Lord Dracula of Lviv, Chapter #1: The Spires in the Mist

Lviv, in her late autumnal sorrow, was a city of fog. Her spires rose like fingers of bone through the drifting veils of dusk, and the streets, damp and glistening, whispered with every carriage wheel that passed. The lamplighters came early in those days, their torches flickering as though the darkness itself fought to consume them before they could light the way.

In this twilight, when the bells of the Latin Cathedral tolled their mournful hour, he came. Lord Dracula of Lviv did not enter as other men did, for no door could frame his passage, and no hearth could warm his presence. He was simply there: stepping from a corner of shadow, his cloak trailing like the wings of a fallen angel, his eyes fixed upon those who dared meet them.

To the people of the Old Town, he was a tale. To the women who felt his gaze, he was temptation and terror entwined. There was one, Kateryna, daughter of a bookseller, who first spied him beneath the arches of the Dominican Church. She saw not a stranger but a prince of centuries past, a figure carved of marble and despair, whose smile hinted at every secret the city had buried. He spoke to her not in words but in a silence that pressed upon her soul, compelling her to follow.

And so she did. Through the narrow serpent streets they went, the moon a pale coin tossed upon the mist, the echoes of their footsteps swallowed by silence. The city’s countless churches loomed about them: St Andrew’s, St George’s, the Jesuit church with its statues watching like sorrowful guardians. Each tower was a sentinel, yet none struck at him. For it was said that the holy places, though consecrated, had grown weary of warding him away. Lviv herself seemed to crave him, to hold him in her bones as part of her story, as much a citizen of the city as her cobblestones and her ghosts.

At last he brought Kateryna to the Market Square, empty but for the skeletal outline of the City Hall and the silent monuments of ages past. There he stopped. The fog curled around them, and the spires above seemed to bow. He raised his hand—pale, unearthly—and touched her cheek. She did not tremble; she only closed her eyes as though surrendering to a fate written long before her birth.

“Why me?” she whispered, daring at last to break the silence.

“Because you listen to the city,” he murmured, his voice as soft as falling ash. “And I am the city’s voice.”

The kiss that followed was not of passion but of eternity. Cold as the stone of Lviv’s tombs, it drained colour from her lips even as it etched a strange fire into her soul. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone. Only the mist remained, coiling between the spires, as though it had swallowed him whole.

The following morning, her father found her standing before the bookshop with an unreadable calm upon her face. She spoke little, her eyes always fixed upon the heights of the city, as though waiting for something only she could see. Others noticed the change, and they whispered. Another had been taken. Another had been marked by the eternal wanderer who haunted their streets.

And somewhere, unseen among the fog-drowned steeples, Lord Dracula of Lviv watched, and waited, and listened to the slow heartbeat of the city he would never release.