Writing Prompt Story: Iron-intolerant Vampire
writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/175961780920:
PROMPT: You are a creature with a faery mom and a vampire dad. From your mom’s side you’re allergic to iron. From your dad’s side you need blood.
A few days after your birth, your condition is diagnosed by an old gnome that makes house calls, who tells your parents that their daughter may not survive the week. Your vampire dad stays up all day in a sunless room researching. By evening he has a list of animals with blood that carries oxygen utilizing hemocyanin, similar to hemoglobin, but copper based. These creatures are all sea creatures, so your family moves to the shore.
The blood of various mollusks, crustaceans, and cephalopods is enough to keep you alive, but not healthy. Your father, obsessed with finding a way to de-ironize human blood, becomes a vampiric mad inventor, sort of a Dr. Frankenstein meets the Dad from Honey I Shrunk the Kids. He’s constantly coming to you with his latest experimental invention - homemade alchemical tablets that are supposed to dissolve in blood and turn iron molecules into gold (but half the time they change it to silver, which is equally problematic) fang tip filters that fit over your teeth and screen the blood (which actually works, they’re just so delicate they constantly break, often in the biting process, rendering them useless) heavily altered summoning rituals (if I can summon the whole demon, why can’t I summon just its blood?) various magic potion additives for mixing into blood (okay but you have to follow the recipe EXACTLY or you’ll leak all your minerals out of your eyes, and your bones will melt. You know what? never mind, give me that back) centrifugal devices featuring magnets (that one had a lot of promise, but none of the models ever quite did the whole job, and they weigh a ton)….
While your father is determined to discover a process that will allow you to feed on humans, your mother focuses on fairy magic hacks - she teaches you how to set circle traps, and syphon health from people, but, like all fairy magic, there is a trade off. The more health you syphon, the worse your health the next day when it wears off; it’s like a hangover. And, like with a lot of the darker magics, it becomes a little less effective each time you do it, requiring more and more health be syphoned to achieve the same gain. So she teaches you more things, how to use glamor to seem convincingly healthy, how to float instead of walk, how to ensnare the minds of mortals to use them as temporary servants if you need things. How to temporarily access various kinds of life force from forests, from the wind, from the creatures of the local biome, etc,. Standing next to you on the beach at night, she shows you how to pull power directly from the magic of the full moon, and use it to experience a brief respite from your sickliness… which grows slowly worse.
It’s all so tiring. You spend more and more time on the beach, sitting in tide-pools, staring out to sea, motionless. Time flows by without touching your immortal parents, and hardly anything changes. Your mother wanders off to follow her self interest, as fairies are wont to do, but she visits often. Your father is obsessed as only a vampire can be, and barely remembers to get enough to drink; many nights you have to ask him “Dad, when is the last time you exsanguinated anyone?”
Years pass.
One night as you are sitting on a rock amid the rising tide, idly draining crabs of their blood while lost in thought, you finally notice that every time you reach down into surf, another crab is put into your reaching hand. Looking down into the water, you see the laughing face of a playful young woman, and that’s how you meet Neera.
Neera, you learn, is half werewolf. Every full moon she must turn into a wolf, and so she can’t live in Finfolkheem, the crystal-halled deep sea home of her mother’s people, which is a three week journey from the nearest beach. And she can’t live with her father on land, of course. She doesn’t even know where he is, or if he’s alive.
On her mother’s side, she’s finfolk, and part ceasg, part selkie, which somehow has something to do with her mother’s family and their ancient tradition of vacationing along the shores of Shetland. “I’m a total mutt,” she says, laughing, and you can’t help but smile. Her eyes are like black opal. She’s beautiful.
Neera spends a lot of time alone. “Feral,” she grins, but, while loneliness has made you quite and shy, it seems to have had the opposite effect on Neera.
She’s an amazing shape shifter. She can have a lower half that is plush-furred and flippered like a seal, or jewel-scaled and finned like a fish, and she can magically remove her fur or scales like a thick skirt, to reveal human legs. And while she is helpless to be anything but a wolf for three days out of the month, she can choose to be a wolf anytime she wants. “And I can be like, part wolf part human, like this” she shows you. “AND I can almost change into a whole seal, like great-gran, she’s a selkie, even though her daughter and grand daughter, that’s my mother, can’t do it” she tells you excitedly, “probably because of my were-blood; great-gran thinks selkies and werewolves may have been related way back when, that would kind of explain why I can take my scale-tail off the same way selkies change, so I think I’ll be able to go full seal. I haven’t quite got the trick of it yet, but soon I think. Mother hates me trying; when I first started I would turn into a wolf instead, and I almost drowned a couple times.”
