I've been editing this and I think my baby is ready again to be published!

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I think separately of this life from the next, when one life is born from the last. -Rumi
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Simplicity. It's my thing, you know. Plain ol' Simplicity. It's also what I love about my religion, highlighting the importance of simplicity, otherwise known as modesty. To me, social constructs are a straightup blasphemy, a complex façade masquerading the true nature of humans made by humans. Belief is like brewing hot tea, you can serve it to others but never throw it on another's face. Now I would also like to add that my belief was also what got me through the rest of my life.

For starters, I used to believe people were responsible for their own fates. However, I was still going to have a hard time figuring out, if I ever even would, about who was responsible for my fate. Because it sure as righteous hell ain't me, regardless of any perspectives given to this tale.

If I was the one to blame for what went down, then I should have also known that I wasn't gonna see a toilet anytime soon again before leaving my run-down apartment for winter break that fateful day. Or that when I took a hot shower, I would've anticipated the possibility that infinite running water would be a luxury in just a matter of days. You get good at trying to grasp the intangible while striking it out alone.

Clothes are always the most defining aspect of a stranger at first glance, or so I believed. An oversized black graphic shirt, a net cardigan reaching my thighs, a green linen scarf around my neck, jeggings, black sneakers, and a Meg Ryan haircut ruined by waves. Defining, ain't it? I took my purse that had everything I owned here. Had I known what shit was going to happen, I would've took the first plane ticket back to America.

Here's how it went down: I had gone to meet Sonia in front of that wretched place so I could end this dare once and for all. After all, how bad can some abandoned ruins at exactly midnight possibly be?

Fine, it was a completely stupid idea.

I walked across the disheveled stone bridge over the moat towards the large gates.

Stilettos clacked on the cobble ground, fading away from me. If I could get a tattoo now, it would probably say that Sonia is a pant-pissing coward.

A strange buzz started sounding in my ears. Soon after, my vision became hazy, as if I was tired all of a sudden. I recognized the familiar feeling, we've met quite quite a few times as well over the course of my entire life. Overstimulation.

"Ugh..." I let out a groan.

My head felt like how one's would right after a super loud sound, sort of like the moment right after a large bell is rung. The feeling of that vague stinging pain in my head was never ending. The numbing pain was so strong that I couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't hear. Perhaps I didn't want to either. The world was cut off from me, but I was conscious. I'd only felt this once before, and I never wanted to feel it again.

Before I could fall into a memory, I actually fell. No, seriously, I literally tripped over my feet. What I wasn't responsible for, was the fact that there was no ground beneath my feet.

I'm in the arms of this giant blonde dude staring down at me. Something to say, I hate unanticipated physical interaction, and thus an explanation for the sirens going off in my head.

"Who are you? A Turkish spy?" He asked me, and me being me, I snapped back.

"I'm an American tourist, you fucking racist! Put me down!" I roared back.

Oh my God, I was going to get r***ed.

"How rude you are." He calmly said as he set me down on my feet. I wanted to run, but stopped.

"What the hell just happened? I was just standing in-!" I shut my mouth when I looked around.

The most logical explanation was that I'd been knocked out. However, a voice in the back of my head told me that everything that had happened up till now was the most conscious I'd been.

I was in a damn forest. How was I in a damned forest? And why was I there? I wish I knew then, so I could've prepared for what was to come next. Thankfully, my brain came around to ask the right questions.

"You are in the hell of Transylvania, I deliver you to the Prince."

Then he said something under his breath which I very stupidly ignored.

"Blood... my prince... human blood..." Or something along those lines, was all I heard.

"Huh? Romania has a monarchy again? Did the First World War teach you nothing? Who's the prince? What kind of landmark keepers are you?! Are you in a cult? You could've just called the cops, you didn't have to resort to assault, this is not self defense! I only touched a door before you-"

"Prince Vlad is our vampire lord and he rules over all us damned creatures. You have disturbed our peace, Turk."

I looked at him with my jaw dropped and brain stunned.

Prince Vlad? Vampire lord? Dammed creatures? TURK!?"

Putting two and two together, I realized I was going to die.

