The Vampire's Thrall

This story has a harshness rating of 1.5 (out of 3) and is categorized as Romanticized, which means that it contains positive-ish depictions of things which in reality would be evil or unsafe.

All characters depicted are above the age of 18.

I do not consent to the use of this story, or any of my other work, in the training of AI language models.

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It took Priscilla scarcely a quarter hour to determine that Professor Octavian Viccari's literature class would be her favorite.

She had attended not more than two other classes here, so far, but they had both been the same, and just as she'd expected. This one, however, was a different matter. It was no surprise for a class on literature to be her favorite, but it did surprise her that any class here at the Dacian Society, no matter its subject matter, would spark joy within her heart.

Priscilla had not come here by choice, after all. By her own reckoning, an academy of natural philosophy was no place for her.

But Professor Viccari, standing there at the head of the hall, eyes sharp as he gave his opening lecture: it seemed to her that this dreary institution was no place for him, either, though he seemed with ease to make it his home. He was much, much younger than any of the other professors Priscilla had yet seen, no more, surely, than thirty years of age. His hair was dark, and his face was clean-shaven, and his skin was pale and smooth: it made a sharp contrast with the finely-tailored jet-black silken suit he wore. He had stern and uncompromising features, and already Priscilla had heard worried whispers from a few of her classmates about his strictness, but his blue eyes had something in them: not anger, but a piercing quality, a keenness. This man *saw*.

He was handsome. There was no question about that, and Priscilla could not deny that this was no insignificant part of her enjoyment, here in his lecture hall, but there was more besides: much more. Her first two classes had been on subjects for which she had never cared very much at all, and of which her knowledge was very meager; and she had listened to their teachers speak for three hours apiece: and she had scarcely any notes to show for that, because the teachers had had very little to say that Priscilla did not know already.

Professor Viccari had spoken for fifteen minutes on a subject Priscilla had studied vociferously in school and out of it for the better part of her life, and already she had filled three pages.

She leaned forward in her seat, clipboard and parchment held primly upon her knees, and rested her chin on her hands.

(This lecture hall, used by Professor Viccari alone, was not excessively large, holding only a few rows of seats, each raised behind the last, and the professor's lectern at the base. It was located on the academy's first floor, and like every place here it was richly crafted, though understated in decoration; but this hall was flawlessly clean. Priscilla could not quite imagine how the maids had accomplished that. The first two halls she'd attended had been respectably well-kept themselves, but here there was not a single speck of dust in sight -- save for the rafters, which, curiously, were covered from one wall to the other with thick cobwebs, stretched between the beams. Perhaps the maids could not reach so high?)

Her two dozen classmates, arrayed about her, were motionless and silent. The only movement was the sharp sudden sweeps of the professor's arms, and the only sound was his stern and echoing voice.

"Literature," he said, turning back to the students, having written notes in slender and spidery script upon the chalkboard, "is not, primarily, a means of creating beautiful things. Nor is it a means of preserving history, nor of disseminating polemic. It may perform all of these functions, but they are not its most fundamental nature.

"Literature is a power bequeathed to Man by God. It permits the creation of a channel between one person's thoughts and another's. It is not magic as your philosophy professors would have it, but it is a kind of magic nonetheless. For by reading a work of literature, you may absorb the thoughts and feelings of a person three thousand years dead. You may drink in her soul. You may cross the unbridgeable chasm."

He paused, and his eyes swept the room, deliberately, pausing for a moment at a time on one student and then another. For just an instant they touched Priscilla's, and her heart beat faster.

"For there is a chasm," Professor Viccari said, and his voice had softened just slightly. "Between every living thing and every other, isolated in time and space. Who may understand the interior thoughts of another? But Man possesses a power to accomplish this. This of course is speech. Speech provides an envoy from one cold island to another. Speech permits understanding, and friendship, and brotherhood.

"Literature is speech refined and crystallized. Literature is about *love*."

Priscilla's heart beat swift and thunderous. As his lecture went on she found him looking her way more and more, and when his eyes found hers they *held* them. Such a piercing gaze.

