Page 1 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

The Castle

Many stories have been told about me, but only this one is disloyal enough to the imagination to be calledtrue.

One winter night, long ago, a star trickled down the sky, as stars often do, and fell somewhere upon the dense, sloping forestland outside the walls of Lumia.

This was not a remarkable event in itself, for the people of the Asteria Realm were accustomed to using stardust for all kinds of mystical and mundane purposes, especially in the cities of the Faraway North, where every human was born with a little bit of magic inside them.

But Lumia was a small, sleepy capital roosting deep in the heart of the West, where the people were simpler and unused to the wild ways of magic, its unexpected outbursts, and profuse peculiarities.

You see, people have a long history of fearing the things they cannot understand and often find more comfort in shunning them altogether rather than learning about them. Because people… Well, fond as I am of them, they do suffer from an interminable case ofwillful ignorance—a terrible disease, really, and highly contagious, but what can you do? You learn to take the good with the bad and so forth. But where was I? Ah, yes. Magic and its disastrous effect on the ordinary.

Indeed, the people of Lumia had more than enough troubles associated with magic to wish for nothing more than to lead quiet, peaceful,magiclesslives.

But what they didn’t know was that the very woods encompassing the city’s walls were far from magicless, particularly the narrow glade upon which the star fell, for under the flourishing shrubs and colorful clusters of wildflowers lay the ruins of a temple.

It was an ancient, godly place, and gods liked to leave traces of their divinity behind for the mortals to find. It amused them to see how easily people could get corrupted by the mere illusion of power.

When the stardust collectors rushed to Lumia to get a piece of the fallen star so they could sell it to the witches and the potion makers and the Curiosity Shop owners, they were shocked to discover that instead of a crater, the strangest alchemical reaction had occurred the second the star hit the holy ruins.

It was a magnificent sight (not to toot my own horn, but I’ve made more maidens swoon than every prince and knight in this entire Realm), a dwelling grand enough to be the envy of every king and queen. Yet it did not touch the ground but floated high in the air above the trail of shrubbery like a cloud or an optical illusion, and instead of treasures and riches, its impenetrable walls were filled with divinity.

A Castle of the land, of the sky, and of the gods.

I will not tell you how famed heroes and fearsome warlocks, and even great kings with their great armies, came from all over the Realm to build high ladders and lay claim upon me. This is not a story about greed, after all. In fact, this is not a story aboutmeat all.

This is a story about love.

I will ease your concerns, though, and tell you that none of them was successful in their rapacious endeavors. No one even managed to reach my threshold, much less pass the sanctity of my doors. In truth, I guarded myself so well and for so long that eventually, I started to regret it.

Don’t get me wrong, an entity of my intellect and magical superiority is above all mortal pettinesses, including the one of loneliness. However, quite unexpectedly and to my great disappointment, I did find myself craving company. And more than that, I craved to be loved. Not admired. Not lusted after. I wanted someone to want me for me and not for the things I could do for them. Which, I’ve discovered, is both the greatest and hardest wish one could ever make.

Still, I waited, alone and afloat with my iridescent spires and turrets shimmering like nightly apparitions amid the looming trees of Lumia. But, of course, waiting is the sum of an eternity to the one who waits, and as months turned to years and years to a century, my spirit and patience began to wither.

People forgot about me, or more accurately, their imaginations changed me, for nothing remains unchanged once it falls prey to human imagination. It is a very human assumption, you see, that everythingotheris also dangerous.

And so, as they nursed their myths and spun their legends, stories of ghosts and banshees and red-eyed demons, of haunted crypts and insidious death traps, started crawling out of my empty walls to penetrate their mortal hearts.

I was no longer desired but feared all across the Realm. No one dared to even look in my direction, let alone approach my star-stricken glade.

Finally, I accepted that there was nothing I could do anymore but wait for the day I would no longer be a castle. After all, if there was one thing I learned about life in this world, it was that nothing stayed the same forever, and in that I found both thrill and hope.

Then, suddenly, because these things always happen suddenly, my fate changed.

A miracle.

I still call it a miracle, for despite my infinite years and wisdom, I’ve yet to logically understand the way the human heart finds things to love.

Well, in my case, nothumanexactly.

Esperida Aventine was only twelve years old when she got lost in the forest and stumbled upon me. She was a forlorn, night-kissed child with long raven hair, star-bright silver eyes, and skin so pale you’d think she’d drunk the whole moon.

She also had blood on her teeth.

And on her frayed pink dress.

And maybe there were a few droplets on her worn-out red shoes—it was hard to tell since the moonbeams made everything look glossy and liquid beneath me.

The girl was a vampire, and her unfortunate victim was the mighty squirrel. She was a hungry little thing, a true creature of the night, for a vampire’s life is cursed to be sunless and ravenous. But she was also many other things, things that to me were more important than a curse she had not chosen for herself.

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