Carmiria Memories

Ding.

The bell rang.

It was a small thing. Brass, polished every morning by the same hands it summoned, hanging from a cord of faded red silk in the drawing room on the second floor.

Ding.

Miruna was already moving before the second note finished. Her body had learned the bell long before her mind had. Two short rings meant tea. One long ring meant the young master was bored. Three rings, quick, impatient, the cord yanked hard enough to make the brass bite into the wood... three rings meant someone was angry, and that someone would need a place to put it.

It rang three times.

Of course it did.

"...Coming."

Her voice did not carry. It was not supposed to. A maid’s voice existed only to be heard by the person standing directly in front of her, and only when that person had asked a question. Anything else was noise. Anything else was insolence. Miruna had been taught that lesson so many times that the lesson no longer needed a teacher.

She was nineteen years old.

She knew the palace better than the people who lived in it.

She knew that the fourth step of the servants’ staircase groaned if you put your weight on its left side, so she put her weight on the right. She knew that the east corridor carried sound all the way to the master bedroom, so she never cried in the east corridor. She knew which door the queen’s perfume drifted out of a full minute before the queen herself appeared, and she knew to have her eyes on the floor before that minute was over.

Eyes down. Shoulders in. Make yourself small.

Smaller.

Smaller than that.

If they cannot see you, they cannot find a reason.

That was the rule. That had always been the rule. And for nineteen years, Miruna had followed it so faithfully that some days she was not sure there was anything left of her behind it.

What happened in those corridors was never written down.

Nobody kept a ledger of the slaps that did not leave marks, or of the nights she was told to stand in the hall until morning, or of the things that were said to her in the soft, reasonable tone people use when they know there will never be consequences. Those who knew chose to forget. It was easier. It was cleaner. It cost them nothing.

And those who forgot never once imagined that someone, somewhere in the walls of their own house, was remembering.

Every word.

Every face.

Every time the bell rang three times.

That night, the sky split open.

There was no warning. No omen. No prophet screaming in the square. One moment the stars were where they had always been, and the next there was a seam in the dark, a long, pale wound running from one edge of the world to the other, and through that wound something poured down that had no name in any human language.

Later, the scholars would call it the Assimilation.

Later, there would be maps, and theories, and numbers. Eighty percent. Billions turned to stone in a single breath. Continents swallowed, a planet stretched to ten times its size.

Later.

That night, in a narrow room in the servants’ wing of a palace in old Romania, there was only Miruna.

And Miruna was dying.

"Ah... ah, ah, ah..."

It began in her chest. Not a pain, at first. A pressure. As if someone had placed a hand flat against her sternum and was leaning on it, gently, patiently, waiting for something inside to give.

Then it gave.

It hurt.

It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt...!!

Her spine bowed. Her fingers clawed at the thin mattress until the fabric tore. Something was moving under her skin, something was being pulled apart and stitched back together while she was still awake to feel every thread, and she could not scream, because a maid does not scream, because screaming means someone will come and someone coming means...

"Hh... hhk..."

The small mirror on the wall above her bed cracked.

She did not see it happen. She only heard it, a thin, bright snap, like a bone in a bird’s wing, and when she managed to turn her head the glass was split down the middle, and in the two halves of it there were two Mirunas looking back at her.

One of them was a frightened girl in a maid’s nightgown, sweat pasting her hair to her forehead, lips bitten bloody.

The other one was smiling.

...Ah.

That was the last time she ever saw the first one.

It should have killed her.

By every rule of the world that had existed until that night, it should have killed her. The cook died. The stable boy died. Somewhere in the city, entire streets simply stopped, frozen mid-step, mid-word, mid-breath, their bodies turned to grey and silent stone.

Miruna did not die.

Miruna woke up.

The senses came first.

She heard it before she understood what she was hearing. A soft, wet rhythm. Thump... thump. Then another, slightly faster, from somewhere to the left. Then another, and another, and another, layered on top of each other until the whole palace was a single living drum.

