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A melancholic melody was born in the timid, rushing swirl of the first snow. Precisely where the delicate, lacy edges of these icy constellations managed to touch, snowflake to snowflake in a bewitching dance, and among this dancing multitude, notes cut through with dazzling brightness. Quiet instead of loud, they were not meant to become otherwise. Not allowed at all.
But still, they were heard, eyes were closed, and faces were offered to the reverent coolness of the new morning. Both hands reached out to it without fear or the acrid poison of false hope. They didn't look down, even if the melting ice cracked on the wide, rebellious expanse of the sprawling lake.
The Prince didn't care about it, just like he didn't care about those untouched snowdrifts far below the window. He only carefully lowered both joyful hands onto the windowsill, towards the light of the long-broken glass, not feeling how the old shards tore his skin in indifference.
After all, in the dawn twilight, music created from the window poured over the edge. Never lingering inside, it now flowed through the cracks of the broken, drafty stained-glass windows. Vlad urged it on, smoothing it with his restless palm towards the wind.
To its natural strength, its relentless movement further, to the east and to the west. Into the glow of the dying century, which the Prince himself did not notice behind the sadness of his walls. Only he took this music back with the wind, splashes of light on the breaks of parchment skin.
"Don't be so capricious, come to me." Vlad spread his arms wide, one step and he would fall into the abyss yawning with darkness that never happens. But he stood his ground anyway, caressed the wind with splayed fingers on the back of his head. "Come all of you."
And these snowflakes, once so loved by her, one and two, and an incomplete thousand in flight, all rushed to their doom between his fingers. Foolish, the Prince shook the snow off the windowsill with hands that had grown younger overnight. Therefore, the wandering wind did not recognize him, having grown accustomed over the years to meeting an angry old man instead of a smiling youth.
"My faithful, riotous friend!" Vlad shook his head, long dark hair pleasantly caressed his pale cheeks. A strange touch, he didn't recognize it at first, and then repeated it, trying to get used to it. "You won't have to languish around my loneliness anymore. I'm going after her."
But that wind, taught by delirium and grief, hastily fleeing towards the sunrise with the brilliance of all the pearly frozen stars, desperately rushed back. Into the room and further, to the warmth that had long ceased to exist.
Straight into the Prince's open arms and under his thin nightshirt. Where his heart beat, trembled, driving foreign blood in his blood through long-dried veins.
Vlad himself was not used to seeing himself so young, now, embracing the wind, he examined his hands. She had to like them, there was no other way.
Otherwise, he would lower them and retreat to the shadow, to the edge. He will return to loneliness, so as never to forget about her. Always watch from the darkness against the whimsical scorching sun. These thoughts settled heavily in his breaths, somewhere even deeper.
And from them, the Prince felt his restless heart in excitement, revived anew, in his once empty chest. He laughed at this sensation in a ringing voice, embracing the quieted wind under his shirt.
It pushed into his chest strongly, as if in disbelief, and Vlad stepped away from it in one step. A relentless step away from the new world, which the wandering wind had crossed back and forth in the years of its changed wanderings.
This new world blindly renounced his principality and title. From his beautiful princess, who had been resting for centuries under a tombstone in the remains of a ruined coffin.
Shivering from the cold, Vlad only pressed the cowardly wind closer to himself, warmed it from his skin and took off his shirt over his head, releasing it to freedom. He showed himself, so inflamed with incomprehensible happiness. Young for her.
"How can't you understand, I found her." his reddened, moist lips whispered.
In joy precisely, because death mercifully did not come for him today. And he had been unsuccessfully trying to calm down in her patient embrace for hundreds of years now. In order to wait unexpectedly.
The Prince continued to laugh loudly, allowing the wind to touch his strong body and the many bloody sins that had appeared on it last night. There was no difference in them.
She was.
Nearby.
Reach out your hand, you won't touch her, but now one touch to her seemed to him the highest reward. To his returned princess, born in England under a different name and in a different century.
He found her in this riot of life unfolding outside his castle by chance. Providence and a new sin to her inviolability, which he had to commit. She was his Elisabeta. His only.
"Look! Well, don't be stubborn, look." his palm spread a low stack of protruding cardboard rectangles on the table. Where in the colored light of different rooms there was one smile on each image. "How beautiful she is, my Elisabeta."
