Susanna Nádasdy smiled seductively at the young lady, Mircalla Karnstein, who was kneeling at her bedside with her hands under the coverlet. There was a kind of pleased wonder in her bright brown eyes as she beckoned for Mircalla to come closer. Mircalla obeyed and withdrew her hands from Susanna's coverlet and began to caress her body instead. At last, Mircalla even laid down beside Susanna on the bed, and drew her in close, smiling languidly as she did so. Susanna made a purring noise and felt immediately delightfully soothed.
"Dearest Mircalla," she whispered, voice low and husky with love.
"Susanna," Mircalla's voice was even lower and raspier. "It has been far too long since last we've met."
"Well, I scarcely can get a day to myself," Susanna replied ruefully. "You know how domineering my father is. I can't even breathe without his permission, just in case I ever do something to slander the Nádasdy name."
"Well, whatever happens, I doubt that it will be your breathing that slanders your family," Mircalla replied cheekily, shifting under the covers until she was straddling Susanna. "That is, of course, unless your breathing comes in too fast or too hard," she continued to tease, giving the woman beneath her a wink. Susanna only laughed in reply, watching with excited eyes as Mircalla lowered her head until their lips were touching.
Susanna and Mircalla were countesses of neighboring estates and had met not too long ago when their fathers arranged a meeting with one another to discuss a possible alliance. While they were busy making treaties, their daughters were busy making acquaintances. The two became fast friends, and then they became something even more… In time, the two women were constantly on the lookout for any chance to be together again. As of this particular night, Mircalla had managed to sneak away from her home in Karnstein to come and visit Susanna's estate. She was able to get away with this so easily because her own father, Ferenc Karnstein, was highly negligent. He hardly ever even noticed when she was present, so how would her absence be any different to him?
Susanna's father, meanwhile, was just the opposite, but he was no less of a nuisance than Ferenc. His name was Hans and he had eyes like a hawk. If Ferenc never noticed a thing Mircalla did, Hans noticed everything. He was watchful where Ferenc was blind. If Mircalla could leave her castle without being spotted, then Susanna could hardly even breathe without bringing some sort of chastisement back down over her head. But despite the odds, Mircalla still managed to sneak into Susanna's estate and come spend the nights with her, as they were doing then.
As romantic as nights like these were, however, nothing compared to nights they spent in the garden, but that was perhaps because they were the riskiest nights of all. Just two young countesses, creeping between shadow and moonlight and amongst the leaves and flowers of the estate to share a night of wonder together. In fact, the two countesses even shared their last kiss in this moonlit Eden, sitting side by side and overlooking a small lake towards the edge of the garden. The moon was a glowing disc upon a dull gray sheet of water that was as still and silent as glass.
"I am sure, Susanna, that you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on," Mircalla said to her lover.
"I have been in love with no one, and never shall," Susanna replied. "Unless it should be with you…" and Mircalla felt something powerful move within her as Susanna said this. Even though her tone was soft, her voice carried the passion of a thousand suns and Mircalla basked in their light.
Mircalla suddenly moved forward, catching Susanna's chin in her hand. She pulled Susanna closer and closer until their lips met. This kiss began slow and gentle, but soon became feverish and hard as hands roamed through hair and across skin in perfect rhythm to the motion of their mouths as they kissed. Soft moans filled the warm summer air and combined with the occasional rustle of a nightgown as the two women continued to nuzzle and caress one another with lips and fingers.
"Darling, darling," Susanna finally murmured, "I live in you and you would die for me, I love you so..." it was a good hour before either of them chose to return to bed, sneaking back across the massive garden and into the castle once more.
Right before the pair went back inside, however, Susanna stopped them both and turned to face the moonlit garden one last time.
"Let us look again for a moment; it is the last time, perhaps, I shall see the moonlight with you," she said.