Hearts.

She could hear their hearts.

Through the walls. Through the floors. The old butler in the room beside hers, slow and stubborn. The young master two floors up, quick and shallow, the heartbeat of someone having a bad dream. And above all of them, in the royal chamber at the top of the house, a heart she would have known anywhere.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The queen.

And beneath every heartbeat, carried along with it, she could feel something else. Warmth. Movement. A slow red current running just under the skin of people who were sleeping two floors away and had no idea that anyone was listening.

Then came the hunger.

It was not the hunger of a body that needs to be fed. Miruna knew that kind of hunger intimately; she had been sent to bed without supper more times than she could count. That hunger had edges. It had a shape. It ended.

This one did not end.

This one had no bottom.

It opened inside her like a mouth, and for a few long, terrible moments it swallowed everything. Her name. Her rules. The fourth step of the servants’ staircase. Eyes down, shoulders in, make yourself small... all of it went into the dark and did not come back up.

There was only the drum.

And the warmth.

And the want.

The door opened.

Of course someone came. Someone always came. She had been too loud, after all. A maid is never allowed to be loud.

It was the head of the household’s personal valet, a lamp in one hand, irritation already written across his face, already drawing breath to say the words he had said a thousand times before.

What do you think you are...

He did not finish.

Because Miruna raised her eyes.

She had not meant to. It was simply that she had forgotten, for one instant, that she was not allowed to. And in that instant she looked straight at him, and he looked straight at her, and she watched it happen.

She watched his face change.

She knew that face. She had worn that face every day of her life. The flicker at the corners of the eyes. The way the hands tighten. The tiny half-step backward the body takes before the mind has decided anything.

Fear.

He was afraid.

Of her.

"...Ah."

Something in her chest, something that had been clenched for nineteen years, slowly, slowly let go.

"Ahah."

And Miruna smiled.

They say the moon over the palace turned red that night.

They say the screaming lasted until dawn.

They say she went mad, that the thing that came through the sky took her mind and left only an animal behind, a starving beast in a torn nightgown that did not know what it was doing.

That is what they say.

It is not true.

What few people will admit, what the songs and the history books carefully step around, is that Miruna did not go mad.

She knew exactly who was running from her.

She knew their names. She knew their voices. She knew which of them had laughed, and which of them had looked away, and which of them had told her, in that soft and reasonable tone, that she should be grateful.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

She knew which doors stuck in their frames. She knew which rooms had only one way out. She knew that the fourth step of the servants’ staircase groaned under weight on its left side, and so, when she heard it groan, she knew precisely where someone was hiding.

How strange. How funny.

Everything they had forced her to learn, every single thing she had memorized just to survive another day in that house... all of it was still useful.

It was simply useful for something else now.

And then, behind a locked door at the end of the east corridor, the corridor that carried sound all the way to the master bedroom, the corridor where she had never once allowed herself to cry, she heard it.

"Please."

A voice she knew very well.

"Please. Please, I’m begging you, please, please..."

Miruna stood in the hallway and listened.

It was the same word. Exactly the same word. The word she had said into that same carpet, in that same corridor, on her knees, so many times. The word that had never once been answered. The word she had eventually stopped saying, because saying it only made things worse.

Please.

She pressed her forehead against the cool wood of the door.

“...I asked too,” she whispered.

And she went in.

And in that moment she discovered something that frightened her far more than the hunger ever had.

She was happy.

Not relieved. Not vindicated. Happy. The plain, simple, bright happiness of a child on a summer afternoon. For the first time in nineteen years her chest did not hurt. For the first time in nineteen years she did not have to make herself small.

For the first time in nineteen years, she was not afraid.

They were.

So she drew the night out.

She did not have to. She was faster than any of them now, faster than anything that had ever walked those halls; she could have ended it in minutes. But minutes felt so short. Minutes felt like being robbed.

So she let some of them run.