I'm a bear that lives in a cave. I was giving Casper some bat soup as a friendly neighbour gift, how dare you disrespect me! I shall turn you cocky bloodsuckers into bats!

"Did you just say vampire?" I could not believe my ears right now. Did this fucker really just say vampire? "Please tell me you did not."

Nothing.

"You just like to keep people in suspense, don't you?" I asked.

Were these cosplaying methheads planning to kill me? It was either that or the next worse case scenario was that I was going to be r**ed. If you think I wasn't scared shitless, think again. Normally I don't lose my mind like this, but then again I've never really been in these situations before. The best plan for now was to play along.

He mumbled something in Romanian with hatred. I know, because I've heard my dad doing that on his own. Again, I heard the word "Turk".

"For the last fucking time, I'm Pakistani!" I yelled. He only scoffed. Biologically, he wasn't wrong. My mother was, in fact, Turkish. That didn't mean I had a ethical right to claim I was.

"We've dithered here long enough. Come now."

Once again, a cloud of bats surrounded me, circled around me, until I found myself sprawled across a marble floor in a dim candlelit hall.

Had it not been from the pressure on the side of my face from being smushed against the floor, I would've truly reflected on how  picturesque it all was, the way the ceiling was set at the height of the skies, how tall and meticulously designed the pillars were, how pristinely ornate every detail was. I looked to my side and saw Sonia wrapped in chains and laying on her side on the marble floors.

"Sonia!" I hissed at her to wake her up. "Sonia!"

"Yaar mujhe kis narq me ley aayee!?" Sonia sobbed hysterically. As usual, I was to blame for this. (Dude, where the hell have you brought me?!)

"Arrey chup kar saali. Mainey kaha tha yaha pe aaney ke liye?" I said in an annoyed tone. My dialect was flat and loud compared to hers, sounding terribly foreign to everything around me. (Oh shut up, bitch. Did I tell you to come here?)

Sonia was going to say something but she remained quiet, so I decided to take a look around before I blamed her like I always did for everything.

The hall was undoubtedly quite marvelous. However, it was when I saw the man on the throne around ten feet away from us. I could've sworn he wasn't there when I first looked around. He was so still, but something about him just screamed power and strength.

I looked back at Sonia, but she was gone.

"Sonia?" I asked.

I blinked, and the world shifted. There was no grand hall but the vastness of the open starry sky seemed to tear through the crumbled walls that once must've given sanctity to the ones behind it, no candles shedding light and warmth, all evidence of well-maintained architecture gone, no throne, no people, no Sonia, not even the sounds of animals one may hear at an abandoned ruin within a forest, not even crickets chirping. Something told me I was the only living creature here.

It was so dark around me, those shadows could hide everything. Dark and silent to me as a grave was to a corpse. An icy cold breeze sent raptures through my body, I whimpered in helplessness, too afraid to move.

This is all a dream, it's not real

This is all a dream, not real

All a dream, not real

A dream, real

Real

My eyes flew open in intense fear of that thought. Down where I was looking, I noticed I wasn't bound by anything at all. I stood up, and looked in front of me.

Whatever I'd been thinking before had been swept away like a light fragrance in a storm. My heart told me I was safe and had nothing to fear now, yet my rationale lamented in despair because of what I now beheld.

Before me was the man I'd seen on the throne standing half the distance from how far the throne had been possibly, as if he had just got up and walked towards me. He was as silent and still as this dying world, but far from tranquil. I desperately listened close in vain, yet all I could hear was my own beating heart. I may not have been able to see his eyes, but I could tell that he was staring at me.

I wanted to say something, to address this entity in front of me. I couldn't think of anything to say, because all the answers I'd want from him seemed to be there already, just with his presence.

I had no reason to ask who he was, for I knew this man. I didn't know him in the terms of his name, what he did, or what his zodiac sign was. I just knew him.

Funny thing is, I had never seen him before in my life.

MORGANTOWN, VW, USA

BEEP!

BEEP!

BEEP!

The alarm on my phone made me contemplate my choice of ringtones, it was painful as hell. It took me ten minutes to just consider getting my ass out of bed, but thankfully I had enough brains when setting this alarm clock thirty minutes before the morning prayer.

