If you look two miles off the east coast of the nation of Striany, though not so far out that you find the tribal nations still living upon their archipelago, you might find a lighthouse built by a long-dead king in the first days in which humans had attempted to ape the technology of their fallen vampiric overlords.

Let us back up a step. Though Charlotte and her grandfather, who lived upon the lighthouse’s story island, knew very well that vampires were real, one could not say the same for most people who lived in Striany, nor for those living in the neighboring nation of Telenia. To folk with common sense and a broad understanding of history and of human nature, the ancient accounts of vampires—human-shaped creatures with inhuman speed and strength, capable of instantaneously regenerating wounds, capable of shifting their forms into those of beasts, burned by the holy light of the Sun and empowered by that of the Moon—could not exist.

No, the nation which had once ruled over the ancestors of modern folk—when those ancestors still lived in a tribal fashion—were surely an advanced, human, and very mundane nation from across the ocean, a conquering people who had to come to subjugate the natives of the ancient land.

Yes, of course the enslaved had stolen their masters’ technology and used it to rise against them. Having murdered and exiled their oppressors, the freed had at that point rebuilt their nations as they saw fit in the shadow of their vanished oppressors. Yes, all that hat occurred, reasonable and educated people said, but there had been nothing supernatural about it. Nothing vampiric, for certain! The ancient peoples, only recently risen from primitive tribalism and into the shadow of a more technological master, had no frame of reference as to what was science and what was supernatural. They had surely, in their ignorance, ascribed to magic what was simply technological advancement. Granted, the freed had failed to preserve the technology of their oppressors, and that was a great tragedy, but nothing to do about it centuries after the fact.

All this described the narrative maintained by educated persons in Striany and Telenia alike.

Yet, it was wrong.

Charlotte's grandfather had told her quite a lot about vampires throughout her life. He had lost his leg fighting them, just as her mother had lost her life fighting them and her father had lost his life while caught in the crossfire.

Her mother and grandfather had belonged to the secret order of Memories, those dedicated to scalpeling out vampires and their spawn wherever they caused trouble in the civilized world. For, Charlotte’s grandfather had explained, the vampires were not all gone. The Ur-vampire, the father of them all, had perished in the ancient revolution, as had quite a lot of the highest vampiric nobles of ancient society. The rest, panicked and knowing only that humans had discovered a way to kill them after hundreds of years of slavery, had fled to the continent all together, and the Sun only knew where they were now. Not causing trouble for Striany and Telenia, at the very least!

But some of the cleverest vampires had remained behind, creating new lives for themselves using whatever wealth they could hide during the upheaval and reintegrating themselves into human society, biding their time for some purpose which the Memories could only guess at. In the modern age, a vampire could walk through the middle of a town at noonday, being the wealthiest and most accomplished gentleman in his professional field.

All the while, his heart would seethe with a bitter thirst and a wretched hatred for the humans who surrounded him.

Or so said Grandfather. When he had told this to Charlotte, she had asked how vampires could walk around in the sun, and Grandfather had changed the subject. Charlotte always wondered, after that, if he’d made up the whole bit about vampires pretending to be humans just to scare her from wanting to live on the mainland.

He seemed to want to keep Charlotte from pursuing anything in life. Whenever Grandfather spoke of vampires, which happened less and less as she grew older, Charlotte's heart with a tremor of thrill and terror mixed. She had been confident, as a little girl, that she herself would someday take up the same path as her family of Memories. Whenever she brought this up, Grandfather sharply told her she was safe on the lighthouse, that there was no need for her to throw away her life fighting monsters.

This peevishness from Grandfather was only one part of a pattern which irritated Charlotte throughout her early life. She and Grandfather lived alone on the lighthouse’s island—which was called, imaginatively, Lighthouse Island by the folk on the mainland—from the time Charlotte was eight until she was twenty. Throughout this time, the pair of them rowed their tiny boat to the mainland once a week for market, where they were looked upon as the strange folk who lived on the island but accepted warmly enough by the inhabitants of the coastal fishing town. In addition, the two of them rowed once a month to the shore only for Grandfather to row back to the island alone, for at this time the king of their canton held court in the small city of Udin, their canton's capital. Grandfather permitted Charlotte to travel there to watch the proceedings and to enjoy the festivities which were always held upon this occasion, and Charlotte fairly lived for these long days.

