Page 3 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

Thea

Alittle girl lost in a forest was a feral, fearsome creature. She was aware of the dangers but free of the fears. Her mind made an adventure out of every dark little thing. The cawing blackbirds, the evolving shadows, the ghostly moonlight peering through the skeletal boughs, and the brambles that scratched her flesh and tugged at the edge of her cloak. They were all her companions, her fellow adventurers, or simply mysteries she needed to uncover. She saw no threat in the gleaming eyes of the owls, the scampering of the animals in the undergrowth, the slippery, moss-covered rocks by the riverbank, and the hungry family of nixies swirling beneath the black water. And she most certainly had no fear of the other, more insidious creatures of the night.

Unfortunately for me, I no longer was that little girl. I was twenty-two years old, alone in the woods after dark, and scared out of my right mind.

I’d always considered myself a woman of adequate intellect and notable capability. So, for the love of the stars, what madness had gone through my head to start this journey in the middle of the afternoon instead of waiting for daybreak?

My internal voice of reason must have thrown up its hands in exasperation at least a hundred times today, yet I did not seem able to listen to any of its many sensible arguments.

But honestly now, how was I supposed to wait even for a minute longer after receiving that wretched letter?Delayedletter. It had taken a whole month for it to reach me, and it hadn’t even come from the Castle itself but from my dear friend Lena, who lived with her wife in Kartha. The Eastern Kingdom had gotten the news first, for the Castle was currently resting above the strip of forestland outside the capital’s walls.

I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Eron and Esperida Aventine were dead.

Once again, I had to stop in my tracks, lean against the trunk of a tree, and wipe the tears from my eyes before I was able to continue.

I’d known Esperida had been consuming a potion to help her age faster—it was a common practice among vampires who wished to grow old with their human companions—but I had no idea that the two of them had also taken the Eternal Vow. It was done so rarely and performed by so very few priestesses these days that most people had forgotten about the ritual altogether.

Long ago, during the wedding ceremony, couples had the option of binding their souls for eternity by branding their flesh with the words of a sacred spell that knitted their two individual life threads into one. A spell so ancient and powerful that it surpassed any curse, even the one of vampirism. It didn’t matter if you were a fairy or a nymph or a witch. If your half’s heart stopped beating, yours was spellbound to follow.

I understood that Esperida and Eron had loved each other more than they had loved life itself and that they’d refused to be separated even in death, but by the gods, I still thought it was the most absurd, selfish thing in the history of the world. After all,Death was rarely cruel to the dead. It was the ones who were left behind he tormented the most.

But Esperida, in all her mystifying immortality, could have never imagined that her husband would be taken early and by something as mundane as a heart attack, let alone that she would have a child to worry about leaving behind. To this day, Hector was the only one of his kind.

Hector.

The mere mention of his name used to make me think of cozy winter nights. Intense gazes. Sandalwood and campfire smoke. The stiff leather of the chair in his study. Now it was a pang in my sternum.

Four years had passed since the last time I saw him. We disappeared from each other’s worlds like it was nothing, with a handful of ugly words and a single broken promise. But a broken promise was a lot like a broken destiny. It changed the trajectory of your life forever.

We had been inseparable once, despite the notable wedge of our differences. I loved meeting new people and discovering new places. I loved to dance and sing and walk with my face turned against the sun. I loved daydreaming and reading romantic stories, for that was the only way I could weave dream into reality. But Hector… Hector was the dream itself. A prince of the sky and a creature of the night. That was the substance of our antithesis. I was of this world, and he was of the one above it. I was made of clay and fire; he was made of clouds and frost.

Sometimes, he could be breathtakingly alluring too, but that was just the vampire in him. All of them were like that, wrapped up in layers of beauty and charm while the true darkness of their souls lay deep beneath their marble skin.

Ultimately, the only thing Hector and I did have in common was our age, for I was a mere day older than him. Both of ushad just turned twelve that fateful day we met in the Dragonfly Forest.

I’d been born in Steria, a small village outside Thaloria, the grand capital of the Faraway North. Mother owned the local oracle shop, while Father, who was from the South and therefore magicless, owned land. Miles and miles of flower-dotted strawberry fields, which you could only go through by horse. We lived comfortably, and I’d spent most of my childhood running around the Dragonfly Forest, getting into all kinds of wonderful and terrible trouble. I’d played with pixies and laughed with sprites and even learned a little swordplay from Walder, the forest’s ancient spirit who had found me once wandering a little too close to Fairyland. He’d saved my life that day, for fairies were quite literally the vampires of the fey world.

For as long as I could remember, I’d been drawn to magic, and it was this exact yearning for all things extraordinary that united me with the Castle that day. My heart was a compass, and wonder was my north.

It was rare for the Castle to be in our part of the world, but Esperida happened to be visiting the Celestines, and so there it waited for her, in the heart of the Dragonfly Forest.

The stars aligned, Hector and I met, and before I knew it, he, Esperida, and Eron became my second family. The distance didn’t matter. Time and time again I crossed it without a second thought, yearning for their whimsy and magic-touched wisdom, which was incomparable to my parents’ land-bound one.

Yes, my friendship with Hector didn’t end on the best of terms, but I still couldn’t believe he didn’t write to tell me of their loss. Was he too heartbroken to write? Or did he hate me that much now?

According to Lena’s letter, the Castle was last seen outside of Kartha, so after I packed my suitcase with only the absolute necessities, I went straight into the city to Nepheli’s CuriosityShop for it had a Door and I needed a Door to get myself from North to East as fast as possible.

Although Nepheli Curiosity was my newest, she was perhaps my greatest friend and the only one not to deter me from taking this journey. We had spent every day of the past year together, attending classes at the Academy of Magical Arts and getting her new Curiosity Shop ready. She had star magic in her veins, for she’d accidentally swallowed a handful of stardust as a child. Of course, something like that would normally be deadly to a human—especially a little one—but the gods of fortune had other plans for my little Nepheli.

In the short year we’d been friends, she learned to control her starlight, infuse it in inanimate objects to make them sentient, opened a new Curiosity Shop in the heart of the city, and got engaged to Prince Apollo of Thaloria.

AllI’ddone this past year was read scandalous books, daydream about fictional men, and eat an obscene amount of chocolate cake. I did discover that I had an inclination toward fortune-telling, but this was no grand revelation considering the kind of magic that ran in my bloodline.

My grandmother could hear the future like the notes in a melody. She listened to the turnings of the wind, the buzz of the cicadas, the rustling of the willow trees at night. She could discover whole destinies in theshushof the ocean, the rush of the waves as they approached the shore. Mother could read the future. In a palm, in a deck of cards, in the darkened tea leaves lingering along the edge of a porcelain cup. And I, evidently, could see it. Indeed, I’d had more than a few prophetic visions throughout my life to call myself a seer. However, they had all been so abstract and insignificant that they could hardly be compared to the fate-touched magic of the women in my family.

I was… lost. Physically. Mentally. Magically. I was completely and overwhelmingly lost.

---