He spoke again and again of how the gap between souls could not be crossed without words, written or spoken, but his very speaking belied that claim: for it seemed to Priscilla that Professor Viccari had seen her soul with his eyes alone. He gave voice to things she had always felt, deep inside her, and which she had never found the words to communicate. (Except perhaps in poetry, where layered symbolism could at least lead a reader in the proper direction...)

But the thing he described, the unbridgeable gap: it was for that reason precisely that Priscilla had been so reluctant to come to this dreary place to begin with, until her father had strictly required it. It brought her no joy to study dead and dying things, and the science of making use of them. She wanted to love others, and be loved in turn; she wanted to understand, and be understood in turn. That was the reason, and the only reason, why she had desired so desperately to attend a literary academy.

She had not at all expected to find anyone in this dreary place of science and death who shared her passion for such things.

"By semester's end," Professor Viccari was saying, "you will have read closely a selection of the most remarkable authors ever to lay pen to paper, and you will have understood them, at least if you expect a passing grade. You will have mastered the art of taking your speech and making it solid upon the page. You will have learned how to choose your words so that those who read it will understand your meaning, even if they are very far and very different.

"That is all. You will return to me next week. I look forward to working with each of you."

His eyes scanned the class and lit upon Priscilla again, and his lips curled upward in a smile.

He had not smiled all lecture long. Now he did, and it was for *her*.

Priscilla's breath caught, and she resolved then and there that she would devote all the attention to this class that it deserved: let the others be damned.

* * *

Priscilla hunched over her desk on the fourth row of Professor Abati's lecture hall, scribbling with quill on parchment. She *was* trying to pay attention, but the lecture was inelegantly structured and very difficult to follow, and she was not certain of the significance of any of it. Abati spoke of the morphic fields: how all living things made impressions in them, and how when they died, those impressions remained for a time.

"You have all heard stories, I expect, of how this academy is haunted," he said, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips -- drawing his long white beard slightly to one side. "And it's true! But not in the way you may have expected. No need for worry; you won't find any vampires in the catacombs down below, because vampires do not and cannot exist. Embodied creatures like you and I are, I'm afraid, bound quite firmly by the laws of mortality.

"In fact, the catacombs themselves are hardly haunted at all! Ghosts dwell in the places where things live and die, and those old tunnels have been deserted for centuries. If you were to go down there -- which you can't, of course, because the doors are locked, and besides, you're good rule-abiding students, aren't you? -- you'd be much more likely killed by a collapse than fed upon by some creature of the night."

Priscilla hated that the world was like this.

For all of history Man had dreamt that there were magical things lurking just out of sight: and now Science had proved him right, except that it was *meaningless*. Folk called ghosts the souls of the dead, but ghosts *had* no souls. No thoughts or feelings or self. They were deaf and dumb, no more alive than the depression you might leave behind in a cushioned chair upon standing. They were like...dying embers. Not even flames. A flame, at least, had the appearance of life and feeling.

Outside, beyond the lecture hall's narrow windows, the rain came in sheets. It poured from the rooves of the spires, and the trees in the courtyard garden, buffetted by the howling wind, drank it eagerly.

Even those old willows laid claim to more personhood than the empty things Science had the gall to name ghosts.

How could anyone stand it, spending day after day in deep meditation on such a terribly depressing feature of the world? There were those who spent their lives in study of such things. How did they survive? Perhaps they yearned to be dead, and that was why ghosts would bring them comfort.

A mockery, that was what it was. God's laughter at the cares of living things.

Priscilla had known all her life that her parents intended for her to study here at the Dacian Society, and when she was young she had heard from her friends the dark stories of this place. The network of catacombs beneath its proud buildings, and the whispers of what dwelt there. Sometimes she had lain awake in tears from fright, repeating her mother's reassurances again and again to herself, but certain nonetheless that one day she would meet her end beneath a vampire's fangs.

She rested her chin on one hand and looked out through the window at the pouring rain, and found that she wished those terrible stories were true.

* * *

Priscilla dashed through the darkened tunnel, her heart a drumbeat, her feet sounding sharply against the centuries-old stones, nearly tripping on her tattered dress. (Where had her uniform gone? She could not quite remember.)

There was no light but that cast by her dim and flickering lantern. When her pursuer approached, she would not see him.

She rounded a corner, and he was there.