Until she was sixteen, Grandfather had insisted on traveling along with her to Udin. Charlotte had always enjoyed this, for the old man seemed to come more alive when they walked on the road surrounded by beautiful greenery and the thrumming insects which did not at all live on their small island—in the spring and summer, at least. Grandfather seemed to grow ten years younger and fifteen times more cheerful. He was often even jovial to the people who passed them or joined them on their journey.

But once she was sixteen, once she was permitted to go alone to Udin, Charlotte walked with a heavy heart through spring and summer and autumn and winter, each time remembering Grandfather's prior improvement and wondering if he would ever show such signs of happiness again.

For all her life, Charlotte's heart had been filled with a love for the people and environments of the mainland. She did not hate living on Lighthouse Island, and she took joy in the proximity it had to the nearby archipelago, where the only people she knew well enough to call her friends lived, but she felt more at home surrounded by buildings and trees and throngs of strangers than on a stony shore with a single spire of inhuman stone rising from the middle of it. It was a sad thing, one that had been created to guide a fleet of ships which the ancient people had never actually figured out how to build. When they finally discovered the laws of ship-building in later years, they no longer cared about the tiny bay which lay near the meaningless canton of Udin.

When she was younger, Charlotte had often asked Grandfather whenever they returned from a trip if perhaps they could move to the mainland. She talked about farmers and merchants and tinkers with whom they had spoken on their trip, describing her smiling and childish plans for how the two of them could make a living for themselves.

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But whenever Charlotte raised these notions, Grandfather always shook his head. “This is the life for me,” he would say each time. “It's what I chose, and it's what I need. When you're older, you can make that decision for yourself.”

“When will that be?” she would ask.

For some years Grandfather refused to set a standard for “older,” but eventually he said, “When you’re sixteen, you'll be a grown woman. Then you can do whatever you want.”

Well, twenty-one days after her 16th birthday came the day of the king's court. It fell in the middle of winter, and a silent blanket of snow fell upon mainland and island alike. Grandfather's injury was bothering him, and, rubbing his hip—his leg had been severed just above the right knee, and a mass of scar tissue ran up from this to the hip itself—the old man said he didn't think he would go along on that day, now that she was old enough to travel on her own.

Charlotte was a strong girl, despite her slender frame. She had fished and rowed since she was a little girl, and though Grandfather would have preferred if, amidst the choppy seas of winter, that his granddaughter stay safe and warm at home, she determined not to let anything dissuade her from wrapping thick cloths around the oars and hauling with all her might for the shore.

It was an arduous journey, as it always was in winter, but many people had gone on the road before Charlotte, and she trudged blearily in their grooves for the many hours to reach the capital. She carried in her purse the few coins she had saved up over the past month, and a few more she had been saving for a long while for this occasion, her first journey as a grown woman.

The world seemed new and wondrous to her. Her spirit sang with the glory of freedom, for the whole world seemed to lie at her feet. She was now permitted to choose any life she wanted.

Beaming with life even more than usual, Charlotte caught the attention of more than one young man at the winter festival in Udin. She was a bit of a vain girl, which is forgivable for someone who spends all her life cooped up in a stone tower. She was, furthermore, sharply aware of what a striking appearance she must create, for example, standing bundled up in seal fur, her cheeks burning red in the biting cold, her golden ringlets falling all about her shoulders and dusted with the still-falling snow, her hazel eyes a poetic compliment to the roasted hazelnuts which she bought with a coin from a grinning old woman.

For the first time in her life, to her heady delight, Charlotte found herself the object of an argument between two dashing and striking young men, a teamster and a fisherman's son. After one of them stormed away in a huff, she gladly linked arms with the victor and decided that, now an adult, she might be falling in love.

Indeed, the rest of the day was a whirlwind of banter, laughing, chaste kisses, and promises to Charlotte that her suitor would come to visit her on Lighthouse Island in three days’ time.

Charlotte’s companion tried to convince her, at first with gentle jokes and then with less patience, to allow him more than just a kiss, but every time he did so an image of Grandfather would flash into her mind along with warnings that young men were no better than wild dogs, and she would with a giggle push him away and make a light joke of the matter.

At the end of the day, the boy huffed away, quite irritated, even as Charlotte called to him that she would look forward to seeing him in three days.

