carmilla’s rightful anger at this world she had been born to. Incapable of understanding the cruelty that had been once inflicted upon Carmilla.

She scoffed, as she imagined talking to Striga about it. “He has a right to know,” Striga would probably say. “He has a right to understand it.”

“How can he understand it?” Morana then would reply. “He is only human!”

“Because he, too, has suffered. And he, too, has been angry. Just like Carmilla.”

“He is nothing like Carmilla,” Morana then would say.

“You are right.” Striga would chuckle at that. “He is more like Lenore. But Lenore had understood Carmilla, hadn’t she? She had at least tried.”

And at that point Morana would have to admit, that even she had never quite understood the anger eating up Carmilla’s soul. And Striga would know it. Because they both had never quite grasped it. That anger and hatred. It was, why in the end they had failed to help her. To help their sister.

They should have done so. They should have helped her heal. Carmilla had deserved to heal. But somehow… Somehow they had failed her just as much as the rest of the world.

But realizing this did not bring Morana an answer to that question, as she was lying in the bed too large for just herself. She was not even able to sleep without her wife around.

She did not want to tell the boy about her sister. She did not want it. But maybe, just maybe, Striga would be right – if Morana had asked her. Maybe the boy deserved to know. And maybe… Maybe him knowing would let something good come from all of that pain.

Chapter Text

Being outside again was balm to Hector’s soul. And yes, he did understand the irony quite well. But, as in many other regards he had to admit, that Striga was right and that listening to Striga ended up being somewhat helpful.

Now, that he was up and about again, the flu having passed, he had been outside with Cornuet for almost the entire afternoon. They had gone down to the other side of the valley, where the river was running. And while Cornuet had grazed there, Hector had laid down in the grass, reading a bit and just enjoying the fresh air.

As so often, though, it also had been a humid day. A day almost begging for a thunderstorm. Though so far, the sky was clear, as Hector was riding back up to the castle.

Overhead, the sky had turned red and was already purple in the east. But he felt good today. And it seemed that Cornuet was in high spirits, too. Hector could sense it. So, maybe Striga was right about that, too. The horse actually liked him. His horse…

The castle gates were open as they were on most days when he arrived, so they made their way over to the stables, where Hector glid of Cornuet’s back. He was already fairly good at riding without a saddle, though given their ride had been several miles in the end, he knew his thighs would ache the next day.

“Want a snack?” he offered the horse, going into the storage room next to the stables.

Of course Cornuet wanted, munching up the apple offered to him rather quickly.

With Cornuet back in the stables, Hector went up to Isaac’s office to pray. He was already late for it, but given he had still not quite figured out his own believes, he did not particularly feel bad about it. It was about the meditation first and foremost, rather than an actual prayer. He tried to pray. He did by now. But he was not quite sure how to even go that. Thinking those pleas made him feel silly. Thinking about thanks did, too. Never the less, he tried.

Only afterwards did he go to the dining hall, as he had not had a warm meal so far. He was talking with some of the younger vampires, who were up by now as well. And once he had eaten, he returned to the chambers normally shared with Isaac, only to jerk and stand still in the door when he found Morana sitting there on their sofa.

For a moment the two of them just stared at each other. Then Hector cleared his throat. “Good evening. I did not expect you here.”

She gave a dry laugh. “Neither did I.”

He walked over to her, sitting down on the sofa, though with enough room between the two of them. “What brings you here?”

Not replying instantly, she gave a sigh. “I have thought about what you have asked. Carmilla’s story, that is. And I… I have decided.”

He did not want to appear to silly, repeating what she had said. So he just stared at her.

“I will… I will tell you some of it,” she said. “Not because you deserve to hear it, but because Carmilla… She deserves to be understood. She deserves to be seen as more than a villain of history.”

“Alright.” He did not know what else to say. “Thank you.”

After she looked at him expectantly, he paused. “Now?”

“I would say rather now, before I change my mind,” she replied. There was something in her eyes, that he could not make sense of. Still, he nodded.

“Let me fetch my stuff from the library.”

“Sure.” She tried a smile and succeeded somewhat, before he turned to quickly run over to the library – even though it was half the castle away.

Still, these days he was fairly quick on his feet and managed to get there in a short amount of time, grabbing the tome he was usually writing in, as well as some ink. He still had quills in their chambers, so one less thing to balance, as he made his way back.

He was lightly panting, as he arrived back at the chamber door, relieved to still find Morana inside.

“Alright,” he said, as he went over to the sofa, putting down the book on the low tea table next to it. Then he went to fetch those quills, having to sharpen one, before he could dip it inside the ink. “I am ready.”

Again, there was a very thin smile on her lips, before she sighed. “Admittedly, I do not even know where to start. Because Carmilla… Carmilla is complicated.”

He waited, whether she would say anything else, before prompting: “Since when have you known her?”

“The year had been 1064,” she replied. “That was the year I met Carmilla and Striga. Though the year was almost over when we met. It was… late October, I think, though it might have been early November. All I know is that there was already a lot of snow and that travelling had become hard, when we arrived here.”

“So you met in this castle?” Hector asked, while writing down some of the sentences.

“Yes. We met here…” She sighed. “In our wonderful fairytale castle.”

Unsure of what to ask – or whether he even was allowed to ask – he waited for her to continue, though she was silent for at least a good minute, sighing once again.

“It is ironic, really. I feel at times as if I know more about Carmilla’s story, than I know my own.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Because I do remember her story, while my own… There are so many parts of it missing.”

He looked at her.

It was strange to him. But living among the vampires for so long now, he had started to be able to recognize their age to some degree. Not only did older vampires have this “aura” – there really was no better word to describe it – but something about their faces just… shifted. Sure, he could vague tell that Morana had to have been in her mid-twenties, when she had been turned, but her face did not look like that any longer. While it bore the outwards signs of youth, there was also something else in it… Maybe it was her eyes. Her eyes looked ancient.

“You really do not remember your own story?” he finally dared to ask, and Morana shook her head.

“I… I know where I come from. I know of the kingdom I was born in. I know how society was organized there. I know how I became a vampire. But I do not remember it. It is more that I have told the story so often, that the knowledge did not get lost. But… I do not remember the faces of the people that lived there. Or their names. All I remember is short glimpses…” She shook her head, then frowned, so clearly only now realizing what she had been saying and who she had been saying it to.

There was a long pause, before she sighed. “Carmilla’s story… It was not that long ago. Not in the way I understand time at least. And while I have not been there for all of it… I understand it better than my own.”

Hector was silent. He would have loved to ask about her story as well, but he was not sure, how she would react to that. Still, one thing he could not help. “I imagine it is hard… To live for that long, I mean. I… I cannot even begin to imagine it.” He did not look at her, rather looking at the parchment in front of him. “You were alone for so long, weren’t you?”

She did not reply, just sighed.

Once more silence fell between them, until she said: “You have to see, we told our stories to each other over and over again for this reason. To not forget. To not forget who we were and where we came from. To not loose ourselves.”

“Does that happen?” he asked. “To vampires, I mean.”

“At times. Though only few get old enough that it can happen.”

That he knew. Most vampires did not live more than ten years after being turned. It was rare for them to reach a hundred years. And even of those who did, most died within the following centuries, only very few reaching even half a millennium. Striga had told him that much. Those who did not die in battle, would choose the sun as some point – or just dwindle away, after they had stopped to feed.

“We promised each other though that it was our stories. We would not tell anyone else. Because we were…” She stopped.

“You were the ruling council. And you were above everyone else,” he muttered.

“In a way, yes,” she replied. A sigh came over her lips, then she looked at him. “You have to understand that Carmilla was very hurt. She had been hurt again and again in her life. She had been betrayed again and again. That was, what made her angry. Because whenever she thought she had something worth fighting for, the universe would just take it from her. Again and again.”

He looked at her, his mind making a connection to what they had told him last winter. “Like Laura?”

She paused, then nodded. “Like Laura.” She shook her head. “Striga keeps comparing Carmilla to that self-crowned king of yours. But… She knows that there is nothing to compare. I am not even saying that your little boyfriend has had a nice life until he came here and took everything from us. Or that you had, for that matter. But it is nothing compared to what Carmilla went through. Or Striga for that matter. What you went through you had to endure for, what? Two decades. Carmilla’s life… It was like that for centuries.”

Now Hector put his quill to the side, sensing that she needed to first ramble about this, not quite able to put her thoughts into coherent words. “But she was… I mean, she had this castle. This realm. You,” he said.

“And even that got taken, didn’t it?” she replied bitterly.

He sighed. “I mean… I could tell, that she was not entirely happy. She… She made that quite clear.” It was still a miracle, that he had not sustained lasting damage from what she had put him through in the month until they had arrived here.

“She was not.”

“And… from her ramblings I was able to gather that her… issue with the world was men,” he said.

“It was. At times. But not really,” Morana muttered. “It was the world itself. It just so happens that this world as it is right now is run by men. But I doubt…” She stopped, shaking her head. “She was hurt. She was hurt a lot. When she arrived here she…” Another pause. This time she frowned. “She arrived here like you. A prisoner. A slave. Only that other than you she was not quite aware that she was a slave. Because she had been tricked.”

Now he could not help a bitter comment: “So indeed like me. Only that she realized the trick a bit later…” Probably on the basis of not getting beaten to a pulp every other night in her way to the castle.

Morana looked at him. “In a way… Yes, in a way I assume that you are right.”

Another silence fell between them.

“It is hard for you to talk about this,” he finally observed, and she nodded.

“It is.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel like I am betraying her. That I am betraying Carmilla by telling you any of this. Because you are a man. And a human. And you… You should not deserve her story.” She sighed. “But… as I said. She does not deserve to be the villain of the story either. So… I guess someone needs to tell it. And someone needs to preserve it.” She looked over to the window, where the sky by now was dark. “Because even I will not live forever…”

Chapter Text

In the end, Morana had mostly rambled about her sisters, about the bond they had shared. She never quite used the word “love”, other than Striga, but Hector had still known that was, what she had meant. Morana and Striga both had loved their sisters, both in their own way, and he had to assume that it had been at least somewhat reciprocated.

He knew Lenore had loved them. Because she had been unwilling to betray them in the end. She had loved all three of her sisters, though he still did not quite understand what their relationship had actually looked like.

