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Hector

S ometimes I thought I was born loving her. The same way people were born with hearts, I was born with an unremitting love for a girl that would never love me back.

I blamed my years before Thea for this, which were nothing more than a blur of colorless, meandering moments. One eternal night, sacred and sunless and unending.

Of course, the rarity of my condition had achieved the impossible. I could walk in the brightest morning sun, the hottest summer day. I could see the flowers tilt their faces toward the sky and keep the smell of scorched grass in my lungs. But I still liked to think that I only experienced true light after I met her.

There were no words good enough to describe what it was to bask in the light of her perpetual merriment. She taught me everything that mattered. How to laugh, how to be bold, how to unbind my tongue. With everyone else, words always evaded me, but with her, all I did was talk and talk and talk. About everything. About nothing. Either way, I knew I would not be judged.

When she told me her name, I smiled for the first time in my life. Dorothea: a gift from the gods.

Indeed, there was something divine about this girl. Her tender stare, her soft lips, her heart, which could only be compared to a forest, a place full of life and undiscovered mystery. Once, an eternity ago, I had hoped to dwell in that forest of hers, live under her skin in the secret pathways of her longings. And to this day I still wonder how every person who has ever met her managed not to fall in love with her even just a little bit.

Everything was different in her absence. Life became both harder and easier, for few things were more painful than the proximity to an unfulfilled dream. Away from her, I was free to follow my initial destiny, to become what I really was: a creature of the night.

I traveled far and long, the way the humans do, without the comfort and magic of the Castle. But I did not live as a human. I lived for the midnight hour, when the sky was tipsy with stars and the magic of the land rose like a layer of celestial mist to wipe away the mundane. I learned the taste of fresh blood, the taste of one’s surrender, and the dark, primitive need to take, take everything one was willing to give.

But not once in four years did I forget her.

There were many odd things about life, but nothing like being haunted by someone alive. Absence, I discovered, only made the longing greater.

Everywhere I went, I found things that reminded me of her. A delicate wisp of lace. A bejeweled gown. A comb with roses along its dainty arch. I told myself that one day, I would summon the heart to send her a wedding gift. I would write to tell her that I was sorry for the things I said that day. I’d been young and proud and selfish, and I’d only thought of myself. I would tell her that I had only ever wished for her happiness and that she could always count on me to stand by her, take care of her, protect her. I would write things that, after a while, read less like an apology and more like a love letter. And so I only gathered gifts and never the courage to send them.

Whenever I would think of her with him, my whole body would clutch in anguish. Do you laugh with him like you laughed with me? I asked her in these unsent letters. Do you lean over to brush his hair off his eyes while he reads? Does he know why your breath catches when you gaze at a sunset? Did you really not know that to me you were the most important person in the world? How could you not know? Everyone else did.

As I entered my bedroom now, I couldn’t help but stare at the dead bouquet of roses by the windowsill. They’d been soft pink once. Mother’s favorite. The Castle used to swim in pink roses all year round. Except for when Thea visited. Then I would ask the Castle to make the roses red, because red roses would always remind me of how we met in the Dragonfly Forest.

She had stung herself trying to pluck a bud, and the scent of her blood had driven me half-mad, abandoning the squirrel I’d been chasing to hunt for her instead. But when I found her, my hunger vanished, the curse inside me put into deep sleep. I’d only felt worry staring at that tiny human girl with the bloodied fingers and the bright yellow cape.

“Have you lost your mind? Who tries to pluck a rose with their bare hands?”

“Someone who isn’t afraid to get stung,” she had declared with a haughty little raise of her chin.

And that was it. I took her to the Castle to bandage her wounded fingers, and after I was done, she leaned in and kissed my cheek as a thank you. My heart had never beaten faster. We were the same age, but I didn’t feel the same as her. She was so confident in her body, so striking in her mannerisms, while I was a mere awkward heap of muscles that could hardly hold her stare for longer than a minute.

So I promised myself that one day I would become a man worthy of her. And I tried. I tried to forge myself into someone that could make her happy, but in the end, she chose the possibility of someone else over the certainty of me. At least, that was how I saw it at eighteen. It took me a while to realize I was mostly at fault. I never spoke of love to her. I never fought for her the right way. That was why I lost her. That was why I kept writing letters asking her all the what-ifs in the world.

Now she was here again. Fuller. Softer. The kind of woman that could bring a man to his knees with a simple tilt of her neck, a hint of a smile.

Only that love didn’t make any sense to me anymore. Everything stood meaningless and distorted. Even the Castle weighed on me. It was no longer my home but my grave. The tomb in which everything I had once held precious had been buried.

I’d known about the Vow. I’d known that one day I’d lose them together. That was how they’d wanted it. Still, I never thought of their death. No one ever thinks of death until death becomes all you can think about.

What tormented me the most was that I never got a goodbye, a last word, an affectionate final glance. I was away traveling when it happened. The last significant memory I have of my parents was of my nineteenth birthday: the three of us down in the kitchen attempting to master the art of baking, their laughter as effortless and brilliant as the bob of a flame in absolute darkness.

I remembered feeling so incredibly, comfortably loved that I almost didn’t want to leave the next morning. I wanted to stay in our little universe forever, here, in our castle in the sky, where even melancholy came with a sweet serenity, and everything was invariably secure and tenderly familiar. But I’d drowned myself in work after Thea’s engagement, and Father insisted I get out and see the world. Adventure and discovery and all that. So I left. And when I came back, there was nothing for me here but a legacy I wasn’t nearly worthy enough to carry.

As I swept a blackened rose petal off the floor, I didn’t want to ask the Castle to make it lush and red again. I wanted to be buried under the ruins of my life. I wanted to shun myself from all light and beauty. I wanted my pain to turn into emptiness. How I wished to be numb, to close my eyes and slump into an endless sleep where the ghosts of my family couldn’t reach me and things like love died in the darkness.

I didn’t ask the Castle to do it.

Yet, when I looked up again, the roses on the windowsill gleamed pure red in the twilight.