Octavia Grigore/Background/1650s
The vineyard lay hushed under a sky strewn with stars, the night air sharp with the tang of roses, damp earth, and aging oak barrels. Lanterns of amber hung like watchful sentinels along the veranda, their soft halos painting Octavia’s crimson fur coat in fiery strokes against the gathering dark. She reclined with the ease of one accustomed to dominion, a half‐drained glass of deep red wine poised between her slender fingers, her blue eyes glinting like glacier crossroads as they swept across the rows of vines.
Silence spread itself between us, steady and patient, broken only by the faint susurrus of leaves stirred by a restless breeze. When she spoke, her voice was low and smooth—an accent wrapped around each word like smoke around embers.
“Childhood,” she murmured, tipping the wine so the liquid sloshed gently at the rim, “is a wild thing. Fleeting, fragile—and never quite so innocent as we’d have it.”
Behind those thick, cat’s‐eye lenses, her face was unreadable. Yet the faint curl of her lips spoke of memories too sharp for complacency. “In Wallachia, in the mid‐sixties… the forests were ancient, impenetrable. The mountains loomed like silent sentries. Night fell like a curtain thicker than any wool.” Her voice narrowed on that last word, as though she still felt the weight of it.
She shifted, and the fur coat swept like a ribbon of blood across her pale skin. “I was born to privilege, but privilege means little when the peasantry starve at your walls. They whispered of strigoi in the dark—blood‐hungry phantoms. My father called it superstition. My mother… she taught me to trust the silence between words.”
Her gaze drifted back to the vine‐dark fields beyond, where shadow and moonlight tangled. “I recall lilacs heavy with dew, the sweet musk of earth freshly churned by spring rains. My mother tended her garden as if it were a living omen—wild, tenacious. I would hide among the roses, watching her hum, believing for a moment that life could always be that gentle.”
She lifted the glass again, savoring the wine with deliberate care. “My father schooled me in strength and iron will. Mother schooled me in patience, in the quiet art of bending so you do not break.” She paused, eyes fixed on an oak’s silhouette against the stars. “She spoke of an old oak by our manor—twisted, scarred, older than memory. It survived the fiercest storms because it bent.”
A ghost of a smile brushed her lips, distant yet poignant. “Survival,” she said, “is the lesson we learn too late.”
Her tone darkened, heavy with recollection. “Then came the night of smoke and blood. Fire in the wind. Roses turned red with flame. My childhood crumbled in an instant, reduced to ashes—and from those ashes, but I would rise from that ash.”
The night settled back around us, the echo of her words hanging like mist. Only the scent of roses remained, and the steady rustle of leaves beneath a canopy of eternal stars.
