Octavia Grigore/Background/1690-1695

The moon had climbed higher now, casting its pale glow like a silver river across the veranda’s stone floor. Octavia lifted her glass, the wine inside catching fragments of starlight as though it, too, harbored secrets to reveal. Her voice, when it came, was steady and assured, yet beneath each measured word lay the sharp tang of ambition and the dull ache of old, unhealed wounds.

“In the year of 1690,” she began, “I slipped away from the collapsing courts of Europe aboard a battered merchant brigantine that creaked and groaned like a wounded beast. We sailed the Black Sea under a jaundiced sun, bound for the promise of the New World. I had managed to secure my passage as cargo, confined within a large wooden crate of earth from the mountains of my home, meant to be delivered to the city of New York. But fate—ever capricious—sent us reeling into storm and shoal, and left the ship stranded upon uncharted mudflats of what would one day be called the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.”

She paused, inhaling the cool night air as though drawing the memory into herself. “There was no port, no settlement—only waterlogged bayous that reeked of rot and promise, cypress swamps draped in Spanish moss like mourning veils, and the simple villages of the Bayougoula people, who lived in thatched huts upon the water’s edge. The newcomers—French fur trappers and explorers—dribbled into their world in small, wary numbers.”

Octavia’s lips curved in a faint, wry smile. “For months I roamed those bayous as a predator, listening to the Bayougoula sing their moonlit songs, watching fireflies stitch ghostly patterns across the black water, breathing in the musky sweetness of alligator and frog. I moved through that wilderness on four legs—slipping beneath thickets of bramble, guided by the sharp eyes of night herons and the watchful company of native wolves. Hunger sharpened every sense, and I hungered for more than the blood of marshfowl and alligator.”

Her fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. “Yet the Bayougoula swiftly grew wary of my presence, and there were no French villages to sustain me—only Spanish fishing skiffs making clandestine runs northward from Veracruz. Under the cloak of dusk, I drifted alongside their vessels, claiming to be a widow of a gentleman trader. They welcomed me with bread and cheap wine, intrigued by the pale woman whose silence held its own mysteries. But I tasted neither loaf nor vintage. When the deckhand slumped in his hammock, I roused him with gentle words… and ruthlessly slaked my hunger. By sunrise I was gone, and they blamed his death on sudden fever.”

Octavia’s gaze darkened like stormwater. “The bayou could not sustain me. I soon heard of French trappers pushing upriver toward St. John—encampments of ragged exiles from Mobile and Biloxi, men half-starved and drunk on freedom. I ventured inland, stumbling upon a solitary Jesuit chaplain in a crude mission. With soft Latin phrases, I won his pity and safe harbor. Yet while night wrapped its cloak around the world, I haunted his quarters and fed upon him, only enough to sustain myself however, as such a steady source of Vitae cannot be wasted.”

A faint, predatory glimmer sparkled in her eyes. “Before long, whispers of Sabbat packs skulking among the sugarcane fields reached my ears. I offered sanctuary in exchange for secrets. We shared stolen casks of French wine, toasting alliances built on ruin—but the true feast lay elsewhere: a pierced vein here by candlelight, a throat bared there beneath moonrise, a heartbeat stilled in praise of Caine.”

Octavia leaned forward, her voice dropping to a raspy hush. “In 1695, a mortal French commandant from Mobile sought to marshal the drifting outcasts of the area under his banner. From the swamp’s edge I had a flurry of burning arrows loosed into his camp—and left behind evidence of those he sought to unite. Later, I watched as a wolf from the shadows, as the French and the outcasts turned on one another like rabid dogs. I slipped away while they tore each other apart.”

She straightened, the lantern light glinting on the crystalline curve of her glass. “And so I survived: on the very essence of those who thought to harbor me. The bayou, with its tangled roots and silent waters, taught me a harsher truth than any courtly intrigue: survival is the province of the cunning. In those murky depths, I learned that power is best wielded in silence.”

Octavia drew a slow breath, her gaze lifting once more to the moon-gilt hills on the horizon. “I came to see the New World as a crucible—its swamp and river my forge, its creatures my kin. The Bayougoula taught me stealth, the wolves taught me cunning and ferocity, the storm-tossed brigantine taught me resilience. And though I carried the scars of torment and the hunger of the damned, I emerged tempered by hardship, sharpened by loss, and hungering still—for freedom, for dominion, for the taste of the wild.”