It is a peculiar sensation, waking to silence. Not the hush of a crypt, nor the reverent stillness that follows a grand reckoning, but a smaller, meaner sort of quiet.

There is no thunder in this silence. No chanting thralls. No weeping moons. Only the creak of old wood and the occasional shriek of some passing idiot bird who does not yet realise it’s already dead.

It used to be different.

Once, my very name made kingdoms tremble. My breath stirred storm clouds over the Carpathians. My footsteps left embers in their wake. Princes sought my counsel. Priests begged my damnation. I dined with liches and broke bread with devils, and when morning came, it was I who remained.

I remember those nights fondly.

And yet… even before the end, I sensed something changing. Not all at once… Pride rarely dies quickly. It clings like ivy to the crumbling stone of pride, whispering that it is not you who has changed, but the world that has grown small and unworthy of what you once were. I told myself it was strategy, my retreat from the grand stage; that I was conserving power, and choosing silence over spectacle. But in truth, I was shrinking, becoming cautious. The kind of caution born not from wisdom, but from fear. Fear that the next moon would be my last, and that I was no longer the storm, but the echo of one.

So, when the chance came to reclaim what I had lost, and to remind the world that the name Vlad Dracula still carried weight… I seized it.

The ritual I chose was meant to be my crowning triumph. Something brilliant, something foolish. A weaving of power and magic so delicate that even I would dare not repeat it twice. I remember its shape: a latticework of blood and night, poised on the cusp of the impossible. Then came the flash of light and laughter, of all things.

And now… this.

I am small. That much is plain. And graceful, undeniably so. I move with a precision I never possessed in deathless flesh. My balance is faultless. My reflexes are absurd. Even the faintest breeze bears a thousand scents, each more intoxicating than the last.

My shadow is narrow. My claws are discreet. My contempt for furniture… Devotional.

I am, in the cruellest twist of fate, a cat.

Not in metaphor, nor dream, nor infernal jest. A cat in truth. Tail, ears, whiskers, the whole wretched ensemble.

What irony this is. What celestial buffoonery deemed it fitting that I, Dracula, should suffer such diminishment? That I, who once strode the night as a god among men, should now pad softly across embroidered carpets to the sound of tinkling bells?

The heavens offer no answer. They seldom do.

Once, I was greatness made flesh. I was the whisper in the chapel, the dread that stilled the heart. Kings knelt. Empires trembled. Now, some simpering fool calls me Muffin.

Still, mistake me not for a common beast.

Yes, I recline upon a velvet cushion. Yes, I dine from porcelain, polished with more devotion than the sermons that slip the lips of priests.

And yes, I endure the adoration of a girl whose hands are softer than snowfall, and whose idle chatter flits between innocence and blasphemy.

But they do not know what they cradle.

They cannot.

For there is a law woven into this cursed flesh, a law I neither penned nor can unmake. Should any mortal glimpse the truth of what I am, or who I once was, they must die… or I will.
Not that survival comes without its price.

The rule is simple: if I kill them, I live. Yet each death robs me of something greater than life, a memory, a hunger, a shadow of the self that once ruled empires. Piece by piece, I am unmade. With every life I take, the name Dracula fades further, and the name Muffin tightens its grip.

And so, I keep my silence, wear obedience like a collar, and suffer their touch while I dream of the night when more than vermin lie before my unsheathed claws.

Not that any of the human inhabitants of this dimmable palace realise how useful I am in the matter of extermination.

This estate is pristine because I will it so. Because I have chosen to endure and shape this small existence into something worthy of me.

A cat, yes — but still myself beneath the fur.

While they sleep and dream their petty, ridiculous dramas, I hunt. Silent, sovereign and unseen.

I have leapt from beams high above the granary floor, descended like judgment upon nests buried deep within the walls. I have slit the throats of sewer-things so bloated and ancient they wore fungal crowns like kings.

No, it is not the glory I once knew. But it is, alas, a life I have learned to accept.

My power is but a splinter of what it was. I cannot bend the stars, nor unmake a soul with a word. Yet I have retained enough. Enough to slip from shadow to shadow. To sharpen fang and claw beyond the physical. To scent corruption where none should dwell.

My eyes glow only in darkness now. But they glow still.

Let the servants believe the mice have fled of their own accord. Let the Lord Steward think his new grain supplier merely keeps cleaner stock. I walk among them as a legend in fur.

The only problem is that, like all legends, I grow bored.

Luxury, as it turns out, dulls even the sharpest claws. I enjoy the comforts, yes. The warmth of the hearth, the embroidered cushions placed just so, as if the servants have at last understood the necessity of choice. I have even grown fond of those snow-soft hands.

