The butcher, Klaus, was a kind albeit superstitious man. He spoke politely to me, treated me with the same respect that he would show to any close neighbour and customer, and tried his hardest to disguise how anxiously he clutched at the protective talisman in his pocket.

His wife, a mean middle-aged woman, balanced out his professionalism with a dose of exaggerated disdain. This was not unusual - she, like many of the villagers, was quick to analyse my condition and draw the obvious conclusions.

A vrykolakas came back to murder those who it held dearest. To protect yourself, therefore, you simply had to ensure that the creature never came to love you. I could hardly hold this reasoning against them, but it was insane for them to think that my affections could be so easily swayed.

As I watched Klaus wrap up a cut of smoked beef - my family’s portion from the Feast, prepared in anticipation of my married older sister's visit - I thought back to the day before, to the gruesome story that echoed like blasphemy in Asmara’s chapel.

The stink of viscera on opening the cottage door, blood on the walls, nails scraping a wooden door, a man’s hands clutching a tiny waist, small hands digging through his guts, and eyes red, red as a suit of hearts in solitaire. She did not love those she killed. She hurt them because they hurt her, an indisputable law of instinct.

Could I do that too? If I rose with a vengeance, what if it was not those I loved that I haunted, what if I bypassed my family’s home and crept into the beds of those who scorned me, the butcher’s wife for example, and tore her to pieces? Her heavy heart in my hands, a river, a bloody river, and there would be no grave to tell - just a ditch in a field, at a crossroads, its contents rotting and alone.

A cough. My head snapped up with a shock. Klaus was wiping his hands on his apron, my package neatly wrapped up on the table between us.

What were those images, so cruelly swirling in my head? I don’t want to do any of those things, I thought with shame and disgust.

With shaking hands I thanked Klaus and took the paper-wrapped bundle. Its normally delicious smell sickened me. I left the butchery, my heart beating wildly, and walked towards home.

But no, that wasn’t all Valdemar said. She was so different. Yes, he said the superstitions were wrong. They are wrong. She was a real creature, he said, a creature that tore itself from the pages of myth and made itself real, a creature distorted by rumour, a creature that ate no livers and killed no loved ones (what if she killed them already, and only moved on further? Or what if she loved Clement, loved Nix, loved - no, that’s impossible).

I stopped.

She was nothing like what we expected. So what did we know of myself, my own wretched fate? When was the last time there was a vrykolakas in our midst? I could not have been the only one to be born like this.

Spoken as a threat, anonymous and ever-present, but vague, vague, vague.

Repeating the same things as if they were a prayer.

Never a single name to attach to those tales.

Valdemar, beautiful Valdemar, his lips forming a name. Callisto. He was so much more real than any of this.

-

A humble feast was spread across the table. Potato soup, rye bread, the smoked beef from this morning cut into thin slices, and arranged on a chipped plate in the centre of the table, and salads of pickled vegetables - cucumbers, onions, beet, carrots and radishes. No tomatoes, though, as our mother was allergic.

My older sister Laima was talking excitedly about the tomato plants that she, having married and moved out to live with her husband in a neighbouring village, was finally allowed to grow. Of my living siblings she and I shared the most physical similarities, our faces almost copies of each other. The same large, downward-tilted eyes, the same straight nose and black hair - whilst parts of these features were found in the rest of our family too, it was in us that they showed up the most fiercely, albeit hers were printed with a more delicate, feminine touch. I remembered her laughing, when we were children, that I could wear her frock, pretend to be her, and fight off all the boys that were teasing her. They would probably be too baffled to notice the little beauty mark that set me apart from her. Laima had always been a bright and silly girl, apparently too silly to care for her brother’s strange curse.

When she left us a few years back, I watched her go with pain in my heart and a childish abhorrence for the unremarkable man who stole her away.

This man, Mantas, had brought a large and smelly chunk of cheese to the table, the result of one of his only interests in life - dairy-farming. His one other interest that I was unfortunately aware of was his passion for staring shamelessly at me. I knew exactly why he did it, and was certain that the others had noticed it too but simply never cared enough to point it out. That day, however, I did not quite feel so peaceful.

“Something wrong, brother-in-law?” I asked, looking up at him. “You’ve been staring at me this entire time.”

Laima shot her husband an irritated look.

“Er,” Mantas averted his gaze.

“Have you ever seen a vrykolakas?” I asked. My brother scoffed into his soup.

“...well, no, I wouldn’t say I have.”

“Oh, and I guess there’s nobody like me in your village either.” I maintained, “But for now I’m like any other person, so there’s no need for you to look so amazed.”

“I wasn’t looking at you,” he said warily.