As before, even if he had not had the opportunity in his life to meet her so young. Young indeed, not yet fledged, soft under the blinding flash. Proud.
The Prince lovingly peered into the resolute firmness of her gaze, into this ideal spreading curve of her smile. He ran his dry fingertips carefully over it. And the wind touched his palm with her forgotten touch in its wake.
***
But he still didn't believe his eyes, his breath that had stopped in an instant of excitement. And his hands, which suddenly seemed old and wrinkled under the absent fabric of his usual black gloves. When he saw her with his own eyes.
Quiet and thoughtful, sitting in the very center of a tiny, multi-voiced restaurant on the outskirts of London. He expected to meet her in the luxurious depths of the city, under the gold of centuries-old crystal chandeliers among dozens of interfering cavaliers. But she was here, not yet belonging to him.
Four miserable meters to the meeting, five steps to her. But he didn't take them, staring at the modest blush that was blazing on her cheeks. So the light of the old street lamps above her became the glow of many spicy torches.
His shoulder was rudely bumped, so that his thoughts were confused, there were not many of them anyway, now it was difficult for the Prince to remember what they were about. He apologized restrainedly and coldly, not honoring the stranger with a glance, with his obviously effective curse.
Because to take his eyes off her would be ruin. Vlad was afraid to close his eyes, even if they were already stinging from dryness, and the first tears hastily rolled down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the soft pads of his fingers, touched the corners of his lowered lips.
He took the first step immeasurably wide, the heel of his boot slipped on the polished floor shamefully, if only to no avail. His second step was not much smaller. That's how they step into the abyss to death. He stepped towards her like that.
To the radiance of warm light that blushed her cheeks and her pink smile. Elisabeta smelled of ringing, real laughter, squeaky and loud. Leaving dreamy dimples on her cheeks until the onset of imminent seriousness.
Vlad remembered that she had them, he just forgot how often they could appear. It did not escape his tenacious attention that there was nothing in front of the girl that could have caused her such laughter. And no one nearby who could have made her laugh in his absence.
Because here, among the bustling crowd, she laughed differently. Not aloud, to herself precisely, and slowly turned the pages of a battered old book. The Prince was an even greater antiquity for her. But still, he tapped his fingers carefully once-two-once near her elbow on the table.
"Didn't I bother you?" the Prince wanted his smile not to be so wide, telling everything without words ahead of the destined hour. After all, they really haven't had the happiness of getting to know each other in the new time. Only she treacherously spread across his rejuvenated face. "I just wanted to say hello, Elisabeta."
"Are we acquainted?" a flat paper packet of sugar deftly lay between the pages of the book that had closed in an instant. So, she was not going to be distracted by the conversation for long. And he should hurry in what he had conceived. "I can't remember you."
Headstrong.
His.
"I'm afraid that's not the case." Vlad deftly threw his coat over his elbow, freeing his hands, and leaned forward a little. Under the light of the lamps that blinked equally at his request for her surprise. He only approached the back of the empty chair, but did not hurry to take a seat at the table.
Because she did not invite him to her, and he could not afford anything without her voiced permission. Whispered in the night under the lightness of hot blankets in centimeters from his kissed lips. The Prince shook his head, breaking free from the captivity of crumpled memories that possessed him.
And again he could not take his sad eyes off Elisabeta, even if she looked with distrust at his sudden appearance. With obvious indifference, and then lingered a little with her gaze on his pupils, on his irises. His face as a whole, familiar seeming among this grayness of identical gloomy faces.
She dropped a tiny spoon deep into the mug, raising splashes of diverging circles on the coffee surface. Elisabeta twitched, blinked, and regretfully noticed that coffee had spilled on the yellowed pages of her book. Suddenly covered with a snow-white handkerchief.
"Wait a little, don't touch it." Vlad politely did not allow the girl's thin fingers to remove his modest gift from the book, blotted the wet pages himself, and only timidly smiled at her bewilderment. "It seemed to me that you didn't want to spoil it."
"It's from the library." Elisabeta said irrelevantly, watching the confident attempts to correct the situation. Her own timid hands were only trying to blow on what was inevitably penetrating into the thickness of the read pages.
