Author's Note: Thank you so much to ecastle_vania on the Castlevania Creatives Discord for the help and editing suggestions on this chapter!
No Belmont child ever had a reason to fear monsters under their bed.
Not because of the holy power said to spark through the family's legendary whip with almost a life of its own. Not even because of the sheer physical prowess they were trained to have without it.
Belmont children did not fear monsters under their beds because they knew from experience that there were enough monsters to fear out in the world already. While others might have lain awake at night, paralyzed with terror over some nebulous beast lurking just at the corners of their vision, the Belmonts would collapse from exhaustion, lulled almost to sleep through their dealings with the tangible and the definable and the real.
Real was the contents of the hold, the buried treasure beneath their ancestral home. It was the leaves of the bestiary, all of Satan's menagerie illuminated and taxonomized and murdered there on the page. It was the marauding creatures in the woods and beyond that dreamed to try their luck against their most deadly foes, and it was the scars they left behind when they dared.
The scars were always Trevor's favorite.
Like those sunken streaks across his father's arms: the result of his prey volleying blades from a distance. ("Thing was clever," he'd say with a shrug. "Knew its only hope was me losing the whip.") That hope was soon shattered by the Morning Star's strike—along with the monster's armored shell.
Or the line of circles just above the collar of his mother's gown, from when some cornered night creature had brought white-hot claws to her chest. ("Filthy beast didn't notice my crucifix," she'd always explain, her necklace flashing in the light like the blade of a sword.)
There was a patchwork of scars on seemingly all those that lived in and visited the estate, and each scar had a story. They were more a hallmark of the Belmont trade than the family crest.
Trevor already had some of his own, of course. Little scratches from climbing his favorite tree, barely noticeable. Slightly bigger ones from those times he and his cousins had gotten too rough during their sparring games, pulled apart by parents with lectures spoken with secret smiles. And, most recently, real scars, earned on the hunt, like his father had done with his father before him, as far back as the age of Leon.
They'd seek woodland creatures when the sun shined. Night creatures when it didn't.
Nothing too dangerous—that would come later. A meal large enough for the family, caught in the sunlit forest grounds close to home. Lesser demons falling before his lesser whip in the uncertain night world beyond. Challenges, perhaps, for one unused to hunting, but trivial for the Belmonts. He was twelve, finally deemed old enough and strong enough to brave the night on his own, armed as much with a lifetime of theory and training as he was with his weapons. Each moonlit hunt was like a slow transformation into the heroic monster hunter he would one day become. There was the sighting, the battle, the victory, and, through it all, the fear that made each victory all the more real.
A monster hunter's fear was different from that of those they sought to defend. It might even have been called respect. Not respect for the beasts themselves, but for the carnage they'd surely bring if left unchecked. Trevor supposed it was not unlike what the rest of Wallachia felt about the Belmonts—always at a cautious distance, whether they were shunning the family when times were bad or begging their help when times were worse.
The Belmonts' scars, carved by human and demon alike, told more than battle stories. Even the youngest Belmonts knew that. They were reminders of this fear, of the danger of the things that prowled the night. They were a sign of just how close those who'd earned them could have come to death.
But even death itself was not what gave such gravity to every battle. It was the family legacy, the emblem shining gold from their weapons and etched across their skin. It was the knowledge that, should the Belmonts fall in battle, there would be no one else left to do the work to which they'd sworn their lives.
Or, at least, no one who could do it so well.
And yet, it was not celebration when Trevor returned with his quarry, following a twisting path home made hazy in the twilight and the adrenaline rush of victory. It was progress. Another night creature's carcass to study. Another item in the bestiary that he could point to in feigned carelessness before admiring relatives. ("Oh, that one? Yeah…" A pause, for effect. "Killed that one too.") A higher raising of the bar.
One night, one night lit red with blood and passion, he'd take home a bigger prize. Then he'd be a hunter, a real one. He wasn't sure yet what that prize would be. Maybe the knowledge that his actions had saved a whole village, even if he knew from his family's experience that those villagers would soon forget. Maybe a new item added to the bestiary, some horror no one had ever seen, much less killed—no one until him. Maybe even a vampire: the greatest prize of all.
He'd never seen one in the flesh. Literally. The remains in the hold were stripped down to the bones, with only the skulls left on display, and only those to show off the fangs. The same fangs that glared crimson from the page as the vampires leered out from the bestiary, and that came thrillingly close to so many Belmonts' throats in more family legends than he could remember.
Never close enough for scars, though. They could not be allowed the chance. Vampires did not leave scars—they left corpses. They would always fight to kill, whether seeking to drink or turn, and so, between a Belmont and a vampire, there was only ever the possibility of one of them leaving the battle alive. It was usually the Belmont, but that was no guarantee. ("Take your eyes off the fangs," the family warning went, "and you're as good as dead.")
