"Revenge for not getting paid," my father explained. "Historians will tell you that he lured the children to a nearby lake and drowned them in it, but that is far from the truth."
"Just like Shakespeare stole Romeo and Juliet?" I asked.
My father chuckled then dragged from his pipe. "Rather like it."
"So where did he take them?"
"Before I tell you that, you have to know that only seven children escaped the Piper." My father felt the need to educate me. It seemed like he had to teach me our ancestors' history for some future reason he had in mind.
"Seven children escaped? Where did they go?"
"No one really knows," my father replied. "But the Piper is still looking for them to this very day."
I began to fear this Piper more and more.
"We call them the Lost Seven," my father added.
"The Lost Seven." I repeated the words on my lips, as if not wanting to forget them. My intuition told me I would be repeating the words for the rest of my life.
"Other than the Lost Seven, all children were deported by the Piper to a faraway place," my father said.
"Neverland?" I squeaked, but my father shook his head. I grimaced, as I sensed he was going to tell me something I wasn't ready for.
"The Piper took the children of Hamlin to Transylvania."
Instantly, I shrieked and clapped my hands on my mouth. I had been told that Transylvania was part of vampire lore. "But how do you know, Father?" I asked. "This story seems far-fetched."
My father patted me and stood up. He walked to his huge library and climbed a ladder to get a book from the highest shelf. When he came down I saw it was a book of rare poems, documented and authenticated, although the poets remained unknown. "This is a special book, written by our great ancestor himself," my father explained.
"The very first Karnstein?"
My father nodded as he opened the book. "After the children were sent to Transylvania to be turned into an army of vampires by the Piper, who had vowed revenge on the whole world, only one child managed to escape."
"Our ancestor!" I proudly clicked my fingers.
"Exactly," my father said. "Our ancestor escaped after he learned all about the vampires. That's why we, the Karnsteins, are the only ones who know how to kill them."
"So what's in the book of poems?"
"A poem that explains it all." My father flipped the pages then laid the book on the table, low enough for me to read it. I was reading a poem called "The Pied Piper of Hamlin." An incredibly long poem. Then my father pointed at a part that made it connect. I read with an open mouth, realizing how history was both fabricated and true at the same time. Each person knew part of history's true incidents but then added his own flavor or lie to it.
The poem I read was later published under a pen name of Robert Browning, and was known of one of the greatest. The part my father pointed at read:
How their children were stolen away,
And there it stands to this very day.
And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there's a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbors lay such stress.
And that had been my first encounter with how most of the things around us weren't as they seemed, and that historians taught us lies.
***
Three years after my father educated me about my ancestors, I turned fifteen years old. Not only was I right in the middle of my teenage years, and on the threshold of becoming a girl, I was about to learn one of the darker secrets of my childhood.
I was old enough to be told why I wasn't allowed to see my own reflection in the Pond of Pearls—thinking about it now, I don't have the slightest idea how I lived without seeing my reflection for fifteen years. How did I tolerate not knowing how I looked like? I guess that since I had never seen my face, I wasn't curious about it.
The truth was that I was mentioned in a prophecy, spread by a blind woman who supposedly lived in a dragonship in the middle of an endless ocean called the Missing Mile, somewhere far away in a land few mortals knew how to reach—I myself thought it was myth until I sailed to it years later.
The blind woman's name was Justina, the Godmother of Justice, and her predictions were told to my parents by a mysterious messenger who had access to the Missing Mile. My family had always been into superstitious traditions.
Justina claimed I was the curse-breaker. I was a special child, a white soul, a gift to my people. Not just that. She claimed I was the nameless witch's all-time nemesis, and that I was going to give birth to an even more powerful girl than myself in the future.
But these blessings came with a price—the same way everything came with a price. A price that only I had to pay.
As it turned out, the universe always demanded balance. For everything it granted us, it took something in return—a basic law in alchemy. The curse that had been lifted when I was born wasn't going to just fade away. It morphed into another shape of a curse somewhere else in the universe.