She let them reach the end of a corridor and believe, for one precious second, that they had escaped. She let them hide behind curtains and inside wardrobes and under the great oak table in the dining hall. She walked slowly. She hummed. She knocked on doors and called people by their names, the way they had always called hers, so that they would know, so that they would understand, so that they would feel exactly what it was like to hear your own name and know that something terrible is about to happen.

And then she caught them again.

She listened to every sound they made. Every gasp. Every bargain. Money. Titles. Apologies that arrived nineteen years too late. She listened with her whole body, carefully, attentively, like someone finally learning a language that had always been denied to her.

The language of the people at the top of the stairs.

It was not so difficult, after all.

And she drank.

The queen was the last.

The queen did not run. The queen sat at her dressing table, in front of her tall gilded mirror, her crown still on her head, as if the crown alone could hold the night back. Above her, on the wall, the great family portrait looked down on both of them: the king, the queen, the children, all painted with the same serene, untouchable faces.

There was no one in that painting who looked like a maid.

There never had been.

“You,” the queen said. Just that. Just you. The way she had always said it.

Miruna tilted her head.

“Me,” she agreed.

What happened next is not recorded either.

But years later, in a locked gallery in the heart of Carmiria, among a handful of objects that no visitor is ever allowed to touch, there would be a crown, dark stains still sunk into the grooves of its gold, that nobody in the Empire dares to polish.

And beside it, wrapped in red velvet like a pressed flower, there would be a bone.

A souvenir.

Of the most wonderful night of her life.

Something older than hunger heard that night.

It had been drifting through the wound in the sky with everything else, a fragment of something vast and ancient and patient, and it had been searching. It always searched. It searched for the point where a will finally breaks, the point where a person stops being a person and becomes simply an appetite wearing their face.

It had found that point in so many before. Kings. Saints. Monsters. It had worn every one of them until there was nothing left inside but itself.

They would come to call it a sin.

They would call it Gluttony.

And it came for Miruna.

It slid into her the way water slides into a cracked cup. It reached for her name, to dissolve it. It reached for her will, to snap it. It reached into the bottomless hunger that had opened inside her and tried to say: this is mine. This was always mine. You are only the vessel.

...Ah.

But it had chosen the wrong creature.

There is a hunger that no sin can surpass.

It is the hunger of someone who spent nineteen years being denied everything. Denied food. Denied rest. Denied a voice. Denied the right to raise her eyes, to say no, to say please and be heard. Denied even the right to be angry about it.

That hunger does not break.

It was forged in a place where breaking was the only thing ever offered to it, and it refused, every single day, for nineteen years.

“No,” said Miruna.

Not to the queen. Not to the bell. To the thing inside her.

“This is mine.”

And she bit back.

It was not a battle anyone could have seen. There was no light, no sound, no crack of thunder. Only a girl in a ruined nightgown kneeling on the floor of a dead queen’s bedroom, very still, very quiet, with her eyes closed, eating.

When the red moon finally sank beyond the horizon, Gluttony no longer existed as it once had.

The girl from the palace was still standing.

She was still Miruna.

But now there was something inside her, folded up neatly beneath her ribs like a second heart, that would never, ever be sated again.

The morning came anyway.

That was the strangest part. The sun rose. Birds sang in the gardens as if nothing had happened. Light came through the tall windows and lay across the floor in long golden bars, and in that light the palace looked almost beautiful.

Miruna walked through it alone.

She passed the drawing room on the second floor. The little brass bell was still hanging there on its faded red cord, perfectly still.

She looked at it for a long time.

Nobody would ever ring it again.

She passed the portrait. Someone, at some point during the night, had dragged their nails across it; the painted faces of the royal family were torn into long ragged strips, and nobody would ever restore them.

She looked down at herself. At the uniform, the black dress, the white apron, now soaked dark from collar to hem. For nineteen years that uniform had meant one thing. Servant. Property. Small.

She laughed.

Not hysterically. Not madly. Softly, with genuine relief, like someone setting down a heavy bag at the end of a very long walk.