Now he was sitting here again. In Lenore’s room. A room still left unchanged since the day of her death, because… Well, he was not quite sure himself. They had not changed Carmilla’s room, either, of course. Isaac kept saying there was something ill lingering there. As if Carmilla’s hatred had infected each part of the room.

He sighed, looking at the painting of Lenore on the wall. It had been put up here a while ago, and he was pretty sure it had been Striga who had put it up, though she claimed to know of nothing. But Striga knew well, that both he and Morana came here, both of them dealing with the loss of Lenore in their own separate ways.

He did not want to hurry Morana with Carmilla’s story, of course. He was thankful she was willing to tell it to him either way. So, who cared if it took three nights or four months. Morana for certain had the time – and frankly, even he could spare that time.

A part of him could not help but wonder if Lenore could’ve been saved. If Carmilla could’ve been for that matter.

Even now he had not entirely untangled his feelings for Lenore. It was why hearing about her – about how she had been with her sisters – still hurt. Not because the thought of whatever she had been outside of those not quite three months they had known each other, but because thinking about her in general still hurt. Especially if he did not do it on his own terms.

He had accepted what had happened to him. Had tried his best to accept it somewhat at least. Just as he had accepted, what he had done. He had killed. He had killed many. And either of those things – his own suffering and the one he caused – did not somehow balance the other. All of it had been misery and there was no undoing it.

Yes, he had accepted it. Or he was trying to accept it. But Lenore… Thinking about her was still confusing him.

Because she had hurt him. She had. And because he had loved her, still. She had betrayed him and he had betrayed her. She had died. And he had felt at once a great relief and a great sadness. And all of that was so hard to make sense off.

No matter how hard he tried to just accept everything, he could not wonder whether there could’ve been a version of events, where she had lived. By now he knew, that in that night that Isaac had freed him, Striga and Morana had been here, by the castle. And they had decided to not intervene knowing Carmilla was already dead and had assumed the same had to be true for Lenore. They had not been willing to give up on any potential future together and he was thankful for it now. Still… If Striga could’ve somehow saved Lenore, if she could’ve somehow gotten her out… If just, somehow, Lenore did not need to die…

“You really are a lot like her…” The voice almost made him jump, as he turned around to find Morana there.

“What?” he asked.

“You are a lot like her,” she repeated, her face neutral. “And I hate to admit this.” For a moment she hesitated, then she went over to him, sitting on that sofa next to him, looking at that painting herself.

Hector sighed. “Striga keeps saying so.”

“And she is right,” Morana muttered. Just a hint of a smile appeared on her lips. “I really hate to admit it. I hate it. But she is right…”

He did not reply. Because, yes, it had been something that Striga had talked about a lot. How Lenore, like him, had loved the animals and had cared for them. How she would find injured critters in the forest and bring them home. How she would never like the killing, that their lifestyle as vampires would entail. And how she would not leave the castle, unless someone else made her.

The silence between them was long and rather awkward. It was the first time, he realized, that Morana had sat with him here, in this room. They had met each other here before, yes, but they had never interacted with one another, had never talked.

“She felt bad for it, you know?” Morana now said, making him turn his head.

“What?”

“She felt bad for what she did to you,” she replied.

“How do you even know?” he asked.

“You forget that I can sense people. I sensed her. She felt bad. Though she tried to suppress it.”

Once again he was silent, not knowing what he was even supposed to say about this. Because even if it was true… What good did it do him? What good came from it, if it was like that. It did not undo his hurt. Though…

“I never thought of her as evil,” he whispered. “Of course not… I… You know that I was in love with her, even though I do not quite understand those feelings myself. But it was love. In a way.” When she did not answer he added. “It was different, than it is with Isaac. The love… It felt different. But it was love, of that I am sure. I was in love with her.”

“I… I know,” Morana said. “Striga keeps talking about it. About how…” She did not dare to look at him directly. “How in a different world you might’ve saved each other.”

“Yeah, Striga told me, too.” It was strange to think about. How things might’ve changed if they had met under different circumstances. And be it just if Carmilla had just convinced him to come along to Styria. If he had met Lenore not from inside a literal cage, after being beaten up and almost frozen to death for a month before. “You know, the irony is… by the time she slid that ring onto my finger, I had already fallen so deeply for her, that it would not have taken a lot to convince me to do… basically anything. I would’ve made that army of monsters, if I had just…” He stopped, slowly shaking his head.

“I thought you wanted to go home?” Morana said. “Was that not what you told Carmilla?”

He sighed. “At some point… I did not really care. I wanted freedom first and foremost. I mean, my ‘home’… It never had been much of that. It was a place where I lived. With my animals. But…” A somewhat bitter smile found its way onto his lips. “I did not realize it back then, but this place now is the first time I actually feel ‘at home’ somewhere.”

Now it was her turn to be silent for a long while. He could see her mind working, though, could almost sense her thinking. “Say Carmilla would not have treated you like shit,” she finally said. “Say you came here in a somewhat respectable manner and Lenore would’ve just… done her thing. Your little boyfriend still would’ve attacked. What would you have done?”

“I honestly don’t know.” He pursed his lips, once more looking at that portrait of Lenore. Where she was standing. Dark blue dress, a white fur coat over her shoulders. “It depends on so many things. You see… All the time getting beaten. The time alone in the dungeon, too. It gave me too much time to reflect on all the wrong things. And I felt guilty for having betrayed Dracula. And while I was trying to come up with a plan to escape, I got contacted by… Well, I guess it was Death itself, who contacted me. But… You have to understand, before Isaac saved me, he and I were never really friends.”

“So, why did he save you?”

He stared at her, surprised that she had never gotten that bit of information. He almost felt like laughing about it. “Oh, he did not come here to save me. Not originally. He came here to kill me. He wanted to take revenge on me for betraying Dracula.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No. He had time to reflect. So he did no longer want revenge.”

“But yet he killed Carmilla…” She sighed now. She shook her head as well. “Don’t get me wrong. Your little boyfriend talked at length about this. He is…” She stopped.

“He is like Carmilla in that regard,” Hector finished that sentence for her. “All-too willing to regale you with his philosophies for hours.”

Admittedly, he jerked, when she chuckled at this.

“You are… not wrong,” Morana muttered. “In that regard they are alike.”

“But… yeah.” He paused. His gaze glid over to his left hand, where the lost finger had long healed into a stump that only hurt when the weather was shifting. “I think… If Carmilla had not mistreated me the way she had done, I do not know whether I would’ve started to feel bad for betraying Dracula. I think… part of it was just that compared to Carmilla, he suddenly seemed reasonable to me. And that made me feel bad for betraying him.”

“It does not answer the question, though,” Morana observed. “What would you have done, when your little boyfriend arrived here?”

He thought about it for a long moment. “I think I might have fought. For you, that is. For Carmilla, even.” Again his eyes were wandering the room, looking over to that picture of Lenore. “At times I am wondering, whether the reason I fell for Lenore was just, that… I was in a very shitty situation and she was the only person nice to me. But I liked her humor. Talking to her was fun. So, I’d like to believe that even without all of that… I could have fallen in love with her.”

“She was easy to love,” Morana said.

“She was, yes,” he replied.

Again silence fell between them, though this time for not quite as long, as Morana spoke up again: “She cared about you. That much I know. She cared about you. Enough to get into at least one really bad fight with Carmilla about it. She really wanted you to have a good life here.”

“She never understood why I wanted to be free,” he muttered. “She kept telling me about how there was no true freedom in the world and that even the mighty were not free and all that.”

“Because she did not feel free herself.”

“I guess so,” Hector muttered. By now he knew, of course, that Lenore had been a prisoner for most of her human life. She had quite literally been the bird inside the golden cage. Which is why she could not take being imprisoned once more. Something he had not known. Isaac had not either.

“What really happened between you after… you know. After Striga and I left?”

Even though he did not want to cry, he could feel that by now familiar burning in his eyes. Because thinking about it still was hard. But because of the hurt, but because of the conflict in his feelings. “I still tried to make those creatures for Carmilla,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty darn sure, Carmilla would kill me otherwise.”

“She might have,” Morana admitted.

“I know. So… I tried to get my hammer to work to make those night creatures. And came nightfall, Lenore would come to the forge, bring me some food and talk to me. Usually at some point… We ended up going to my room. At times she would wash me. And then… We fucked almost every night until Isaac came. At times she would hurt me. And afterwards… we would often still talk, until I would fall asleep.” Every night. For a bit over six weeks. “At times it felt, that she just stayed with me to not have to talk to Carmilla. Because every time she did…”

“I think in a way, she enjoyed that she did not need to hide from you,” Morana muttered.

He stared at her. “What?”

“Lenore… She was never quite like the rest of us. She was a softer soul. She was less angry and more hurt… And I think she did feel like she didn’t need to hide it from you.”

“She hid it, though,” he replied. “She barely ever told me anything. Not about herself, at least. She was always guarded.” A sound, that he did not even quite know how to name, came over his lips. Was it a chuckle? A scoff? “We fucked every day for almost six weeks. And I never once have seen her naked.”

“Because of her scars…” Morana muttered and Hector could not help but sigh.

“Yeah. Maybe. Because she did not want me to know that hurt.”

Chapter Text

Somehow it seemed fitting that the sky over the valley had been clouded over, with thunder rolling over the landscape, though there was not yet rain or lightning.

They were sitting here, in one of the smaller studies of the castle, with the boy looking at his book rather than her. And she? She hated to admit it. Having talked to him just now there was a little part of her that could not help but feel sorry for him, to feel sorry for what had happened. A part of her that wished that those things now almost six years ago had gone a different way.

“You know,” he muttered. “It is alright if… I mean, I understand it. I do. You still feel accountable to them, so…”

“No. It is alright.” She closed her eyes, focusing. Because it was, as she had told him. Carmilla did not deserve to be remembered as a villain. Carmilla had been so much more than that. She had been…

“When Carmilla was a human, she was born to a merchant family. She… She always said she did not remember how many siblings there had been at total, but from all there were, only three survived. She and two older brothers.”

The boy seemed surprised, but then his quill started to scratch over the paper.

“She always said that her father had not wanted a daughter. I don’t know if that is true. But she said that. And she also said, that her older brothers were always treated better than her.” Morana looked over to the window. The sun had set maybe an hour ago by now, though the sky really was an inky black. “I think it might have just been the usual. We live in a world where in most places the life of a girl is worth less than that of a boy.”

To this the forgemaster said nothing, just writing, letting her ramble on.