He was smiling, and in the smile were fangs. She gasped in terror, and he seized her, hands quick as lightning. Her lantern fell from her grip to the ground and now his shadow filled the ceiling. She whimpered and struggled, but to no avail; and begged, but there were no words in her begging. He tore at her clothes and she was naked. She tried desperately to cover herself, but he held her wrists, and he was stronger. He laughed.

Now he had pushed her to the dusty ground and he was holding her there, and before she could find the breath to scream he was raping her.

It hurt. Never had she had a man inside her, and her attacker took no care for her comfort. His eyes held hers as he took her. There was a look in them, like hunger and need. As if he were in desperate distress to equal hers. As if nothing in the world could save him but Priscilla's body and soul.

He opened his mouth and his fangs glistened, and then he leaned down and they were buried in her neck.

She screamed, but it was useless. No one would ever hear her: she knew that in her heart. The pain was sharp and cruel. He drank from her, and she knew for certain that by the time he was finished with her she would die.

But the *pleasure*. Not hers: his. He was satisfying himself. He was a creature starved half to death, and now a beautiful morsel had found her way into his chambers, and he was availing herself of her. Who could blame him for that? She had seen it all in his eyes. To rape her, to drink her, to *possess* her: it would satisfy his hunger a thousandfold.

Wasn't that worth dying for?

\* \* \*

Priscilla awoke, trembling, her sheets and her nightgown stained with sweat and the place between her legs wet with another sort of moisture. Her breath came in gasps. She lay there, for a few long moments, as her racing heart slowed.

That had not been real, she reminded herself. Vampires did not exist, and this academy was not haunted by them. There were no love-starved beasts stalking the catacombs beneath her dormitory. It was important that she remember this.

After all, it would be foolish to allow her hopes to rise.

She sat up, reached over to her nightstand, and lit a candle.

Her chamber was small and intimate. Each student slept in her own private room, but the rooms were, perhaps as a consequence, cramped. Priscilla would have expected to find that a worthwhile trade -- she had always treasured the time she spent alone -- but now that she was here, spending the greater part of every day in total solitude and the rest in classes where the teachers forbade her to speak to anyone, she felt a certain yearning. Perhaps a roommate would not have been such a terrible thing.

She sat down at her desk, unrolled a sheet of parchment, and dipped her finest quill in the inkwell.

During his second lecture Professor Viccari had given his students an assignment. Each was to write the best work of literature she could. The form did not matter, and the content did not matter; only the quality. Priscilla had already, the previous evening, written a short story in the style of the classical author Indro Fornaciari. She was pleased with it, but that was no guarantee. Octavian Viccari was an exceptionally strict professor: that was obvious enough from the way he spoke, and she had heard the stories. Still, she had done her best last evening.

But now... Now, she felt rather inspired.

Vampires were not real. That thing she had felt drinking greedily of her lifeblood as it raped her was not real. That need and desire, which could not be satisfied by nothing save Priscilla's heart: it did not exist.

(She felt a pang of sorrow and loneliness.)

But just as she had while she slept, she could imagine that those terrible, wonderful things were real, and she could write them into being. Take her wistful longing and crystallize it in lines of black on white. Make it real upon the page.

She touched her quill's tip to the parchment, and began to write.

She could not be too direct, of course. If she were to describe such warm and secret feelings too explicitly, no doubt the professor would be angry with her. But the important thing was the desire, the yearning. That was what filled up her whole brain and demanded escape. It was the wonderful thing about feelings: they could be easily abstracted.

So she would write. And she would not stop until she was satisfied.

* * *

Priscilla stood before the door. Her heart pounded. She should have been half-faint with drowsiness (for she had slept scarcely four hours the night before, between that nightmare and the hours she'd spent carefully scribing the poem it had inspired, determined not to rest until it was perfect and complete), but her nerves allowed no such thing. *Professor Octavian Viccari*, the plaque read, the words engraved in brass fastened to the polished wooden door.

She lifted her hand, and knocked.

"Hmm?" came a voice from the other side. "Enter."

She could detect no emotion in the words: not excitement, nor anger. Her answer would have to wait another few seconds.

She took a breath, gathered herself, and pushed open the door.

Professor Viccari was seated behind his desk, quill in hand, making swift decisive marks in red on a paper which, curiously, appeared to be written in his own hand and not a student's.

