From the first time our eyes met I knew that he would be my triumph, my saviour. My destined love.

Later he lay on the chapel floor, golden hair matted with gore, and the butcher was digging through his entrails.

-

I was born the seventh child of a peasant family.

In the minds of the villagers, that was enough to brand me as one whose death shall mark the beginning of countless murders.

As repugnant as they must’ve found me because of this, they would not kill me, for doing so would have only sped up the inevitable.

It is said that the primary victims of a vrykolakas are those who, in life, were dearest to its heart. It visits friends and relatives in their dreams just as, in waking, it wraps its clammy fingers around their throats. If the victims awaken the next morning, then only long enough to call family to their bedside.

They will be abnormally pale, as if their blood was sucked in the night without a single wound left behind, and often too delirious to speak those final, merciful words - to a partner, to a lover, to a scorned brother or misunderstood mother - that we all hold close in our hearts and resolve to reveal only once it is too late.

In the graveyard, a vrykolakas will unearth a corpse and eat its liver.

Exhumed, a vrykolakas will be found undecomposed, its limbs supple, its blood fresh and uncoagulated. If you hadn’t seen it die, if you hadn’t washed its corpse and readied it for burial, you would be convinced that it still lived.

Or so they say.

I was born the seventh child, and it mattered not that three of my older siblings were already dead. Seven is an unlucky number, enough so to bind me to this destiny. They say that I have two hearts beating in my chest - one will die along with my humanity, whilst the second will continue pumping blood around my corpse and transform me into a crazed beast.

Every night I lay silently in my bed, and listened for this second heartbeat. But I could only hear one.

My siblings regarded me with mixed feelings. They teased me, as all older siblings tend to do, but they did it with a smidge of fear that did not go unnoticed. Affectionate mockery mixed with statements of ‘You’re so young, we’ll die before you,’ spoken as if to comfort themselves.

My parents were typical, superstitious folk, bred and raised in the very same village we still lived in. My father talked of his one trip over to the neighbouring parish with all the awe of a great and experienced traveller. Looking at his wrinkled, sun-worn face as he spoke thus, I felt that it was not only my death that was set in stone, but my life also.

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And so when I first heard that a woman - married off to some distant foreigner long ago - had come back to the village with her worldly son, I was ignited with curiosity.

I did not see them arrive. For the first few days, I only knew them through the words of others.

Twenty years ago this woman, Justina, gave her hand to a travelling merchant. He came from Woltair, a Kingdom an ocean away, and she let him whisk her away. I could only wonder at what she saw, what she felt when she first laid eyes on those impossibly distant shores.

Travellers that sometimes stumble into the village tell us tales of Woltair, of its nobility, its ever changing gods. There were no parishes, no priests, no censure. You could wake up one morning and change the one you worship, or worship none at all. There were balls and feasts and no rules as long as you reserved your dignity, or had the charms to do well enough without it. Freedom, freedom and possibilities, a dozen doors to a dozen futures, tucked away in the pockets of embroidered suits and hiding behind perfect smiles.

Justina raised a son there. I could see him so clearly - this boy with the blood of Aquir peasants flowing through his veins, parading down the city streets of Woltair as if that was where he belonged, unaware of the lucky hand that fate had generously extended to him. He would not read the many books available to him, or listen to lectures given by his teachers. Instead, he would attend balls and while the time away indulging in the temporary pleasures of absinthe and women, for a city-born boy was as foolish as he was grand.

But now Justina had come back with her son in tow. They say that she looked haggard as she stood at the village gate and trembled like a woman touched by the grave. When she laid eyes on her old father, she burst into tears, and neighbours could hear her crying throughout the night. Poor little widow, they call her.

She hasn’t gone outside since then.

The same couldn’t be said for her son. The first time I saw him, it was as if my heart tore itself apart and reassembled into something new.

He stood by a neighbour’s garden, and chatted to her as she watered her flowers. His hair was the first thing I noticed. And how could I not? It was a lion’s mane, voluminous and curly, that ran down to the small of his back. The nobility of distant lands adorned itself in gold-lined clothes and jewellery studded with gems, but I was certain that those expensive sparkles could never compete with the golden glisten of his hair in the afternoon sun.

He wore a tunic and embroidered vest, as do many common people, and the sash tied around his middle drew eyes to the delicacy of his waist. He was tall and slim, yet broad shouldered, and his sun-kissed skin was tanned not from gruelling farmwork but a cultivated leisure. He had a curious grace to his motions - the way he raised a hand to stifle quiet laughter, the attentive tilt of his head, the perfectly straight posture - that signalled his foreignness to the village.

Watching him, it was as if the daily bustle of the village faded into the background. Even the flowers, in all their beauty, seemed to me nothing more than splashes of colour put upon this earth simply to compliment him who stood among them.

The world was a painting and he was its subject.

And how he dazzled me already.

But he didn’t see me then, and it was only a week later that our eyes finally met.