"What do you mean?" Mircalla replied, a little alarmed by this cryptic and gloomy remark, but Susanna would not answer. Instead, she only continued to stare out at their little Eden with languid and pensive eyes, one arm still wrapped sweetly around Mircalla's slim waist. But after several minutes had gone by, Susanna finally turned her back on the moonlight and led Mircalla back to the safety and sanctity of her chambers…
Not long after this, Susanna proved correct in her prediction. Although Mircalla was able to spend one more day with Susanna, their next night was cut short. Ferenc had finally noticed his daughter's absence and although he had absolutely no clue where she had gone, not knowing her well enough to even conjecture, there was someone out there who did know Mircalla well enough to guess. Hans. When Ferenc sent him a letter explaining that Mircalla had gone missing, Hans put the pieces of the puzzle together easily. He may not have known Mircalla all that well either, but he knew Susanna, and he knew that if he could find Susanna, then he would find Mircalla. Sure enough, his thought process proved correct.
After the letter from Ferenc arrived, Hans kept an extra close watch over his daughter for the rest of that day and well into the night. It was at this time that he found the missing countess. He had been waiting outside his daughter's chambers when he heard voices starting to speak behind the door. Realizing that Mircalla must've snuck in through the window, somehow, he grew enraged. What sent him over the edge, however, were the blasphemous words he was hearing pour out of the young ladies' mouths. He did not hesitate to kick in the door and draw his sword...
Susanna and Mircalla escaped that night unscathed, but the next one they shared together would not yield the same result. Firstly, Susanna and Mircalla were kept far apart, forbidden from even seeing each other for nearly half a year, but even once they were free to at least speak to one another again, either Hans or Ferenc had to be in attendance. It was the first time in Mircalla's life that Ferenc had ever paid any real attention to her, though even now, it still ultimately boiled down to a selfish reason. He didn't really care about what Mircalla did, he was just worried about what it might do to his reputation. Even while watching Mircalla closely, the vain and selfish man only ever really saw himself. But it was still better than Hans who, unlike Ferenc, did care about what the two girls did, and made sure that his every expression somehow conveyed displeasure with them, even if they talked about things as mundane as the weather.
Of course, the two girls were forbidden from ever sharing a room or a night, and guards were posted outside their doors whenever one young lady visited the other, but Susanna was not ready to admit defeat. Instead, one particular night, she managed to dupe her father and her guard into thinking that she was curled up in bed when, instead, it was just her nightgown, stuffed with pillows and hidden with an extra coverlet. The real Susanna was quickly making her way to Mircalla's room, an ancient spellbook in hand...
"What are you going to do with that?" Mircalla demanded in a small voice. She wasn't even sure how Susanna had been able to escape her room and get around the entire castle just so that she could climb through Mircalla's window the same way Mircalla had climbed through hers a few months back let alone how she had been able to do it all while holding what looked like a very heavy old book. And it was a full moon out! How had Susanna not been spotted?
"I'm going to reunite us, to everything we once were," Susanna replied determinedly as she flipped through the old pages of the spellbook. "I am going to reunite us and give us the life that we deserve. Everything we've ever wanted. A life we can share as one..."
"You mean you're going to have us run away?" Mircalla asked, sounding almost excited. "We'll see the world together?"
"We will do even more than that, my darling," Susanna replied, not looking up from her book. "And you are mine, and you shall be mine. You and I are one forever…" then she trailed off into silence as she began skimming her book again and Mircalla fell into an anxious silence of her own…
At last, Susanna found what she was looking for. It looked like a spell that would give them the power to blend into the shadows until they could escape. Her eyes lit up.
"Only a few hours more, and you shall know all!" she whispered excitedly to her companion before she began to chant the spell, but she never got the chance to finish because, only a few seconds into it, a guard burst into the bedroom. One of Susanna's body guards had dared to enter her room and wound up discovering her ruse. He knew at once where she must've gone and wasted no time in making his way down to Mircalla's room.
The two girls were both arrested for their attempted witchcraft but, in the end, only Susanna wound up paying any sort of lasting price. She was executed. This was because Ferenc and Hans made an agreement that they would spare one daughter by pinning all the sins on the other. After some debate, they decided that it should be Susanna who paid. But the only reason either man decided to save either daughter was because Ferenc was so vain that even though he felt no love for Mircalla, he didn't want so much as one, single, little stain on his great name. If Mircalla was punished with Susanna, it would make him look bad too and he did not want that, so he and Hans decided to pin all of the blame on one girl.
