DISCLAIMER: Hetalia: Axis Powers – Hidekaz Himaruya

AND Dracula – Bram Stoker

CASTLES IN THE AIR

ONE

03 MAY 1897

I took my leave of fair Sofia, endeavouring to graph the interior of the northern country on assignment from my benefactor. I am a cartographer by interest and a surveyor by employment, but truly a romantic at heart. The monetary yields of this three-month venture remained my formal excuse for what I privately celebrated as a tour, not of the continent, like the respectable children of well-to-do aristocracy, for I fit no such category, but rather a tour of fantasy. I have always been enamoured by folktales and superstitions and it has been my experience that the deeper one delves into a country's interior, the deeper, too, dwell its stories.

My father—a pragmatic farmer of cereal crops—suspected the truth, but did not speak of it. He dismissed my infatuation with the unknown in much the same way he dismissed my pursuit of formal learning in university. But I was as determined on that day in May as I had been six years previous stepping beneath the yawning edifice of Sofia University, only a decade old, itself, and thrumming with the excited energy of new, fresh-faced students. I traded the fields for a lectern hall and a library, and I am afraid my father has never forgiven me for wanting to become a learned man of the modern world.

A hypocrisy, of course, for, though I packed in my luggage the tools of science, my mind reeled with medieval pictures and Gothic tales. I accepted the assignment on the enchanted whim of a boy, not a man, who quivered at the thought of hiking the forgotten footpaths tread upon for centuries by the nightmarish monsters of legend.

"Boris," said my mother with affectionate reproach, "you have no sense of self-preservation, child. Clever, to be sure—my boy, the university graduate!—but you lack the basic survival instincts that God gave a dog! Promise you will not go looking for trouble in the mountains?"

"I will not," I said.

She held fast to my hands: hers, red, dry, and cracked; mine, ink-stained with bitten nails.

"But—" I added, teasing her with a gamin grin, "—I cannot be held at fault if trouble finds me."

"Oh, you are a wicked child, Boris Bookamooka!" she cried, scolding me even as she reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck, crushing me to her bosom, squeezing me as if I was still a boy. "I swear it, I will have your head if you provoke harm unto yourself!"

"Yes, mother." I smiled and kissed her cheek. "I love you, too.

"I will be back in three months!" I called, waving as I leapt adventurously onto the departing train. And then, just to embitter her, I added: "I will be back once I have acquired misadventures of my own!"

11 MAY 1897

The last meal I ate in the company of men was at a lodging house inBrașov, where I had stayed the night before. It was a hot and hardy dish consisting of paprika, maize porridge, and tender eggplant stuffed with forcemeat (I must remember to procure the recipe before I take my leave), after which I had a carriage deliver me into the mountains to begin my work. At the roots of an endless, dense forest I began my arduous journey. I hiked the pathless unknown all day, calculating and charting and sketching the natural landmarks into a crude, preliminary map, and stopping only for a modest dinner at midday. I was enamoured by the sights and sounds and scents of the forest, which seemed like a far foreign colony to me, who had grown-up in the wide open of farmlands and the closeness of cities. Never had I seen—never had I felt—nature like this and I reveled in it. I breathed in the cold, clean mountain air; I smelled the deep earth scents of dirt and roots and foliage; I listened to all of the unseen living things that called this forest home.

It was on the darker side of twilight when I finally stopped to rest. The wind whistled mournfully through the trees and the sky above was crowded with swollen clouds. I do not know how long the storm had been brewing for without my notice, distracted as I was by my task, lost in my exuberant exercise, but it came upon me fast and I could ignore it no longer. A deluge crashed upon the mountainside, in one moment soaking and disorienting me. I searched for cover, but found none. The ancient forest, which had embraced me before, rejected me now: biting and stinging and tearing at my clothes and skin, and betraying my footing so that I fell down a rocky slope. I cried out, for all the good it did, for I was alone here.

Would the proprietor of The Golden Krone Hotel notice my absence? Would he send a search party for me if I did not return, or assume that I had found shelter elsewhere?

I had read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of an imaginative whirlpool. Perhaps it was that expectation that accounted for my reaction to what happened next.

A hand on my wet face. I did not recognize the chill of the fingers for the coldness of my own skin, but what I did feel was the soft smoothness of a hand that had never known toil. A noble, then. A woman, most likely.

I peeled back my eyelids and whined at the effort.

"Be still," said the stranger, a young man in a large hood. The wind tore at it, obscuring his face.