There was a greater target still. One too great even to hope for, but that didn't stop Trevor from trying. The deadliest and most elusive predator of all. The lord of all vampires, Dracula.
At least a decade had passed since word of his atrocities had spread across the country like so much spilt blood. Decades more since he'd been seen at all. Even Trevor's great-grandfather, a man who now seemed as distant a legend as Leon, had never seen his face—only tracked and infiltrated his castle.
Twisted and towering, dark and dangerous, it cast as much of an invisible shadow over Wallachia as its master. Both were said to watch and wait somewhere out of sight, in a dead and remote corner of the lands, just beyond the awareness of their prey.
The notes Trevor's ancestor had left behind, in a hand that still shook with the lightning rush of a hunt unfulfilled, said everything and still not enough. A window broken with a lash from his whip, granting him entrance before the cursed fortress could vanish as it had so many times before. Halls darker than the night outside, eyes of the beasts within glinting in and out like some ill-omened star. Pits and spikes and devices for which he had no name, marked with the remains of hunters already consumed by monster or machine. The hellish engines that were the castle's heart, from which an almost tangible fog of dark magic pulsed even in their stillness.
But he had persevered, guided by the demon corpses in his wake and the throb of the Morning Star's own energy against his hand. He almost reached the highest jutting tower, lit only by the moon, where the ruler of the night lay in wait.
Almost. But not quite.
He'd been wounded as he fought his way to the top, pinned down from behind and torn by something that seemed a mass of legs and claws, something he'd killed too quickly for even a memory to sketch for the bestiary.
He was hurt now; hurt and tired and suddenly doubtful that he truly was the one to end the war against the night, the last and bravest of the Belmonts.
As he stood there, dripping with blood and unsure if it was his own, with only a staircase separating him from Dracula, he thought of his family. A new wife, unused to hunting. A child, newly born.
("And so I left the demon castle, unwilling to chance leaving those I loved at the mercy of a terror against which I myself could so easily fall. I left the demon castle with knowledge as my bounty," his notes concluded, "so that my family would surely return to save the people of Wallachia once and for all, stronger, and more certain, than before.")
Leaving was nearly as dangerous as entering. The few night creatures left straggling behind trailed him all the way back down, drawn by the scent of the blood. Surely Dracula had sensed him as well, then—sensed him and let him walk free.
Trevor's ancestor had wondered why to the end of his life, according to those relatives fortunate enough to have heard the story told. Was Dracula guaranteeing himself more Belmonts to kill in the future some warped idea of mercy, or had he simply expected the hunter not to leave the castle alive?
Trevor's great-grandfather grew desperate with his worries by the end, risking shortcuts wherever possible. Mad leaps down stairwells. Frantic twists through gaps in damaged walls. The lower he descended, the more likely it seemed that some final cruel trap awaited him just within the shadowed entrance hall.
Before its massive doors could come into sight, he'd broken another window on the floor above, scaled down the castle's exterior as far as he could—and jumped.
As soon as he landed, he ran without looking back. But it was not cowardice.
Dracula would be sure to slip from the Belmonts' grasp again, like darkness from the dawn, and the shockwaves from his castle's disappearance were known to carve fissures in the earth and rend flesh from bone. It was all Trevor's ancestor could do to escape, with no prize to present the family that had saved his life but himself, in one piece.
His flight from the castle had been nearly perfect. When an electric hum rang out—the signal of the vampire's stronghold blinking into nothingness—it sounded from somewhere far behind him. As the thunderous rush of air that followed caught up with him, it was just minuscule fragments of rock that sprayed against his back. Supposedly, the only lasting damage from this mission was a single scratch on the nape of his neck: perhaps the only scar left by a vampire in all of Belmont history.
("Of course the bloodsucker didn't stick around to finish the job," one relative commented to Trevor, interrupting one of the countless retellings of the legend. "Coward knew he stood no chance.")
The only other surviving record of his greatest achievement, that last battle that never was, could be found in the story he'd lived to tell. It had taken on a life of its own, the spark lighting each new Belmont's way through the night. It was the reminder that, one day, some scion of Leon could do the same—and better.
The legends said that the righteous power of the Belmonts increased by the generation, that the power to slay Dracula could, perhaps, be found now, in a hunter not yet grown.
Trevor hoped it would be him. But any Belmont hunter knew that hope was not enough. And so he prepared, like any Belmont hunter would.
He trained by day and hunted by night, and in between he listened and he researched and he learned. And when he dreamed, it was of the hunt and the battle, the triumph and the trophy, the legends still untold. He dreamed the lives of all the Belmonts before, and awaited his destiny to come.