“Well, I know that her mother died, when she was about ten years old. I do not know from what cause, just that it was a sickness. And I knew that they did not quite burry her properly, burning the body instead. Might have been the plague or something. I don’t know. Carmilla did not like to talk about it. All I know is, that her father started to drink after it and would go on and on about how useless women were. He would beat her, she said.”

The boy made a noise, but clearly kept himself from saying something. Though she could not help but look at him.

“What is it?”

“Just… Just that I know how that feels,” he muttered. “Having a father who drinks and beats you.”

She looked at him. A part of her wanted to take offense in this. In him comparing himself with Carmilla. But… Carmilla had been human back then, right? So maybe in that regard they had been similar.

“What I also know is, that her father died, when she was just seventeen,” Morana continued. “And her oldest brother became the head of the household. He decided that he did not want to feed her. Carmilla that is. He did not want to feed her, so he wanted to marry her off.” She obviously could only retell the story, how she had been told originally. She was never quite certain in which parts… Well, she knew Carmilla had not purposefully lied, but she also knew that memories would always be colored by emotions.

“You see,” she continued, “Carmilla was somewhat peculiar in that she… She loved women. She had always loved women. It was what she and me had had in common.”

Now the boy looked over to her. “When she was at the castle… She went on a long rant towards Dracula where she was speaking about fucking men.”

“She would fuck men, yes,” Morana replied. “But not love them. She said… At the time she had been in love with a miller’s daughter. That’s what I know. But of course her marrying another woman was not an option. So, her brother wanted her to marry a man. And he knew…” Oh, just thinking about this made Morana feel angry herself. “He knew, that Carmilla was pretty. He knew she was beautiful. So, he wanted to marry her off to some lowlife nobility guy owning parts of the lands they were living on. You know… Use her to gain an advantage himself.”

Again the boy was making his notes. His little notes, before he sighed. “I take it that she did not go through with it. That she did not marry him?”

“No. She ran away. She wanted to run away with her partner at the time. But… Things did not turn out that way. But she ran away. She fled to a convent and became a nun.”

Now the steady scratching of the quill stopped. “A nun?” There was disbelief in the boy’s voice.

“Yes. A nun.” She looked at him. “See, as a human Carmilla was quite the devout Christian. She really believed in God. She believed in all those things. She found purpose in it. And so… Yes, she went off to become a nun.”

A short silence spread between them. “Striga has mentioned something like this before,” he muttered, frowning now. “When we talked about hell. She mentioned that Carmilla had been a devout believer.”

“She was. She just lost… most of it,” Morana muttered, then sighed. “Most of us do, you know?”

“I know…” He was silent for yet another moment. “Striga said that, too. How… How pretty much every religion is clear about not killing. And most vampires kill. And at some point…” Another pause. “At some point they either choose the sun or loose their religion.”

“That is pretty much how it goes, yes,” Morana admitted. She could almost sense the coming question. A question asked without much thought behind it. Just an almost instinctual reaction to what was said.

“Were you ever religious?”

“I do not remember,” she said. “I think I was. I know that my people believed in a pantheon of gods. And they believed that we… That vampires had gotten their power through divine magic.” She tried to think about it, but those vague information on the society she had once grown up in was all that she could muster. She did remember the temples though. Big and beautiful. Impressive. Yeah, she did remember that much. A sigh came over her lips.

The boy waited though. He waited for her to find her way back into the presence.

“Carmilla had a messy relationship with it, though,” Morana said. “With her religion. Not just because she was a vampire. Choosing the convent was the one thing she could do to be ‘free’ from men, but the bible still preaches how women should be subservient to men and all those things.”

“Right,” the boy muttered, somehow also noting this down.

“But of course… A convent was also one place where she always would just be surrounded by other women. And hence would not be forced to fit in any expectations laid to her by men. There was another woman there she told us about. Rebekah. Carmilla said they loved each other. And the convent… it was a good place to hide a relationship like that, was it not? So… That was what she did. According to her.”

The quill scratched across the parchment for a bit longer, until he looked up. “And then she got snatched up by a vampire?”

As if the weather had waited for that question, lightning shot across the sky just a moment after he asked. The first raindrops started to fall down to the castle. Rather thin raindrops, but Morana could almost feel that it would be pouring just a moment later.

She sat there, remembering Carmilla. More than any of her other sisters, Carmilla really had felt like that. Like a sister. Because in a way Morana had understood her – and Carmilla had understood Morana the other way around. They had been different in so many ways, but yet the same in the important ones.

To Morana, Striga had been a lover first and foremost. She had fallen for that amazing woman almost the instant she had seen her. And Laura had been her fledgling, her child. Yes, after a while Laura had been something of a sister, but Morana had never been able to quite shake that different attachment. And Lenore, who in a way had always been so frail and pretty… Had she been more of a little sister or a child to her? Even Morana could not say.

“It’s not quite that easy,” she answered the boy’s question, just as the first heavy raindrops started to splatter against the windows in a crescendo of sound. “Because her sire… Hilderic… He had been a patron of the convent. He had shared knowledge with them, had gotten some food from them in return. He had ruled the region… He had ruled it differently from us. Making sure there were some protections, but letting the human rulers still hold the region partly. Keeping them happy. All those things.”

“Why didn’t you?” the boy asked.

“Because the human rulers were men,” Morana said. “And as men they would not accept the rule of four women.”

This made the boy look down onto the parchment. Sighing. “I guess.”

The boy guessed a whole lot. A strange habit of his to phrase himself like that. He was still fairly passive. In that way he differed from Lenore, who always had tried to assert herself. Sure, Carmilla never would have it – would never allow Lenore that self-assertion, but Lenore at least had tried.

“No, we had no choice. Either give up on our rule or take the region fully, implement a true kingdom, not just in notion.”

“Okay.” That was all, he would now say, his quill once more scribbling something down. “So, what did this Hilderic do?”

“Hilderic… Hilderic was a good actor. He was good at telling people, what they wanted to hear, to get from them what he wanted in turn…”

Once again lightning brought a sudden flash into the room. The boy did not even need to say what he was thinking. How Carmilla and Lenore had not been any different towards him. Manipulating him in much the same way that Carmilla had been manipulated herself.

“We vampires always knew Hilderic to be an ass, especially towards women,” Morana continued. “But of course, not all of the humans knew about it. Many only knew him as this charmingly strange man, who would come around often enough that it did not become suspicious that sometimes people went missing not long after he left. And he came to the convent often. So… I guess he just took a liking to Carmilla. To her beauty. And he wanted to have her.”

“Have her?” the boy asked.

“He wanted to own her. Because Hilderic could never imagine to actually be in a relationship with a woman. One that was build in respect, that is.”

“Well, Carmilla was not into men either way, right?” the boy replied.

“She was not. Not that way. But… Something she did not like to admit to herself was, that she wanted to feel wanted and powerful for once. So, that was what he would offer to her. But it was Rebekah, who looked right through it of course.”

The rain drops became even louder now. Hammering against the window so loudly, it was almost deafening.

“So…” The boy paused. “He killed her? That woman, I mean. Rebekah.”

“She… had an ‘accident’,” Morana replied. “Nobody ever knew whether it was him. But… Yeah, it is likely it was him.”

“And Carmilla did not see through it?”

“Carmilla was human at the time. About as old as you were, when you started to serve our dear lord Dracula. She was naïve. So, no. She didn’t. She did not see through it at all.”

“So… What happened?”

Morana sighed. Wasn’t it ironic. How what had happened next had led to everything else. To them living here. To her falling in love with Striga. To their little family and all else. But at times she wished it had not happened. Because she very well did remember that girl they had met in the winter their common story had started. That poor thing… And she wished that Carmilla would not have lived through all of that. “He asked her to marry him, become his wife. He promised her riches. He promised her power. And… Carmilla was too taken by the fantasy to even question it. So… She agreed.”

Chapter Text

The atmosphere in the room was chilly, especially with the thunderstorm outside. Hector looked at Morana. He could hardly imagine it. He could hardly imagine Carmilla being as painfully naïve as he had been. But then again… He assumed there were more than four centuries between that Carmilla and the Carmilla he had gotten to know.

He stood up. “Do you want some tea?” he asked.

Morana looked at him irritated. “Why?”

“With the thunderstorm it is feeling chilly. And tea is good to warm the body and the heart.” He went over to the fireplace of the room, thankful that there were some logs of wood there even in summer. He used a spell to light them.

Morana was silent for a long moment, before she sighed. “Sure. A tea sounds nice.”

He smiled. “Alright. Let me get some herbs and a kettle.”

In honesty, he was not quite sure why he took this break. Because he was thankful for the story, but he also felt like he needed just a moment to think about the things he had just heard. He needed a moment to imagine that human Carmilla.

It was the challenge with all the vampires, right? Well, at least all the old vampires, who had already lost so much of their humanity. They were still very human on one hand, yes, no matter how much they denied it. But they were also something different, something that was hard to describe. He was not even sure what it was. Maybe it boiled down to empathy or something like that. No, that wasn’t right. But then, what was it?

He pondered this question as he went to fetch some fresh mint, a kettle and water.

There were vampires who were still very human. He counted Wolfgang – who took care of the stables – as one of those. He had taken care of war horses as a human. Then he had gotten turned and had continued to care for the horses. For a good eighty years now. The only thing that had changed for him was that he no longer could go out into the sun and was dependent on blood.

There were others like Rüdiger, who upon turning had embraced their new nature, so glad to acquire the new skills and everything connected to it. Glad to feel powerful, too. Originally Hector had found the man disagreeable, as Rüdiger was prideful and despite his fairly young age of just about sixty years already was good at looking down onto humans. But he had found that the two of them could share a passion for the outdoors and the forests.

There also had been Lenore, of course… Who seemed so keen on denying her own humanity. There was no better way for him to phrase it. She had denied her humanity for some reason he did not quite understand yet.

Meanwhile, there also was Striga, who could be so human that even most of the careful humans had stopped fearing her. Which was still ironic. They feared Morana and not Striga, even though Striga was the more dangerous one.

Returning to the study, he found Morana still sitting there, watching him in silence as he put the kettle over the flames. He shot her a smile. “I am afraid I cannot offer any blood to go along with it.”

This even got just the hint of a smile from her. “I wonder… Did Lenore ever drink from you?”