“What were you looking at then? The wall?” I said and bit into a piece of cheese - I didn’t think I could stomach any meat.

“Gustav, what’s gotten into you? Leave him alone.” Laima interceded.

“He’s just grumpy because he missed you, darling, we all have!” said my mother.

“He’s mad he has to eat with us instead of playing with his new friend.” said Asta at the same time.

They all looked at each other.

“What friend?” my father deigned to ask.

Asta was more than happy to answer. “That half-Woltairian boy staying with old Jon. He-”

“Oh, Woltair! I’ve always dreamed of visiting!” Laima exclaimed, her husband’s predicament instantly forgotten. “Imagine! All that extravagance…”

“All that blasphemy, more like.”

“Blasphemy! Yes. I heard that the new King’s baby was born oddly soon after his ascension last year…” Mantas said, still avoiding my gaze. And good riddance to that.

“Early births happen,” said my mother.

Asta smiled deviously. “Was it early, though?”

My brother emerged from his bowl of soup to add, “who cares? If you want to gossip, gossip about our leaders instead.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Why, is there something to say about the High Priest?”

Laima nodded. “There must be! Vaiva (that’s our neighbour) said that her sister’s son, who is currently undergoing scout training in the capital, heard that High Priest Caine is ill!”

“That’s not interesting. Everyone gets ill. And isn’t he kind of old?” said Asta.

“He’s in his thirties, idiot.” said my brother.

“But High Priests always die quickly, so he’s basically old.”

“Fifteen years…”

“He might die, that’s true.”

And with that they lapsed into a discussion of whether or not Caine should be considered old, and if this illness might indeed mean death. Why did the High Priests rarely survive more than a decade long reign, anyway? Nobody knew, but this table of villagers was sure that, with the aid of homebrewed alcohol, they’d soon figure it out.

I took advantage of this moment to slip away from the table and leave the house before the conversation turned back to me or, worse yet, my friendship with Valdemar - friendship, could it even be called that? I doubted that he thought we were that close.

Regardless, Mantas had served to embitter me further, and I strode to the village graveyard.

It was quite out of the way; down a path past the chapel, and there came into view a grassy hill strewn with graves. I climbed my way to the top, a flat area which was crowded by a copse of trees and the surviving headstones so old that their engravings were illegible.

I preferred that part of the cemetery; it was rarely visited, so the Chaplain liked me to go up there sometimes and set down candles or clear the fallen leaves. There were few people left who knew of those that lay in peace amidst the birch trees that grew tall in fertile soil. I dreamed of being buried, one day, in that solitary silence, surrounded by the ancient bones and ashen dust of humans I’ve never known, far away from the three little graves down the slope, where my mother brought flowers and cried the tears of one impossible to console.

I looked out to the graves below. Did all dead here rot by nature’s laws, or were there some bodies still intact, swollen and drowning in blood that was not their own, kept at bay only by the clever machinations of mortal man? Oh, yes, there were ways to tie a monster to its funereal bed.

When I was little, my father told me the tale of a long-dead Prince. He fled a Kingdom burning with rebellion and took the identity of a commoner, where he lived in peace for a while. But one day he fell ill and in a panic told the people that if he were to die, they had to behead him and put the skull somewhere he could not reach, else he would rise as a monster from his tomb. The people of that land had never heard of such a thing, and their bewilderment at his request spread so far that it reached the ears of the Prince’s enemies, who knew of his curse and had been tracking him relentlessly. It is said that even when they found him and pressed a blade to his throat, the Prince pleaded not for his life but for his fate in death.

I wasn’t sure I believed that story. Maybe it was true, or maybe it was my father’s own fabrication told with hope that, like the Prince, I will lay down and beg to be dismembered.

Regardless, there was no way to tell if anyone in the village cemetery had suffered such a burial, or anything equivalent to it. There were no tombstones with ominous words etched into them. From the surface there was no way to tell what lay below.

No way to tell who here had been a seventh child, a murder victim or suicide, or a baby born with a red caul, or a godless heathen who drowned in the local river, all ripe candidates to life as a vrykolakas.

I lingered for a minute longer, half-expecting a sign of some sort. Something to confirm or deny everything that had been plaguing me since birth and now more so than ever before.

But there was nothing.

—

Valdemar sat with his back against our tree, working away at a little block of wood he held in his hands. He looked up at me and smiled.

“What are you doing?” I asked, sitting down beside him. The ground was uncomfortably cold, but he didn’t seem to care, so I tried not to either.

“As you can see, I’m carving.” He held it up for me to see - the wood had already taken the rough but certain shape of a cat.

“Oh!” I gasped, finally remembering, “I never gave you back your knife. It’s… it’s in my room, I think.” I flushed at the memory of it, of how I ran away from him, taking his tool with me.

