In the shadow of the Carpathian peaks, where mist clings to the stone like mourning veils, a fortress rises from the mountainside. Its spires jut out into the horizon much like sharp fangs. Ravens circle its towers, crying over fields once red with conquest. Inside, by torchlight, a prince sits alone on a throne carved from oak felled by lightning. His eyes are dark as the spaces between stars. His hands rest on the armrests, stained with something that might be wine or blood.

They call him Drăculea, Son of the Dragon. Yet in the valleys below, the name twists on the tongue, becoming devil. Both seem true enough. For along the passes stand forests of stakes, bodies impaled like grotesque blossoms, their faces frozen in supplication or rage. He watches from his balcony, unmoved. Each horror is a message. Each act of cruelty, a kind of governance. When mercy is a weakness, fear must serve in its place.

But power is a hungry thing. The dark prince learns this as easily as he breathes. Nights in his fortress are long and filled with whispers – the kind that sound like prayers, or confessions, or the echo of his own heartbeat slowing. When he looks upon the candle’s flame, he sees in it something familiar: devotion, yes, but also consumption.

To rule is to devour. To love, perhaps, the same.

Centuries pass. The fortress falls to ruin. His name becomes myth, then nightmare, then story. Yet stories are a kind of resurrection. In the mind of a foreign writer, the prince stirs again. His cruelty now refined into charm; his hunger transformed into allure. Where once he raised forests of the dead, he now raises glasses of red that gleam like garnet. The warrior becomes the seducer.

And so, he endures, velvet-voiced and terrible, the scent of cherry and smoke in his wake. The sweetness that lures you nearer conceals the same iron beneath, the same taste of power and surrender.

If you listen closely on certain nights, when the wind from the east carries a scent of rum and amber, you may hear the soft echo of a toast raised long ago: To the undying, and to the ones who love them anyway.