Priscilla stepped inside and bit her lip, surprised, as her eyes darted about the room: his office was not at all like his lecture hall. It was lit by candles, two on the desk, two on the floor, one atop a bookshelf; and everywhere there were books and papers and rolls of parchment, strewn across the desk, stacked on the floor, lining the bookshelf haphazardly.

The room had one thing in common with the hall, however: the rafters above were covered completely with cobwebs, so thick she could not see the ceiling.

The chair in which a guest would sit was fine enough, a typical specimen of the expensive chairs in this academy; but the one in which Professor Viccari himself sat was a battered rickety skeletal thing, made of wood nailed together. How truly strange.

The door clicked shut behind her, and all at once the professor's attention shifted. His eyes flicked up to see her, glinting, and now they were utterly intent on her, following every movement no matter how small --

Her breath caught.

"You asked to see me, sir."

"Yes," he said, his face expressionless, his eyes, unblinking, still fixed on hers. "Priscilla, I believe."

"Yes, sir."

He pointed to the chair across from him. "Sit."

She obeyed.

(Was he angry with her? Had she done something wrong? The rumors she had heard were vague regarding what exactly Professor Viccari did to students who displeased him, but it was obviously enough something very unpleasant. Most, Priscilla suspected, would have called her a fool for even daring to submit something unconventional for his class.

Indeed, she had given much thought and agony to the decision, but in the end she had elected to give him the poem she'd written. The beautiful one, the one that had sprung from her dream. She...well, she did not *regret* that now, exactly. But she feared the consequences. Had he found it too personal? He was no doubt learned enough to see through the obfuscation to the subtext; perhaps he was angry at its eroticism?

He had not yet blinked once, nor had his eyes left her. She could feel, as it were, nails of iron projecting from his pupils, piercing through and pinning her where she sat.)

The tip of his tongue darted out, and he wet his lips absently. "The poem you gave me," he said.

Priscilla swallowed. "Yes, sir."

Viccari smiled slightly. "It was very good."

The breath she'd been holding escaped her in a rush. "Oh I see. I'm glad, sir. Thank you, sir."

Now she was starting to blush, and she had little choice but to lower her eyes, fidgeting, for all that this would do nothing to hide her brightening cheeks from Viccari's sharp gaze. But --

-- she had never been praised for her writing before. Not by someone so educated.

"Tell me," he said, his voice measured and careful. "Who taught you to write like that?"

She blinked, looked back at him, found that his eyes were still made of iron and flame, and fled his gaze again. "No one? Not really, I mean, sir. I had a few good teachers during my primary schooling at home, and they taught me my letters, and a few of the more basic principles, but... That was in a small town, sir, and a little schoolhouse. Nothing like here."

His eyes had not moved from her, and his lips gave no reply. Obviously he expected her to continue speaking until he found her explanation satisfactory. She blushed brighter, and continued. "Well, you see, sir, I...I read a great deal?"

"Ahh," Viccari said, a note of peculiar satisfaction in his voice, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

"My parents were literate, sir, and they taught me to read very young, and..." She had been the sort of girl who kept to herself. "Our family was well enough off that I did not need to employ myself in spinning, so as a girl I spent a great deal of time at the library. It was as I said a small town, and the library was, I imagine, rather impoverished compared to what you are accustomed to, but I read what it offered. Classical literature, philosophical texts. Myth."

...And, occasionally, works of sweeping romance and fantasy, which had taught her of men and monsters and minds very different from hers, and the sorts of things those minds might want from her. It had not been until much later, on her sixteenth birthday, in the late evening by candlelight, that her mother had explained to her the intimate details of the things those books spoke of only abstractly, but those details, she thought -- those matters of anatomy -- were incidental. The longing, the hunger, the passion and the intimacy: these were the things of import, and of them the books had taught her well indeed.

Some, no doubt, would have called those stories frivolous. Perhaps they were. But she treasured them nonetheless, and their lessons had been very enlightening.

"I see," said Professor Viccari, thoughtfully. "You must possess a truly remarkable talent to write so skillfully with mentorship so thin."

Priscilla flushed scarlet, and bit her lip. "Thank you, sir," she murmured. She stole another glance at his eyes. Under his gaze she felt so very vulnerable, as if his eyes could pierce her skin and rifle through her soul, but -- he *approved* of her. He found her skillful and impressive.