And then, standing in the ruins of the house that had owned her, she noticed something.

She was still hungry.

After all of them.

After everything.

She was still hungry.

...And that realization did not horrify her.

It fascinated her.

If this hunger had no bottom, then perhaps neither did she.

The first vampires appeared soon after.

She did not plan it. She discovered it, the way she had discovered everything else: by accident, and then with great interest. Her blood changed people. It went into them and remade them, painfully, the way the sky had remade her. And the ones it remade could do the same.

Children of her blood.

And children of their blood.

And children of theirs.

The bloodlines multiplied, spreading like red roots through the broken earth of a broken world. Houses formed. Hierarchies formed. Whispers formed, and then prayers, and then a word they began to use for her that no one had ever used for her before.

Mother.

Progenitor.

Every single one of those bloodlines, no matter how far it wandered, no matter how proud or ancient it pretended to be, led back to the same place.

To a maid who refused to die.

The world lay in ruins.

Cities had fallen. Governments had fallen. Billions stood frozen in the streets, grey and silent, statues of the last second of their lives. Forests swallowed highways. Monsters walked out of the mountains.

Miruna could have wandered through all of it as a predator. It would have been easy. It would have been fun, for a while.

But she found that she wanted something else.

Something she had never, in her entire life, been allowed to own.

Something that was hers.

So she built.

From the ruins of old Romania rose fortresses. Then walls. Then laws, and roads, and markets, and systems to feed her children without turning every city into a slaughterhouse. Then ministers, and governors, and courts. Then an empire.

She cast off the surname of the family that had once owned her. She would not carry their name. She would not carry anyone’s name. If she was going to have a family, it would be one of her own making, beginning with her, belonging to her, answering to no one.

Thus was born the House von Carmilla.

And the land that lay beneath her Blood Moon came to be called Carmiria.

Twenty-four years have passed since that night.

Miruna still looks nineteen.

Those who travel to her court, the diplomats and ministers and hunters and kings, always arrive expecting the same thing. A cold sovereign on a cold throne. A silent monster in black silk, eyes like old wine, the kind of ruler who speaks in whispers and never smiles.

That is not what they find.

They find a young woman who laughs too loudly at banquets. Who walks out of important meetings in the middle of a sentence because she got bored. Who adores sweets, and parties, and pretty dresses, and beautiful things of every kind. Who sometimes, for reasons nobody quite understands, greets her most important guests wearing a maid’s uniform, smiling, and serves them tea with her own hands.

Who will talk for hours, genuinely delighted, with anyone she finds interesting.

And who will have that very same person killed the moment they stop being interesting.

Perhaps that is what unsettles people most. The ones who know her story.

Because they keep waiting for the monster to show itself. For the mask to slip. For the moment the cheerful girl gives way to the thing underneath.

It never comes.

There is no mask.

Miruna never lost her humanity. She loves. She hates. She laughs. She enjoys herself. She remembers every face from that night and every face since, and she understands, perfectly, exactly what she does to people.

The monster did not replace her.

She chose it.

And she hungers.

Blood is no longer enough.

It quenches the thirst, yes. But thirst is such a simple, crude thing. Over twenty-four years, her appetites have grown more refined, the way a palate grows refined after a lifetime at the finest tables.

Desire has a flavor.

Sweet, and heavy, and a little sticky, like honey left too long in the sun.

Fear has a flavor.

Sharp. Bright. Electric on the tongue. She knows it better than any other, because she lived on the other side of it for nineteen years.

Ambition has a flavor.

Bitter at first, like dark chocolate, and then, slowly, intoxicating.

And memories...

Memories have a flavor too.

The richest of all. Layered. Complex. Every experience a person has ever lived, folded into them like spices into wine, ripening, deepening, waiting.

Miruna has tasted many of them.

Kings. Hunters. Saints. Monsters.

But she is always, always looking for the next one.

Someone whose story is worth savoring.

Someone who has lived enough to be interesting.

...Someone like you, perhaps.

Ding.