But ease is a poison of its own. Time no longer bends to my will; it drips instead, slow and viscous, each drop mocking me with its smallness.

At first, the killing of pests stirred something like pleasure — the stalk, the strike, the brief return of purpose in the violence of it.

But what is that, compared to what I once was?

Now I dispatch rats the way a master swordsman trims his garden: with elegance, precision, and not the faintest tremor of thrill. There is grace in it, yes, but no challenge. No worthy foe. Only the endless echo of repetition.

And so, as all predators must when denied the taste of fear, I have begun to crave something more.

******

It was on the third night of the crescent moon, just after the bells struck the eleventh hour and the wine-drenched nobles were beginning to slur their way toward slumber, that I finally got my wish.

My patrols are not scheduled, but they are ritual. I begin at the west wing — always the west, always where the sun bleeds last.

In my former life, I could never stand in sunlight. Its touch was ruin, its light a blade that mocked immortality. Yet now, in this absurd shape, I may walk beneath it unharmed. I feel its warmth seep through fur and skin alike, and though I loathe to admit it, that warmth soothes something long dead within me. It is the one grace this curse affords, and the only mercy I will not spit upon.

From there, I move through the armoury, then the kitchens, and out into the gardens, where the night flowers bloom.

It was in the northern corridor, the one behind the servant’s chapel, that the air tasted wrong.

That’s the thing most mortals never learn about magic. It has a taste. Most confuse it with copper or cold. Amateurs. Magic is movement. Magic is disruption. And tonight, something had nudged the weave, as delicately as a spider adjusting a strand of silk.

I froze. Whiskers forward. Tail still. One paw suspended above the marble tiles.

There it was again. Not a sound, no. This thief was trained. There was no footfall, no shadow. But the air shifted, ever so slightly, as if exhaling in surprise.

I crouched low, ears rotating, every sense stretched to the brink. And then I saw it.

A shimmer sliding along the edge of the wall like oil on glass. Cloaked in illusion, masked with scentless powder and spells, the figure moved with absurd confidence. Slipping past guards, past locks, past wards woven by lesser mages. But not me. Never me.

They crept toward the archive wing, where the oldest scrolls and records lay, documents most of the palace had long forgotten.

I dropped silently from the lintel, my body a whisper in the dark, and followed.

They never heard me.

Fools think the sound of battle is always thunder and clashing steel.

They never suspect that death might come on four velvet paws.

I moved in silence, my body low and fluid, shadows cleaving around me like old friends. The thief ahead was precise, measured, exuding that sort of confidence found only in those who have never been caught.

But they had never been hunted by me.

They slipped between columns and across open hallways. I watched as they paused, just for a moment, at the mouth of a grand corridor, no more than a few feet from a pair of palace guards standing in polished breastplates, chatting in low, drowsy tones.

The thief didn’t freeze. Didn’t falter. He simply waited until one guard turned to stifle a yawn, then moved.

Right between them.

I could have howled at this point. I could have leapt into the air and shrieked like a banshee with a thorn in her backside. The guards would have jumped, weapons drawn. Perhaps they would even have managed to swing in the intruder's general direction.

But I didn’t.

No.

For this one was mine, Curse be damned.

Their blindness was not my concern. Their incompetence was practically a service.

I kept to the high ground, leaping from the back of a bronze statue to the heavy drapes lining the corridor wall, claws sinking delicately into embroidered velvet.

They passed through the Moon Gallery, ignoring the tapestries and silver-inlaid relics that would tempt any typical burglar. No, this one had intent. They weren’t here to steal finery; they were after something rarer.

The old archive door stood ahead. It hadn’t been opened in years. Dust coated the hinges. A dead potted fern sat beside it like a forgotten offering.

The thief hesitated, knelt, fingers brushing over the floor. A detection glyph, faint but still humming with dormant energy, flared beneath his touch, then snuffed out.

I narrowed my eyes.

So… They weren’t just good, they were trained. Possibly by the kind of people I used to hunt across the ruins of empires.

They pressed two fingers to the door’s edge. Whispered something. The air pulsed, once, and the lock clicked.

They slipped inside.

I followed, barely a breath behind.

The archive chamber was dry as parchment and twice as brittle. Moonlight filtered through slats in the far shutters, striping the room in silver. Scroll racks and dust-cloaked shelves loomed like sentinels.

The thief moved with purpose. They didn’t rummage or pry. They selected. A practised hand passed over a row of ancient tomes, halted on a binding cracked with age, and gently removed it from its place.