There was still a very clear memory of this. “She did. Once. After Carmilla was already dead. Because Carmilla did not want her to drink from me. Lenore… Lenore kept saying that Carmilla was afraid Lenore would try and turn me.”

“Why would she do that?” Morana scoffed.

He looked towards the window, where heavy raindrops were still banging against the glass. “Because I was ‘fun’, as Lenore said it.” The thought made him shiver, because he never had found out what she had meant.

Maybe the truth was different either way. Because she had been lonely. Lenore had been like him in that way, too. Having the ability to be lonely while being surrounded by people.

Morana was silent, watching him, making him wonder whether she was sensing him.

“Would you have wanted it?” she finally asked.

In confusion he frowned. “What?”

“Her turning you. Lenore I mean.”

“I…” He found his gaze wandering again. “If she had offered it, I would have said ‘yes’,” he finally muttered. “But not because I would’ve wanted to be a vampire… Just because I wanted to be with her.”

“Even though she hurt you…”

“Yes.” He was relieved that the kettle started bubbling, taking it from the heat to put the mint into it, for it to properly infuse. Then he returned to the desk, dipping the quill into the ink. “I am sorry for the break.”

“It’s alright.”

The fireplace added more light into the room than the candles burning so far. With the cloud cover outside so thick, that no star or moonlight would ever reach them. There was still thunder rumbling in the distance, though it seemed that the eye of the storm had already moved on.

Another silence spread between them, before Morana sighed. “I need you to understand that Hilderic was a cruel man. While he was good at playing nice and agreeable, everyone knew he thought of pretty much everyone as a thing to be used either for him to gain power or to entertain him. Especially women. I mean… He was like most of us. He would fuck whoever and whatever he got a chance to fuck. But he liked to toy with women. He liked to break them. Bit by bit. Until there was nothing left of them.”

Hector swallowed, as he somehow could imagine what this could entail. “And Carmilla was supposed to be…”

“She was his victim, yes.” Morana’s voice was toneless as she spoke. “See, when he brought her to the castle, he made a game out of it. For a while he just kept her here, treating her as a princess. Not long, mind you. Just a few weeks. Giving her all the things she had not been given before. Attention. Fancy dresses. Good food. Just… him talking to her, as if he took her as an equal. And she enjoyed it. She did. She never wondered why he would always go out at night, or why most of the staff at the castle would work during the dark hours. She just… enjoyed being this princess for once.” She paused for a long moment. “And then, one night, he bit her. He turned her.”

“Against her will,” Hector concluded.

“Against her will,” she confirmed. “She… She did not understand what was going on. As I said, she was naïve…” Another pause, as outside there was another thunder clap rolling over the castle. “See, to Hilderic there were two kinds of women. No, I guess technically three. The kind that was easy to break, the kind that was hard to break, and the one he knew he could not touch. He liked the second kind the most. And had figured Carmilla was going to be one of them.”

Once again Hector could feel his throat tighten. Because… well… He had a vague idea what it might mean. “What did he do to her?”

“All sorts of things,” Morana muttered. “Originally, she did not want to kill. So, he forced her to. You know that fledglings require more blood. So, he let her starve until she was almost feral and then watched her kill. He liked… to present her some more… innocent victims. Children. Young women. And he made her kill them, until she was numb to it.” Slowly, Morana’s control of her voice was faltering. There was pain in it. An empathy he so far had not known from her. “And when she was numb to it… He would inflict other pain. A more physical one.” She let out a sound, that was as much as sigh as a whimper. With one hand she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

Hector got up, checking on the tea. It should be good by now. So, he filled two mugs with it, handing one to her.

He tried a smile, not sure if it was going to be understood right. But maybe it was, as she sighed. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” He sat back down, carefully nipping on the tea.

“Maybe I should not be telling you this,” she finally said, her voice still weak. “But what do you know of our bloodlines?”

“I know that there are vampire bloodlines and that within them can be certain… abilities,” he said. “Stuff like giving Striga just a bit better fighting abilities and you the power to sense people.”

“Yes,” she replied. “That is about… it. There is theories… No.” She stopped herself. “Some, including myself, are theorizing that originally vampires were artificially created to serve certain functions in society, as they did in the society I was born to. With certain abilities getting sealed in the body and somehow activated by blood. These abilities usually get passed on through a baptism of blood, when the sire gives their blood to the fledgling. Though they thin out over time. So the fledgling of a fledgling might have less powers. They also show up stronger in fledgling the further the sire had developed the ability.”

Hector made sure to note this down, too. Because it was one of the aspects of vampire culture, that still interested him. Where vampires once came from. They had not been there forever, right?

“Hilderic was from a warrior bloodline, but one different from Striga’s. The abilities in his bloodline were more about endurance and regeneration, rather than strength.”

Now Hector found himself frowning. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because he made a game of this. He claimed he wanted to activate her powers, her abilities. And for that she needed to regenerate more.”

“So…” Hector paused. “He injured her?”

“He tortured her,” she replied. “At times stripping the skin from her flesh. He tortured her and he… enjoyed it. After her powers activated… He found other reasons to continue.” Her voice was quiet now. “You know… He liked her, because she was stubborn. Because she would not that easily yield to him. And in between… He would still treat her like a princess. But she knew she was only his toy.”

Hector was not sure, what he was supposed to say. He took a sip of the tea, drinking it while shaking off that shiver. “She killed him in the end though, didn’t she?”

“She did. After twenty-four years.”

“Twenty-four years,” he found himself repeating, struggling to imagine it. Struggling to imagine what it would be to live through that for twenty-four years. There was another, more bitter thought coming to his mind, though. “And still she had not the least bit of pity for me…” Sure, that month-long march was maybe nothing compared to her suffering. But he had been human. And he had nearly died several times.

“Because you are a man,” Morana replied. “And you are human. She… You never were a person to her.”

He sighed. “I… I know.”

***

It had to be after midnight, when Hector finally was lying in bed again. By now the storm had lessened, though there was still a constant patter of rain against the window by the end of the bed. He was just lying here in the almost complete darkness trying to find sleep.

By now his sleeping habits had gotten better. It was the mix of going out more, getting more movement, and also talking to more people, that was making a difference. But this night…

In general, he missed having Isaac there in bed with him. To talk to Isaac before falling asleep. It had been eight days since Isaac had left now. And he would probably still be gone at least another week. Maybe a couple of days more. There was this little unreasonable part of Hector, who wanted to get onto Cornuet and go out there for a ride. Go and find Isaac. But he knew it was unreasonable. He knew he would just have to wait.

But that was not the only reason for the sleep to evade him. He was thinking about what Morana had told him, too. About Carmilla… Because there was a part of him that felt something he would not have thought to feel towards Carmilla. Pity. The kind of pity she had not once shown him.

He was not like her. Never had been. Or maybe he had just been less honest with himself. He had been angry at the world. That much he had accepted by now. He had been angry for having been born to parents, who would abuse him; for having been born into a world that did not seem to have a place for him. And it had been that anger that had made him follow Dracula in the end. But maybe he had been too much of a coward in his anger.

No, he had not wanted thousands to die. At least he did not think he had. His anger had hidden away as sadness and hurt. It had been there. Otherwise he would not have looked at the dead bodies the night creatures would bring every night for those almost six months and feel some sort of satisfaction.

But the anger had been not as close to the surface as Isaac’s anger – or as Carmilla’s. Both of them had outwardly shown their anger again and again. Had openly and with violence lashed out against the world.

In a way he could understand it, though. He could understand Carmilla’s anger. How could one go through that… Twenty-four years. Twenty-four years of torture, of someone trying to break her. And something had broken, right? Something had broken inside of her. Just as something had broken inside of him by the time, he had been thirteen. When he had decided to kill his parents. He had just been in the path of her rage. Like the poor people in Wallachia and those lands to the west of it had ended up in the path of his own rage through no fault of their own.

He had asked Morana to tell him this story exactly because he started to understand this. That in the end everyone had felt in their right. He had felt justified in the destruction he had hailed down onto Wallachia in Dracula’s name. And Carmilla had felt justified whenever she had beaten him up, when she had taken his boots and made him walk barefoot through the snow.

What would’ve happened, if Isaac had not killed her? Could she have ever been convinced to… stop raging?

Chapter Text

“So, how did you actually meet Carmilla?” the boy asked, as he was once again sitting at the desk, his quill in hand.

Other than the last night this one was starry, with only few clouds in the sky. A crescent moon hung over the valley, the pale light flooding the courts below. A beautiful night, Morana assumed. And so very different from the night she had arrived here.

“I had created a fledgling the summer before. You already know about her. Laura. She… She was the one of us four back then, who had chosen to be a vampire completely on her own volition. It made the fledgling stage easier to deal with – but it still brought its complications. She needed a lot of blood… As long as the roads were clear, we travelled, taking a bit from here and there, but…”

“You did not have a home back then?” the boy asked.

Morana closed her eyes. “No. No, we didn’t. I… I was adrift for most of my life.”

“I… I did not know that,” he muttered and she found herself scoffing.

“Obviously. As far as I know you have not yet developed the power to view the future.”

“Not yet,” he replied drily. “Might work on that one next.”

Somehow that got her to smile as she looked at him, once more sighing. “No. I was adrift back then. I left Cho’s court in… It had to have been around the year 900 of your calendar.”

“Cho’s court? You knew Cho?” When she looked over to him, she found him frowning.

“Yes. I knew Cho. I stayed with her for almost three hundred years,” she replied.

“I…” He stopped. “You travelled a lot, didn’t you?”

“I did. I travelled most of the European and Asian continent. Travelled parts of northern Africa as well. But it was in what is and back then already was the Holy Roman Empire that I found Laura and she… insisted on me turning her. We travelled south from then on and my original plan was to get to the Mediterranean before snowfall. But due to circumstance we were slowed down. And we needed a safe place to stay. I knew that Hilderic was an asshole. I knew that while he would not dare to touch me, he might try and do something with Laura. But it was a vampire kingdom and it was the one safe place to stay for several months. So, when the snowfall started…”

“Did you kill back then?” he suddenly asked, making her stop.

“What?”

“When you were travelling with Laura… Did you kill? I… I assume there will be less of an angry mob if you do not kill. Especially with… Well, I do know that normally vampire bites heal fast.”