And since Hans was a little more willing to sacrifice a small part of his public image, he had agreed to Ferenc's demands easily enough. Besides, in exchange for sacrificing his daughter for Ferenc's, Ferenc promised to use some of his own good clout to help Hans disassociate with his treacherous child and rebuild any honor that he might've lost because of her heinous crimes. It was a win-win for both of the counts.
The two men wasted no time in twisting the truth. They argued that since Susanna had been the one with the spellbook, then she was the one to blame. They lied and said that Susanna was a witch, using her evil magic to seduce Mircalla into her services. They then painted Mircalla as an innocent and confused victim, nearly defeated by the forces of darkness because she did not know any better. Anything that she had done wrong was instantly blamed on Susanna's witchery. They made Susanna out to be the vile and vulgar one, responsible not just for witchcraft, but for various homosexual acts between herself and Mircalla. Even though it had been Mircalla who had come crawling through Susanna's window every night, it was Susanna who was painted as the temptress, and they said that she had used her evil magic to make Mircalla enjoy these sinful, shameful acts instead of reviling them as any good, normal person would.
The entire countryside ate the story up without question and soon, all eyes were turned on Susanna. Mircalla was, vicariously, set free. Hans and Ferenc had done such a good job of painting her as a victim of circumstance that any time she tried to take a stand for Susanna, she was written off as still deeply traumatized by all of the terrible things Susanna had done to her. Her mind was still addled by Susanna's magic, Hans and Ferenc would say, so nothing that she said could be taken seriously. Once again, their respective estates believed them in a heartbeat.
Mircalla could only watch from afar, aghast, as her lover was executed right there in Karnstein, right in front of her very eyes. And on the day of the execution, Susanna only said one thing:
"Fear not, Mircalla! To die as lovers may, so that they may live together, shall be our story! I will meet you again in death and then we will never be parted again!" then she spoke no more.
From that day on, Mircalla became increasingly bitter, cynical, vindictive, vengeful and sadistic. With her one true love gone, Mircalla felt as if she had nothing else to live for. She stopped caring. Stopped feeling. Stopped thinking. She became selfish, arrogant and cruel, doing whatever she wished whenever she wished. Sometimes, she would even have innocent servants punished out of spite, just because she felt as if the rest of the world ought to suffer with her. She took great pleasure in knowing that the riffraff were being put back into their place… And Ferenc had stopped caring again. Now that Susanna was out of the picture, he had no need to pay attention to Mircalla anymore, so he didn't.
Several months later, the countess of Karnstein finally attended her first ball. She did not remember anything of that night, except for how lovely it might've been to waltz with Susanna instead of all of those stuffed shirts whose adorations hurt her ears. Oh how she wished that she could've been waltzing with Susanna instead… But what happened after the ball ended was something that Mircalla would never forget…
Mircalla had only just curled up in bed when she noticed a strange, spectral figure staring at her from the corner of the room. Suddenly feeling her body go numb and limp, Mircalla could do nothing but stare as the specter drew closer to her, mounting her and kissing her on the neck the same way Susanna used to do. What was happening? Was it a dream? A hallucination? A ghost? Had Susanna somehow returned from the grave? Was this gentleness supposed to be a comfort… or a punishment? Was Susanna back for revenge? Or was she here to take Mircalla to a place where they could finally be happy together forever? What were these kisses and caresses? Mircalla could only moan as Susanna nipped at her.
Suddenly, Mircalla felt a sharp pain, cutting deeper than any knife ever could have. But she couldn't even scream anymore, suddenly feeling as if every ounce of strength in her body had been drained out. She could only lie there, mouth open in a silent cry as the pain grew. It began to burn and she struggled to push the specter away, but she was paralyzed. She could only lie there as her life force was sapped right out of her.
Finally, then, Mircalla began to fear death. For the first time in her life, she was afraid to die and she wanted desperately to live. She clung to the last threads of her mortality, but they unraveled faster and faster as the fates prepared to unwind her story and cut the string. She began to pray silently, though she did not believe in a good or forgiving God anymore. She prayed for life, begging to be spared. In that one moment, it became her one true fear, even worse than losing Susanna. In that one moment, Mircalla would've done anything to escape death. Then she died.
