I dreamed I was in a sort of Jane Austen novel setting. I was close to a family of three sisters, and we'd all been invited to a house party at the estate of a famous but very reclusive baron. The oldest sister was just out of mourning for her dead fiance, and still grieved for him, but the other two girls were excited about the possibility of meeting potential husbands.
Upon exploring the grounds around the manor, I discovered a lovely cottage where an eccentric old woman lived. She was kind of a regency Joan Rivers. She had some familial connection with the Baron, but she never spoke of it. She didn't go visiting, but was pretty friend and effusive when I met her and went to see her, bringing my friends. We all liked her very much.
The middle sister was the prettiest, and she got a lot of attention, but soon she seemed to really hit it off with a tall, slim young man with curly, light brown hair. They sat beside each other and talked for hours. They danced together as much as propriety allowed. We all knew it was just a matter of time before he asked her father for her hand, but her father had developed a severe dislike of the young man, and no one, not even he, could quite say why. His wife scolded him, and encouraged her daughter, because really the young man seemed so nice, and he was certainly wealthy.
Slowly, though, the oldest sister began to be suspicious, too. One evening she told us that the madwoman in the cottage had given her a secret device to take into the ball room that night. When the switch was flipped, the room would go dark, and if any evil lurked in the room, it would glow white and be revealed for what it was. We thought it was all a huge joke, but that it would be lots of fun to plunge the room into darkness.
So after dinner, as the musicians were warming up to begin playing the dance, we all glanced around at each other, looked over to the oldest sister, and nodded. She flipped a switch and everything went dark.
Except for the Baron, our host. Except for the middle sister's new suitor. And except for half of the young men in the room. These all glowed with an unearthly, sickly pallor, lips black, faces gaunt and haunted, and teeth lengthened into fangs. They were all vampires, and they knew what we had done. All the humans in the room began to scream and scramble for doors and windows, and we scattered across the grounds, into the night.
I was holed up with the middle and youngest sisters and their parents in a cave on the edge of a river that ran through the Baron's park lands. We were all weeping because the oldest sister was missing, and because the middle one was so heartbroken. We were glad she was safe from whatever horrible fate might have lain in store for her, but it was so awful to know that the man she was falling in love with wasn't a man at all.
We heard a scuffling at the back of the cave, and an opening gaped in what we had thought were solid stone walls. The Baron and his bloodthirsty minions began to stalk in, and we prepared to fight. Suddenly, there was a small flash of light, and one of the vampires shattered like glass. Then another, then another. We gazed to the mouth of the cave, and there stood the madwoman, but she was transformed into a radiant being cloaked in shimmering white, and she held a lantern that flashed out beams of sunlight that shattered the undead like dropped crystal.
Around her stood half a dozen other women, of all shapes and ages, with similar lanterns. Slowly, their newest recruit came forward. It was the oldest sister, her short auburn hair brushed thick and smooth around her head, hooded and gowned in glistening deep green. With her lantern she personally shattered the man who had threatened her sister, then the Baron and the Madwoman stood face to face. They were brother and sister, we could all see it now, and she wept at the thought of destroying him, but he was the last left of his hellish brood.
Suddenly, as they stared at each other, each grabbed onto the other's shoulder and they rushed out into the night, and presumably had their to-the-death standoff somewhere else. Neither was ever seen or heard from again. The oldest sister traveled around the country with the other women, hunting and destroying vampires wherever they found them, and the middle sister took her heartbreak overseas to the new world, where she began an American chapter of the League of Light. And then I woke up.
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