The thing she hated to admit most was, that he was not stupid. He could be observant, even though he was still somewhat naïve. “No… We… did not.” She had not desire to tell him that back then, she usually would find willing donors. Not because she cared about the humans, but because of the thing he said. It was the easiest way to prevent the angry mob with the torches. So she would go around and trade knowledge for blood. Even though it had become harder with Laura. Especially as originally Laura had been so insistent on not killing. Because she had been another one of those soft souls. But warm. Other than Lenore or this boy, Laura had been warm.

Maybe he sensed, that she did not want to elaborate, because he prompted: “So… You got here to winter, I assume.”

“Yes, we went here to winter. Because I knew that here blood would be provided for us to survive the winter. I dreaded Hilderic. He was… old enough that I had the misfortune to encounter him a couple of times before that and knew of his habits. Especially as I have heard stories from others as well. But…” Even though so much of her old memory was fading, she did very well remember that winter day. She remembered coming here. There was a heavy snow fall and the gates had been drawn. And her and Laura out there. Bargaining with the guards. “When we arrived we learned, that Hilderic was dead.”

The boy looked to her. “Carmilla had already killed him?”

“She had. She had killed him five nights before.”

“How did she do it?” the boy now asked. “She was still fairly young, right? And he was at least a hundred years, I assume, if you knew him before.

“He was about five hundred at the time,” Morana replied. “And she… She played into what he wanted to see. She became his broken doll. She was his to command. And he liked that. Carmilla… She kept it up just for long enough that he would get a bit bored – but not completely. And then… She got him out onto one of the balconies and hung him.”

“That killed him?”

“The glass shards in the noose did,” Morana replied.

He stopped in his writing, thinking. “That sounds like a risky move. Would it not have been easier to stab him or something?”

Morana shook her head. “I don’t know. I… I honestly do not think she was thinking straight. She only knew that either he had to die or she really would break, and once she was fully broken, he would kill her.” She could hear the boy swallow.

“And what was about his servants?” he asked. “I mean…”

“Well, that is the situation that Laura and I walked into. There were a lot of vampires arguing about what to do with Carmilla – and about who was supposed to take the throne, now that Hilderic was dead. Some already thought that Carmilla should rule by the right of the kill, while others wanted to tie her up on a stake and leave her out in the sun. It took us a while to convince them to actually let us inside. And… we met Carmilla that night. She was locked up in her room and…” Now she looked at him, holding his gaze. “She was not at all the woman you got to know. She was… a mess. She was shaking and crying, was clawing at her own arms, was clawing at us. She… wanted to die, I think.” This, too, she remembered surprisingly clearly. That girl they found in that room. A room with claw marks on the wall. A room where parts of the furniture had been destroyed. Carmilla had sat in that corner, had been cowering there. Like a hurt animal. She had screamed at them. No words. No curses. She had just screamed, when they had entered. Like a hurt animal.

“But she didn’t,” the boy observed.

“She didn’t. Laura… She was soft. And she took care of her. While I… convinced the guards and soldiers to not lock her up any longer. I am not a fighter. But even back then… I was more than a thousand years old and the age alone gave me a sort of authority.”

“I see…” He was silent for a long while, his gaze now drifting out of the window and towards the pale crescent moon outside.

She could see some emotion in his gaze. It was subtle. But there were some emotions showing in the way his eyebrows moved. “What are you thinking…”

He did not answer directly, considering his words it seemed. “I… I cannot even imagine it. I cannot imagine to be trapped like that for twenty-four years. To go through all of that…” He shook his head. “At the same time I still cannot imagine what it is like to want to die…”

“You never did?” she asked.

“No. Maybe I am just too much of a coward to do so,” he muttered. “Even… Even when I was getting dragged by Carmilla across half the continent. Even down there in the dungeon. Even after Lenore…” He stopped. “You know, when I fell sick after that… A part of me was thinking that maybe it would be good if I just died. But I never even thought about killing myself. The entire time… I tried to escape. I tried to…” He shook his head. He put the quill into the inkwell and looked at his hand. “To imagine how much pain one has to feel…”

“She was in a lot of pain back then,” Morana said.

“And so was Lenore…”

“Yes.” Morana sighed thinking about sweet Lenore again. Sweet Lenore, whom they had inadvertently abandoned.

He tried and failed to blink away a tear, wiping it away with the back of his hand before just closing his eyes. “You know, a part of me wishes that… A part of me wishes that things had gone different. That they could’ve been saved.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But…” He stopped, pursing his lips. “I know you met Striga that same winter, too. And she told me that somehow she killed her sire then as well. And that she herself was also thinking about… going into the sun.”

At times Morana really was surprised how much her wife had told the men. But then again she knew quite well that Striga had practically adopted both of them as “brothers” of some sort. Sparing with the self-crowned king and teaching the boy to fight as well. Riding out with him, too.

“Lazarus, that is Striga’s sire, arrived with his troop about a week after me and Laura. And he saw the chance to finally take over the kingdom. And Striga… She and Carmilla were similar back then. Both turned by cruel men who delighted in their suffering. And Striga… She killed him, when he tried to claim the castle. And then killed her brethren, too.”

“She had backstabbed him. A surprise attack,” the boy said.

“She told you even that?”

“She did.”

“Yes. She was older than Laura or Carmilla, but not yet a century old. So her powers had not fully developed. But… Well, it turns out that a lot of cruel man do not expect people to backstab them. And… After Lazarus was dead it was us, who laid claim to this kingdom.”

His quill was scratching over the parchment again, but then he paused. “It was your idea, though, right? To take the kingdom.”

Yeah, he hated how clever he was. “Did Striga tell you?”

He shook his head.

Yeah. A clever, observant one. “It was my idea. Because I yearned for a stable place – and all three of them needed it. So… I proposed to take the kingdom. And nobody objected.”

Another long silence fell over the room, as his quill scratched along. In the end the quill once more ended up in the inkwell, as he once more thought about it. “How long did it take?”

“How long did what take?”

“For Carmilla… Well, you said she wanted to die. How long did it take until she was better?”

Once more Morana scoffed. “Define ‘better’,” she muttered. “Carmilla… She managed to get herself together within maybe six months. It was about three years until she started with all the scheming and what not. It was around that time that some of the anger was sparking.”

“Because she could not bear the pain…” the boy whispered.

“What?”

“It is something Striga said. She could not bear the pain and so she turned it into anger. Like Isaac.”

“Do not compare that self-crowned king…”

“But it is so very similar,” he muttered. “Don’t you see? Both of them made slaves of some sort. Both of them turning the hurt and pain into anger. Both of them claiming the throne after… well, killing the person who sat on top of it before.”

Morana grimaced at this. Because she hated that it was true. And that at least to the boy it must seem even truer. He was able to do the thing she did not want to do: To see the other perspective. Yes, she knew that from each of their perspectives it was almost ironic how similar the situations were. Of the king or queen putting so much hurt onto someone – and that person indirectly then being responsible for the ruler’s demise. But to her Carmilla’s pain… That pain was true. Because she had felt it herself.

That she remembered, too. Seeing that broken thing in that room. That broken, screaming thing. Seeing it and even with her more than a thousand years of practice being unable to shield herself from all the pain. That pain had been true. While the pain of these men… It could not be as true, because they were human and they were…

It was mostly an intuition that made her sense the boy. And he was… feeling pain. Empathy. Pity. For Carmilla?

“Why do you want her story?” she asked. “Why Carmilla out of all people? You could have asked me for mine or Striga for hers, but you asked for Carmilla’s story. Why? Why her?”

He sighed. “Because… Look, I am not even quite thirty years old. And there is a good chance that within these thirty years I have caused about as much pain and suffering as Carmilla did in her four-hundred. And it took me years to realize that. You know, when Carmilla was dragging me those eight hundred miles… We came through all those burned down villages. We saw people starving and suffering. And… You know what I felt?”

She grunted. “I don’t.”

“I pitied myself for the situation I was in. I did not even think about that part of all that suffering was my fault.” He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “And I did not want to confront this fact for so long. But in the end… I did all that. And Isaac did all that. And we both felt very justified in our actions at the time. So did Dracula. He thought that this one death, the death of his wife was enough justification to kill thousands. And realizing that… It also made me realize that it was the same for Carmilla. She felt justified in what she did – to me and others. And so… I think I need to understand her.”

“To what end?”

“Because of what you said. She deserves to be more than the villain of my story.”

Chapter Text

“You really have been hanging with the scary vampire lady a lot,” Astrid said, as she sat down next to Hector.

“Straight forward as always, eh?” Hector smiled. He was having dinner at the dining hall. Not much more than just some bread baked in egg. “I assume you have your day off?”

“Don’t try to evade my question,” she replied and looked at him. “I am just very surprised you are not yet dead.”

He chuckled, eating a bit, before drinking a sip of his water-juice mix. “I told you before, Morana is not going to harm me.”

“And I told you before she is fucking scary!” Astrid had put down a plate with some of the food as well and now started to eat.

“Not as scary as Carmilla,” he muttered and sighed.

“Well, excuse me.” Astrid was speaking with her mouth half-full and only now swallowed. “I never got to meet dear Queen Carmilla up close. So I gotta take your word for it. All I know is that Morana is running around with an aura as if she is gonna kill the next person who does as much as look at her the wrong way.”

Hector was chuckling again, but then sighed. It was a good four years now since Striga and Morana had returned to Styria. In the beginning he had been afraid of both of them, though Striga had been tried to be nice from the moment they met in Vienna. He still remembered that night on the street, where she had just… apologized for her rather small in all what had happened to him. Morana, meanwhile… Well, she for certain had put up a show trying to keep literally everyone away from her. But he felt, he started to understand by now. “She is lonely. She had been the whole time. You know… She is old. So very old. And she lives in a world now that is no longer her own.”

“Oh, so you two now have some sort of big philosophical conversations, or what?” Astrid was munching down on that softened bread still, speaking between the bites. There were some habits people took up when they had too little and too bad food for too long. This was one of them. Making it almost ironic she was working in the kitchens.

“She is… She is mostly telling me about Carmilla,” he said.

“The one who was even scarier than her?”

“Yes. The one…”

“The one who beat you up and then literally dragged you over half the continent.”

Of course he had told her by now. Though somehow this time he could smile at that. “Yeah, that one.”

“Why would you wanna talk about her?”

“Because I am trying to understand her perspective,” he replied. “I am trying to understand why she did, what she had done.”

“Because she was crazy, probably.” Astrid shrugged, before clearing the rest of her plate.

