I’ve spent most of my life behind bars—both subjective and literal. I was told my father sold me when I was no older than a few months. The couple that bought me showered me with love; they taught me to read and write, and they listened to my singing day after day.

For a time, we were happy.

​Then, everything changed.

​The war was brutal on everyone,no one saw it coming, our enemy being a myth that had stayed in the shadows for so long we’d convinced ourselves the dark was empty — the kind of monster we told children didn't exist under their beds. It started slowly, with people going missing—shadows that simply never returned. Then, the silent killings began. Entire families were discovered days after their passing; some were still in their beds, looking hauntingly peaceful. Others were found in tangled heaps in the middle of their kitchens or living rooms, their faces frozen in expressions of absolute agony.

​Only one boy survived. They found him trembling under a mountain of blankets in a cedar closet, his eyes wide and hollow. He had stayed silent while his world ended; he had witnessed the slaughter of his entire kin, and the story he told wasn't one of men, but of the things we had always promised him didn't exist. ​The boy’s testimony was a jagged, nonsensical thing. He spoke of beings carved from the void itself—shadows so deep that the lantern light seemed to pass right through them, illuminating the wall behind as if they weren't there at all. And the wings... he described them as vast, silent spans of a starless night sky, unfurling in the smallness of his family's kitchen.

​​It made no sense. How do you fight a war against something the light cannot find?

​But after months of living in a fever dream of terror, the creatures grew tired of the shadows. They stepped into the open, slaughtering in plain daylight in the centers of our crowded streets. They brought a whirlwind of chaos and carnage everywhere they went, turning our bustling markets into abattoirs.

​​The myth had finally outgrown the dark. We still didn't really know what they were, and no one knew how to hurt them. Our weapons passed through them like smoke, and our courage broke against their starless wings.

​But when all hope seemed lost, a researcher unearthed a fragment of the past that the rest of the world had forgotten. Buried in the suffocating dust of an ancient library, hidden within the pages of a book so old its spine cracked like bone, lay the truth: their weakness.

​The weakness was as simple as it was impossible: sound. Specifically, a frequency so high it could shatter glass and bone alike.

The military moved with desperate speed, forging sonic weapons—massive, brass-rimmed emitters—capable of screaming louder than any man. But when the first waves of sound hit the invaders, the world learned a second, darker truth. The shadows didn't die; they dissolved. The "beings of void" we had been fighting were merely a front—a shifting, translucent disguise for the real monsters hiding within.

Blood sucking being, nightmare creatures.

Vampires.

​I was two years old when the world began to end. By the time I turned five, the draft had reached our doorstep, and my adoptive father was taken to the front lines.

​At that point, my life changed even more. The love that had once felt like a warm blanket became a cage of iron and anxiety. My mother’s smiles turned to frantic pacing, and my singing—once a joy we shared—became a desperate, daily ritual. She would lock every bolt, pull every curtain, and whisper for me to sing higher, louder, until my throat burned.

​I didn’t know then that she wasn’t just listening to a child’s song. She was listening for a shield. From that moment on, I was not allowed to be a child anymore. My life now revolved entirely around my voice—training it, stretching it, and sharpening it until I could sing notes as high as humanly possible.

​My throat was always raw, and my childhood was measured in scales instead of games. If my voice faltered, the shadows drew closer. If I succeeded, we lived another night.

My father died, ​we received the news on a Tuesday. There was no ceremony, no military officer at the doorstep, not even a sympathetic knock. The letter was slipped into our mailbox in the dead of night, cold and anonymous. In a world of monsters, a soldier's life was worth nothing more than a scrap of paper delivered in silence.

​We couldn’t have a funeral. We weren’t even allowed to see his body, let alone bury it. In this war, the dead didn't belong to their families anymore; they belonged to the flames or the fangs.

​My mother didn't cry when she read the letter. She didn't scream. She simply walked over to the window, checked the locks, and looked at me with eyes that had gone cold and hollow. It scared me—deep, bone-chilling fear—but from the heights of my seven years, there was very little I could do.

​Following my father's death, we fled. She moved us to a cabin deep in the woods, a place with a bunker buried in the basement. That tiny, windowless concrete box became my home. She even modified the door, changing the way it opened so she could bolt me inside from the other side.

​I was no longer being protected. I was being stored. That was my life now: sleep, eat, sing. Sleep, eat, sing, over and over again.

