Elena returned to the castle at dawn, barefoot, with forest mud on her ankles and blood already dried on her skin. Her hair was tangled, her eyes—two abysses in which the night had not yet died. No bell rang, no servant dared address her. Rumors had already begun: that she had fled, that she had died, that the fire had taken her. But she walked through the front gate, head held high and her body burning with silence.
The Baron was in the great hall, seated on his black wooden throne, a bottle of wine in his hand and an old bloodstain on his cuff. When he saw her, he laughed—a short, dry laugh, like a knife grazing stone.
"You came... I knew it... You can't run from what you are, little girl."
Elena did not answer. She stepped slowly toward him, and with each step, the chandeliers above began to tremble. The air thickened, the wood creaked, and the candle flames bent toward her, as if bowing before a forbidden queen.
When she reached him, she raised her hand. Not to strike. But to speak. From her cracked lips came a whisper:
"Sanguinem dedisti. Vitam tibi aboleo."
(You gave blood. I erase from you even the idea of life.)
The Baron tried to laugh again. But the laugh froze in his throat. His gaze emptied. His pupils dilated like two wounds. He blinked. Once. Twice. Then began looking around like a child lost in a room too vast.
"E... e... L... E... naaa! Haaa... Aaaa! G... g... gaaa! Taa... tă! Ppppp... aa... aa!"
His words were torn apart, hurled from an abyss of madness. No sentences, no ideas. Only scattered sounds, screams that scraped the air, and letters spilled like the shards of a shattered mind.
He leapt from the throne and began to run in circles, giggling like a child in the heart of an invisible storm. He tore at his clothes, screamed at the shadows on the walls, spoke to the portraits as if they were old friends. Then he stopped abruptly, put a finger in his mouth, and began licking the floor with fervor, mumbling through thick spit:
"T... t... tăăă... Mmm... kkkhh... brrraa... Eeee... HHHaaa!"
He no longer had words. Only heavy, harsh, twisted sounds. He stuck out his tongue and dragged it across the floor, then giggled and slapped his own face. He tried to feed on shadows, biting at the corners of darkness like a masterless beast. He slammed his face into the walls, then rolled on the floor laughing, screaming letters without meaning. His sounds were no longer human—they were hoarse, sometimes sharp, sometimes like a dry throat begging for one last sip of meaning, but never finding it.
He crawled on his elbows to the fireplace, where he began to chew the warm ashes, spitting them onto his chest and laughing loudly. He plunged his head into a basin of dirty water, gurgling meaningless sounds, then rolled on the floor and started licking his scraped knees, crying and laughing at the same time. He rose onto all fours and began biting his forearms, then shoved his tongue into his nose and started to sing—if that broken, strangled sound could be called a song.
He was the sole prisoner of a prison without walls, built inside his dismembered mind.
The servants stood frozen. Some crossed themselves. Others turned their backs. No one dared approach.
The Baron climbed onto the table and began to bark. To crawl on his belly. To gnaw on his sleeves.
"Hhh... bbbrrr... khhhh... aaAA... nnnaaaa!"
There were no more words. No more language. Only howls, gurgles, terrifying sighs that cut through the air like rusted blades. He thrashed around the table, foaming at the mouth, banging his forehead against the corners of the furniture like a rabid beast. He made sounds like a calf sensing the knife, then whimpered like a dog being beaten. Nothing articulate. No trace of thought. Only shattered instincts, grotesquely alive.
Then, suddenly, he went silent. He collapsed to the floor and curled up into a ball.
Days passed. Sometimes he hid beneath the table and refused to come out for hours, trembling and weeping like a chilled infant. Other times, he ran barefoot through the castle, screaming for an invisible doll, yelling that his mother had stolen it. He crawled into corners, wrapped himself in wet rags, and bit into dry wood as if it were food. He tore out his eyelashes, his hair, his nails. He chewed them and spat them out, giggling like a man possessed.