Perhaps it should not have surprised her that a pure and uncomplicated joy had taken root in her heart.

(She had worked so very hard to develop her poetry to the point where it stood today. No one had ever really noticed, not back in Glevumshire, and to be finally praised for her skill, by one of the Dacian Society's strictest professors, no less: she found it very, very gratifying. She could still see that brief hint of a smile he'd shown her when he'd first said that her poem was good, and she would cherish it for all her life.)

Viccari reached down, opened the uppermost drawer on the right of his desk (his eyes not leaving her all the while), and slid out a sheet of parchment. Priscilla recognized it quickly by the hand in which it was written. Her poem. He placed it on the desk, facing her.

Priscilla's eyes widened. There were perhaps two dozen red marks upon the page. She looked up at the professor.

He smiled again, wryly. It was a very surprising thing to see upon his sharp-edged face. "It is a very good poem," he said. "But there is room for improvement. There always is. You will learn from every word I teach you and you will get better, you understand?"

Priscilla nodded hurriedly. "Yes sir," she said. "Thank you, sir."

(She very desperately did not want to disappoint him.)

That wry smile grew a tiny bit warmer. "Good," he told her. "Because you are excellent at this, and I will not allow a treasure like you to be wasted."

* * *

Priscilla knelt before a cluster of fine white lilies, and the dew wet through the fabric of her skirt.

It was early morning. The sun had dawned, but still it hid bashfully behind the walls of the academy buildings, from Priscilla's vantage here in the courtyard garden. Its beams peeked just faintly over the rooves. Everything was delicate and pale in the half-light, and all around her the dew sparkled on the grass and the flowers and the bushes and the trees. It was not a large garden, by any means, but it felt to Priscilla as if it would take a score of years to fully explore: for its gardeners had very nearly made a maze of hedges, and the cobblestone paths wound about each other and terminated in quiet alcoves, hidden from every angle but above.

There were a dozen other students here with her, somewhere, but they were all so reverently still and quiet in the morning air that she might as well have been alone.

She lifted her spirit glass and peered through it at the pale white spider making its way along a silver thread between two of the delicate lilies.

It was slender and elegant, perhaps the size of a silver coin, and it climbed slowly, with care. Building its web, perhaps, to snare its prey. But through the treated glass she held in her hand, she could see more: the lines of power, faint and blue, that came forth from its body in concentric patterns and looped back toward it. The life-lines.

She picked up her quill and clipboard from where they lay beside her, scribbled down a few notes, and bit her lip.

She still had notes from Professor Finizio's lecture yesterday, when he had prepared them for this assignment. He had spoken of how in gregarious species, like men or wolves or ants, the life-lines passed from one individual to the next, connected them: resonated, and sustained them, in mutual fashion. But in a solitary species, like the variety of white spiders this specimen before her called its own, the lines bent and curved and looped in upon themselves.

She wondered: were the life-lines love?

Certainly Professor Finizio would scoff at that notion. But still she wondered. It was true, surely, that all things needed love to survive. Priscilla had been loved, always, by her mother and her father. She was still, and this sustained her. But a spider, cruel and predatory, guarding its territory with jealous fervor, hunting and devouring, and, if ever it were to meet another of its kind, fighting and killing and eating it...

It must at least love itself.

Musn't it? What other explanation could there be? That must be what the looping lines were. How could it possibly bear to exist if nothing in all Creation loved it?

She bit her lip again, and raised her poisoned needle.

One swift stroke, the slightest of pricks, and the poison would act and the spider would die. And then as its life left it, she could peer through her spirit glass and see its ghost forming. It was best that she be on with it. She would fail the assignment if she refused to carry it through to completion, if she did not record what happened as the spider died.

The needle's tip was scarcely a finger's breadth from the spider, and she found that she was hesitating.

Slowly, she withdrew the needle. Set it down upon the clipboard. Brought her hand back, empty, now, to where the spider climbed slowly along a second thread.

She reached out the tip of her finger and, very gently, stroked the spider's pale abdomen. It shivered.

"I love you, little spider," she murmured. "Even if nothing else in all the world does, I love you."

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