…her life had seemed to fall apart. yes yes yes. End of sentence.
Before we return to our history of the servant woman Aleksandra, there are two things that you must know about demons: one, demons love to pose as gods, and two, if they can sniff it out, they will never miss a blood sacrifice.
This occasion was no different. A demon called Valac was in the vicinity, and he was enticed by the miserable scene. And so, just when Aleksandra couldn’t possibly have felt any more dejected, Valac assumed a shape that matched her inner visualization of Perun, put his hand to her shoulder and assured her that her sacrifice was more than acceptable.
Aleksandra was the very picture of shock. She had always believed in Perun, but never had she imagined that she was worthy of a personal visit. Valac as Perun glowed faintly in the dark of the woods, and he smiled brightly, assuring the poor servant woman that she was worthy of his attention. When she recovered her senses, she threw herself at his feet and begged him to rescue her from the court of the disbelievers. Valac petted her head and promised to rescue her on the following night at midnight, all the while nibbling on the bit of flesh she’d hewn off for Perun.
The servant woman wiped her tears away. Although she was exhausted and weak from the blood loss, she felt relieved for the first time in weeks. She had kept her promises to Mariya, and she was finally going to be rewarded.
Valac disappeared after making additional promises to return for her, taking his glow with him. Aleksandra caught her breath for a few long moments while she allowed her eyes to readjust to the darkness of the wood. She was preparing to stand when she heard a twig snap behind her, and a pit settled in her gut when she realized that she hadn’t been alone in the woods.
The darkness had obscured Gleb’s expression, but it was clear to her that it was full of malice. He whispered that he had seen her evil treachery in the woods, and that if she made even the quietest complaint that he would not hesitate to let the Prince know that she worshipped false gods.
Aleksandra was filled with terror, but she also recognized that she had a god—a god who had just promised to save her, at that!—in her corner. So she screamed. She screamed as loud as she could.
Her scream carried far, even though she had travelled deep into the woods. In the distance, the palace guard took up arms and shouted to each other to search for the disturbance.
Gleb panicked. Aleksandra continued to scream, and Gleb understood that the only way for him to stop her scream was to stop her throat. So he stopped her: he put his hands to her neck until Aleksandra could scream no more.
The boyar was furious that he had destroyed so lovely a creature. He knelt next to her, uncertain as to which vile action he wanted to perpetrate on the destroyed woman.
Remaining true to his degenerate self, Valac hadn’t left the woods. He had stayed to watch the whole ghastly murder play out. With the taste of flesh still on his tongue, he felt compelled to toy with the humans, so Valac entered Aleksandra’s poor, lifeless body and animated her corpse.
Gleb was still kneeling over Aleksandra’s body when he was suddenly thrown onto his back. He looked up in utter horror to see that Aleksandra had pinned him to the forest floor, and she had a vicious, ugly grin on her strangely illuminated face. With a burst of unanticipated strength, he broke free and ran toward the palace, but he was no match for the demon inside the body of the dead servant woman. Just as they reached the edge of the woods, Valac overtook the boyar, and the demon, in Aleksandra’s body, bit into the warm, tender flesh of Gleb’s neck and subdued the boyar without much effort.
All the while, the palace guard had spread out in search of the source of the scream. It wasn’t long before one of the guards happened upon Valac possessing Aleksandra, feasting upon the throat of a convulsing Gleb, with that same vicious, ugly grin on her face. The guard recognized Aleksandra and was frozen for a moment by his revulsion. Only one word came to mind, and it was the epithet that had been uttered about her behind her back. He cried, УПИР!
Good news travels fast, but slander travels faster. Before the end of the night, everyone within the palace of Kiev was unable to sleep, for word had spread that the упир Aleksandra had murdered the boyer and was on the loose.
Helena wept over the body of her husband, and her grief dared her to demand from the Prince Vladimir and Princess Anna why they hadn’t believed her when she said that the servant woman had been nothing other than an evil, blood-drinking упир.
And упир, after it’s been transliterated and contorted over several centuries to fit inside the Romance and West Germanic languages, starts to sound very much like the word vampire.
Poor Aleksandra.
I’ll tell you more about Valac on the next day of Anael. Dominus tecum.