I'll Keep Missing You, Lady Lich
A Vampyre Romance
Beloved Netherwalkers,
Given the length of this tale, and out of deep respect for your tired eyes, I’ve divided it into distinct chapters. Take your time. Pause whenever you must, especially now, as the nights are short and sleep is sacred.
Though this tale unfolds within the same universe as my previous vampyre narratives, it stands entirely on its own. That said, I’ve included links to earlier stories should curiosity strike, or if you simply wish to revisit where the shadows first gathered.
If you’d like to receive the playlist that guided my hand in composing this mythical, sensual story, be sure to subscribe. I’ll share it in the coming days within our Nether Street Blues group chat. And please, don’t skip the acknowledgments at the end. There are treasures there, and a few names worth remembering.
Awaken to a sunset midday
It was the year of the solar flare, the summer of that terrible heatwave, when Bucharest lay dormant by day. My collaboration with KS Merlyn ended after their system failed catastrophically, and I would’ve surely gone broke if not for Doru Moroiu, who requested my services the old way, by paper mail.
He needed to transfer some real estate and liquidate assets to finance a new venture in the States. Since he was living in California, I assumed it had something to do with film, though I never had the chance to ask. He sent me to liaise with his most trusted notary public, admonishing me sternly in the letter to keep whatever relations we might have strictly professional.
Such warnings came as a surprise. Bored and huddled in the apartment that now served as my office, I spent an entire afternoon amusing myself by imagining the kinds of danger this individual might pose to me.
As night settled fully, gossiping and merry people gathered before the shops and cafés. In the cool wraps of darkness, no hour was too late for laughter and shouting — voices enjoying this brief quarter, spared from the flaming concrete. The night was not only a time for frivolous revelry, but also for business. At sunset, I set out on my trek by subway (cars had become too untrustworthy, their systems prone to glitches) toward the notary office known as Sigillum Ultimum.
“Fancy name,” said Nicolas, the owner of the café where I’d just served the last iced coffee of the day. In the nearly two decades I’d spent in Bucharest, we’d grown quite close—an unintended occurrence, at least on my part, likely due to his friendly demeanor and general bonhomie. He was a large man, covered in traditional tattoos, a tapestry of animals and plants enshrouded his skin, which he revealed generously that cruel summer, wearing only shorts and an apron, always barefoot.
“You know that saying about gift horses and their mouths, Nico?” I asked. He nodded.
By circumstance or by desire?
When I reached the address I’d scribbled into my pocket pad, I was certain I’d made a mistake. Before a ruin, not a building, I stood and would’ve left had my instincts not been arrested by the amber glow leaking from the lowest windows, deep in the basement.
I opened a yellow steel door and stepped into a courtyard where two enormous black hounds were playing. They stopped at once when they sensed me, their gaze locking onto mine. Somewhere between German Shepherd and Doberman, they might have terrified: if not for the serene joy in their faces, and the eerie silence with which they greeted me. Not a bark, not a growl.
A faded sign marked the entrance to the basement. I could still make out the word Ultim. I descended the stone steps, worn with age but meticulously kept. At the bottom, behind a red door thickly padded with leather, was the notary’s office. It looked abandoned. Until I saw the candlelight. Dozens of flames flickering, steady and soundless.
But how can I describe Lira? Can anyone write truthfully about a hurricane in its moment of perfect form?
She was petite, more pixie than woman, but every line of her radiated a deliberate, devastating femininity. High-breasted and buxom, yes, but honed too: her body taut and lithe, her frame all curve and tension, like something sculpted in reverie. Her hips flared just enough to haunt the edge of your vision; her movements, though slow, were coiled with the suggestion of speed. She didn’t walk, she glided, as if gravity itself deferred to her. Her dark hair, dense and thick as the cosmos, flowed around her like both a snare and a mane.
Her dress was dark, so old-fashioned it seemed to belong to the bleeding edge of fashion: thin as smoke, clinging to her like dusk clings to the last shape before night swallows it. It shimmered faintly with movement, more a suggestion than a garment, as if spun from candlelight and silence. Her slender, toned legs, pale as alabaster, were draped in black fishnet stockings. The stiletto heels, timeless as she, made her appear taller, yet the unreal grace of her movement made any comparison to walking on stilts feel crude and absurd.