No one brought him food anymore. No one shaved him. No one touched him. Time had abandoned him. Elena, who now ruled the castle with a terrifying authority, had given strict orders that he was not to be helped in any way. And the people, terrified by her eyes that seemed to burn without flame, obeyed. Their fear was not blind—it was wise. A new order reigned in the castle, and the Baron was no longer part of it.
But it wasn't only submission to Elena. The servants remembered. They remembered when Baron Vornic had slapped them over an unwashed spoon. When he had whipped their backs for eating scraps. When he had forced them to scrub the floors with their tongues or sleep naked in the stables. They remembered the beatings, the humiliation, the hunger. And now they saw him on all fours, drool dripping from his chin, munching on straw and howling at the ceiling. They saw justice. They looked at him with the same coldness with which you stare at a worm beneath your boot.
For Baron Vornic, hunger became hallucination, and hallucination became comfort. His hands had gone numb, his stomach screamed voicelessly, and time flowed in erratic circles, like in a sick dream. His thoughts were blurred, inverted, and he saw shadows moving on the walls, believing they were bringing him bread. The smell of meat was everywhere—in the stones, in the wood, in his own fingers, which he sniffed hungrily, without understanding why. He pressed himself against walls, stared at the chandeliers, thinking they were ripe fruit. Sometimes he wept, convinced his mother was feeding him. Other times, he screamed from hunger in his sleep, and his muscles writhed in bitter cramps.
In the absence of food, the mind decayed before the body. Hunger left him stripped of humanity, stripped of self. He was nothing but a painful void, a pain that became identity. And in that void, the Baron slowly melted—a fire that burned not with flame, but with silence.
He had lost his dignity, his power, his name. He spent his final days crawling, drained of strength, through the great hall, murmuring meaningless letters over and over. And one morning, his body was found lifeless, curled beside the throne, eyes wide open and mouth parched, still stretched toward a memory that no longer existed.
Above him, Elena, she of the black soul, watched him in silence. That twisted, withered body was nothing more than a torn shadow, a pale memory of the man he had once been. There was no pity in her eyes — only a kind of bitter stillness, cool and calm, like the air after a storm.
"This is what a curse looks like. Not blood. Not death. But forgetting. You tried to break me, but I was stronger than you, always stronger."
It was not revenge. It was judgment. And it was not yet over.
Elena did not bury him. She didn't even dig a grave. She gave the order to have him thrown into the ravine at the edge of the forest, where the hungry beasts could smell blood from afar. Let them feast on what was left of him — let him be good for something, at least!
That very night, Elena left. She knew where she had to go. And to whom the next judgment belonged.
Her father stood in the doorway, drunk, filthy, eyes bloodshot from wine and weakness. He didn't recognize her at first. Or maybe he didn't want to. He spat on the ground and laughed hoarsely:
"What wind blows you here, ugly girl? You come back to remember your place?"
Elena said nothing. No gesture, no look. She simply raised one hand, and in the air between them opened a void, a pause in the fabric of the world. From her fingers was born a silent, sharp pain that pierced straight into his chest.
The man collapsed, mouth agape, trying to scream but unable to make a sound. His body convulsed, eyes bulged, and his flesh trembled in a grotesque, brief, and absurd dance.
Then silence. His body stilled, face down in the mud, hands clutching an empty bottle.
It was a death without poetry. Without glory. Without any grand tragedy. Just the natural end of a wasted, petty life.
Elena watched silently for a few seconds, then walked away without looking back.
Though she was now the lady of the land and had a carriage with fiery horses, Elena chose to walk to the castle, right through the center of the village. She returned to Gruiul with a cold stillness in her eyes and long shadows trailing her steps. She spoke no words, made no threats, asked for nothing. She passed among the people like a spirit hungry for the past. And the village felt her.