My sense of direction fled. "I do not know..." I managed to say. My tongue felt heavy, my words sluggish, my lips chattering.

"You have stumbled into my territory," he said.

Only later would I recall his word-choice: territory instead of property or lands.

"The storm has robbed you of your sense. They are a commonplace occurrence of this season and come upon the world without warning. If you were a local you would know that, so you must be a traveller; though, I cannot think of what purpose brought you here."

"I-I-I—I am a cart-o-grapher," I shivered. "I-I-I—I come from a firm in Sofia."

"A traveller, indeed. That explains your voice.

"Come, master scholar," he said, standing swiftly and extending his hand. "Let's away before the rains come again. You are cold and weary."

I clasped his hand and he pulled me to my feet with unexpected strength—unexpected, because, as I stood, I realized that I was the taller and broader of us, which speaks more to his fragility than it does to my musculature. I am tall, indeed, and there is a solidness to my frame made of big bones, but I would never describe myself as a large man. I have known many large men, all of them farmers, and all of them much taller and broader and simply bigger in all respects than I. Then again—my classmates in university had liked to tease me with my upbringing, calling me "farm-boy strong". I thought it a joke spoken with affection, as young boys have always and will always express their love for one another through mockery. But now that I think back on it, I was quite a lot stronger than they, all of whom had grown-up in the capital, studying and playing gentlemen's sports, and not helping to sow and till and harvest crops, or wrestle livestock into pens and harnesses, or lift bales of hay. Perhaps, unbeknownst to myself—who wanted nothing more than to write and record and explore—I had become "farm-boy strong". But I certainly did not feel it, now.

I clung to the stranger's slender hand as though my very life depended on it, curling my frame toward him in helplessness. I felt that my legs would collapse beneath me, so stiff were they with cold. I felt brittle and moved slowly, as if moving too fast may cause my bones to break.

"Where are you leading me?" I asked, with more weariness than trepidation.

"To my home," he replied, his voice unburdened; no puffing exhaustion or gasping effort; no inflection at all. "You will be safe there," he promised, "from the storm."

I held fast to him, following his tread in agreement. I was cold and soaked and tired and hungry, though I did not feel the latter under the circumstances. I wanted nothing more than to sit down somewhere warm and dry.

"I am Boris," I said, tilting sideways when my gait slipped. "Boris Bookamooka of Sofia," I added, because I did not think he would know the small country village of my birth.

He caught my balance and wrapped his arm securely around my middle, and surprised me by saying: "I do not know Sofia. It is in the land of the Ottomans?"

"Oh, um, no—I mean, yes, it was," I said, further surprised by his ignorance, "but the principality of Bulgaria has been an autonomous state for over twenty years."

"Has it?" he asked, expecting no reply. His tone was polite, but dismissive, as if he did not care about foreign affairs. I had met many alike him in school.

"Yes, indeed," I pressed, proud of my country's accomplishments. "Bulgaria is as strong and stable as any of her neighbours, Prince Ferdinand has made it so," I said, because to say otherwise would be unpatriotic, and the fetal nation of my origin needed all the support she could get. In truth it had been a tumultuous couple of decades in which I grew-up. "Bulgaria has gained great respect for her defeat of Serbia's attempted invasion and continues to deny the great power of Russia. How many nations can boast of that?" I bragged.

The stranger's reply was tolerant and gently mocking. "Indeed," he parroted me, still uninterested.

I would have further argued my point—I had been taught to argue well in the capital—but it was there that he stopped.

"Welcome, now," he said with courteous grandeur, a sly curl to his words, "to my home, Boris Bookamooka."

I expected a cottage, or a hermit's hovel, but I saw no such thing.

It was a castle. A looming medieval fortress upon the jagged rocks and yielding trees of the mountainside. A structure that had weathered the test of time proudly, if not unscathed by it. It looked abandoned, cold and pitiless, and forgotten by the outside world. It looked wicked even against the dark sky and crags of barren rock, but it was no less a refuge from the storm.

I looked from the castle to the stranger, my guide, my rescuer, and gasped, for he had pulled down his hood to finally reveal his face. And what a face it was! A being of ageless, inhuman beauty stared back at me through eyes as red as blood.

"What are you?" I whispered, bewildered, beguiled.

"I am Vladimir, lord of these lands," he smiled, pressing up on my chin to close my slack-jawed mouth, "and I am what you would call: a vampire."