“My mother’s people don’t really like me” she confides one day, “most folk are frightened of me, because of my father; I even scare my siren cousins a little” she says, looking at you out of the corner of her eye in a rare moment of vulnerability.
“Don’t worry, my dad’s a vampire,” you say, baring your fangs at her, “no werewolf is going to make me nervous” But she does make you nervous. But not, like, scared nervous. You still can’t believe she wants to keep hanging out with you.
The two of you are soon spending almost all your time together, down on the beach. When your mother visits, she is glad her daughter has found “some fey creature” to be friends with, and you father is happy that you’re happy.
“That’s great! My little fruitbat has a friend.” He looks up sharply “does she have red blood, or does she bleed blue?”
“NO, Dad, I’m not going to eat Neera” you tell him, rolling your eyes.
“Yeah, okay,” he agrees “seal and wolf, that’s a lot of mammal anyway, probably hemoglobin all the way…” he trails off as he resumes tinkering with a ferrous gel he’s trying to entice a half-tame poltergeist into possessing.
Neera tells you about her ceasg family members “They’re basically Scottish mermaids closely related to the finfolk, they can live in lakes, rivers, seas and oceans; My grandmother was a full blooded freshwater ceasg, my mother is half ceasg, half finfolk and selkie. Have I told you about the time I met some oceanic ceasgs? The saltwater ceasgs can grow monstrous big, like if a whale was a mermaid!” Her stories are captivating, like everything about Neera.
You grow more and more sickly, but you hardly care, spending your time on the beach watching Neera frolic in the waves and listening to the stories of her adventures. She discovers that your vampire heritage means that breathing is optional for you, and she guides you carefully to some nearby underwater caves. It’s the most beautiful adventurous thing you’ve ever experienced, until later that night, when you return to the beach and lay on your back in the surf, looking at the stars with Neera, and she reaches over and takes your hand in hers.
...
“What would happen if you drank my blood for real?” She asks one evening as the two of you watch the waves.
“Well, I’d have a terrible reaction to the iron in your blood, and I’d probably die.”
“I thought faeries and vampires were immortal though.”
“SOME faeries are immortal, others just live for thousands of years.”
“Yeah, but, wouldn’t your vampire blood tip the scales there, make you true immortal?”
“Probably,” you shrug “Actually yeah, Dad is pretty sure it would.“
“That’s cool,” she ruffles then smoothes the fur just below her hip; she’s been working on her selkie form. “Mermaids and werewolves and everything I am don’t really… I’ll probably only live about 200 years. I wish I had that vampire thing going on”
Your compromised immortality is an uncomfortable subject for you, but the thought of Neera dying fills you with horror “It wouldn’t save me from death by iron though; faeries and vampires can be killed, they just don’t often die of old age. I might though. I keep getting worse”
“Oh,” she leans against you for a moment, and kisses your shoulder. “But what if you weren’t allergic to iron?” She’s asking a moment later - nothing keeps Neera down for long - “What would happen if you drank my blood then?”
“Well,” you say, playfully, “If I didn’t drain you empty, you’d be my thrall; You’d be under my spell, and you’d do anything I told you. For a while. It would wear off eventually.”
Neera wiggles deeper into the sand “Your servant? Could be fun. But I thought I’d become a vampire too.”
“No, for that after I drank almost all of your blood, you’d have to drink mine. If you could stomach it.”
“Oh, come on,” she says, smiling with a mouthfull of teeth like a piranha “you know I’d eat you right up” making you blush and change the subject.
By the time you realize how deeply in love you are, it is obvious that you are dying. Vampires can’t live long on the blood of crustaceans; you’ve been dying this whole time, and the only reason you are still alive is because your fairy blood has made dying take so long. At least your own research in your fathers lab has turned up some information worth sharing with Neera.
“Hey, I figured out what would probably happen if we did the blood exchange ritual” you tell her one morning, squinting in the glare.
Neera looks up from her sunbathing, and flips seawater at you with her tail “Yeah?”
“Yep. It doesn’t happen with finfolk or werewolves often, and, of course, I couldn’t find any literature on someone with your exact pedigree. But from all I could tell, you’d get the immortality at the price of blood dependence - the two are strongly linked. Your supernatural origins would probably cancel out most of the rest of it, so you wouldn’t even have to give up all this,” you say, waving your hand vaguely at the bright unpleasant sunlight. The sun didn’t do to you what it would to your father, but you don’t enjoy it the way Neera does. “You’d have to drink someone’s blood pretty often though, it’s a high price.”