She didn't need to touch them. Nor to curse them. Her presence alone, her gaze, her shadow on the walls was enough. Children began to cry in their sleep, without reason. Afterward, the milk soured overnight. The water in the wells took on the taste of ash. Women's hair fell in clumps, and men awoke with pain in their bones, as if burdened by invisible weights.
Smiles were the first to vanish. Then the songs. A girl's wedding was canceled without explanation — the groom ran screaming into the forest. The village priest forgot his prayers. And the church bell split in two, as if it could no longer bear its own sound.
People didn't die, but they lived with difficulty. With their souls eternally tense. With eyes darting to corners of rooms, with hearts trembling at every step. As if each moment was shadowed by a pain they could not name, but which gnawed at their dreams.
And no one knew exactly what she had done to them. Only that Elena had been there, and when she took her first step beyond the village, she carried with her all the joy and peace that had ever gathered in that place — as if she had torn out the heart of a living being and walked away with it in her palm.
Just as she had lived — with fear in her bones and a knot in her throat — so too would they live. Not for a day. Not for a month. But until they learned to remember.
Three months. That's how long it lasted. That's how long it took Elena to repay the world with the same coin it had paid her. Three months in which hatred smoldered, then rose in tall flames. The longest and hardest was the vengeance upon Baron Vornic — a slow, shameful, dreadful fall.
Her father and the village? A single day was enough. One day and no forgiveness.
That night, when she left the village and returned to the castle, the moon climbed round into the sky, full and white like a gaze from above. Elena withdrew alone into her tower, her body bare beneath a heavy cloak, as if her senses were too tired for clothing.
In the cracked mirror in the upper room, she looked at her body. The bruises were gone, the wounds had closed, but something unspoken disturbed her. She placed her palm on her belly. Empty. Silent. No pain, no cycle. And then she knew. Through all the hatred, all the blood and silence of the past months… she hadn't bled at all.
She was pregnant.
She collapsed onto the cold floor, her forehead pressed to the stone. She laughed. She cried. And her laughter broke into dry sobs, breathless, tearless.
That night, she dreamed of him again.
The demon stood in a place without edges, his eyes covered, tall and unmoving like a living statue. Around him — ash. A scorched, mute world, suspended between dream and hell. He said nothing. He only reached out his hand. And in his palm was a black flower — made of stone, yet alive, faintly pulsing.
"Ex odio nata es. Et ex te, aliud nascetur." (You were born of hatred. And from you, something else shall be born), he said — without lips, without voice, yet the words wrote themselves into the air.
She woke suddenly, her heart pounding in her temples, a strange burning in her chest. The wind howled through the cracks in the tower, whispering in forgotten tongues.
Elena rose slowly from the floor, her body heavy with thoughts, her eyes wet but hollow. She moved to the window, where the moon loomed larger than ever — like a white wound on the darkened sky. She touched the glass with her slender fingers, and the pane trembled slightly, like a soul stirred by premonition.
"What have you done to me?" she whispered. "What have you put inside me?"
In her chest echoed the silent reply: life. But not a life like any other. A life born of ash, of blood, of death and pain. A child of the pact. Of the curse. Of her choice.
On the skin of her belly, she felt a faint, pulsing warmth — like a red light beneath flesh. She did not love this child. Not yet. But she felt it. Like a silent presence that knew everything she had been and all she was yet to become.
She turned back to the mirror. Looked at her face. She was someone else. No longer the girl with the ragged doll and wide eyes. She was a woman with a past, with magic, with death on her shoulders and an unknown future in her womb.
And then she heard him again. The voice of the demon, now spoken from within her, not from a dream:
"Sanguis meus, via tua. Sanguis eius, mors tua." (My blood, your life. His blood, your death.)
She fell to her knees, hands on her belly, mouth open in a silent scream. But not from fear. From recognition. She understood, at last. The true judgment was only just beginning.
That night, Elena understood that revenge was not the end. But the beginning of a path even more dangerous.
And that the blood within her was no longer hers alone.