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M any stories have been told about me, but only this one is disloyal enough to the imagination to be called true .

One winter night, long ago, a star trickled down the sky, as stars often do, and fell somewhere upon the dense, sloping forestland outside the walls of Lumia.

This was not a remarkable event in itself, for the people of the Asteria Realm were accustomed to using stardust for all kinds of mystical and mundane purposes, especially in the cities of the Faraway North, where every human was born with a little bit of magic inside them.

But Lumia was a small, sleepy capital roosting deep in the heart of the West, where the people were simpler and unused to the wild ways of magic, its unexpected outbursts, and profuse peculiarities.

You see, people have a long history of fearing the things they cannot understand and often find more comfort in shunning them altogether rather than learning about them. Because people… Well, fond as I am of them, they do suffer from an interminable case of willful ignorance —a terrible disease, really, and highly contagious, but what can you do? You learn to take the good with the bad and so forth. But where was I? Ah, yes. Magic and its disastrous effect on the ordinary.

Indeed, the people of Lumia had more than enough troubles associated with magic to wish for nothing more than to lead quiet, peaceful, magicless lives.

But what they didn’t know was that the very woods encompassing the city’s walls were far from magicless, particularly the narrow glade upon which the star fell, for under the flourishing shrubs and colorful clusters of wildflowers lay the ruins of a temple.

It was an ancient, godly place, and gods liked to leave traces of their divinity behind for the mortals to find. It amused them to see how easily people could get corrupted by the mere illusion of power.

When the stardust collectors rushed to Lumia to get a piece of the fallen star so they could sell it to the witches and the potion makers and the Curiosity Shop owners, they were shocked to discover that instead of a crater, the strangest alchemical reaction had occurred the second the star hit the holy ruins.

It was a magnificent sight (not to toot my own horn, but I’ve made more maidens swoon than every prince and knight in this entire Realm), a dwelling grand enough to be the envy of every king and queen. Yet it did not touch the ground but floated high in the air above the trail of shrubbery like a cloud or an optical illusion, and instead of treasures and riches, its impenetrable walls were filled with divinity.

A Castle of the land, of the sky, and of the gods.

I will not tell you how famed heroes and fearsome warlocks, and even great kings with their great armies, came from all over the Realm to build high ladders and lay claim upon me. This is not a story about greed, after all. In fact, this is not a story about me at all.

This is a story about love.

I will ease your concerns, though, and tell you that none of them was successful in their rapacious endeavors. No one even managed to reach my threshold, much less pass the sanctity of my doors. In truth, I guarded myself so well and for so long that eventually, I started to regret it.

Don’t get me wrong, an entity of my intellect and magical superiority is above all mortal pettinesses, including the one of loneliness. However, quite unexpectedly and to my great disappointment, I did find myself craving company. And more than that, I craved to be loved. Not admired. Not lusted after. I wanted someone to want me for me and not for the things I could do for them. Which, I’ve discovered, is both the greatest and hardest wish one could ever make.

Still, I waited, alone and afloat with my iridescent spires and turrets shimmering like nightly apparitions amid the looming trees of Lumia. But, of course, waiting is the sum of an eternity to the one who waits, and as months turned to years and years to a century, my spirit and patience began to wither.

People forgot about me, or more accurately, their imaginations changed me, for nothing remains unchanged once it falls prey to human imagination. It is a very human assumption, you see, that everything other is also dangerous.

And so, as they nursed their myths and spun their legends, stories of ghosts and banshees and red-eyed demons, of haunted crypts and insidious death traps, started crawling out of my empty walls to penetrate their mortal hearts.

I was no longer desired but feared all across the Realm. No one dared to even look in my direction, let alone approach my star-stricken glade.

Finally, I accepted that there was nothing I could do anymore but wait for the day I would no longer be a castle. After all, if there was one thing I learned about life in this world, it was that nothing stayed the same forever, and in that I found both thrill and hope.

Then, suddenly, because these things always happen suddenly, my fate changed.

A miracle.

I still call it a miracle, for despite my infinite years and wisdom, I’ve yet to logically understand the way the human heart finds things to love.

Well, in my case, not human exactly.

Esperida Aventine was only twelve years old when she got lost in the forest and stumbled upon me. She was a forlorn, night-kissed child with long raven hair, star-bright silver eyes, and skin so pale you’d think she’d drunk the whole moon.

She also had blood on her teeth.

And on her frayed pink dress.

And maybe there were a few droplets on her worn-out red shoes—it was hard to tell since the moonbeams made everything look glossy and liquid beneath me.

The girl was a vampire, and her unfortunate victim was the mighty squirrel. She was a hungry little thing, a true creature of the night, for a vampire’s life is cursed to be sunless and ravenous. But she was also many other things, things that to me were more important than a curse she had not chosen for herself.

Esperida was fearless and clever and loved to learn in a time when vampires were not allowed to learn anything, not allowed to be anything but the great evil of this world. Her parents had been killed by vampire hunters, and she’d been left all alone in a kingdom that was far from forgiving to her kind. Of course, these were not unreasonable reactions to her curse. Vampires, driven by bloodlust and maddened by eternal night, have committed some of the most grotesque crimes against humankind. But just as not all humans are good, vampires, fearsome as they might be, are not all evil either.

That night, Esperida cast her starry gaze upon me, licked the blood off her lips and her two long fangs, and told me that I was the most curious thing she’d ever seen. So beautiful and magical, yet so miserably lonely. In a way, I was a vampire too, ancient and misunderstood, feeding off the essence of this land.