She stood behind the desk, surrounded by candles, a surreal mixture of pencil pusher and pagan priestess. Without looking up, she said: “You’ve got such a winsome smile. You should use it more often.” Her voice tasted of ash and mint. Her giggle brushed the inside of me, delicate and invasive.
“I didn’t mean to smile, ma’am,” I said, stepping closer and extending my hand, only to let it fall when she rose. I think I froze, not from fear or sentiment, but from something older and more immense. A force, savage and magnificent, seemed to rise around me like an invisible wall.
And when she looked at me, I was lost in her eyes: red as rubies, more arresting than any sunset.
I shall not bore you with the details of our legal business. As fascinated as she seemed by them at the time, they feel too mundane now to mix with the icon of her memory, that burning image I carry still, and shall carry for as long as memory remains a faculty of this transient self. Looking back, I can’t help but rue it. We had met for business and nothing more. Yet somehow, I ended up stealing from her the little time she had left.
What shadows give each other
Whenever I was near her, I felt like a god. Her voice, that sweet and exquisite laughter, sent my heart hammering against my ribs. The moment my eyes traced her nymph-like form, language deserted me. My tongue failed. A sudden fire crept through my blood. Noise filled my ears, and a shudder mingled with sweat in the marrow of my bones. I turned pale, pale like sunburnt grass, yet a fury lit up within me, restless and raw as my hunger for Lira.
I tried to run from her, to exile her presence from my soul, recalling the warnings of Doru Moroiu. And yet, I felt a deep contentment whenever her name drifted to the forefront of my thoughts. A strange contentment, laced with a profound sadness so heavy it left me sleepless through the sweet night.
I began taking long walks through Bucharest’s great parks, wild and scorched as they were in that savage summer. Despite its barren trees, my favorite remained Cișmigiu, the Cișmigiu of that time, forsaken and left to its solitude.
Beneath its naked towering trees at dusk, the Unknown walked within me, stirring my melancholy. I moved with solemn grace, leaning on the balustrade of a bridge above the bone-dry basin of the lake, drifting along the worn paths of memory, smoking, pausing now and then, lost in thought. But what thoughts could they have been, to seize me so completely, to bring me to tears?
That I could not say. Only that it was on that night, in the final days of June, that I saw Lira. She was fidgeting with a rope like some graceful gymnast, dressed in a lacy garment that might have looked like an oversized T-shirt on anyone else, but on her, it was more akin to a robe. When she pretended to notice me, she came close, gentle like a breeze.
“In the presence of Beauty,” she explained, “solitude becomes unbearable. And tonight, my good sir, tonight is too beautiful. A night of fable and of dream.”
“Nights like this are said to return, or so the story goes.” She continued, touching my arm. I felt her short claws, painted in a pink hue that caught the lamplight above the bridge, caress me through my dark blue linen shirt. She took off her sunglasses and stared into my eyes, smiling with restraint, trying to hide her fangs.
“Long ago, in their hidden silence, such evenings seduced the old masters into giving form to sacred legends. But only rarely did even the most gifted brushes manage to capture their clarity, their glass-blue transparency,” she said, her voice thick with that sweet, smoky accent of the Balkans.
Time itself, it seems, fascinated by that dreamlike being that was Lira, forgot to move. My mouth was dry. In the fluid air, not a breeze. In my ears—or better said, behind them—I heard the fiery throngs of muted angels. But in the leaves, there was not a murmur. I wanted to run, or to leap into the sky, but when I looked down at the surface of the water, there was not even a shiver.
“Why run, my good sir? Because you’ve been told to?”
I nodded and swallowed nothingness itself. I pulled my hand away, and I felt her wince with sadness. Then I reached back and took her cold hand. And I held her.
I am the shadow of your body
From that moment on, we faded together into the dateless night. In the coolish mornings, beneath shutters that kept out all light except for a single thin beam where dust danced, neither the stiffness in my body nor the strangeness of my surroundings disturbed me. With Lira’s cold form in my arms, the weight of the heat was gone.
Unburdened by her love, I was like a loose kite in a gentle wind, tethered only by my will.
At first, it was strange not to hear her heartbeat or feel her chest rise with breath as she lay motionless in my arms. But in time, I grew to love holding her more than I had ever loved anything. She became my blanket of freshly fallen snow.