“No… She wasn’t. She was just… hurt. By a lot of things. Because the world had not been kind to her.”

At this Astrid rolled her eyes. “Now look at you, Mr. Vampire-Understander.”

He smiled. “I think… I think that this entire thing can only work out if we try to understand each other. And if we try to… Understand what has happened in the past.”

“Spare me,” she grunted. “Just don’t get all philosophical on me, alright?”

“Alright.”

There was a short pause in which Astrid just emptied her mug of ale in one big gulp. “So… What was the crazy vampire’s story?”

“I don’t think I am yet allowed to tell,” Hector replied. “We… We will see about sharing it at some point.”

***

While he spent some time after dinner with Astrid, Hector ended up going to the pastures later on. He had brought Cornuet out in the morning and the stallion was waiting for him eagerly, prancing happily when he saw Hector coming. It made Hector laugh, as he opened the gate for Cornuet, allowing the stallion to come out. “You wanna go for a bit of a ride?” he asked, at which the horse first checked his hands for treats. Only after getting his apple, there was a neigh, that Hector took as a yes. And indeed, the stallion allowed him to mount.

They were taking a ride down to the village below. It was a hot summer day. At times, when it did not rain and storm, the heat would somehow just collect within the valley, with the air being humid and stale. But Hector did not mind it that much.

He was still thinking about Carmilla’s story, of course. Twenty-four years. It was such a long time. He was going to be thirty summers old next year, so twenty-four years… It would have still been a majority of his current life.

He did not have it good with his parents. In fact he wondered at times, how he had even survived to the point when he had killed them. Not only had he been beaten, he had been starved at times, and whenever he had been sick nobody had cared for him. But maybe he was like Morana in that sense. Too stubborn to die. Like Carmilla, too.

Morana had not really been graphic, with what she had told him. But… knowing that Carmilla had been tortured – brutally tortured – that she probably had been raped as well… And her father and brothers had not been kind to her either, had they? So, no wonder that she had not held the highest opinion of men.

And Striga had told him, too, that some of the things Carmilla had said about vampire men were true. That many of them turned to cruelty and saw themselves as even further over the rest of the world than… well… He guessed Carmilla had then turned it around. Seeing vampire women as the only ones worthy to rule.

There was one other thing he was wondering about, too, though. The one person who showed up in those stories he had heard but that he knew nothing about. Laura. Basically all he knew about her was, that she had been Lenore’s sire, Morana’s fledgling, and had somehow been quite close with Carmilla. And that she was dead, of course. That she had died a long time ago. Was this something he could ask about? He didn’t know. Maybe he should try.

By the time he arrived back at the castle, the sun was already sinking towards the horizon. He brought Cornuet to the stables, gave him an additional snack and dried him off, as like Hector he had sweated a lot during the ride.

Then Hector went to wash himself, before going to “pray” or do the closest thing to it he was capable of. Only after that he went down to the dining hall again, having the usual stew as it was served almost every evening.

Just as he sat down to eat, there was a stir. People suddenly fell silent for a moment. Then there was a murmur going through the hall. And looking up he found it not surprising. Because there she was. Morana. Here.

She never ate here. She barely ever ate, when it was not Striga who had cooked for her. And if Striga did not drag her to have supper with everyone else, she would not come to the dining hall.

Her gate was stiff, as she went to get herself a bowl of stew as well, before she went over to sit opposite him. And somehow… He knew that commenting on this would be wrong. After all… This was a good thing. Her being here was a good thing. He was somewhat certain of it.

An awkward silence fell between them, before she cleared her throat. “You look tired.”

He managed a smile. “I have not slept well during those last few days. I miss Isaac.”

Another pause, before she nodded. “I guess… I can understand that. I miss Striga, too. Without her the room is… big and empty.”

“Yeah… I can see that,” he muttered. “Our room is not even that big… But without Isaac.” He shook his head, while dipping a bit of bread in the stew. “It is funny how used one can get to have someone else there…”

A hint of a smile was on her face. “Yes. It is.” Then she ate. Slowly. In silence, while Hector, too, started to properly eat.

Only, when she had finished, she looked at him. “Would you care for a game of… something?”

He allowed himself to joke for once. “Sure, ‘something’ would be fun.”

Indeed, she chuckled. Just a short, quiet sound. But she did.

“Though I wanted to ask you something else, too,” he said, as he got his bowl to put it with the other used kitchenware.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I… Laura. Do you have any paintings of her?”

Once more Morana was silent. “Why do you ask?”

“Because… She seems to have played such a big role and I know next to nothing about her. I want to at least know how to imagine her.”

Morana sighed. “Yeah. I… We still have one or two paintings of her.” There was that sadness again. That deep sadness in her eyes. It made Hector think that the things they were saying… They were true. They had seen each other as sisters. As family. And now a part of that family was missing.

“Come,” she said, leading the way. They walked to the south of the castle – and from there down the staircase.

“Are we going to the dungeon?” he asked, as they kept climbing downwards.

“Not quite,” she said.

Indeed, they only passed the dungeon area, climbing still further down.

Of course Hector knew what was down here. A general storage area, that had been filled with too much stuff for them to ever properly clear it out. Discarded and broken furniture, some more shelves with books in languages he did not understand, trunks filled with clothing, and yes… some paintings. He had never paid them much mind.

Yet, Morana went for a certain collection – neatly stored in another trunk. Opening the wooden crate and going through the paintings, that were stored without even the frames.

Vampire art had always fascinated Hector, as it had always been so much closer to life than the art humans did. Almost as if they had actually captured the moment with those colors. Like magic. Though it was probably more a difference in the taste of immortals, as well as just centuries that some vampire artists had to perfect their artform.

But then Morana found the artwork she seemed to be looking for. She got it out of the crate, putting it against the crate.

It showed Carmilla, sitting there like a queen. With another woman standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder.

What surprised Hector most was, that this woman had a similar skin tone to his own. Not as dark as Isaac, but certainly darker than most people living in these areas. Her hair was black. Her eyes were green, not too dissimilar to Striga’s. But it was her smile… It was warm. Warmer than on most vampires he had seen. Even warmer than Striga’s. And be it just because there was no hidden hurt in her eyes.

Her features looked young, though. Younger even than Carmilla’s.

He knew of course, that she had been turned young. That much he had gathered. And given that on this picture she lacked that certain agelessness older vampires would get – as did Carmilla for that matter – he assume it had been painted in the first centuries after the sisters had taken the region.

“She is… pretty,” he said.

“She was,” Morana replied, before getting out a much smaller picture. A simple portrait of the same woman. One that had focused even more on those unnaturally green eyes.

While Hector was looking at the picture, Morana sat down on the next trunk. “I met her in one of the villages where I stayed during my journey. There was a tavern and I… earned some money by telling stories. She came to hear my stories every night during my stay.” A sad smile made her lips twitch. “When I left… she followed me. Because she had figured out my nature. And she… she begged me to turn her. I would not do it, of course.”

Hector looked at the woman in the painting. She was smiling in this one, too. The smile almost seeming cheeky in this one. “But you did so anyway.”

“She was stubborn.” Morana chuckled, though this, too, was sad. “Oh, she was stubborn. She kept following me and then… she had a seizure, fell, and I… I turned her to save her.”

“A seizure?”

“The reason she wanted to be turned. See, Laura… Like Carmilla she came from a merchant family. But other than Carmilla she was loved by her family, her father especially. He doted over her, his little princess. But she had also been born with a sickness. She would get these seizures, at times so badly that she was out of it for a whole day. And it was clear she would die. And her father… Her father was so protective of her. All she wanted was to see the world. And all he wanted was to know her safe.”

“So she ran away to see the world as a vampire?” Hector asked. He was not sure he could understand that. To imagine to have a loving family. People to actually care about him. And still run away.

“Well, she probably would not have reached twenty-five summers if she had not been turned,” Morana said with a sigh. “But yeah… In the end I turned her, even though a fledgling was the last thing I wanted at the time.” She took the picture from it to look at it herself with this sad smile. “Of course it was a good thing she was with me at the time…”

“Why?” he asked. He felt kinda useless standing there right now, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “I mean…”

“She understood Carmilla,” Morana said. “She understood her in a way…” Pausing, she shook her head once more to clear her mind. “She was warm, as Striga would say. She had this inner warmth with her. And Carmilla needed that at the time. Maybe we all needed that at the time. I mean, she was young and at times painfully naïve, not knowing how shitty the world could be. But she was also soft… caring…”

Eying the other picture – the one of Laura and Carmilla – Hector frowned. “But she died.”

“She died,” Morana said. “You see… She had spent her entire human life never leaving the village she was from. And she wanted to go out and see the world. So… She stayed with us for almost three decades. But then she left to travel…”

“I think… I think Striga told me this before,” Hector muttered. “She travelled only coming back every two or three years.”

“Yes,” Morana said. “And she loved it. The freedom. Learning things. Meeting people.”

“A vampire who goes out and enjoys meeting people…” He could so hardly imagine it. Though, she guessed, Striga was not so different from it these days.

“Yeah…” Morana shook her head. “We never learned in detail what had happened with her and Lenore. Lenore was basically forced to marry. She nearly died in childbirth. Laura turned her to save her life. That’s all we know. The two of them were apparently travelling south to make their way back here, once Lenore’s first hunger had subsided. But… some English soldier somewhere killed Laura. Found them out. Something like that. Laura died. Lenore lived. And somehow managed to make her way here…”

“Striga said Lenore was almost feral when she got here.”

“She was… More animal than vampire,” Morana said. “It was Striga, who took pity on her. Who managed to fix her up enough to… function and speak in full sentences.” A bloody tear was running over her cheek, that she so carefully brushed away.

Again Hector’s gaze met those painted green eyes as he sighed. “Do you think… Do you think if she had not died Carmilla and Lenore could’ve been…” He did not even know what kind of word he was looking for. “Better?” he finished the sentence in the end.

Morana shrugged. “Do you think if his wife lived Dracula would have become a good man?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, but then remembered that man he had met about nine years ago. That man who had not looked at him with disgust. Who had spent a whole night talking to him – actually listening. “I think so. I think she was changing him for the better.”

“Maybe…” Morana turned to put the picture back into the crate, but somehow Hector caught her hand.

“I think…” He had to fight his instinct to freeze when there was annoyance in her gaze. But he managed. “I think this might not belong down here. I think that… just maybe. Maybe they shut be put up somewhere upstairs.”