But death did not keep her. Instead, it spat her back out into the land of the living, but she had come back wrong. Changed. Different. Monstrous. Vampiric. She was sure that she was still dead, that disconnect of body and mind (soul?) acting as an ever-present torture for her, but she was able to walk, talk, see and experience once again. She could think, respond, act and react, but it all felt... different. She had no pulse and no need to breathe or eat, but she did need to drink…
From the moment Mircalla's dark eyes opened again, she was thirsty. But even after she had quenched her initial thirst, another kind of hunger drove her further than that. But this new hunger wasn't as simple as a desire for blood. Was it a hunger for life? What an ironic Hell for the girl who'd spent her death throes fearing the scythe of the Reaper. Was this God's punishment for an unrepentant sinner like her? To force her to roam between the living and the dead forever? To trap in her limbo? To make sure she never felt safe or at home anywhere? God was cruel. It was a fate wherein she would always want for something that she could never truly have. But then again, that was nothing new for the disgraced countess.
But in time, Mircalla would come to see that she was only half right in her assessment. A far more exquisite torture was in store for her, beyond being dead in a world of life. Her ultimate torture was the most ironic and painful Hell of all. It was to see Susanna again, in death just like they had wanted, but never to find a happy ending. Time and time again, they would find one another and fall madly in love, but never would it ever end in anything other than death and despair.
And as an extra sort of irony, if Mircalla was the girl of death stuck in the land of the living, Susanna was the girl of life stuck in the land of the dead, forever haunted by Mircalla's specter. Her punishment had not been to endure eternal death as Mircalla's had been. Hers was to experience a very twisted eternal life. She could die, yes, but she was never kept for long before being reborn, again and again and again. Maybe she came back in a new life every time, but she was an old soul. She was forced to experience birth and life in an endless, vicious round.
Worst of all, though, to Mircalla, was that Susanna never had any recollection of any of her past lives. It didn't matter how many times she'd died and been reborn, every time she and Mircalla were reunited, it was like the very first time for her. Mircalla cursed God for giving them both such ironic Hells and began to ask why, but vaguely, something did stir in her memory...
When Susanna had died, she was welcoming of death and she had promised her loyalty to Mircalla even unto the grave. But Mircalla? When she died, she had feared death and begged for anything else, forgetting even Susanna in that one moment of terror. How ironic was it now for their roles to reverse? Susanna would forever be the one to live and fear death and she would always shy away from Mircalla every time they met. She would forget Mircalla after every new death while Mircalla was the one who would never forget Susanna and never be able to pass on into death the same way Susanna had tried so hard to do centuries ago. Susanna would be a creature of perverted life and Mircalla of perverted death. They really would become one through their loves, God himself switching them up to torture them.
Their story ended the same way every time before completing its cycle all over again in a different time and place. Same play, different stage. Year after year. Mircalla always ended up taking Susanna's life, only for it to be returned to her within a few years' time, and Susanna always filled Mircalla's dead heart with life before death would do them part for another decade or two until they could be as one once again. Susanna always ended up hurting Mircalla, although it was all inadvertent. Mircalla always ended up hurting Susanna, though it was all unintended.
But the vicious cycle of hurt between the two girls, like the endless round of life and death, never ceased. The very first cycle had started the moment Mircalla had crept in through Susanna's window on that dark and fateful night centuries ago and so it would be for centuries more. They had lived together, they had died together, now they would live together once more, just like Susanna had promised in her last moments of her first life. But they had both come back wrong. In the same way homosexuality was a perversion of love, so too was their existence a perversion of life and death.
AN: Here's the first chapter of a Carmilla fanfic inspired by several lines from the book that imply that this isn't the first time Carmilla might've fallen for a victim. I'm using the OTP prompt that says that Person A is Person B's lover, reincarnated over and over again. Also, this fic will cover book and webseries and Susanna is, of course, Carmilla's original Laura. I came up with the name because Susanna was J. Sheridan-LeFanu's beloved wife.