Neera laughs, a loud and shockingly happy sound that bounces around the cove “I’m finfolk and werewolf” she reminds you, still laughing “I lure men into the sea and drown them for fun, I snatch men off the side of the road and eat them for dinner at least once a month - I don’t think I’d be too broken up about a little change in diet like that.”
For some reason it makes you love her all the more.
One night the two of you are walking along the beach together, hand in hand, and you see a glint of a metal ring half buried in the sand. You both reach for it, then jump back exclaiming “Silver, YUCK!” in unison. You collapse on the sand together, laughing. “Oh what a shame,” Neera pouts, “I was looking forward to some new jewelry” You feel your breath catch, your sickly heart leaps and stutters. You reach into your pocket, for the ring you’ve been carrying around in cowardice for so long. You’ve only been waiting for the right moment, you’ve told yourself… but if this isn’t the right moment no moment ever will be.
“Well,” you try to drawl casually, but your voice breaks “I’ve got this one made of gold. Has a diamond on it.” Neera looks at you with wide, wide eyes as you turn awkwardly in the sand and raise up on one knee.
“Neera, you know I’m dying, and I have no right to ask you..” You can’t talk for a moment, and you see tears brimming in Neera’s eyes. That’s no good, if she starts crying you definitely will. You clear your throat “Neera, I… without you, my life wouldn’t…” all your carefully planned speeches are forgotten and useless “Neera, I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?”
She leaps onto you and kisses you deeper than you’ve ever been kissed. Somehow her tongue nicks a fang, hers, yours, impossible to tell - a single drop of her blood slides down your throat; you feel the small pang from the few molecules of iron in it, but you don’t care, you would suffer much worse for her to keep kissing you like this. The kiss comes to an end, but before you can remind her that she hasn’t actually answered yet, she says softly, lips still brushing yours
“if”
she kisses you again and then gets up, stepping back as you lay there on the beach, a strange look in her black eyes. “I love you so much,” she whispers “and yes,” her voice gets stronger “yes I’ll marry you IF” she takes another step back, swinging her scaled skirt/tail over one shoulder, “if you CATCH ME!” and with that she starts sprinting toward the water. Up to mid thigh in the ocean, she stops to put the skirt back on, where it transforms into her fish tail once more. “It won’t be easy!” she yells back at you as you climb to your feet “Show me how much you want to marry me!” and she disappears into the sea.
Are you heart broken? The most excited you’ve ever been? Confused, that’s for sure. “Yes if??” What the hell is that?! And you’re still just standing on the beach!
Concentrating, you summon your faery magic, casting a functional glamor that lets you move easily despite your sickly condition. Entering the water, you stop breathing - your vampire nature serves you well in this. You cast a spell similar to the one that lets you levitate, and you begin sliding through the water at a rapid pace. The blood, that single drop of her blood you swallowed, it gives you a faint sense of what direction she went. You follow quickly.
After a few hours your glamour wears off. You are out deep in the ocean, and no closer to catching Neera. You are… angry. What the fuck. Who does that, just runs off and tells you to chase them? Is it a werewolf thing? Because the ocean makes that extra fucked up. You reach deep inside and connect to the old magic. Broadcasting it, you draw life-force from the local sea life. Of course you’ll pay for it later, and weak as you have become that will be especially hard on you, but you don’t care. Is she playing with your heart? No, your love is mutual, you trust her, something else is going on. You have to catch her. Burning up your borrowed energy, you surge through the water.
After 24 hours, you are desperate. You’ve never used the fairy magic this heavily before. You’re in deep crushing blackness, but you utilize your vampire powers to counter it, seeing in the darkest dark, transmuting your flesh to mist to avoid being compressed like an empty can. Where IS she?
After three days, you are more frightened than you’ve ever been. You’re not sure you’ll survive this. Your tenuous blood link to her indicates she still lives, but at this point you are scared for her too. You thought the blood link would wear off, but it seems to you that the intensity of your hunting is keeping it engaged. Engaged. Is that what you are now? Is this a selkie engagement ritual?
You won’t get much further without at least a little blood of some sort. You latch onto a 6 foot humboldt squid like some kind of freakish remora. It fights you at first, tearing at you with all its arms but you drain it with such rapid savagery that it dies before it can do you much harm…
A full week now, you’ve been zipping through the ocean. Periodically you cry. Sometimes you laugh. You’ve leaned on the old fey sorcery so hard that death seems the certain trade off at this point, and you are determined to look into Neera’s eyes one last time before it claims you. Fuck it. You were dying anyway. This has been the biggest adventure of your life, of most people’s lives. You’ve seen secrets no human has ever known, met demonic giants of the deep, passed by mysterious crystal cities on the lowest ocean floors, witnessed creatures thought extinct by even the long-lived and nature-sensitive fey. Only your love for Neera and your desire to see her one last time keeps you going, pulling a little life from every living creature within ten square miles of you with the darkest magics you know.