As she slept, or so I thought, I studied the lines of her face. Not lines of age, but of sorrow, as soft and enduring as the viewing gauze of a coffin.
When we weren’t in each other’s arms, whether in her strange office or in my penthouse apartment overlooking Cișmigiu, we prowled the streets of Bucharest. Lira wore sunglasses that reminded me of Holly Golightly. Nico’s was our favorite haunt in the city, but her true preference was a peculiar lodge we reached by fiacre, pulled by her two hellhounds, or, as she called them, my demon pups.
The carriage lurched as we turned onto Strada Speranței. I remember the uneven stones, how they rattled the wheels and sent tremors up my spine. Lira barely moved, her head tilted, as if listening to something beneath the city's murmur. She lit a cigarette, and from that smoke, a pathway formed, a road of mist and light that spiraled upward into the star-strewn sky.
We arrived at an ancient inn nestled in the branches of a great tree. Within, beings I still cannot name feasted and made merry, while unseen musicians played alien tune: melodies that stirred feelings beyond the reach of joy, sorrow, or melancholy.
Over exquisite, unknowable meals, we spoke of everything and nothing. I cannot remember our words. Only the glow of her red eyes remains, gleaming like blood comets across the void.
I tried to ask her about her past, but she was no Doru Moroiu when it came to confessions. Indirectly, I gathered she must have once been some kind of noble— mostly from her last name, Logofătu, which she told me was not a surname at all, but a title once held by her father. She claimed to have forgotten her real name. Lira, she said, was just something she invented the day she ordered her last set of business cards.
“It suits you anyway, baby,” I told her.
“It does, doesn’t it? And don’t ‘baby’ me, it’s impertinent, considering the difference in our ages,” she said with a giggle, her claws digging into my thigh as we shared a blood pudding at the Lodge.
“My apologies. Just being affectionate. Though I’ve been meaning to ask you… what do you see in me? Normal women don’t usually go for younger guys.”
“My sweet love, it’s something as simple, and as deep, as that smile of yours. It’s the look in your eyes. That searching look, like you’re chasing something you’ll never find.”
She paused, then added, more softly, “I’ve been searching for it too.”
The impure whiteness of noon
“It’s good to see you smiling so often, but I’ll warn you—like your client did. That little lady is danger incarnate,” said Nico one evening as I checked the time on my new watch, a vintage gold-plated Omega, counting the minutes until my lady would wake. “She probably whispers a lot of sweet nothings in your ear, elegant as sapphic lyrics. But I’d be careful. Never put them next to your heart, it’s a saying we have in Romanian. You’ve heard it before?”
He looked up through the glass he’d just finished polishing, like a pirate spying for land.
“Never,” I said. “But I can guess what it means.”
“Heartache is the foremost universal language.” With that, Nico clapped his hands loud as a bullwhip, then pulled a notepad from his apron and jotted something down.
“Brother, that’s a Nico original,” he said, more than a hint of pride in his voice. I refused to ponder upon his observations, the same way that I refused to read the personal advice that Doru Moroiu kindly imparted to me through his personal letters. And what a selfish fool I was for ignoring them.
We walked through the streets at night, getting lost in the back alleys of Unirii, Romană, and Victoriei, passing shuttered flower shop kiosks. Closed, for all intents and purposes, forever.
“You know,” said Lira, “I’ve never, in all my long unlife, seen a flower stand with iron bars. Just a simple lock, always. I guess no one tries to steal flowers.”
“My beloved,” she whispered that August night, velvet and ruin in her voice, her fangs grazing my neck as she bent me over a random bench in some nameless park off Victory Avenue. “The very air punishes my being. Behind it, there are monsters. And they feast upon my essence.” She said it curled against me, her breath cool as absinthe, our bodies slick with the fever of something far more eldritch than lust.
Those words made no sense to me at the time, yet they filled me with dread. Moroiu’s epistles offered a measure of clarity and comfort—but only after Lira was gone. Doru had tried to warn me. He wrote that the sun no longer burned, it unmade. Not with fire, but with a kind of inward unraveling. Vampyres were never meant to endure such metaphysical violence.
“Lira should not have lasted,” he said. “But I suspect your love gave her more time than fate ever would have.”