And so for the first time since I became a castle, I let down my stairs.

This is the wonder of living. Right in the midst of an ordinary existence, a random soul falls right next to yours, and your sky is forever changed.

A bond was forged between us, in magic and in blood, and we became inseparable. She spent days, months, years losing herself in my many secret arcades and alcoves and finding herself in my grand libraries and studies. Anything she wanted, I could provide. Anything she desired, I could bring to fruition. Peeks into other Realms. Knowledge reserved for the gods alone. Cups of tea that changed every time they touched her lips. Naturally, there were limits to my magic, but even that she had fun discovering, for her heart was never burdened by greed. To her, this was all but a wonderful adventure.

Her favorite colors were white, black, and pink, and so I dressed my halls in the shades that brought her joy with lacquer and onyx and mother-of-pearl. She loved things that sparkled, and so I flooded my ceilings with crystal chandeliers that dazzled day and night like eternal constellations. She was always cold, so my rooms were always warm. And when she told me she yearned to see the world, I was the one who took her to see it. I took her to bustling cities, enchanted forests, and faraway kingdoms, drifting like a cloud in the starlit gloom and hovering over empty fields and wide glades as I waited for her to return to me.

We were never apart. We were never alone. We were one. A single destiny.

Until one day, little Esperida was no longer little. As her limbs stretched, her heart stretched too and grew large enough to dream of much bigger dreams.

In the stories you’ve heard, vampires don’t age, for they are already dead, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything ages. Everything changes. Vampires have hearts and souls and warm blood in their veins, and so they wither. They just do it differently from other creatures. Once born, they grow like humans do, fast and excitedly, until their curse transcends their physical bodies and they transform into something else, something wilder and darker. Something closer to divine. After that they age like mountains, like sea rocks and gemstones. Slowly. Too slowly for the human eye to detect.

My little Esperida was no different, and thus I had the pleasure of watching her grow into a brilliant and ambitious woman. She had dreams of changing the world, of helping her people come out of hiding and form a community of their own, a corner in society that was theirs alone. She wanted to prove that their bloodlust could not only be controlled, but with a little cooperation and a lot of empathy, vampires and humans could create an entire new world together.

And so they did.

It was not easy, and it was not bloodless, for humans cling to their prejudices and vampires cling to their ways, but no feat is impossible for the dreamer.

We traveled together from North to South, East to West. Under her guidance and with the power I bestowed upon her, the vampires of every kingdom gathered and created a society with its own laws and practices that respected their needs as well as human life. And to ensure that no vampire would hurt a human again, Esperida appointed a ruling family to each of the four kingdoms. These were not kings and queens but generals. Their job was to maintain the peace and project a certain sense of authority upon the vampire communities.

The Ravenors took the East, the Valkhars took the South, the Celestines ruled over the vampires of the Faraway North, and as for the West, she was there, and no one would ever dare rise against the legendary Esperida Aventine.

Together they worked to cement interspecies relations, ensure prosperity for both parties, and forge an infallible pact of defense against the rogue vampires who still wished to indulge their appetites in a more… inhumane manner.

Soon, the vampire hunters gave up their curvy daggers, and after years of trials and failures, peace was made between the humans and the creatures of the night.

Esperida became the sovereign of the vampire world, a benevolent ruler and an insidious diplomat, and for many years she was happy continuing her holy work of bringing people and creatures together.

She had never been one for romance, which worried me sometimes, for I often found myself wishing she would fill my halls with a family of her own. I knew she liked to read about love—I was providing the reading material, after all—but in a century of thrill and adventure, she had never experienced it for herself.

Then another miracle happened. A miracle named Eron Soraendale.

He was a handsome but humble man who’d come to our glade to ask Esperida for her help. A pack of demon-wolves had been attacking his village east of Lumia, coming on the full moon and picking off his people one by one. These infernal creatures had been unleashed into this Realm at the dawn of time when the gods still walked upon these lands. Knowing this, the villagers made offerings of treasure and blood to them, but nothing proved satiating enough.

Yes, the demons were formidable opponents, but Esperida had the speed of a fallen star and the strength of a hundred soldiers, and despite his clear disadvantage—he was only a mortal man, after all—Eron did not hesitate to go into the woods with only a sword and the bravery of his heart to fight alongside her. Esperida won a great battle that night, but she lost her heart forever.

Their union was celebrated all across the Realm as a true symbol of peace, the magical thread that bound humans and vampires together for eternity. So, when a year later Esperida gave birth to a half-vampire, half-human boy, she named him Hector, which means to hold .

The young dhampir prince had his mother’s raven hair and his father’s hazel-grey eyes, her intelligence and his bravery, her great strength and his human heart. What a marvel he was, a boy that could walk in both day and night. A vampire in a human body.

He was extraordinarily beautiful too, for when different people come together, beauty always follows, but he was also very proud and overly suspicious of others. His existence was wholly unique, and so was his loneliness.

Most days he spent in the sanctity of his room, studying the history of both of his peoples and documenting the advantages and struggles of his own singular experience. His every waking hour was consumed with what it means to be human in a body that craved inhuman things, but I like to think that only after he met her did he finally understand that some things cannot be explained so easily.

Some things are simply magic.

Interestingly enough, his story began much like his mother’s. He was twelve years old and chasing a squirrel in the forest only to stumble upon something magical. That was the first thing that popped into his head when he found Dorothea Valentia, with her radiant brown skin, clever fawn eyes, and soft head of curls, lost in the heart of the Dragonfly Forest.

She looks like magic.

I told you this is going to be a love story, didn’t I?