Valdemar shrugged. “I know. It’s fine, just keep that one.” He ran a finger down the cat’s back. “Her name is Mixie. We left her back in Woltair.”

“Why didn’t you take her with you?”

“Would a cat survive such a long voyage?” He asked, then, “maybe she would have. But I had my hands full already…” a tinge of regret crept into his voice.

“But you left her with someone, didn’t you? I’m sure she’s doing well.”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“And you could always come back there for a visit.” I added meekly.

He shot me a strange, piqued look, and I saw that it was the wrong thing to say.

Valdemar continued working on his cat. We sat in silence for a little while, the only sounds around us were those of his knife chipping away at the wood, the distant voices of the villagers, and the tired chirping of birds. The sun had begun its downward descent, and I watched with mild interest as the sky turned slowly red.

Suddenly, he set the cat down and turned to me. “Did you think about it?” He asked.

No context was needed. I nodded and hugged my knees to my chest. I had thought about it, indeed spent the majority of the day thinking about it, and as I gazed at the reddening sky I did not want to think of it any more, not today at least, I didn’t want the sky to turn to blood before my eyes.

“I thought about it,” I said, my eyes on the clouds, “I thought that you were wealthy in Woltair.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. I thought that you had many books and attended private academies, and that you went to balls and danced with ladies and drank absinthe all night long.”

He laughed. “That what’s you thought of me? I’m no aristocrat. I wasn’t invited to balls and only rarely drank absinthe. But I did have a tutor for a while, that’s true. Are you disappointed?”

“No, but it’s strange. You look like you belong to that world.” I idly picked at a piece of grass. “Strange to think that you are in mine.”

“I feel like I should be embarrassed by this, somehow.” Valdemar said without a trace of embarrassment. He tilted his head and regarded me thoughtfully. Then he stood up and, after brushing off stray pieces of grass from his clothes, said, “But, you know, I can dance a waltz.”

He held out his hand. Not quite understanding, I took it and let him drag me to my feet. “Even though you didn’t go to any balls?” I asked.

A half-hearted shrug. “Nix taught me. She thought it’d be fun.” He said that name casually, but I felt a twinge of distaste at the mention of the dismembered woman. However, he didn’t give me a chance to dwell on it, adding, “I’d like to teach you too.”

I blushed. “I don’t think I could.”

“Why not?” he asked, and just for an instant I thought his gaze had turned cold.

I didn’t respond, truly not quite sure why not either, so Valdemar took my silence for assent and pulled me closer. He put his left hand on my shoulder. “Place your hand on my waist.” He instructed. When I hesitated, he took my hand and guided it there himself. Then he locked our free hands together. “This is our frame,” he said. “We need to maintain this throughout the dance.”

I nodded, vaguely shocked at the contact. A part of me struggled not to overlay the present with the memory of my arm wrapped around him, his blood dripping down my palm or, worse yet, Clement’s predatory grip on that girl’s waist.

“You’ll lead.” Valdemar said.

“Huh? How?”

“It’s not complex. I’ll tell you the steps, and after a few sequences you’ll get the complete hang of it.” He smiled broadly. “And then you can lead us wherever you like. How’s that sound?”

“I don’t think–”

“Then don’t think. Didn’t you wonder what life is like for those privileged Woltairians? I’m offering you a chance to live a part of it, here, with me.” He looked quite serious as he said this, even if the smile didn’t completely fall from his face.

“Alright,” I said. “Teach me.”

He showed me my steps, gently pulling me in the right direction when I seemed confused. He was right - it wasn’t awfully difficult and after a few rotations I felt quite adept, if we were to disregard the times I stepped on his toes.

His steps were graceful and loose, and he followed me with a self-assured discipline in tune with his demeanour. I enjoyed the freedom of taking us whichever way I liked, I let myself get absorbed in the pleasantly repetitive steps, and when he broke the frame and our chests pressed together, I felt that we were one being, one creature dancing away from the fields of the mundane.

I dipped him down. His long, blond hair brushed the grass and he grinned at me, his eyes alight.

The sun was setting behind us, bathing him in a deep orange glow and he looked like a fae, like a young god, like the sun itself came down from the skies to be held in my arms.

I thought of nothing but him, nothing but how I could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hands, and the words slipped out unbidden, “But why did I hurt you?” If I am not doomed, why was it so sweet?

He blinked - his lashes threads of gold, more delicate than the embroidery on a prince’s suit - and his smile widened. “Because it wasn’t the vrykolakas that wanted to do those things. It was you. Just you.” he said it simply, with that tell-tale ghost of dismissiveness so typical of him.

As if it was nothing, as if it were only obvious. Just me.