A fallen leaf at the dawning of the day
The last time I saw her, she was translucent, barely corporeal, and her eyes seemed to melt into red tears over a face that had cracked and lost its shape. But beyond that eldritch ruin, I could still see her beauty. I could taste it at the back of my throat, feel it in the echo of every heartbeat.
I begged her to rest. I promised I would wait for her. Decades, if necessary.
“What’s the point of holding on endlessly?” she whispered. “To chase new ventures for Moroiu? To become nothing more than a hungry beast draped in the rags of culture and civility, pretending not to be lost? My sweet love, even if life isn't fleeting for those like me... happiness always is.”
I held both her hands between my palms, studying her claws that she still painted red. A sob was forming in my heart, and I was afraid it was going to escape into an ugly cry.
“Everything that has substance casts a shadow, and all that is sweet must also be bitter in some hidden way,” she added, and we embraced for the last time.
“You made the silence flutter, beloved… the silence of lilacs blooming in the wind, the kind that has lived inside me for eons. You turned this unlife into a child’s story, one I never believed I was allowed to dream. And even the fire in the sky, even death itself, they became nothing more than excuses for beloved ceremonies. For this. For you.”
Her breath thinned. Her body stilled—no final cry, only a long sigh, like silk slipping off bone. I held her, but not tightly enough. The light in her ruby eyes dimmed into mist, and soon, the rest of her evaporated, dancing for the first and last time among the dust motes that played in that thin beam of light.
When I left her office, the hellhounds were gone, but I heard the echo of a faint bark carried by the windless air. I felt hollow as I walked—not soulless exactly, but as if I no longer had one of my own. Only a fragment, a tether, binding me to the Heart of the Universe.
Somewhere behind me, I heard the ruin collapse—a silent implosion. But it didn’t matter. I still felt Lira’s presence in the dying dark.
By sunrise, I reached Nico’s, just as he was closing for the morning. Though October would bring a return to more temperate days, it was still September, and Nico, like all of Bucharest, clung to the nocturnal rhythm.
I sat at the bar, watching him clean the last of the dishes. He said nothing. Just poured me a glass of whiskey. In the amber fluid, I saw my reflection—that same winsome smile, and felt the sob rise again.
I tried to push it down, but Nico said, “Let it go.”
And I collapsed onto the bar. He patted me on the back as I cried, heavy tears soaking into the wood.
“It’s nothing but a heartache, big guy. Just a fool’s game. It’ll pass, trust me. Everything passes. You’ll find another life to live… and there’ll be more of you left to give,” and the morning seemed to stand still as I let Nico’s clichés and half-remembered song lyrics wash over me like a cleansing rain.
Acknowledgements
I shall resist the temptation to name every soul who offered me some form of metaphysical assistance in conjuring the dark miracle that is Lady Lich. By now, I like to think you know who you are. And if not, I promise to make it clear in the days to come, my beloved readers.
The setting was inspired directly by
’s poem The mountains are burning again, and I would never have returned to vampyre fiction if not for ’s vampire screenplay extract—and the encouragement I received on earlier tales of this kind from , , , and many, may more. I also must thank Laura for her poem Inanimate whom I cannot “@” for some unfathomable reason) for reviving in me a fierce obsession with Legacy of Kain lore. And , , thank you for your unwavering support.I also must thank my Neo-Decandence (Demiurgy) peers,
, , and whose literary presence on this platform, and whose generous recommendations, have shaped the contours of my short but fervent journey here on Substack.I also owe a great debt to two departed poets: Alejandra Pizarnik, whose Extracting the Stone of Madness inspired most of the chapter titles, and Patrick Kavanagh, for the mournful beauty of On Raglan Road.
And how could I nearly forget Sappho? Come Close is a luminous and accessible gateway into the work of this titan of longing and lyric.
Do explore the work of the great departed, but more importantly, take the time to visit the creations of those I’ve mentioned here. Their voices are alive, and they matter.
First off, I adore everything vampire and you had me with your old-world spelling Vampyre. Your writing is so beautiful. It's intoxicating! One of my favorite poets of all time is Baudelaire. Your story and style is reminiscent of his prose in Paris Spleen. I'm excited to read more. Your description of her alluring femininity was out of this world! I must re-stack it immediately!
Believe me when I say the like was earned before I have even finished the entire story. I am making my way through as time allows and enjoying every second. I'll comment again when I'm done but as always, my friend, fantastic work so far.