Bursting through the heavy door from the dark of night outside Helena called aloud as she shed off her coat. Hooking it on a nearby coat hook. The bluebells hopped with her, “Ursula! Ursula! My friend! I have great news!”

Her excited echo bounced on each wall, slipping through the stone of the castle, the uttered syllables overlapping each other until they became unintelligible.

No one called back.

Placing her bundle of bluebells on a nearby creaking credenza, Helena called out once again, “Ursula?”

Nothing.

Night swooped in from the crystal windows, basking the castle in a biblical gloom and shade. Confused at the hands of this untimely silence, Helena began to call out for her host as she walked through the still hallways. Venturing around the turning and twisting corridors of the castle left her lonely.

Her excitement began to bleed into a stillness as she ducked through more doorways looking for the woman dressed in the dark.

Even the library was empty. The stacks of books sitting still, their eyes peering at her. The stained glass portraits with irises filled with black quill ink. No clue that Ursula had ever been here. Huffing, she felt around in the dark for a candle to light but instead, her hand connected with an unknown object.

She pulled on it, once, twice and on the third she heard a rumbling nearby. Behind her a hole had sprouted to replaced the fireplace.

“A passageway?” Helena muttered as her finger pads trailed over the cracking stone.

A few stone steps lead her further south, the quiet seemed to escape the hallways as Helena could not quite hear herself take a breath. The silence and sound had been swallowed whole. She walked until the brimming of a small room’s light gripped the hallway wall.

Visage half obscured in shadow and light, Helena peered into the small dome-shaped room. Empty as it was, the few candles lit it up with a conservative light. A singular chalice sat lonely atop a table centered in the dome. It looked similar to Ursula’s usual chalice, though tonight Helena could see its differences. Built with more silver engravings and leaves as well as a red background like that of rose petals.

A bitter cold flowed outwards from this unknown room and into the passageway. Goosebumps birthed themselves upon her skin as the hair raises on the back of Helena’s neck.

Then she heard the clicks. First, the charcoal web of fabric was kicked into view as the towering frame of Ursula Athanasia deposited a large jar next to the small chalice.

Beginning to take a step from the shadows, Helena stops herself abruptly. For an unknown reason she ceased her movements; perhaps a morbid curiosity and to watch this form continue on its path without external forces, or perhaps for an indescribable awkwardness she felt or for another reason she could not quite describe.

So she stayed still, watching with a tilted head as Ursula gripped the jar’s frame, she began to pour the red wine into the hands of the chalice. The permeating smell of iron in the air. Bottles upon bottles of vermillion wine stacked on filled shelves.

And this is when she knew. This was no wine.

She watched in horror and dread as Ursula’s pursed lips captured blood, her pale ones drowned in it. They were covered in the ichor, ivory lips tainted scarlet. She had watched those lips speak, sing and recite. This was not the wine she had been told about. But the blood that had been omitted. The overwhelming scent of iron drifted through the air.

Was this the work of her God? His opposite?

The desire to burst with questions strangled her like the wrapping of silk hands against her throat. It was overwhelming, the words wrote themselves into her skin, begging, down on their knees they begged to be uttered.

But each letter slips away from the ink of her when she realizes its truest form, who stands before her. Who drinks the blood of the living not ten feet from her shaking legs.

Ursula Athanasia had been a recluse for a reason, and like a dragonfly in the skittering samite of a spider’s web, she was the prey. Was she not?

Oh, if only Helena could scream. Tears welled in her eyes, like an overflowing well. Silently they streaked down her face, the scarlet blood mirroring its own deadly colouring in the long, pearly tears. She had known it. The way her faith had wavered under Ursula’s piercing gaze.

She ran the moment the connection between her limbs and mind was restored. The strings of a marionette tying themselves around her wrists and ankles, tearing her from the area.

She traced the perimeter of the rushing river with her idle steps; her mind empty as she balanced on the rocks. Her white hair splayed in the reflection, caught like spider silk in the moonlight. Even in the night she could not hide from the moon’s gaze, a taunt perhaps. Did the moon desire to play tricks and laugh at Helena’s disorientation and turmoil?

Then, like a cracked mirror, her bones simply gave themselves to the ground. She fell to her knees like a prayer. Clasping her hands together, knees digging into the heavy and thick mud. The ivory fabric stained, obliterated by the green Earth she prayed into. Over and over she repeated, “I pray to you for guidance, to be my refuge from pain, to give me help and to replace my distress with peace.”

Her voice shaking like the hand of God in His wrath, her own prayer more empty breaths than true words. But it was no matter as the warnings of the river drowned out her whispers.

Every tale she had hear in passing or told in tall tales reflected in the spring waters. A Vampyr.

She had eaten next to the undead, prayed within their hallowed halls. Ursula’s empty soul teeming with transgressions that Helena had not caught onto. The truth still made her head spin, as though the ground beneath her was sinking and growing at the same time.

The prayer for God’s looming audience left only silence in its wake. Her short and simple breaths echoing as the dirt dug into her knees and left behind stains on her dress. For tonight, the silver of her cross hung with the weight of fire and brimstone.