Dr. Emilia Cole's Journal

Entry #1

When I think back on that day, I sometimes wish I could forget. I often tell myself that it was nothing more than curiosity, but it was more than that, it was obsession, an inexorable pull, as if something ancient and malignant had hooked into me and refused to let go. That's the thing with vampires; they don't just drink blood, they take hold of every fear, every weak spot, and every dark corner of your mind.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. I am Dr. Emilia Cole, a historian, an archaeologist, and a fool. I was one of those children obsessed with the macabre and the ancient, a child who spent her allowance on books about curses, mysteries, lost civilizations. It felt like fate when I met Alexander at university. I knew immediately that he shared my fire for the ancient mysteries of the world, my need to unearth things that others might wish buried. He became my partner in every way, through our studies, then our research, and later, our marriage.

We built a reputation over the years, often traveling from one continent to another. We specialized in uncovering the relics of past empires, the ruins of cultures lost to time. Our work led us to strange and wonderful places, burned temples in Greece, cursed tombs in Egypt, abandoned caverns in Israel. Nothing had ever truly frightened us. Until Romania.

It was an invitation unlike any we had ever received, almost a whisper in the dark. A government official reached out to us personally, asking that we meet in a discreet location in Bucharest. "We have uncovered…a site," he had told us, refusing to say anything more until we agreed to take on the assignment.

I was intrigued, though Alexander was wary at first. But the official swayed him. He showed us photos that seemed too surreal to be true, fragments of an ancient stone tablet, symbols etched into it in a language neither of us recognized. It looked almost Babylonian, but older. Much older.

"Please understand," the official had whispered, leaning in so close that his breath, laced with the sharp odor of garlic, brushed against my ear, "we only found this site because of a landslide. The locals know nothing about it, nor should they. You will have complete access, and we expect you to leave nothing behind. Every piece of evidence will be transported under strict orders. Do you understand?"

It felt as if we had been handed a secret too heavy to hold, yet too seductive to refuse. A chill ran through me then, a faint sensation that I chose to ignore.

Within a week, we were in the Carpathian mountains, standing in a valley shadowed by steep cliffs that seemed to close in on us, the air thick with the scent of earth and decay. The Romanian officials had left us to our own devices, no escort, no supervision, just the hollow silence of the mountains, which somehow felt more oppressive than all the ruins and tombs I had ever visited. It was as if the mountains themselves held their breath.

We found the entrance to the site buried under layers of soil and rock. After several hours of clearing the debris, Alexander and I finally uncovered the entrance, an arched doorway that seemed to yawn open into darkness. Inside, the air was stale and frigid, untouched by time or sunlight. With each step, our flashlights cut through cobwebs that crisscrossed the narrow hall, revealing symbols etched in the stone, fangs, eyes, and strange beasts I couldn't place, each more disturbing than the last.

Then we saw it, the stone tablet, partially buried in a mound of dirt. My heart thudded in my chest as I knelt beside it. As I brushed away centuries of dust, I saw the carvings up close, jagged and raw as if etched in a fit of rage. It bore a symbol unlike any I'd seen before, a long, curved fang set inside an intricate mandala.

"It looks like…a seal," Alexander muttered, reaching out, his hand trembling ever so slightly. But I pulled him back.

"Wait," I said, feeling a strange resistance, almost as if the air thickened the closer we came to the stone. But he ignored me, his fascination already overpowering his caution.

As his fingers brushed against the fang symbol, the temperature plummeted. I could see my breath fog in the light, and an unnatural silence fell, swallowing the sound of the wind outside. I heard something then, a whisper. No, several whispers, just on the edge of hearing, filling the darkness with faint, inhuman murmurs.

"Did you hear that?" I asked, my voice barely more than a breath.

Alexander's face had gone pale. "I…I think so. It sounded like…"

We listened, straining to catch the words, but they slipped away like wisps of smoke. I shivered, more from fear than from cold. My instincts screamed for me to leave, to abandon this forsaken place, but I couldn't move. I was rooted there, my gaze locked on that fang, so ancient, so impossibly sharp.

Alexander pulled out his notebook and scribbled down what we could make out of the carvings, but the symbols defied any language we knew. Then he noticed something, at the base of the tablet, almost hidden in shadow, was a carved line of words, faded but still legible.

" 'The Children of Midnight,' " he read, his voice barely more than a whisper.

I felt a pulse of dread at those words, as if I had just awakened something. But curiosity burned brighter than fear, and I found myself reaching for the tablet.

"No!" Alexander said, grabbing my wrist. "We don't know what we're dealing with."

I laughed it off, but his fear was contagious. That night, I dreamed of darkness, endless, suffocating darkness, filled with fangs and red eyes staring out at me. When I woke, the tent was deathly cold, and frost had gathered around the edges despite the warmth of our sleeping bags.

Alexander was already awake, sitting cross-legged with the tablet between us. He hadn't slept. He told me he felt as if something was calling to him, urging him to dig deeper. I wanted to tell him to stop, to leave the stone buried, but my words felt hollow even to me.

The next morning, we found our equipment scattered outside the tent, covered in frost. The local workers had left, refusing to return, whispering of curses and bad omens. We were alone in that valley, yet I felt watched, surrounded by unseen eyes that followed our every movement.

As we continued to study the tablet, strange things started to happen, faint shadows at the edge of our vision, voices that echoed in empty spaces, flashes of images in my mind, scenes of people, no, creatures, their mouths smeared with blood, eyes empty and hollow.

When I shared my visions with Alexander, he merely smiled, a strange glint in his eye. "We're on the edge of something historic, Emilia. A discovery that could rewrite everything we know."

But his excitement unnerved me. His eyes had a feverish gleam, and he started speaking of the Children of Midnight as if they were old friends.

That was the night I saw him standing at the edge of the camp, talking to something I couldn't see. I called out to him, but he didn't respond. When I touched his shoulder, he turned to me with a look I had never seen before, a hunger, primal and cold.

In that moment, I felt an overwhelming urge to leave, to run and never look back. But it was too late. We had disturbed something ancient and hungry. Something that had waited centuries for fools like us to unleash it.

That was the last night I felt anything close to warmth or safety. From then on, every step I took felt like it echoed through that dark valley, reverberating into something vast and hollow, a void that waited with teeth bared and eyes aglow.

We had opened a door that could never be closed. And it had opened for us.