A VAMPIRE'S LOVE

I was a vampire, trapped in a castle for three hundred years, until July 4, 2024.

Stone walls memorized my footsteps. The chandeliers learned my silence. Seasons came and went like visitors who never knocked—snow frosting the windows, ivy crawling higher each century, the moon always faithful, always out of reach. I counted time by the cracks in the stone and the way my name echoed less each decade.

I had been sealed there by fear, by betrayal, by a promise broken long before memory learned to soften pain. Immortality is cruel when it has nowhere to go.

Then came July 4.

Fireworks cracked the sky open like a spell misfired—light bursting where only darkness had ruled. The castle trembled, ancient wards confused by joy and noise and human laughter. The iron doors, rusted with centuries of waiting, finally sighed open.

Freedom didn’t arrive roaring. It arrived quietly.

I stepped outside and felt something new on my skin—not the sun (I was careful), but possibility. The air tasted like smoke and summer and rebirth. Humanity celebrating its independence unknowingly marked mine.

Three hundred years of night didn’t vanish, but they loosened their grip. I wasn’t just a creature of shadows anymore. I was a witness. A survivor. A being who had endured long enough to begin again.

And as the last firework faded, I realized the most terrifying thing wasn’t the centuries I’d lost—

It was the future I was finally allowed to want.

Morning arrived like a rumor.

I watched it from the treeline, hidden beneath ancient oaks whose roots had never known my name. The sky softened from ink to blue, and for the first time in three hundred years, the world did not feel like it was moving without me. Birds argued cheerfully over nothing. The wind carried the smell of dew and distant coffee and something sweet I couldn’t name.

I should have felt fear.

Instead, I felt grief—gentle, aching grief—for the version of myself that had learned to survive stone walls and silence. That vampire had been sharp, controlled, frozen in time. Freedom made me softer. Dangerous in a new way.

I walked until the castle disappeared behind me. With every step, centuries peeled away: the language I no longer spoke aloud, the faces that used to visit my dreams, the anger that had kept me alive when hope would have killed me. Immortality isn’t endless life—it’s endless remembering. And remembering is heavy.

Humans passed me without knowing what I was.

A woman walking her dog smiled. A child waved. A man complained loudly into a glowing rectangle he held like a talisman. None of them screamed. None of them ran. The world had changed while I slept, and somehow it had made room for monsters who learned how to be quiet.

By nightfall, hunger returned—not just for blood, but for connection. For a voice saying my name without fear. For a reason to stay.

I found shelter in the ruins of an old church, roof broken, altar crumbled, moonlight spilling freely where it once hadn’t been allowed. I laughed then, a sound rusty with disuse. Even holy places fall apart eventually. Everything does.

Except me.

And that was the question that followed me into the dark:

What does a creature built to endure do when endurance is no longer the goal?

As the moon rose, I made myself a promise—soft but unbreakable.

I would not hide forever.