Again Morana looked at the picture, a slight shaking in her shoulders. “You… You might be right.”

Chapter Text

Now here she was, looking at the picture. Laura. Sweet Laura. Who had died almost two hundred years ago. And knowing her, Laura’s biggest gripe had probably been to not be able to safely escort that young fledgling of hers over to Styria. Because Morana knew that Laura… Laura had always tried to live in a way that she would not have any regrets.

To think what would have been different if she had not died. For once, Carmilla might have never turned that… icy.

There had always been this anger in Carmilla. Of course there had been. How could she not have been angry after what had happened to her? But with Laura around, she was able to control it. Her anger never turning into outright cruelty. With Laura around she had been able to be soft at times. Gentle. To let down her guards. Be honest. Laugh. Cry. These things. And once Laura was gone… all that was left was this cold anger, this cruel anger, that had slowly consumed her.

Morana was not entirely unaware that she herself was completely dependent on Striga. If Striga would die, would leave her… Her life would be over. She could not again go back to being alone. Never again. At the time she had come here those four hundred years ago… She had been thinking about going into the sun for years at the point. Striga would always say she was too stubborn for it, but maybe Striga was wrong. Maybe Morana had just been too much of a coward to do it.

It had felt to her as if that entire millennium before… She had been waiting for something. And once she had met Striga, she had become convinced that Striga had been what she had been waiting for.

And maybe she was right about it. Maybe it had been fate for them to meet. Maybe it was just what Morana had chosen to believe. She didn’t know. Oh, she didn’t know. But she couldn’t be without Striga again. She didn’t want to.

It might have been the same with Carmilla and Laura. Or it might have been different. Even though Carmilla had existed on this planet for almost five decades when Morana and Laura had found her, she had been a girl. Because Hilderic had never allowed her to be anything else. She had been so hurt. So deeply hurt.

And Laura had been able to mend it, somehow. Not to fix it up completely, but to lessen the pain. Bit by bit she had lessened it, had allowed Carmilla to heal. Not completely. But to a point that the pain had been bearable for Carmilla.

Oh, Carmilla had been sad whenever Laura had left. But she had understood it in some regard. And she had not wanted to hold her back. So often Laura had suggested for Carmilla to come along, to go and see the world together with her. Carmilla had been conflicted about it. A part of her had wanted to go. But in the end, she never did.

Morana understood it. Because she had been the same. And so had Lenore. Hell, even the boy had kinda gone that way.

When she had settled here, she had not wanted to leave. She had not wanted to drift again, had wanted to stay in the safety of the castle, of the kingdom. And Lenore, too. In those two hundred years she had left the castle only a couple of times for longer than a week. It was just… good to have a place to feel safe at, Morana assumed.

Lenore would probably have done better with Laura around, too. Because Laura had been warm, she had been caring, and she might have been able to help sweet Lenore. Not only that, but… Morana knew that Laura’s death had weighted on Lenore. The girl had felt responsible for it. That Carmilla again and again had made sure to enforce this idea of responsibility had not helped.

Had Lenore arrived here together with Laura… Maybe even she and Carmilla could’ve been sisters. Maybe then, Lenore would have been more than this eternal maiden, who tried her best to not fall apart.

But it was too easy to blame it all on Laura’s death, wasn’t it? Because it was not only Laura’s death that had changed their fate. Sure, it had been a big part of it, but… Morana could not lie to herself. She knew that she had failed. And maybe other than Striga, she had not even properly tried. Because when Laura had died, a part of her had died, too. The part that had wanted to be at least some help to others.

She had stopped sensing Carmilla. She had sensed Lenore as little as possible. Because she had been unable to bear their pain. Because she had not been able to deal with it.

Striga had tried, of course. Which was the irony. Striga had been created in her current form, to be a warrior, a tool of destruction. But she always had been soft and caring. In her very nature she had always been this big sister. It had been her who had cared the most about little Lenore, when Lenore had arrived. It had been her, who had held the girl, when she was crying. It had been her, who had tried to get her outside, get her riding, get her to do… things. Because Striga had understood the dangers of building a nest in the pain.

She had failed, though. She had failed helping Lenore. Because… Well, Morana did not really know.

She knew why Striga had been unable to help Carmilla. It had been fairly clear. Because after the death of Laura, Carmilla had build up those walls around herself.

Oh, Morana remembered. How much Striga had tried. She had tried so hard to be there for all of them. To support Morana in her grieving, to help that fledgling vampire not to fall apart, to help Carmilla, too.

She remembered, too, that one night in which Carmilla had buried her claws in Striga’s chest. Because she had not been able to bear it any longer. To grieve any longer. The pain had just been too much. It had been too much for all four of them.

The worst of it all was, how clear those things became these days. Whenever she was watching Striga interact with the two human men. Because they were like her sisters in so many ways. But they were not like them regarding one trait. They had been willing to let down their guards. They had been willing to grieve. The self-crowned king had done so from the start, while it had taken some while to get the boy to do so. But in the end they had done it. In the end…

Was she failing at it, too? At grieving? She had called out the boy for finding new love so quickly after Lenore’s death. But maybe it had been him, who had done right, who had moved on. While Morana… Morana had denied herself the same thing.

***

“It is rare to see you outside,” the hissing voice said behind her. “Especially alone.”

Morana turn to find that fly-like creature standing behind her, apparently being in guard duty right now. A part of her was still disgusted at those creatures, who were so clearly not even human. This one looking so much like an insect, that it was rather unsettling. It did not even make sense to her, that the beast could talk without any lips.

Still, she tried to hide her disgust, looking out to the western horizon, where the last bit of sunlight was skill coloring the sky. “I… I felt like I needed some fresh air,” she replied.

The creature was holding a spear, though Morana had to wonder, if it really needed it. After all, night creatures were monsters, they were created to fight. They had claws and teeth and did not really need weapons, did they.

“Going outside is a good thing,” the creature said. “Feeling the wind on your skin…”

“Do you even feel the wind?” She could not help but look at its shell.

“I do. Oh, I do.”

She paused. Most of her interaction with the beast had been, whenever it had been in the room because of the men. Whenever it had spent time with them, while she had been there mostly because of Striga. “You are a philosopher, right?”

“In a way, I guess I am,” it replied. “Do you need something philosophized?” There was humor in the voice, that sounded human and yet did not. Not quite.

“I guess I do,” she admitted.

A pause followed. A pause, as it waited for her to say something, anything. So, she guessed she should do that.

“I… Do you ever wonder, how things could have gone different? If just tiny things had changed in the past.”

A chuckle broke forth between those strange teeth. “That is not much of a philosophical question, is it?”

“Maybe it isn’t,” she admitted. “Maybe the right question should be, whether it would be right to change the past, had you the access to do so.”

“Hmm.” The creature hummed. “I think time is not such an easy thing to handle that way. Things have a cause and an effect. Or rather so many causes. I think it is easy to imagine a world where things might have gone better. But that we also tend to idealize those other scenarios. Because we never are able to see the full picture.” The multi-fractured eyes reflected this last bit of sun between the mountains. “I have wondered many times, whether things might have gone different in my old life, had I just followed the doctrine back then. Or had I not named my friends. Maybe I would have gone to heaven. Maybe I would have met my family later on. But I did not. And there is no changing it. Say, I found a way to go back in time. Say, I found a way to save my old self. Would that person still be me? I am not the same person I was back then. Because we all are the sum of our experiences. So, would I save that man back in the day, he still would never be me.” There was another chuckle. “Even if I was still a man.”

“What if the man you could have been instead could have been better?” Morana asked. Because it was that, what she was wondering. What if Carmilla could have been better? What if Lenore could have been?

“What if that man could have been worse?” the creature replied.

She did not answer to that. Because to her it was hard to imagine. That anything could have ended up worse. How could it have been worse? Her sisters were dead now. And part of the reason why they had died was, that Laura had died so many years ago. She was certain of that. She was certain that given a chance to change this little fact…

“It surprises me that it is you who is pondering this,” the creature spoke.

She scoffed. “How so?”

“Because it is your wife who keeps reminding everyone of us on the importance to just… accept the past.”

Morana sighed. “I know.” Oh, she knew. She knew what Striga had been saying.  On how thinking about how to change the past would just keep one from living in the now. From making the best out of what was happening right in the moment. It was the one thing Striga was succeeding in. And maybe it was hurting Morana, too. To see how happy Striga was. And be it just because she was no longer surrounded by the same festering pain.

“It is hard,” the creature said. “Accepting the past. Because… I think even the happiest man might find something he would rather change. And most people… are not happy.” It made a strange sound. “I think we are all too good at holding onto the pain.”

Looking at the monster, she frowned. Though mostly she did, because it made so little sense for her that a creature might make so much sense. In the end another sigh escaped her. “You probably are right.”

Chapter Text

Hector started to correct his prior assumptions about Morana. She was not scary. She was just as hurt as they all had been. The sisters. But him and Isaac as well. Too hurt. Too stuck in the past. A past that was still painful.

But she was trying. By now she was trying.

She rolled the dice and moved two of her pegs across the Nard board.

“So,” he started to speak, as he got the dice again. “You… No. I mean… Carmilla hated Lenore, didn’t she? I guess for… For being the one who got here instead of Laura?”

Morana looked at him for a long moment, but then she sighed. “Yes, that was pretty much what happened. She… She never forgave Lenore for being the one to return. And I think… I think I never forgave her either. I loved her. I did. But not in the same way I loved Laura. And… at times I hated myself for it. Because it was not her fault. It was not…” She closed her eyes.

He rolled the dice, moved along his pegs and thinking about it. About how Lenore had felt. And about what Striga had told him now almost a year ago. “She always tried to make up for it, didn’t she? For being the one who survived.”

“She knew…” Morana paused, taking the dice back from him. “Carmilla made clear that she looked down on her for taking Laura from us. She had not, of course. What had happened had not really been Lenore’s fault. But to Carmilla it made little difference. Laura had been the one good thing in her life – to her – the one thing that was keeping her from falling apart. And with Laura gone… With Laura gone she did just that. Fall apart.”

Hector looked at her, finding himself almost somewhat surprised by this. The honesty of it. He was not entirely sure how to react to it. To her honesty. To her telling him that. So for a moment, he didn’t. He just waited for her to roll the dice, thinking about it. About her words and about Lenore.