She walked home in the dark, accompanying a family with several small children who lived in the coastal village, helping the mother of the family to carry her two infants and consumed with the dreamy assuredness that this had been the greatest day of her life.

Charlotte remained with that family overnight, so exhausted that she felt asleep wrapped up in her furs on the floor almost at once, and then in the morning made her laborious way back to Lighthouse Island.

She told Grandfather all about her day in a huff of excitement, though she left out most of the details about the young man whose name, Charlotte realized to her utter embarrassment halfway through the account, she had never actually received.

But Charlotte realized by the end of her story that, as she had invited the boy to their home, she would in fact need to give some kind of explanation to Grandfather. She did so in the most tactful, simple words she could conjure. “He seems very interested in the lighthouse,” she lied. “I told him a bit about what an excellent angler you are, and it seemed like he wanted to ask you some questions about the trade. I told him about the view from the top of the tower, better than anything he'll have ever seen on the mainland, for sure!”

“What, you didn't give him any ‘better view’ yourself?” Grandfather asked coldly.

Charlotte’s cheeks flushed. “I can't believe you said that! I remember what you told me about boys. How stupid do you think I am? I'm not a little girl anymore, Grandpa!” She paused, steeling herself, her stomach clenching and twirling. “I think… I think I'm ready to move to the mainland.”

“Like Hell you are,” he snapped back.

This was not normal behavior for Grandfather. He was always gruff, always a sour old man to some degree, but it was exceedingly rare that he be this rude and inconsiderate to her! The last instance Charlotte could remember had been four years ago, when she had accidentally broken a dish which his late wife had made during their youth.

But all Charlotte had done now was enjoy a festival in the company of a charming and amusing young man. She didn’t deserve this treatment. “You promised me!” she cried. “You've been saying for years that once I’m sixteen I can do whatever I want. Well, I’m sixteen now!”

“I’d thought you’d have learned to act like an adult by now,” Grandfather muttered. He sat in a rickety chair facing their fireplace, a thing as hot as a furnace. He leaned in close to it, as though he needed such an inferno to protect him from the winter cold. His back was to Charlotte, and he did not look at her as he spoke. “You didn't think twice about leaving me to go have fun with a boy in town. You're lucky he didn't kidnap you. What would’ve you been able to do about it? What do you know about the world, girl?”

He never called her “girl.” Charlotte could not remember a single time in her life when he had done so.

Charlotte took a step forward. “Grandfather,” she asked, her voice low. She tried to control her emotions. “Are you feeling all right? You're not acting like your usual self.”

He was silent for a long time. “I can't stop you from leaving,” he said. “Your life is yours to do with as you want. But if you leave, you'll abandon me. Just… know that. You'll abandon me like everybody else.”

He turned at last, his weathered eyes heavy with tears. “That boy isn't coming,” he said, twinges of disappointment and pity in his voice. “You didn't give him what he wanted. He won't bother with you any more.”

That idea was so terrible that Charlotte burst into tears and ran from the room, stomping up the spiral stairs which led to the top of the dead lighthouse.

Frozen, early morning wind burned Charlotte’s cheeks as she emerged and stared out at the rising Sun, the life-giving god of humanity. Just beyond the horizon lay the archipelago and the tribes who lived upon them, the people who made the medicine which kept cancer from consuming Grandfather's body. They were good people. They were fond of Grandfather, even if he was as gruff with them as he was with the people of the coastal town and of Udin.

Grandfather would be welcome in the archipelago among any of the tribes if Charlotte decided to leave him. He would not be abandoned. He might, in fact, live a happier life there than he did now, isolated as he was with only his last remaining family for company.

Yet his words echoed in Charlotte's mind throughout that day, throughout that night, throughout the next week, and for years to come.

“You will abandon me,” his voice whispered to her as she rowed alone the market or to Udin. Charlotte heard it every time she looked down the road, to the West, knowing that other towns and villages and cities lay in the world beyond the purview of her wanderings. She heard it every time she longed to go out and explore the rich things life offered, while rowing or visiting with her friend Ai’kalak, while fishing or bargaining or happily holding a newborn baby.

From that moment on, until she was twenty, Charlotte did not abandon Grandfather, but returned at the end of every day to Lighthouse Island, where a bitter old man who loved her more than anything in the world awaited her return.

She never did see that boy again.