Chapter 1
“Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a singular purpose?
That the luckiest man in this world is the one who finds… true love.”
- Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (1992)
Dear Mina,
Love
Love is so sickeningly sweet a poison.
To die to the fancy of one’s affection.
To string the heartstring’s harpstrings
To the yearning melody of eternal pining.
Oh sweet angel
By the cherubic lustre
Of your star-lit eyes,
That daintily and gaily,
You skip in the forlorn meadows
Of my soul,
Bringing withered life into verdant spring.
To kindle within me
The violent joy of desire again.
Oh phantasm, oh ruin,
That deigns to walk in my beloved’s skin.
What macabre theatre in which I am bound hostage to watch
You play, strutting to the adulation
Of my godless lust, affection, yearning for the silken
Symphony of your touch,
That Heaven alone could only mirror,
Within its divine pallor, pallid compared
To the promise of infernal ecstasy,
Oh icon, you shapely chalice,
From which I pant to drink,
How I loathe the man who l loves you,
And claimed you as his own.
How I bay for you,
To worship you,
And to have your blood beating hot and red
In cadence with mine own.
Your voice is a lullaby
Your beauty a sliver of heaven’s river,
Moulding thy mortal face
To your soul’s elegance,
Ardour pure, matched outward the rhythmic play
Of your enfolding spirit.
Time is cruel.
It sheds years and joys and life,
Like leaves in the autumnal rain
Of extant decay
Yet even its vast ocean may be voyaged,
Be it as deep and cavernous and as eternal,
As the sorrow murk of my riven soul.
Even its sinewy serpentine treachery,
Within her coils that dictated once
My own mortal coil,
Riches beyond gold
Spill like vitae blood into my arms,
And here now, destiny altered,
Time’s vast expanse, crossed and conquered,
The loom of fate woven strands of destined cause,
The grains of sand whispering to the sandglass’s basin.
I have found you again.
Be you a trick, a deception crueller
Than hell’s mockery to taunt my wretched, cloven heart,
Or heaven’s mercy manifest in mine own
Ageless eyes?
Nay but this songbird is rotten,
Would you dance to the maddening elegy,
This aria of lonely decay,
Bittersweet amidst the bitter rot of this world
Time is cruel,
For it has robbed me of what little mortal joy I could muster,
For even immortals age and die.
Faithless and void of God, have I walked this life
For spans of your mortal decades.
Long have I endured my deathless life,
A relic deprived of purpose.
The world turns eternal in its entropic descent,
Spiralling slowly into the void,
And I am left cast out and aside
To witness the world of the creator I renounced,
Silent, deathless and desolute.
My world darkens.
It is bereft of hope
I live only to wish
For my endless end to hasten
As the night overtakes me
This fading vessel of bloodless life,
Alone, loveless and lovelorn,
My life for me was misery,
Until distantly like a fallen star,
Upon my forlorn fate,
God cast upon my wretched lot, a boon.
Your glance envenomed me,
Your eyes spurring me,
The dreaded heraldic charge hastening me
In ardent want of you,
To behold and hold close
Your sculpted angelic form
Your impression searing into the flesh of my heart.
How you drive me,
Resolute and resolved,
To have you as my bride
To have you be mine.
But never without will,
Never without want,
That in our union joined,
I would absolve you of your longing,
As you would absolve me,
And grant me the peace
That in my tormented aching
I would by your want be delivered from.
And to you, oh for you,
I would give the world.
Nay,
I would murder the world
To have you and have alone,
By heaven’s sweet touch,
Given in your caress,
For all time, until its end,
And all the laws of the world, by God’s ordainment
Become undone,
And in tumultuous ruin,
Crashing down about us,
I would wish only
For you to be in my arms,
And ruin oh ruin,
What fear would you strike in me,
If close to my breast I held
The one thing I treasure over all earthly and heavenly delight?
Life’s ruin, with its mortal woes, sins that cleave one from God,
And its fleeting joys,
Yes for you,
My love, my eternal,
My breath, my life,
I would give it all,
I would give all,
To hold you once again,
For so long as God
In his abundant mercy wills it.
My Mina, My Elizabeta, come again,
My one
And only,
Love,
Vlad.