"I believe you. You will return it safe and sound, just let it dry." the letters did not fade under the fabric, they remained just as clear and large. He conscientiously read a couple of sentences. "You have excellent taste."
"Who are you?" he turned to her involuntarily, and it seemed as if stars, dropped by the sky, were in the brilliance of her curious eyes. Bright and attractive, so that Elisabeta smiled at his confusion. "And why are you helping me?"
"I am your new good friend, Elisabeta." his words, loud and heavy for the first meeting, inappropriate at all under the light of electric lamps, resounded dully in the ensuing silence. Broken by her short, silenced laughter. "Are you laughing?"
"I've been introduced to in different ways, but never like that." her quick movements with a napkin wiped the missed coffee stream from the edge to the middle. Crumpled, like soft paper, hid under the table. "Will you sit down?"
"I would be very grateful. Thank you." if he had a hat, he would have taken it off before her before sitting down on this uncomfortable chair. The best chair, because the girl with her foot only slightly, but moved it away from the table, inviting him. "Oh, and forgive me, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Vlad."
"Nice to meet you." her palm turned out to be just as light, cool and gentle. Given out of surprise, because no one was giving out palms at this time anymore. "Ah."
And Vlad gently touched it with his lips. Weightlessly, almost only in his dreams, but her smell and the tart floral taste in the touch made him believe in the truth. The aroma of floral hand cream and oil remained on her skin.
It was unthinkable to let her go, to release the bird after catching it, when he had been waiting for centuries for her return to him. The Prince looked askance at her delicate fingers, bowed his head, and her touch relieved his eternal headache.
"It's not worth it." the girl pulled her hand away reluctantly, as if something in the heat of his lips had become unbearable for her. She lowered the sleeves of her blue blouse lower, accidentally touched his leg with her heel under the table, not used to sitting in company. "We are not that familiar with you."
"I dream of getting to know you better, Elisabeta." his smile said, closed, because he was savoring the taste of her skin on his lips. This lovely forgotten aroma of pine needles from the forests of his principality sprawling in the snows. "But, please, don't be distracted by me. Your drink will cool down."
"It's okay, I don't like coffee anyway." she, as if disdainfully, moved the mug to the opposite side, cautiously away from the book. She took out a sugar packet from the pages, not letting it get wet. "And I'm Liz, not Elisabeta."
"Forgive me, an old habit." her first name at birth, inherited by no one and not fully returned to him. An echo, an incorrect abbreviation, Vlad never allowed himself the audacity to call her that. "Allow me to treat you to something more lovely than coffee?"
"Like to call people by their full name?" the girl teased, ceasing to hide her wrists under the blue of the silk. This blouse did not go with all the other clothes, familiar to the eye at this time. "I want hot chocolate, with whipped cream and liqueur."
"I want to call only you that." he coughed dryly, lowering his eyes to the floor, so that she could see how his own lips betrayed him and broke in this bitter smirk. "You can't even imagine what fools the men were who didn't win your hand."
"Well, I'm not going to give my hand to anyone." the one where the trace of his kiss was obsessively cold on her skin. And she touched it constantly with her fingers, until she could warm her hands on a tall mug with a drink. The Prince noticed how her skin turned red.
"I will take your heart, my princess." he clearly longed to steal her from this alien scorching heat back to the cold. To a place where his trembling heart and her hot flesh under the touches could merge into one. Blood to blood until eternity.
And she only shook her head, picking up her neat brown coat from the back of the chair. She snorted, as if it was funny to her, and patted the Prince on the shoulder.
Dissolving in the multi-faceted darkness, where he knew her apartment and window. Her geranium, standing on the windowsill and many curtains breaking out with the wind with the ingrained smell of pine soap on the fabric.
***
He found her silhouette well after midnight, broken through the balcony railing, playfully lifeless in pose. Relaxed, she wanted to catch the fleeing wind with her palms. The Prince squeezed it, elusive, with his palms and did not release it.
So that only she would feel how nothing more prevents the waves of her brown hair from neatly covering her shoulders. To cover herself from prying eyes in this uncomfortable night, where he alone could not fear the sun. Cursed before the sinless. Elisabeta, who acquired a surname, while he himself could not remember his first name without effort.
