292- The Legend of the Golden Eyes
POV Seraphine Valerian:
I didn’t want to think about that. It could be my mind, influenced by everything my father and my aunt said, creating fantasies. That faceless man from my dreams, so real that he shook me, pulled the ground from beneath my feet, throwing me into a spiral of emotions, was a product of my imagination.
It had to be.
“Teo, open the door. Don’t take this madness any further!”
“Leave me alone, Aunt...”
“Please, child. Promise you’ll listen to me and stay!”
“No.”
She sighed, finally no longer shouting.
“Then I’ll have to tell you everything. Open the door.”
I wiped my face with a blue blouse and stood up. I obeyed. Gretel went to the bed, never taking her eyes off me. She sat on one end and I on the other.
She twisted her plump hands in her lap, anxious.
“When Alba met Zorvan, I was angry. You know, it was just me and my younger sister here, our parents already dead. At that time we were already hiding our ethnicity. Nazism wiped out more than half a million gypsies, and the persecution continued under communism. It became safer this way. But she was like you—passionate about our culture. Wanting to live free under the Romani motto.”
“The earth is my homeland, the sky is my roof, and freedom is my religion,” I murmured the proverb I knew.
“Exactly. So she took that trip to Romania and fell in love with your father. I never forgave her for abandoning me. She wanted me to go there too, but I had my comfortable life here, my shop. I learned that being nomadic and free would not give me security.”
Gretel reached out her hand and smiled faintly, stroking a red curl of my hair.
“You look so much like her! You have nothing of Zorvan.”
“I have his blood. And the love for my people.”
“We are your people too, Teo. You have Romani, Romanian, and German blood. You are as much a Kurz as a Valerian.”
“Then I can choose to stay or go.”
“You know what will happen if you step into that place! Alba had to leave while pregnant with you. She did it to protect you.”
“None of that is real, Aunt! Maybe if she had stayed, nothing would have happened!”
“Is that what you truly believe? You say you’re proud to be Romani, yet you deny your father’s spiritual predictions?”
“I don’t deny them! They might be exaggerated and—”
“Even your dreams and nightmares?”
“They’re just dreams!”
My heart raced, because it wasn’t that simple. Those dreams had been with me for as long as I could remember and had even interfered with my life, my relationships. But I couldn’t admit it and become a coward again.
“Zorvan knew you would be a girl before you were born. And that you were in danger in Romania. He stayed away from the daughter he loved, lost his wife—everything to protect you. How can you disrespect that?”
Especially on his deathbed?
Guilt and fear squeezed me inside, but I held them back.
The need within me was far greater.
“I will never forgive myself if I don’t say goodbye to my father. If I’m not with him during his passing, since I was forced to stay away my entire life.”
“He will be desperate. He’ll die afraid that the premonition will come true.”
“That won’t happen.”
Gretel sighed, exhausted at the sight of my determination.
“What do you know about the cursed ones, Teo?”
“What I’ve been told. Everyone talks about the strange creatures of Romania. Especially Dracula. His castle receives millions of tourists every year, even though people know he wasn’t a real vampire but a violent impaler. They’re legends, Aunt, like those beasts my father swears exist in the Tharnak!”
“But they exist.”
“You’ve never been there, never seen them.”
“Zorvan has. He told me.”
He had told me too, though without going into detail. Nonsense that sounded like werewolf stories. A threat he believed was real and capable of destroying me.
They were too close to the village, even though they lived in isolated territories around the mountain. They were bigger, more violent, and more powerful. From time to time they appeared in the city of Sibiu, and from there they prowled around our village. People had disappeared, never to return.
“What does that have to do with me? He says he saw death mixed into my future, along with fire and beasts. He insisted I could be another one to vanish, to be kidnapped by these cursed creatures. But all of that is so crazy!”
“He sent your mother back here to protect you. He loves you. It isn’t madness. He has reasons to say that—he saw it happen. He never told you everything so he wouldn’t frighten you, but I see I’ll have to do it now.”
I sighed, because it all sounded far too fantastical. Even so, I waited. She licked her lips and began.
“Vila Rósia lies right at the foot of the Tharnak, outside them but close enough to attract attention. It’s a path to larger cities, like Sibiu. They say they’re wolf-men.”
“They say…” I murmured, making it clear that nothing was certain.
“One of them started prowling around the village more than a century ago. Around the same time women began disappearing. There are accounts from your great-grandfathers about it, stories passed orally from parents to children.”
“They thought they were abducted. But what if they decided to leave, to move away?”
“You don’t understand, Teo. They weren’t kidnapped. They fell in love with him and followed him willingly. The creature seduced them. Many were promised to other gypsies, about to be married. They never returned.”
I was surprised and thought about it for a moment.
“They may have been happy with him. Or they didn’t come back because they knew their families would reject them for breaking their marriage promises. You know most are promised while still children.”
“Yes, no one truly knew their fate. But the fact is the beast kept returning after a while. And the women kept leaving with him. Until it stopped for a period.”
“Why do they call him a beast? Did he look like one?”
“No. Others like him passed through the village, even bought things from the gypsies. They were respected and feared, but never harmed anyone. This one must have been very attractive, to take the women with him. Zorvan said some people disappeared after venturing too far into the Tharnak in that region and those who survived spoke of hybrid beings. That’s why they’re known in the village as beasts.”