​I grew up between the four cement walls of the bunker, and my voice grew stronger with me. To pass the time, I’d invent song lyrics and sing to myself softly, weaving stories out of the silence. Years passed, and as I got older, I grew more resentful. I started to despise my mother. It didn't matter anymore that she claimed she was protecting me; a cage is still a cage, even if the bars are meant to keep the monsters out.

​We survived a long time in those woods. In the end, it was only a cruel throw of fate that a group of vampires finally found us.

​It was during one of my rare moments outside of my bunker. We heard them first. It was subtle at first, like a stronger wind rustling the leaves, or the dry crack of branches under a heavy weight.

​And then... we heard their voices.

They sounded surprisingly normal. There was no guttural growl, no supernatural hiss. It was the casual, effortless tone of hunters who knew they had already won. To hear a nightmare speak with the voice of a man—to hear them laugh as they moved through the forest—was more terrifying than any scream.

​From the moment we heard their voices, everything went so fast. They burst through the door, sending it flying in a shower of splintered wood. My mother panicked, her instincts fraying as she tried to run, but there was nowhere left to go.

​Me? I froze.

​People might expect terror, but how is one supposed to react to the very thing they have been wishing for? Because I had been wishing—secretly, desperately—to be found and freed. Even if my freedom meant my death. Even if it meant the end of the world.

​I could hear my mother’s screams echoing from the back room as they took her. I didn’t even want to imagine what they were doing to her—what they were capable of.

​During my years in the bunker, she had fed me so many horror stories: tales of monsters who take young girls and women to break and abuse them. She wanted me terrified. She wanted me paralyzed by fear so that I would never fight her, never question the locks, and never try to escape my cage.

​She had used the monsters to keep me her prisoner long before they ever reached the door.

​Lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t notice that one of the attackers had stayed behind.

I was seven when the door first locked me in. I am twenty-five now. Eighteen years of my life had been swallowed by the silence of that bunker, and in all that time, I never once imagined that a nightmare could be so beautiful.

​He stood there, watching me with an intensity that should have made me tremble. But I didn't. I simply looked back at him, my eyes tracing the sharp, perfect lines of his face. He was a creature of moonlight and ivory, a sharp contrast to the jagged, blood-stained stories my mother had force-fed me for nearly two decades.

​He blinked, his expression shifting into something like disbelief. He had expected a victim—a sobbing, broken thing. Instead, he found a woman who looked at him as if he were the first wonder of the world.

"What are you?"

His voice was smooth, like velvet over broken glass. I was confused. Why would he ask that? Was it because I wasn't screaming? Was it because I was looking at him with wonder instead of horror?

​What am I? I had always assumed I was a human being. But as I looked into his moonlight eyes, a doubt began to fester. I remembered the stories of my biological parents selling me as an infant. I remembered the obsessive way my adoptive mother had trained my voice, as if she were sharpening a blade rather than teaching a child to sing.

​If vampires were real—if these beautiful, terrible things existed—then what else was hiding in the dark? Maybe his question wasn't about my lack of reaction. Maybe he saw something in me that I hadn't been allowed to see in myself.

​He tilted his head, his moonlight eyes searching my face. "What do you call yourself?"

​I hesitated. For eighteen years, my name had been nothing but a label used to command me. I had been a "weapon," a "shield," a "prisoner."

​"My mother calls me Nymia," I whispered.

​The name sounded thin and alien in the cold air of the bunker. I hadn't used it for anything other than answering her demands in so long that it felt like I was speaking for a stranger. He didn't look convinced. He took a step closer, and for the first time, I felt the hum of raw, kinetic energy radiating of him—the same energy I had been trained to shatter with my voice.

​My throat tightened. The urge to use my voice—to unleash that jagged, high-pitched frequency I had spent eighteen years perfecting—was a physical ache. It would be so easy. I could shatter him where he stood.

​But I didn't.

​There was something about him that pulled at me, a gravity I hadn't expected to find in a monster. Like a moth to a flame, I was hypnotized. I had spent so long being a weapon that the chance to be something else—to simply be near someone who wasn't my captor—made me forget the danger entirely. I stood there, trembling, waiting to see if he would burn me or save me.

​My mother’s screams grew quiet, and when they finally stopped, a heavy, suffocating silence filled the room. We stayed there for a few more minutes, locked in that strange, hypnotic stare.

​"What are you doing!?"

​The second vampire burst out of the back room. He was covered in blood, breathing hard as he adjusted his pants. The "beautiful myth" was gone; in its place was a monster who smelled of copper and cruelty. He looked at me, then at the one standing in front of me, his eyes wide with impatient hunger.