The trail, blood link growing ever fainter, seems to indicate that Neera is heading for shallower waters. Suddenly it occurs to you: the full moon - she has to return to land, the ocean is no place for a wolf.
It’s the third and final night of the full moon’s effects on her… how is she still in the water?
Summoning your vampiric flavored fairy powers, you launch upward through the ocean and burst skyward, letting your emotion fuel a pull on the forces around you strong enough to put you up among the birds. You assess the blood link as you waver there, your outer body numb as it has been for days, the very blood in your veins vibrating painfully, your soul drained as a broken bottle.
There, the beach of a small island, hardly more than a sandbar. You don’t think it’s on any map, but it has to be the place, the moon is out, Neera will be swimming as a wolf, as she has been for three days and nights, she has to be exhausted, she must be headed for that tiny strip of land. The magic falters, but you are so close, you grit your teeth and pull, and
every seagull near falls dead from the sky as you use their stolen life to hurtle toward the beach.
It isn’t going to be enough though.
You aren’t going to make it.
So close, but you start to fall. It’s too bad, because you can see a dark canine shape dragging itself painfully from the ocean.
NEERA
As you tumble through the air, you remember your mother, standing next to you on the beach at night, arms raised…
…pulling power from the full moon.
Crying, desperate, you try. The moon is sinking below the horizon as you make the tenuous connection. It’s just enough. You crash down onto the sand mere inches from a very wet and weary wolf, one hand closing around her hind leg.
The magic is gone. Time to pay the price in full. To call it a hangover would be to laugh in the face of certain death, and you haven’t the strength. Your head bumps and shifts, and you open your eyes to see Neera, beautiful Neera, cradling your head in her scaled lap. You feel peaceful. You’ll die. It’s okay.
“N…eera..” you manage, “dy… dying.”
With great effort she pulls your torso upwards to embrace you. “No,” She whispers, clearly near the end of her own strength “you’re not going to. Remember I told you my gran was a ceasg?”
Oh. It’s story time. That’s nice. Good way to go. Her voice is beautiful, even when strained from your shared ordeal.
“Here’s something about ceasgs… sometimes they marry. Even mortals, if they are caught. And when you catch them… They can grant you wishes.”
You thought you were paying attention before, but now every part of your brain that isn’t dead already is concentrating on her words
“My gran, was full ceasg, when she was caught, she could grant three wishes,” Neera says, huskily, tears leaking from her inhumanly black eyes, “My mother was half ceasg,” she continues “and she was able to grant two wishes, but the chase had to be extra difficult, that quid pro quo all magic has… and it doesn’t work if you let yourself be caught” Neera starts to cry “Oh my love, I had to be sure, I had to be so certain, I had to try my very hardest. I pushed myself until I didn't know if I would make it” she sobs “I was so scared… but I knew you would catch me. I knew. And after a chase like that… I should be able to manage one single wish.”
She leans down, resting her forehead on yours. “Don’t fuck it up,” she whispers, voice breaking “don’t wish to live… wish away your iron allergy”
“…but…” It doesn’t make sense. The iron allergy doesn’t matter at this point “… die any… anyway.”
“Sshhh. No you won’t. Because then, once you’ve made your wish, my sweet, my dearest… you’re going to drain me of blood”
What? No. “… you… you die”
Neera laughs through her tears “Me? Oh no my love, not me..” she brushes one thumb across your cheek and bares her fangs in a lewd and loving grin “Don’t you know? I’ve always wondered how the rest of you tastes…”
Yes. YES. You close your eyes, and make your wish.
Her blood is the sweetest most pure thing you’ve ever drunk. Life, stronger than any life you’ve lived before, floods your whole being.
After, her fangs buried in the artery on the inside of your thigh, you feel an ecstasy your vampiric heart never knew it needed.
Later, the two of you explore your new vampire selves together; never having drunk real blood, the experience is as new for you as it is to Neera. As the sun rises you dig a hole in the sand and cover yourselves in it, wrapped around each other to sleep. It just feels right.
Laying in the cool dark underground, Neera snuggles against you. “SO," she asks mischievously, “what do you think of a deep-ocean marriage ceremony?”
You laugh, “Wherever you want, my love; you already know… I’ll follow you anywhere”