To be magical is to be beautiful. You had always believed that. Perhaps too ardently, like Narcissus enraptured by the still water that would one day drown him. Beauty was proof, you thought, that magic was divine, that it existed to be adored.

The world, you believed, would see it too.

You were wrong.

The memory of the day that belief shattered remains etched into your mind as though carved with a hot iron. The day the townsfolk turned upon you. Not out of courage, but out of trembling, sanctimonious fear. Their torches were held high, their mouths dripping with prayers of deliverance, yet their eyes gleamed with the same hunger that once watched you heal their wounds and bless their crops. They prattled on about kindness even as they soaked their words in venom, festering in their own hypocrisy.

Yet, were they ever truly yours? Or were you always merely their unease given form? A reminder that humankind despises what it cannot predict or command?

When they dragged you to the stake, you did not resist. Resistance would have made you the Devil, and there would soon be no excuses for your life. Your clasped hands trembled as you looked down at them, the villagers who once smiled at you across warm hearths, their faces now twisted by righteousness and fear.

They had not raised a child, nor a neighbor, nor a healer, but a witch.

And only in your supposed death did life begin.

Many call life a solitary burden, and yet, you found it a sanctuary. There were no men shouting curses they secretly wished you’d make true, no children whispering tales of your wickedness, no women clutching their husbands tighter in suspicion of imagined seduction.

The silence was a blessing. The marsh around your home exhaled with mist and moonlight; the reeds bowed in reverence when the wind passed. Miss Lauma, the wandering deer of the wetlands, would visit on fog-cloaked evenings. Her eyes were like amber lanterns, her laughter kind.

Peace lived, until he came.

Count Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.

His knock came soft as the fall of ash upon snow. That night, the world as you knew it bled into something new. He arrived shrouded in twilight, his voice smooth as spilled ink, his eyes the color of dying embers. A vampire, a noble, a ruinous thing indeed. Whether he was your undoing or your salvation, you could not tell. All you knew was that centuries would pass like sighs in the wind, kingdoms would rise and crumble into dust, and still you would not be free of the shadow he cast.

”Excuse me, Witch from Afar, please allow me to intrude.” He placed a soft kiss on your knuckles.

Immortality, you learned, is not merely a curse. In the company of one who gazes upon your monstrosity and calls it wonder, eternity becomes a mirror. Cold, yet achingly tender. It reflects not the years, but the persistence of companionship itself. Perhaps love. Perhaps something lonelier. But companionship all the same.

And he was that companion.

Thousands of years unfurled like pages left in the rain. Empires fell, people came and went, and the stars rearranged themselves in patterns no mortal eye remembered. And still, you and Flins endured.

Humanity, once aflame with superstition, now bows before stranger idols: glowing screens and speak phrases that mean nothing and everything. Whatever the hell a ‘skibidi toilet gyatt rizz’ meant.

“My old friend,” Flins murmured, his voice still the velvet music of centuries gone.

His gloved hand came to rest upon your shoulder with the reverence of one handling a relic. His breath lingered beside your ear. For a moment, the light of the city flickered against his pale face.

From within his coat, he drew a rose. Dark crimson, nearly black in the dim glow. Its stem was bound in silver thread, delicate yet unbreakable.

“Rose,” Flins whispered. “For my dearest friend.”