She had been hurting. He had known that. He had known – even before Striga had told him – that she had tried to proof something with him. He had known it from that moment she had paraded him in front of her sisters.

Once more he took the two dice back, rolled them. “It is ironic,” he muttered, as he was moving one of his pegs for the entire number of eyes.

“What is?” Morana asked, taking back the dice.

“All… All Lenore really wanted, was to be loved and appreciated, wasn’t it? To be seen as… To be seen as an equal.”

“And there was nothing she could do for Carmilla to do so,” Morana said.

“Yet, I loved her. I loved her even after everything she did to me. I was willing to forgive her everything. But… I was never enough.”

Now it was Morana’s turn to be silent for a long moment. She rolled the dice as well, but paused before moving her pegs. “To be perfectly honest… I do not think anyone ever could’ve been enough. Striga and I loved her. We tried to help her. But it was not enough. And I think even if Carmilla had… had even opened herself up to her… It would not have been enough.” She drew a shaky breath. “I see that now. I see it now.” Her voice was close to breaking, as she leaned back on the chair. “I honestly don’t know what could’ve been enough. Because for certain, I would’ve given it to her.”

So would he have, had he been given the chance. Even though it might have been self-destructive in nature – which was the worst thing about this all. He knew that for him… no matter how much pain he had been in over it – was still in – it had been good for him, that she had died. If she had stayed, he would have just longer been dependent on her.

The silence between them was a long and painful one, until Morana finally remembered to move his pegs. “So… Are you okay now talking about her?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I guess… I cannot escape thinking about her either way.”

“Can I ask?”

He almost chuckled over that question. Because it was so unlike Morana to be considerate about these things. “Sure,” he muttered.

“What exactly happened between you two? I know she seduced you, but I did not care enough back then. And now… Now I cannot help but wonder.”

He sighed. He took the dice back from her but did not roll them. Instead he reached out for the glass of juice he had been drinking from. At least he could say by now that swearing off the wine had been a good decision. “Well, once your wife had me thrown in the dungeon… I was pretty darn miserable down there. I knew what Carmilla wanted me for, of course, because she would not have dragged me along for eight hundred miles for shits and giggles. But I also knew she would sooner rather than later realize her miscalculation. And… Well, I tried to stay hopeful, but… I was not even sure what for. And in came Lenore… You know, looking back on it, she was quite genius about it. She made clear on our first meeting that she could kill me at any point if she just chose to.”

“She did?”

“Oh, yes. I… I tried to escape. She beat the living shit out of me. But she still left me some food, a blanket. And when she came down there next, she acted as if everything was fine. Gave me more food.” He sighed. “She always knew what to say. To flatter me. She was good at that and I was too naïve to realize. Again… It was quite genius. The leash and collar, too. Getting me used to being her pet.” He scoffed. “And then… It took her only those two weeks. Courting me. Softly. Gently. Then she started hinting that she wanted to run away with me. And then she seduced me.” For a moment he fell silent. “I still feel quite like an idiot about it.”

Morana did not reply to that, just waiting for him to continue.

“Well, in the end… In the end I was bound, of course. And… I really thought my life was over. That there was no hope for me. But she still stayed… gentle with me. I do realize that the sex was something she needed. I don’t really get why. But I get that she needed it. And to me… When… Well, when we fucked I could forget how fucking shitty everything else was. No matter what she did to me.”

“What did she do to you?”

“Whatever she wanted,” he replied. “Mostly we just fucked. And mostly I was okay with that. But… it did not matter if I wasn’t. And we would do what she wanted. Whatever she wanted.” He sighed. “I still waited like a fucking dog for his master for her to come to me each evening. And I enjoyed talking to her. I enjoyed her humor, her wit. I mean… I fucking enjoyed the sex most of the time. It was just… At the time I did not think about it. About her using me. After you left… Well, I guess it just was not the best idea to leave her and Carmilla alone together, you know?”

“I know,” Morana replied.

“So… Yeah, on the bad days it was never quite clear… On some days she came to me just looking for support. And on some she came to me…” He stopped, remembering quite well how her claws would dig into his chest. Never in a way that would do any much harm. But just enough that he still had those scars to this day. Scars all over his chest and shoulders. “And yet I loved her… like an idiot. I loved her. She could’ve beaten me up further and I still would’ve loved her.”

Morana was still silent, though after a moment she said. “It is still your turn.”

“Oh…” He remembered the dice he was still holding in his hands, rolling them. “I…”

“She was not that different, though, right? She also loved Carmilla in that same desperate kind of way.” The chuckle coming over Morana’s lips was not really filled with humor, but it was a chuckle never the less. “Two lost souls so desperate for love.”

As he handed her back the dice, he sighed. “I still do not know how I feel about it.”

“You probably never will,” she replied. “Because it is messy. It was messy from the start.” She shook her head. “Believe it or not, I know that feeling… I have had those loves as well…”

It took him a moment to realize, what she just had done. She had compared herself to him. As if he was a person. As if he was… well, at least something close to her equal.

Maybe she noticed, too, as she evaded his gaze. “What happened after Carmilla’s death?”

“I probably did all the wrong things.” He leaned back on his own chair, looking over to the window, where some clouds were covering the stars from time to time. “I… When Isaac took over, I brought Lenore into the dungeon. And I knew it was a bad idea, but I also did not know what else to do with her. She was angry with me. So angry.” She had scratched him again, though it had not made much of a difference. “Two days later Isaac and I decided to allow her back in her room with certain security measures…”

“Why didn’t he kill her?”

“Because I asked him not to,” Hector replied. “That’s… That was all. But she was still so angry at me. And I mean, it was her right. It was her right. I had betrayed her. I just… I thought…” He shook his head to clear his mind. “She had betrayed me and I had been willing to forgive her. So I thought we could just start anew. Start in a position where we could be more… equal. But… Maybe that was naïve, too.” Then he looked at Morana. “She was getting really bad, really fast. She thought you had abandoned her.”

Morana just looked at him, pausing for a long moment. “We kinda did, didn’t we? We… We did not even consider…” She drew a shaky breath. “I mean, the thought never crossed our mind that you might live. And we never considered that you might actually try and save her. But we did abandon her.”

He looked at her, saw that regret in her. What was he to say to it? She was probably right. In a way they had abandoned her.

What had happened that night – the night Carmilla had died – still felt unreal to him. Because he had never thought that Isaac would forgive him. Not with how madly loyal Isaac had been to Dracula. He had been so sure he would die that night, and yet…

“How did it happen?” Morana asked after a while.

“Well, as I said, she just… went out into the sun.” He had to brush away a tear of his. “I spend those nights with her. And she got angry again and again. And…” Once more he found himself just staring at the window, at the sky. “She told me that morning, that I did not understand Carmilla. And I didn’t, of course. How could I?”

Morana did not say anything to that.

“And then she said something about… How she would not sit in a cage and that she wanted to see the sun.” Another tear ran over his cheek. “I fully admit that… My attempt to stop her were probably too half-hearted. But she went out there and… I followed her. I watched it happen.” Once more he tried to brush away those tears. “I still remember it so… so vividly. I remember it… She turned to me and she smiled and she said: ‘Is that all there is? Hector, you really are a silly man.’ I… The next moment, there was fire and a second later she was just… gone.” He forced himself to look at Morana away, surprised to find that there were bloody tears running down her cheeks as well. Bloody tears that, when she tried to brush them off just like he had tried to brush his own tears, just left smears on her dark skin.

“When our kind… When we decide to die… The sun just takes us. I have seen it happen a couple of times. If one of us steps into the sun without the intent… It is long and painful. But… If we want to… It can be quick. Almost peaceful.” She made a strange noise, once more trying to brush away the tears.

Hector got out a clean handkerchief, handing it to her. And she took it.

“It was peaceful,” he said. “I just wish…” He sighed. “I mean… I am happy now. I am… And maybe… Maybe it is just because I finally have found something like that – happiness – that I wish… I wish that she could have found it, too. That she could have been happy in her life. Especially with what I know now. She should’ve become happy. Carmilla, too.”

“Even Carmilla?” Morana asked.

“Yes. Even her. At the time I was happy she was dead, but now… I don’t know if there was any chance for her to be saved. But I wish there was. I wish… I wish things could have ended happily for them, too.”

Once again Morana was breathing a shaky breath. “It is unfair…” Another tear was running over her cheek. “It is unfair…” She shook her head, shook it again. “And I hate myself for having failed them. For not having found a way to save them. I should not get to move on after that. Not after everything.”

Hector found himself unable to reply. He had not anticipated those words. He had not anticipated her to share something like that with him. Not with him out of all people.

“I find myself thinking, that it should’ve been me. But I know that there was no version of this that had me dying and either of them surviving. And I know… I know that Striga…”

“She needs you,” he said.

“Maybe she does. But maybe… She managed to move on and I just cannot.” She looked at him. “I cannot look at you and not be angry for you to be the one sitting here and not her. Not because it is your fault she died, but because you are so like her and you managed to move on. Just… Just look at you. Oh, I know you were pretty darn miserable last winter. But it was this once and now you moved on. And she was here like that, nesting in her own pain, for centuries! How can that be?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I really don’t know.”

“It’s the same with your little self-crowned king. Don’t think I have not noticed those similarities… But he cannot be that similar! Not because he killed her, but because… How can it be? How can it be that he just decided one day, I would let go of that rage and that pain and could just do that?” She was rambling now, anger and desperation in her voice. And he understood it needed to get out, had been bottled up inside for those last few years.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “And I know it isn’t fair.” He felt awkward, when an all-too human sob came over her lips. A sob that made him feel the thing, she probably did not want him to feel. Pity.

He still barely knew anything about her. But he could imagine. She was old, ancient. More than one and a half millennia old. And she had probably seen so many people die. Brothers, sisters, lovers… So many that had died. And she had held on. Out of ‘pure spite and stubbornness’ as Striga used to say. But to imagine the pain she had to carry with her…

Slowly he got up and walked around the table. He felt awkward, so very awkward, when he put one hand onto her shoulder.

He knew quite well that not too long ago she had still wanted him dead. But maybe… maybe he slowly started to understand.

“I am sorry.”

“I know,” she whispered. “That’s the worst part… I know…” So desperately she was trying to hold down a sob. She took a deep breath in an attempt to control her breathing, though again she failed. “And I… I think I am sorry as well.”