That was when I let them feel me.

Not a sound. Not a purr. Just presence.

The kind that raises hairs on the back of your neck before your mind can name why.

They paused. Stiffened. Their head turned slowly, eyes scanning the shadows, then halting.

On me.

I sat atop the archive’s central reading desk, back straight, tail coiled neatly around my paws, just outside the reach of the moonlight. A single ray caught the edge of my eye.

They stared.

Then a small, scoffing breath escaped him. “A cat,” he muttered, for it was a man. “Shoo,” he hissed, in a whisper meant to be kind. “Go on. Off with you.”

I blinked slowly but did not move.

His hand drifted to the blade at his belt, a thin thing, designed for quiet work, not combat. “You’re well-trained,” he murmured, as if to himself. “A little too well for palace fluff.”

He took a step toward me.

I met his gaze.

It’s easy to forget, when one looks into the eyes of an animal, that some eyes are older than they appear. His mask covered much of his face, but the sliver of flesh between brow and cheek twitched in an instinctive reaction to the creeping realisation that something wasn’t right.

He stopped.

“…What are you?” he breathed.

I smiled.

Or at least, the closest thing a cat’s face can manage. A slow curling of whiskers. A widening of pupils. A stillness that promised something final.

His blade flashed.

Fast. Faster than most. A blur of steel hissing through the air, sharp and silent as a drawn breath.

But too slow, for I was gone.

Not pounced. Not dodged.

Just gone.

One moment, I sat on the desk, regal and still.

Next, I was elsewhere.

The thief staggered, momentum carrying him forward. He blinked, hissed a curse, and spun to find claws kissing the back of his hand. The blade clattered to the floor, spinning end over end before thudding against the wall.

He gasped, stumbled, and spun again.

I stood behind him now. On a shelf. Watching.

“You’re fast,” he said under his breath, clearly trying to convince himself he was still in control.

He threw something. A flask, glass and rune etched, filled with swirling white mist. It struck the shelf and burst in a cloud of choking fog.

Again, I was gone.

Through the haze, I struck. Not to kill—at least not yet—but to educate.

A slash across his calf, just deep enough to bleed.

A flick behind his knee, just enough to buckle it.

He cried out and whirled with a second blade.

It sliced the air, and… Unforgivably, caught.

The edge skimmed the right side of my face, and a single whisker fluttered down to the archive floor.

I landed in a crouch atop a toppled chair and stared down at the fallen filament with the quiet horror of a master swordsmith discovering a crack in his own blade.

That should not have happened.

I ran my tongue once along my shoulder, more from ritual than necessity, and narrowed my eyes at the thief, who now looked both triumphant and afraid.

I let out a slow, measured breath.

“Well,” I said, in a voice low and unamused, “that’s going to throw off my balance for a week.”

The words, my first real words in over two years, tasted bitter.

Not because he was skilled, but because I had grown soft.

Too many days lounging in sunbeams. Too many nights spent stalking idiots with twitching tails and a vocabulary of squeak.

Still, my words were all it really took.

The book dropped from the thief’s fingers as, without another word, he turned to flee.

I let him get three steps before I finished the hunt.

One leap. One twist. One perfect, final silence.

I stepped down from his back, shook one blood-misted paw, and surveyed the aftermath.

Scrolls lay scattered like fallen leaves. Dust floated in lazy, glowing clouds, disturbed from its centuries of peace. His blood pooled in quiet defiance, spreading across the cracked stone like ink spilt from a well. It glistened in the low light, sharp and vivid against the pallid floor.

I sat beside the corpse and regarded it for a long moment.

It is a peculiar thing, killing in silence. Not the righteous roar of war, nor the thundering exultation of a battlefield claimed, but a quieter, crueller sort — a hush that arrives only after something significant has stopped moving.

I cleaned my paw with deliberate grace. Each stroke, a benediction. Each flick of the tongue, a hymn to precision. I felt a small part of my old self slip away as payment for my indulgence.

A fair price.

The curse takes its toll, yes, but in return, I am granted the exquisite pleasure of the hunt. To feel the heartbeat falter beneath my claws… it is worth the erosion.

The guards will, of course, find the body. But that’s of no matter. Let them whisper of curses and killers and of breaches in their ranks. Let them wonder how the thief entered, and who, exactly, keeps this palace safe.

The Duchess will find no blood on my mitts—only a warm, purring weight curled upon her lap come morning.

They do not know what they honour.

The legend has withered; the man has gone to dust.

Still, I am still enough.

From Count to Collar