to the heart of me •

ETELKA FERENCZY (1854 -) spent a great part of her mortal life wishing to be a man, or at least to be something else than a woman who couldn't be allowed the freedoms that she saw her father and older brother enjoy. Pursuing academia made her a curiosity, pursuing a career in music made her somehow perverse while her constant refusal to engage the male sex in her life made her a spoiled, ungrateful child. Fortunately for Etelka, she had a father (and a brother) who supported her agency and rather than letting her stay in Budapest to marry a Hungarian noble, she was sent to the more liberated Paris to study the piano with a French pianist and composer of great talent and reputation. Antoine Archambeau. She'd stay in Paris for a decade, learning to play expertly from Antoine, who was especially known for his tempo, and attempting in vain to ignore his unwanted attentions and advances in the hope of not having her name smeared by him in the musical milieu, if she openly declined. Eventually, he wouldn't take no for an answer any longer and Etelka felt forced to accept his invitation to sleep with him, thinking that it would just be this once and he'd move on with his affections finally. What she didn't know, however, was that Antoine was a vampire and on the night she went to bed with him, he drank from her, emptied her body and sired her, turning her, too, into a vampire. From that moment on, Etelka stopped dreaming of being a man, instead longingly remembering simply how it was to be human.

There were advantages and disadvantages of suddenly being a vampire. Suddenly she could reach a tempo at the piano that she had never been able to achieve before, but having lost her soul, so had her music. Mourning her loss, still pursued by Antoine who now felt he held ownership over her, Etelka turned her attention from her own musical career to the ballet, an interest she had discovered after coming to Paris. She would begin attending late performances, watching the beautiful ballerinas tiptoeing over the stage like ethereal graces and she decided to spend the eternity awaiting her on claiming this art form as her own. She started sponsoring some of the ballerinas, was invited to morning classes, paid for opulent productions and all the while, she would mark the girls for death. Unable to help herself. Perhaps also a bit unwilling. In the ballet world, there was always someone else standing at the barre, ready to take the place of whoever didn't turn up the next day.

Fast forward 25 years of being the mostly reluctant, ballet-obsessed vampire wife of Antoine and things would take a turn for the better. Well, for Etelka, at least. A girl named Celeste entered the orbit of stardom at the Ballets Russes in Paris and gained everyone's attention, including Etelka's. Soon, she would become the ballerina's patron with everything it entailed of expectations and payoff. For a couple of years, their relation was good, they both enjoyed themselves, but then Etelka got the idea - what if she turned Celeste? She would be stronger, faster and enjoy an infinity of applause from crowds throughout history. Furthermore, she wouldn't have to give the girl up to death, neither by her own hands or the hands of anyone else. Antoine had done the same to her. A few days later, Celeste would be sired, waking up to a reality Etelka had enjoyed for the quarter of a century now. However, unlike Etelka who had in the end accepted Antoine's wronging of her, Celeste raged and screamed and fought. For days, the two of them, Etelka and her, would be at each other's throats or at each other's mouths, interchangeably. Only as it was time for her to appear on stage in a big premiere, a week later, did Celeste settle down, though never accepting, Etelka would learn. Never accepting. In an effort to appease her, Etelka took out her rage on Antoine, finally killing the man who had ruined all her dreams and aspirations, but his pile of dust didn't speak the right words of apology to Celeste who simply went back to the studio, at night, now. Training. Preparing. Keeping her distance.

Fast forward again, a century this time, and Celeste has continuously made a star of herself on every big ballet stage over the past 100 years. And Etelka, in turn, has followed her around from engagement to engagement, trying to win just a moment of her time. Sometimes she would, sometimes she wouldn't, such was life when you no longer lived it. In the meantime, she still resides in Paris, playing patron and benefactor to the Paris Opera Ballet, feeding on the girls there when needed, in a huge mansion in one of the Parisian suburbs, bought with the money she has inherited from her father's estate. She plays music sometimes, uselessly. Otherwise, she's waiting for her time to come - either to be with Celeste, finally, or to get killed, whichever comes first.

The stake's the last direct way to the heart.