Midnight After Midnight - Nanowrimo 2022

Chapter 15 - A Longer Story

Utterly defeated, Simon dragged himself back home. He sighed as he slowly and weakly climbed up the stairs to Elizabeth's room, waking her up with a creak of the door. After a few minutes of yawning while stretching her arms, she was ready to stand up, blinking rapidly at her father to express her confusion. As he began to cry, she became concerned, immediately jumping and then tightly wrapping her arms around him, her eyes gleaming with sorrow.

"Father, why are you crying?" she asked, her voice trembling, and Simon hugged her tighter.

"You're not ready to know the truth," he said gravely, beginning to cry even harder.

She remained silent for a minute before he let out a deep sigh, prepared to tell her everything.

"Well, you see, my father and I went to visit the cliff. We had a great time until he stepped on its crumbling edge, and then... And then..."

"He plummeted to his death?" she asked desperately.

He nodded feebly. "Yes, he did. Fate was so cruel to take us from him just when our situation was about to get better. May he rest in peace."

"Yes, may he rest in peace," she whispered, after which they both sat on the edge of the bed, having no idea what they were going to do for the rest of the day or the rest of their lives for that matter.

"I'm heading to the kitchen to finish your cake," he said with an awkward inflection in his voice after what seemed like half an hour.

She nodded, running off to the attic. It was her favourite place to spend her time, especially when she was facing emotional turmoil and needed nothing more than to be alone. There, she kept all her canvases, cans of paint, paintbrushes and all other such supplies, mostly painting things she knew from real life, but sometimes painting images which she saw in her dreams.

A figure that often appeared in her dreams was a beautiful woman with long red hair and sapphire eyes, her lips reminiscent of strawberries, her skin white as milk, and her fingers long and bony. Gloves made of lace concealed her sharp claws, large bat wings sprouted from her back, and among her normal pearly teeth were two especially pearly fangs, not too noticeable unless one was paying much attention to her. She was told that it was what her dead mother looked like - except for the parts that reminded her of vampires. The same mother she'd never seen in her life, the mother who birthed her at seventeen and left her right after giving her a name.

She'd never thought much of her or knew much about her for that matter. Thusly, it was strange to her why she tended to appear in her dreams if she'd only seen her in pictures. What was even stranger was that she was always standing on a balcony during a night with a coal-black, starless sky, her right hand leaning against the fence, breathing in sighs as she gently wept at the curse Fate cast on her, whatever it might be. Those dreams were so haunting and vivid that she had to stop ignoring them and paint them a few months ago, the images in them being carved into her mind for years beyond counting.

She showed her father all her paintings, except for that one, knowing how severely it could impact him if his eyes were cursed with the misfortune of seeing it. Profound sorrow terrorized her face, especially her soulful blue eyes, making her seem like a tormented phantom. And what other description was there for her, at least in that painting? She was a phantom, a beautiful, tortured phantom, damned to never see the light of God again, forever yearning to feast on the blood of the innocent, that function leading her through her entire life. What was there for her to do other than sigh and cry? Nothing, and that would never end unless she somehow found a way to break herself away from the punishment of Fate.

But none of that was real, now was it? After all, vampires only existed in folktales, and her mother had died in an unfortunate accident. It would be silly to think otherwise. She thought of the situation that way ever since the dreams began, but on her fifteenth birthday, which to her seemed cursed, she found proof that it being fiction wasn't as certain as she had previously thought.