"Can't you sleep?" his smirk was illuminated by the light of the waning moon, shading his elongated fangs. At night, everyone drops their masks, but he dropped the skin of pretense before her. "Today is a surprisingly beautiful sky, don't you think?"
"You? What are you doing here?" Elisabeta hissed, rushing back to the protective light of her small room. To the curtains that covered her naked body, but she hid behind them for a short time. She stepped under the moon, in a thin flowing atlas on her delicate skin.
"In such weather, creators created their best works." the Prince continued, not noticing as if the girl's embarrassment, her suddenly revived interest in him. And that beautiful flexible body under the fabric, and he dreamed of touching it for centuries.
With just one glance in the scattering light of the generous moon. From him, the girl's hair seemed lighter, just as curly and loose under the play of the released wind. She herself, graceful as a cat, holding the fabric of her shirt at her chest, carefully leaned on the railing of her balcony.
"Do you dance?" so beautiful, as before, it's a pity there is no one nearby to help her in this secret dance. To the music of his box, because he carried it in his pocket close to his heart. For her sake. And himself. "You're doing very well, I'm sorry I distracted you."
"You decided to follow me?" the girl joked, suddenly leaning over the railing, and her hair was gently picked up by the wind. As well as the fabric that she released from her thin fingers.
"No way." the untruth escaped from his lips, but it did not seem prickly and bitter all of a sudden. The lie was erased under the boundaries of the past time, and Vlad shamelessly could accept it for good for himself. "I was just walking."
"At night." Elisabeta nodded her head, glancing askance at the star-studded sky. She also reached out to it, moved her palm so that it would all shatter among her movements.
Always playing with fire.
Found solace in the cold distant light.
"Not everyone likes to walk during the day." Vlad politely clarified, admiring the ease of her movements. But she lacked someone who could catch her dreamy hand, protect her from that inevitable edge. "Be careful, don't lean over like that."
"And aren't you afraid of monsters in the shadows?" ignoring his warning, she was again in the envious shelter of transparent curtains. She came to her senses as if, trying to throw them on herself from the gaze lowered to the floor, and touched the tips of her fingers to her lips for a very short time.
Because she was saying not at all what serious Liz so often said when she was distracted from books and many burdensome things. She was talking at night with an almost familiar person, almost naked. And she was not ashamed of him.
"No, I'm not afraid." he could not cross the threshold without an invitation. Go around the fence and penetrate from the back. Not into her apartment for sure, but he so wanted to feel with her in a single movement of air.
"In vain." Elisabeta shook her head, shifting from foot to foot, clearly frozen in this incomprehensible beautiful night. She hid herself more tightly behind the curtains, useless from ignorance. That she is clearly visible to someone who knew her body better than herself. "A lot hides in the dark."
"I don't think so." he knocked the old cane to the gate until it rang, once, four and three. A short known message, listening to which the girl smiled selflessly. Because he begged for her smile all the sky illuminated with dusty silver glitter. "Won't you invite me to your place?"
"I don't invite strange men to my place." she again became Liz from a tiny noisy coffee shop, illuminated by a different light only. She resisted, looked at herself from the side, and crossed her arms on her chest.
"We are acquainted." the Prince gently reminded, trying to drive away the contented smirk from his face, which still appeared under the serious words of his beloved. He erased it uncomplainingly with a handkerchief full of coffee stains and the thinned taste of her lips. "And I am your friend, you should not forget about it."
"Come on up." to the last barrier that collapsed to retreat. For him, because her life was obliged to remain inviolable. Whether in the day or night, forever alive. Without his involvement in it.
***
In the flickering light of the candles he had begged to be lit, the prince revealed himself sharply to Elisabeta. Without pain or regret, for his patience could no longer bear her unapproachable presence in such distanced proximity. He watched her unrestrained, breathless confusion.
Under the melody of his love in the music box, carefully lowered onto the soft bedspread. Wound up by her interested fingers without hesitation, to suddenly see her fate there, in those notes.
In the beautiful echoes of their shared past. In the gentle touch of his hands to her bare shoulder, her elbow, her alluring, never-kissed neck. To the skin with that enchanting pine scent of his native home.
And she recoiled, embarrassed, disbelieving. Frightened by that strange thing that had long settled among her dreams, her thoughts, her words so immeasurably often. And it was terribly difficult to admit, even to herself, the highest degree of this disbelief.