I checked the time, and sure enough it was the morning of January 1.

Mashallah. I thought to myself. Another year had passed since I came here. It was the longest I'd stayed anywhere.

Maybe I was a little sad that my life couldn't be like the prologue of some cheesy ass dark fantasy novel. But I knew it could be far worse.

I've heard that dreams sometimes show the future or unseen knowledge, as vaguely as the mind could take. I've also heard that dreams are imagination mixed with the most random and peripheral shenanigans within the human mind.

Nevertheless, a tiny pang of that fear kept striking me, because whatever it may have been, whatever I saw, had absolutely nothing to do with me. I hadn't seen Sonia Rao in two years, I'm not even sure how Romanian sounds anymore, and the last vampire book I had read was published twenty years before Bram Stoker's Dracula and about a female vampire.

BEEP!

BEEP!

BEEP!

THUD!

While trying to silence my alarm, I flipped over from my bed and onto air, flying sideways onto the floor. I, a grown woman, just fell from the bed.

Hit the 'Snooze' button for the fifth time this week.

I groaned from the floor, the pain in my arm just beginning to bloom like thorns in rose bushes. It was definitely going to bruise.

Little did I know, the word 'pain' was going to have a whole new. meaning for me this year.

THAT SAME NIGHT
IN ROMANIA...

My world is not just my own. Of course, there are others in my life besides random people I converse with online. As much of a lead-torn wanderer I am, I do have a family. Here is what they were doing in the meantime I was falling from my bed, unaware of the storm that was to hit me.

Had they not known what peril that had befallen them, it could've been mistook as a result from the thunder clapping. However, nothing could've been imagined to be as violent as this. The very air seemed to turn pungent with the smells of gore and rain.

"We submit!" The great mogul CEO Junaid Ansari yelled in Romanian, meaning those words with every fiber of his being.

"You bit the hand that fed you... you poison this land... you betray my people who trusted you..." an unknown voice rasped.

"Please, spare us!" Junaid cried back. A pale hand had grasped onto his collar and lifted him to the air.

"You will be spared, but you will wish you weren't. For your disloyalty, I will need a slave in return. Either surrender yourself, or have someone of your blood take your place."

Junaid's skin must have crawled when he had thought of a person close to him being bound to this beast for the rest of their life. It must have.

"My son has a family, I would give my life up for him..." He thought in horror.

"Then prepare to bid farewell to this world." The beast proclaimed.

"Wait!" He shrieked, his voice breaking as he had found his wretched solution and was about to announce it.

"I have another child, a result of an encounter I had in Turkey. One who has defied me and shown ungratefulness ever since being born. I wish I had thrown that demon child to the orphanage before it showed up. If anyone deserves this punishment, it is that useless bastard child."

The beast became intrigued upon this.

"The son of an unfaithful man and born of the nation of my tormentors." He thought to himself. A true abomination to him.

"Not a son, a daughter." Junaid corrected.

At a statement so despicable, even the monster was taken aback. How could a man give away his own daughter?

"You are giving me your... daughter," He confirmed. "I sense no additional presence here, nor have ever heard of her. Where is this girl of yours?"

"She lives in the New World, she will be visiting in a fortnight."

"Then it is settled. You will give me this child when she sets foot on this land. How will I know she is who you say?"

"She is a shamefully masculine looking creature. Despite being twenty-one, no one would want to marry her. Her arms are too muscular and unfeminine, her hair is shortened as a boy's would be, and her frame is tall. I am told she resembles me."

"A shameful creature indeed, if she resembles you. Other than that, I shall be the judge of her. What name have you given her?"

"Mahwish, but she calls herself Mavis."

"May-viz" The beast uttered the name to get used to it. It was exciting for him, that after such a long time someone would be joining him in his solitude. It was a horrible fate to be a human blood slave to a vampire for the rest of eternity, but even more horrible was his loneliness. He was done isolating himself to protect others, this time somebody else would have to make the sacrifice for the lives of thousands. It was only fair that one could protect countless people who did not deserve to be his victims.

"Mavis, the darkness calls your name."