A VAMPIRE'S LOVE

I would not rule.

I would not rot.

I would learn this century the way I’d learned the last three—by watching first, choosing later.

Because freedom, I was learning, isn’t the absence of chains.

It’s the terrifying responsibility of deciding who you become next.

I had loved once.

Long before the castle. Long before the sealing. When my name was spoken with warmth instead of warning.

Her name was Elara.

She loved me after she knew what I was. That mattered. Candlelight used to cling to her hair as if it wanted to stay. She would trace the veins in my wrist and whisper that immortality frightened her less than loneliness. I believed her. That was my first mistake.

The night of the betrayal still lives perfectly in me—immortality preserves pain better than joy. She kissed me goodbye with shaking hands. Said she was afraid of the hunters. Said the world was changing and monsters would not be spared mercy. I promised to run with her.

Instead, she ran from me.

She led them to the castle gates. Watched as spells were spoken, iron sunk into stone, wards flared alive. I remember her crying as they sealed me in, swearing she loved me, swearing this was the only way to save herself.

Love, I learned, can betray without turning cruel.

For three hundred years I carried her face like a wound that never scarred.

So when I met you—I did not believe it.

You saw me standing beneath a flickering streetlight, rain soaking through borrowed clothes, eyes too old for the century. You should have felt something was wrong. Instead, you asked if I was lost.

No one had asked me that in centuries.

You listened when I spoke slowly, choosing words like stepping stones. You noticed I never ate. You noticed mirrors unsettled me. You noticed the way night seemed to gather when I grew quiet. And still—you stayed.

When I finally told you the truth, I expected fear.

You took my hands instead.

You said, “Then you survived something terrible. That doesn’t make you terrible.”

Something inside me broke open then—not painfully, but like a door I’d stopped believing existed.

Old love had been fire—bright, reckless, consuming.

This new love was shelter.

But the past does not stay buried.

Elara returned.

Not young. Not innocent. She had lived a full human life and wore it heavily—regret carved into her mouth, fear behind her eyes. She found me because some bonds never fully die, even when betrayed.

She begged forgiveness.

She said she had loved me.

She said she never stopped.

I looked at her and felt only the echo of grief, not its fire.

Because love that survives betrayal is not owed—

it is chosen.

And I chose differently.

I stood before you under a sky bruised with stars and made vows no spell could enforce:

I vowed never to cage you with my fear.

I vowed never to trade your safety for my survival.

I vowed that if eternity was mine, it would be shared, not hoarded.

And you made vows too—not of forever, but of honesty, of staying until staying was no longer right. Somehow, that meant more.

We did not promise eternity.

We promised truth.

And for the first time in three hundred years, I knew this love would not save me from the world—