"You are not human," Elisabeta hissed in horror, holding out both hands, covered in goosebumps from prolonged games with the freedom-loving wind. She stepped back one step, two, and pressed herself, cornered, with her hips against the chest of drawers.
"It's true, I am a curse," the prince, undeterred by her fear, cupped the girl's face in his hands. He subdued her fright with the languid touch of his thumb from her forehead to her lips. "I have waited for you for hundreds of years. Like no one else, my princess."
"In solitude?" her sympathetic lips suddenly asked, on which his fingers lay, and he felt every letter they uttered on himself. A granted happiness in this timid, shying darkness.
"I had minions, I created them to find you." And still unable to take his hands from her face when she suddenly pressed her cheek to his wrist. To his scent, identical to hers in the kinship of marriage. "Only these disenfranchised saints killed everyone I had blessedly cursed."
Blessedly precisely, the prince considered his fate a punishment from a reviled God. Their lives, however, in shadows and scattered colors, were a bright carnival of vanity and lust. They enjoyed their prolonged century with joy.
Now all of them are headless, buried prudently meters deep in the ground. Vlad threw the last handfuls of wet earth onto their shrouded graves. Without coffins, because it was not customary to bury monsters with honors.
"I'm so sorry," Elisabeta calmed down in his begged, reliable embrace, hid on his chest, ready to listen to his long life minute by minute. She closed her eyes, and he ran his hand adoringly through her soft, unruly hair.
And in the light of the wide-open window, in front of the made bed, he told her the monotonous story of his long, drawn-out life. Year after year to the truth, through suffering, sins, and incomparable pain.
"I liked knowing that in the world, I was still waiting for you," the prince timidly leaned down, touching her warm, excited forehead with his lips, which grew cold under his kiss. With immense effort, he forced himself to step back. "There were those who could know me."
Her palm ended up in his palm by chance, correctly and warmly, smoothed out the scratchy, longing fear in his voice when he got to the years close to her. To the photographs that were lost on the way in the mail, thrown out of the car, placed in his hands by fate itself.
So that he would recognize his Elisabeta in her face.
And she did not recognize him.
"I so hoped you would remember me," with despair in his broken voice, the prince found the strength to distance himself from her. To a distance sufficient for his acute understanding. That she was drawn not to his former self, but to his new, mysterious nature for her.
"I'm trying," the girl reached out to his hands without knowledge, with hope. She touched them slightly with her fingertips, and he took her back to himself without a single chance of his salvation.
"I dream that you would be my wife, Elisabeta," Vlad whispered into the softness of her wavy hair, buried his fingers madly in them, pressed his lips for a moment to this tickling familiarity. "Don't be afraid of me, I won't become your curse, I won't encroach on your life."
"But I need to save yours, because mine means nothing without yours," Elisabeta looked into his eyes with the strict intention of the words spoken. As if they were right for her, truly belonging to her.
"Why are you saying this?" the prince pleaded, stroking the girl's face with wide palms, rubbing her cheeks until a lovely blush appeared. Not a single portrait of her during her lifetime could capture it even in remote accuracy.
"Because these words have haunted me at night for years," the girl confessed, covering Vlad's palms with her insistent hands. Forcing him to stop and look her in the eyes. "And I kept thinking, who are they for. For you, my prince."
"Take my hands. Take my soul, if there is any left." And if inside his rejuvenated body, among this alien, raging blood, there was no hint of a soul left, he would curse the Almighty again to give her everything that would be destined for him. "Be mine."
"I want to love you," a pensive wrinkle ran between her frowning eyebrows. Her, Liz, no other way, and the prince carefully smoothed it with his lips. He took away the doubts that tormented the girl. "Like before."
"Elisabeta, I don't even dare to beg for your love," in the world and the form in which she had yet to experience it. He was stealing her life for his own peace of mind, and she so serenely handed herself into his familiar, native hands. "I would be happy to become a cat curled up at your feet."
And she nodded her head timidly to the sacred truth in his quiet, hot words. There, where her life continued in the uneven thread of a loving pulse, Elisabeta, who had exchanged her name, accepted a frightening fate instead. She fell into its outstretched, protective embrace.
Back to him.